Is it just that we're more aware of the current philosophers, who will be forgotten in a century or two? Or is the philosophical opposition actually stronger now?
Yes, that's why I specifically cited Newton. I could have cited Copernicus as well, and Galileo, and a few dozen others but I didn't want to get too long-winded.
> Is it just that we're more aware of the current philosophers, who will be forgotten in a century or two? Or is the philosophical opposition actually stronger now?
If anything I think it's weaker now than in the past because the fruits of science are so evident to everyone. It is plain to everyone that smart phones did not come out of philosophy departments. The niches in which philosophers can make meaningful contributions are getting narrower and narrower, which makes them more and more desperate and shrill. But I predict they will eventually go the way of the alchemist. Or maybe the astrologer. Astrologers figured out a way to eke out a living as charlatans. Maybe philosophers will too. (Maybe they already have.)
What is the nature of consciousness?
What are things beautiful? What makes something ascetically pleasing.
Why any of this exists at all?
What is the purpose of this existence?
Is something ethical? Science can provide answer about consequences of an action but cannot determine if said action is moral or ethical.
… science is not a book of facts. It is merely a process for testing a hypothesis. It is not a replacement for philosophy, it is underpinned by philosophy.
> How do you believe the results you are getting? What makes such a belief justified?
Read David Deutsch "The Fabric of Reality" chapter 7.
> What is the nature of consciousness?
Read Daniel Dennett, "Consciousness Explained".
> What are things beautiful? What makes something ascetically pleasing.
Read Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene" (and, if you want to get deep into these weeds, "The Extended Phenotype").
> Why any of this exists at all?
What makes you think that any of this does exist at all?
> What is the purpose of this existence?
What makes you think that this existence has a purpose?
> Is something ethical? Science can provide answer about consequences of an action but cannot determine if said action is moral or ethical.
Read "The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod. (The Selfish Gene addresses this as well.)
> science is not a book of facts.
That's true.
> It is merely a process for testing a hypothesis.
No, it's not "merely" that. It is a process for producing good explanations that account for observations. That turns out to be tremendously powerful.
> It is not a replacement for philosophy, it is underpinned by philosophy.
No, it isn't. The existence of philosophy (and philosophers!) can be explained by science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations
It's not lost on me that Tractatus was warmly received by philosophers, but Investigations got a frostier reception from the same group. I especially enjoyed Russell's snippy quote. Ol Ludwig struck a nerve, did he, Bert?
Ethics is supposed to answer real-life questions, like "How do I live a moral life?".
Yet philosophical movements, that actually tired to answer such questions, like the stoics and the epicureans are long gone. When you read on the actual writings of contemporary philosophers you'd see impossible moral standards - "It takes 5 dollars to save a starving African child, a night out with friends is the equivalent to abandoning a bus of drowning children to their deaths"[1]
It's impossible to live by such philosophy, except for those that think of themselves as some sort of creature of pure evil who cares nothing of right and wrong.
Because philosophy is useless as a guidance to life, right and wrong are now decided by the encyclical, the fatwa and the resolutions at the party congress, depending on your religion.
[1] https://daily-philosophy.com/peter-singers-drowning-child/
Monsters, the lot of them, just as bad as the rich-worlders. Ethics demands we all live joyless lives of endless toil until every child is fed.
Do you think an Ethiopian community is immoral because it puts effort into having enjoyable festivals, dignified funerals and large weddings? Think of all the effort that could have gone to the starving children!
Here's a more practical question for you. There's a homeless guy who hangs around my place. He's definitely not malnourished, in fact he's somewhat fat. If I give him a dollar, should he return it to me with instructions to give it to African children instead?
These philosophical thought experiments are too simplistic to offer any guidance. Five dollars does not save any starving child; he will need food for the rest of his childhood. And they also neglect the social aspect of the problem. What if the whole neighborhood or country is poor? It is more sensible to attack this problem using the tools of developmental economics; how can we alleviate the problem for everyone over time?
The only think I'd have to add is I don't think the thought experiment is merely "too simplistic". It's an evil sophistry designed to make people believe ethical conduct is unattainable.
https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE?si=FmgmYH8BDWrkIcMJ
There’s still a lot of value in philosophy when we use it to think about how we structure and rationalize the world.
