Dear TOK Society,

  Below is an announcement from Nick Maxwell, who is a philosopher who has been promoting the need to anchor our understandings to wisdom, and to consider how we think about knowledge in the context of flourishing. Its basic message is highly consistent with the fundamental thrust of the Unified Framework, and I encourage folks to check out his work. Here is an article he did in Aeon<https://aeon.co/essays/bring-back-science-and-philosophy-as-natural-philosophy>.

Best,
Gregg

From: Group concerned that academia should seek and promote wisdom <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Maxwell, Nicholas
Sent: Friday, May 8, 2020 7:17 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Our Fundamental Problem

Dear Friend of Wisdom,

                                          Yesterday I published Our Fundamental Problem: A Revolutionary Approach to Philosophy, McGill-Queen's University Press, Canada.  Among other things, the book argues that if we are going to save the world from disaster, we need to bring about a revolution in science, and in academic inquiry more generally, so that the aim of the latter becomes wisdom, and not just knowledge.  In the hope that you might be interested, here below is a copy of the Preface.

                                      Best wishes,

                                             Nick Maxwell
Preface   Our Fundamental Problem
How can our human world - the world we experience and live in - exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe?  That is our fundamental problem.  It encompasses all others of science, thought and life.  This is the problem I explore in this book.  I put forward some suggestions as to how aspects of this problem are to be solved.  And I argue that this is the proper task of philosophy: to try to improve our conjectures as to how aspects of the problem are to be solved, and to encourage everyone to think, imaginatively and critically, now and again, about the problem.  We need to put the problem centre stage in our thinking, so that our best ideas about it interact fruitfully, in both directions, with our attempts to solve even more important more specialized and particular problems of thought and life.
The book is intended to be a fresh, unorthodox introduction to philosophy - an introduction which will, I hope, interest and even excite an intelligent 16 year old, as well as any adult half-way interested in intellectual, social, political or environmental issues.  Scientists and professional philosophers should find it of interest as well.  The idea of the book is to bring philosophy down to earth, demonstrate its vital importance, when done properly, for science, for scholarship, for education, for life, for the fate of the world.
If everything is made up of fundamental physical entities, electrons and quarks, interacting in accordance with precise physical law, what becomes of the world we experience - the colours, sounds, smells and tactile qualities of things?  What becomes of our inner experiences?  How can we have free will, and be responsible for what we do, if everything occurs in accordance with physical law, including our bodies and brains?  How can anything be of value if everything in the universe is, ultimately, just physics?  These are some of the questions we will be tackling in this book.
   These questions arise because of this great fissure in our thinking about the world.  Our scientific thinking about the physical universe clashes in all sorts of ways with our thinking about our human world.  The task is to discover how we can adjust our ideas about both the physical universe, and our human world, so that we can resolve clashes between the two in such a way that justice is done both to what science tells us about the universe, and to all that is of value in our human world - the miracle of our life here on earth - and the heart-ache and tragedy.
   It is all-but inevitable that even the smallest adjustments to what we take science to tell us about the universe, or to what we hold to be the nature and value of our human world, will have all sorts of repercussions, potentially, for all sorts of fields outside philosophy - for science, for thought, for life.  And indeed revolutionary ideas do emerge in this book from the exploration of our fundamental problem.
   There is, first, a revolution for philosophy.  A new kind of philosophy emerges which I call Critical Fundamentalism.  This tackles our fundamental problem, and in doing so seeks to resolve the fundamental fissure in the way we think about the universe and ourselves in such a way that this resolution has multiple, fruitful implications for thought and life.  Second, there is a revolution in what we take science to tell us about the world: it is concerned, not with everything about everything, but only with a highly specialized aspect of everything.  This is the subject of chapter 3.  Third, there is a revolution in our whole conception of science, and the kind of science we should seek to develop - the subject of chapter 4.  Fourth, there is a revolution in biology, in Darwin's theory of evolution, so that the theory does better justice to helping us understand how life of value has evolved.  This is the subject of chapter 5.  Fifth, there is a revolution in the social sciences.  These are not sciences; rather, their proper basic task is to promote the cooperatively rational solving of conflicts and problems of living in the social world.  In addition, they have the task of discovering how progress-achieving methods, generalized from those of natural science (as these ought to be conceived) can be got into social life, into all our other social endeavours, government, industry, the economy and so on, so that social progress towards a more enlightened world may be made in a way that is somewhat comparable to the intellectual progress in knowledge made by science.  Social inquiry emerges as social methodology or philosophy and not, fundamentally, social science.  Sixth, there is a much broader revolution in academic inquiry as a whole.  We need a new kind of academic enterprise rationally designed and devoted to helping us resolve the grave global conflicts and problems that confront us: habitat destruction, loss of wild life, extinction of species, the menace of nuclear weapons, the lethal character of modern war, gross inequality, pollution of earth, sea and air, and above all the impending disasters of climate change.  These problems have arisen in part because of the gross structural irrationality of our institutions of learning devoted as they are to the pursuit of knowledge instead of taking, as their basic task, to help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, thus making progress towards as good, as wise, a world as possible.  Seventh, there is the all-important social revolution that might gradually emerge if humanity has the wit to develop what it so urgently needs: academic inquiry rationally devoted to helping us make progress towards a better, more civilized world.  These fifth, sixth and seventh revolutions are the subject of chapter 7.
   Academic philosophy, whether so-called analytic or Continental philosophy, is not noted for its fruitful implications for other areas of thought and life.  How come, then, that philosophy as done here, Critical Fundamentalism, has these dramatic revolutionary implications for science, for academic inquiry, for our capacity to solve the global problems that menace our future?  I do what I can to answer this question in chapters 2 and 9.
   Why has academic philosophy, lost its way so drastically that it has failed to put the richly fruitful conception of philosophy, as done here, into practice?  What caused academic philosophy to lose its way?  I give my answer to this question in the appendix.
   My chief hope, in writing this book, however, is that the reader will be beguiled or provoked into thinking imaginatively and critically - that is, rationally - about our fundamental problem, not obsessively, but from time to time.

Website: www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.ucl.ac.uk_from-2Dknowledge-2Dto-2Dwisdom&d=DwMFAg&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=wjF8cZoiFchamTuxBdDEmw&m=qdqvgILpg0KnFvry3LZnOKChu9elzrg2ipBvCQdrXCU&s=quy24AKheNnoBqJxvHvJt4nH0aMVNZr6LbiclBBpZNM&e=>
Publications online: http://philpapers.org/profile/17092<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__philpapers.org_profile_17092&d=DwMFAg&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=wjF8cZoiFchamTuxBdDEmw&m=qdqvgILpg0KnFvry3LZnOKChu9elzrg2ipBvCQdrXCU&s=xA5RoY3axbBfdVCUHKn35uVNZ_wbigVZzNCugttWYXU&e=>
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/view/people/ANMAX22.date.html<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__discovery.ucl.ac.uk_view_people_ANMAX22.date.html&d=DwMFAg&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=wjF8cZoiFchamTuxBdDEmw&m=qdqvgILpg0KnFvry3LZnOKChu9elzrg2ipBvCQdrXCU&s=SPHqyBHJ-XwSwNtlzn8jVuuMbkArmlhmiW5m45_6KmU&e=>


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