Philosophy is Dead

When Hawking demonstrates that he knows what philosophy is all about then he will deserve to be taken seriously.

Rubbish ! Only "the philosopher" who also has a qualification in quantum physics can make such a statement. In the interim, bear in mind Feynman's description of philosophers as "intellectual tourists scratching their heads at the strange practices of the natives/physicists" (paraphrased).

thack45 wrote:

In what ways was philosophy to have "kept up" with sciences? They seem to have unwittingly called themselves out for their inability to effectively demonstrate what it is that their sciences mean.

As usual, those who know nothing about what they are talking about, sy nothing sensible, but just mouth off. When Hawking demonstrates that he knows what philosophy is all about then he will deserve to be taken seriously. Meanwhile, he is blowing in the wind.

Quote:

When Hawking demonstrates that he knows what philosophy is all about then he will deserve to be taken seriously.

Priceless !

It was only in the last five or odd years that I invested my time (on reading) and money (on buying books and internet access), in earnest, to study philosophy, assuming that it would lead to some utopianisk salvation, but alas!, all that has gone in vain. Or so it seems!

Now, that it is openly declared that philosophy is dead, although i heard rumours of its possible death for a while now, i wish to mourn the mortality of philosophy and the fag end of an era of false promises. I also never knew that philosophy would also be subjected to the law of diminishing returns!

Unless of course , some brilliant mind, possibly in this forum also, still can resurrect it and help my sulking intellect a fresh boost of intellectual energy that had found platonic expressions through deliberate articulations, which survived from Socrates to Spinoza, from Kant to Krishnamurthi. If such a resuscitation can be given, then, at least, I can justify my investments to my old parents for a while more, until they are declared dead too!

Rubbish ! Only "the philosopher" who also has a qualification in quantum physics can make such a statement. In the interim, bear in mind Feynman's description of philosophers as "intellectual tourists scratching their heads at the strange practices of the natives/physicists" (paraphrased).

Physics is both understandable and teachable because it is logical...

No, no, you're not thinking. You're just being logical

Philosophy is dead. So says Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their recent publication, The Grand Design. They state this deeply profound statement and then support it with... one sentence. "Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics."

I won't bother going any further right now as to why I think they're off their rockers.

The book does contain lots of profound and interesting scientific insights. But why the authors (both seemingly very intelligent men) think this constitutes a philosophy is beyond me.

So, forum, thoughts, comments, snide remarks?

Philosophy is a hard subject and the sciences are part of it as they were originally natural philosophy. As it grew it became science. Scientists are philosophers in a narrow sense i.e. extracting knowledge from the natural world. What you do with it is the philosophy. But for a philosopher to understand the process he needs to know science. This where the current batch of philosophers fail. They are skipping the sciences. There is no short cut to knowledge. Second class philosophers like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein led to Nazi philosophy as they could not understand that Sir Francis Galton was a second class scientist who came up with the ideas that IQ tests were directly related to genius and he came up with the horrible idea of eugenics. Wittgenstein came up with his "keep your mouth" philosophy and Nietzsche took up the eugenics cause under ubermensch, or superman, that Hitler exploited and got Aryan superiority and Nazi death camps.

In 1883 he tried and failed to obtain a lecturing post at the University of Leipzig. It was made clear to him that, in view of the attitude towards Christianity and the concept of God expressed in Zarathustra, he had become in effect unemployable at any German University.

According to a common myth, Nietzsche's ancestors were Polish. Nietzsche himself subscribed to this story toward the end of his life. He wrote in 1888, "My ancestors were Polish noblemen (Nietzky); the type seems to have been well preserved despite three generations of German mothers."[39] At one point Nietzsche becomes even more adamant about his Polish Identity. “I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood.”[40] On yet another occasion Nietzsche stated “Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins [...] I am proud of my Polish descent.”[41] Nietzsche believed his name might have been Germanized, in one letter claiming, "I was taught to ascribe the origin of my blood and name to Polish noblemen who were called Niëtzky and left their home and nobleness about a hundred years ago, finally yielding to unbearable suppression: they were Protestants."[42]