Even if science gives us ever better models of the underlying reality of the universe, there’s still the understanding of how we conceptualize that reality and what it means to us. Specifically in ways that don’t require religion or supernatural beings, nor in purely psychological means of perception or physiology.
I think of it as the study of the emergent properties of complex information processing. It can do things like help us talk about the minds of others, for example future AI, potential extraterrestrial intelligences, or even other terrestrial intelligences (dolphins, octopus, etc)
https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...
I think you'll need some sense of metaphysics and epistemology and maybe even ethics to function, most people have one (they know what they think the word "reality," means, they can distinguish between thoughts and observations, they wouldn't kill unless they were seriously threatened) but when that is extended into a "let me tell you how the world works" thing it becomes philosophy done bad, which can only be resisted by knowing philosophy done right (the impassive if frustrating collection of a lot of possible solutions). It is a universal human trait to want to answer these questions, even the so-called "rationalists" have a web page with a list of doctrines. The only way to do it wrong is to come up with one answer and think that it is the answer because it's the only answer you know and that is what learning philosophy is for.
What did gain societal power is capitalism is brute-forcing its way into everything via "tech" that then pats the people in gold-plated cages, who allow their genius to be used for that on the back, while feeding them crumbs. Where nothing that can't be counted matters and destroying the environment -- both physical and that of society, that which minds get formed in -- is perfectly rational, as long as there is a cent of profit to be made.
Some people get really high on it, think someone's "won" (what?) and it might even be them, but let's not pretend any of the great scientists that get name-dropped so easily have anything to do with that, or haven't even spoken against it at length.
> Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.
-- Albert Einstein
> Let us not forget that human knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind.
> What these blessed men have given us we must guard and try to keep alive with all our strength if humanity is not to lose its dignity, the security of its existence, and its joy in living.
-- Albert Einstein
> As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. [..] This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings.
-- Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man" (1871)
> It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the people you love.
-- Stephen Hawking
Science is a tool. More precisely, it's a method to make and improve and gauge tools. But those tools can't ask questions (we didn't somehow put there first), they cannot judge. They can tell you if something is fair according to your parameters and heuristics, but they know nothing of the inherent value in being fair, they can't answer "should I be fair?", and the same for everything else that actually matters.
And do you think that philosophy has shed any light on the answer to the question, "Should I be fair?" Or indeed on what the word "fair" actually means?
You're not wrong that science can't answer these questions, but what science can do is demonstrate that, for example, different people want different things, and have different ideas of what words like "fair" mean. We can then go one to (say) devise systems that maximize value according to some quality metric, but that's the best we can do. We cannot somehow derive some universal standard of "fairness" because no such thing exists. And we don't need philosophers to tell us that.
But you're doing it right now? I agree and would like to subscribe to your philosophy newsletter ^^ Kidding aside, I have to think of this talk by Erich Fromm, "Psychology for non-psychologists", where he starts off with saying there everybody is a bit of a psychologist, otherwise we wouldn't be able to even navigate and survive infancy. The same with what you just said and philosophy in general, I think. The only difference between a hot take on a forum (which is grounded in your experience and thoughts you had previously about it) and "a philosopher" would be doing it full time and for money I guess, or being known for your claims, but that's secondary IMO.
Sorry, what exactly is the "it" that am I doing right now (or was doing right then)?
> everybody is a bit of a psychologist
Sure. So?
> The same with what you just said and philosophy in general
Sure. So? Everyone is a bit of an amateur everything. That doesn't mean that everything that people do can be meaningfully elevated to the level of a profession.
> "a philosopher" would be doing it full time and for money
Yes, exactly. Everyone is an amateur philosopher just as everyone is (say) an amateur thumb-sucker at some point in their lives. That doesn't mean that there ought to be an elite cadre of thumb suckers who get paid to do it.
Why? Scientists are still human beings, they have partake in torture and genocide in the past. "I aim at the stars.. but sometimes I hit London" etc.
