Philosophy vs Science (Baggini vs Krauss)

[onager]

Debate in last week's Guardian between Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss. Posted here because they cover a lot of the issues often debated in this group. The comments after the article are good too:

Philosophy v science: which can answer the big questions of life?

Julian Baggini - Some of the things you have said and written suggest that you share some of science's imperialist ambitions. So tell me, how far do you think science can and should offer answers to the questions that are still considered the domain of philosophy?

Lawrence Krauss - Thanks for the kind words about science and your generous attitude. As for your "but" and your sense of my imperialist ambitions, I don't see it as imperialism at all. It's merely distinguishing between questions that are answerable and those that aren't. To first approximation, all the answerable ones end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/sep/09/science-philosophy-debate-julian-baggini-lawrence-krauss

[orpupilofnature57]

1. Does the ' Theory of Relativity ' still hold true ?

Last edited Sat Sep 22, 2012, 07:34 AM - Edit history (1)

How could you gage Love, Hate, Empathy or Apathy ? ' Socrates cave ' is the essence of philosophy, what accolade to science is immortalized because what we consider " answerable " is ambiguous, Deja vu isn't.

[longship]

2. Everybody knows that deja vu is a reboot in the Matrix.

.

[skepticscott]

3. So which questions

that are solely in the "domain" of philosophy have philosophers continually improved their answers to over time? What do we understand better than we did 50 or 100 years ago as a result of the work of philosophers? What are we able to do today that we couldn't do 100 years ago, as a result of philosopher's musings?

[onager]

4. I have the same kind of questions.

And that's another reason I posted this in the Religion group. The same questions apply to philosophy's dumber kid sister, theology.

To answer your questions, I can't think of a damned thing. The magisteria are overlapping all over the place these days.

I agree with Steven Hawking and suspect that his snark may have inspired this debate:

“But almost all of us must sometimes wonder: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8520033/Stephen-Hawking-tells-Google-philosophy-is-dead.html

Now if you'd asked me what questions are solely in the domain of recent college grads in Philosophy, maybe I can think of a couple: "How do I run this damn latte machine, boss?" or "Do you want fries with that?"

Yes, that's sort of mean. But I recently saw some youngster on the Internetz posting a word-salad about the greatness of his college courses in Post-Modern Philosophy or some bullshit. He threw in a gratuitous swipe at all the "drones" taking STEM classes - Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Apparently never a thought about how he is able to play Keyboard Warrior and send his alleged thoughts out to the world. Philosophy aside, irony is damn sure dead.