Most scholars dispute Nietzsche's account of his family's origins. Hans von Müller debunked the genealogy put forward by Nietzsche's sister in favor of a Polish noble heritage.[43] Max Oehler, the curator of Nietzsche Archive at Weimar, argued that all of Nietzsche's ancestors bore German names, even the wives' families.[39] Oehler claims that Nietzsche came from a long line of German Lutheran clergymen on both sides of his family, and modern scholars regard the claim of Nietzsche's Polish ancestry as "pure invention."[44] Colli and Montinari, the editors of Nietzsche's assembled letters, gloss Nietzsche's claims as a "mistaken belief" and "without foundation."[45] The name Nietzsche itself is not a Polish name, but an exceptionally common one throughout central Germany, in this and cognate forms (such as Nitsche and Nitzke). The name derives from the forename Nikolaus, abbreviated to Nick; assimilated with the Slavic Nitz, it first became Nitsche and then Nietzsche.[39]
It is not known why Nietzsche wanted to be thought of as Polish. According to biographer R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche's propagation of the Polish ancestry myth may have been part of the latter's "campaign against Germany".[39]

Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, therein introducing the concept of a value-creating Übermensch.

Another concept important to an understanding of Nietzsche's thought is the Übermensch. While interpretations of Nietzsche's overman vary wildly, here are a few of his quotes from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Prologue, §§3–4):

"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? … All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.... The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth.... Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end."

Nietzsche's growing prominence suffered a severe setback when he became closely associated with Adolf Hitler and the German Reich. Many political leaders of the twentieth century were at least superficially familiar with Nietzsche's ideas, although it is not always possible to determine whether or not they actually read his work. Hitler, for example, probably never read Nietzsche, and if he did, his reading was not extensive,[82] although he was a frequent visitor to the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and did use expressions of Nietzsche's, such as "lords of the earth" in Mein Kampf.[83] The Nazis made selective use of Nietzsche's philosophy. Mussolini and Charles de Gaulle read Nietzsche.[84][85] It has been suggested that Theodore Roosevelt read Nietzsche and was profoundly influenced by him,[86] and in more recent years, Richard Nixon read Nietzsche with "curious interest".[87]

NEW YORK (Commonweal Magazine) – Lurking behind this science-versus-religion controversy has been an issue that extends beyond creationists and evolutionists. Among the first to frame it was Friedrich Nietzsche.



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In the words of biographer Curtis Cate, Nietzsche hailed Darwin’s “calm annihilation of the fairy-tale fable of the creation of the World” and welcomed the support it supplied in his campaign for a “transvaluation of values” to overthrow the “morality of slaves.” But Nietzsche disliked what he detected in Darwin as a genuflection toward English industrialists and imperialists, as if they were the end product of the contest for existence.

The relationship between the views of Nietzsche and Darwin is interesting both for the general insights it offers into the intellectual upheaval in 19th-century Europe and for the particular questions it raises about the impact of these two thinkers. In the case of Nietzsche, the question of whether he was a champion of artistic freedom and uncompromising individualism or, instead, a prophet of enslaving the weak and eradicating the unfit was examined in “The Gentle Nietzscheans,” a controversial and influential article by Conor Cruise O’Brien published in the New York Review of Books almost four decades ago (Nov. 5, 1970).

It was no accident, wrote Cruise O’Brien, that Nietzsche was remembered as an apolitical “man of thought and letters” who made major “contributions to psychology, German prose, and the critique of ethics.” This image of Nietzsche had been crafted by latter-day disciples-“Gentle Nietzscheans”-who insisted that his most violent and brutal teachings were meant to be “provocative” and “paradoxical,” always intended “in the most spiritual sense,” never as policies of state. Pictured in this light, Nietzsche becomes, in Cruise O’Brien’s analysis, “a benign schoolmaster, whose astringent and sometimes frightening quips conceal a heart of gold and a strenuous urge to improve the spiritual and moral condition of his pupils.”

In reality, Cruise O’Brien contended, Nietzsche sought a societal and political context in which the illusions and evasions of Judeo-Christian morality would be replaced by unflinching realism and unmerciful resolve. In The Will to Power, for example, Nietzsche posited that “society, the great trustee of life, is responsible to life itself for every miscarried life – it also has to pay for such lives: consequently, it ought to prevent them. In numerous cases, society ought to prevent procreation: to this end, it may hold in readiness, without regard to descent, rank, or spirit, the most rigorous means of constraint, deprivation of freedom, in certain circumstances castration.”

The enthusiasm Nietzsche expresses in this passage is for eugenics, a theory of biological determinism invented by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s first cousin. However extreme Nietzsche’s recommendation might sound today, by the first part of the twentieth century eugenics came to be widely practiced. In 1933, little more than thirty years after Nietzsche’s death, the Hereditary Health Courts set up in Nazi Germany were enforcing a rigorous policy of enforced sterilization; to a lesser degree, similar policies were carried out in societies from the United States to Scandinavia.