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Comment by normalnorm | Hacker News Reader

> There are good reasons that most of academia moved on from philosophy.

There are philosophy departments in almost every reputable University I know...

Everything that is non-STEM is underfunded, it doesn't matter if it is philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, etc. This has nothing to do with academia itself, but with the managerial society we live in, where MBA-types decide on the value of everything with simplistic, dumb and short-sighted economic metrics.

Science absolutely needs philosophy. Science is philosophy. There is not a lot of encouragement to do real science/philosophy these days, because this requires deep thinking and following all sorts of unknown paths. Everything must be justified in terms of what gadgets can be built with the discoveries.

We are going through a profoundly anti-intellectual stage in western culture.

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To see the difference between science and philosophy, compare this article to a reputable scientific paper.

You will see that science includes a testable hypothesis, experiments and/or analysis, and conclusions derived from the data.

This essay contains none of that.

Philosophy encompasses science. Testable hypothesis are a philosophical idea, justified on philosophical grounds. You can't justify the very idea of "testable hypothesis and experiments" by using testable hypothesis and experiments. There is a branch of philosophy devoted to this type of question, called "philosophy of science".

One very famous philosopher of science, Karl Popper, gave us the idea that for something to be considered a scientific theory, it must be possible to devise and experiment that could, in principle, falsify the theory. Still, the issue is not settled and there are alternative positions. These are deep questions.

One interesting thing to retain here is that science provides empirical knowledge, but there are other forms of knowledge. You alluded to "testable hypothesis", and so you in fact deployed non-empirical knowledge.

The scientific method gave birth to a branch of philosophy, first known as "natural philosophy", and modernly known as "science".

I do not think there is any value in disparaging philosophy, but in responding to such attitudes in the current context, it would be more useful to discuss what the branch known as philosophy of mind is achieving now, rather than the significance of philosophy in the foundation of science.

If philosophy is useless, then the good news is that we have no particular reason to believe that testable hypotheses, experiments, and data-derived conclusions are particularly useful either.

The reasons remain the same, regardless of how you label them.

>Everything that is non-STEM is underfunded, it doesn't matter if it is philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, etc.

...

>Science is philosophy.

If you are going to justify philosophy by subsuming science, then you can not consistently claim that it is underfunded. By any reasonable standard, pure scientific research is respectably, if not ideally, funded.

What's missing here, of course, is any consideration for those branches of philosophy that are not science. This strategy of showing the importance of philosophy by invoking the success of science is short-sighted, and does a disservice to fields such as ethics.

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