The End of Philosophy

Kant realised that the revolutionary developments of the natural sciences put enormous pressure on philosophy as a fundamental autonomous subject.

He tried to pose philosophy as a non-empirical discipline that provides the foundation to science and human experiences. After this, two schools of thought emerged.

1. Preserving academic, scientific and logical rigour in philosophical arguments. This leads to analytic philosophy.

2. Rejecting the scientific method as a way to answer philosophical questions. This leads to continental philosophy.

You already knew this, so now I will tell you the ultimate fate of both of these traditions.

The first tradition is already dead. Philosophers in the Vienna Circle, the logical positivists, the naturalists like Quine—these analytic philosophers were not really philosophers at all, they were scientists, logicians and linguists. Whenever they had to resort to philosophy, it was solely because they hadn't yet developed the scientific tools required. In retrospect, their criticism of continental philosophy was, simply, that it wasn't science.

The second tradition. Most of the time, to call it philosophy would be a misnomer... it's a combination of history, sociology and psychology. Most continental "philosophers" are just cultural critics. Again, philosophy is not a legitimate autonomous subject. In the cases where it attempts to answer metaphysical questions—something which continental philosophers claimed science could never do—the highly subjective and inconsequential answers will be met with derision.

There is no space for philosophy in the modern world. We just need to advance the social and the natural sciences further.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

You don't know the first thing about the history of philosophy, shut the fuck up.

t. New atheist

Scietism is a fucking retarded, OP. The only thing science does is give us answers to trivialities. Ultimately there is no way to understand anything about the world without philosophy.

Just read the Wikipedia page for "Philosophy." You'll see that your characterization of it is reductive and ahistorical.

Interesting self portrait

LIFE IS MEANINGLESS MORTY FOCUS ON SCIENCE

You like that show? I've never seen it.

>Scietism is a fucking retarded, OP.
Ok
>The only thing science does is give us answers to trivialities.
Retard

Most reductionist crap like this appears from those who are eager to show off themselves as sophisticated and versed in philosophy but in reality have just skimmed trough a few "grand" authors.

Prove it doesn't.

Why is reddit cancer all over Veeky Forums now?? Go into your laundry room and find a jug of bleach, drink it all but don’t tell your parents.

OP here, I will now respond only to people that can answer this question:

What questions can philosophy answer in a useful manner that cannot be answered by empirical disciplines?

Everything else will be ignored as angry garbage.

Also, I have probably studied more philosophy than anyone else here, and this isn't a criticism of philosophy, it's simply a prediction of its utility in the future.

I was beginning to come to the same conclusion as you OP. It’s strange once you think about philosophy’s new role in a world that’s vastly different than what we had around the time of Plato.

kewl argument bro

>what can reduce suffering
My, how trivial.

not an argument, observation, buddy

It's the tapestry on which all those other disciplines are illustrated and the means by which we corral their output. What good is scientific knowledge without discussions into ontology, epistemology, and ethics? What good is art without discussions of aesthetics and critical inquiry into artistic traditions?

user, the very questions you're asking are philosophical.

An utterly vacuous observation.

>Prove it doesn't.
It's part of the return of the Geist towards itself

I read philosophy in chronological order and there was a clear and evident trend into its branching into the sciences, I'm just extrapolating from this trend.

I agree with you but that it has been the foundation of all other knowledge, but we're approaching a time where things can either be answered empirically, or they can only be pondered.

>ontology
Pure speculation. Try reading modern ontology (Heidegger) which is supposedly revolutionary ontology, and it's nothing but weak arguments obscured in made up jargon.
>epistemology
This is currently being outsourced to linguistics and logic, which while traditionally philosophy, they are quickly starting to resemble science in their rigour.
>ethics
This, I can give you... it's the only branch that is genuinely purely philosophical, although behavioural economics and psychology is starting to explain new ideas which could render it useless. I'm not saying it is now, but we can hope.

1. Social and natural sciences usually arise once their foundations have been sufficiently developed in the field of philosophy, and their basic methods of research, theorising, collecting data etc. established as apart from philosophy.

2. Seeing this process as a "failure" of philosophy is simply an ideological perspective. It could equally be considered philosophy's chief success. For example, the development of natural science in the modern era, resulting from a lengthy examination and rejection of medieval aristotelianism and a defence of inductive reasoning as a valid form of knowledge, was itself a philosophical development.

3. Following from this, any field of inquiry that hasn't reached a point of sophistication where its subject and method can be separated from philosophical modes of thought, can be considered as a proper part of philosophy. It is also likely that some fields may never reach this point for various reasons, like ethics or ontology. Thus we could pursue philosophy as a base-level that provides reasoning for and grounds all other more specific modes of investigation.

