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25th November 2012, 10:55 AM | #81 |
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Well, any logical axiom, like the law of non-contradiction, or any rule of inference.
Originally Posted by tsig
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25th November 2012, 10:56 AM | #82 |
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Fred Hoyle's objections to the Big Bang were philosophical. Far better if he'd followed the science.
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25th November 2012, 10:57 AM | #83 |
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25th November 2012, 11:01 AM | #84 |
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He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.---GOETHE
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25th November 2012, 11:02 AM | #85 |
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25th November 2012, 11:03 AM | #86 |
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25th November 2012, 11:04 AM | #87 |
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Assertion does not equal proof. You are aware that the burden of proof is on the claimant?
If it's all philosophy then who could argue it but philosophers? Computer programmers tend to think that life's like a big computer, Electrical engineers think it's all electricity and philosophers think it's all philosophy. Hammer/nail |
25th November 2012, 11:05 AM | #88 |
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25th November 2012, 11:11 AM | #89 |
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I have joked that philosophy is what happens when very intelligent people have too much time on their hands....
We had a fairly active atheism "group" on Facebook (before it was abruptly removed)that had some pretty good discussions and debates. One participant was obviously newly-enrolled in philosophy classes, and his arguments got more and more obtuse as weeks went on... We enjoined him to stop using jargon and write in plain English as none of the other participants were studying... But he wouldn't quit and eventually went off in a huff, evidently to frequent a philosophy-oriented board. I have found a tendency in philosophical writing to become unnecessarily obtuse. That's fine if you're speaking to a group of similarly-trained scholars, but not if you're trying to convey concepts to folks outside that heady group. |
25th November 2012, 11:37 AM | #90 |
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I do consider the ones I mentioned to be axioms of science. Are you asking for examples of axioms that are *exclusive* to science? That'd be difficult for me, I guess, considering the universality of many of them, but the assumption of the reliability of deduction and empirical evidence come to mind.
Originally Posted by tsig
Now, before you snark, keep in mind that I've already supposed that my understanding of philosophy might be too broad in my very first post in this thread. No one's provided an alternative definition so far, though.
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25th November 2012, 11:44 AM | #91 |
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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. |
25th November 2012, 12:03 PM | #92 |
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25th November 2012, 12:07 PM | #93 |
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Which philosopher or philosophers did Micheal Faraday read at university?
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25th November 2012, 12:13 PM | #94 |
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I don't understand the implication. Are you saying that physicists are not well educated outside of their own disciplines?
I suppose that could be so. My plumber probably knows little about horticulture. I don't get anything useful out of the lack of reliance of physics on philosophy. What's rather more interesting is how much of philosophy deals with other disciplines like mathematics and physics. But it's what you'd expect in a field that encompasses rather more than physics alone. It's probably a good thing that physicists don't try to take on too much -- they get to specialize. |
25th November 2012, 12:14 PM | #95 |
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25th November 2012, 12:16 PM | #96 |
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25th November 2012, 12:19 PM | #97 |
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25th November 2012, 12:29 PM | #98 |
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What's wrong with you? You know them. You've already quoted, highlighted and responded to them.
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25th November 2012, 12:30 PM | #99 |
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25th November 2012, 12:43 PM | #100 |
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Originally Posted by Atwill
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25th November 2012, 12:57 PM | #101 |
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Don't mean to be rude, but have you as much as wikied any of this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thought http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philoso...ific_reasoning This is pretty basic stuff Atwill is saying. Scientists don't need to know it, but this is what science is based on. Might be common sense, but the point is to identify what axioms they are using. As for the OP, what I detest is when people who self-identify as skeptics claim philosophy to be practically worthless. It is vastly ironic, but also a bit sad. |
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25th November 2012, 12:57 PM | #102 |
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I can't think of one. But again, the same thing works as well if I ask which physicist had to exist for me to raise sheep. Physics isn't derived from philosophy (since, I believe we have excluded the early blending of "natural philosopher").
