Assistant Professor of Philosophy Russell Marcus presented an invited talk titled “Critical Assessment of the Scientific Method: Experience, Intuition, and Justification” on March 19 at the University of Southern California (USC). His presentation was part of the USC seminar series on engineering, neuroscience and health.
Marcus argued for a “non-naturalistic (or apriorist) methodological unity among science, mathematics and philosophy.” He said that while many contemporary philosophers attempt to argue that all of our knowledge is, at root, empirical or experiential, “there are ubiquitous and ineliminable a priori elements to work in all disciplines.”
Marcus said that rather than replacing a priori intuition in philosophy with experimental data as some experimental philosophers suggest, “we should recognize the role that it plays in science and mathematics and embrace a fallible a priori methodology while avoiding the problems of first-person exceptionalism that sometimes characterize its dogmatic applications.”
