Contact
I rather like the film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact (a film I really should use in
class!) because it touches on a subject I devote much of my time to. By this I
do not mean aliens but history and whether it matters and in what way. I
believe it was Stephan Daedalus who quipped that history was a nightmare from
which he would awaken. I sometimes agree. Contact,
however, never awakens from history for it does not know it is asleep. It does
not understand its own presuppositions which are a-historical and perhaps even
theological. The movie, of course, involves communicating with aliens though it
does not treat this theme as subtly as the later Arrival by Denis Villeneuve. This is because it exists in the
innocent dream time when history and language as constitutive problems did not exist for popular imagination. Aliens
can speak to us in math because math is universal for all rational entities.[1]
They can speak to us about physics too for physics describes the universal
structure of all nature and matter. Contact
exists in a world for which translation is a simple technical problem readily
overcome whereas in Arrival the
problem of translation is almost the entire plot. This reflects the optimism of
Sagan and the SETI program he created. This optimism is based on the
universality of reason in the forms we now possess it. We can talk to aliens
because WE and THEY share the one language that matters, science. Science is
universal because science describes what is simply there which aliens can see
as well as us. The ground of communication is direct realism about nature which
cannot differ for different rational subjects. This is especially so as aliens,
who for some reason are always wiser and cleverer than us (like angels I
suppose), are not burdened by religion, mythic poetry, aesthetic culture or any
other embarrassing thing that might inhibit their rational perceptions of pure
physical reality.[2]
They are absolutely a form of wish fulfillment in the form that ‘rationalism’
seeks it (rather like Swift’s rational horses). Like the Epicurean gods they
stand as ideals of dispassionate reason (when they are not super-villains). This is not surprising, I suppose, as
poetry legislates all things and ‘rationalists’ need myths and stories with
magic beings just like the rest of us. Contact,
then, is alien fantasy for high modernists while Arrival is its more troubled post-modern counterpart.
It will surprise no reader of this blog (should such
readers exist!) that I am much more on the side of Arrival than on the side of Contact.[3]
If we should meet aliens at some point the problem of talking to them may well
be insurmountable. After all, we can barely talk to each other! The brief way
to put this is that I do not think counting allows us to transcend language and
I don’t think reason allows us a ready or easy way to transcend historical
determination. If it did I would find it very hard NOT to conclude that some
sort of teleology was involved. Let me try and boil this down to its barest
bones. IF we can communicate with aliens on the basis of the universality of
the language of reason then history does not matter. History, however, matters
therefore we cannot communicate with aliens by means of the universality of the
language of reason. If this is true it is a good question if we can communicate
with them at all though that is not one I can answer here or, most probably,
anywhere. Of course you are still wondering what I could possibly mean by
saying ‘history matters’ especially as I do not mean by this the academic
discipline of history (which can be as grindingly empirical as you please) but
something else I would rather call ‘historicity’. Let me get at it this way.
There is a clear way in which history may not matter and that is if knowledge
is directly universal, realist and un-tensed. In this case the entire history
of things like religion, politics, aesthetics and so on would (if they had any
function at all in the coming to be of science) serve only as prompters that
pointed to what was always and already THERE. They would play a role in the
logic of discovery but not in the (far more august!) logic of justification.
Scientists MIGHT have seen what was already there without such prompts, indeed,
eventually they would have seen it just because it was THERE. Knowledge, in
such a model, is only accidentally related to time and it is a mere accident who
discovered the laws of planetary motion and when they did it. It was there to
be discovered by anyone and if Kepler had not found them in the 17th
century someone else eventually would have. Indeed, someone might have seen it
earlier had they exercised scientific reason in a sufficiently neutral and
objective manner. A truth is tensed only accidentally given, say, the relevant
data. Give an ancient Greek the same data and he could have, indeed should
have, seen what Kepler saw.
Many people seem to believe this idea on an intuitive
level. Others promulgate it because they believe the AUTHORITY of science rests
on its being universal and un-tensed. Deny this basic proposition and you
attack reason and open the door to voodoo which we know is bad without opening
a single book on Haiti by a single anthropologist. However, I have come to
conclude that the picture cannot possibly be this simple. We believe foreground
things because of background things as so many thinkers in the last century
pointed out. Further, we are not necessarily aware of what these background
things are. Indeed, to some degree we cannot be aware of all of them even in
the most rigorous of transcendental reflections. Self- consciousness never
quite catches up with itself: the ontic is never the ontological.[4]
The background things determine what and how we see in the foreground. Also,
the backdrops change such that in different epoch people necessarily see
different things and this does NOT depend simply on data: one can see the
planet Uranus over and over and not conclude it is a planet if one is not
looking for new planets. Even Herschel needed some convincing on this point
having thought he had observed a comet!
