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Comment by bingchenasian | Hacker News Reader

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"Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking."

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> There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis.

A counterexample of this is the kind of philosophical speculations that led to the General Theory of Relativity. E.g see the first 3 sections in Einstein's paper from 1916 "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity".

I agree with the sentiment of this quote but I think that sometimes there are indeed truly fruitful ideas to be found buried in a given philosophical work. What's hard is spotting them by weeding out all the BS. David Hume's and Mach's work certainly influenced the development of scientific ideas. For one, their empiricism taught us to be wary of concepts about which we cannot talk about in an operational sense, such as absolute space and absolute time. Both SR and QM owe something to this view. It's funny that some of the thinking employed in the formation of GR actually resembles more the kind of philosophizing employed by ancient thinkers, and would perhaps be dismissed as "metaphysical" by most scientists today.

The irony, of course, being that Wittgenstein's view is itself a metaphysical view, albeit a reductive one.

Wittgenstein himself seems to be aware of this in his later works, where he walks back the claim of having solved philosophy to just the claim of having rendered metaphysics moot.

In other words, philosophy is a form of mental “self-stimulation.” It feels like you’re accomplishing something when actually you aren’t. That matches my views at any rate. Not that there’s anything wrong with a bit of self-stimulation. I’m here commenting after all. But philosophy is pretty unique in that they present their fun as some kind of noble pursuit.

More like, philosophy is the extreme version of the 'Uncategorized' box of science -- it's almost the leftover pile which gets slowly picked up and put into neat boxes of knowledge. Mechanical nature of life was once philosophical musings, now is biology. Atomic nature of matter were philosophical musings, now physics. Nature of consciousness is now philosophy, will sooner or later become neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

Philosophy isn't useless. It is a ground for preliminary discussion before the matter is ready to shift into more solid ground -- mathematics, logic, or hard sciences.

That it suffers from (a degree of) infinite dwelling on pointless topics is inevitable, because it is very hard to judge what will one day be useful or legitimate of discussion; making the false positive nil will increase the false negatives too much. Plus if philosophy decided on a too strict topic regime, soon another field would be born to house the outcasts of academic philosophy, thus becoming the new leftover pile of reason.

Pretty much this. It's like pre-science. I could see how a lot of modern philosophy could be rehashing issues that have already been extensively formalized though

There is plenty of knowledge that is non-scientific. Not all knowledge is accessible through the scientific method. Ethics, metaphysics, etc.

>Nature of consciousness is now philosophy, will sooner or later become neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

You speculate so.

That is the most frank yet loving description of philosophy I have read. Bookmarked.

I seem to post a version of this comment whenever a philosophical subject ends up on HN:

First, Wittgenstein's ultimate views concerned the validity/fundamental meaninglessness of metaphysics, not all philosophical inquiry. There are other subjects in philosophy that require little to no metaphysical justification: aesthetics, mathematics, and certain branches of ethics are all examples of this.

Second, we (HN users) are all here because of philosophy. The fundamental theories and methods of computation stem directly from the work of philosophers in the 1920s and 1930s, who in turn were building off of systems of formal reasoning devised in the 5th century BC. The same can be said for our political organizations, our aesthetic considerations, and our basic Western metaphysical perspective. I'd call that "accomplishing something."

Yeah, a rare few philosophers did some precursor work to my field before it was its own field of study. Well enough. Would someone else have done it if they hadn’t? Perhaps a mathematician? Maybe. Maybe not. Probably. Philosophers doing something useful a century ago tells us little about whether philosophy continues to be a productive force in society. If the best thing you can say about the pursuit is that many years ago its members contributed to studies we now think of as separate disciplines, well, that’s not much.

> Yeah, a rare few philosophers did some precursor work to my field before it was its own field of study.

We're talking about the late 19th and 20th centuries in the cases of Frege and Russell (two of dozens), well into mathematics being its own field of study. I brought up the 5th century BC to show a continuous line of inquiry, but you can look into most philosophy departments today to see novel work in the philosophy of mathematics. I studied under some professors who did that work.

> If the best thing you can say about the pursuit is that many years ago its members contributed to studies we now think of as separate disciplines, well, that’s not much.

I'm not understanding this reasoning. The "separate disciplines" you're talking about would not exist without philosophy. All modern computing, mathematics, and political science stems directly from relatively recent discoveries and insights by philosophers. In my book it's a sign of tremendous success, not failure, for one field to spawn another.

>would not exist without philosophy >stems directly from relatively recent discoveries and insights by philosophers

You are affirming the consequent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent

We have only the timeline we live in. Praising the impact and efforts of anyone for anything can be attacked as affirming the consequent.

no. This is a response to the claim that these things would otherwise not exist

"Not that there’s anything wrong with a bit of self-stimulation. I’m here commenting after all."

That sounds a bit solipsistic. Don't you believe other commenters exist?

I believe other commenters exist. I don’t believe any of the comments any of us are making are useful. We are all here because commenting feels productive, even though it totally isn’t.

> We are all here because commenting feels productive, even though it totally isn’t.

Actually, I don't feel like commenting is ever productive (for me), but I enjoy doing it, or can't resist trying to make a point. Being productive is certainly not a motivation I have when thinking about philosophy, any more than it is for enjoying art or any number of subjects.

Being productive only matters when I have something I need to get done.

> accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis.

I'm guessing he believed Buddhism to be a monumental waste of time.

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