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Symbolism in Science and Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Wilbur M. Urban
Wilbur M. Urban*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Is metaphysics possible? From the beginning of our present sophisticated era we have continually been compelled to ask this question. For myself I confess to a growing impatience with this and like questions. I hold with Kant that metaphysics is a Naturanlage, that should all science pass away and should we revert to barbarism, there would still be metaphysics. I am also disposed to think that should mankind develop in the opposite direction, should we become the supermen or the angels which the perfectionists of all times have envisaged, metaphysics would not only remain, but metaphysical insight would be the very life of that perfection. As Dante said, “metaphysics is the bread of angels.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , July 1938 , pp. 276 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1938

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References

Notes

1 Philosophy and Logical Syntax, p. 15.

2 The New World Picture of Modern Physics, Nature, September 8, 1934.

3 H. Margenau, Methodology of Modern Physics, Philosophy of Science, Vol. II, Nos. 1 and 2 (January and April, 1935).

4 See E. G. Spaulding, A World of Chance, p. 283.

5 Appeal is often made also to the “logical theory of types” to prove the impossibility of metaphysics in the sense of propositions about the whole. The theory of types is, however, becoming increasingly unsatisfactory, even from the standpoint of logic itself, and it is an open question whether its application to this type of problem is legitimate. In any case it is possible to state the point at issue without appealing to this debatable notion. In fact it was already done by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason.

6 See my Intelligible World, p. 53.

7 Philosophy of Religion, pp. 207 ff.

8 A somewhat similar view is developed by Stephen C. Pepper in an article entitled The Root Metaphor Theory of Metaphysics, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XXXII, No. 14, July 4, 1935. The notion of the origin of the metaphysical concept is roughly the same, but the “symbolism of metaphysics “is not related to that of science and the dis. tinctive character of the metaphysical symbol, as I conceive it, is not made clear.

9 Process and Reality, p. 6.