Kant,1 Scientific Pietism, and Scientific Naturalism

Robert Hanna

doi:10.7213/aurora.28.044.ds10

Abstract

The doctrine of Kantian natural piety says that rational human animals are essentially at home in physical nature. In this essay, I apply the doctrine of Kantian natural piety directly to the natural sciences, and especially physics, by showing how they have a cognitive, epistemic, metaphysical, practical/moral, aesthetic/artistic, religious, and sociocultural/political grounding in Kantian sensibility, both pure and empirical. This is what I call Kantian scientific pietism, and it is to be directly and radically opposed to scientific naturalism

Highlights

Kantian pietismPietism was a European reformist religious movement of the 17th and 18th centuries, whose central emphasis was on religious feeling or sensibility, direct religious experience of the holy, and experiential faith, as the cognitive and practical grounds of religion and theology
I apply the doctrine of Kantian natural piety directly to the natural sciences, and especially physics, by showing how they have a cognitive, epistemic, metaphysical, practical/moral, aesthetic/artistic, religious, and sociocultural/political grounding in Kantian sensibility, both pure and empirical
What I want to do in this paper is to apply the doctrine of Kantian natural piety directly to the natural sciences, and especially physics, by showing how they have a cognitive, epistemic, metaphysical, practical/moral, aesthetic/artistic, religious, and sociocultural/political grounding in Kantian sensibility, both pure and empirical

Summary

Kantian pietism

Pietism was a European reformist religious movement of the 17th and 18th centuries, whose central emphasis was on religious feeling or sensibility, direct religious experience of the holy, and experiential faith, as the cognitive and practical grounds of religion and theology. What I want to do in this paper is to apply the doctrine of Kantian natural piety directly to the natural sciences, and especially physics, by showing how they have a cognitive, epistemic, metaphysical, practical/moral, aesthetic/artistic, religious, and sociocultural/political grounding in Kantian sensibility, both pure and empirical This is what I call Kantian scientific pietism, and it is to be directly and radically opposed to scientific naturalism, by which I mean the philosophical doctrine consisting of (i) universal deterministic or indeterministic natural mechanism[11], (ii) physicalism (whether reductive or non-reductive), and above all (iii) scientism, including (iiia) epistemic empiricism (whether classical empiricism, as per Locke, Hume, and Mill, or radical Quinean empiricism), (iiib) the Lockean epistemological “underlaborer” conception of the relation between natural science and philosophy, such that philosophy is the underlaborer of the sciences[12], which is re-affirmed in Sellars’s mid-20th century slogan that “science is the measure of all things,”[13] and (iiib) the Baconian and Cartesian technocratic ideology according to which, as natural. In view of the deep, seemingly irreversible, and hegemonic sociocultural/political and ideological connection between modern and contemporary natural science, the military-industrial complex, mastery-of-nature technology, global corporate capitalism in the post-Cold War age of neoliberalism, and the apocalyptic threat of permanent eco-disaster (whether by nuclear holocaust, biochemical holocaust, slow-moving global-warming-driven disasters, or whatever), it is not going too far to claim that the future of humanity itself is closely bound up with the philosophical fate of Kantian scientific pietism and natural piety[15]

How to ground natural science on sensibility

Conclusion