I have been this afternoon to the Meetup philosophical debate and I had to leave before the end of it: I could not stand the feeling I was speaking a completely different language (a very funny one) and nobody could really care about what I was saying at all. Maybe that was just the feeling everybody gets on their first philosophical debate experience.

At some point, it seemed to me that the debate was going nowhere and I tried to redirect it to the main points that we were supposed to be dealing with. “Have the modern sciences replaced philosophy as a way of investigating the world?” and “What is the place of philosophy in the modern world?” I know that this kind of starting questions are just a first spur to move people to talk about the topic even if they are later put aside .

But the fact is that nobody was bothering to answer them right from the beginning.
Everybody started trying to excuse the existence of philosophy on an era where most problems can be solved by science. In fact, the existence of philosophy (so you could understand by hearing the different opinions) is just a proof of the limits of science, and you could guess that what was meant is that, if science could be fully developped, then philosophy would be unnecesary.

To put it in a nutshell, everybody (except a gentleman who I think was a physicist) was taking for granted that science is the only true way of reaching reality, that it really explains the facts in an aseptic way, and that, as it evolves, it reveals truth in a more and more perfect and deep way. This is obviously quite an idealistic way of looking at things, but try to explain that to somebody who, trapped by the illusion of “common sense”, “facts” or “the universality of mathematical truths”, feels like an intellelectual joke the fact of putting these ideas into question.

Well, I am not going yo say that is (in principle) bad to be a logical positivist if you are aware that that is what you are, if you know what exactly you are standing for and against. The bad thing is being completely uncritical about your points of view, because the blind assumption of principles and truths that are not tested and are assumed as “natural” and “evident” is not precisely a genuine philosophical attitude.

My last intervention, the one that I used to unprofitalby try to redirect things in a way I thought that was sensible consisted of the following points.

· When we talk about modern sciences we are not only talking about natural sciences but about human sciences as well (Economics, for example has a high pretention of being an almost infallible science). But I think only once somebody mentioned something about psychology and the possibility of a complete knowledge of the psyche, since this is, that was said, something natural. For the rest of the time physics and mathematics were the absolute stars. If that was so…, was it perhaps because the idea was that every human phenomenon could be ideally reduced to physic or chemical elements?

· When we talk about science as taking the place of philosophy as a way of investigating the world it seems that they are the only two alternatives there has ever been to investigate the world, and one of them, science, has replaced philosophy on that role when society was mature enough to realize about its epistemological superiority. But the fact is that these two have not always been the exclusive ways of looking for truth.They have always coexisted with at least two more that I can think of. Art and Religion.

· And, in the case of the latest, I tried to defend that the relationship of the former ones with this is not a relationship of coexistence but rather a relationship of derivation. Art, Science, etc…. do not exist as separated individual fields since the beginning of times, they were born inside religious world views, and they carry their imprint. The fact that modernity put an end to the supremacy of religion as a last explanation for everyhing in Europe, and the appearance of different disciplines that provided their own explanations following their own logic does not mean at all that they “discovered” completely new concepts, completely new categories and structures for understanding reality. The ones that already existed just changed, mutated.

· I pointed out that the universality of certain sciences, or the repetitiveness of categories, concepts, etc, all around the world nowadays can be explained because of material reasons. I claimed that science is a rather European discourse, and that it is, furthermore, a discourse generated from its origins by a very specific individual, the male bourgeois individual, who took himself as a mesure and example for every discipline. To make it easy and evident I tried to simply defend that trade and war (colonialism) are an apparently valid way of explaining to a certain extent the universality of science despite its European origins. At least somebody replied to this. Somebody said that, if some Martians would happen to try to establish contact with the human being, mathematics is the way we could more perfectly make ourselves understood to the aliens, which, according to this person was a proof of the objectivity and universality of mathematics.

· I even dared to state that science is a way of constructing truth (at the same level as art, or philosophy, or…), and that the key of its supremacy over the other disciplines is that is a “useful” construction of truth. Science “creates” nature, impose its logic in the world and therefore is able to “use” it in an efficient way.

· I pointed out that speculative science is a very rare thing nowadays. Far behind remains the ideal of the wise person who could dedicate his time to contemplate truth selflessly. The scientist works for a company, and his research depends on market decissions most of the time. In the same way, University can rely less and less on State support and has to look for sponsors, who will give money mainly to researches that are considered to be profitable. To think about a scientist who could look for truth independently of these elements is like thinking about an artist who wish to try to survive outside the art market.

This is what I said there, but nobody cared about replying even if it was to tell me I was wrong.
Had I stayed a little longer I would have tried to give my opinion about the role of philosophy in the modern world.
All the people there agreed that “maybe” philosophy´s role in the modern world is limited to ethics. To control, for example, the way in which science is used. And there I could find finally a point of agreement, even if a weak one. Philosophy´s role in the modern world has to be mainly critical, and not critical in a superficial way, but critical to the core of whatever it enquires about.

Nietzsche used to say that there is no judgement about reality that is not a moral judgement at the same time. Philosophy, cannot resign itself to accept uncritically the assumptions of science and limit its action to praise the benefits it brings and regret its consequences. Science is not an aseptic discipline that can be used for good or bad purposes, science is, to a large extent, “applied science”, is technology, and mixed with its “humanistic” claims carries hidden within some more dubious ideological assumptions.
Philosophy, therefore, cannot be an adornment to science in the modern world. Their role is not even similar (not anymore) despite what was agreed from the beginning of the debate. Science´s role is a positive one, while philosophy´s role is negative. Science deals with the construction of useful reality, philosophy (it is, of course, only my opinion) must deal with the denunciation of the weak points of that construction (and of those of other disciplines). Science is about truth, philosophy about lie.

I apologise for having taken so much space to define my point of view, and for any possible language incorrection I might have commited, since English is not my first language and now I am falling asleep :P