| Answering what is philosphy is philosophy. And thus, IMO, I am right. > Philosophy is what academics who work in philosophy departments do. IMO this is too restrictive. You reduce philosophy to a job title or diploma title. I guess, many philosophers would not agree with this definition. > I make a strong counterclaim: all progress in philosophy comes from progress in the hard sciences. I agree that new knowledge and new abilities lead to new ideas and questions and concerns.
But philosophy is not limited to physics or chemistry; IMO the only hard sciences. Physics and chemistry are hard sections within an open ended spectrum: - The begin (1D view) or lower level layer (3D view) are unknown. Is string theory correct ? What are strings made of ? Is mental conscious the lower layer ? Is all a simulation ? - The end (1D view) or upper layer (3D view) are soft science. Like biology, sociology, psychology, economics. Regarding economics:
Yanis Varoufakis: Live at Politics and Prose
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H38tZhPying&t=377 |
I'd say that it is usually what we treat philosophy as when these discussions come up. As you said, it's probably too restrictive, and the truth is we're all philosophers to some degree, and all working off of certain philosophical underpinnings. But the article (and many philosophers) end up treating philosophy as the above poster describes ("what academics who work in philosophy departments do").
If we use a broad definition of philosophy then of course it is useful, and of course its changed over time (most would consider it progress, some wouldn't). But this doesn't seem to say anything about whether or not the small subsection of philosophers who work as academics in philosophy departments have made useful contributions recently. The fact that they struggle so much with this question suggest that they might not have.