4. Additionally, the accumulation of scientific fields does not by itself guarantee a better grasp of the world in general. An alternative goal of philosophy can be stated, namely in creating a general common-sense picture of the world and human society. Thus the idea would be to systematise and present the major discoveries of all the scientific fields into a coherent whole, that would be more accessible for the non-specialist.

Yours too, pal

Why is suffering necessarily bad? Answer that scientifically.

Philosophy is the root of intellectual pursuit.

Releases certain chemicals in the brain and I read some article that said happy people lived longer.

Science by its very nature is unable to answer any fundamental questions of reality existence etc.

What is beauty?
what is love?
What is right and wrong?
What is a good life?
What is the meaning of the universe?
Does God exist?
Etc etc etc

What is right? What is wrong? Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more.

Why is living longer good?

Are actually retarded? Why are these chemicals bad, and why is living longer good.

Philosophy might not exactly have greater utility than psychology when perhaps say answering a question about the future state of the human psyche. But it can help us get a different picture of the situation when we look at some philosophical pieces on similar matters. It never hurts to have more information from different standpoints.

Because you experience more life, duh!
Have more time to do stuff and experience.
Those chemicals make you feel less happy, man. You want to live long and happy.

That Sounds like a philosophical claim bud.

Philosophy ends with Wittgenstein. Everything after is showing how what he said is incomplete, and exposes behavioralism and metaphysics as the only avenues of productive investigation.

Let's describe your utopia, then: everyone is wearing a mask constantly supplying you with nutrients and your brain with happy chemicals. Everyone is hooked to such an apparatus but a small amount of slaves who do nothing but produce food and electricity for the rest. Is this the pinnacle of existence?

OP here

Good response.

Terrible response. You can't read. I didn't say everything can be answered by science alone, I also included the social sciences and humanities.

>What is beauty?
Art, biology (evolution) and neuroscience explain what it means for something to be considered beautiful. They do a much better job than philosophers do.

>what is love?
Answered by evolutionary theory and neuroscience.

>What is right and wrong?
Already answered.

>What is a good life?
>What is the meaning of the universe?
>Does God exist?
Nobody has answered these you pig fuck don't act like philosophy got anywhere with that.

>What is a good life?
>What is the meaning of the universe?
>Does God exist?
isn't philosophy the only doctrine that tries to answer these questions?

>There is no space for philosophy in the modern world. We just need to advance the social and the natural sciences further.

If we need to advance the sciences forward in order to understand philosophical concepts, then clearly we still need philosophy to do that until those sciences are able to achieve that. In other words, the modern world needs philosophy because the sciences aren't "there" yet.

Do you not see the contradiction of your argument?

Philosophy is necessary as it allows us to purposefully craft future events to allow for the allowable range of freedom desired within the flow of fate. Using cardinals we are able to manifest tools and progressions that allow for deeper and more vast expressions of freedom upon the flow of fate. Studying it in the last 50 years has been an exercise in aligning ourselves towards generally profitable schemes of relations towards that which is physically present and that which is present because we determine it to be so.

You do not need to do this to profitably exist, you do not even need to advance beyond intellectual behaviors themselves to profit from them, but should you do so you can craft a future for yourself out of the possible ones available should you be capable of taking into account enough of the meaningful relations your life will encounter. A basic metaphysical scheme will be created by a child over time regardless of whether or not its crafted well, and learning about your ability to exist is not wasted effort. It simply produces a diminishing result after a profitable general alignment has been reached, often provoking mutations to that alignment that would seem "unnatural" to someone not versed in the rhetoric of rigorous thought.

It is useful for maximizing your possible range of futures into a statistical reality beyond the logic of presentism, or for making machines that interface with the world directly on behalf of those whose comprehensions they're leaned on in the stead of for speed and space. You can explore design space without ever leaving the present, but doing so produces linear advancement whereas informed investigation can lead to leapfrogging that benefits mankind on a scale previously inenvisionable.

The first one can be answered by many different angles. The good life isn't just a set of instructions, it depends on historical and social context.

There is no contradiction, I am saying we can expedite the whole process by not wasting time attempting to answer difficult questions with theoretical conjecture.

>There is no contradiction, I am saying we can expedite the whole process by not wasting time attempting to answer difficult questions with theoretical conjecture.

And how do you propose we do that, specifically?

To vaguely say
>Most of the time, to call it philosophy would be a misnomer... it's a combination of history, sociology and psychology.

and that we need to "advance" by these means is meaningless without context to how this might be achieved for any given problem.

Also, please read these books:
"The Scientific Revolution" Shapin
"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" Kuhn
"Philosophy of Science: A New Introduction" Barker & Kitcher

That's a lot of philosophy

What is good life is the most philosophical question there ever is. What you put there as context is so philosophically loaded like my balls after a week of nofap. If you fail to see this then start with the Greeks and delete this bread.

