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“I find no good reason to think that philosophers today do philosophy better than philosophers 600 or 2000 years ago.”, summarizes Justin Weinberg, Associate Professor.
Photo: [ancient Egyptian wine vessels]
That’s Ana María Mora-Márquez (Gothenburg) in an interview with Richard Marshall at 3:16am. The interview covers some of her work in medieval philosophy, Aristotle, and logic. At one point, Marshall asks:
Are there important things that contemporary debates can still use from this Aristotelian metaphysics, epistemology and logic or has it all been supplanted by more powerful explanations of the phenomena needing explanation?
Professor Mora-Márquez replies:
Good question: yes, there are. Most likely the phenomena that have now more powerful explanations are those we can now observe better because of better modern observation tools. That excludes precisely metaphysics and language and logic, the objects of which are not observable in the same way that, say, viruses and exoplanets are. Epistemology is a bit more complex because modern science has indeed supplanted many old explanations on some aspects of knowledge, but with explanations that are not philosophical. However, the social epistemology that has been developing in the last decades, for instance, has a historical precursor in ancient and medieval philosophy at which it would be worth taking a closer look.
Also, it seems to me that metaphysicians then and now don’t lead substantially different discussions (except for the format), so contemporary debates could find good ideas in the old ones, I’m sure.
The whole interview is here.
Source: Daily Nous
