Even though the wikipedia page for “meaning of life” is enormous, it boils all down to the very simple either/or statement I gave.
Providing you ignore the enornous amount of substructure hanging off each option.
do we know if something is answerable?
We generally perform some sort of armchair conceptual analysis.
Wouldn’t science need to do conceptual analysis? Not really,
Why not? Doesn’t it need to decide which questions it can answer?
Volition is a label for an axiom that’s been nailed in stone.
First I’ve heard of it. Who did that? Where was it published?
Why still have the hard problem of consciousness if it’s answerable by science? Because the brain is hard to understand.
Or impossible, or the brain isn’t solely or responsible, ro something else. It would have helped to have argued
for your prefered option.
Give another century or so. We’ve barely explored the brain.
As it is now, philosophy is simply following science’s breadcrumbs. There is no point in doing philosophy, unless there is a reasonable expectation that it will solve a problem that can be more likely solved by something else.
Philosophy generally can’t solve scientific problems, and science generally can’t solve philosophical ones.
A scientific theory of ethics? It wouldn’t have any “you ought to do X because X is good,” but would be more of the form of “science says X,Y,Z are healthy for you” and then you would think “hey, I want to be healthy, so I’m going to eat X,Y,Z.”
And what about my interactions with others? Am I entitled to snatch an orange from a starving man because I need a few extra milligrams of vitamin C?
Providing you ignore the enornous amount of substructure hanging off each option.
We generally perform some sort of armchair conceptual analysis.
Why not? Doesn’t it need to decide which questions it can answer?
First I’ve heard of it. Who did that? Where was it published?
Or impossible, or the brain isn’t solely or responsible, ro something else. It would have helped to have argued for your prefered option.
Give another century or so. We’ve barely explored the brain.
Philosophy generally can’t solve scientific problems, and science generally can’t solve philosophical ones.
And what about my interactions with others? Am I entitled to snatch an orange from a starving man because I need a few extra milligrams of vitamin C?