Whereas scientists that are alarmed by things like biodiversity loss and climate change really are pounding at our door, and have societal power in some circles but not on the whole, not enough, which is made clear by the outcomes.
Logical positivism tried to do this, and failed. Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge pretty much killed logical positivism, because he showed that no scientist is in the fully objective position that was required to set up and evaluate the experiments.
No, you don't. This is a common mistake. Science is not about knowledge, it's about explanations. The whole idea of "knowledge" is just part of a vast web of explanations that turn out to be exceptionally good at accounting for the data.
> logical positivism
The mistake of logical positivism is the unjustified assumption that there exists such a thing as "truth", and that this thing is accessible to us by thinking. It isn't. It's a consequence of the empirical observation that the scientific method converges towards something. "Truth" is just a label that we attach to the thing that it's converging to (or at least appears to be converging to -- we won't know if that limit actually exists until we get there).
However, there is also another possibility, and that is that the word "knowledge" is being used in two different ways. "Knowledge" in science is often used as a shorthand for "The best explanation we currently have in hand, one which has so far withstood all attempts to falsify it." This is different from the kind of knowledge studied by epistemology, but it is a not-entirely-unreasonable use of the word.
Seriously, philosophy is a personal endeavor. You derive your own, make your own deductions, and you believe in them. That makes it valid for you.
But ... if your philosophy is about how the world works, about some aspects of reality, and you want to ensure that both your philosophy and reality agree, then you can choose to do science:
1. From your philosophy, derive some hypothesis.
2. Check you hypothesis with some experiment.
More important, following this thread upward we see:
1. The urge of some scientists to offer science as a replacement for philosophy was scored as a fatal flaw
2. The question was asked, "Why is this a fatal flaw?"
3. That question was answered with the claim that something called "epistemology" is needed in order to make decisions based on experiences. Evidently, "epistemology" is an essential ingredient to human decisions which would be lost if we tried to replace philosophy with science.
4. But I said, no, I personally don't need "epistemology"--whatever that is--to make decisions.
5. Then it was claimed that whatever I'm doing to make decisions is inherently "philosophy." Yet, I'm not doing anything special, so if I'm doing philosophy then I guess everyone is doing philosophy, even scientists.
6. If that's true then what happened to "epistemology" and the fatal flaw of omitting it in the vain attempt to substitute science for philosophy?
This really isn't adding up.
Professional philosophers do essentially the same thing we do, they derive a set of personal beliefs that they see as trustworthy. The difference is that they go out and try to sell their philosophies to the public as if they were universal, but they aren't, so they almost always fail. Their books and publications tend to be filed under the heading "OPINIONS".
The second topic you mention is about the role of epistemology, in theory the study of knowledge but in practice an amalgam of (once again) opinions from different philosophers. It's difficult to explain epistemology without referring to those opinions, and those may be wrong anyway. Several pieces of the puzzle are still missing.
On the topic of philosophy, if there's two kinds, the kind which comprises opinions sold by professional philosophers to the public as if they're universal but aren't, and the kind which comprises the activities we all do in life, then I'm pretty sure the former is the one being held up to scrutiny as Bergson and Canales try to elbow onto the podium alongside science.
On the topic of epistemology, I don't know a thing about it and I don't think I need to in order to believe the results of experiments or go about life, which pretty much is what also was claimed further up the thread.
That's an unusual claim. It's typically attributed to the criticisms of Popper and Quine, after which the foundations were undermined.
A physicists dismissing philosophy as out of date implies that we are already on the optimum path to discovering the remaining knowledge about the universe to be learned.
It implies they believe that. Which is ultimately a dogmatic ideology. That is why I call it scientism and not science. Obviously we cannot know if that is the case or not because of the nature of time (the future holds answers that the past cannot, yet remains inaccessible to beings such as us). There is no good reason to believe that our theories aren't missing some crucial aspects which were already understood and subsequently lost. The cultural narrative of progress is so strongly asserted, yet what we know of as "history" is such a narrow and skewed perspective.
