In academic circles right now, it is very trendy to study and write on the philosophical thought of ancient tribal Africans and near-easterners. Keen attention is paid to thinkers who “got their first” - which is to say, if you can find an African thinker that stumbled upon the cosmological arguments of Aquinas or Anselm chronologically before Aquinas and Anselm thought of them, or an Indian thinker who discovered the is-ought dichotomy chronologically before Hume, you’ll be an instant academic hero.
As I’ve progressed in my study of physics and metaphysics over the last 5 years, I’ve gradually come to realize that we’re all whistling through a kind of graveyard. I don’t know when it began or who started it, exactly, but on thing is for sure: we really don’t like thinking about it.
What am I talking about?
Well, the journey for me, really began (ironically) with the philosophy of science. You see, modern science is committed to a belief that the world is explainable all the way down (as the saying goes). In other words, there is an inherently intelligible order to nature that functions as the first major premise of every scientific argument: the world behaves according to reason. And, even if we cannot fully fathom the reasons for some particular phenomenon now, still in principle it is possible to discover them all eventually.
