Why do physicists bash philosophy?

M the name SG

PHYSICIST STEPHEN HAWKING: Philosophy is dead

PHYSICIST STEVEN WEINBERG: It's murky and inconsequential.

PHYSICIST RICHARD FEYNMAN: Philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.

PHYSICIST LAWRENCE KRAUSS: Philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless.

Why do physicists bash philosophy?

Physicists expand the circle, philosophers help clear up the paradoxes

By JIM HOLT

A KERFUFFLE has.broken out between philosophy and physics. It began when philosopher David Albert gave a sharply negative review in The New York Times to a book by physicist Lawrence Krauss that purported to solve, by purely scientific means, the mystery of the universe's existence.

The physicist responded to the review by calling Dr Albert "moronic", and argued that philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless. And then the kerfuffle was joined on both sides.

This is hardly the first occasion on which physicists have made disobliging comments about philosophy. Last year, at a Google Zeitgeist conference in England, Dr Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy was "dead". Another great physicist, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, has written that he finds philosophy "murky and inconsequential" and of no value to him as a working scientist.

And physicist Richard Feynman, in his famous lectures on physics, complained that "philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem".

Why do physicists have to be so churlish towards philosophy? Philosophers, on the whole, have been much nicer about science. "Philosophy consists in stopping when the torch of science fails us," Voltaire wrote back in the 18th century. And in the last few decades, philosophers have come to see their enterprise as continuous
with that of science.

It is noteworthy that the "moronic" philosopher who kicked up the recent shindig by dismissing the physicist's book himself holds a PhD in theoretical physics.

Physicists say they do not need any help from philosophers. But sometimes physicists are, whether they realise it or not, actually engaging in philosophy themselves. And some of them do it quite well. Dr Weinberg, for instance, has written brilliantly on the limits of scientific explanation - which is, after all, a philosophical issue. It is also an issue on which contemporary philosophers have interesting things to say.

Dr Weinberg has attacked philosophical doctrines like positivism (science should concern itself only with things that can actually be observed). But it happens to be a mantle that Dr Hawking proudly wraps himself in; he has declared that he is "a positivist who believes that physical theories are just mathematical models we construct, and that it is meaningless to ask if they correspond to reality". Is Dr Hawking's positivism. the same positivism that Dr Weinberg decries? That would be an issue for philosophical discussion.

Physicist Roger Penrose is a self-avowed Platonist, since he believes that mathematical ideas have an objective existence. The disagreement between Dr Hawking the positivist and Sir Roger the Platonist, - a philosophical one - has hard scientific consequences: They take radically opposing views of what is going on when a quantum measurement is made. Is one of them guilty of philosophical naivete? Are they both?

Finally, consider the anti-philosophical strictures of Feynman. "Cocktail party philosophers", he said in a lecture, think they can discover things about the world "by brainwork" rather than experiment. But in another lecture, he announced that the most pregnant hypothesis in all of science is that "all things are made of atoms". Who first came up with this hypothesis? The ancient philosophers Leucippus and Democritus. And they did not come up with it by doing experiments.

Today the world of physics is in many ways conceptually unsettled. Will physicists ever find an interpretation of quantum mechanics that makes sense? Is quantum entanglement logically consistent with special relativity? Is string theory empirically meaningful? How are time and entropy related? Can the constants of physics be explained by appealing to an unobservable "multiverse"?

Philosophers have in recent decades produced sophisticated and illuminating work on all these questions. It would be a pity if physicists were to ignore it.

And what about the oft-heard claim that philosophy, unlike science, makes no progress? As philosopher Bertrand Russell (no slouch at physics and maths observed, philosophy aims at knowledge, and as soon as it obtains definite knowledge in a specific area, that area ceases to be called "philosophy". Scientific progress gives philosophers more and more to do. Said Nietzsche: "As the circle of science grows larger, it touches paradox at more places."

Physicists expand the circle, philosophers help clear up the paradoxes. May both camps flourish.

NEW YORK TIMES

Jim Holt is the author of the forthcoming book, Why Does The World Exist? An Existential Detective Story.

Part D, The Straits Times, Saturday, June 16 2012, Pg D13

BroInChrist SG

PHYSICIST STEPHEN HAWKING: Philosophy is dead

PHYSICIST STEVEN WEINBERG: It's murky and inconsequential.

PHYSICIST RICHARD FEYNMAN: Philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.

PHYSICIST LAWRENCE KRAUSS: Philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless.

Why do physicists bash philosophy?

Physicists expand the circle, philosophers help clear up the paradoxes

By JIM HOLT

It is noteworthy that the "moronic" philosopher who kicked up the recent shindig by dismissing the physicist's book himself holds a PhD in theoretical physics.

Philosophers have in recent decades produced sophisticated and illuminating work on all these questions. It would be a pity if physicists were to ignore it.

Physicists expand the circle, philosophers help clear up the paradoxes. May both camps flourish.

NEW YORK TIMES

Jim Holt is the author of the forthcoming book, Why Does The World Exist? An Existential Detective Story.

Part D, The Straits Times, Saturday, June 16 2012, Pg D13

I guess it is because while physicists study things in nature, philosophers question the nature of things which in a way impinge upon the conclusions of the things being studied, and these makes physicists upset?

