From WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University.

You guys are so cute. Get over yourselves, philosophy is up and running for the first time since Socrates. Almost everything in between was little more than sophism and semantics. (mind you I have deep respect for great sophists)

As we are finally able to ascertain that we finally “know” things (few as those things may be) we can get to work. The question you ask is merely the symptom of a dying philosophy.

Thank goodness. Maybe now, Homo Intellego (or Homo Skeptikos) will finally begin to replace the hariless ape, Homo Assumptive (which refers to itself as Homo sapient, a clearly incorrect appelation).

When you can tell me why the universe exists, whether or not other universes exist, etc…than you can declare Philosophy dead, till then…look up me laddies, look up.

From WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University.

You guys are so cute. Get over yourselves, philosophy is up and running for the first time since Socrates. Almost everything in between was little more than sophism and semantics. (mind you I have deep respect for great sophists)

As we are finally able to ascertain that we finally “know” things (few as those things may be) we can get to work. The question you ask is merely the symptom of a dying philosophy.

Thank goodness. Maybe now, Homo Intellego (or Homo Skeptikos) will finally begin to replace the hariless ape, Homo Assumptive (which refers to itself as Homo sapient, a clearly incorrect appelation).

When you can tell me why the universe exists, whether or not other universes exist, etc…than you can declare Philosophy dead, till then…look up me laddies, look up.

I tend to agree with you here. Neither analytic nor Continental philosophy have solved any big problems, and although the feedback loops are badly stretched, the poor track records have contributed over time to the acute shortage of jobs in academic philosophy.

But is it enough for academic philosophers to announce that solutions are going to come from physics and biology and psychology and economics–perhaps after those disciplines have come to be more appreciative of theretical arguments? While the philosophers are still residing in philosophy departments, training students to operate in philosophy departments (if they can ever find jobs there)?

After all, those philosophers who claim to defer to psychology are usually far removed from actual research efforts in the field, and tend to have rather strong opinions about which empirical results in psychology are worth paying attention to at all. I am not sure that they have fully overcome the bad example set by Quine, when on the one hand he said he was naturalizing epistemology, and on the other he insisted that the only psychology he had any plans to listen to was behaviorist.

Robert

I tend to agree with you here. Neither analytic nor Continental philosophy have solved any big problems, and although the feedback loops are badly stretched, the poor track records have contributed over time to the acute shortage of jobs in academic philosophy.

But is it enough for academic philosophers to announce that solutions are going to come from physics and biology and psychology and economics–perhaps after those disciplines have come to be more appreciative of theretical arguments? While the philosophers are still residing in philosophy departments, training students to operate in philosophy departments (if they can ever find jobs there)?

After all, those philosophers who claim to defer to psychology are usually far removed from actual research efforts in the field, and tend to have rather strong opinions about which empirical results in psychology are worth paying attention to at all. I am not sure that they have fully overcome the bad example set by Quine, when on the one hand he said he was naturalizing epistemology, and on the other he insisted that the only psychology he had any plans to listen to was behaviorist.

Robert

Perhaps the idea that philosophy has run its course is a form of nostalgia for a golden past — one in which philosophers filled in the gaps in everyone’s empirical awareness of the natural world, and the discipline’s explanatory power seemed limitless. Now that the biochemists and physicists can explain in baffling detail the workings of the natural world, maybe some philosophers feel crowded out of the “explain-the-universe” business, and they’re stuck instead in the “explain-your-specialty” ghetto of academia.