Shame on you. I normally like your posts, but that statement betrays the same kind of proud and willful ignorance so common in cretin creationists and IDiots.Scientific method itself is the product of philosophy. There would be no modern science were it no the insights of great philosophers like Aristotle, Bacon, and Hume, to just name a few.
Perhaps you're right, but science has moved on while in many ways philosophy has not. Philosophers seem to still be fighting the same issues they were 2,500 years ago.
Or, perhaps I am reacting more to the versions of philosophy we see on these threads. When I see what a couple of our resident philosophers post I am glad I managed to avoid philosophy entirely through 12 years of college.
(Courtesy pings.)
Judging the merits of any scholarly discipline by the anonymous posts of people on internet forums seems rather unwise to me.
I am glad I managed to avoid philosophy entirely through 12 years of college.
You seem to be taking pride in your ignorance. That's not a very scholarly attitude, to say the least.
P.S. Twelve years of college? Surely you jest. I've never known anyone stupid or lazy enough to have taken that long to obtain an undergraduate degree. I hope you are including grad school and a stint as a post-doc in that 12 year figure.
Perhaps that's because certain universal issues haven't changed in 2,500 years. Science really hasn't any way of "changing" them, in the sense of bringing them to conclusions.
But philosophers don't "fight" issues. (I am beginning to detest the usage of words such as "fight," "struggle," etc., etc., so beloved of our socially progressive would-be world-changers....) Philosophers simply recognize that there are perennially open questions that need to be left open. All answers posed to them must in principle be considered provisional; contingent, not conclusive.
Questions like: Where did the world come from? What is life and death? What is knowledge? Why are things the way they are, and not some other way? Why is there anything at all, why not nothing? These are not scientific questions, though they ultimately lie at the very root of science....
The reason they are "open" questions is because the scientific method has no way to "close" them. Remember, the scientific method can deal only with phenomena capable of direct observation — that is, "detectable by human or machine sensors in observer time." To "close" philosophy's open questions would mean that the observer would have to stand outside of spacetime, to know not only the whole present, but the whole future as well as the whole past. And this no human observer can ever do.
Of course, it's entirely possible that questions like these have no appeal, no attraction for you. In which case, I'd wonder why....
Thanks for the ping, Coyoteman!