“The more closely you look at one thing, the less closely can you see something else.” ~ Werner Heisenberg
I’m not a physicist, I’m not a mathematician, I’m not an economist, a chemist, a biologist, a political scientist or a doctor. I haven’t gone down the rabbit hole on any of them. However, I know something about each of these fields and more – enough to make intelligent conclusions about them. That’s because I’m a philosopher.
A philosopher has to know enough about a number of various fields in order to be able to see them all together, to see how they interrelate, to see the patterns and the truths which come from these relationships. He also needs to be able to see the dead ends that can happen when one field is left too narrowly and too long in their specialty, losing track of the forest in which they have been measuring trees.
He needs to be able to know many things, to integrate wide areas of knowledge in order to recognize and validate truth. Herbert Spencer wrote, “Knowledge of the lowest kind is ununified knowledge; science is partially unified knowledge; philosophy is completely unified knowledge”.