I'm not widely enough read to really do it justice, imo.

Hawking and Dawkins have contributed more even to modern academic philosophy, let alone to "real philosophy," than the great majority of contemporary philosophers (eg search for their names in SEP and you'll see them discussed in multiple articles). It is true that sometimes they speak outside their specialties, but that doesn't make their actual contributions to philosophical thought less valuable.

More fundamentally, this criticism relies on an obsolete division of knowledge, where scientists study the physical world and philosophers study metaphysics. I see no grounds other than historical and bureaucratic for making this distinction any longer. Time, space, being, and the other fundamental categories that used to be explored as metaphysics are now quite clearly best explored through the scientific method than through intuition or a priori reasoning.

Yeah, like Hawking said the only people with any hope of making progress on this must be trained in science....they can be totally ignorant of Aristotle, Wiggenstein etc.

Philosophy is not dead and will never be dead. For Philosophy among several things is the attempt to ask questions that science has yet to answer, to actually consider how to live our lives in society in ways that benefit from modern science and acquired wisdom, to debate the foundations of science and knowledge itself and force science to answer tough questions including reframing its own structure at the core.

Philosophy is the mother of science. It is how you begin to have science. In the end however allow me to be arrogant enough to say that only a physicist or well versed in mathematics and physics other kind of scientist or polymath today can be a real legitimate relevant philosopher.

Agree completely.

The thing is though, while this is correct in theory, in practice, it's embarrassing to watch philosophers - even the best and smartest - flail around in physics. They make amateurish mistakes, say things that seem good philosophically but are absolute nonsense when you understand some physics.

I think physics has reached a point - maybe 100 years ago - where we've reached the limits of where our uninspired minds can take us. Understanding physics does more to advance the cutting edge of philosophy than all the philosophizing in the world.

If you think about it, the history of the world is one of physics correcting philosophy. Observe Aristotle's clownish attempt to understand the world around him - Earth, Fire, Air, Water. Observe medieval religious philosopher's clownish attempts to do the same - nonsense about God, the special nature of man, the universe, etc. Darwin did more to advance the philosophy of what man is and where he belongs than all of the great thinkers before him. Telescopes did more to advance an understanding of man's place in the universe than all of the philosophers that came before telescopes. Similarly, a philosophical understanding of our own ability to comprehend reality has been advanced more by understanding physics and neuroscience than by all the mental masturbation that philosophers do.

It's no coincidence that philosophy became increasingly advanced, and threw away/corrected much of its nonsense, as science and technology have become more advanced. Philosophy has achieved very little self-correction or increasing sophistication on its own.

What about physics would make it an especially challenging area of science to philosophize about?

I'm thankful I discovered early on that philosophizing is better than philosophers.

lol. This is no shyte imo though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracta...-Philosophicus

On the other hand the centennial is approaching, don't know if anything worth reading has been published after that.

Yeah, but I think even that might only be "worth reading" like literature is worth reading. Different from works by Newton or Gauss, which nobody actually reads but everybody learns.

1. No one really understands it, despite it forming the basis of our reality and giving us new ways to think about reality
2. The guys who understand it the best are the ones who do the equations.
3. This is well in evidence by seeing philosophers and humanities academics hold forth on physics, which ranges from insight-free to embarrassing.

In fact, an excellent way to observe the limits of the philosophy is to watch what happens when well-regarded philosophers or academics take on relativity or quantum mechanics. It's both painful and hilarious.

1. Understanding understanding is in the order in really understanding anything. That's philosophical while science continues to account for all real individual understanding.
2. The essential ghists of existing within a physical reality approximated by specialists are not a challenging set of suppositions.
3. sounds like an appeal to emotion.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is (probably) the first prominent treatment of truth-tables, which are still taught in basic logic classes, so at least in this case you're wrong.

Wiki says they appeared earlier in a paper by Post (and in other work from the late 1800s) which I imagine was far more influential for their use in math and CS. Granted, they are probably too trivial to not have had dozens of independent inventors.

Edit: But its a fair point that Wittgenstein was at least involved in discussions about the foundations of math involving people like Godel, Hilbert, Turing etc though he obviously had very little (if any) impact on math and a ton on philosophy.

How about understanding understanding understanding? Neuroscience will do more for understanding our own minds and what we can know than all the philosophers before it.

