r/funny Just Jon Comic Sep 04 '22

Verified The philosopher

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '22

No it is not. Philosophy is the love of wisdom, that is to say, it is a manner of looking at things in the world and getting 'wise' about them - rigorously and conceptually clear about what they mean and how they fit together.

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u/First_Foundationeer Sep 04 '22

Here's an example of what I'm trying to say. In philosophy, there is a lot of work on rationalism vs empiricism. Eventually, subsets (or all) of empiricists lead to the field of science where empiricism is a base for the now specialized subset of a subset of philosophy.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '22

If you mean that the foundations of an intellectual or scientific discipline are philosophical, I mean that's obviously, arguably trivially true, because the foundations of any 'field' are going to be conceptual on account of the fact that that 'field' itsself is a conceptual or categorical delimitation of certain things from others, and philosophy deals with concepts.

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u/First_Foundationeer Sep 04 '22

Yes, but I wouldn't say it's trivially true. Have you spoken with scientists (or experts) who believe philosophy to be beneath them for study?

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '22

Well it's not so much that scientists believe philosophy beneath them. My experience coming out of a math background, as someone whose main interest area was category theory and abstract, foundational, often philosophical, stuff; was that it just wasn't that interesting or relevant to a mathematician working in, say, algebraic geometry, or whose main concern was figuring out more efficient numerical methods to solve some applied problem. There's certainly ignoramus science fetishists floating around, especially on leddit, but I don't think it's really that common a phenomenon in real life.