>Le chemicals in your brain explains everything.

Might as well kill yourself desu

>Nobody has answered these you pig fu
People can't agree on one answer, therefore the entire field can be tossed in the trash.

>There is no space for philosophy in the modern world
Yes there is, back to the Greek, Roman, and early Christian philosophers.
Philosophy should be about practical living, not autistic sperging over definitions or grand systems.

>>What is a good life?
>Nobody has answered these you pig fuck don't act like philosophy got anywhere with that.
Philosophy gave the most practical answer thousands of years ago.

>le neuroscience meme
Oh- user I....

Which empirical discipline says you're not an useless fucking idiot?

>Why is suffering necessarily bad? Answer that scientifically.
Why? You wanted something non-trivial that science can answer, and I gave you something.

...

>I HAVE A SOUL

>Art, biology (evolution) and neuroscience explain what it means for something to be considered beautiful. They do a much better job than philosophers do.

>Answered by evolutionary theory and neuroscience.

>Already answered.

Care to explain how one reaches the conclusion that these propositions are the case? You seem perfectly satisfied to state whatever you intuit as being the end-point,
but then you show no work to explain how you arrived there.

funny how you can't come up a decent argument

funny how you can't come up with a non-philosophical answer as soon as your own utility is questioned

Ask me about an actual topic you are interested in and I can elaborate. Since everyone here is talking about ethics, framing is a good start if you want to tackle moral problems.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)

No because of slaves.

u sound like a fan

yea philosophy sux and all
but
like
who cares man
convince me that I should care
*scientifically *

okay.
what if i'm interested in meta-meta- ethical questions
is it all just frames embedded in frames?

Art.
What is art, according to Science?
What differentiates something beautiful from singing vulgar?

iframes

Something something chemicals in our brain, dopamine something something.

Original person you replied to here. Thanks for linking the article.
I guess based on it though I can see how it can provide a medium by which ethical problems may be addressed, but
how does it resolve or provide an orientation for ethics in-itself?

Further, I think the philosophical point could be made that this assumes priority of some sort insofar as cognition and
world interactions.

Did someone say end of philosophy?

ANSWER US OP

I will read one of those. Thanks for the recommendations.

>what is the good life
I find philosophy's advice as good as self-help books, frankly. One of the best books I have read on this topic is "Man's Search for Meaning". That is a psychology book.

For example?

You created the science-only restriction... music (and more generally, art) is a subject in itself distinct from philosophy. If you want to know why a particular piece sounds good, you can study music theory, if you want to know why mumble rap is popular, you should read Dialectic of Enlightenment, a sociology book, that talks about propaganda, mass media, and other things. None of this requires "aesthetics".

Not sure how to answer this to be honest, I will PHILOSOPHISE some more until I figure out how to answer without the use of PHILOSOPHY.

Can you form a more coherent argument? Isn't everyone already a slave, in one way or another?

yea neat just decompose the concept and practice of 'philosophy' into sub-disciplines until it disappears
revolutionary

>claims to be well-versed in philosophy
>hasn't considered that it might have been the posing of questions rather than the answer of them that has been the strength of philosophy for the last 2500 years

I'm going to give you some fields and areas of study off of the top of my head, and then I want you to answer a trivia question about them by the end of my post.

>Linguistics
>Sociology
>Psychology
>Computer science
>Political science
>Economics
>Law

Now, the question is this: what field of study is (partially or entirely) the genesis of all these fields of study?

Philosophy and mathematics are the purest fields of study, the genesis of all others. Pure philosophy is as "useless" (instrumentally) as pure math, but they give birth to and animate all other fields of study, and those may be instrumentally useful. Believing that philosophy is over with and done, that it is barren rather than pregnant with fields of inquiry we have yet to even imagine, betrays a profound lack of historical consciousness. Your prediction about the "utility" of philosophy in the future is severely misguided.

>Not sure how to answer this to be honest, I will PHILOSOPHISE some more until I figure out how to answer without the use of PHILOSOPHY.

Well, I may have begged the question there. I guess all I would say is that I think philosophy as the "love of wisdom" is still needed in the sense
of systematizing the sciences that are disparate and remote into a cohesive whole. Not that things lose their distinctness, but I would say philosophy
has one advantage over the sciences insofar as it is not constrained in subject matter, for better or worse, in what sort of objects it can take in (i.e. mathematics, biology, ethics, programming, psychology and so on). I think the fundamental question is whether people take philosophy as something
that hovers over the world - which is untenable - or as something that works within and alongside others in our striving to know.

Also, sorry people are inundating you with questions/nitpicks (people such as myself) and not focusing on one subject.
It is dishonest to overflow a fellow in the discussion with questions to the point they are spread thin.

