Metaphysics lives - part 2

This is the second in a short series of posts based on a review* at Catholic world Report of Scholastic Metaphysics: a Contemporary Introduction by Edward Feser. 

Contemporary scientism contends that there is no such thing as metaphysics that can go beyond physics and that nothing can attain fundamentals better than modern science. Feser disputes these contentions:-

2. In principle, the scientific method is incapable of a complete description of reality. Modern science in general, and modern physics in particular, is fond of quantifying things with mathematical equations or univocal schemata. But this craze for quantitative description, powerful as it is for unlocking many fundamental secrets of nature, is still in principle leaving out vast sectors of reality from its descriptions: namely, those qualitative aspects of reality that cannot be subjected to empiriometric mathematization or empirioschematic quantification. As the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger recognized: “the mind itself remains a stranger in this picture, it has no place in it, it can nowhere be found in it.” After all, who is applying the scientific method, if not beings with minds? 

Clearly, there is here a fundamental aspect of reality that will forever elude scientific description, because the mind cannot be reduced to the merely quantitative, without annihilating all the qualitative features of the mind and of the scientific method that it wields. To maintain otherwise, Feser points out, is like saying we can clean a house by sweeping all the dirt under a certain rug—and then arguing that we can get rid of the dirt under that same rug by applying the very same method. In the same way, the scientific method, by targeting only particular and specific aspects of reality (like the quantitative), guarantees that we are in principle leaving out everything not targeted by that method. To then step beyond that method, by rashly claiming that everything can be explained by and reduced to what that method focuses on, is an unjustified—indeed, a crazy—philosophical maneuver.

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* The reviewer is Christopher S. Morrissey, professor of philosophy at Redeemer Pacific College, Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia.

Scholastic Metaphysics: a Contemporary Introduction by Edward Feser. Editions Scholasticae, 2014, 290pp.