http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Analytic-philosophy-Wikipedia-the-free-encyclopedia-tp3235494p3239854.html
Echoing and expanding Glen's thoughts:
Alfred North Whitehead once
famously claimed that "All European philosophy is but a footnote to
Plato."
One historic problem with philosophy, as a field of inquiry, is
that whenever philosophers start to get too systematic, and start building in
the way Owen desires, the bloody edifice off and leaves. Any mapping of
academic lineages would reveal that at some point in history all current fields
broke off from philosophy. For example, "Biology" "Chemistry" and "Physics" are
what you get when "Natural Philosophy" starts to get cumulative. All of modern
logic, set theory, and combinatorics, derive from Aristotle's Categories, which
itself derives from previous work that is obviously philosophy. When that stuff
starts to get to cumulative, one suddenly finds that here exists mathematicians
and computational scientists. Thus, Glen's notion of "trail blazing" is not
only a good representation of the present state of affairs, but also of the
historic events that led to the present state.
One awkward relationship
for philosophy at the moment is the continued tension over whether or not the
youngest child, psychology, has grown up enough to really be out on its own.
Psychology
should be what you get when
epistemological and phenomenological questions start to get answered by an
accumulation of empirical knowledge. However, philosophy still tries
desperately to keep those areas of inquiry from being seen as empirically
investigatable, using many of the same arguments that were used to try to keep
biology and physics in their infant state hundreds of years ago. At least some
of the recent discussion and controversy with Nick is symptomatic of this
awkward relationship between psychology and philosophy.
Eric
On
Fri, Jul 10, 2009 10:41 AM,
"glen e. p. ropella"
<[hidden email]> wrote:
Thus spake Owen Densmore circa 07/09/2009 07:17 PM:
> So the question to the philosophic amongst us: what is the answer to the
> above question? Is there a way in which philosophy can build on past
> work in the same way mathematics does? Is there an epsilon/delta
> breakthrough just waiting to happen in that domain? Will there be a
> "Modern Algebra" unification within philosophy, finding the
common
> ground amongst widely different concepts like symmetry groups, fields,
> rings, Hilbert spaces and the like?
Personally, I believe that philosophy (by which I mostly mean
analytic)
is the larger system in which mathematics is grounded. I tend to view
it as if philosophers are trail-blazing mathematicians. They foray out
into the wild and whittle away at the fuzzy thoughts out there,
preparing them for the more fastidious, civilized, mathematicians who
follow. (Note that I believe programmers to be a form of
mathematician... less fastidious than their more formal brethren,
applied mathematicians who are still less fastidious than their
brethren, pure mathematicians.)
At each stage, the reliance on the semantic grounding of the formalisms
is whittled away until you have, at the pure math stage, formalisms
grounded solely in identifiable axioms like zero, reciprocal, axiom of
choice, etc.
So, in my (fantasy) world, philosophy will never be as rigorous as
math
because philosophy _is_ math and math is philosophy... they're just at
different stages in the process. Philosophy is "upstream" and math is
"downstream". This leads to the following direct answers to your
questions:
> Why is it that philosophy does not build on prior work
> in the same way mathematics does?
Because philosophy is a frontier, wilderness activity, where prior work
is less important than solving some case specific, imminent, problem.
> Is there a way in which philosophy can build on past
> work in the same way mathematics does?
No, because the domains in which philosophy are useful are aswim in
meaning and syntactically impoverished. Philosophy is an embedded,
situated, open-ended, activity where everything constantly shifts
around. Foundations are built on sand, not granite.
> Is there an epsilon/delta
> breakthrough just waiting to happen in that domain? Will there be a
> "Modern Algebra" unification within philosophy, finding the
common
> ground amongst widely different concepts like symmetry groups, fields,
> rings, Hilbert spaces and the like?
Yes! But there is not just ONE breakthrough/unification coming. There
are many, just like there have been many. And once those breakthroughs
come, they congeal into a mathematics that is then adopted by an army
consisting of a different, more fastidious, type of philosopher. The
trail blazers move on to the next wild frontier while the "settlers"
move in and bring mind-numbing order to the region surrounding the
breakthrough.
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com
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Eric Charles
Professional Student and
Assistant
Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA
16601
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College