I believe in the social sciences some refer to these as ‘plausibility
structures’. Different plausibility structures determine what people see and
how they evaluate what they see. The problem is further complicated by the fact
that multiple, even contradictory, plausibility structures can be in play at
once. Plus, there is no pure Archimedean view outside all plausibility
structures from which to determine which correspond to reality and which do
not. We must each argue from within our own set of plausibility structures by
standards internal to those structures. This is not an attack on reason but a
simple description of how it proceeds. Common ground between positions is not a
simple given, it is not grounded in the authority of some ‘majesty of reason’
embodied in a principle or formula any no-matter-how-situated subject can be
bludgeoned with. This is as much as to say that common ground is sought and
defined in dialogue with others. The conditions of dialogue are sought and
defined in the process itself. A ‘rationalist’ who insisted that the Pharaoh
and the god Re cannot be one and the same because of the law of contradiction
would have to defend that law to the puzzled Egyptian who has no trouble
thinking that one thing can be another and also itself. They would end up in a
discussion of unity, difference and identity that might well prove interesting!
Indeed, we would see very much something like what transpires in Arrival as the modern rationalist tries
to work out what the Egyptian is saying in his highly pictorial language![5]
We might well imagine the sum total of
such conversations between rational beings bringing forth the universal as its
result though this distant regulative ideal can seem so remote from our
everyday struggles to communicate.
Now let me consider a test case of this hypothesis. Carl
Sagan and his acolytes do not just believe in science. They believe in a
certain sort of science. By science they mean, maybe, some bits of Greek or
Arabic science but they do NOT mean Chinese science, Indian science, Byzantine
science, Babylonian science or any other such body of knowledge. Plus, those bits of Greek or Arabic science are there only insofar as we have
absorbed them into our own scientific conceptions. Thus, they begin from the
Eurocentric, 'Whig historical' assumption that modern western science is real science and that
those others are mostly not except as they accidentally contribute to our
properly certified knowledge. Plus, it is strongly implied, societies who do
not have organized bodies of ‘scientific thought’ do not have knowledge at all
in any meaningful science. All knowledge is publicly certified knowledge and science, in
its modern western iteration particularly, is the one true way of certifying
knowledge. This means that aliens, who for narrative reasons will always be
smarter than us (even if they are malign!), will have the same sort of science
which will certify the same basic things as true: thus, translation is a mere
glitch on the road to first contact! With this comes a certain approach to the
history of science, one heavily criticized by people like David Bloor. According
to this approach the aim of science studies is to line up the explicit,
conscious scientific statements of scientists and show how each one is more
‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ than its predecessor. Science is purely a history
of reason and its methodical exercise and involves no extraneous (or un-thematic)
elements from the general society and culture in which it is embedded. This is
the basic ‘necessary march of science’ narrative which has been under question
for over a century though that has gone completely under the radar of public
proponents of science.
I, however, make the basic point in response that
western science requires certain plausibility structures in place before it can
BE western science and that aliens would have to somehow repeat much of our
cultural history to develop the bodies of knowledge we have developed. This
would, to put it mildly, be an amazing co-incidence. To make this point clearer
let me say why I think the ‘plausibility structure’ necessary to make western
science and its discoveries possible is not simply ‘objective reality seen as
it is’. I will do this in two steps. First
I will make some comments on the plausibility structure of science in general
and then I will talk about the plausibility structure of western science in
particular. Where I live we have a large community of
indigenous people, the Miq'maw. These people have an extensive stock of
observations of the environment they live in. They do not, however, organize
these in a body of science. That is simply not their mode of being in the
world. For one thing, they do not (I was told by a traditional Miq'maw person)
make causal inquiries in the sense of describing physical causality. They
rather inquire about the status of relationships. In other words they live in a
relational world whose bonds or threads of connection are narrative. Many
societies have taken this view of things and until the 19th Century
in Europe most iterations of science have shared cultural space with such
animistic and mythic conceptions of the world. In fact, where I work (Grenfell
Campus) they still do. This is why I cannot, as a matter of pedagogic and
institutional necessity, begin from the standpoint of the aggressive scientism that
has become such a popular reaction to the shock of 9/11.
