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Comment by flocial | Hacker News Reader

Philosophy certainly got left behind as science marched into the forefront. We certainly don't live in a age when one could be a world class mathematician, physicist, and philosopher at the same time. Who is the greatest contemporary philosopher that comes to mind?

I find it ironic that this debate is taking place at UNLV because it sort of mirrors the way colleges push certain sports. Likewise with scholarship it's all about the professors who can crank out successful grant applications and co-author paper of the highest quality or expertly exploit gullible grad students.

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> Who is the greatest contemporary philosopher that comes to mind?

That is a question that is as difficult to answer as "Who is the greatest contemporary scientist?"

Some candidates are Slavoj Žižek, Peter Singer, Annette Baier, Alastair Hannay, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Simon Blackburn, Thomas Nagel, Leo Zaibert. The are also many famous philosophers are partly academics in specialist fields, eg. Richard Dawkins, Umberto Eco, Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, George Dyson and many more.

> Who is the greatest contemporary philosopher that comes to mind?

In fact, this is not a relevant question, it's the same like we'd be asking "who's the tallest philosopher?" or "who's the most handsome?". Heraclitus or Epicurus or Thomas Aquinas are as relevant to us, people of this day and age, as are the philosophers that by chance happen to live in the same time with us. I don't know who said it first (Hegel, I think), but I think that the history of philosophy is the same thing as philosophy itself, there's no linear progress from the pre-Socratics to the post-Marxists.

It does seem to be relatively popular for scientists to philosophize towards the end of their careers, though the quality is mixed. Maybe it would be better if there were more people familiar with multiple fields. For example, Stephen Hawking's latest book is in part theoretical physics, but in part metaphysics, proposing a new position of "model-dependent realism". That part might've been improved by better understanding the existing realist and non-realist positions and the problems they've encountered. Of course, some existing metaphysics might be improved by better understanding theoretical physics, so it's not really a one-way street.

But the approach of trying to pretend that that's not philosophy and therefore you don't have to engage with philosophy seems odder; it's difficult for me to see how proposing a metaphysical interpretation of a physics theory is not philosophy.

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