Is philosophy dead?

[Alex K]

I think there is a grossly distorted picture of what the  majority of theoretical physicists actually do, because literally 99% of the media attention goes to people like Michio Kaku rambling about parallel universes. That is a problem because it misrepresents the nature of what is done by most people. Superstring Theory has also gotten a disproportionate amount of attention esp. in the US.  I'll give you this, at the quantum gravity end of things, there is a problematic level of speculation going on because of lack of good data, which is kind of unavoidable given the subject. But still the people working in Superstring theory are mostly not of the waving with your arms and blathering about parallel universe types. Many of them try to advance the mathematical structure behind it, hoping to obtain a clearer picture of the possible consequences of the theory framework. One could call that philosophy with some math, but since the "some math" is among most advanced stuff that has ever been devised, I'd say that the intellectual rigour of that work is much above the "bad philosophy" we are talking about here. Where some of the public voices working in this field go off the rails is when they hype the natural-scientific significance of their results.

I think in this case, where you have a lack of good information, but problems which people have a deep desire to solve, and you have speculation of varying degrees, you have exactly philosophy.  That it's philosophy about the material universe is immaterial (lol).  What you have is a higher-order philosophical process which benefits greatly from existing knowledge to produce more interesting ideas.  I doubt that Plato, for example, could have come up with string theory.

But even the early philosophers considered, in their way, math, arts, and all the limited learning which was available to them to arrive at new and more interesting ideas and conclusions.  To see the process as 3000 years of bullshit, then the glorious truth of Science, makes it look like a scientific revolution, when in fact Science represents the height of philosophical evolution.

I agree completely