So, minimally I suppose, ‘science’ in the sense of organized inquiry into nature involves some distinction from the world of mythic narrative and custom. It involves, to use the Greek terms, distinguishing logos from mythos and phusis from nomos. This involves separating out nature from other things and making of it an object on inquiry in terms of principles and causes. Not all cultures are interested in making this kind of abstraction. Part of the plausibility structure of a scientific world view, then, is the concept of nature itself as a system of intelligible relations at very least relatively independent of narrative or knowledge given in social custom or tradition. In this sense, while the ancient Egyptian certainly had what WE would now call scientific observations (of a medical variety) he did not necessarily have these in the form science as such. It also requires some concept of systematic relations. Instead of having a society of gods each with their own interests and perspectives (united by an inscrutable fate) we have a system of causes or laws that unite a sensible manifold. Diversity is unified under concepts. In Greece, this comes about in poetic tradition first, as the inscrutable moira or fate becomes assimilated to the will of Zeus. One principle determines all to a single order and so we have the ‘pure monad’ of the Pythagoreans, the Platonic Good, Aristotle’s God and so on. For Aristotle, a least, mythic poetry was the primary form of inquiry which, in science, moved from imagery and narrative to pure ideas. The Hebrews also have the conception of an intelligible natural order founded on the word of a single divine principle but they DO NOT in fact develop that into a body of science being taken up more with ethical and ritual concerns. This is why the Hebrew contemplation of nature is more aesthetic than inquisitive though they certainly DID think that the divine word was a principle of limit and order somewhat like the Greek nemesis.
The basic plausibility structure of a science,
then, seems to be the notion of a unified natural manifold which unity must be
open to intelligence as being grounded in intelligence.[6]
Nature is a product of a single intellectual principle and is for that reason
knowable. We know, in advance, that investigation will uncover unity and
intelligibility and not a surd and unintelligible dissonance and arbitrariness.
This is why science can frame itself as an interpretive rather than simply
descriptive procedure. In the ancient world we can see that such unifying
principles in the various iterations of ‘logos’ among the Greeks, ‘me’ among
the Sumerians, the Egyptian ‘Maat’ and the Hebrew creator God. Among the
Chinese and Indians we see the Dao, Dharma, and so on. All of these may be
called irreducible principles of order and grounds of explanation. Such
principles may be necessary conditions of science though, as we can see with
the Hebrews, they are not by themselves sufficient. Any causal inquiry involves
some such pre-apprehension of the nature of the cause. If a Sumerian asks ‘why
did the crops fail this year?’ he knows beforehand that it is some
determination of the principle ‘Enlil lays down the ‘me’ for each year’.
Otherwise there would be no sense in which he could even formulate the
question. ‘Why did x happen?’ presumes the existence of some ultimate why
whether divine or natural or, as in the case of the Sumerians, both. The why of
things for the Sumerian was personal agency or will. That is why he can
formulate the question ‘why did the crops fail’ as ‘why did Enlil determine the
crops should fail this year’. He already pre-apprehends the kind of cause he is
looking for as no one asks ‘why’ without some conception of what ‘why’ means.
However, this is only part of our problem. If we can lay down some general plausibility conditions for science that does not answer the question of what makes the European scientific revolution what it is and why OUR science has the character it does. This, obviously, is a complex question for the scientific revolution is a complex event with many strands. Do we mean by the 'scientific revolution' the rise mechanical philosophy in general? Do we mean the development of specific theories like helio-centrism or Galilean physics? Do we mean a new emphasis on empirical observation and experiment? Do we mean the attack on the Renaissance tradition of magic and notions of occult causality? All of these things are distinct and none quite reducible to the others (Bacon and Descartes have rather different views on science!). If we are to ask about plausibility conditions here the problem is also complex for there are a number of these ranging from the obvious to the esoteric. There is ancient classical science (and its hierarchical world image) and the under studied body of medieval science (not all of which was Aristotelian and much of which was Arabic!). There is the Christian theological tradition and the (esoteric to us but well known to early moderns) speculations of the Corpus Hermeticum. If we attribute something in modern science to ‘biblical’ influence we have to factor in that that the ‘Bible’ in this pure sense did not quite exist for Early Moderns. Robert Fludd absolutely elevated 'Biblical Science' above the pagan superstition of the peripatetics but his 'Biblical Science' included great chunks of the Corpus Hermeticum because, after all, Thrice Great Hermes was a pupil of Moses! Moreover, the language of theology already contained the speculations of Middle and Neo-Platonism. Such conceptions determined scriptural interpretation. Indeed, through the medium of the Hebrew diaspora in Alexandria, those speculations entered the Bible itself! Thus, we have Platonism, Pythagoreanism, Aristotelianism, the Bible, Hermeticism, older bodies of science and even folklore (see Pliny!) all in some configuration with each other along with all the social and material factors that would interest, say, a Marxist.
