Interesting. I just came to the same from a different perspective:
There is no reasonable way to be an amateur physicist. Actual physicists are deluged by a barrage of mail from people with no training in physics who think Einstein was wrong. These people are pretty delusional.
Similarly, an amateur architect who thinks he/she can build a skyscraper is delusional. But an amateur architect can certainly critique building built by professional architects, and also build a shack in their yard.
In that way, philosophy is like architecture and not like physics.
Of course answering the question is made a lot easier if we first agree on the meaning of “free” and “will”. A lot of people seem to equate “free will” to “unpredictable”. Not the same thing.
There have been some experiments that claim to say something about the existence of free will, but they are extremely flawed.
To the people who want to apply the claimed non-existence of free will to morality (i.e., there is no free will = they couldn’t help doing it = it’s wrong to punish them) I say: it was predetermined that I was going to lock up the criminal and throw away the key, I can’t help it, so why are you bothering me with your argument?
Also, to the determinists: please explain to me when exactly this radioactive potassium atom I have right here is going to decay and why then and not at some other point time.
What we would call “science” today, or more specifically “physical sciences”, was called “natural philosophy” a few centuries ago. In other words, science was a subset of philosophy. Questions such as “Why do heavy objects fall downward to the ground, rather than upward or sideways?” Those were questions of philosophy before they were questions of science.
Most people drive cars every day without worrying about how cars work. But some people have an interest in looking under the hood and learning how and why the engine and other parts of the car work. And most people live in the universe without thinking too much about how and why the universe functions. But some people choose to turn their intellectual energies to the questions of what makes the universe and reality and existence function as they do. That’s philosophy.
Adding to the reading list already suggested in this thread, I highly recommend Sophie’s World
Yeah, science is a subset of philosophy. Anyone who tries to define philosophy by contrasting it with science is wrong.
My definition would just be “structured or rigorous thinking”. Almost every nonfiction writer is engaged in philosophy to some extent. Every scientist and mathematician, for sure.
It was once explained to me that philosophy is the non-empirical art of inquiry. Anthropologists study what people did, how they did it, and what it meant in terms of their culture. Philosophers study why people thought that any of the things they did, the traditions they established, and the culture they crafted should exist in those particular forms and not in some other forms.
What is science? How do we know that “testing something for yourself” lets us know whether it is true or not? Why does science give us access to the truth—or does it? and how do we know? What is truth, and what does it mean to know it? Is science the only means of seeing what’s true, or are there others? Are there truths that we can’t find out via science but can find out via other methods? Again, why, and how do we know?
When you ask and attempt to answer questions like these (or attempt to analyze the answers that others have given), you’re doing philosophy.
How do you figure? I’m not seeing how science:philosophy::astronomy:astrology. I guess it depends on how you define science and philosophy though. I made my definition known above. Do you dispute it?
Science is natural philosophy. Science operates differently from other forms of philosophy by its defining trait, the scientific method. This is like saying a chair isn’t furniture because you can’t lay down in it. It doesn’t follow.
Yeah, kinda. Your definition is too broad; if it includes science, then it includes all thinking and reasoning. When a child asks, “How come,” then he’s “doing philosophy.” The term becomes so broad as to have no meaning.
I think this is just word-play with no meaning. As a comparable question, “Is Mathematics a Science?” You’ll find many who say yes, and many who say no. In the same way, I say no, science is no longer philosophy, just as astronomy is no longer astrology, even if that’s how it got started.
(To be honest, I’m not at all sure what my answer is to whether Mathematics is a science!)
Yes…but a chair is no longer a bed, even if that’s how chairs first got started. There’s enough speciation that cladistics no longer work for major categorization.
In Aristotle’s day…even in Copernicus’s day…science was just a part of philosophy. But once you hit Newton, that starts to fall apart. Copernicus did a lot of reasoning on the basis of comparisons and even theological constraints.
Once the umbilicus is cut, the forms are no longer linked. Anyone attempting to do science, today, by applying philosophical reasoning would be politely asked to leave the laboratory.
(I think Lysenko may have been the last really influential “science via philosophy” advocate…or victim.)
That’s where we differ. You think philosophy is a specific type of thing, that only philosophers do. I think it is a defining aspect of being human. Yes, a child asking “how come?” is absolutely doing philosophy, in my mind (until they start making it a game and asking “why?” over and over just to annoy you). Everyone does philosophy. Politics, science, medicine and math are simply applied philosophy. Almost every debate on this message board is just people doing philosophy, including this one.
The trouble is, we now have a word with two definitions:
Thinking and wondering and trying to reason about the universe;
Formal academic philosophy, including the study of published works categorized as philosophy.
Now, okay, yeah, lots of words have two (or more!) meanings. This being the case, I’d want to be very careful that a given discussion doesn’t slip-and-slide from one to the other. I also still think that definition 1 is so broad as to be of no value. If what I’m doing here is philosophy…then may God help philosophy!
Like a lot of things, there are levels. I have a garden and some laying hens in my back yard but that doesn’t make me a professional farmer. I do small experiments fairly often to test if I’m correct about this or that assumption, but I’m not a scientist.
It’s more like math. Everyone does math everyday. When they pay bills or make music or count steps or draw pictures, it all comes down to math. I consider math to be a fundamental aspect of being human, just like philosophy. But most people are not mathematicians. And similarly, we all think about the big questions, we all have a personal philosophy that we live by, we all participate in debates using logic and reason, but most of us aren’t capital P Philosophers.
I’d say philosophy is the separation of that which is self-evident from that which is not, and an attempt to put that which is not self-evident into a debatable form.
