Object and definition of Philosophy. Philosophy as metaphysics. /part 7/
However, this is not the question of the positivism of Auguste Conte and his followers who disagree with one or another, whether it is dogmatic or critical, metaphysics, but they are all opponents of every metaphysics. Positivism, and later non-positivism, believe that everything outside of the scope of our positive experience is inaccessible to knowledge. Questions such as those about the beginning and meaning of the world, of the soul, of immortality, of freedom of will are not given in the experience and can not be the subject of scientific research. Only available to the senses objects and phenomena and their most immediate connection should be studied. Then our knowledge will be positive and practically useful. Mankind has come, according to positivism, gradually to this consciousness. Initially, it has spent a theological stage in which it has explained everything by the action of hidden living beings, spirits who have been worshiped and deified.
Later this stage gave way to metaphysical. Here things were explained by the admission of some hidden, inaccessible for reason, complex mental speculations, and therefore knowledge lost its positive and beneficial character. Finally, through the work of Kant himself, this stage is overwhelmed and replaced by the era of positivism, "which will no longer end. Here, any metaphysics was impossible and completely redundant. No less zealous in the denial of metaphysics is the philosophy of Johannes Remme and his followers. In their view, metaphysics was basically the vicious premise that there are two different worlds: a world of the subject and another of things in itself, a world of phenomena, another of the essences; one relative and one true, absolute. Metaphysics had the task of penetrating "behind physics" to gain the "essence" of things by rising above the world as it existed "for us. But since counterposition is the result of a misunderstanding, so the claim of metaphysics to be a basic, general science is not justified, as there is no justification for existence and not at all. The place is occupied by the basic or general science created by Remke itself. In defense of metaphysics, it must first of all be emphasized that human reason is naturally metaphysical and can not deeper and deeper explore the phenomena and relationships that stand before him and ask "what is standing in and behind their essence .
In this respect, the mind of Remke and his followers is no less metaphysical, so their basic science is in fact a system of metaphysics that may be bad or good, but in essence is metaphysics despite reluctance and acknowledge that. Regarding the reluctance of the Remkyans to accept the old name, it is due to the misunderstanding and non-differentiation of "metaphysics dogmatic" from "critical metaphysics", which gives to a great extent the dogmatic character of the "basic science" itself, extremely critical. The misunderstanding lies in the division of the reality of relative and absolute, of reality "for us" and of real reality. Indeed, metaphysics does not divide the reality of relative and absolute, but divides our knowledge of reality into relative and absolute, by trying to make its knowledge less relative, more direct. When we say "reality in itself" and "reality for us", we do not imagine dogmatically two parallel, equally constant magnitudes, without transition from one to the other. Here "for us" means "for us now, at the present level of our scientific possibilities." . .
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