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Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#51

Post by opaque »

n4r9 wrote: post #43
opaque wrote: post #32

> So pure theory is not for everyone. But if you love theory, philosophy is the top of the heap of all the disciplines. I think calling philosophy "theory" is a bit of a reach. Theories (Relativity, Quantum, Evolution) draw on, and can be falsified by, direct evidence. Philosophy is more argumentation on subjects that won't have scientific basis (morality, meaning of life) or don't yet have one and may never (conscio…

"Theory" is a much broader term than "scientific theory", which is what you're defining. For example, in mathematics you have the "theory of natural numbers", or in art you have the "anti-essentialist theory". These aren't required to be hypotheses about the real-world. Rather they are like frameworks or languages which enable us to discuss and explore complex structures.

Perhaps I'm inclined to read it that way from working in physics, which is divided into theory and experiment. He also refers to 'experimentalists' in the preceding sentence, which adds to the effect.

Also if you take the fully general meaning, it's so vague I don't understand how it's something you can 'love', but then maybe that's why I'm not a Philosopher.

Edit: The author's work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Maudlin is all on the Theoretical Physics / Philosophy boarder, in which "theory" vs "experiment" is the more common usage.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#52

Post by nyc111 »

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #41
nyc111 wrote: post #2

> Philosophy, in its purest form, contains the study of what it is to live a good human life. I don't think this a properly general definition of philosophy (although he says "contains",maybe he is not after generality). I would say philosophy is the science of definitions. This is why it is fundamental.

Why do you think this? Philosophers don't write dictionaries; they write huge, creative and systematic theoretical treatises. Of course, that requires a certain amount of conceptual innovation - but so did Shakespeare's plays, and that doesn't mean that Macbeth is, in reality, just a very odd dictionary.

You are right of course, generally they don’t but at least one philosoper I know of wrote a dictionary: https://history.hanover.edu/texts/voltaire/volindex.html

But I think definitions are in the foundation of philosophy because if philosophers argue with badly defined or undefined words, the discussion turns into a discussion to assert academic authority. In this case, definitions of words are not explicit but implicit. I think this is what most people think philosophy is, ie sophistry. In computer languages I cannot use an undefined word. I would get an error message. It would be nice to institute a similar mechanism in philosophical discussions too.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#53

Post by brobdingnagians »

mapcars wrote: post #27

Philosophy to me is a kind of fanciful thinking. Article mentions something about being "purely theoretical", but is your life theoretical or real? If it's real you can't approach it by pure theory. As well as there is much more to life than just thinking.

Ancient philosophers didn't believe it was purely theoretical. They thought it was a way of gaining wisdom and living a good life (or study of physics, but again, practical). But, then again, it is kind of an equivocation to say that most modern philosophy is philosophy in the sense it was taken before. It was taken to be highly practical in days of yore.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#54

Post by YorkshireSeason »

dstrohmaier wrote: post #16
keiferski wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these topics fall under the domain of philosophy.

Whether or not these topics fall under the domain of philosophy, let me assure you that people in philosophy departments are covering them. Especially philosophers working in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science have a lot to say about issues such as embodiment, the relation between agents and environment (consider the extended mind debate or the debate about affordances), representation (e.g. Fodor), and man…

In my experience when philosophers say something about those things, they say it in natural language (typically English), and that is not precise enough for measurement. All problems can be handwaved away with ad-hoc modification.

The difference between philosophers 'doing' AI and what e.g. DeepMind do is that the latter are precise enough (indeed as precise as possible -- pace the Church-Turing thesis) about their research hypotheses that they can measure and confirm/refute their hypotheses, unlike the former.

Whence all progress in AI since Turing, Shannon, Zuse et al has come from programmers and not philosophers.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#55

Post by paganel »

nyc111 wrote: post #2

> Philosophy, in its purest form, contains the study of what it is to live a good human life. I don't think this a properly general definition of philosophy (although he says "contains",maybe he is not after generality). I would say philosophy is the science of definitions. This is why it is fundamental.

> I would say philosophy is the science of definitions

It depends, I guess. If it matters I for one stand on Socrates's side when it comes to what philosophy is and I find definitions to be just "syntactic sugar", they don't bring anything new to the table. This is also one of the reasons for why I found Aristotle pretty boring, I think he started this trend with categorizing things and defining terms, without trying to explain why we do the things that we do.

I also think that philosophy nowadays should stick to ethics and political philosophy, the physics and maths are too complicated and I honestly think that not even the mathematicians and physicists have a "grand view" of it all anymore. Case in point the pseudo-psychosis around the quantum theory thing and how, if proven "right" (whatever that means) it might obliterate the concept of free will (or vice-versa, I didn't really follow) and we might start killing each other out of the blue just because a physicist has proven a theory in some forsaken lab. That is not the case.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#56

Post by tkyjonathan »

A bit off-topic, but philosophy has a huge underground following now. Even I started to get into philosophy of systems (general systems theory) as well as pure topics like epistemology, ethics, aesthetics and logic.

If you are out of Uni and never learnt it while in Uni, I recommend looking into Objectivism.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#57

Post by rimher »

alister wrote: post #21

Surprisingly, Ycombinator co-founder Paul Graham was a philosophy major for most of his college years. He has a lot to say about it in one of his essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

Paul Graham's blog is still full of pearls, thanks a lot for sharing. One thing that I think is missing in his essay is the fact that Wittgenstein in the end also realized that philosophy is incredibly effective as meditation, I still find that thinking about things is relaxing and cathartic.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#58

Post by tkyjonathan »

garmaine wrote: post #26
dalbasal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The is how philosophy is, in relation to stuff outside of philosophy. For example, there's the discipline of epistemology, study of knowledge. There are actual working versions of science, that deals with all the hairy compromises and complications of reality. Car Vs picture of a car. Still the contribution is philosophers had a major role in creating the scientific method (eg Karl Popper).

Describing the scientific method, not creating it.

Philosophy is the study of concepts and you can have philosophy of science.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#59

Post by edna314 »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #50
edna314 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example take this quote from Nietzsche on the sentence "I think" from Beyond Good and Evil: >"When I analyze the process that is expressed in this sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove—for example, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a…

I would guess that quote is Nietzsche attacking one of the most famous first principles in Western philosophy, Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." "I think" is too complex to be accepted a priori for him, he's not discounting definitions completely.

I think, I would disagree in the sense that he was not only completely discounting on metaphysics, but also on ontology. Because one cannot write up a definition without using the word 'is' he must have been somewhat also completely discounting on definitions. His philosophy is in a sense Heraclitean because it is centered around 'becoming' rather than 'being'.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#60

Post by malmsteen »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #45

Sounds like a clever, witty, and charming guy. Would be very interesting to talk to him; I like his style of talking. Curiously ironic that he cites a consensus in personal belief in atheism and agnostics among philosophers (at least, modern philosophers, most philosophers in history believed in God..) as a good reason for philosophy not accepting the existence of God, which appears to be a popularity contest (and ec…

The point of science is that its supposed to be verifiable/ provable at least by someone. Its "trust" (in that "someone" or "group of people" who can prove it)... not "faith".

Faith is when its literally unprovable by anyone but you still believe it. Its completely different.

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