It’s often said that a problem with Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and a host of other ontological philosophers was that they either ignored or had certain sciences not available to them, thus they labored in “ignorance” on mind-body dualisms or significance.
But a good number of atheism-prone philosophers from the Enlightenment to date also suffer from an even worse affliction…intentional intellectual poverty!
For example, real scientists in a real science over and over prove the universe HAD a “transcendental causal agent”, yet many non-ontological philosophers critical of metaphysics persist as if saying: “Yeah? So? You BETTER keep listening to my musings dependent upon only a cosmos!”. Seems some can’t accept atomist, nominalist, linguistic, existentialist, or positivist philosophers AREN’T right about a universe without ex nihilio creation.
That’s not a boast: in “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity” (1989), University of Chicago/Yale educated humanist and widely read philosopher Richard Rorty puts forth a schema to counter the Platonists he rejects in toto, a schema based on belief there is no truth higher than the human being’s ability to reproduce themselves, i.e, no transcendental causal agent. In that Rorty died in 2007, he had available science facts on transcendental causation of the universe, just like atheist-turned-believer Antony Flew, but kept insisting as in “Contingency” that government should inculcate a diverse community held together by opposition to suffering, and not by abstract ideas such as ‘justice’, ‘common humanity’, and so on.
Just some of my reasons for not tossing out Parmenides, Plato, and their chains of thought.
