[ExI] Why Physics Needs Philosophy

[John Clark]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:

​> ​
> 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."'


​I grant you that not all modern philosophers are as silly as Adler was,
and some are interesting people who do a good job explaining the ideas made
by others to ​
humanities majors
​. But w
hat
​original ​
discoveries did those professional philosophers make that was even close in
important
​to​
 the gargantuan philosophical discoveries make by NON-philosophers like
Cantor who discovered that there is a infinite number of different types of
infinity
​,​
or Godel who discovered that some things are true but
​have no proof​,
 o
​r​
Turing who discovered that things can be deterministic but not predictable
​,​
or Clausius who discovered Entropy
​,​
or Maxwell who discovered that static electricity magnetism and light were
​all ​
related
​,​
or Darwin who discovered how bacteria can turn into people
​,​
or Planck who discovered that everything comes in little packages
​,​
or Watson and Crick who discovered that heredity is digital
​,​
or Hubble who discovered that the universe
​is​
 expanding
​,​
or Perlmutter Schmidt and Riess
​
who discovered that the universe
​is​
 accelerating
​,​
or Einstein who discovered that space and time
​are​
 not absolute. What discoveries about the nature of reality have
​
professional philosophers
​
made
​in the last ​
couple of centuries
​
that
​was​
 even in the same ballpark
​in​
 importance, or even
​in ​
the same continent?

​ John K Clark​


      ​




>
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