8 ms·
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 pr
by F_J_H 15y ago
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 said, but one thing that has always stuck with me was his opinion that “If we didn’t have philosophers, we’d still be burning witches.”
That philosophy is useless because it in not practical is the same sort of thinking as expressed by reluctant students taking algebra and pre-calculus: Why do we need to know this stuff? It’s not like I will use it in everyday life. True, for the most part, many things you learn in a math course you will not need to live your everyday life. However, learning these things teaches you how to think, how to reason, and that answers can be derived by methodically applying known principles to discover the unknown. Athletes perform many exercises in the gym using motions and machines they will never encounter in their respective sport, but the point is of course these exercises help to make the body stronger and build endurance. The same principle applies to philosophy.
To me, the spirit of philosophy is asking “why” when everyone just accepts, much like the student in this anecdote:
One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half of the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.” God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?” -Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr
- kmm 15y agoI don't understand, what question does philosophy conclusively answer?
- kirubakaran 15y ago"Do we need philosophers?"
- mikeryan 15y agoPhilosophy doesn't answer the question, it teaches you which questions to ask.
- pjscott 15y agoQuestion: "Which questions should we ask?" Does philosophy answer this question? Or perhaps questions of the form "What questions should we ask in circumstances [FILL IN THE BLANK]?"
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- kapy 15y ago"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -Picasso First time I saw that quotation, I thought it showed an amusing lack of understanding. Now I see the point; we need to know what questions need asking before we can begin to build anything of value in response.
- huherto 15y agoIt is so ambiguous that it each person can interpret it in a different way and it looks so deep and thoughtful. Coming from Picasso I would imagine he may have been thinking "...They can only give you answers, but no create beautiful things"
- tel 15y agoI 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.
- jackfoxy 15y agoOne can argue philosophers, or a philosopher, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon 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.
- davesims 15y agoGalileo 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.
- JonnieCache 15y agoScience evolved directly out of philosophy. Before science was called science, it was referred to as "natural philosophy." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy Principia Mathematica's full title is Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica
- joeyespo 15y agoWow, very well said. Really liked Dr. Peacock's story. I have to ask though, in his account and to further prove the reason for questioning, did the vascular reconstructions actually end poorly or was it a success?
- sp332 15y agoThere was an article posted a while back that illustrated this perfectly: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443316 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443316 The article asks: Is Sugar Toxic? Some readers complained that the article doesn't answer the question, but they missed the point. The author spent a lot of time and effort doing research and interviews and putting together information to make a better question. The author just asks a question really, really well.
- brudgers 15y agoWhen philosophy starts coming up with answers, we start calling it something else, e.g. what we call "psychology" grew out of philosophy over time as modern theories of the mind evolved from Kant to James who was trained as a physician and exposured to the empirically grounded Pragmaticism of Peirce (who was himself a working scientist).
- davesims 15y agoThat's one way of looking at it, and certainly the scientific community would like to think so -- as if Kant and James did a bit of theoretical work that the scientists fleshed out in practice. But this is really quite naive, and when you look at the particulars, really one discipline has very little to do with the other. James certainly did lay the foundation for modern psychology, but to the extent that he did he was acting as a scientist, not a philosopher, and very little of James' actual philosophy survives self-consciously in the discipline today. How many psychologists do you know claim that the epistemological bedrock of their practice is rooted in a Jamesean (or Dewey-ian) pragmatism? How many psychological curriculums require a study of James' theory of belief? How much practical application do Kant's categories have in modern psychology, and if they did, would they hold up under serious philosophical scrutiny? The answers to these questions are: few if any, not many/none, not much, and no.
- brudgers 15y agoOne might make a case about James being a scientist, however that's the sort of after the fact revision which Kuhn describes in Structure of Scientific Revolution. But there is no way to make that claim about Kant and Critique of Pure Reason. The logic underpinning such an argument - that Kant's view of the mind does not match popular current scientific theories and therefor does not constitute science - would also place Newton's Principia outside the realm of Physics. To suppose that the thrust of Kant's categories do not underpin modern psychology one would have to be the most radical of behaviorists. Modern psychology readily accepts that a person's experience of the world is largely shaped by the features of their mind - e.g. reframing. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reframing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reframing] As for what psychologists claim as their epistemological basis, I suspect that the rate at which psychologists would claim James as a predecessor is significantly greater than the rate at which planetary astronomers who would claim Giordano Bruno's work as their epistemological base.
- ristretto 15y agoI 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", just because quantum mechanics is hard to understand, or they propose that "consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe". Such things remind more of new-age mumbo-jumbo rather than serious thinking. Generally, their role in the field has not been very constructive, and most neuroscientists quietly ignore them taking a physicalist approach.
- davesims 15y agoThis 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.
- omarchowdhury 15y agoConsciousness sure is a fundamental property of your universe.
- ristretto 15y agoThe problem is some philosophers go so far as to suggest that consciousness is a fundamental property of the physical world that is only "detected" by brains, or that consciousness is in principle unexplainable. Imho, that's just rubbish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
- omarchowdhury 15y agoIt definitely is rubbish if you are grounded in physicalism.
- vacri 15y agoRe: the Peacock story. The student has missed some of the particular issues concerning highly specialist medical research. Frequently done with n<20 (due to lack of realistic subjects) and heavily invested in an ethical framework, it is common for medical research in specialist areas to be conducted in the form of case studies. Controls in these cases aren't "people that weren't treated" but "responses prior to treatment" - the student asking the question has a simplistic grasp of the peculiar issues surrounding medical research. Remember 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.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ff00 15y agohttp://www.tracyfineart.com/usmc/philosophy_who_needs_it.htm http://www.tracyfineart.com/usmc/philosophy_who_needs_it.htm