Footnote zq0

zq0. The philosopher Thomas Nagel remarks,

Philosophy is also infected by a broader tendency of contemporary intellectual life: scientism. Scientism is actually a special form of idealism, for it puts one type of human understanding in charge of the universe and what can be said about it. At its most myopic it assumes that everything there is must be understandable by scientific theories of the kind we have developed to date – physics and evolutionary biology being the current paradigms – as if the current age were not just another in the series.

Precisely because of their dominance, these attitudes are ripe for attack. Of course some of the opposition is foolish; it can degenerate into the rejection of science – whereas anti-scientism is essential to the defense of science against misappropriation... Too much time is wasted because of the assumptions that methods already in existence will solve problems for which they were not designed.

-- The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel (Oxford 1986).

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