What's an example of a philosophical notion that did pay off?
human rights has no grounding anywhere but the natural world
And its grounding is quite solid. It's been talked about for many millennia. And for example, saying that slaves or serfs have no rights is itself an acknowledgement of human rights, an indication that it makes sense to consider that humans might be worthy of rights. There isn't really any definition of the word "rights" except that it starts with human rights.
The field is somewhat doomed to only contain the good ideas of the future and the bad ideas of the present, because as soon as they are identified as good ideas they get their own branding and are no longer part of philosophy.
For example, my current distraction is homotopy type theory which is a way to reason about computable functions without error, amenable to machine checked proof. That is, it's a credible path to building software that actually works. Here is is under the philosophy department of Cornell. https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/philosophy/hott/
The entire point of this conversation was that some fields, including physics, get split off from philosophy, leaving behind a mishmash. But many scientific fields absolutely began as aspects of philosophy, and it's only because they're so successful that people deny that.
They didn't quite know how to name the last book since its contents were so abstract and unrelated to the everyday world, so they simply called it "the book that comes after the Physics," which eventually became known as the Metaphysics. It is worth noting that the title is a specific reference to the book, not to any notion of the subject matter somehow transcending physics. After all, why physics, in particular?
In the light of that, it is even more jarring to see the term 'metaphysics' being used to describe spiritualism and new age mysticism.
You're right that science can be done better, but that's the state of modern science.
Another example: black hole information paradox. Solid modern science. It begins with "suppose we have a black hole defined as such and such". It has structure similar to many philosophic ideas, e.g. solipsism: "suppose we have solipsism defined as such and such".
I don't consider Aristotle's approach to physics to be the gold standard of modern science, but I'm willing to entertain the notion if you spell out exactly what you mean by "Aristotle's approach to physics."
> Also geocentrism is still used, because it gives correct numbers. Next question is whether correct numbers are everything needed from science. If yes, then geocentrism is perfectly good, because it gives correct numbers.
This makes zero sense to me.
> Another example: black hole information paradox. Solid modern science. It begins with "suppose we have a black hole defined as such and such". It has structure similar to many philosophic ideas, e.g. solipsism: "suppose we have solipsism defined as such and such".
OK. What, if anything, does the study of the philosophical notion of solipsism contribute to resolving the black hole information paradox?
What's an example of a philosophical notion that did pay off?
Whether that claim is true or not depends on the meanings people assign to the terms "physics" and "philosophy." Newton may have called himself a philosopher but we're not obliged to follow suit. If the fruits of his labor today are taught as physics but not as philosophy, that supports the argument that today we should regard him as a physicist by today's standards and not a philosopher.
Myself and a number of others who have studied and work in physics|mathematics regard it as such and thus regard physics as an example of something worthwhile that arose from philosophy.
Similarly one can regard modern 20th century logical philosophy in the same light and embarce the work of Russell, Godel, Turing, Church, et al as worthwhile developments of philosophy.
As for Godel, Turing, and Church, if they were philosophers they were also mathematicians, which means we can't rule out the possibility that their contributions owe more to the latter than the former. It doesn't help us evaluate philosophy in isolation, as distinct from math, physics, or computing. To do that, we would be helped by examples of laudable contributions from people who were ONLY philosophers.
You haven't negated that claim in any form that I recognise.
> As for Godel, Turing, and Church, ...
Interestinglly I have a degree in mathematics, I was present when Tao met Erdős in Australia, and while I studied Group Theory, Functional Analysis, and other such things as part of the mathematics curriculum I had to go to the Philosophy department to study 20th Century Logical Philosophy under Graham Priest alongside fellow students one who now heads a Physics Department, another who heads a Philosophy Department (and, incidently also studied undergraduate mathematics alongside myself and the physicist).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Priest
> Moreover, I make these claims and arguments without reference to our personal biographies, yours or mine
Sadly I only have my own personal experience of the world, informed to a degree by the thoughts of those I've met and worked with.
> It doesn't help us evaluate philosophy in isolation, as distinct from math, physics, or computing.
Why on earth would you want to do that, these things are all intertwined.
> To do that, we would be helped by examples of laudable contributions from people who were ONLY philosophers.
We should then also reject papers on black holes by physicists that also studied philosophy?
I fear you're advancing your own private Idaho by means of a True Scotsman Philosopher whom I've not personally met.
