Massimo Pigliucci has a really interesting blog post detailing his first five years in philosophy (after 26 years as a biologist!). A lot of the post concerns the extent to which Pigliucci thinks (1) scientists often aren't interested enough in philosophy, and (2) philosophers often aren't interested enough in science. Here are some choice snippets:
The first thing to admit is that, academically, things have been a bit more complicated than I had anticipated. I had (naively, as it turns out) assumed that having more than a quarter century of experience in science, but also having done the hard work of going back to graduate school to build philosophy creds, would mean that as a philosopher of science I would encounter a generally friendly atmosphere: the scientists would be interested in what I had to say as a philosopher, because of my reputation in their own field; and the philosophers would be happy to have a real scientist in their midst who had taken their discipline seriously enough to go back to school for it. Instead, more often than not, I found the opposite to be true: a number of my new colleagues in philosophy think of me as too much of a scientist (I keep asking the perennially annoying question: “but isn’t this a matter of empirical evidence?”), while my old colleagues in the sciences see me as lost (i.e., prematurely retired) to armchair speculation (always asking them: “but isn’t that an epistemological or metaphysical assumptions that you are making?”)…
The mirror to scientists’ puzzlement at the claim that philosophical assumptions are fundamental to what they do is some philosophers’ bewilderment at the idea that their analysis ought to be informed by the best available empirical data. I’m not talking about the (correct) rejection of Sam Harris’ naive contention that science can determine moral values [14], but rather the general mistrust that so many of my colleagues (especially those in the so-called “analytical” tradition within the field) seem to have in regard to anything that smells too sciency.
For instance, there is a debate currently going on within metaphysics — one of the classical core disciplines within philosophy — about the extent to which science, and particularly fundamental physics, should be taken onboard while doing metaphysics. On the one hand we have the contributors to a recent collection entitled Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology [15], who argue for a metaphysics essentially independent from science, as if it were still tenable to think that we can somehow gain a priori knowledge about the world by just thinking about it (has nobody read Kant, of late?). On the other hand there are the contributors to an alternative collection, tellingly entitled Scientific Metaphysics [16] who refer to the other group (scornfully) as “neo-scholastics,” and who maintain that the project of metaphysics is to make sense of the picture of the world emerging from the individual sciences, not to proceed without science. I think the second group wins hands down, while the first one is fighting a loosing battle that only contributes to the further isolation of philosophy from the rest of the intellectual world.
Any thoughts? I'm inclined to agree with Pigluicci. If philosophy is to remain relevant in the 21st Century — if we are to do good philosophy of language, good philosophy of mind, good philosophy of time and physics, and good philosophy of free will 😉 — we need to get out of the armchair and get more involved with the science.
Or so say I. What say you?
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