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by modernpink 922 days ago
All of modern science is possible without philosophy. In fact, it is when what was called natural philosophy broke off into the natural sciences that philosophy per se devolved into a series of language games on metaphysics that became of little relevance aside from those in the philosophy profession itself.

All our modern advances from hypersonic missiles, large language models, quantum physics and spaceflight and are in spite of what is called philosophy, not due to it.

2 comments

To turn this around, is all of modern philosophy possible without science? And critically, do we want it to be?

Advances, musings and insights in one domain do not preclude those in others, just as the ethical and epistemological boundaries (and possible trajectories) of missiles, models and spacecraft do not suddenly disappear just because we invented them.

Even moreso, the surrounding language games can be just as impactful: doomsday clocks, Turing tests and space supremacy have informed many policies on the docket, well before any practical applications were feasible. In these instances, it would be (and has been) quite difficult to seperate the science from our language, just as the other way around.

Let me see if I got this right by echoing it aphoristically: science doesn't care about epistemology?

How do you feel about falsifiability?