[Serious] Generally speaking, is philosophy a worthwhile subject of study?

[polymath257]

What substantial idea has philosophy (as done by a philosopher, not a specialist in the area of study)  given in the last 200 years that has actually played a role in physics? or chemistry? or biology? or geology?

The article's author gives a pretty good answer to that. (No idea. Nor does philosophy really attempt to pursue such ideas.)

What I find interesting is that it used to do so. Philosophy seems to have given up in one of the realms it did a lot of good work with in the past.

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I think one problem we're having is giving a clear definition of philosophy for someone to criticize. Poly is right to point out that all abstract or systematic thinking ought not be deemed philosophy. It's unfair to insinuate that because it's obviously not his position that abstract or systematic thinking is bad. So I could see potential strawmanning there too.

A better (but slightly ambiguous) way to define philosophy is "critical thinking about fundamental issues." But that has the problem of including cosmologists and physicists. -shrug- Perhaps there is some overlap in the two fields. Or perhaps "critical thinking about fundamental issues" is too vague to count as a good definition. But it's a decent ballpark definition... up for debate anyway.

"Fundamental issues" isn't so hard to clearly define, anyway, so I think it's an okay working definition.

One thing I see philosophy as doing a lot of good with is figuring out good definitions.

What do we mean by a 'cause'?

What do we mean by an 'explanation'?

What do we mean by 'knowledge'?

What do we mean by 'free will'?

What do we mean by 'consciousness'?

What do we mean by 'good'?

Looking at edge cases of proposed definitions is a very useful aspect of thinking about things deeply. And this seems to be quintessentially philosophical. And too many discussions fail because of different definitions being used.

I also think the question of 'why' fails with truly fundamental issues. The reason is that the only answer has to be in terms of *deeper* fundamental issues. At some point, there *cannot* be an answer to 'why' (unless there is an infinite regress of explanation, which may well be the case). So limiting philosophy to questions of 'why' and saying science deals with 'how' seems to be self-defeating.

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A better (but slightly ambiguous) way to define philosophy is "critical thinking about fundamental issues." But that has the problem of including cosmologists and physicists. -shrug- Perhaps there is some overlap in the two fields

There has to be, you can't completely separate the two so that there is no intersection. Theories that are developed in science often involves having to think deeply about fundamental stuff. Agree with Angrboda there.

When Einstein wrote his work on relativity, there was little experimental work on his part. He was basically doing philosophy albeit accompanied with advanced mathematical calculations. * Physicists today who hold to any interpretation of quantum mechanics that goes beyond just "shut up and calculate" are also doing philosophy and they don't typically do this just for the fun of it, they actually make arguments for these views and explain why other opposing views are wrong or unlikely, despite the lack of empirical data conclusively supporting any of these views. And there's nothing wrong with that anyway. I would personally say to be a great scientist, you have to be a great philosopher as well. You have to go beyond just following a system faithfully and not thinking too much about (or not appreciating) the history of thinking and current philosophies that underlie it.

Yes, science is awesome, so is philosophy in general and metaphysics specifically.

* What I mean here is that he was doing both philosophy and science, not just science, not just philosophy (metaphysics).

I would strongly disagree here. Einstein was doing theoretical physics. He was proposing a hypothesis. One aspect of a theory in physics is that it is likely to be very mathematical.

Those *physicists* that are proposing different interpretations are doing *physics* because they are attempting to gain intuition concerning how to solve physics problems (not metaphysical problems). The reason there is a lack of empirical data distinguishing those interpretations is *why* they are different interpretations. They are all *the same theory*, just from different perspectives. The point is to get an intuition about the physics to be able to figure out *without* difficult calculations what is likely to happen.

A good example of physicists doing philosophy are the Bohr-Einstein debates.  They were attempting to grapple with what a theory of physics should do and what is possible in attempting to understand the physical world. Each had deeply held beliefs. And, ultimately, Einstein was wrong. And that was shown by actual observations showing his intuitions didn't correspond with reality.

That is a wonderful example of what philosophy *should* be (when it comes to issues related to science). It discussed the different views, looked at the consequences, and ultimately found a way to resolve them by some outside standard. And the answer says something fundamental about our universe.

I understand your point that to be a great scientist, you need to be a great philosopher. But I think the facts on the ground show that claim to be incorrect. Maxwell was not a 'great philosopher', nor was Boltzmann, nor was Faraday, nor was Hawking. They dealt with physics and thought about physics. They thought about deep aspects of physics. But what they were doing was physics and not philosophy.

I could turn things around that claim that to be a great philosopher, you should be a great scientist. In order to think deeply about fundamental philosophical issues, having a good background in the sciences and being able to deal with the details that science has discovered is essential (I am assuming issues of metaphysics, not of ethics, or other aspects of philosophy here). Unfortunately, I don't see this happening today (it did in the past).

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Excellent article, Grandizer.


@polymath257

I recommend you give it a read. It's quite brief, and it's coming from someone in your field. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blo...hilosophy/

My favorite point:

If your criterion for “being interesting or important” comes down to “is useful to me in my work,” you’re going to be leading a fairly intellectually impoverished existence. Nobody denies that the vast majority of physics gets by perfectly well without any input from philosophy at all. .... But it also gets by without input from biology, and history, and literature. Philosophy is interesting because of its intrinsic interest, not because it’s a handmaiden to physics.

