Poll: empiricist, idealist or?

[Anselm33]

As part of my learning curve to give a course on Catholic philosopher/theologians this spring, I’ve been reading about Aquinas. One little book in particular has caught my fancy, by Henry Margenau, a renowned mathematical physicist and philosopher of science, “Thomas and the physics of 1958; a confrontation”. In this he said that before the 20th century both empiricists (those who took everything by the evidence of the senses and then constructed theories to fit those “dial readings”) and idealists (those who constructed mathematical theories and fit the observations to those theories) could find common ground; you could make a transition from one point of view to the other. But now, according to Margenau, by virtue of the mysteries of quantum mechanics, you have to be either an empiricist or an idealist; they don’t automatically merge into each other as they did before 1901.

So that’s the point of this poll: are you (1) an empiricist (only sense data is to be trusted); (2) an idealist (the “Laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics” --Galileo Galilei) ; (3) the whole distinction is silly.

Please respond and comment, if you would, please.
Thanks,
Anselm

 

[Janet1983]

I do believe that God is the Creator, which would make me an idealist. I do however believe that because of the evidence found in nature, which would make me an empiricist.
To take the scientific without the philosophic is a problem. If we look around us and devise a theory, then we are idealists. I don’t see good evidence for evolution that would bring that theory from being idealistic to being empirical. It is both. It has a scientific component and an idealistic component. In conjunction that is what we call the evolution theory.
I take the same evidence and I come to a different conclusion. My scientific component is more or less the same, but my idealistic component is not. That is why I differ.
For spiritual beings like humans it is virtually impossible to be exclusively idealistic or exclusively empirical.

 

[fons_vitae]

Probably the “correct” answer in this case would be “a mix of both”… but I’m just too darned idealistic at the end of the day.

 

[awatkins69]

Saint Thomas Aquinas says, in De Veritate, that “Nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses.” Of course, I don’t buy into any of the empiricist stuff that sense-data are those things which we apprehend. Rather, I think sense-data are those things by which we apprehend the object which is causally working on us. Also, with mathematics, I don’t think we gain any real knowledge about the world from the discipline *itself *(though some Platonist mathematicians would beg to differ). It’s sort of just working consistently within the rules of a system. It’s like a game almost. Rather, I think that mathematics can be falsified just as much as any other discipline. For example, non-Euclidean geometry is more in line with the real world than Euclidean geometry. The reason 1+1=2 is because that’s the way reality is. So the reason [some] mathematical truths are true is because when we investigate the world we find that they conform to reality; but that’s really metaphysics, not maths.

 

[Katholish]

Since Catholic Philosophy based on St. Thomas says that all knowledge comes from the senses, that would tend to put us in the empiricist camp, while recognizing that we share very little in common with the others who call themselves empiricists.

awatkins69 had an excellent point that when it comes down to it, we disagree over what sense data is.