has philosophy lost its way?

[iambiguous]

Hawking contra Philosophy
Christopher Norris presents a case for the defence

Stephen Hawking recently fluttered the academic dovecotes by writing in his new book The Grand Design – and repeating to an eager company of interviewers and journalists – that philosophy as practised nowadays is a waste of time and philosophers a waste of space.

We'll need a context of course. And that's basically what we do at the new forum I was recently invited to join. We explore the "for all practical purposes" implications of human interactions given insightful speculations from both philosophers and scientists. What are the limitations of logic and epistemology? What are the limitations of the scientific method? How might God and religion be factored in?

More precisely, he wrote that philosophy is ‘dead’ since it hasn’t kept up with the latest developments in science, especially theoretical physics. In earlier times – Hawking conceded – philosophers not only tried to keep up but sometimes made significant scientific contributions of their own. However they were now, in so far as they had any influence at all, just an obstacle to progress through their endless going-on about the same old issues of truth, knowledge, the problem of induction, and so forth.

So, is this "generally true"? And what of that crucial distinction between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy? The role the scientific method either can or cannot play in regard to conflicting value judgments. And above all, what beliefs can actually be demonstrated to be true for all rational men and women?

Had philosophers just paid a bit more attention to the scientific literature they would have gathered that these were no longer live issues for anyone remotely au fait with the latest thinking. Then their options would be either to shut up shop and cease the charade called ‘philosophy of science’ or else to carry on and invite further ridicule for their head-in-the-sand attitude.

"The philosophy of science is a field that deals with what science is, how it works, and the logic through which we build scientific knowledge." UC, Berkeley

My own main interest here revolves around "I" at the existential juncture encompassing identity, value judgments, conflicting goods and political economy. Logic and scientific knowledge there. And, in my view, less regarding what we can know and more regarding what we may not ever be able to grasp in a No God universe.

[iambiguous]

Hawking contra Philosophy
Christopher Norris presents a case for the defence

Science is Philosophical

Professor Hawking has probably been talking to the wrong philosophers, or picked up some wrong ideas about the kinds of discussion that currently go on in philosophy of science.

On the other hand, some might argue, the one thing that philosophy seems to lack is the equivalent of the scientific method. Instead, philosophy seems to focus far more on language. What can be articulated logically? What can we know and perhaps not know rationally about our interactions? Again, physicists, chemists and biologists can accumulate facts about our interactions that really are applicable to everyone.

Well, sans sim worlds, dream worlds and Matrix contraptions.

His lofty dismissal of that whole enterprise as a useless, scientifically irrelevant pseudo-discipline fails to reckon with several important facts about the way that science has typically been practised since its early-modern (seventeenth-century) point of departure and, even more, in the wake of twentieth century developments such as quantum mechanics and relativity.

Here again, however, what are we dealing with? The gap between science communicating relationships in the either/or world [where it excels] and the general lack of scientific endeavors relating to the is/ought world. Philosophers do take on the interactions derived from conflicting goods, but since there does not appear to be the equivalent of the scientific method here, ethicists themselves can fall all up and down the moral and political spectrum. Whereas with science disputes tend to crop up only in regard to grappling with the very, very large and the very, very small. And, of course, issues pertaining to the Big Questions.

In other words, with regard to probing the relationship between the "human condition" and the "existence of existence" itself when does science become philosophy and philosophy science?

[iambiguous]

Hawking contra Philosophy
Christopher Norris presents a case for the defence

Science has always included a large philosophical component, whether at the level of basic presuppositions concerning evidence, causality, theory-construction, valid inference, hypothesis-testing, and so forth, or at the speculative stage where scientists ignore the guidance offered by well-informed philosophers only at risk of falling into various beguiling fallacies or fictions.

Back to the dictiionary?

Philosophy: "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline"

Science: "the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained"

Now, all we need is a context. The part where we take the academic discipline and the laboratory experiments out of the hallowed halls and introduce particular assessments and conclusions to the world of ofttimes tumultuous human interactions. What of science and philosophy "for all practical purposes" then?

In particular, are there perhaps limitations beyond which neither technical discipline can go?

Instead, over and again [in my view] we come upon assessments such as this...

Such were those ‘idols of the theatre’ that Bacon warned against in his New Organon of 1620, and such – albeit in a very different philosophic guise – those delusive ideas that, according to Kant, were liable to lead us astray from the path of secure investigation or truth-seeking enquiry.

As though it can't be argued that Kant's own deontological moral philosophy has lead many astray as well by presuming that given a "transcending font" [which most call God] we mere mortals do have access to an objective morality.

That's not to say that God does not exist, only that lots and lots and lots of them are said to exist. And not only have the faithful failed to pin down which God that actually is, but they are still attacking each other around the globe for worshipping the wrong God. At least there's no scientific equivalent of that. Or none that I am aware of.

This was sure to happen, he warned, if the exercise of pure (speculative) reason concerning questions outside and beyond the empirical domain were mistakenly supposed to deliver the kind of knowledge that could be achieved only by bringing sensuous intuitions under adequate or answering concepts.

