Which philosophy is dead

So philosophy of science now looks set to reoccupy its native ground by getting back in touch with physics. Rather it is the point that scientific theories — especially theories of the ultra-speculative kind that preoccupy theoretical physicists like Hawking — involve a great deal of covert philosophising which may or may not turn out to promote the interests of knowledge and truth.

Least of all should philosophers carry their justified respect for science and its many impressive achievements to the point of ceding all authority over issues that lie within their own sphere of competence. Thus it is counter-productive for everyone concerned, philosophers and physicists alike, when Quine and others suggest that we should always be willing to change the ground-rules of logic so as to help us find room for certain otherwise puzzling, anomalous, or downright baffling results.

This project combines the basic procedures of logical, e. Hawking offers numerous examples of the use of each of these philosophical tools in the course of his book, along with other cases where their joint operation is the only thing that could possibly explain how science has been able to achieve some particular advance. Indeed it may be good for philosophers occasionally to remind scientists how their most productive thinking very often involves a complex interplay of empirical data, theories, working hypotheses, testable conjectures and even sometimes speculative fictions.

Besides this, there are supposedly cutting-edge theories which turn out, on closer inspection, to unwittingly replicate bygone notions from the history of thought that have been criticised and eventually laid to rest. He spends a lot of time on what seems to be a largely unwitting rehash of episodes in the history of idealist or crypto-idealist thought, episodes which have cast a long shadow over post-Kantian philosophy of science.

So if Hawking is right to charge some philosophers with a culpable ignorance of science then there is room for a polite but firm tu quoque , whether phrased in terms of pots calling kettles black or boots on other feet. My point is not so much that a strong dose of philosophic realism might have clipped those speculative wings but rather that philosophers are well practised in steering a course through such choppy waters, or in managing to navigate despite all the swirls induced by a confluence of science, metaphysics, and far-out conjecture.

After all, physics has increasingly come to rely on just the kind of disciplined speculative thinking that philosophers have typically invented, developed, and then criticised when they overstepped the limits of rationally accountable conjecture. No doubt there is room to debate whether these are really and remarkably instances of scientific discovery achieved through an exercise of a priori reasoning or whether they amount, as sceptics would have it, to a species of disguised tautology.

Indeed, there is a sense in which the scientific enterprise stands or falls on the validity of counterfactual-conditional reasoning, that is to say, reasoning from what necessarily would be the case should certain conditions obtain or certain hypotheses hold.

In its negative guise, this kind of thinking involves reasoning to what would have been the outcome if certain causally or materially relevant factors had not been operative in some given instance. Hawking constantly relies on such philosophical principles in order to present and justify his claims about the current and likely future course of developments in physics. Of course he is very welcome to them but he might do better to acknowledge their source in ways of thinking and protocols of valid argumentation that involve distinctly philosophical as well as scientific grounds.

It is that scientists tend to go astray when they start to speculate on issues that exceed not only the current-best observational evidence but even the scope of what is presently conceivable in terms of testability. To speak plainly: one useful job for the philosopher of science is to sort out the errors and confusions that scientists — especially theoretical physicists — sometimes fall into when they give free rein to a speculative turn of mind.

There is a large supply of present-day quasi- scientific thinking at the more — let us say — creative or imaginative end of the scale that falls into just this hybrid category of high-flown metaphysical conjecture tenuously linked to certain puzzling, contested, or at any rate far from decisive empirical results.

Think Hawking. Our 21 st -century scientific priesthood — mostly atheists and materialists to the extent that their metaphysics is coherent enough to be described — is dominated by half-educated technicians with publicists. Atheists like Hawking believe that the universe ultimately makes no sense and has no purpose. Why should we ascribe purpose or sense to their own half-educated musings? Image credit: Flickr user rubberpaw. If so, would you donate so it can continue?

Help provide a platform for me and other scientists to keep telling the truth about Darwin and intelligent design in We rely completely on readers like you to make our articles possible. Can I count on your support? Close this module. Do You Value Evolution News? We submit that a more precise question needs to be addressed: Which philosophy is dead?

The question over the death of philosophy is certainly not new. More recently, the late Richard Rorty and the French theorist Alain Badiou proclaimed the death of philosophy.

In his book Infinite Thought , Badiou defines the school of analytic philosophy. In this way, analytic philosophy sets up the standard for what is legitimate to say and what is nonsensical. The task of analytic philosophy is not about the creation of ideas but a policing of the rule of linguistic meaning.

These are the ones who still today turn philosophy into a slave to the hard sciences, especially physics. Those who believe philosophy must keep up with science will have to declare its death if philosophers, as Hawking said, fail to keep up with the latest scientific developments. The real question here might be: What is it about the anal-retentiveness inherent in analytic philosophy that submits to standards that necessarily lead to its own impotence and even death?

We just need to be bold enough to use all the resources philosophy provides, some of which we are only now coming to understand. For the essence of analytic philosophy focuses on meaning at the expense of openness to different and surprising truth-conditions that may appear beyond an assumed analytic structure, stipulating what philosophy can do or cannot do. In this respect, analytic philosophy is passe because its method is too conservative to transgress the presuppositions on which it is based.