[bambataa]

I’ve read the book under review and would recommend it.

Philosophy has always appealed to me but disappointed because it never seems to settle on answers. There’s a bit in the book where Kleene (I think?) is advising young academic philosophers to go into logic instead as at least there they’ll get answers.

Someone in the book describes philosophy’s truth value as less like scientific inquiry and more like poetry done in logical argument. That seemed like a potentially valuable way of looking at it.

[mjburgess]

I think this is the wrong conclusion. The issue is that "from no premises, come no conclusions" and philosophy has no internal mechanism to treat any premises as axiomatic. (Whereas, eg., the sciences treat empiricism, causes, experimentation, universal regularities, etc. all as axioms).

Science "has no answers" either if you deny its premises.

So all systems of "answers" are just systems where we find some set of propositions so nearly certain that we take them as axioms and hence believe what follows.

You can, and indeed should, do this with philosophy too. If you find that science has answers, then just take its premises as axiomatic -- and throw away all philosophy which denies them.

That arguments can be advanced against those premises has no epistemic status. Arguments can be advanced against any arguments. And move to "deny the premieses" is always available.

Sceptics regard this as interesting and important. It isnt. Knowledge, truth, belief, reality etc. are not set by what has arguments. The hidden premise to this scepticism is that "cognition & arugmentation are the foundation of knowledge & reality" -- deny this, and the whole manic schizophrenic enterprise disappears in a puff.

Philosophy, then, has tones and tones of answers.

[Telemakhos]

Philosophy’s real problem is that it spun off all its useful and productive branches. Science used to be part of philosophy; now it’s a separate discipline. Theology and psychology were branches of (meta)physics, and now they’re separate fields. Computer science has split from logic. Math is its own thing. Grammar split from logic ages ago. There’s very little left for philosophy outside unproductive questions of epistemology (“Are we brains in jars on a shelf?”) or ethical debates. All the real fruit now lies elsewhere.

[mjburgess]

I think this bares little relationship to research philosophy. Social epistemology, the logic of imagination, hyperinstensionality, computational theories of cognition, physical church-turing thesis, philosophy of physics, of mind, of...

There is a significant amount of question-answering going on.

That these answers come to be fundamental to other disciplines is the success of philosophy, and obvious. Those other disciplines are where philosophical premeses are taken as certain.

[redbar0n]

«In 1889, Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office. He is widely quoted as having stated that the patent office would soon shrink in size, and eventually close, because…

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”»

[scandox]

Ethics are important.

[eimrine]

The sentence is not finished.

[bambataa]

That’s interesting, thank you.

Does it not leave inaccessible vast swathes of philosophy where, almost by definition, science cannot contribute answers? Such as the nature of numbers and other metaphysical things.

I haven’t heard of the areas you mention in a sibling comment, so I’ll look them up. Do you find that you need to refocus attention to areas where scientific premises are useful as axioms so that progress can be made?

[johngossman]

I highlighted this from the book in question.

“From its earliest origins in ancient Greece, Western philosophy has gained its identity through a contrast with sophistry. If sophistry is non-rational, cynical, manipulative, then philosophy represents a rejection of it, by committing itself to rational, disinterested persuasion.”

[curation]

The point of philosophy is to ask better questions, specifically questions that do not mystify the problem and thus perpetuate it. It's is not and has never been about answers. - love, a philospher