Einstein's essay is valuable because it can communicate to a modern interlocutor when others will be ignored.
But his statement already presupposes the Humean "can you derive an ought from an is" disjunction, implicitly making morality irrational. Problem is, our entire moral language (as MacIntyre shows in _After Virtue_) is predicated on reason being able to derive an ought from an is: by knowing what something is and what its final cause (telos) is, we can then know how it is to be treated to realize rather than frustrate that telos.
It would be more correct to say that, because the physical sciences deal in phenomena rather than teloi, they cannot teach us what ought to be done; that job is for philosophy. Both fields, however, deal in truth.
I am a bit confused...are you saying Einstein would have supported mask and vax mandates because non-scientists like Fauci, Biden, Whitmer, and Walensky have a broader and deeper view?
(joking)
Do pastors ever say a mask mandate feeds the State beast and covers our God-given faces or that we can't live just in order to not die? I haven't heard it. They usually say, my gift is expository research and making sermons, the scientists have spoken and therefore we need to elevate politeness to have unity because we don't have the expertise to disagree with Fauci, NIH, NY Times, etc. That is, "I just spent all week with 18th century theologians, Greek dictionaries, and a Confession, how do I know anything about masks - can't you guys just get along?"
Einstein came of age at a pretty remarkable time for physics, and after some extraordinary scientific advances between, say, 1870-1910. Then he saw World War I and II, the Depression, Nazis, and Russian communism. Scientists either helped those things happened, or were unable to prevent them from happening. That left Einstein in a better position to realize the limits of science in guiding human life than we have been recently.
Einstein's essay is valuable because it can communicate to a modern interlocutor when others will be ignored.
But his statement already presupposes the Humean "can you derive an ought from an is" disjunction, implicitly making morality irrational. Problem is, our entire moral language (as MacIntyre shows in _After Virtue_) is predicated on reason being able to derive an ought from an is: by knowing what something is and what its final cause (telos) is, we can then know how it is to be treated to realize rather than frustrate that telos.
It would be more correct to say that, because the physical sciences deal in phenomena rather than teloi, they cannot teach us what ought to be done; that job is for philosophy. Both fields, however, deal in truth.
I am a bit confused...are you saying Einstein would have supported mask and vax mandates because non-scientists like Fauci, Biden, Whitmer, and Walensky have a broader and deeper view?
(joking)
Do pastors ever say a mask mandate feeds the State beast and covers our God-given faces or that we can't live just in order to not die? I haven't heard it. They usually say, my gift is expository research and making sermons, the scientists have spoken and therefore we need to elevate politeness to have unity because we don't have the expertise to disagree with Fauci, NIH, NY Times, etc. That is, "I just spent all week with 18th century theologians, Greek dictionaries, and a Confession, how do I know anything about masks - can't you guys just get along?"
Einstein came of age at a pretty remarkable time for physics, and after some extraordinary scientific advances between, say, 1870-1910. Then he saw World War I and II, the Depression, Nazis, and Russian communism. Scientists either helped those things happened, or were unable to prevent them from happening. That left Einstein in a better position to realize the limits of science in guiding human life than we have been recently.