I will pick out one strand in all this that bears specifically on the question of what if anything makes modern science ‘Christian’ science. This is the elimination of hierarchy in the conception of the world and the overthrow of the classical world view. This was part and parcel of the overthrow of Aristotelian science as the paradigm of good science. It was congruent with a theological project with which it interacted. If one looks at the rise of mechanical philosophy in France, say, it very much had to do with a theological project: overthrowing the authority of Aristotle and the doctrine of final causes which was thought to be too direct an attempt to read the hidden providence of God. Descartes and Malebranche are there quite explicit. In England, Fludd also regarded the new scientific research as an attack on the authority of Greek Paganism as embodied in Aristotle. For this reason Fludd extensively attacks Peripatetic notions on meteors and meteorology.[7] So certainly if theology did or did not inspire the new mechanical physics it DID affect its reception both positively and negatively. This is so whether or not one claims the rise of modern science was specifically CAUSED by, say, the reformation or some other transformation in the religious sphere. The question of causality may be too complex to untangle but we might make the more modest claim that the shift from Aristotle to the new sciences occurred in concert with fundamental changes in philosophy, theology, politics and indeed the arts. Whatever the causal relations here, certain common elements recur in these various domains. Of course, one might wonder what exactly historical ‘causation’ is and whether a historian might use the word cause more loosely than a chemist might but that is for another essay.[8] The thing to note here is that in early modernity the relation of God to the world was fundamentally reconfigured in a manner that crossed what we now consider disciplinary boundaries. This reconfiguration took analogous forms in different domains of inquiry and practice. What resulted from this reconfiguration was not only modern science but also what we have come to call modernity (something we may or may not have surpassed!).
I would suggest this process in various domains replaced
notions of hierarchy and mediation with notions of immediacy. Here we might go
back to what I said about Augustine above. In his views on number Augustine
veers towards Middle Platonism, which assimilates intellect to God, and away
from Neo-Platonism, which elevates God above intellect. This directness of our
relation to the divine (we share the divine perception of the necessity of
number) is very much congruent with a Christian desire to unify the human more
directly with the divine. However, we must note the ambiguity adverted to
above. Augustine achieves this aim in part with the help of Classical
philosophy which also, from its own angle, deals with the relation of god to
the world and the human mind. This kind of immediacy and directness seems to
triumph everywhere in the modern period. Of course, we are all familiar with
the overthrow of priestly mediation in the reformation doctrine of
justification by faith which unites the soul directly and intimately with God.
Hierarchy, however, is just as decisively challenged in the physical sciences.
The distinction between celestial and terrestrial matter is overthrown for
instance. All matter is now the same corpuscular or extended mechanical
phenomenon determined by the same quantitative relations. Divine will now
governs all natural events directly in the same way everywhere. We do not even
have the difference of formal and final causes. Different entities are
different arrangements of matter with no inner principle of difference.
Everything is directly under the will of God and his laws in the same univocal
sense whether above or below the circle of the moon. This is part of the legacy
of medieval nominalism. God’s will is direct and not mediated by universals or
intelligible principles. All order is direct and inscrutable positive
legislation. God is only what he does and is not an object of knowledge in any
a priori sense. Nature is not intelligible through forms and essences. It can
only be known through direct observation of what God has immediately done and
thus knowledge must turn more radically to the physical world whose order is
now empirical determinations of will embodied in direct facticity. Thus, one
part of the early modern ‘plausibility structure’ is a nominalism and
voluntarism which did not, as classical science did, engage in an eidetic
contemplation of the natural as reflective of ideal reason or the Good. Clearly,
then, a modern European has another set of prejudgments which not only involves
an investigation into cause but a special emphasis on certain KINDS of cause,
specifically material and efficient ones. This, for instance, captures some of
the distinction between Aristotelian 'observation' and the much more
interventionist Baconian 'experiment'. Now the complex thing here is that these
modern plausibility structures do not simply and directly replace the older
ones. They mix and match and even interfere with each other in various individuals,
places and times. Even in the 18th Century for instance we find Leibniz
trying to reintroduce entelechies or Cudworth arguing for the retention of ‘plastic
natures’. Plus, we can still see in Galileo and Kepler (and sometimes even Bacon!)
the idea of nature as an icon of pure reason and an object of contemplation.
In general then, modern notions of law, cause, efficacy,
power, will and so on form the metaphysical backdrop for the scientific
activity of the period. Heidegger, for instance, thought that medieval
Christian theology very much determined those notions though he does not seem to
have thought that a good thing exactly. He thought modern science was grounded
in a metaphysic of pure will that comes in considerable part from the Christian (or Hebraic?) doctrine of creation and that this led to modern techne and the eclipse of being. Personally, and as I’ve indicated
above, I don’t think Heidegger’s history of being quite gets at the complexity
here as, for instance, it pretty much skips all of Neo-Platonism both in its
ancient and early modern forms. Still, a general flattening and simplifying of
structures that subjects the natural to greater and greater degrees of precise prediction and control grounded in the universality of quantity and the eclipse
of qualitative distinction and hierarchy seems to be what comes out of the
overall process of the birth of science. Though Christianity is not the only
actor in this drama I DO think Heidegger is correct at least to this extent:
the nature that emerges from this process is very much a Christianized nature
in which Classical elements have been muted and more ‘Biblical’ ones foregrounded
(though granting the ambiguity of the notion of the ‘Biblical’ adverted to
above). However, I must point out one other thing in this regard. If modernity
realized a form of ‘Christian nature’ (a mechanical system subjected to the
immediate will of god without an intelligible hierarchy or system of intervening
causes) this is NOT the only possibility.[9]
Christianity in the East, with its different doctrine of the Holy Spirit, has a
much different sense of nature. Plus, it retained the more hierarchical
standpoint of Dionysius’ ‘negative theology’ while the west opted for the more
rationalistic position of Augustine. I am not a theologian so it is not my
place to say which tradition has more truly actualized what was given in the
origins of Christianity. I WILL say however that going forward we might agree
that the early modern Christianized nature has reached a kind of terminus and
that we will be developing new natures going forward perhaps with the help of
the traditions of indigenous people.
Either way however, I think this ramble through history
has made one thing clear. Aliens will not have Christianized science or even
classical science or the contrast and conflict between the two to produce a third
thing by. As far as I can tell, then, we will be translating their thoughts for years, perhaps
for centuries. We will not exchange some basic math and then get down to business.
Though I like both movies I think Villeneuve’s intuition here is sounder than Sagan’s.
It is grounded, I think, more on linguistic
skepticism than historical skepticism but the two for me come to a comparable
result. In one way this is tragic for without compatible bodies of knowledge
and technologies that can interact there seems basically no hope of communicating
across interstellar distances. In that case a project like SETI seems
hopelessly misconceived unless the deck has somehow been stacked in favor of cultural
convergences on different planets. As to what kind of being or agency COULD
stack the deck in such a way one can only speculate. Such an agency would, it
seems, WANT communication across stellar distances. That or some hitherto
unknown physical principle presses upon us in such a way as to make us all
think roughly the same. If such a thing existed in the galaxy as a whole, though,
one would have to wonder why it doesn’t operate more forcefully on earth where
divergences between cultures are drastic even though all share the same basic physiology. Here though, speculation must come to an end.
