[ExI] Why Physics Needs Philosophy

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 9:26 AM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 30, 2016  Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Note: no mention of Mortimer Adler here. I wonder why?
>
> Maybe because
> Mortimer Adler
> never produced one bit of original philosophy in his life
> , or because

My point was that Tim Maudlin, a philosopher who deals mainly in philosophy
of physics, didn't mention Adler -- unlike you who many months ago brought
him up as if all philosophers working today were Adler's heirs and as if
Adler were the essence of philosophy. In fact, when I put your previous
rant against philosophy to a professional philosopher, his response was:

'Mortimer Adler is a silly example since he is respected almost solely by
non-philosophers.  But I'd put the contributions of Wittgenstein, Putnam,
Kripke, Anscombe, Davidson, Sellars, McDowell, Brandom, and Thompson up
against any of these supposed "gargantuan philosophical discoveries made by
non-philosophers."'

Note that this is a professional philosopher stating Adler is not a big
deal inside philosophy. Let me put it another way, there are various crank
scientists out there -- usually some guy with some college who spouts off
their pet theory that resolves all current issues of physics and hails
themselves as smarter than Einstein. Would you think of those folks as
telling us physics is obviously nothing more than a crank field and we
should set it aside? No, right?

> Mortimer Adler
> was a creationist
> :
>
> https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j17_2/j17_2_80-82.pdf
>
>
> Or maybe because Mortimer Adler was a creationist who thought that the
Catholic church had a right to execute heretics
> :
>
> http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1420714/posts
>
> I've heard it said that the word
>
> "
> philosopher" comes from the Greek and means
> lover of wisdom
> , if so then I am a philosopher and I do not love
> Mortimer Adler
> because
> Mortimer Adler
> was not wise.

See above.

My point, again, is Adler is not a good example of philosopher. It's almost
as if someone here were to trash the field of history by pointing to the
History 2 Channel's seemingly endless supply of lunatic fringe content --
"Ancient Aliens" and such* -- as what history is all about.

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://author.to/DanUst

* Not to say there's not some mild entertainment value in these, but they
are mostly informative about how gullible people can be.
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