Philosophy

Philosophers often talk about science, science seldom about of philosophy and its impact on science. Below is a set of quotes, continously updated, from scientists and philosophers concerning philosophy.

Richard P. Feynman 

Philosophers, incidentally, say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive and probably wrong. 

My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza - and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these Attributes, and Substances, all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there is no excuse for it! In the same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions and take the contrary propositions, and look at the world - and you can't tell which is right. Sure, people were awed because he had the courage to take on these great questions, but it doesn't do any good to have the courage if you can't get anywhere with the question.

It isn't philosophy that gets me, it's the pomposity. If they'd just laugh at themselves. If they'd just say, `I think it's like this, but von Leipzig thought it was like that, and he had a good shot at it, too'. If they'd explain that this is their best guess ... But so few of them do; instead, they seize on the possibility that there may not be an ultimate fundamental particle, and say that you should stop work and ponder with great profundity: `You haven't thought deeply enough, first let me define the world for you'. Well, I'm going to investigate it without defining it!

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Carl Friedrich Gauss

You see the same  sort of thing [mathematical incompetence] in the contemporary philosophers Schelling, Hegel, Nees von Essenbeck, and their followers; don't they make  your hair stand  on the end with their definitions? Read in the history of  ancient philosophy what the big men of  that day - Plato and others (I except Aristotle) - agve in the way of explanations. But even  with Kant himself it is often not much better; in my opinion his distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions is one of the those things that either run out in a triviality or are  false.

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Steven Weinberg

The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative way - by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers ... It is just that philosophical principles have not generally provided us with the right preconceptions. In our hunt for the final theory, physicists are more like hounds than hawks; we have become good at sniffing around on the ground for traces of the beauty we expect in the laws of nature, but we do not seem to be able to see the path to the truth from the heights of philosophy. 

From time to time since then I have tried to read current work on the philosophy of science. Some of it I found to be written in a jargon so impenetrable that I can only think that it aimed at impressing those who confound obscurity with profundity.

But I do not aim here to play the role of a philosopher, but rather that of a specimen, an unrenegate working scientist who finds no help in professional philosophy. I am not alone in this; I know of no one who has participated actively in the advance of physics in the postwar period whose research has been significantly helped by the work of philosophers.

Even where philosophical doctrines have in the past been useful to scientists, they have generally lingered on too long, becoming of more harm than they ever were of use.

Physicists do of course carry around with them a working philosophy. For most of us, it is a rough-and-ready realism, a belief in the objective reality of the ingredients of our scientific theories. But this has been learned through the experience of scientific research and rarely from the teachings of philosophers. 

Daniel  C. Dennett

When philosophical fantasies become too outlandish - involving time machines, say, or duplicate universes or infinitely powerful deceiving demons - we may wisely decline to conclude anything from them. Our conviction that we understand the issues involved may be unreliable, an illusion produced by the vividness of the fantasy.

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Clark Glymour

A second contemporary approach to skepticism and the problems of knowledge, an approach that can best be called primitivism [Among proponents of primitivism mentioned are notably Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty], rejects the concern for rational, true belief that such problems presuppose ... 

Primitivism doesn't have much to offer those interested in the possibilities and limits of knowledge, in how we must be constituted and how the world must be constituted for us to know the world, in the nature of reason, demonstration and meaning, in how the phenomena of mind can arise in a mindless world. Indeed, primitivists do not want to offer any results about these topics, nor, often enough, do they want others to.

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Stefan Kafner 

Philosophy is concerned with two matters: soluble questions that are  trivial and critical questions that are insoluble.

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Frederic Raphael

We thought philosophy ought to be patient and unravel people's mental blocks. Trouble with doing that is, once you've unravelled them, their heads fall off.

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Bertrand Russell

I think that bad philosophers may have a certain influence, good philosophers, never.

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher and this development, we are assured is indubitably in advance. Unforyunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us  this assurance.

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Gilbert Ryle

Soo too  Plato  was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was  too  much  of  a philosopher to  think that anything he had  said was  the last word. It was left to the disciples to identify his footmarks with his destination.

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