41–50 of 242 posts
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There is an old joke that goes like this: It is well know that the Math department is the second cheapest department at a university. The people there only need a pencil, paper, and rubbish bin. But which is the cheapest department? The Philosophy department. There you don't need the bin.
yes but nowadays the Math department needs computers, so Computer Science must be cheaper.
> Lawrence Krauss engages with philosophical arguments for theism without understanding them properly. Most saliently, he ends up criticising a caricature version of the so-called cosmological argument about the existence of God.
Oof. Perhaps back up those drive-by-shootings with some clarification.
> Usually, the prose is infused with arcane terminology and learned jargon, creating an aura of scholarly profundity. We can call this phenomenon obscurantist pseudophilosophy.
The irony.
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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 sc…
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?
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.
> Often, it’s due to simple misunderstandings (such as confusing truth with belief or knowledge), but sometimes it’s due rather to wilful obscurity Sorry, but the pseudophilosopher here is the author of the article. He can't disambiguate between truth as some property of the universe/time-space/actual historical occurence, and truth as it matters to us, and thinks that just because Foucault doesn't spell the distinct…
"And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its régime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourses which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true”
This sort of thing is always by turns boring and frustrating to read, because there are good and interesting philosophical criticisms to be made of Foucault's epistemology, but the idea that for him facticity itself is questionable isn't one of them. Foucault is never really in doubt about what constitutes, e.g., an event, occurrence, or fact - actually his entire corpus very self-consciously relies on having a commo…
I didn't read the linked article yet, but to me, Foucault really is one of the most interesting intellectuals of the 20th century (or longer) - if only because of how differently people perceive him. There's that old debate between him and Chomsky, and it's incredible how different people will score that debate. Some see obscurantist posturing versus Chomsky's towering, rigourous intellect, where others see Chomsky o…
(SFW even though it's on an .xxx domain)
(It is "this debate" in a broader sense, not this specific debate, which I also happen to love. I both agree with you that it is amazing how everyone sees what they want to see in that debate, and also am in the "lol Chomsky got owned so hard he didn't even know what was going on" camp.)
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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 re…
> 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 sc…
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.
This sort of thing is always by turns boring and frustrating to read, because there are good and interesting philosophical criticisms to be made of Foucault's epistemology, but the idea that for him facticity itself is questionable isn't one of them. Foucault is never really in doubt about what constitutes, e.g., an event, occurrence, or fact - actually his entire corpus very self-consciously relies on having a commo…
Complexity and language: It is always funny how long boring sentences are found in philosophy. I think the problem is that our language is lacking in clarity for describing the subtle nuances of reasoning and logic. And sadly it is a bit confusing. Especially if one (like me), does not know all the people listed in the paragraphs. Personally I tend to shorten the sentences and focus on the presentation of the informa…
When you read incomprehensible gobbledygook, it is because the author is being lazy, at best. At worst it is a deliberate attempt to appear as if making a complex point, while saying nothing. Verbose and opaque writing can make one appear intelligent and be a shield from criticism. (If you don't understand me, it's because you aren't smart enough, and until you understand you aren't allowed to criticize.)
Remember, the burden is on the author to be clear and understandable. If they can't be bothered to make the effort, you are under no obligation to believe a single word.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 sc…
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…
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.
This sort of thing is always by turns boring and frustrating to read, because there are good and interesting philosophical criticisms to be made of Foucault's epistemology, but the idea that for him facticity itself is questionable isn't one of them. Foucault is never really in doubt about what constitutes, e.g., an event, occurrence, or fact - actually his entire corpus very self-consciously relies on having a commo…
There are facts and facts. The OP thinks that Foucault's (pseudo-)philosophy is against the fact that the Earth is non-flat, or that saying that the Earth is non-flat is somehow infused with ideology, but there are also facts that are given to us as true (and which affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people) which are indeed infused with ideology, one of the latest examples being the "fact" that austerity was the thing to do after the 2008-2010 crisis (a "fact" which has recently been debunked by the IMF itself, originally one of its most important ideological backers).