I feel like a lot of people defend philosophy on the basis of transcendal sentiment, which says that says there ought to be something more to the world than the ground and the sky, as it were, usually phrased as the "meaning" or "purpose" or "nature" of something.
I understand the feeling. It's natural to probe. But what if it really is all just ill-defined sentiment? Why should we imagine there is something "more" there, that there is a "nature" of things beyond that which we can measure?
The principle of parsimony demands that we reject extraneous abstractions, and I don't see anything forcing us to acknowledge that the nature of reality is a legitimate object of inquiry as distinct from physics and math.
I understand the feeling. It's natural to probe. But what if it really is all just ill-defined sentiment? Why should we imagine there is something "more" there, that there is a "nature" of things beyond that which we can measure?
The principle of parsimony demands that we reject extraneous abstractions, and I don't see anything forcing us to acknowledge that the nature of reality is a legitimate object of inquiry as distinct from physics and math.