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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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up to the point where it's not its domain at all anymore, philosophy in areas of empirical reality is expected to be superseded by science and as such seems to be as worthwhile as ancient talks about arche and medieval religious talks about creation of the world.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.

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