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First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

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Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#51

Post by davesims »

ristretto wrote: post #39
F_J_H wrote: post #5

From the article: This is a key point to understand: philosophy, as a discipline, does not provide answers. Well, notwithstanding the fact that it certainly provides some answers, philosophy is more oriented towards learning how to come up with answers, and more importantly, learning how to recognize if the answer you’ve come up with is right or wrong. I have forgotten much of what my first year philosophy professor…

I am often disapponted by the inadequacy of modern philosophy of mind to follow recent advances in neuroscience and the brain sciences in general. Many of them have inadequate knowledge of the fields or outright dismiss verified results in order to advance obscure entities such as "qualia", or to promote a dualistic view of the world. Some of them also like to use quantum mechanics as "correlates of consciousness", j…

This attitude towards philosophy -- 'quietly ignore' -- has been the status quo in basically every discipline since the turn of the twentieth century. It certainly isn't unique to neuroscience.

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#52

Post by davesims »

jackfoxy wrote: post #17
tel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to flame, but in the light and sense of that quotation, weren't controls invented by scientists and refined by statisticians both concerned with effective experimental design? There weren't philosophers involved until way later. I find there's some important common ground between science and epistemology that can be talked about, though practicing scientists, in practice, never need to tread there.

One can argue philosophers, or a philosopher, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon , developed the scientific method. Bacon and Galileo were contemporaries. I don’t know if either influenced the other at all. Maybe they each independently discovered modern science.

Galileo was a first-rate philosopher of science as well as a scientist. He was a contemporary and co-belligerent with Bacon in laying the foundation of modern science. His role as a serious philosopher is often overlooked.

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#53

Post by vacri »

F_J_H wrote: post #5

From the article: This is a key point to understand: philosophy, as a discipline, does not provide answers. Well, notwithstanding the fact that it certainly provides some answers, philosophy is more oriented towards learning how to come up with answers, and more importantly, learning how to recognize if the answer you’ve come up with is right or wrong. I have forgotten much of what my first year philosophy professor…

Re: the Peacock story. The student has missed some of the particular issues concerning highly specialist medical research. Frequently done with nRemember that science is about rigorously reporting what is observed. It is possible to do good science without having to slavishly demand a control group - for example, where is the control group or the null hypothesis in the field of taxonomy?

The student in the anecdote does ask 'why' and I'm all for that, but I would have preferred the anecdote to answer his question rather than just leave it as a joke.

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#54

Post by MaysonL »

bugsy wrote: post #41

Some random thoughts that come to mind. 1. Philosophy is worth studying for many different reasons. 2. It is known that Philosophy majors have higher IQs and SAT/ACT scores than students in any other specialty. 3. Philosophy graduates make fantastic software engineers. It's a better screening degree than computer science (which is actually a pretty bad screening degree). 4. Pragmatism is an illusion.

Well, according to this table, it changes in grad school, where they seem to come in in 9th place:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070104093613/http://www.econphd...

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#55

Post by vacri »

Dysiode wrote: post #49

This man is a master of irony. He's discussing the nature of philosophy which is itself philosophical in nature; therefore, he's using philosophy to argue against the usefulness of philosophy. This begs the question: Is he therefore advocating we shoot him? This would be one of the most clever ways to commit suicide. His gravestone would have to read "Trollololol". On a more serious note (so you don't down vote me. G…

I found it very disturbing that the subtext of his article was "philosophy is kind've useful, but do we really want our judiciary and administration doubting themselves?"

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#57

Post by bugsy »

MaysonL wrote: post #54
bugsy wrote: post #41

Some random thoughts that come to mind. 1. Philosophy is worth studying for many different reasons. 2. It is known that Philosophy majors have higher IQs and SAT/ACT scores than students in any other specialty. 3. Philosophy graduates make fantastic software engineers. It's a better screening degree than computer science (which is actually a pretty bad screening degree). 4. Pragmatism is an illusion.

Well, according to this table, it changes in grad school, where they seem to come in in 9th place: http://web.archive.org/web/20070104093613/http://www.econphd...

Thanks for digging that up, that is a good source. Combined with spindrift's reference he dug up from 2010 (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/verbal-vs-mat...), they show a much fuller and more accurate picture than I portrayed. Philosophy students are the best at verbal and writing on the GRE, but are only at the top of the humanities in math ranking, and are below the levels of STEM subject applicants.

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#58

Post by anghyflawn »

bluekeybox wrote: post #29
yummyfajitas wrote: post #14

The author makes an unjustified claim: I don't know what the tariff for higher education at UNLV is nowadays, but you can be damn sure that every $50,000-a-year Philosophy major at Harvard is subsidizing a hell of a lot of electron microscopes for the glamorous—and much less profitable—Molecular Biology majors. This is nonsense. The materials scientist who bought a $1M electron microscope received a grant for roughly…

As someone with a BS in Molecular Biology, I have to say that there is nothing glamorous about that degree.

It really does depend on your standard of comparison. Cosmology? Yeah, I guess you're right. Philosophy (or for that matter any humanities department)? Guess who gets more "serves them right" jeers if a a university decides to close down the department

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#59

Post by nick_urban »

jff wrote: post #21

One thing that struck me strongly when taking a Philosophy of Technology course at my university (part of a concentration in philosophy) was that these philosophers really had no understanding of the technology they were trying to discuss. They'd simply latch on to something they heard--I recall "cybernetics" was one such topic--and misconstrue a bunch of news articles about it, then publish papers at each other defe…

I'm not sure what you're thinking of in particular, but I'm guessing that most talk about cybernetics in modern philosophy is derived from Heidegger's claim that in modernity, we lose any an ultimate referent for our chains of signification. Everything gets taken as for the sake of something else (e.g. as a resource to achieve some ends extrinsic to it), but there is no final "something else" to make it all meaningful. The reason he calls this "cybernetic" is because it deals with unending loops instead of the sort of hierarchical organization we might have seen in pre-modern times (e.g. with God at the top of the tree of meaning).

Philosophy often attempts to dip below accepted meanings and systems of thought. This may make it seem like philosophers "have no understanding of the technology they're trying to discuss", but in fact they aren't necessarily discussing technology in the sense which one might assume. They're trying to get at a completely different strata of thought than the "how-to" of any given technology.

Re: First, Let's Shoot All the Philosophers

#60

Post by jchrisa »

vecter wrote: post #37
jchrisa wrote: post #23

I studied Philosophy at Reed College. The department there is biased toward the analytic side, which means I mostly studied set and number theory, reference and meaning of language, and other somewhat technical questions. I'm absolutely certain this was better preparation for my current career (writing Erlang and making dorky music videos about CouchDB) than anything I could have learned in a CS program. Maybe other…

That's interesting. Could you elaborate on why you think analytic philosophy better prepared you for a career as an Erlang programmer than a computer science degree?

The biggest thing I learned in Philosophy, is how not to skip steps. Even the most mundane thing can have a ton of interesting questions hiding inside it. The best way to not skip steps is to train your mind to be in a state of perpetually acknowledging your ignorance. This is hard to do, and I wouldn't consider myself great at it, but the fact that I've identified this as a goal is something I credit to some of the professors I worked with there, Mark Hinchliff in particular.
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