Isn't physics just an attempt to marry mathematics with reality and collect facts about the world? That's hardly captures philosophy at all. Sure, some philosophers critique and expound on science. Here's an example of a paper addressing problems in confirmation theory: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/8544...nfirmation.pdf In that instance, we have a philosopher trying to clarify how a scientific theory can be confirmed and what it means to be confirmed in the first place. Sometimes physicists also dip into philosophy, as when they argue about different models with equivalent evidences. They puzzle about how to interpret results from quantum theory (the famous Copenhagen interpretation vs other ideas) or they wonder if symmetry is a necessary principle or exactly how cause and effect works. The meaning of time is another subject that can often have physicists waxing, if not philosophic, at least poetic. Here's an example of the marriage: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?inde...rds=0521664454 But I am not a physicist. We should ask one directly. James Lloyd wrote an interesting article about it for Scientific American: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...tell-the-tale/
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25th November 2012, 01:09 PM | #103 |
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25th November 2012, 01:20 PM | #104 | |||
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Making philosophy more palatable:
(Some swearing, maybe NSFW)
There is a nice series of these. I think my favorite is Nietzsche. |
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25th November 2012, 01:43 PM | #105 |
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The Angry Atheist Podcast #112 with Walter Ego |
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25th November 2012, 01:45 PM | #106 |
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delete
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25th November 2012, 01:49 PM | #107 |
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25th November 2012, 01:51 PM | #108 |
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Hyper-loquacity. One of the seven warning signs.
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25th November 2012, 03:12 PM | #109 |
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Does there seem to be something a little... funny, perhaps... about judging an area of academic study based on the behaviour of one person who newly enrolled in a class?
I mean, do you normally do that? Do you judge karate based on knowing one yellow belt, or art based on knowing someone who took one watercolour class, or economics based on knowing someone who read a blog about it, or a genre of writing based on reading one short story? |
25th November 2012, 03:30 PM | #110 |
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So pondering a question like "what's this poet trying to communicate here" would or would not be a waste of time?
I've found some philosophy useful, and some philosophy not so useful. I try to encourage what's useful by sharing it, and kill what's not so useful by forgetting about it. |
25th November 2012, 04:17 PM | #111 |
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“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” – Christopher Hitchens. |
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25th November 2012, 05:13 PM | #112 |
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25th November 2012, 05:19 PM | #113 |
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What is irritating is people criticising skeptics for being skeptical of the claims of philosophy although no evidence for its value is ever produced.
All we have are claims that everything we do is somehow philosophical. I can go one further and claim that my discipline of aaargism is everything that ever worked in any way whatsoever. Therefore aaargism is important and everyone should respect the power of aaargism and aaargers because without aaargism, nothing would work. |
25th November 2012, 05:26 PM | #114 |
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There are two reasons we assume our logic is correct and that evidence is repeatable. One is that we have never found another two assumptions that could possibly work and the second is that the assumptions appear to work.
If this is philosophy, it is a very minor and trivial part of science. |
25th November 2012, 05:44 PM | #115 |
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Also, people who state flatly "no evidence for <some claim> has ever been produced" when it is obvious that evidence HAS been produced, but the flat staters were not convinced by it.
The claim that evidence has value in deducing the truth of a proposition is a philosophical one, and is a fundamental, rather than "a very minor and trivial," part of science. |
25th November 2012, 05:56 PM | #116 |
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not in a terrible ,ranty mood anymore, so looking back, I shouldn't have made this thread.
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25th November 2012, 05:57 PM | #117 |
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I think we can divide the world in 2 and comment separately.
Historical Philosophy: I think that Plato, Hume and Descartes gave us a real advance in the methodology of thought. I think that they and some other philosophers were essential in moving mankind's cognisance forwards. University Philosophy: Some bellends combining discussion of the history of philosophy with ethics, politics, history and language to come up with some irrelevant conjecture and claiming some authority in the process. |
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25th November 2012, 06:08 PM | #118 |
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For example:
Cogito ergo sum - the 12 year old me understood this essential truth immediately. Thus Spake Zarathustra - the 13 year old me thought what the bloody hell is this all about? I also read other existentialist philosophers - what a load of bollocks that all was. |
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25th November 2012, 06:21 PM | #119 |
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25th November 2012, 06:27 PM | #120 |
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