Originally Posted by
Walter Ego
You simply cannot understand ..... science without knowing the philosophical currents of whatever era you are studying.
Does that mean you are under the impression either that scientists like Stephen Hawking cannot possibly understand their own publications, or else that they have all studied formal university courses in academic philosophy?
How many physicists, chemists or biologists do you actually know? How many of those have told you that their experiments and theories rely on Kant, Hume or Wittgenstein? Because amongst the several hundred research physicists and chemists that I've met, I never met anyone who even bothered to mention philosophy of that sort. Afaik, few if any of them knew the first thing about any philosophical claims.
I suspect it’s very rare for any modern day scientists & mathematicians ever to give any thought at all to what has been written by any philosophers. In my own 20 years of research I never even heard of any named philosophers. And I never met any colleagues who ever popped over to the philosophy dept for anything.