Publisher's Synopsis
Science is under attack.
Religion, philosophy and relativism seek to undermine our confidence in science, relegating it to the realm of mere opinion and not of actual knowledge. This treatise on epistemology traces the attack against science back to one root premise: the theory of axioms, that we should begin with self-evident principles and then use logic to derive all necessary truth from those axioms. This belief leads to an analytic philosophy that replaces actual scientific experiments with thought experiments, designed to replace sensory perception with intuitions, thereby destroying the grand tradition of real science and hard scientific experiments to learn the truth.
This book offers a radical new alternative to the theory of axioms. Instead of axioms, we should rely upon sensory experience, scientific experiments, and empirical data, to form the fundamental foundation upon which all analysis, logic and knowledge can be built.
The first part of this book is a collection of philosophy papers which explain how scientific experiments can be used to answer philosophical questions such as whether God exists and whether human beings have free will. The second part of this book is a 40-pages-long paper that attacks the theory of axioms within objectivist philosophy and shows that sensory experience is superior to axioms as a foundation for all logic and reason. The third part of this book is a 300-pages long treatise which asks: if we begin with empirical experience, not with axioms, do we need to assume that perception is valid or that the physical world exists, thereby implicitly relying on axioms? The essay shows from the beginning to the end how our knowledge of the physical world can be justified using only empirical experience as a basis for reasoning, without any necessary reference to axioms or intuition. The treatise argues that all first concepts begin from children's minds processing sensory perception, and all other concepts come from first concepts plus further empirical experience, so all concepts derive from experience and can be put to the test of the scientific method.
This treatise offers bright, bold new ideas about how reason and perception work. The two key ideas in this book are the philosophical scientific method, which means using scientific experiments to answer philosophical questions, and pure empirical essential reasoning, which achieves knowledge by using the essence of a perceived object as a basis for universalizing empirical data to apply to all times and places including those not perceived at the present time. This book restores science to its rightful place at the center of human knowledge.
A must-read for students of philosophy and for people who want to learn more about knowledge and reason. Every philosophy nerd, and every smart person who likes science, should read this book!
