Why is it that all the best philosophers throughout history have also been mathematicians, physicists, and geometers...

not what op was asking*

I'm not OP. I'm just clarifying his statement to some extent.

>Aristotle
>One of the best
lol

>Can one have a deep understanding of philosophy without jointly studying the sciences?
Yes
science is 100% useless for cultivating virtue

please take your positivism elsewhere

That was the style at the time. Today, we have specialists.

t. pseud

I wish it still was
Science is too concerned about what and how that they never bother to ask why

That's because you that isn't a scientific question.

You can have a deep understanding of *particular* philosophical topics without a deep understanding of the sciences, but some of the best work being done today is being done by philosophers of physics and analytic metaphysicians who probe the interpretive issues in physical theories.

>positivism

I wish Veeky Forums and Veeky Forums would stop using this buzzword to refer to anything or anyone with an even remotely positive view of science. That's not what positivism is.

I'm not sure Newton was any kind of philosopher. You're talking about a deeply religious alchemist. He was also an MP, there is no record of him being a great parliamentarian, although he was a good manager of the recoinage.

Nor was Leibniz, he gets more grandfathered in really because he did have some interesting ideas that have since become of interest to philosophy but he didn't construe them in that way himself.

Disciplinarity is a relatively recent invention, user. At the time of these people, philosophy included the "natural philosophy," out of which grew the various disciplines we today recognize as the sciences.

>tfw Nietzsche and Marx both sucked at math

At least Neetgod didn't have a humiliating book full of him trying to teach himself some 8th grade math, you have to go look at his secondary school grades to see that he was bad at math.

Because back then most thinkers were polymaths.

College and capitalism want people to learn a single, extremely specific field and ignore everything else, which creates easily manipulated, incompetent, autistic worker-drones. This is unnatural and denies people their curiosity. Exploring different ideas and fields are what make people intelligent. Sticking to one specific corner of knowledge makes you banal and ignorant.

That's why you have STEMfags who hate literature and literaturefags who hate science etc. If you're truly intelligent you will be, if not an expert, then at least literate in every field.

Normal person's brain
>A lot of philosophers seem to have been mathematicians and vice versa. I wonder why. I should learn about it.

Veeky Forums user's brain
>CAN NON MATH FAGS EVEN COMPETE .LEIBNIZ DESTROY PHILOSOPHY, NEWTON, DESCARTES, MATH UNSTOPPABLE WHY AREN'T YOU LEARNING MATH RIGHT NOW

>What did Newton and Leibniz contribute to philosophy
>What did Newton contribute to philosophy
>Newton

Why don't you ask Kant you fuck? Jesus Christ it's like you haven't read any philosophy from that period. Everyone worth a damn made it very clear how indebted they were to him.

Leibniz was right about everything.
If only by btfo of empiricists and historicists for eternity. Relative neglect of his philosophy in the early 19th century is one the the reasons we got plagued by positivism and dialectical memery.

I've been meaning to read him. What would you recommend?

The professionalization of the humanities is one of those dumb mistakes humanity has made thinking it would be of benefit. Hopefully it will be undone in the coming decades with cuts in spending.

Those are all awful philosophers, genuinely some of the worst. Excellent in their own fields, but an absolute joke in philosophy. Sciences pervert philosophy and reduce it to STEMspergisms.
Aristotle is for pseud undergrads.
There is no good philosophy being done today.

Marx was good at math, he disliked how Newton and Leibniz formulated differential calculus so he tried to do it himself. He was not a mathematician or physicist and was not dedicated to it, so it didn't work out.
t. pseud

Philosophy and math both require intense critical, analytic and abstract thought, hence the overlap

the gap between science and the humanities is a false dichotomy perpetuated by people trying to justify their expensive liberal arts education.

Liberal arts is not expensive, it's the only thing that can kill a STEMsperg (unless they're Chinese or Korean)

>There is no good philosophy being done today.

that's false and a pretty poor opinion

>There is no good philosophy being done today.
>I've never actually studied philosophy

>Nor was Leibniz, he gets more grandfathered in really because he did have some interesting ideas that have since become of interest to philosophy but he didn't construe them in that way himself
He absolutely did. Do you even know what you're talking about?

light kek

semi-serious question: who do you mean? and in what fields?

The amount of shit-posts and memery in this thread. Wew.

Mathematics teaches you clarity of thinking (among other things).