Dalforce 1941 SG

"A Hard Look at a Philosopher",
a review by Carroll Quigley in The Washington Evening Star, July 29, 1965,
of a book:
HEGEL: Reinterpretation, Texts, and Commentary,
by Walter Kaufman.
Doubleday & Co.: New York, 1965

HEGEL: Reinterpretation, Texts, and Commentary.
By Walter Kaufmann.
Doubleday & Co. 498 pages. $6.95.

   Thirty years ago, when I was reading the works of the great philosophers, they (with few exceptions) seemed to me surprisingly incompetent. Their writings were filled with undefined terms, with unstated assumptions, with egocentric attitudes, and with absolutes based on ethnocentric conceit. From dusty rooms, men like Kant pontificated on the structure of the human mind without ever taking time to examine how a person's mind develops as he grows up, or how minds in other periods or other societies were developed (and how they came to be constructed in the way they were).

   In recent weeks, a reexamination of some of these writings has strengthened my earlier, tentative, impressions. Four advances in human knowledge, in the last few generations, make much of older philosophic writings seem unbearably verbose and misled. These four are: (1) advances in our awareness of the process of socialization and personality development in our own society; (2) our increased knowledge of the comparative study of such processes in other societies: (3) our greatly increased awareness of the role of unconscious processes and motivations in human actions and attitudes: and (4) less obviously, our more sophisticated understanding of the nature of logic in rationalization.

   The weakness of most philosophic writing is well shown in respect to Hegel in the present volume. The book has real merit in the sense that it is based on close examination of what Hegel really wrote; it studies Hegel's ideas in terms of their development from his early years; and the author has a real (and somewhat amusing) enthusiasm for Hegel. But the merits of this book and the basic honesty of its author reveals the ineptness of his hero as a philosopher, or even as a writer.

   In the latter connection Kaufmann does not hesitate to admit Hegel's frequent lack of clarity or even coherence. He says, of his efforts to find Hegel's meaning (p. 137): “The highly allusive style turns the reader into a detective rather than a critical philosopher: One looks for clues and feels happy every time one has solved some small mystery. . .. The question whether the author is right drops from consciousness. Allusions replace arguments. Understanding, because it has become so exceedingly difficult, takes the place of critical evaluation for which no energy seems to be left. It is so hard to get the point, and so few do, that the big problem is no longer whether the point stands up but rather whether one has got it. And the main division is not between those who agree and those who do not, but between those who understand and belong and those who do not."

   Prof. Kaufmann is fully aware that this failure of communication in Hegel reflects a confusion of thought. His deepest admiration is directed toward Hegel's "Phenomenology," whose preface is translated with a commentary in this volume. Of this work Kaufmann says: "Hegel writing the 'Phenomenology' is worlds removed from the . . . timeless image of the sober scholar. He is far closer to the world of Dostoevsky's novels" (p. 111). And he adds immediately: "It was not written with a clear outline in mind as if Hegel had known exactly what he proposed to do and then had done it."

   It is clear that Hegel, to Prof. Kaufmann's broad and cosmopolitan outlook, has greater value as a personality than as an expositor of eternal philosophic truths. From this point of view, and as a figure of considerable historical significance in subsequent thought, Hegel has some value, and Prof. Kaufmann is an excellent guide for such a study. In this connection, however, Kaufmann is most helpful in his frequent indications that Hegel's thought is, in fact, quite different from what is usually attributed to him and that most subsequent commentators found in his writings what they hoped or expected to find rather than what was actually there. The most astonishing example of this is the attribution to Hegel of the three-stage dialectical method which Marx and others are supposed to have obtained from him. On this subject Kaufmann writes (p. 168): "Fichte introduced into German philosophy the three-step of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, using these three terms. Schelling took up this terminology; Hegel did not."

   Information such as this shows the value of Kaufmann's volume, just as Hegel's pretension to "absolute knowledge" reveals the naive presumption which he shares with most other philosophers.

http://www.carrollquigley.net/book-reviews/A_Hard_Look_Philosopher.htm

BroInChrist SG

HEGEL: Reinterpretation, Texts, and Commentary.
By Walter Kaufmann.
Doubleday & Co. 498 pages. $6.95.

http://www.carrollquigley.net/book-reviews/A_Hard_Look_Philosopher.htm

I think physicists (or scientists in general) should also appreciate the fact that underlying science itself is a piece of philosophy, or philosophies if you like.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science and http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/philosophy

charlize SG

"Why do physicists bash philosophy?"

Is this question coming out for the Philosophy 201 final year exam?

Dianahales39 SG

M the name SG

In the olden time, much of how thing works are created by Greek philosophers like Aristotle who offered "logic but unscientific" explaination. For an example, if an object move slow or stop moving, it is not because of friction, but because they are "tired". If an object fall from the sky, it is not because of gravity, but because they want to "reunited" with mother earth.

That why the Father Of Science, Galileo Galilei had maked this statement :
"These grand personages who set out to discover the great truth and never quite find it, give me a pain. They can't find it because they are always looking in the wrong place."

Other than science which is "indisputable and maybe fixed", I guess philosophy only had room in areas like Art, Language, Political or Economic etc where different type of ideas can be discussed.

BroInChrist SG

Other than science which is "indisputable and maybe fixed", I guess philosophy only had room in areas like Art, Language, Political or Economic etc where different type of ideas can be discussed.

Science books go out of date all the time and scientific controversies abound. Philosophy and science and distinct but yet related. As mentioned earlier there is even a field called the Philosophy of Science.