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Comment by HaoZeke | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for the reminder. I was overly dismissive and I'm glad you called me out over it. To be more constructive though, I feel like the intersection of the sciences and philosophy now is purely driven by these kind of articles which seek to establish that in the past research ideas would borrow from concepts of philosophy. Globally education has shifted further and further from this view, and without articles like this, no living professional scientist would know Hume from Kant.

This declining relevance is true of other scientific works as well, but that is rarely touched upon. I suppose in some sense my comment expressed my annoyance that only philosophical roots are rediscovered every now and then.

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You're being downvoted unfairly. There is of course a very simple reason why philosophy plays almost no role any longer, which was rightly pointed out by Stephen Hawking in 2010. Philosophers lack the mathematical training and maturity to follow what is going on in modern science. At Einstein's time this was not yet the case, at least Special Relativity was relatively easy to follow for philosophers (even though, to be fair, none of them managed to contribute anything of substance to it or anything of substance to early Quantum Mechanics).

It lasted up until the 1950s or so, and then philosophers started to fall behind. There has also be a substantial decline in math education for philosophers. Both Russell and Quine contributed directly to the foundations of mathematics, for instance. Even Kripke made substantial contributions to modal logic and semantic paradoxes. Nowadays you'll have to look very hard to even find a substantial contribution of a philosopher in logic, even though that's historically the mathematical discipline they know best.

As for the philosophical ideas without backing them up. People always grab some philosopher who had an idea and point out the "early roots", but they conveniently neglect the fact that simultaneously hundreds of other philosophers had patently absurd ideas as well. Even within philosophy there is a huge business based entirely on selection bias. People quote Aristotle as authoritative source, but of course only ever those parts of his work that remotely make sense. Democrit's theory of atoms is another typical example. It barely made sense at his time, and only so in opposition to other nonsense invented by "nature" philosophers then, yet he's misquoted as the inventor of the modern atom theory in every second slide show about chemistry.

That would seem reasonable if you consider Russell, for example, as a philosopher who knew mathematics.

But it seems equally valid to consider him a mathematician who knew philosophy. In which case, you could just as well frame the argument as mathematicians and scientists no longer have a good understanding of philosophy and are therefore incapable of contributing to the philosophy of their field.

I doubt that is anything to be concerned about, as we can reasonably expect that, among scientists, there will be a number following in the steps of Einstein and Bohr, taking a philospohically-minded approach to science - there's David Deutsch, for one. Ironically, many of the people objecting to Hawking's dismissal of philosophy offered, as counterpoint, the claim that Hawking's own work had philosophical components!

And there are a few philosophers, such as Tim Maudlin, who know the science well enough to persue its philosophical questions. Despite these exceptions, I think it is not unreasonable to ask if 21st. century academic philosophy has chosen to turn away from the philosophical issues of 21st. century fundamental science.

No-one is stopping philosophers from contributing to science.

Given the current state of the world, perhaps it's not a good thing that philosophical thinking has taken a backseat.

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