 
I think everyone knows of some piece of literature that they think says something substantial about life. Worst case scenario, philosophy is some kind of weird off-shoot of literature, where the truth-content (and not the meaning) of the "literature" is vigorously debated using logic. I don't see it that way. I see philosophy as its own intrinsic thing. But even if one did deem it some kind of literature off-shoot, so what? That doesn't make it not valuable.

And this is how I see a good deal of philosophy. it is good literature that gets us to think about our opinions. And that is a good thing.

Students have their eyes opened by critically examining these ideas. This is Russell's "food for the mind" argument. In my philosophy of religion class, I used to debate theists. Many of them came to a better understanding of nonbelief after taking the class. And this wasn't just because of our silly "after class" debates over beers. It was because we read material that clarified the arguments, and that sparked better debate on the subject.

But even aside from being food for the mind, I think philosophy has knowledge value. Let's say an ethicist is examining arguments for Divine Command Theory, and comes to realize none of the arguments she's seen is satisfactory. Well, maybe there is some argument "out there" that really makes a case for DCT, unknown to the ethicist -- and so, arguably, no knowledge was gained in her analysis. But yet, I think the ethicist has gained some knowledge by plotting out the negative space and ruling certain things out. Can't we say that a person who has investigated something and ruled out a few possibilities has gained knowledge of a sort?

I would not call this knowledge. It is a refinement of her opinion. I guess you can consider this a type of self-knowledge if you want to push things.

So the question is whether myth and literature (and, for that matter art and music) give *knowledge*. I don't think that they do. They help us refine our opinions. But because they cannot truly be tested, there is no real way to eliminate falsehoods. And that means there are no actual truth values and hence no actual knowledge.

This does NOT mean that the discussion isn't valuable. Art, music, literature, and philosophy are good subjects of discussion and are part of a meaningful education. But they are not knowledge-based subjects.

Finally, let's examine a thinker like Spinoza who posited something like physicalism or materialism WAY before it was cool. Spinoza didn't JUST argue materialism, he followed materialism all the way to the human condition. To Spinoza, the universe behaves according to laws of nature and all of our choices happen because of the laws of nature. All of the emotions we feel are because of the laws of nature. (It's all the universe "happening," if you will, that leads to all our choices and emotional states.) After having painstakingly established this via a series of "proofs," he goes on to do some analysis of what causes certain emotional states, including a theory of what emotions are. THEN, he examines what rational ideas might free us from our bondage to certain negative emotions. All of this thought following directly from the premise that we live in a deterministic universe.

What physicist wants to do THAT? That, by definition, isn't physics. Philosophy isn't trying to be physics, nor is it trying to do something physicists can do better. For an even better example of analysts of the human condition, consider Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. Both grappling with the issue of human suffering in similar ways (both think life is full of suffering and inherently meaningless), but they take two very different approaches when it comes to solutions. Exploring these two thinkers is very much worthwhile.

And that is a good example. Again, not a piece of knowledge, per se, but definitely a good piece of analysis.

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As we move into a more and more advanced age developing our philosophical understanding could help develop better our use of the Turing complete space computers offer. This might involve over time improving and developing our understanding and experimenting with different axioms to see how they play out and compute and also to see if we kind find more optimal approaches to some problems we have by developing philosophy further.
People who think philosophy is simply about questioning if a spoon really is a spoon are missing the wider scope of mind progress in philosophy can offer.
Quite frankly right now with physics struggling to keep up with the latest discoveries about the universe the intellectual community could do with throwing a bit more philosophy into the debate to improve open mindedness and perspective development preparing scientific minds that bit better to embrace new discoveries more a get theorising as to why reality is coming up with such results.

This is what I would like to see philosophers do: look at the results of modern science and create a new metaphysics that corresponds to what we actually see.

The problem is that the old notions simply don't work in quantum mechanics. Even notions of causality need to be readdressed.

For example, one of the physical theories investigated in the 1960's proposed 'fundamental' particles that were each 'made from' others. So, particles of type A, B, and C where A was made of B and C, B was made of A and C, and C was made of A and B. Such things are impossible in classical philosophy, but are distinct possibilities in modern physics. So even the question of what it means to be 'made of' something else needs to be reconsidered.

We need new and better intuitions about quantum physics. It seems that metaphysics has still not really dealt with the wave/particle/quantum field trichotomy. Physics has found some fundamental similarities between all fundamental particles known so far (probabilistic, not deterministic, etc). And there are fundamental divisions (fermion vs boson) that I don't see philosophers thinking about deeply.

Classical notions simply fail when attempting to deal with what has been discovered and verified. Such things as superpositions and entanglement are still too often considered from a classical perspective and that leads to endless confusion. We need *new* concepts and intuitions to learn to deal with these. Plato and Aristotle need to be discarded and something new worked through. And, if philosophers stepped up and actually learned the physics they could be in a position to truly help with this.

But I don't see it happening.