Is philosophy dead?

[The Grand Nudger]

Christ, it's like the Twilight Zone all of a sudden.  Not my interview, not my tagline, not my response.  However confused I may be about -anything- has absolutely no bearing on the contention made by another.   That contention, oft quote mined and blown out of proportion (as has happened twice on these boards in as many weeks), is and was a criticism of pure reason.  

Even more specifically, it was the contention that philosophers have not kept abreast of scientific discovery which, again, is a system for generating sound propositions.  Not that there wasn't anything new to talk about, that there was some struggle to find something new, precisely the opposite.  That the same bullshit, as you put it...keeps getting rehashed is exactly what the notion of the death of philosophy refers to.

To cover the final point expressed in that same conversation, which has garnered so much controversy...there was also the claim that science has taken the field once dominated by philosophy.  When we want to answer a question...we don't run out and hire philosophers.  Not even when the question is one of pure reasons traditional strongholds.  We're doing science there as well.

Can you see why, in a popularizing interview...for google.....a person might say, regarding the above....philosophy is dead?  It was an attempt at a pithy summary.  It worked, because it stuck....otoh, it stuck so well that people don't recall the rest of it.  :throws hands in the air:

[bennyboy]

Even more specifically, it was the contention that philosophers have not kept abreast of scientific discovery 

That's like saying that dogs haven't kept abreast of beagles.

When we want to answer a question...we don't run out and hire philosophers. Not even when the question is one of pure reasons traditional strongholds. We're doing science there as well.

Again, that's like saying that when you want a beagle, you don't run out and get a dog.


See, the thing is that scientific progress IS philosophical progress-- it's a useful branch of philosophy which leads to very good results in certain categories of inquiry. However, trying to replace philosophy with science is like trying to replace dogs with beagles because you are sure they are the best and most relevant dog. All you'll achieve is the loss of utility that the other dogs provided.

You STILL don't have any good explanation of cosmogony, or of psychogony, or of what is/isn't moral. At best, you can parrot the words "not yet" over and over, or try to redefine terms so you can start collecting data about something that kinda looks like the things people care about.


Don't believe me? Write the perfect science-driven musical composition, and I'm sure you'll be super-rich and popular. Right?

[The Grand Nudger]

That's like saying that dogs haven't kept abreast of beagles.

Either you think they have...you think they haven't, or you don't know.  I don't know, personally.  It's obviously the opinion of Hawkings that they haven't (and particularly so in regards to physics, in his opinion).  

Again, that's like saying that when you want a beagle, you don't run out and get a dog.

His contention, our behavior.  Why don't you just read the article that caused all the fuss Benny, or any of the follow up articles.....honestly, this is tedious. I doubt that you'll disagree with anything other than their choice of words.

[Alex K]

....lol?  When the players on the field..in this case philosphers...try to play it that way, it -is- dead.  This is all that has ever been discussed behind that tagline, this is what was meant, despite your imaginative fantasies of the last few pages.  This is a fact easily checked by sourcing the quote which started the conversation.  

Much ado about nothing, again.

I think you're confusing the subject of philosophy with the redudant douchery that exists in academia today.  Look at almost ANY school, including some of the theoretical physics schools and almost all the humanities, and you'll see pompous know-nothings puffing up some bullshit position to keep a niche for themselves.  Yes, philosophy is particularly prone to this, since there's little that an academic can achieve that a reasonably smart person can't match with a few hours' free time and a couple dollars in late charges at their local library.

But it's not the death of philosophy, imo, that we're really talking about.  It's the oversaturation of academic institutions, and the struggle to find ANYTHING new to talk about, that leads to us all being buried in bullshit.

I'm not saying that there aren't any pompous assholes promotimg bs in theoretical physics, but it is very rare to have actual know-nothings achieve anything that gets attention in the community, because to say anything that is accepted by your peers even as a proposition, you have to do the math, and the math is hard. People could be rightfully accused of propagatinge bullshit positions on speculative topics, but they still have to have a formidable technical foundation to say these things in the first place. Complete charlatans are therefore usually found out or at least marginalized quickly.

[bennyboy]

I'm not saying that there aren't any pompous assholes promotimg bs in theoretical physics, but it is very rare to have actual know-nothings achieve anything that gets attention in the community, because to say anything that is accepted by your peers even as a proposition, you have to do the math, and the math is hard. People could be rightfully accused of propagatinge bullshit positions on speculative topics, but they still have to have a formidable technical foundation to say these things in the first place. Complete charlatans are therefore usually found out or at least marginalized quickly.

That's right to a degree, I'd say. You can't just grab a Starbucks coffee and put an iPad in your man-satchel and get a physics degree. However, it seems to me that much of theoretical physics is as wishy-thinking as the worst of philosophy. Or it's just philosophy with some math to it.

[Jackalope]

No what Benny, Chthulu and others have been saying is right.  Philosophy is how we find our way out of darkness, and there is always more darkness.  It is the way you step back and get a wider perspective.  It is foundational.

Sure.

Science does this for our understanding of the natural world, but it can't by way of its own methods provide its own foundations.

Neither can reason.

Has anyone claimed otherwise? Pure reason and scientific inquiry go hand in hand. Each is relatively useless without the other.

[Alex K]

I'm not saying that there aren't any pompous assholes promotimg bs in theoretical physics, but it is very rare to have actual know-nothings achieve anything that gets attention in the community, because to say anything that is accepted by your peers even as a proposition, you have to do the math, and the math is hard. People could be rightfully accused of propagatinge bullshit positions on speculative topics, but they still have to have a formidable technical foundation to say these things in the first place. Complete charlatans are therefore usually found out or at least marginalized quickly.

That's right to a degree, I'd say.  You can't just grab a Starbucks coffee and put an iPad in your man-satchel and get a physics degree.  However, it seems to me that much of theoretical physics is as wishy-thinking as the worst of philosophy.  Or it's just philosophy with some math to it.

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.

[robvalue]

I suppose we can have subjective philosophy like morality, and objective philosophy like mathematics. They both deal with the abstract, but one is opinion dependent and the other is not.

By the way, how many philosophers do I have kill before philosophy itself is dead? Because my arm's getting tired.

[Silver]

Philosophy is not a science. The explanation is in the definition of the word.

Philosophy is a never ending study that never reaches the end result that science accomplishes.

Philosophy is religion's weaker cousin.

[bennyboy]

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.