I myself am a physicist. I once had the confidence to assert that physics is the One True Way to understand life, the universe, and everything and that progress is inevitable (Newton's "shoulders of giants"). I no longer believe this is the case because of my explorations through the traditions of thought present in philosophy. For sure I can cram the lines of discourse that most interest me into quasi-physics-based theories (post-structuralism is especially interesting as a systems person) but that's not to say that physics can represent everything there is to know. Physics is a language just like any other and there are some ideas that physics simply cannot express.
Note that the scientific method is self-correcting even in this regard: if someone can demonstrate a more productive method of inquiry, someone following the scientific method would accept that new method, just as they would accept any hypothesis that is demonstrably superior to the current state of the art.
Does not follow. It suffices that such a physicist thinks philosophy isn't going to improve on science (like it hasn't so far).
It might turn out alchemy will become useful, but it's unlikely. And bear in mind alchemy provided more results than philosophy so far.
There might be something else, even better than science, that's an independent question. But why people assume philosophy will necessarily be involved in any way?
This is the trick that philosophy and religion uses that frustrates me the most. They claim all the territory we don't know anything about as if their own it and shout "scientism" and "dogmatism" when people protest :)
We don't even know if the scientific method is the best it could be in what we use it for. After all, it was only expanded with the idea of falsification in the 20th century yet we were still doing useful science before than.
No, it isn't. This is a very common myth, but it is in fact a myth. Science has no axioms.
> We don't even know if the scientific method is the best it could be in what we use it for.
That's true. But what we do know is that the scientific method is vastly more effective than anything else humans have come up with in helping us navigate our existence and exercise some degree of control over our destiny.
> After all, it was only expanded with the idea of falsification in the 20th century yet we were still doing useful science before than.
That is also true, and that is one of the reasons to believe that the scientific method is special and unlikely to be improved upon. It's not just an arbitrary choice. It is privileged, and there is actually reason to believe that this privileged status is a reflection of some underlying reality. But this is not an axiom, it's a result.
> We don't know how wide that window happens to be and how much of reality we can see through it... We don't even know if the scientific method is the best it could be in what we use it for.
It is telling that these sentiments are not followed by something beginning "analytical philosophy, in contrast..."
> [Science] was only expanded with the idea of falsification in the 20th century yet we were still doing useful science before than.
It was doing de facto, though somewhat ad hoc, falsification long before Popper focused his attention it. The philosophy of science is much more descriptive than prescriptive.
Having said this, you may be surprised to learn that I spend a some of my free time reading and thinking about various aspects of philosophy. I must say, however, that I feel that western metaphysics lost its way in its attempt to address fundamental questions through the analysis of language.
We've yet to see one example going the other way.
At best philosophers provide interesting questions. At worst they are just paperpushers categorizing the work others did into pointless and arbitrary categories and arguing about them :)
More here:
Tbh I'm suspicious of your inability to find them yourself or your quest for examples.
It's a bit sealiony.
It's very basic stuff.
If you are unable to work it out from the original link and description I gave or the previous reply, I think any more effort on my part will be a pointless time sink.
That said I can’t imagine having a good faith discussion about it; there’s nobody to defend the idea, because obviously nobody believes that they have a blinkered, over-confident belief in anything. They just think the domain of problems that their method can address is larger than the domain you think it has, I guess.
I guess I can’t imagine the mindset that would “see how the sausage is made” in science, and think that method was going to solve the universe. Everyone is aware that we’re becoming increasingly over-focused on tiny little niches.
I mean yes, of course, the undergraduate Physics student is being handed a packet of metaphysics when they get the Einstein lectures on SR and GR. And it's very seductive, if you can crack through enough of the math to hear the music in it. The idea that Einstein is a "continuator of Descartes" just means you can learn all that stuff, get A's in every single class at Cal Tech or someplace else, and in the end you are still left with the exact same Dualism.
That might be a valid critique of Science in general, but I don't see how it attacks Einstein. There is also a more subtle point about the history of measurement. We started to depend on accurate measurement of time when we needed it to circumnavigate the planet. Even without Einstein we still needed the Lorentz and Fitzgerald corrections to the classic Newton equations. It would have happened without Einstein, and maybe we'd have different metaphysics in that case. That idea is more interesting to me than what Bergson seems to be offering.