Abstract
The Courage of Doing Philosophy is a volume dedicated to one of the most original contemporary philosophers of science, the Pole Leszek Nowak (1943-2009). Main founder of the so-called Poznań School of Methodology and Editor-in-Chief since 1975 of its official review, Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Nowak distinguished himself on the international epistemological landscape thanks to the systematic development of the idealizational conception of science (see Nowak [1980]).
The main role of this scientific approach, which Leszek Nowak reconstructs starting from a methodological study of Karl Marx’s and Galileo’s works and that he re-elaborates in a creative way and with a close comparison with the most significant conceptions of contemporary epistemology (Carnap, Hempel, Popper, etc.), takes its conceptual nucleus from the Marxian need—in turn taken from Hegel—to separate essence from appearance, to catch what is more essential in a phenomena: that is, according to Nowak, the fundamental aim of science.
But this need can be completely developed only if we turn our gaze toward what constitutes Nowak’s theoretical starting point, both simple and innovative, that is to say his thesis about the difference between abstraction and idealization. In fact, differing from what has been usually been maintained by inductive philosophies or even by the positivist and postpositivist ones, is the latter—according to Nowak—the core of scientific method and not the first. In fact, there is a substantial difference between abstraction and idealization that Nowak specifies thanks to a methodological reconstruction of Karl Marx’s Capital; even though Marx used the term “abstraction,” he intended it in a radically different way from the empiricist conception. To understand better this difference, we can take the example of the Galilean law of free fall, which assumes that the air resistance on a body equals to zero and the gravitational force is assumed as constant. In reality we know that things are different, but that is the real way scientists work; they formulate—sometimes tacitly—some “idealizing assumptions.”
Nowak’s thesis and of his School consists therefore in maintaining that mature science proceeds by systematic idealizations, so in science we work that way: (1) we introduce idealizing assumptions, (2) we formulate idealizing laws, and (3) we gradually concretize and approximate these laws.
The difference between abstractive procedure and idealizing procedure consists in the fact that, while the first is applied by the human intellect to obtain universal concepts from the knowledge of particular objects (by the generalization of empirical facts), whereas idealization proceeds by “enclosing in parenthesis” some aspects of phenomenal reality that we consider secondary, to take into consideration the essential factors of the phenomena under investigation. Classic abstraction finds its roots in Aristotle’s works, where it is considered the building block of theoretical sciences like mathematics, physics, and so on. But, Aristotelian abstraction refers to the immediate reality and that is why it is not able to catch the deep discrepancy between essence and appearance.
This aspect of Nowak’s epistemological reflection has been taken into account by epistemologists like Nancy Cartwright and others.
The volume The Courage of Doing Philosophy contains contributions not only about this epistemological side of Nowak’s thought, but also about the other two aspects of his thought, developed subsequently, that is to say non-Marxian historical materialism and Unitarian Metaphysics.
Non-Marxian historical materialism, says Krzysztof Brzechczyn, “is, on the one hand, a modification of Karl Marx’s historical materialism and, on the other hand, its extension” (p. 235). In fact Nowak, in formulating non-Marxian historical materialism, makes use of both Marxian methodology (idealization) and Marxian dialectics; but he radicalizes the original Marxian version extending the materialistic critique to the political and cultural aspects (that Karl Marx considered super structural). From this generalization emerges the main thesis of non-Marxian historical materialism:
Class divisions exist not only in the economy, but they emerge in other spheres of human activity, like politics and culture.
In political relations, the means of coercion determine the division of a society into the class of rulers, which controls the means of coercion, and the class of citizens, deprived of these possibilities.
In economy, the material level is characterized by the means of production, which determines a division into the class of owners and the class of direct producers.
In culture, the material level is characterized by the spiritual means of production, which determine a class division between the class of “priests” and the class of “believers.”
The consequence of this Nowakian conceptualization is the idea of a triple lord (Stalinist Russia) that possess all political, economic, and ideological power, giving birth, in that way, to the most oppressive kind of society.
Unitarian metaphysics is a philosophical project on which Nowak spent his last energies. The starting point of the Nowakian reflections is represented by the critique of the metaphysical positivism that, says Piotr Przybysz, “is not used for a specific school in philosophy; nor does it denote the metaphysics as inspired by the views of A. Comte or R. Carnap” (p. 315).
According to Nowak, metaphysical positivism represents “the most widespread thinking pattern in today’s metaphysical discussion” (p. 316) and it is based on such dogmas as the one of a single world, the dogma of substantialism, the dogma of positivity of existence, and so on.
Nowak, instead, proposes three basic ideas in his unitarian metaphysics: attributivism, negativism, and possible worlds hypothesis. To the question “What is the fundamental ontological category?” the metaphysical positivist answers “the category of an object” (p. 317); a point of view that can be found in Aristotle’s Categories. Nowak, instead, states that there is no direct access to the object itself, so “the basic ontological category is that of an attribute” (p. 317).
Another fundamental question is the one relative to the positivity of existence postulated by metaphysical positivism, according to which everything that exists is positive. Nowak, on the contrary, claims that just because “negativity is part of being. . . . The dichotomy of positive and negative is inherent to being itself, and prior to language or thinking” (p. 317).
Another aspect of the metaphysical positivism criticized by Nowak is the one linked to the dogma of a single world (we have only one world, the world we live in). Instead, Unitarian Metaphysics “advocates the pluralism of worlds. . . . Each of them contains objects of various categories, i.e. physical objects, material points, etc.” (p. 318).
In short, this volume provides a good presentation of the main aspects of Nowak’s thought, the gravitational center of which is the idealizational conception of science that allowed contemporary epistemology to overcome the fallacies of the positivist (that is to say the dogmas of objectivity, of reductionism, of the mortification of theoretical terms, and so on). Thanks to the idealizational approach, science loses the dogma of the objectivity, because we are aware that scientists do not aim so much to give us a perfect representation of what the world is, but rather an approximate image of it as possible.