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>The realization that philosophy is a dead end is vary common and vary old.

Well yes, that point of view is very old, but then so is the opposite point of view. I thought your point was more substantial than this, i.e. that modern science somehow invalidated philosophy. This point of view is obviously at least no older than modern science.

I'm not sure what your point is re Aquinas. He was a brilliant philosopher who is still very much worth reading (even if his prose is a bit tedious), so he doesn't seem like a good example of why philosophy is pointless. You certainly don't have to believe in the infallibility of the bible to get something out of his work.

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If by modern science you mean Gregor Johann Mendel and Isaac Newton then yea it's only a few hundred years old. But, Archimedes also believed in testing his ideas when possible so "modern science" is probably not the best term.

Anyway, finding someone who in his youth wrote elegant treaties on the definition of justice says nothing about his latter beliefs and due to our limited lifespan from a historical standpoint they take place at about the same era. I said / wrote many stupid things as I child that I no longer agree with. All it takes is the realization that your assumptions are often wrong to realize that Philosophy is a dead end. However, once you understand that there is little more to be said on the topic unless you concoct a system that lets you ignore that fact. So you might go from "proving the existence of god' to saying it’s a question of faith.

PS: "I think therefore I am" is not necessarily true for a puppet reading someone else’s lines or a part of a far large hole. So, "Do I think?" is about as far as philosophy can take you.

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>If by modern science you mean Gregor Johann Mendel and Isaac Newton then yea it's only a few hundred years old. But, Archimedes also believed in testing his ideas when possible so "modern science" is probably not the best term.

What's your point? The idea of science as something separate from philosophy which could actually replace philosophy altogether is basically a 20th century one, and is certainly no more than a few hundred years old. (Science just wasn't impressive enough before then for it to be a reasonable point of view.)

>All it takes is the realization that your assumptions are often wrong to realize that Philosophy is a dead end.

I don't see how that follows. The vulnerability of initial assumptions is a problem for any form of inquiry, science included, but it isn't a fatal problem. Much of philosophy is precisely about questioning assumptions.

>PS: "I think therefore I am" is not necessarily true for a puppet reading someone else’s lines

I have no idea what you mean by this, but it doesn't seem to address Descartes' argument. (He was obviously not suggesting that anyone who merely says "I think therefore I am" must necessarily exist.)

>or a part of a far large hole

whole?

>So, "Do I think?" is about as far as philosophy can take you.

This is manifestly nonsense. Unless you are seriously claiming that there has been no progress in logic, political philosophy, moral philosophy, the philoosphy of science, etc. etc. in the past few thousand years. At the very least, the range of possible views, and the best arguments for and against these views, are much better known and understood than they were before. And in some areas (e.g. logic, and those aspects of the philosophy of science pertaining to it) there has been progress in a much more definite sense.

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Unless you are seriously claiming that there has been no progress in logic, political philosophy, moral philosophy, the philoosphy of science, etc. etc. in the past few thousand years. Excluding logic I would agree with that statement.

If you disagree then [citation needed].

Philosophy is the study or creation of theories about basic things such as the nature of existence, knowledge, and thought, or about how people should live. To be clear Philosophy does not encompass math and it does not require testing of those theories.

PS: Skepticism is a philosophical attitude that questions the possibility of obtaining any sort of knowledge. It was first articulated by Pyrrho, who believed that everything could be doubted except appearances. (ca. 360 BC - ca. 270 BC) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrho

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>If you disagree then [citation needed].

I think you are confused about where the burden of proof lies here. You are asserting the worthlessness of the entire cannon of Western philosophy (and quite possibly other branches of philosophy too). This is an incredible assertion.

By the way, why do you "exclude logic"? Logic has always been a central element of philosophy, at least since Aristotle.

>To be clear Philosophy does not encompass math and it does not require testing of those theories.

Philosophy certainly includes some areas of math (for example, mathematical logic derives partly from work by philosophers). As for whether or not philosophical ideas "need to be tested", that is such a vague locution that it's difficult to respond. But certainly philosophical ideas are supposed to be subject to scrutiny (e.g. compared to alternative points of view, shown to be consistent, etc. etc.)

PS. Thanks for telling me what skepticism is. By the way, if you are interested in testability, you might want to read the ample literature on this notion in the philosophy of science.

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This is an incredible assertion. And yet you can't site a single example of progress.

Thanks for telling me what skepticism is. no I showed an example of "modern" skepticism that is over 2,000 years old. Think about this ~2,300 years ago people were having the same basic argument as we are having today I can think of no other field which has stagnated to that degree.

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Regarding skepticism, I didn't say that skepticism was a new idea, I said that the idea that science can replace philosophy is a new idea. The kind of skepticism you're talking about is actually incompatible with modern science, so it can hardly be taken as an example of a scientific world view. After all, one pretty clear example of recent progress in philosophy is the demonstration that scientific theories are not reducible to statements about actual and hypothetical experiences or "appearences" (i.e., the failure of logical positivism).