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Whither philosophy?

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Re: Whither philosophy?

#181

Post by GoblinSlayer »

mistermann wrote: post #145
kbrkbr wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably don't understand clearly enough. Physics, chemistry, biology, even psychology have textbooks. Pick one, it doesn't matter much. It will teach you roughly the same basic things. Philosophy on the other hand. Pick Searle or Derrida, pick Quine or the late Heidegger, and it is hard to conceive that they are even doing the same thing ("philosophy").

>I probably don't understand clearly enough. Physics, chemistry, biology, even psychology have textbooks. Pick one, it doesn't matter much. It will teach you roughly the same basic things. And generally speaking, the practitioners of these disciplines tend to assert that their findings are true, in fact . Whether they are actually true....well, interest in that tends to drop off quite rapidly. Welcome to Planet Earth…

It certainly looks like philosophers use genetic search algorithm to make better ideas, so there are many mutants, but the method is known to perform well in the situation when the result can't be deduced straightforwardly.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#182

Post by dventimi »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #173
dventimi wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one branch of physics that can't do without philosophy, in the following sense: at a typical American university with a graduate physics program that prepares its doctoral students for a successful professional career in that branch of physics, philosophy classes are a required part of the graduate curriculum.

That's survivor's bias. You can be ignorant about anything until it becomes a problem. Insurance against it IRL is polymorphism: some people won't be ignorant, but you suggest uniform ignorance.

> That's survivor's bias. You can be ignorant about anything until it becomes a problem.

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

Re: Whither philosophy?

#183

Post by dventimi »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #174
dventimi wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot about Galileo, whose laws of motion superseded Aristotle's and did more to inform Newton. You also forgot about Copernicus and Kepler. Meanwhile, Newton formulated laws of motion that are still used today, a law of gravitation that is still used today, a theory of optics that is still used today, and a branch of mathematics that is still used today. Naturally, he had help in these triumphs, as all giants d…

I mean work done on it was steady evolution of knowledge started as philosophy. Newton himself called it philosophy.

> I mean work done on it was steady evolution of knowledge started as philosophy. Newton himself called it philosophy.

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

Re: Whither philosophy?

#184

Post by GoblinSlayer »

kbrkbr wrote: post #101
vivekd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hold the minority position that philosophy is a useful means of getting information about the world around us and it's only cultural factors that happened in the 1700s (movement against rationalism) that makes us blind to it. That's hard to see when we talk about more recently popular philosophical topics like ethics or existentialism. But hacker News also had an interesting discussion recently on Popper and the ph…

I have a genuine question that seems to fit here. It's bugging me for a long time, so any feedback is very welcome. I can see that the scientific method works well in producing knowledge. Because we can do something with it. Like fly to the moon, cure diseases, build nuclear weapons. Philosophy however claims usually to also find knowledge. There are several methods, but none of them seems to have any evidence of wor…

It's a source of knowledge because you can extract an idea that works and in hindsight is expected to work. Consensus doesn't happen because consensus is easily dominated by social factors, science suffers from this too, though it has only one case of encouragement of a lack of consensus.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#185

Post by dventimi »

tekla wrote: post #109
djoldman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's an example of a philosophical notion that did pay off?

The entire enlightenment?

Already this claim fails to withstand scrutiny. I already treated John Lock elsewhere in this thread, so for variety let's consider another crucial figure from the Age of Enlightenment: Francis Bacon. Was Bacon a philosopher? Maybe. But, before we concede that he was, what else was he? He was: a bureaucrat, a politician, an attorney, an architect, a scientist, an author, a political theorist, and a theologian, at least. He read Latin at Trinity, not "philosophy", which can't be identified as a distinct discipline at this time. He rejected Aristotelianism which elsewhere in this thread has been described as "the gold standard" of physics, so ponder that for a second.

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.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#186

Post by dventimi »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #123
simbolit wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> today's philosophy is a junk drawer of dead-end intellectual projects that never yielded anything useful I hold multiple degrees in philosophy and this is a correct description (for >95% of what happens in academic philosophy).

When you look for knowledge, you aim for the best, not for the average. Also science has crackpots too, they are just underfunded.

Whereas in philosophy, ALL the crackpots are overfunded.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#187

Post by dventimi »

cubefox wrote: post #79
b450 wrote: post #7

The argument is sometimes made that philosophy is the mother of all other academic traditions - once a philosophical idea reaches a sufficient level of promise or maturity, it spins off into its own discipline, as in the speciation of "natural philosophy" into specialized hard sciences. One might even point to psychology (or even more contentiously and partially, computer science) as a 20th century offshoots of philo…

Ethics is far from useless. It has important connections to open issues in society and e.g. birthed the effective altruism movement. Metaphysics is useless similar to any foundational research. Theoretical (as opposed to applied) mathematics is also largely useless. Nobody expects to use transfinite set theory in practice. Or the cosmology of the early universe, for that matter. Or an interpretation of quantum mechan…

> Ethics is far from useless. It has important connections to open issues in society and e.g. birthed the effective altruism movement.

That's not a great track record.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/sam-bankman...

Re: Whither philosophy?

#188

Post by bccdee »

kromem wrote: post #83
bccdee wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone else is just a long drawn out claim that we live in a false reality compared to another dimension or that man is impotent to know reality Can you name one mainstream philosopher, besides Plato, whose primary focus was the idea that we live in a false reality? (Not that that was even Plato's primary focus.) That's such an odd complaint. Do you think Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Sartre were all just complaini…

Your focus on individual names does kind of gloss over the fact that for centuries the Neoplatonist and Advaita Vedanta schools of thought had an extensive foothold on philosophical thought. Someone like Philio might not be widely read today, but the adoption of Plato's ideas into the dual creation of man in Genesis lives on today among Kabbalah much as Plotinus's contributions to Neoplatonism evolving alongside the…

Sure—I'm not saying that metaphysical idealism was never a dominant or influential idea, especially in premodern philosophy. But Rand lived in 20th century, when contemporary philosophy was overwhelmingly materialist. I'm genuinely unsure who the "everyone else" is that the original commenter was trying to contrast her with. Presumably not Augustine of Hippo.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#189

Post by GoblinSlayer »

dventimi wrote: post #187
cubefox wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethics is far from useless. It has important connections to open issues in society and e.g. birthed the effective altruism movement. Metaphysics is useless similar to any foundational research. Theoretical (as opposed to applied) mathematics is also largely useless. Nobody expects to use transfinite set theory in practice. Or the cosmology of the early universe, for that matter. Or an interpretation of quantum mechan…

> Ethics is far from useless. It has important connections to open issues in society and e.g. birthed the effective altruism movement. That's not a great track record. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/sam-bankman...

>The elementary tenet of effective altruism - that privileged Westerners could be doing considerably more good in the world than most of us do

Unironically privileged Westerners could be doing considerably more good in the world by protecting their freedoms in their own lives, egoism would be much more effective there.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#190

Post by dventimi »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #189
dventimi wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ethics is far from useless. It has important connections to open issues in society and e.g. birthed the effective altruism movement. That's not a great track record. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/sam-bankman...

>The elementary tenet of effective altruism - that privileged Westerners could be doing considerably more good in the world than most of us do Unironically privileged Westerners could be doing considerably more good in the world by protecting their freedoms in their own lives, egoism would be much more effective there.

Hogwash. Egoism isn't what's in short supply. EMPATHY is what's in short supply.
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