philosophy and physics

A New York Times opinion piece, HERE, that quotes the likes of Hawking and Weinberg saying unflattering things about philosophy.

In one sense it doesn’t matter. There will always be people who disrespect philosophy, or the type of philosophy you or I do, and you can keep on doing it anyway without their approval. (What the physicists say here about philosophy is no worse than what analytically and continentally trained philosophers say even about each other.)

In another sense, I think it’s philosophy’s own fault for being too deferential to the natural sciences on questions concerning the inanimate world.

And in yet another sense, you can read Feyerabend’s remarks about how philosophically barbaric physicists became from roughly Feynman forward, quite unlike Einstein, Bohr, & Co. I’m on the road away from my books, so I’m afraid I can’t give a citation for that. But Hawking’s proud and self-congratulatory claim to be a “positivist” gives a glimpse into that barbarism.

I also couldn’t disagree more with the Russell passage cited here, to the effect that philosophy aims at knowledge, and that once knowledge is achieved in an area it ceases to be philosophy. I’m with the Meno on this one. Philosophy does not aim at knowledge. That’s even the whole point.