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Some parts of philosophy are useful, when they are used to encourage interest in, or as stepping stones to, science and mathematics. But a lot of philosophy ha

Some parts of philosophy are useful, when they are used to encourage interest in, or as stepping stones to, science and mathematics. But a lot of philosophy has been content with its past accomplishments, not producing any new ideas, giving up on trying to progress with certain questions [1], or else just producing bullshit that is either tautological (i.e. contains no information) or simply incoherent - e.g. "deconstruction". Science and mathematics has advanced philosophy more in the past thousand years, than philosophy has advanced itself. Aaronson has said something like this but I can't the exact quote now, but I had been thinking this earlier than that, and I'm sure countless others have too. [1] This is different from e.g. proving that a particular question is unanswerable, since this proof gives us new information to understand the world with. Philosophy has not done this, and is incapable of doing this.

jnbiche 10y ago
> Science and mathematics has advanced philosophy more in the past thousand years, than philosophy has advanced itself. I'm not sure that it's that simple. Many of the most prominent mathematicians of the past 200 years considered themselves philosophers, either first or philosopher/mathematicians or philosopher/logicians: Russell, Quine, Whitehead, Peirce, Frege, Boole, Gödel, the list goes on and on. And their work often reflects their background in philosophy, with Gödel's incompleteness theorems only being the most obvious example from the works of those philosophers I listed above. And not much prior to that, math and science were really considered to be part of philosophy, and not a separate subject. I grant that certain branches and traditions of philosophy in the 20th century wandered off into nonsense and tautology, but the spirit of Russell still flows strong through those philosophy departments that emphasize logic and/or philosophy of science. And I've noticed somewhat of a resurgence lately of this wing of philosophy. In short, I think philosophy still has a lot to offer humanity, particularly in the synthesis of ideas from different science and mathematical fields. If I could go through my undergrad studies again, I think I'd double-major in philosophy and math, keeping only the Latin minor from what I earned in my actual studies (Latin helped me understand language in great depth, and I credit it with helping me pick up several foreign languages later after college). Taught well, philosophy has a reputation (probably matched only by math and physics) for teaching students how to think critically, or for finely honing that ability in students who are already critical thinkers.
- infinity0 10y ago
  Philosophical ideas have inspired some ideas in science and mathematics indeed. New solutions to problems in science and mathematics, such as the incompleteness theorems, complexity theory, etc, have shown ways to begin answering age-old philosophical questions. But can you give an example where a new philosophical solution, has driven advances in existing mathematical or scientific problems? My point is that this happens the other way around, much more often. Philosophy is useful, but useless by itself. It can help you towards learning certain skills such as logical reasoning, or methods such as how to begin to formulate a problem - but if we want to correctly assign truth-values to propositions, the only tool that will allow us to do that is science and mathematics - including being able to precisely define "truth".

jnbiche 10y ago

> Science and mathematics has advanced philosophy more in the past thousand years, than philosophy has advanced itself. I'm not sure that it's that simple. Many of the most prominent mathematicians of the past 200 years considered themselves philosophers, either first or philosopher/mathematicians or philosopher/logicians: Russell, Quine, Whitehead, Peirce, Frege, Boole, Gödel, the list goes on and on. And their work often reflects their background in philosophy, with Gödel's incompleteness theorems only being the most obvious example from the works of those philosophers I listed above. And not much prior to that, math and science were really considered to be part of philosophy, and not a separate subject. I grant that certain branches and traditions of philosophy in the 20th century wandered off into nonsense and tautology, but the spirit of Russell still flows strong through those philosophy departments that emphasize logic and/or philosophy of science. And I've noticed somewhat of a resurgence lately of this wing of philosophy. In short, I think philosophy still has a lot to offer humanity, particularly in the synthesis of ideas from different science and mathematical fields. If I could go through my undergrad studies again, I think I'd double-major in philosophy and math, keeping only the Latin minor from what I earned in my actual studies (Latin helped me understand language in great depth, and I credit it with helping me pick up several foreign languages later after college). Taught well, philosophy has a reputation (probably matched only by math and physics) for teaching students how to think critically, or for finely honing that ability in students who are already critical thinkers.

infinity0 10y ago
Philosophical ideas have inspired some ideas in science and mathematics indeed. New solutions to problems in science and mathematics, such as the incompleteness theorems, complexity theory, etc, have shown ways to begin answering age-old philosophical questions. But can you give an example where a new philosophical solution, has driven advances in existing mathematical or scientific problems? My point is that this happens the other way around, much more often. Philosophy is useful, but useless by itself. It can help you towards learning certain skills such as logical reasoning, or methods such as how to begin to formulate a problem - but if we want to correctly assign truth-values to propositions, the only tool that will allow us to do that is science and mathematics - including being able to precisely define "truth".