I haven't tried to since I don't find the question that argument addresses very interesting.
> Sadly I only have my own personal experience of the world
Not only that, but also ONLY you have your own personal experience. No one else does, including me. That's why when you tell me the biographical detail as you did earlier, "Myself and a number of others who have studied and work in physics|mathematics" as if to somehow strengthen your argument, I'm here to tell you that I'm no more interested in your biography than I would expect you to be in mine, which is not at all, because they don't strengthen our arguments.
> Why on earth would you want to do that, these things are all intertwined.
Why would I want to evaluate philosophy in isolation from physics? I dunno. Maybe because that's "analysis", whose definitions according to Webster's includes "suggests separating or distinguishing the component parts of something (such as a substance, a process, a situation) so as to discover its true nature or inner relationships." After all, perhaps physics and philosophy AREN'T so intertwined. You haven't established that they are anyway. If they aren't and they can be teased apart from one another, then that helps us reason about and understand each better in isolation and with respect to each other.
> We should then also reject papers on black holes by physicists that also studied philosophy?
No, that's a non-sequitur. That doesn't follow from "we would be helped by examples of laudable contributions from people who were ONLY philosophers." "We" refers to us here in this Hacker News thread on the subject "Wither philosophy?" in general, and on the subject of distinguishing philosophy from physics in order to understand both, in particular.
> I fear you're advancing your own private Idaho by means of a True Scotsman Philosopher whom I've not personally met.
I have no idea what this means.
There are many things in modern philosophy. You don't make claims based on ignorance, do you? How modern physics is different from such a modern philosophic idea as compatibilism?
>This claim is supported if we accept that a training in philosophy alone does not equip a person at all to work as a professional physicist.
There are many kinds of professional physicists too. Some can live without philosophy, some can live without much math too: the computer will do math for them. Arguably philosophic ignorance delays development of fundamental physics.
I choose to believe that if you could name a branch of physics that can't be done without philosophy, you would have named it. Therefore, I take your comment to mean that you can't name a branch of physics that can't be done without philosophy. That's consistent with the possibility that no such branch exists. Put another way, philosophy is utterly useless for physics, which is something I wrote elsewhere in this thread
I addressed this already when I wrote above, "Newton may have called himself a philosopher but we're not obliged to follow suit." I don't care what Newton called it. By today's standards, it would be called "physics" and if he was teaching at a university today Newton would be in that department, not the philosophy department.
As for a "steady evolution of knowledge", however steady it was (I don't think it was steady at all), surely it was less steady than it would have been had there not been an eclipsing of classical antiquity and a thousand years of stunted progress in Western Europe. If it was more steady than it was, we would need more than two hands to count the important individuals punctuating scientific advancement. No, Isaac Newton was a towering giant. His Wikipedia page has this to say on the subject:
"It is held by European philosophers of the Enlightenment and by historians of the Enlightenment that Newton's publication of the Principia was a turning point in the Scientific Revolution and started the Enlightenment. It was Newton's conception of the universe based upon natural and rationally understandable laws that became one of the seeds for Enlightenment ideology"
Evidently the philosophers THEMSELVES have spoken and assigned Newton an outsized role in history. As for "Whither philosophy?" itself? However important it was in history and in the progress of civilization, I think now it's a museum piece that's outlived its usefulness. We've long since moved on from any need for philosophy.
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
If you want to continue the matter, you can find me here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCitvgwzEn5__bR6qIeMSZ0g
comment on any video, I'll reply, and we can take it from there
If "the entire enlightenment" is primarily a PHILOSOPHICAL notion that did pay off, then surely Francis Bacon as one of the most important figures of the Age of Enlightenment was himself PRIMARILY a philosopher, and yet was he? He was many things: a bureaucrat, a politician, an attorney, an architect, a scientist, an author, a political theorist, a theologian, and yes I suppose a philosopher. But being so many things, can we really say that he was primarily a PHILOSOPHER, thus contributing to the claim that the entire enlightenment was primarily a PHILOSOPHICAL notion? Let everyone judge for themselves.
Also, any philosopher who was also a mathematician and astronomer could have his or her contributions assigned to "mathematics" or "astronomy" which these days are whole other departments from philosophy, in whole other colleges. In that case, "philosophy" remains in the position of not having much to show for itself.