Topics Philosophy

Question Is it possible that all branches of philosophy will one day be obsolete and replaced by activities yielding precise answers, similar to the way that the scientific method replaced natural philosophy? May Leibniz's vision of the calculating machine and the end of all disputes yet be realised? If so, I think this might be the ultimate goal of philosophy: to destroy itself, by superseding speculation with experimentation and calculation.

Accepted:
April 25, 2014

Comments

You seem to suggest that all questions, or maybe all questions worth trying to answer, might be answerable (at least in principle) by experimentation and calculation alone. But I can't see how they could be. Let Q1 be any question. Now consider the normative question, Q2, "Is Q1 worth trying to answer?" I can't see how Q2 could possibly be answered by experimentation and calculation alone. So there will always be questions of that normative kind left over. You might reply that those leftover questions aren't worth trying to answer, but that reply would itself be a normative claim that we couldn't assess using experimentation and calculation alone.

It may also be that Gödel's incompleteness theorems imply that the answers to at least some questions will never yield to experimentation and calculation.