Philosophy 101 Question: Grouping of Philosophers

[RagnarPirate]

my freshman roommate gave me a copy of fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

[Zeno]

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Branches of philosophy... Well, you know, philosophy is the mother science of ALL sciences. So, in essence, every science is a branch of philosophy.

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Could not let this pass, ElaineMonster. The above is simply flat wrong.

I will leave it to you to figure out why.

-Zeno

[guesswest]

Well, I can't see how it's wrong. Care to explain Zeno?

[diebitter]

Figuring out things through reasoning isn't science. It does not provide a clear means/path to be able to empirically refute in any testable, replicable way.

[madnak]

Science is a branch of philosophy, not the other way around.

[Zeno]

[ QUOTE ]
Science is a branch of philosophy, not the other way around.

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I disagree. Philosophy, depending on definition of course, is a ruminate on a cud - A simple chewing up and the spitting out, or even worse, swallowing wholesale with belief. The problem is that most, credulously, lap up the philosophic drivel like it was the voice of God. “There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it”, quipped a wise old roman long ago.


Waxing a bit more serious and appealing to collective authority, the Oxford Companion to Philosophy offers a short and long, in a twofold manner, definition of philosophy as 1) thinking about thinking and 2) Philosophy is rationally critical thinking, of a more or less systematic kind about the general nature of the world, the justification of belief, and the conduct of life.

If you wish to strictly adhere to the first part of definition 2, then possibly science is a branch of philosophy but in my opinion that is a shaky stance.

Appealing to an individual authority, Bertrand Russell, he defined philosophy as the ‘no-man’s land’ between Science, all definite knowledge, and Theology, all dogma as to what surpass definite knowledge. To quote: “ But between theology and science there is a no man’s land, exposed to attack both sides; this no man’s land is philosophy. Almost all questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem convincing as they did in former centuries. Is the world divided into mind and matter, and if so, what is mind and what is matter? Has the world any utility and purpose…” And so on with more examples. This definition splits up all human inquiry and speculation into three separate spheres that overlap and compete somewhat and are also elastic in that science can push and squeeze at the other spheres as more definite knowledge becomes known, which often leads to more questions and thus can expand philosophy. Theology has been squeezed and loosing out for centuries but that has not detracted from its influence - An interesting thing in itself.


But then I doubt if a strict agreement can be made on the definition of philosophy itself and/or its relationship to science, if branch, twig, root, or completely separate.

Putting the issue into practical and real world terms, if you had one hundred philosophers in a house it would, in general, be a good thing to burn that house down. If you had one hundred scientists in the house it would not only be unwise to burn the house down, you wouldn’t be able to get away with it. We would have you nabbed and sacked in no time.

QED


-Zeno

[guesswest]

What he meant, I think, is that all the sciences were originally branches of philosophy, and the practicioners of biology/physics etc were philosophers.

As philosophers got better at, and learned more about, these specific disciplines - independent academic subjects took form. That's what philosophy does: when it has some success with an area that area emerges as it's own discipline, psychology being it's most recent offspring.

It's a historical/factual distinction more than it is a methodological one - nobody is suggesting a philosophy professor is qualified to perform brain surgery.

[Zeno]

Ahh. Nevermind.

Anyway, it was a fun post to write. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

By the way, many clerics and other scholastic scholars were nascent scientist. The classic example is Gregor Mendel and his work with pea plants.

-Zeno