QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

Devlin, many obvious problems have questioned the boundaries imposed by the legacy of Plato,
Aristotle, Descartes and all the great thinkers in our two-thousand-year intellectual tradition. 375
This criticism is relatively new and almost all of it is controversial. The depth of the crisis and its
character have not yet become quite clear. The majority of natural scientists do not, in general,
share the relativism and scepticism expressed by the critics of scientific-technical culture. The
widely adopted modern scientific-technical way of thinking has offered a working framework for
the solution of countless problems. It has been possible to provide detailed descriptions and
explanations of different real phenomena in mechanical terms - by investigating the structures
and laws of material things. Natural scientists also understand and value the unprecedented
precision and quantity of our knowledge concerning the world. While Aristotle was more or less
only able to classify and name different phenomena, modern science has, in an awe-inspiring
manner, proved capable to provide legitimate explanations of natural facts and laws by reducing
the plenitude of observed phenomena to a few fundamental invariances. The mechanisticdeterministic
conception of reality and the attempts to control nature have also resulted in
unprecedented technical and economic development – whether it is considered a benefit or not.
On the other hand, even though natural science – and especially physical research at the
macroscopic level – made good progress on the basis of the mechanistic-deterministic paradigm,
attempts to understand humans or the workings of society within a similar framework have not
produced such influential results. On the basis of the mechanistic-deterministic paradigm, it has
also not been possible to forecast the risks involved in the manipulation of nature. The
particlemechanistic conception of reality may not provide access to the complex relationships
between different variables and processes and their internal dependencies. As humans do not
have a clear understanding of their own place as a part of nature, they have heedlessly destroyed
the preconditions for their own existence. Also, in our materialistic culture, the significance of
values as the foundations of man’s responsibility for nature and society has generally been
poorly understood. The existential problems like lack of meaning of life and the environmental
problems, can both be taken as anomalies linked to the mechanistic-deterministic conception of
reality.
In spite of the problems, the target of a consistent and overall representation of reality should not
be abandoned. The general reductionist thesis can be said to have driven science forward, even
375 Devlin 1997, 276-279. Examples of other critical philosophers and scientists are Heidegger, Toulmin, Maturana,
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