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Comment by fjfaase | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this an attempt to validate philosophy as a science in itself now that other sciences have invalidated many philosophical positions as being valid. My primary feeling about most philosophy is that it is a historical science instead of a systematic science, where the ideas of a certain philosopher are placed in the context of history. It also seems to me that the philosophers are more important than their ideas and that when a philosopher changes his ideas, they talk about the early and late.

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The article isn't trying to "validate philosophy as a science".

To some degree science relies on certain philosophical assumptions to be viable and philosophy aims to make those assumptions explicit and to allow one to understand the choices one has made in accepting them.

I agree that certain philosophical positions have been encroached upon by science but that is not a process that can continue indefinitely. The realm of enquiry that science can operate on is by neccesity smaller than that which philosophy can act upon.

Many people are going to respond to the above by saying "If your statements aren't empirical and/or falsifiable then they are meaningless - therefore philosophy outside of the natural sciences is meaningless".

If that's your response then congratulations. You've just done some philosophy. Now take a step back and examine the assumptions that brought you here.

> The realm of enquiry that science can operate on is by neccesity smaller than that which philosophy can act upon.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're suggesting that philosophy can talk about anything that science can. And of course, it can, in the sense that there will be uni positions for talking about just about anything in philosophy department, but I'd say that for a long time now when science is able to treat a subject, philosophical investigation of it becomes meaningless pursuit of words, disconnected from reality. And just like religion used to answer some questions about how the world works, but over centuries was in perpetual withdrawal up to the point where it's not its domain at all anymore, philosophy in areas of empirical reality is expected to be superseded by science and as such seems to be as worthwhile as ancient talks about arche and medieval religious talks about creation of the world. What understanding did we gain from arguing over whether the world is made of fire, of water, of ether/whatever? Whether it's deterministic or not? None.

It seems it would be a better use of everyone's time if philosophy withdrew from areas of current and future scientific inquiry.

I agree, at least for the hard sciences.

Would you argue that, although philosophy used to concern itself with how to live a good life (for example, Stoicism) these questions are now better addressed through science of the type done in uni psychology departments?

> Would you argue that, although philosophy used to concern itself with how to live a good life (for example, Stoicism) these questions are now better addressed through science of the type done in uni psychology departments?

No. I don't think it's science's business. Science is descriptive. And psychology in particular doesn't live up to Popper's standards for science. There are psychology departments trying to change that. I wish them all luck and hope they succeed.

And I do think that there are worthwhile elements in the writings of Stoics and Epicureans (I favour the latter), once you subtract from them the parts that are in the domain of science.

In this discussion I am regarding science as a strict subset of philosophy. One where more constraints are added.

So of course philosophy can talk about anything science can because science is a branch of philosophy.

You can't do science without implicitly doing philosophy. Science relies on epistimology to justify it's foundations. Debates about whether topic A or topic B are really science is a philosophical debate. This isn't flippant intellectual game playing. Find a theoretical physicist and an experimental physicist arguing (which they tend to) and they are arguing about the philosophy of science and the nuances of the scientific method.

It's hard to do cosmology or particle physics without tripping over philosophy. "Shut up and calculate" can only take you so far.

By that logic, chemistry is a branch of physics.

Scientists argue about philosophy of science, because it's about their field. It doesn't make science a philosophy of science [EDIT: in previous version I wrote it the other way around].

> It's hard to do cosmology or particle physics without tripping over philosophy. "Shut up and calculate" can only take you so far.

It's also hard to do cosmology or particle physics without using a computer, and scientists will argue the merits of C++ vs Julia vs Python; yet they aren't a branch of IT.

If you don't like the 'branch of' terminology, then what about : chemistry needs foundations based on physics and physics need a foundation based on mathematics/philosophy ?

P.S.: We used to do particle physics and cosmology long before 'computer' became a name for a machine rather than a job.

> Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're suggesting that philosophy can talk about anything that science can.

Science's original name was natural philosophy, so in a sense, yes.

There is an old joke that goes like this:

It is well know that the Math department is the second cheapest department at a university. The people there only need a pencil, paper, and rubbish bin.

But which is the cheapest department?

The Philosophy department. There you don't need the bin.

I've heard the same joke but as "pencils and erasers". That works well too.

yes but nowadays the Math department needs computers, so Computer Science must be cheaper.

And the computer has a skeumorphic waste bin.

This is mistaken, actually: philosophers do use bins, they just don't put their own writings in them.

I'm not sure how much philosophy and science can ever be connected. There is surely little biological basis for systems of ethics or epistemology. Abandoning that, we're left to wonder if they can apply to social systems in the aggregate.

There we find a wide variety of social systems in partial or complete disagreement on what constitutes ethics. In some systems murder is a sin; in others it is tolerated or necessary. Fidelity is variously required or shunned. Simpler things like truthful speaking are all over the map.

Even epistemology is in doubt. Secular science types love provable measurements and consistent theories. Others embrace inspiration, devine communication, even mushroom-induced hallucination as true sources.

So where does science impact philosophy? Perhaps as a tool for describing philosophies, like describing species of animal. That doesn't make philosophy a science, but a subject of scientific study.

I can think of several examples where systems of ethics come from biological and/or sociological evolutionary constraints ?

My experience is exactly the opposite. My undergraduate philosophy degree had exactly one history class. Names of philosophers were important mostly to label ideas.

I'm not sure what you're talking about with respect to philosophical positions invalidated by science. I can't think of any myself.

The ancient Greek philosophers contain some real howlers like Aristotlean impetus and belief that women must have fewer teeth than men because of a smaller skull and an assumption that human teeth are identical in size and spacing. They refused to check their ideas to reality under a self indulgent concept of "purity of thought". I blame aristocratic influnce and the disdain for the practical.

That would be the "pre-socratics". I was forced to study them for my degree, and I could barely contain my laughter.

Some of those guys had some pretty bonkers beliefs, and it does seem to be true that they often disdained actually cheecking their claims empirically. A few of them were on the nail, though, at least sometimes; Democritus, for example.

Funny also how pythagoricians found some mathematical truths and went all cult-like because of it...

Science used to mean knowledge in general, which is its root. Philosophy was a subset of science, and theology was the top science. Natural philosophy, what we now call science, was a subset of philosophy.

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