Iggy

dug_down_deep,
I agree, science has not pushed back the darkness to completely illuminate the quintessential questions. We argue here about "What is", "How do we know", and "What is it worth" constantly and these questions may outlive the stars if we happen to survive them. In science,we are still in a quandary on most of our basic assumptions. Did we begin in a big bang and what prohibits the integration of quantum reality with relativity? Is the fundamental particle a wavicle or a string? And the primary instrument of scientific reasoning has been blunted by Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem!

Pragmatista

Please, not another NOMA.

There must be more to philosophy than claiming to ask the questions that science can't answer.

kennethamy

Yes, the only answer to the question , "how do we know?" can be, the question, "How do we know, what?". For it depends on what it is that is supposed to be known. The answer to "what is?" is obvious. "Everything". What else could it be? And, the answer to the question, "What is it worth?" must be, "It obviously depend on what 'it' is" for how could you possibly answer that question unless you know that. All three questions commit the famous fallacy of, the fallacy of asking about nothing in particular.

Blueskyboris

Interesting.

Blueskyboris

If philosophy is the love of wisdom, then science is philosophy.

Blueskyboris

In a way, philosophy has already been conquered by science. Or to put it more interestingly: philosophy has been conquered by philosophy.

LoungeHead

Does philosophy even do that? I thought that was the role of religion? :huh:

Hugh Nose

The title of this thread is provocative.

Can someone/anyone provide an example of the conquest of philosophy by science in the last, say, 100 years-- since about 1900!

Hugh Nose

kennethamy

I don't know whether this will fill the bill, but philosophers like Russell, and Quine, have advocated what Quine called a "naturalization" of philosophy, so that, for example, epistemological questions were converted into quasi-psychological or physiological questions. Hume, in the 18th century argued that since metaphysics was a dead end (which Hume argued in various places) that philosophers turn their attention to the "moral sciences" i.e. the social sciences, and try to do for them what Galileo, and Newton, did for the physical sciences. Establish them on a firm footing. And he even suggested that philosophers become moral scientists, just as he, Hume, was a moral scientist, i.e. an historian.

Of course, it has been philosophers who have suggested this, and this suggestion has been based on their belief that either there is no such thing as substantive a-priori knowledge, as in the case of Hume, or, as in the case of Russell and Quine, there there is really no demarcation between the a priori and the empirical. And, of course, that is really what is at issue.

Blueskyboris

I suppose that would be the brain/cognitive sciences. Also, the advent of Einstein and quantum mechanics has made physics and metaphysics almost overlap, while ontology is still fully defined by the modern definition of the word philosophy.