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Comment by falcor84 | Hacker News Reader

Being a bit crude, I'd say that natural philosophy became natural science, philosophy of language became linguistics, and philosophy of mind became neuroscience in the same sense that primates "became" humans. The old ones still exist, but we generally don't particularly care about what they have to say anymore.

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This is more than a bit crude in my opinion. For example, philosophy of mind "becomes" neuroscience in the sense that sometimes philosophical questions become scientifically tractable. But we certainly haven't managed to translate _every_ interesting philosophical problem for any field, let alone philosophy of mind, into science. Assuming we have is actually a bit absurd.

You could maybe get away with saying that we're fairly confident that _at some point_ we'll be able to accomplish such a feat (translating all interesting problems into scientifically decidable ones), but even that would be a super hairy/controversial assertion.

Physics is arguably the most successful branch of science (at least in terms of the accuracy of its predictions), and yet physics hasn't resolved the basic dispute between Hume and Kant regarding the nature of causality and objective reality.

Same thing is likely to hold vis-a-vis neuroscience and philosophy of mind.

Let me ask this - if/when the issues regarding the nature of causality and objective reality are finally resolved, will this be a result in physics or in natural philosophy?

If I knew, I'd be the next Hume :-)

I suspect it couldn't be a physics result, because the question is something like "Why does the universe follow natural laws at all" and/or "what IS a natural law, in metaphysical terms" ?

>The old ones still exist, but we generally don't particularly care about what they have to say anymore.

Who is "we"? Americans? Because continental europeans very much care.

I would be surprised if that were true for more than the tiniest fraction of continental Europeans. By "care," I mean, "will notice or be affected by any output of ongoing philosophical study." Of course educated people, even us benighted Americans, still care about our old favorite philosophers from centuries past.

It's not like "normal people" ever cared about philosophy either, however one defines "care".

>I would be surprised if that were true for more than the tiniest fraction of continental European

Well, if by tiny you mean a good 5-10%, then yes. Besides, when was that number much higher?

Maybe you don't.

Yes, yes, subjective experience.

Did you notice the constraint:

> we generally don't particularly care about what they have to say anymore.

It's a human perspective way of saying it's not relevant to much the active work, but it still is being worked.

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