Rationalism, Empiricism, and Methodism in the Ancient World
Sextus Empiricus wrote several books opposing the various academic schools of his time. The books known to us were
- Against the Grammarians
- Against the Rhetoricians
- Against the Geometers
- Against the Arithmeticians
- Against the Astrologers
- Against the Musicians
- Against the Logicians
- Against the Physicists
- Against the Ethicists
Sextus Empiricus, as you can see, was not a fan of the schools of thought popular in his day. A common theme that spans across the millenia is Pyrrho’s disdain for the Sophists. Inspired by the example of Sextus Empiricus, I submit the following modern additions to complement his library:
A scientist, my dear friends, is a man who foresees; it is because science provides the means to predict that it is useful, and the scientists are superior to all other men.
With the fawning words of the original utopian socialist, Henri de Saint-Simon, the long-dormant seed of sophism implanted itself into the trunk of science, growing like a strangler fig around a tree. Where a true scientist is interested in understanding rather than a notion of “science” as a social institution, the sophists found a fertile bed within which to restore the themselves to prominence after a long eclipse. Saint-Simon’s envious secretary, Auguste Comte, went on to found positivism, sociology (“the Queen of the Sciences”), and the secular Religion of Humanity, and the social science theoreticians have grown around it.
In modernity, the rationalists have divided into multiple schools:
- Against the Positivists
- Against the Analytic Philosophers
- Against the Critical Theorists
- Against the Postmodernists
- Against the Sociologists
- Against the Economists
- Against the Behavioral Economists
- Against the Journalists
- Against the Educators
In modernity, the empiricists have divided into multiple schools:
- Against the Statisticians
- Against the Category Theorists
- Against the Skeptics
- Against the Psychologists
- Against the Evolutionary Biologists
- Against the Quantum Non-realists
I offer the following apologias: