I.
The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. That’s a philosophical chestnut attributed to the German idealist, G.W.F. Hegel. It’s a poetic way of saying that wisdom is achieved only in hindsight. The Owl of Minerva, the representation of the goddess of wisdom, begins its activity only at the end of the day, only once the deeds in need of wisdom’s guidance are done. Our plan here is to present what we see as a central feature of why the Owl of Minerva must fly only at dusk and then turn that critical thought to some, by our lights, unjustifiably optimistic calls for public philosophy.
Scientific American
Experts in probability have spotted a logical flaw in theorists’ reasoning
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We exist, and we are living creatures. It follows that the universe we live in must be compatible with the existence of life. However, as scientists have studied the fundamental principles that govern our universe, they have discovered that the odds of a universe like ours being compatible with life are astronomically low. We can model what the universe would have looked like if its constants the strength of gravity, the mass of an electron, the cosmological constant had been slightly different. What has become clear is that, across a huge range of these constants, they had to have pretty much exactly the values they had in order for life to be possible. The physicist Lee Smolin has calculated that the odds of life-compatible numbers coming up by chance is 1 in 10