The metaphysics of science and aim-oriented empiricism

Nicholas Maxwell

Springer - Berlin

2018

This book tackles two fundamental problems: How can our human world exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? What role do untestable, metaphysical ideas about the nature of the physical universe play in science?

In connection with the first, it is argued that physics is concerned only with a highly selective aspect of all that there is - that aspect that determines how events unfold. Physics ignores human experience and consciousness, first because they are not needed to fulfil the predictive and explanatory tasks of physics, and second because they must be ignored if physics is to develop the beautifully explanatory theories that it does develop.