seminar: Naturalism without reductionism
speaker: Dietelmo Pievani (Università di Milano Bicocca)abstract: In Italy the debate concerning the so-called “Two Cultures” is particularly out of date for historical and cultural reasons. We are still within the pendulum between opposite attempts of epistemological colonization: the “scientistic” colonization on one side (in fact a minority trend in scientific community and curiously more supported by some philosophers than scientists); the heterogeneous anti-scientific movement on the other side, represented by the most popular Italian philosophers, used to speak about the “barbarism of Techno-Science” or the “scientific fundamentalism” and other similar vacuities. The opposition between these Two Cultures is frequently based on the misunderstanding about the supposed “unity of science”. The current failure of different kinds of general epistemological reductionism (the physicalistic one, the molecular one, the neurological one) and the failure of the application of an alleged “unified” scientific method demonstrate that there is nothing like a “unity of contents”, nor a “unity of method”, in contemporary natural sciences, as John Dupré has brilliantly argued. Nevertheless, the pluralism of sciences does not imply any relativistic or anarchist outcome. If we consider a plurality of practices of understanding the world with a set of common “epistemic virtues” – giving up the hegemony of one discipline - we could have a more realistic and empiric view of human knowledge. A serious “pluralistic naturalism” seems today the most promising bridge between natural sciences and human sciences. The case of the “uniqueness” of life sciences explanations and the need of a peculiar set of patterns in order to scientifically understand the biological and evolutionary world are good examples of the plurality of methods and contents needed by the current natural sciences. We will consider - as an interesting case study of interdependence between the so-called “Two Cultures” - the attempts to study the biological evolution and the cultural evolution of Homo sapiens in an integrated and non-reductionistic way.
timetable:
Thu 8 Mar, 11:30 - 12:30, Sala Conferenze Centro De Giorgi
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