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In this final chapter I say something about what I take to be the broader implications and significance of aim-oriented empiricism: the urgent need to bring about a revolution in academic inquiry. The issues go back to the eighteenth century Enlightenment. The basic idea of the philosophes of the French Enlightenment especially, was that humanity can learn from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards an enlightened world. Unfortunately, in seeking to implement this profoundly important idea, the philosophes made three disastrous intellectual blunders, and these blunders are still built into academia today. One of these blunders concerns science: the philosophes failed to construe science in aim-oriented empiricist terms. As a result of our failure to correct the three blunders we have inherited from the Enlightenment, academia as it exists today is damagingly irrational in a structural fashion when judged from the standpoint of helping us make progress towards a good, enlightened, civilized world. Academia devotes itself to the pursuit of knowledge and fails to give priority to the vital intellectual tasks of articulating our problems of living, including our grave global problems, and proposing and criticizing possible solutions – possible actions. It fails to give priority to the vital task of intelligently conducted public education about what our problems are, and what we need to do about them. We have betrayed the profound Enlightenment idea in failing to correct the blunders inherent in the version that has come down to us from the eighteenth century. As a result, humanity fails to learn how to resolve global conflicts and problems that, at present, threaten our future. I have published work on this issue for over 40 years but, despite the fact that my work has met with critical acclaim, it has been ignored by most philosophers. This neglect follows on from neglect of my crucial earlier work on the metaphysics of science. I conclude with an indication of the changes we need to make to academia as it exists today to create the kind of rigorous institutions of learning we so urgently need.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-04143-4_5

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