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I realize there's a (stereotypical) tendency for scientists and engineers to look down on philosophy - and I think this tendency colors this whole discussion to

• JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Ancient Greek is stained by history - it was the only science taught in Universities for what? a thousand years. That's the catch - its revered beyond all reason due to history. Simultaneously its old-fashioned and outdated for the same reason. Hard to disentangle the two. I read the Philosophers in College. But I cannot imagine I would ever again pick up a book of Ancient Greek Philosophy. There's just nowhere to go from that stuff. Informative as history, and as an intro to the subject. But I been there; done that.
  • mcguire 10y ago
    That's funny, I've seen Stoicism making inroads in various places lately, including this very hallowed forum.
    • namlem 10y ago
      Because when people hear "ancient Greek philosopher" they think of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Figures like Zeno and Epicurus are mostly overlooked.
  • coldtea 10y ago
    >Ancient Greek is stained by history - it was the only science taught in Universities for what? a thousand years. That's the catch - its revered beyond all reason due to history. That's reversing cause and effect. It's not a mere accident of history that it was "taught in Universities for a thousand years". >But I cannot imagine I would ever again pick up a book of Ancient Greek Philosophy. There's just nowhere to go from that stuff Actually it's one of the best investments in one's personal development and understanding of the world they could make. Physical philosophy aside, philosophy, like arts, doesn't get deprecated over time. Aristotle, Plato, Seneca, Epictetus, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, etc are as relevant as they ever were.
    • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      Sure it was. It was all they had for 'science' for a thousand years. Something about the 'dark ages'. And, as stated above, been there and done that.
      • coldtea 10y ago
        >Sure it was. It was all they had for 'science' for a thousand years. Something about the 'dark ages' There was not much "dark" about the dark ages (as 20th and 21st century scholarly research increasingly showed), and what little was was due to the collapse of a huge organized empire, not because because "that was all they had for science" (I guess "that" being Aristotle). In any case, this is an extremely shallow assessment of the role of philosophy -- like someone reading Cliff Notes on Shakespeare and thinking they got all there is to it.
• woodruffw 10y ago
  Most philosophers will readily acknowledge the pitfalls of early philosophy - many pre-Socratic views are indeed falsifiable, and Aristotle makes all kinds of silly physical qualifications surrounding virtue and its prerequisites. The view that empiricism is what divides science and philosophy is a controversial one. Many philosophers and students of philosophy (including myself) think that there exist empirical truths in the fields of ethics and metaphysics, the latter of which is not scientifically testable by definition. I like to distinguish science and philosophy in terms of their object of study - the sciences inform our knowledge of the external world, while philosophy informs our knowledge of ourselves and (the rightness of/the reasons for) our behavior within that world. I don't think that's a perfect definition, but it comes close to explaining the need for empiricism in both fields.
  • tdb7893 10y ago
    What do you mean by empiricism? I was always under the impression that observation and experiment are what empiricism is all about so I don't understand what you mean by saying that it is empirical but not testable.
    • foldr 10y ago
      I think the poster may be thinking of the kinds of statements that Kripke argued were necessary truths that could only be known a posteriori.
      • woodruffw 10y ago
        I have Naming and Necessity on my bookshelf ;)
    • woodruffw 10y ago
      Philosophy engages in observation and experiment just like the sciences do. It's just that those observations and experiments tend to (but don't always!) run orthogonal to scientific ones. You can test metaphysical claims via a metaphysical framework or even "pure logic" (according to some), just not via normative physics. For example, how can physics even begin to prove that you or I exist? It can qualify our existence as objects in a world, but this says nothing about our minds, their "location", why they exist, why they're different "things" (if they are different things), and so forth. Edit: To the downvoter, please respond as well. Silence hurts more than disagreement.
• dcre 10y ago
  I'd say you're overstating the extent to which Aristotle was "hopelessly wrong" in his physical theories. It's more that the things he was right about have become so deeply ingrained in us that we don't even consider them questions of physics — they're just "how things are". For example, his breaking down of the 4 types of causes: what a thing is made out of (material), what makes it what it is (formal), what process or force made it that way (efficient), and its purpose (final). What we today mean by "cause" usually only includes the efficient cause, so calling the rest "causes" can confuse more than it illuminates (at least at first). But everyone of course understands how to analyze things in terms of their matter, form, and purpose, even though we don't call them "causes" and we don't consider it "physics."
  • charles-salvia 10y ago
    With Aristotle in particular, I was thinking mostly of his statements about gravity and objects moving towards their natural place.
    • foldr 10y ago
      This is an interesting take on how Aristotle's physics was more correct than he is usually given credit for: https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057
    • adrusi 10y ago
      The point is that yes, there are some things he was wrong about, and when we think of the questions that "physics" amswers, those are the ones that come to mind. But that ignores the contributions he made that we don't think of as contributions at all because we take them so for granted that it's not at all clear to us that people could ever have thought otherwise. I don't know if the aitiai are the greatest examples of this, but the entire approach of questioning why objects move and change the way they do and trying to reduce it to a concise set of rules? My understanding of history is that that was very novel.
