> his apparent rigorousness is not at all scientific. It is more scientific than Galileo, just less empirical. Spinoza's contributions to thought lie on the l

> his apparent rigorousness is not at all scientific. It is more scientific than Galileo, just less empirical. Spinoza's contributions to thought lie on the logic axis, not the empirical axis. That didn't really get going until the British empiricists, culminating with Newton, who absolutely saw himself as a philosopher, and saw his physics as part of his philosophical work[1]. But Spinoza's historical axis includes Leibniz, on whose work both Gottlieb Frege and Bertrand Russell saw themselves as building when they formalized mathematical logic as we now know it[2][3]. Turing is another few steps down this road, and knew it[4]. Further down Spinoza's road we also get Kant, who Einstein targeted when he was trying to understand what space actually is[5]. It's also worth mentioning that the whole logic thing starts with the Greek philosophers, who saw themselves as extending Euclid's geometry into other domains. Aristotle formalized several still accepted forms of logical inference and rigorously taxonomized fallacies, as well as inventing the notion of taxonomies (and biology) to begin with[6]. Incidentally, much later, Descartes finished the work of applying Euclid's work to other domains, by marrying algebra and geometry[7], while trying to prove that God exists[8]. > there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy. This is plainly false. Every philosopher in the Western canon saw themselves as refuting earlier philosophers and traditions. Sometimes, these refutations were so spectacular that they became sciences. I don't know man. To me, even when these guys fuck up, they still produce an awful lot of cool tools. --- [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton-philosophy/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton-philosophy/ [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/40693547?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40693547?seq=1 [3] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-4020-5243-9_13.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-4020-524... [4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/#TurMacCom https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/#TurMacCom [5] https://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/significance_GR_geometry/Einstein_on_Kant.html https://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/si... [6] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-biology/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-biology/ [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_geometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_geometry [8] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/#FirResNewMisMet https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/#FirResNewMisMe...