(February 4, 2014 at 11:37 pm)pineapplebunnybounce Wrote: Yea I'm aware of that. But philosophy breeds science because back then people did not have the capacity to test things. A lot of philosophers philosophized about the natural world, the atom was a philosophical idea, but now we've shown that you can split an atom (badly named perhaps), but now we can make new theories and philosophical ideas about nature and see how they test out. Medicine used to be practiced as a philosophy and not a science, that didn't work out well. Philosophy may inform thought and belief, but everything does, everyone is capable of imagination and belief. I'm not quite sure what philosophy actually lays claim to, is it logic? Is it theories? Is it ideas?
Of course they had the capacity to test things. You think people, around Galileo's time, all of a sudden exclaimed "Bugger me! You can test things against the world!" Aristotle did some of that, after all. The problem was that much of the academic concern prior to that was more abstract, and in particular about various concepts and of God. Sure, there were some who doubted you could obtain true knowledge about the world of experience, but no one can really stick to that in everyday life.
If philosophy 'lays claim' to anything, I think it'd be the concepts that underpin what we believe about the world.
Quote:Anyway I'm not here to discredit philosophy, just one of the many people who don't get it and have no interest in it.
I don't think anyone would get on you about that. I just think some of us get irked when comments are made in the same vein as someone who got mad at physicists for not coming up with a new interpretation lf, say, Jane Eyre: it's kinda've a silly objection.
