Topics Philosophy

Question I opened up your website and encountered a philosophical discussion of a bent spoon in a glass of water. Which prompts my question: Why hasn’t there been a scientific revolution in philosophy as there has been in physics, chemistry, biology, physiology, historiography, astronomy, music, political science, the social sciences, medicine, er... well just about everything else? Here's my point. When a college student studies ANY of those other subjects, there is scant attention paid to what people thought before the Enlightenment or at best before the Renaissance (except as a historical curiosity). And that's a good thing, BECAUSE =phlogiston has no place in modern physics; =Air, Fire, Water and Earth in Chemistry =the Great Chain of Being in Biology =Bodily Humors in physiology =the Great Man Theory in historiography =Astrology in astronomy =Celestial number sequences in Music theory =belief in the Divine Right of Kings in Poly Sci =belief in possession by demons, the caste system, or the Noble Savage in the social sciences (not to mention the more recent debunking of Freud, Durkheim, Mead and Galton) =blood-letting, mercury treatments, and garlic cloves in medicine (ok ok- please don't point out that leeches are used in surgery, heavy metals in chemo, and the Mediterranean diet touted ad nauseam -- you know what I mean...), But Philosophy is still counting angels on the head of a pin, repeating platitudes from Plato, being startled by Aristotle, getting the skinny on Augustinian, spinning Spinoza, decanting Kant, exhuming Hume, unlocking Locke, thinking Nietzsche is neat and Wittgenstein a wit. Wondering what a bent spoon is. Has academic Philosophy missed the boat? Has modern thinking (i.e., the scientific method) passed it by? Are today’s Philosophy profs the equivalent of antiquarians, Lamarckians, homeopaths, and creative design advocates? Where’s the rigor? The methodology? The accountability? The math? Is Philosophy just a subcategory of postmodernist literary criticism ? That is, dredge up some outdated top-down Great Thought from The Masters, and babble on about semantics, ontology, and reification as if Darwin, Mendel, Chomsky, Dawkins, Demasio, and Nash (to name a few) never existed? (Just reciting these names is reminiscent of the shortcomings of Philosophy. The names don’t matter; it’s way they go about things. Darwin didn’t dream up a Great Theory of How We Got Here, nor Mendel concoct the Epistemology of Peas. Modern thinking is humble, not about the thinker but the thought, defensible, empirical, bottom up. So that’s my question. Can philosophy deal with the 21st Century? When there is so much to master on the physics of light, the physiology of the eye, the neurology of the visual cortex, the evolution of the mammalian perception system --- how do you have time to engage in omphaloscepsis about bent spoons?

Accepted:
November 8, 2006

Comments

I hate to be overly defensive but, frankly, for someone asking this kind of question, and making these kinds of accusations, the questioner displays quite astonishing ignorance. Rigor? Methodology? Math? I would have thought that twentieth century analytic philosophy was almost defined by its obsession with these things.

Now that said, the next question---whether philosophy is a branch of literary criticism---rather suggests that the questioner has relatively little familiarity with analytic philosophy. Perhaps a good suggestion, then, would be that the questioner should read Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy. Or Carnap's Logical Syntax of the World. Or Quine's Word and Object (though read Carnap first). Or, perhaps best of all, Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic.

And have a look at question 1416.

Besides which: The concern about the bent spoon is a concern about the nature of perceptual representation, a concern that is continuous with the concerns of visual psychologists.