[1]
Whether math is indeed universal seems something the mathematicians I know are
ambivalent on. When I ask them they will never quite tell me! Historically
there seems to be equal ambivalence. Augustine thought that one ‘saw’ mathematical
truths in the divine intellect itself and thus basic mathematical propositions
had the stability and necessity of the divine being itself. Descartes, on the
other hand, held that mathematics depended on the divine will and that
mathematical truths were created and thus contingent. I don’t know if this
conflict between realism and conventionalism has ever been resolved and ‘shut
up and do the math regardless’ seems to be the position of my colleagues on the
matter. The problem seems to be that at a certain level of formal abstraction
one can swap axioms about happily and I have talked to mathematicians who will
happily entertain the thought of 1+1=3 in certain advanced calculations. Maybe
this shows that Plato was right all along. The mathematical sciences are only
on the level of dianoia because their axioms are not un-hypothetical but are
‘laid down’ by the mathematician himself. This calculator can be happy with
1+1=2 when counting cookies but then swap it out for 1+1=3 when dealing with
certain advanced theorems. ‘
[4] As
an illustration of this consider the fact that the public presentation of
science, the self-perceptions of scientists and the present and past practice
of science frustratingly never quite align.
[5]
The ONE realistic (to my mind) portrayal of this problem comes surprisingly
from Star Trek TNG in the episode
‘Darmok and Jalad’. The only problem here, of course, is that the thorny
translation issue between humans and a species with a highly allusive,
pictorial and mythic language must be solved within the space of an hour long
episode. Otherwise the ‘universal translator’ renders everything into
acceptable English without apparent ambiguity or confusion.
[6]
Specifically disembodied universal intelligence which is the mask (in a
non-pejorative sense) of scientific neutrality and objectivity. Thus ‘reason’
dictates we prefer naturalism to pan-psychism. The ‘evidence’ dictates that Darwin
is better than Lamark. ‘Research’ concludes men are smarter than women or vice
versa. ‘Science’ or ‘The Science’ who speaks in and through the scientist, tells
us COVID vaccines are fine. All these uses of language assume a speaker who
does not speak from an embodied, situated position but from the standpoint of
reason as such. This means that the idea of God is very much inscribed in
current scientific language and practice for of course universal, disembodied,
non-spatial reason is divine reason. Nietzsche tells us that Christianity is
Platonism for the masses and science Christianity’s parricidal off-spring. This
seems to me a pretty good illustration of what he means. At any rate we are now
asked to consider who it is that speaks when we say ‘we’ ought to conclude or
hold x. Research does not speak, researchers do. Science says not a thing,
scientists do. I, however, try to always remind myself and others that I speak
for myself and from my own standpoint and make no prior assumption that pure
reason or science speaks through me.
[7]
Fludd is fascinating figure here though one who has been unfortunately classed,
and dismissed, as a magician. Fludd’s Mosaicall
Philosophy begins with a tour de force of exegesis in which he marshals an
impressive array of Biblical texts that justify the study of nature and contain
important clues as to principles of natural change. He does this, I might add,
far more skillfully than I have seen contemporary apologists manage. As a curious aside though, Fludd's attack on Aristotle is also an attack on 'secondary causes'. All is done immediately by God. The curious effect of this is that 'Biblical science' takes on a pantheistic coloring that begins to suggest Spinoza! Perhaps both are informed by Kabbalah here I don't know.
[8] We
might figure historical causation, I suppose, as a circulatory process of
mutual influence and conditioning which can be picked up from a multiplicity of
angles ranging from the most speculative conceptions of the world to the most
ordinary processes of material culture. The crux of the question I am
considering here would be: could an entirely different circulatory process produce
the same scientific theories on other worlds? I tend to think that would be
miraculous but miracles, I suppose, cannot be ruled out apriori.
[9] Of
course I have to add here that by the 19th century it became possible
to conceive of this mechanical system as operating independently of divine nature
altogether. This seems to me somewhat adventitious however. Without a divine law
giver it is hard to see how the mechanical system could have been constructed
though once constructed it might then be taken to operate on its own. For
instance, the Epicurean materialism of antiquity did not depended on quantifiable
laws or rigid conceptions of natural necessity. At its heart was the
arbitrariness of the clinamen or
swerve. This principle was pure contingency in itself. In fact, it was simply
posited to secure the practical aims of Epicurean ethics. Necessity in a strong
sense under-girds modern materialism. The laws continue to be laws without a law
giver. Hume noted the problems with this though Kant rode to the rescue by
pointing out that WE and the apriori categories of our understanding give the
laws of nature their universal and necessary form. There was no Kantian option
among the ancient materialists to explain the objectivity and permanence of order
and that, perhaps, was why they were a minority position.
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