What does that mean?
Additionally, the belief that intelligence alone will improve the world is misguided imo. You need empathetic, intelligent people.
* (Nearly) everybody on our planet lives under a government whose fundamental structure and right to power comes from modern (meaning 17th century) political philosophy.
* Everybody posting on this board is using a machine that only existed in the mind games (and works) of math philosophers just over a century ago.
* The philosophical foundations for contemporary science are very young, practically within living memory. Popper died less than 30 years ago!
Christianity, like just about every religion, has made invaluable contributions to philosophy. But it's ahistorical, to an embarrassing degree, to attribute such broad concepts and bodies of inquiry to it.
(Just a single, rather obvious example. Easy enough to find others.)
Was this philosophy finding truth that guided policy, or was it making up rhetorical arguments in a power struggle on behalf of the rising middle class and its policy?
In absence of criteria of non empirical truth that are independent of the very non empirical truths they are criteria for I tend to believe the latter.
In addition to this inherent weakness philosophical arguments are not for the masses anyways. Not even philosophers usually agree what they mean or entail. How could those idea(l)s have guided the revolution as more than just superficial self justification?
Remember that the enemies of the French Revolution had their philosophers too, they just lost.
Historical events usually have very mundane reasons, class struggles, geopolitics etc. Ideas may play a part too. But I believe not in the sense that they are the horses in front of the cart.
To me, the idea that ideas don't play a major role in world history and politics seems odd. There's nothing more fundamentally human than trying to understand the world around you and wanting to shape it in a certain way. Of course material conditions are important; the French Revolution wouldn't have happened had the state not gone bankrupt. But it also wouldn't have happened in that way without Enlightenment ideas. Very basic principles of the revolution, some of which were kept by Napoleon and in subsequent generations and still live on today were formulated by those enlightenment thinkers. Just consider the declaration of human rights.
I’m saying that the enlightenment ideas happened because the uprising middle class needed justifications in their power struggle. Not that the ideas formed a middle class that then acted upon them.
I agree with you that humans need ideas to tell a story of themselves. And that story better paint them as good! But that story is usually not the driving force.
So I fail to see progress as I don’t see a criterion to measure progress (in general. Aristoteles‘ logic is a tool. Here I see how to compare it to FOL and judge which is better or worse for specific use cases).
As for human rights: do I agree with them? Yes! Can I justify them? No! Do I know where to exactly draw the lines when two rights collide? No! Is it important to justify them in a philosophical way? I doubt.
The claim that propositional calculus is in the domain of philosophy and mathematics is not controversial in either domain. Nor is it unusual: the history of philosophy is the history of discharging subjects once they develop a field of their own.
I am not sure what that claim means precisely. Popper saved science from… a certain group of philosophers?
> when we “do” science, the epistemic model we use is less than a century old
The epistemic model is whatever the scientist in question uses. One can be a Popperian, another can claim they are guided by God, and someone else would just say “shut up and calculate.”
Popper didn’t like Bohr and his Copenhagen interpretation from the philosophical standpoint yet he didn’t deny that Bohr was a good physicist.
> The claim that propositional calculus is in the domain of philosophy and mathematics is not controversial in either domain. Nor is it unusual: the history of philosophy is the history of discharging subjects once they develop a field of their own.
The context of this discussion is that philosophy progresses over time. You cannot say that it progresses just because we put a label “philosophy” on every new thing that isn’t formalized yet. In that trivial sense, of course, philosophy had great progress; especially in its subfield of natural philosophy also known nowadays as science. But did Frege really stand on the shoulders of Hegel, Spinoza and Kant and improved on their ideas?
Ok, sure.
> allowing science to progress without imploding under the demands of positivism
How is giving a description of something necessary for its continued progress? Were people not having sex before evolutionary psychologists and biologists elucidated how and why?
https://aeon.co/essays/what-albert-einstein-owes-to-david-hu...
> * (Nearly) everybody on our planet lives under a government whose fundamental structure and right to power comes from modern (meaning 17th century) political philosophy.
A large number of countries are ruled by dictators and their close supporters. Sometimes they position themselves within the boundaries of a more or less modern ideology but ultimately care only about being the one in command and use that ideology as lipstick. This is a straight continuation of prehistory, not something stemming from 17th century.
...and I disagree with the parent's parent's point on progress in philosophy: all three examples are not progress of philosophy but at best influence or application of it, and in the last case did not involve trained/professional philosophers (e.g. Turing was a mathematician/chemist-turned-cryptoanalyst/computer scientist).
A second example is that of recent advances in virtualization, where the last decade of advances in things like cgroups, namespaces and containers were all done by people who I assert had no training in IBM MVS/zOS and therefore weren't building on what went before (imho, to their detriment).
A lot of mathematics is cumulative, though.
And even if you can go further by going thinner (specialising more), maybe breakthroughs require lateral thinking and connections that are predicated on not being too specialised, but having breadth also. If that is the case, sooner or later we might be in trouble.
Otherwise, I’d say our two thoughts are connected. With increasing difficulty in understanding new progress, there could be an inertial tendency to over emphasise the importance of old knowledge because it’s comforting/easier/pragmatic for teachers and parents.
When I started to go to university I really noticed how bad it was. At university the jump forward was really noticeable.
For example, at school they would show you a couple of simple explanations about derivative math or integrals, briefly and start with all the formulas.
At university I used to have a teacher that started with: history of mathematics, why they were invented, made a point about its primarily practical origins.
To explain things, he could most of the time come with real-life instances of application and there were much more often intuitive or geometric interpretations of the techniques used much more often even before starting the explanation itself to have an intuitive idea and visualization of what you were achieving.
After that, I noticed that to learn math, the first thing is to develop an intuitive, non-mathy idea of what you are doing and later formalize it.
At school and high school they just taught it as almost-memorize tables, apply formulas.
Talking about Spain, btw.
Or do you mean mulitplying out the terms:
(a + b)(a + b) = a^2 + ab + ba + b^2 = a^2 + 2ab + b^2
?We should be explaining the story of maths and how it benefitted society. We should be asking kids about their interests and then showing them how mathematical tools can be used in those areas. We need to show kids how maths is tied to real life rather than just presenting them with a boring formulas to memorise.
I don't think this is the case. I think it's because the teachers themselves don't have a good grasp on "the story of maths and how it benefitted society".
There is a silly meme about asking high school maths teachers "how will we use this in life", and imo it's not because there isn't a good response, but rather that it requires a good understanding of the ways math is actually used. Few high school teachers have actually themselves used the math they teach for anything other than academic exercise. Someone trained in control theory or using physics equations can make things that appear almost magical using maths, and if they are talented, they can find a way to explain it to laypeople. However, people with that combination of talents are desired by just about everybody, from universities to companies, and high schools simply have no way to compete (not least because teaching high schoolers is a soul-crushing job for bureaucratic reasons)
To put the blame on didactically seems to miss the more important factor that humans just aren’t that intelligent, save the one in a million genius who might have the intellectual capacity to learn something so difficult at such a young age.
IMO, an under appreciated dynamic across the board of human endeavours.
With increasing complexity comes the need for more time to understand and master anything.