      • charles-salvia 10y ago
• kurthr 10y ago
  It's interesting that even within the field of philosophy the term sophist/sophistry from the root sophia has come to denote deception and fallacy rather than knowledge or wisdom. I would agree that philosophy has evolved somewhat (Nozick and Rawls), but for me it never really achieved the level of empirical usefulness (past perhaps rule utilitarianism), because it has never been clear enough how (or even when it was appropriate) to apply it. If there were such a thing as "Newtonian" philosophy that had useful testable equations, perhaps I would view it differently. At least I have some idea when physics rules break down and when they are useful approximations. In my experience most philosophy is written as if it is completely true not a model of reality.
  • cgio 10y ago
    In Greek you can use the same root for different purposes. I.e. it is not the word sophia or sophos that came to denote deception or fallacy. Sophist is someone who deceives using the pretense of philosophy. I do not see knowledge as something that comes with an application manual. I.e. there is no manual defining how will use number theory, but still it has applications, sometimes completely unexpected. I would argue that philosophy navigates the fields where the testability of equations and "hard" science fails. That is also why some scientists do philosophy when/where the rules break down.
• ejz 10y ago
  Not sure I can get behind this. We read primary sources in history, but in those cases it is to get understanding that can only come from a first person account, like subjective experience. With philosophy, it is argued that Aristotle's thoughts can only be fully conveyed BY Aristotle (aside from the hero worship of some philosophers I know). My sense is that you're really on to something with empiricism. Philosophy is now largely about purely social phenomena, like epistemology and ethics, that don't have a physical "correct" answer (at least to most people--maybe not Kant). That being the case, there really is something unique about, for example, Aristotle's take on virtue ethics, since there is no virtue ethics outside of his conception of it (and our practicing of it). So the pure thing being studied in philosophy is Aristotle's conception and the surrounding literature of virtue ethics, whereas with physics and Newton his theories and equations are pure things and there is no value to his particular exposition.
• Chathamization 10y ago
  > I would argue, however, that Aristotle (and many of the ancient philosophers) are actually very valuable to read precisely because of their historical impact, and how their works shaped the course of human thought for millennia. You could make the same argument for theology, yet you rarely hear people talk about the importance of reading someone like Irenaeus (for example). And if someone like that is studied, it's often looking at their historical context and their historical impact, rather than someone like Aristotle where the focus is often on the works itself. You don't see many people saying we should be reading and arguing Irenaeus' theological theories. A class on Aristotelian epistemology is not a class on "Western thought," and trying to mask the former by disguising it as the later only suggests that there isn't a terribly great reason to study it.
  • glenstein 10y ago
    I wouldn't equate Aristotelian epistemology to "Western Thought", but I could surely imagine a course on the history of western thought that took Aristotle's treatment of epistemology (or whatever else) as an important landmark.
    • Chathamization 10y ago
      Sure. I once took a course on modern Iranian history that had us read Khomeini's "Islamic Government." But that's very different from how the book would be studied in an Iranian seminary. A historical look is interested in how something ties into the surrounding history, and doesn't pass judgement on the quality of the writing or spend time trying to determine its soundness.
      • glenstein 10y ago
        It sounds like we agree more than we disagree. I would substitute a term like "ties into" for "influenced/gave rise to/made possible." We don't really need to know much about the merits of any particular Aristotelian investigation these days. But that material can be critical for helping us understand, and yes, helping us critically evaluate, the schools of thought it gave rise to.
• d_burfoot 10y ago
  >wouldn't be truly appreciated as part of a formal, scientific method... until... [later] thinkers really formalized it. They didn't formalize empiricism or the scientific method. They couldn't have because they didn't have the tools. In fact, it's still not formal. The reason nobody formalized the scientific method is that science depends entirely on the process of induction, and nobody understood induction in any kind of formal, rigorous, mathematical way until the middle part of the 20th century, with the work of men like Kolmogorov, Solomonoff, Vapnik, and Chaitin.
• imagist 10y ago
  My criticism of philosophy nowadays is not that it isn't valuable to read, but that it's not read from a historical perspective. Instead, people to often read i.e. Aristotle as if it contains modern truths. While some parts of Aristotle remain true, his ideas have been greatly refined over centuries, and integrated into our culture to the point that uneducated people in the modern world often have a stronger grasp of practical philosophy than Aristotle did. But too often old philosophy is taught and read in a vacuum, not as history but as a source of practical modern philosophy. This results in repeated resurgences of bad ideas that were refined away by more modern advancements in philosophy, but are revived when people read old philosophy uncritically. Few people have an understanding of the refinements to even refute many older philosophers claims. Moreover, there are many accepted ideas which we take for granted that should be more deeply questioned which come from philosophy. For example, the pervasive Socratic idea that mind and body are separate entities is all but disproven by modern understanding of the nervous system, but it's deeply ingrained in our culture, and needs less reinforcement, not more.
• namlem 10y ago
  Aristotle had historical impact, but there are ancient philosophers whose ideas were much more useful. In particular, I would point to Zeno (of the Stoics), Epicurus, Democritus, and most of all, the Buddha.