It's also easy to get the two mixed up as Philosophy basically used to be the nascent 'science'.
It's also worth reading this before you get too attached to philosophy:
http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
Ultimately present day philosophy, last I looked and certainly since Wittgenstein, is all about playing with word meaning and almost upfront about it, but pg argues in reality it always was like that.
Have you read any present day philosophy? That's at best a description of some of the worst tendencies of analytic philosophy, which peaked in the 40-50s. (Many philosophers these days identify as "analytic" in the broad sense of "not continental", but that is more to do with sociology than anything else.)
Had a quick google and a lot of the people I read at uni are still listed as great present day philosophers, Derek Parfitt, David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Saul Kripke, Daniel Dennett.
Some of those books still sit on my shelf. I remember Reasons and Persons being very good.
>Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by "free."
Well, yes, which is why philosophers have been trying to clarify the various possible senses of 'free' and to determine whether or not we have free will in each of these various senses. Either we ignore the question, or we try to clarify it and answer it in one of it's clarified forms. And indeed, philosophers have been doing the latter, quite productively, for thousands of years. If there's now a third option, PG doesn't bother telling us what it is.
>Meanwhile, sensing a vacuum in the metaphysical speculation department, the people who used to do literary criticism have been edging Kantward, under new names like "literary theory," "critical theory," and when they're feeling ambitious, plain "theory."
PG is apparently unaware of the resurgence of metaphysics in the past few decades. You could hardly describe EJ Lowe as a literary critic.
> it would be misleading to say the field is 2500 years old, because for most of that time the leading practitioners weren't doing much more than writing commentaries on Plato or Aristotle while watching over their shoulders for the next invading army.
Again, total ignorance of the history of philosophy.
First you accused me, with no proof, of not having read modern philosophy. I disabused you of that view.
Now you are calling us 'unaware' and ignorant because you don't agree with this viewpoint.
You've fallen to the level of name calling.
Didn't Francis Bacon have a lot to do with the initial codification of the ideas behind the practice of science?
I'm not saying his philosophy wasn't a major contributor, but he was around at the time Philosophy and Science were splitting up and he formalized what the scientists were already starting to do.
Just in case anyone doesn't know, this all happened 400 years ago. That was the beginning of the end of philosophy having any influence on Science.
This is the problem that philosophy has, and it's evident in PG's essay, too: "philosophy is old dead Greek dudes". Philosophy is much broader than that, and philosophers are not distinct entities from scientists. Philosophy and science are intertwined; knowing how to ask and answer valid questions are core functions of the fields.
So, no, we're not just talking about the old white bearded guys from Greece.
For me, reading that essay crystallized what had been nagging me about philosophy when I studied it, all the different forms felt the same, the arguments sounded the same but I couldn't vocalise why.
As soon as I read that essay it was obvious.
It was still kind of true in the social sciences like psychology and sociology in the last century, but they've become more 'real', more rigorous and less influenced by philosophers, the questions in those fields today are now asked by people who wouldn't identify themselves as philosophers but as scientists.
I would say that change has really crystallized in the last 20 years, when I was in uni psychology and sociology were still considered a bit of a joke, kind of not real science and the philosophy courses I did about them still tried to pretend to be relevant in the discussion. Now I think we're starting to see the rigor really kick in, which is demonstrated in the recent reproducibility saga.
Philosophy is a slippery slope the same way that improvising in music is. It's value is not in the results but in the process.
There are a few folks who do care about things like multiverses and quantum foundations, which certainly overlap with philosophy a lot more, but it's not really something most physicists do.
The example of string theory is actually proving my point. The resemble part is a philosophical observation not a scientific one. It's that ability to see new context ask different questions that's at the core of philosophy.
The point I am trying to make is that in the very act of conducting science is a philosophical pursuit. The scientific model is just another way of asking philosophical questions. And so you can't decouple them from each other. They are just different perspectives on the same phenomena. Keep in mind that for a long time QM had no application, no value it was seen as a curiosity. Yet it lived on long enough through the philosophical implications that it seemed to present.
Without a philosophical framework there is no meaning to the results of our experiments. They are just anecdotal isolated tests. Thats what Popper and later Kuhn was trying to deal with.
Only in the instances where philosophy asks questions science can test.
Questions like "What is The Good?" and "Is it morally right to do this thing?" are not those kinds of questions.
It's just that most of the 'ingrained' stuff has been settled now, and people are more interested in writing about new, unanchored stuff. The same is true of science - few professional researchers bother retreading settled ground. How often do you see an article by modern professional scientists that examine the basics of the electrical resistivity of copper?
It's important to distinguish between the act of philosophizing and then the disciplin and it's historical context.
Source: I once looked down my nose at philosophy, then I started doing first-priciples on the methodology I was taught. Turns out that 'philosophy of science' is a field unto itself.