Of course, here the various religious denominations and their secular [ideological] facsimiles propound any number of hopelessly conflciting epistemological frameworks. As for speculative reasoning, that's basically what the hallowed halls and philosophy forums seem designed to favor. Let's get the definitions and the deductions revolving around the optimal theoretical assessment before we bring in actual flesh and blood human interactions.

While in no way wishing to lumber science with the baggage of Kantian metaphysics I would suggest that this diagnosis, or something like it, applies to a great many of the speculative notions nowadays advanced by theoretical physicists including proponents of string theory (Hawking among them) and some of the more way-out quantum conjectures.

Not much in the way of "confliciting goods" here though. It's not like many scientists are discovering how the material world functions, but are then insisting that it ought to function another way instead.

These thinkers appear unworried – blithely unfazed, one is tempted to say – by the fact that their theories are incapable of proof or confirmation, or indeed of falsification as required by Karl Popper and his followers. After all, it is the peculiar feature of such theories that they posit the existence of that which at present, and perhaps forever, eludes any form of confirmation by observation or experiment.

Or, as Donald Rumsfeld once suggested...

In particular the part where in regard to the Big Questions [in both philosophy and science] "there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

Thus, the crucial concern for all philosophers and scientists is pinning down the extent to which the human brain itself either is or is not capable of resolving any of this. If, in fact, we can determine that, in attempting to, we do so of our own volition.

[iambiguous]

Is philosophy just a bunch of nonsense?
Even some philosophers don’t think highly of philosophy, but we need it now more than ever.
BigThink site.

Philosophy, along with mathematics and logic, is one of humanity’s oldest intellectual disciplines.

And if in accumulating what you construe to be intellectually crucial assessments of the world around you, you are content to explore this, well, intellectually, then you may never, ever take your assessments down out of the ethical theory discussions. Which means that you won't be confronting the more substantive issues that I raise.

And since its inception — which in the West usually dates back to the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Thales of Miletus philosophy has had its skeptics and anti-philosophers. Indeed, throughout the history of philosophy, some of the biggest doubters of philosophy were themselves philosophers.

Okay, then what in particular did they doubt? What in particular do you doubt? You can be a philosopher or a scientist or neither one. But it still always comes down not to what you either doubt or don't doubt "in your head" but what you can demonstrate that all other rational men and women are obligated to doubt or not to doubt as well.

There are any number of truths about the recent solar eclipse that can in fact be shown to be applicable to all. But what of Marjorie Taylor Greene's suggestion that eclipses and earthquakes are the Christian God's way of telling us mere mortals to repent. Is this something that she can demonstrate?

One notable example from the early 20th century comes from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In both of Wittgenstein’s major works, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (“Tractatus” for short) and the Philosophical Investigations, he makes distinct cases against philosophy as a discipline.

And yet who would deny that in regard to the "limitations of language", social scientists and political scientists and ethicists and philosophers are still unable to form a consensus regarding the resolution of conflicting moral and political value judgments.

That doesn't mean they don't exist, of course, but if they do...what are they?

Is philosophy useless?

More to the point, given free will, can philosophers themselves go from one set of circumstances to the next and establish what is in fact essentially useful or useless?

A central, if not the main, purpose of the Tractatus was to investigate the limits of language. What can and cannot be said? And when considering things which cannot be said, what is their nature? Wittgenstein argues that philosophy essentially makes attempts to speak about things that are impossible to talk about, as such things are beyond the scope of what language can convey.

Basically my own point as well. But just because philosophers confront the at times profound limitations of their own tools -- "what we got here is failure to communicate" -- doesn't mean that "somehow" a way can't be found to encompass objective morality in a No God world.

You believe it can be? Okay, let's talk about it.

[Dubious]

A central, if not the main, purpose of the Tractatus was to investigate the limits of language. What can and cannot be said? And when considering things which cannot be said, what is their nature? Wittgenstein argues that philosophy essentially makes attempts to speak about things that are impossible to talk about, as such things are beyond the scope of what language can convey.

Basically my own point as well. But just because philosophers confront the at times profound limitations of their own tools -- "what we got here is failure to communicate" -- doesn't mean that "somehow" a way can't be found to encompass objective morality in a No God world.

Philosophy, as I see it, consist essentially of stories we manufacture not in any fictional sense but more metaphorically as thought laminations on perceived or actual realities centered mainly on the needs and requirements of the current age. Though the subject in question may not have changed, a periodic need to reinterpret or replace it with a revised paradigm replete with its own questions becomes a necessary adjustment compatible with the age.

In the sense that language expresses the seeing or awareness aspect of one's mind or psyche regarding its thoughts and surroundings, it is fully capable, given the required genius, of expressing what the mind perceives, expounds and resolves. Some languages too are more chromatic in their ability to express abstraction in more minute detail.

It's in that respect philosophy and language complement each other. In my opinion, Wittgenstein would only be correct if, on the whole, language as description were no-longer able to express the contents of a mind whose domain is much in advance of ours. Even within our limitations, language has proven itself to be a catalyst in its ability to reorder prior perceptions into formats not considered before its use.

Especially so in philosophy, language has the capability to create inflection points in ideas and thoughts under review.