Re: The Grand Design, Philosophy is Dead, and Hubris
Posted by
Prof David West on
Jul 07, 2011; 8:29pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-Grand-Design-Philosophy-is-Dead-and-Hubris-tp6559131p6559844.html
Einstein and Mach (and many others in the Physics community) used to say that the only people qualified to be philosophers were physicists. This is not so different and almost certainly shares the same premise that only Physicists really understood Reality.
Interestingly enough, when Quantum Theory became central to "understanding reality" the classical physicists basically banned philosophical type discourse from the profession in favor of 'don't think about what the equations mean, just shut up and calculate."
davew
On Thu, 07 Jul 2011 16:21 -0400, "Nicholas Thompson" <
[hidden email]> wrote:
Isn’t that like saying that mathematics is dead because [some] mathematicians haven’t kept up with modern … um… astrophysics?
N
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore
Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2011 1:02 PM
To: Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: [FRIAM] The Grand Design, Philosophy is Dead, and Hubris
I just looked at the book review for Hawking and Mlodinow's book The Grand Design:
Although the book might be interesting, I was caught up by the statement Philosophy is Dead!
Quote: The Grand Design begins with a series of questions: "How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves?", "How does the universe behave?", "What is the nature of reality?", "Where did all this come from?" and "Did the universe need a creator?". As the book's authors, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, point out, "almost all of us worry about [these questions] some of the time", and over the millennia, philosophers have worried about them a great deal. Yet after opening their book with an entertaining history of philosophers' takes on these fundamental questions, Hawking and Mlodinow go on to state provocatively that philosophy is dead: since philosophers have not kept up with the advances of modern science, it is now scientists who must address these large questions.
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org