Dryer Kant

The characterization of science in the opening of D.P. Dyer's Kant's Solution for Verification in Metaphysics (U. Toronto) is a vexation.

Sixty years after the death of Boltzmann, the battle for atomism at the turn of the century should have given pause.

At the time Dryer was writing, were not the Petroleum Engineers of America battling against plate tectonics just as they now battle against global warming (geology, geography and meteorology strike me as very much sciences close to Kant's own lectures and interests) ?

Today a massive revision of the Linnaen tree of species is underway - arguably as significant a revision in biology as that stirred by Darwin, the structure of DNA/RNA and the electron microscope (and many others that come to mind only with regard to biology which were fresh at the time he was writing.)

And then there is the role of important "thought experiments" in physics which do not fit easily into his brief portrait of the "success" of science (to use Dryer's term.)

The ability of suggestions by Murray Gell-Mann to keep String Theory in constant revision without yet succumbing has troubled at least one Harvard philosopher.

For one glimpse of the current state of philosophy in relation to science and metaphysics, see the CMU work on causality associated with Clark Glymour.

For progress in philosophy in the last century, see the work of Hilary Putnam and John Searle among others.

That philosophy remains beset with sophistry may be evident in the life's work of Habermas when see in relation to Hegel, Marx, Weber and then Searle.

Economics is no doubt the most difficult to assess, with psychology and sociology following close behind (as one might expect.)

Perhaps a present day figure of Kant's stature would being with the problems besetting economics as a science in the sense of organic chemistry or genome-based botany.

For credit to Habermas, see the opposition to GM botany and GM fisheries versus GM mosquitoes.