In some sense yes. Philosophy is traditionally considered a love for wisdom. Skepticism is radically anti-knowledge, therefore anti-philosophy. It's like calling atheism a religion. One could if he so chooses, although it's a bit of a contradiction.

QM seems to undermine objectivity in the sense that measurement cannot be passive. This is mind dependence in terms of perception....

General relativity undermines objectivity in the sense of the gods eye view. There is no overall spacetime perspective to look down upon the rest. Every perspective is uniquely intrinsic to reality.

Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, ever since promulgated his highly influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other". Richard J. Bernstein is recognized as having coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.

Quite true Pagan. Much to the discomfort of your hardcore scientific postivists, relativity and QM have seen metaphysics come back into the picture.

Good, all-purpose quote in this context:

Where did you ever get the idea that the experience of X is identical with X?

There are different ways to conceive of X but these are all forms of experience. X-in-itself, which you seem to be hinting at, is still the experience of the concept X-in-itself, which connects to the idea of noumena. But noumena is a limiting concept. If it is presented as more than a limiting concept, it becomes paradoxical. If we speak of that which is beyond our experience, what could we be speaking of?

There can be elephants and no experience of elephants.

I think that Einstein pointed out that for there to be relativity, there had also to be something absolute. Like the velocity of light.

We have no way of knowing this.

We do have ways of knowing this.

It asserts that experience includes both particulars and relations between those particulars, and that therefore both deserve a place in our explanations. In concrete terms: any philosophical worldview is flawed if it stops at the physical level and fails to explain how meaning, values and intentionality can arise from that.

Perfectly true but I don't know what that means in philosophical terms. I need to do some more reading on it. But the point of referring to Einstein, relativity and the paradoxes of QM is to argue that the naive realist position (the word 'naive' is not intended pejoratively in this context) has been undermined, not just by philosophical argument, but by scientific discoveries. That is why those many physicists, who you criticize elsewhere for 'not being philosophers', have become interested in mystical spirituality (for want of a better term). They are casting about for a world-picture which makes more sense of the empirical data because the idea that the Universe is composed of a bunch of things, stuff, or particles no longer makes sense. As Sir James Jeans said, it resembles a great mind more than a great machine. Hence the rediscovery of metaphysics.

I see no objection to saying that the natural World eludes conceptual understanding. Indeed, this would only mean that the existence of Nature is revealed by mathematical algorthm, for example, and not by concepts--that is by words having a meaning. Now, modern physics leads in the end to this result: one cannot speak of the physical reality without contradictions; as soon as one passes from algorthm to verbal description, one contradicts himself (particle-waves for example). Hence there would be no discourse revealing the physical or natural reality. This reality (as presented as early as Galileo) would be revealed to man only by the articulated silence of algorthm.....Now it does seem that algorthm, being nontemporal, does not reveal Life. But neither does dialectic. Therefore it may be necessary to combine Plato's conception(for the mathematical, or better, geometrical, substructure of the world) with Aristotle's (for its biological structure) and Kant's (for its physical, or better, dynamic, structure), while reserving Hegelian dialectic for Man and History..

The problem remains, however, that the entire world still constructs a reality ruled by an absolute notion of space and time.

I see language as the foundation of conceptual understanding and interrelated subjectivity. Words and numbers are both signifiers for a signified concept, and it is only through language that these concepts can be communally spread. What natural science considers objective reality is only possible because of the rationality of the meaning brought into reality by words.

We have no way of knowing this.

It is not an attribute of the physical world, because without anyone to count, numbers don't exist. Yet it is also not an attribute of the individual mind, because it is the same for all minds. I am still contemplating this. It seems important to me.

As a matter of fact, if there were elephants, but no people, then there would be elephants but not experience of elephants. Don't we know that is true, since it would be impossible for there to be experiences of elephants unless there were people to have such experiences. And, don't you suppose that some place in Africa, there are elephants, but no people around.

In any case, what has knowing whether something is true to do with whether that something is true? Something can be true, and no one know it is true.

You mean, people generally and instinctively still continue to see things this way, despite what relativity and QM says to the contrary? I suppose this is quite understandable. I mean, it took an Einstein so see that things weren't this way.



For some reason, I am very attracted to the idea of mathematical realism. I think number describes a reality. The fact that number is not actually apparent to anyone who can't count makes it even more interesting. It is a non-material attribute of the nature of things. I don't know if I accept 'representationalism' - that number is an mental operation that corresponds to a physical reality. I think mathematics somehow reflects the deep structure of reality itself, and is neither objective nor subjective. It is not an attribute of the physical world, because without anyone to count, numbers don't exist. Yet it is also not an attribute of the individual mind, because it is the same for all minds. I am still contemplating this. It seems important to me.

This conception of number seems transcendental, and it's one I share. Geometry is not something I've thought much on. But algebra and arithmetic seem like modifications of unity, or the number 1. Could all numbers stand or fall on the possibility of what the number one refers to? Is this number one a sign for the concept of substance?

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All of these elephants exists conceptually as your experience. Being - being = "being." Elephant - elephant = "elephant." That's not your usual math. No sir. Your are projecting your memory/concept of elephants into imaginary situations.

If I do any kind of supposing at all, I am experiencing this supposing.