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Philosophy is interested with the very edge of knowledge and learning why and how we can know about it. Perhaps you forget not so long ago the philosophers Freg

by scoofy 15y ago

Philosophy is interested with the very edge of knowledge and learning why and how we can know about it. Perhaps you forget not so long ago the philosophers Frege, along with and Russell and Whitehead. These guys were trying to create a logic that mapped to language better that their traditional logic. This guy named Wittgenstein came up with this idea called 'truth-tables'. This work eventually lead some guy named Turing to invent the effing computer. It was philosophy, now it's a science. Philosophy is the creation of sciences. Whether it's computer science of the recent past, or psychology and political science before that, or even physics if you go back to Galileo's and Decartes' 'natural philosophy'. It's easy to disparage philosophy in retrospect, because you don't consider the science you love as being its biproduct.

bermanoid 15y ago
It's easy to disparage philosophy in retrospect, because you don't consider the science you love as being its biproduct. But this is exactly the problem with philosophy - all the useful stuff[1] leaves the field and takes on another label, because all the crap that's been around forever (you know, all that meandering metaphysical wishy washy nonsense about the nature of existence that everyone immediately thinks when they hear the word "philosophy") is pretty much garbage and nobody wants to be associated with it if they've got something that you can actually use. Philosophical motivations are fine, and every field needs a "Philosophy Of" to guide it; quite often those philosophical thoughts are exactly what inspired the original visionaries to do the real work of studying that field, and that's great, we need people thinking about stuff like that. But the pure study of philosophy has too many dark corners where stupidity can hide out and self-reinforce for me to approve of its current incarnation: while a small part of it is legitimate work in formal logic, a good part of the rest is lightly camouflaged religious apologetics, and the remainder is just inane arguments over definitions which ultimately do little more than remind us that human language is imprecise and does not lend itself to formal analysis. In my experience, way too many of the people that are "into philosophy" focus exclusively on the latter two pieces of it, embracing rigor only to the extent that it allows for squishy beliefs that can never be proven wrong. [1] ...with the notable exception of some parts of mathematical logic, which for some inexplicable reason seemed to stick around in the philosophy departments rather than moving on over to math like they probably should have.

by scoofy 15y ago

bermanoid 15y ago

It's easy to disparage philosophy in retrospect, because you don't consider the science you love as being its biproduct. But this is exactly the problem with philosophy - all the useful stuff[1] leaves the field and takes on another label, because all the crap that's been around forever (you know, all that meandering metaphysical wishy washy nonsense about the nature of existence that everyone immediately thinks when they hear the word "philosophy") is pretty much garbage and nobody wants to be associated with it if they've got something that you can actually use. Philosophical motivations are fine, and every field needs a "Philosophy Of" to guide it; quite often those philosophical thoughts are exactly what inspired the original visionaries to do the real work of studying that field, and that's great, we need people thinking about stuff like that. But the pure study of philosophy has too many dark corners where stupidity can hide out and self-reinforce for me to approve of its current incarnation: while a small part of it is legitimate work in formal logic, a good part of the rest is lightly camouflaged religious apologetics, and the remainder is just inane arguments over definitions which ultimately do little more than remind us that human language is imprecise and does not lend itself to formal analysis. In my experience, way too many of the people that are "into philosophy" focus exclusively on the latter two pieces of it, embracing rigor only to the extent that it allows for squishy beliefs that can never be proven wrong. [1] ...with the notable exception of some parts of mathematical logic, which for some inexplicable reason seemed to stick around in the philosophy departments rather than moving on over to math like they probably should have.