>It is dishonest to overflow a fellow in the discussion with questions to the point they are spread thin.
it's 'dishonest' to start a troll thread on a subject you have no grasp of and then castigate those that call you out on your bullshit

OP here, this goes without saying... I merely posted my argument for the sake of discussion. This doesn't make it trolling. Debates usually start with an assertion, that's much more enticing that a question like "where do you see the future of philosophy?" -- Nobody would have replied.

The fact of the matter is, many scientists actually agree with idea, and it's good to see some responses, I do wonder what they think, maybe we can ask them. Unfortunately some of you took this personally and made fools of yourselves, those that didn't and actually refuted some of the comments, well done to you.

Science can tell you everything that happens when you set your grandmother on fire but can it tell you if you should do it?

>one advantage over the sciences insofar as it is not constrained in subject matter
This is actually what some continental philosophers believed. They thought philosophy should be more like poetry and literature, free of the scrutiny and rigour of academic disciplines. And I agree.

>1. Preserving academic, scientific and logical rigour in philosophical arguments. This leads to analytic philosophy.
>2. Rejecting the scientific method as a way to answer philosophical questions. This leads to continental philosophy.

so, this here, above: at best, a groady oversimplification of 'post-kantian' philosophy. flatulently incorrect regarding the 'thesis' of the 'continentals'
when your ignorance of history was identified, immediately, by the first poster, you cried foul and moved positions, placing the onus of 'proof' (of what?) on everyone but yourself.
but yeah dawg way to facilitate a dialog

shut the fuck up you ignoramus

maths is just applied logic, which is totally philosophy dawg

fuck off u aren't me quit playing

You know full well those terms aren't clearly defined. These lose generalisations I paraphrased from a textbook. Eat shit.

>This is currently being outsourced to linguistics and logic, which while traditionally philosophy, they are quickly starting to resemble science in their rigour.
LOL. You mean science resembles logic in rigor? Oh wait.. it doesn't deal in truths at all. Things must look different wherever you are at.

paraphrased from the cliff notes of the Chinese version of Wikipedia you mean

>Guys, I want you to argue with me so I can rationalize all my beliefs.
No.

Ha that reminds me of university where people would translate a foreign language article to avoid being accused of plagiarism.

Isn't the point of all arguments to go home and think about them so you can refine your ideas?

Does anyone actually argue for the sake of winning the argument? That would be a pathetic waste of time.

I'd rather discuss a more valuable subject. Why shit and polish a turd when I can polish something else?

You are not being held at gunpoint, you obviously this discussion is worthy of your time since you are voluntarily taking part in it. :D

No, I'm taking a shit and have nothing else to do

I implore you to eat more fibre, drink more fluids and exercise more, because sitting on the toilet for that long can lead to haemorrhoids.

I've been here for two minutes, I'm off now

Well just follow the OP logic for a minute. Science is everything, so why are we discussing the topic and not trying some form of scientific exposition? Better to let this thread die because it is worthless in OPs eyes.

Of course, OP is assumed to be interested in this topic and he posted it. He did not reach the obvious conclusion from his assumptions. He is either acting, lying, illiterate, incompetent, or in a stage of a searching awareness. Why engage in his world when he can't even see it?

There are a few types of arguments by the way. His is rhetorical in the sense of trying to convince himself. You can see every post he has made is "post fact" rationalizing, inconsistent, and dubious. Engaging it is like engaging a believer. Every disproof is justification for belief.

>Kant realised that the revolutionary developments of the natural sciences put enormous pressure on philosophy as a fundamental autonomous subject.
What a fucking nigger, Jesus Christ

I'm OP and agreed with many of the replies. Sorry if the way I argue bothers you.

Okay you can say whatever the fuck you want about me but that was copied from Cambridge lecture notes on analytic vs continental philosophy so suck a dick you got nothing.

no it isn't

first it's a textbook, next it's lecture notes
keep your story straight dawg

You are actually starting to bother me with all these accusations. Do you think it unlikely that I use multiple sources of reference? I take the time to respond and you take me for a fool, ridiculous.

you are a fool dawg you just can't see the cliff your tumbling toward

To be honest, that's a fairly strange sentiment to express on Veeky Forums.

Scientism doesn't and never will exist. There is no true distinction between science and philosophy, just that science has much higher standards in terms of actually discerning if something is true or not. Rather than taking it at face-value just because it sounds cool. Furthermore, another difference is that science is far more complex, whereas philosophy is always about baser systems and surface-level inquiry. Still, there is no definite difference. Also, those 'trivialities' comprise the entirety of you and the world's lives, making them the opposite of trivialities.

Kant was a retard. Your post is disregarded. STEMspergs need to fuck off.

>useful
Not an argument
You haven't studied any philosophy, hence why you are a dogmatist.
hurrr le big romance words hurrr