Natural science teaches you to seek a more fundamental structure in the world (among other things).

Both mathematics and natural science centrally value the notion of justification.

Giving precise and justified accounts of fundamental structures in the world is basically what philosophy /is/. It makes sense that they would go together.

To actually answer the question:

-Newton provided a conception of physical space that, while ultimately flawed for both philosophical and empirical reasons, proved and continues to prove useful for gaining clarity in debates over the nature of physical space. Those debates continue fiercely to this day. It's questionable how original "absolute space" is to Newton, though.

-Leibniz gave us Leibniz's Laws, which are as close to incontestable as you can get in metaphysics (note that I do not say uncontested).

So those are two indisputable achievements of central importance. And Leibniz's philosophical corpus is truly astonishing. It's synoptic, bizarre, eclectic, and basically impossible to believe any of it, but the intelligence and creativity with which he grapples philosophical problems is incredible.

Not only "game changers" like Aristotle or Descartes or Kant deserve the pointless honorific "best philosophers in history"

many different problems have been tackled under the label "philosophy." some attempt to aid the cultivation of virtue, but others don't. paying attention to science is important (but by no means decisive all by itself) for many philosophical activities.

not to mention that the methods and approach of natural science are at least sometimes useful to virtually any form of inquiry.

But no one even seems to be interested

i second this, actually. philosophy of physics is really amazing, vital, necessary, intelligent philosophy. and it produces such good work, in part, because many of its practitioners have had a rigorous training in analytic metaphysics. (to be clear, I think analytic metaphysics itself is totally insane and out-of-touch. But the kind of thinking it promotes turns out to be very useful for doing philosophy of physics).

this post is uninformed, sorry.

the question "why?" is open to a tremendous number of interpretations. On many disambiguations, many people are working on that question. What did you mean?

Ya I just made four effort post replies before I realized how garbage this fucking topic is. Yuck.

>Natural philosophy
>Asks unironically why they have been important in philosophy

You have to go back

Idk senpai, I just wish traditional STEM classes involved more natural philosophy.

Like 10 people in this topic are so impressed with themselves, knowing that it was once called "natural philosophy." But are you claiming that the historical association of philosophical and scientific aptitudes is purely contingent?

If I had to answer that in a yes or no question then yes

Oh, I see what you mean. I have definitely felt that kind of bum out before. Not just STEM classes, but STEM people in general. I suppose the social and economic reality is that spending any time on such questions is disincentivized for most parties.

To be fair, I would have thought that any good STEM degree would leave you with at least a nascent sense that all is not OK at the foundations of physics.

Sorry, it was a rhetorical challenge for someone to specify what they actually were claiming. Don't let me put words in your mouth.

But if that is what you intended to claim, then you think there is no sense in which physics, mathematics and philosophy can be engaged in the same enterprise?

Tim Maudlin, David Albert, David Wallance, Peter Lewis, Abner Shimony, Nancy Cartwright, Lawrence Sklar and many others have all done some pretty great and fascinating work at the intersection between philosophy and physics in what is now commonly referred to as the "philosophy of physics" and are infinitely better at conveying the physical significance and philosophical implications of scientific concepts to the layman without any of the popsci garbage you'll find with Hawking or Krauss. It's also great because their work draws from and is drawn on by more philosophically-minded analytic metaphysicians like Lewis, Davidson, Putnam, Mellor, Fine, and others. Saul Kripke's relatively recent insights into the philosophy of language and his challenge to Russellian descriptivism have big implications for both science and metaphysics, stretching all the way back to Aristotle's conception of essences. You don't have to like it or find it interesting, but important work has been done in the field over the past half-century. It's hard to see that when this board mainly wanks off over Marxism and gay french sophists 24/7

I don't think Kripke's insights are really of much importance for science (including linguistics), and Davidson and Putnam surely do not count as "analytic metaphysicians," but I agree with you about philosophy of physics and the rest 100%.

yeah, you're probably right in the sense that Davidson and Putnam would not label themselves unabashed analytic metaphysicans like the others would, but insofar as topics like the phil. of mind/action/mathematics are subjects of metaphysics, I would say they certainly engaged in it quite heavily, more in the vain of the Quinean "reluctant metaphysician". As for Kripke, while his work has no real impact on the way science is conducted I would argue that it does have some implications for how we think about some of the concepts it employs and how they are interpreted.