...at Interalia Magazine. An excerpt:
Scientists and others sometimes deride philosophy on the basis of very little if any evidence of what it is like. There is a lot of extraordinarily brilliant work in metaphysics but there is a predominance of a priori methodology and a lack of engagement with scientific knowledge. This means that while the work is not worthless, since it often exemplifies great rigour and clarity and sophistication of argument and concepts, it is largely irrelevant for someone interested in the nature of reality. Our idea is that naturalised metaphysics exists to say how the world is in the light of all the sciences, and to say something about how the ontologies of the sciences relate to each other and to physics. We define fundamental physics as the science that is maximally general in respect of the scales to which it applies. We argue that as yet we have no account of a fundamental level nor any reason to think there is one and so we ought to unify the sciences without reference to one. This we do with the ideas of scale relativity of ontology and real patterns. The latter have causal/lawlike structure so we are realists about causation, but also pluralists about it so that the causation in evolutionary dynamics can in principle be different from that in economics or medicine. The world conceived as a totality, a single finished entity, may not exist, but there are plenty of things that do including galaxies, cells, viruses, atoms and electromagnetic radiation, and let’s not forget people
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