Investigating and Criticizing the Philosophical Foundations of M-Theory

Autor: Seyyed Aminollah Ahmadiani Moghaddam, Mohammad Jafari
Jazyk: perština
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Zdroj: پژوهشنامه فلسفه دین, Vol 21, Iss 2, Pp 61-82 (2023)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2228-6578
2228-6586
27296016
DOI: 10.30497/prr.2023.243048.1768
Popis: Contemporary English physicist, Stephen Hawking, by authoring The Big Plan and introducing the M-theory, brought the long-running conflict between science and religion to a new level. Despite Hawking's claim of the ‘death of philosophy’, he has used some philosophical principles in his M-theory. This paper, using the descriptive-analytical method, seeks to evaluate these principles. The most important philosophical foundations on which M-theory is based are: (1) Scientism, as the most fundamental basis of M-theory; (2) Instrumentalism, ccording to which laws and theories are merely some instruments for predicting phenomena, lacking any physical reality; (3) Denial of causality, which has been inferred from the ‘uncertainty principle’ and the ‘principle of accident.’ After explaining these foundations, some significant objections have been directed to them, the most important of which are: scientism neglects the limitations of the empirical-experimental method and excludes other epistemological sources; instrumentalism, besides denying the scientific realism, results in accepting contradicting theories; Denial of causality, which is due to a misunderstanding of this philosophical concept, destroys any real connections between the objects in the world. Finally, it is concluded that these fundamental criticisms really challenge M-theory’s validity.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals