You probably wouldn't criticize a sculptor for not hitting a home run, for not breaking a 100-meter dash world record, for not building the LHC, or for not discovering the Higgs Boson, etc. Why? Because that's not what sculpture is about! So for those physicists, all of whom I love but who don't know what the hell philosophy is or even what it's supposed to do, please stop talking about things over which you have no expertise. You kind of sound as ignorant as religious fundamentalists when they talk about science...
One of the physicists who does understand the ways in which philosophy and science can make great allies and help each other in their respective disciplines, however, is Sean Carroll. He's a great thinker, with a gift for precision, clarity and profundity. The following video has nothing to do with the physics/philosophy stuff I mentioned above, but it is a nice example of just how great he is at breaking down complex ideas into an accessible and nicely organized format without sounding the least bit condescending:
I'll check out the rest of this apparent debate later on, and if it's good, I'll post it in its entirety in the weeks to follow.
I think physicists and scientists dislike philosophy as philosophers make claims and theories about how the mind, universe and humans behave without providing testable hypotheses.
ReplyDeleteWhy do philosophy if science can and has the ability to comprehend the whole universe and all physical phenomena?
analogy: Why think and theorize in a pitch black room when you can outside and see what the world is really like?
If we believe Plato, then his teacher Socrates called himself a ‘philo-sophós’, someone who is a friend of wisdom, in contrast to the ‘sóphoi’, those who believed themselves to have acquired wisdom already. Socrates’s enquiries would rather reveal what is not than what is.
ReplyDeleteOf course, over the centuries, it has been debated quite fervently what, exactly, philosophy is. From a historical point of view, we can, on the one hand, certainly say that philosophy, as we understand it with regard to its roots in Greek antiquity, has rendered modern science possible – or, to put it more modestly, has outlined the principles upon which modern science is based.
On the other hand, history has also proven traditional philosophy to be impotent of producing new knowledge, or even analyse the nature of some phenomena, such as the concepts of ‘mind’, correctly, since it turned out that it is impossible to do so without empirical studies. Therefore, many subjects which traditionally belonged to the scope of philosophy have become separate disciplines involving more and more empirical data. Empirical data, however, are blind, and thereby useless, without any framework of interpretation. Outside of a theory, no empirical datum could be of any use.
The question, then, is who is to provide the respective theories. Philosophers, scientists, or both?
In any case, I agree with the contention in the above post that philosophy ought not to be expected to generate new (empirical) knowledge. Philosophy is essentially analysis, especially and for its most part as to already existing concepts. Whether the endeavour of analysing such be help- and useful in regard to each case, we shall only learn by doing so.