And no, understanding understanding is not necessary to understand. It's often an impediment. Look at the biases of the medieval philosophers that closed their minds to all kinds of things.
On the contrary - the insights gleaned from physics, evolutionary theory, geology and astromony have taken us FAR further into new philosophies than all the philosophy before it, which was equal parts ridiculous and sophomoric. Indeed, discoveries about the nature of the world have been the core driver of breakthroughs in philosophy.

Human minds are terrible at coming up with alternative philosophies and questioning their assumptions. It's taken science and empirical discovery to kickstart philosophy.
It's an appeal to observation.

Interpretations of observations. Missing that philosophy is already baked-in to any discipline one may extol may lead to missing it and jumping to conclusions away from understanding an understanding of philosophy.

That's possible, but I will point out that the Tractatus was very influential in the Vienna Circle, which included among its members Godel and Hans Hahn and was visited by Tarski, Quine, Frank Ramsey (who also provided the English translation) and others.

When I taught logic in college I mentioned truth tables as one of Wittgenstein's most important contributions to philosophy.

For what it's worth, I think you're fairly safe as a non-philosopher in ignoring Wittgenstein. He is still too recent and faddish for anyone to have a very accurate sense for his importance as a thinker. However, it seems to me foolish to ignore Aristotle. The efficiency gains in understanding history, philosophy, and religion are too large.

Where do you get your intelligence baseline? You often say that this or that person, typically considered very smart, is actually very stupid, moronic, and sophomoric. Are you speaking from the perspective of a superintelligence?

To me this seems like a rhetorical trick, where you try to convince your readers to give your claims more credence than your arguments otherwise warrant by speaking from a position of such great authority that you can not only criticize the great thinkers of the past, but even call them idiots.

While it's possible, I've credited Myers as being a pretty sensible guy, and he's by no means sympathetic to theist beliefs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PZ_Myers

Thanks for clarifying. I thought you were responding to something else.

The elaborated version is still not a good moral argument.

When you look at the underlying assumptions, you start to see that it's really just a poor use of reasoning. For example, consider the implicit assumption that caring for a child must be a negative (his phrasing is "condemning yourself ... to caring [for your child]"). There are aspects of conditional familial support ("I will only care for you if it's sufficiently convenient for me") and things like that. It's a lackluster attempt to make a moral argument.

If it's a class on moral philosophy, he probably squeezes by with a D+ for his reasoning.

I take a long view of knowledge. I think failing to understand how thinkers thought in the past and understand relationships with those modes of thought with the present will lead to poor thinking. I'm moderately confident that a student in a history of philosophy gets credit for making those connections.

I don't claim to have explained it in its entirety. I've elaborated more in this post, but am hesitant to take the thread too far afield by going further.

I would say that their contributions to philosophy are far more that people are talking *about* them more so than what they've said "philosophically." I will grant that there's probably some disagreement about what that means. If Dawkins makes a claim about biology, would you say that this is also a philosophical statement? Similarly, if Hawking makes an astrophysical calculation, would you consider that to be philosophy as well? Your second paragraph seems to indicate something like this.

I don't disagree that there's overlap and that demarcation can be difficult. And insofar as philosophers are trying to parse the ideas that they've put forth, then I agree that they have contributed to philosophy. But using the same logic, I would have to say that Donald Trump would have contributed to philosophy when political philosophers start trying to parse whatever his presidency turns into.

Dawkins' writing on biology is strikingly philosophical in nature, which is probably part of what makes him so effective as a writer. His most well-known contributions are primarily conceptual rather than experimental, eg the idea of a meme, or the focus on the gene as the unit of selection. This is what SEP's article on philosophy of biology says, accurately in my view, about Dawkins:

Humans can hold 5-12 concepts in our head at one time. Have horribly inaccurate memories. Are fooled by confirmation bias very easily. Fall apart completely at the first level of indirect/abstraction for most people, and by the second/third for people that are trained and highly intelligent. Have enormous trouble questioning or even seeing our assumptions.

We are morons. The baseline I'm using is someone without any of our manifest flaws. Take the best bits of various humans and put them in one person...and see the result. You can see this in geniuses - it's not so much that they're incredibly smart, it's that their brains are functional enough to avoid many of the common cognitive flaws that humans have. The fact that the dumbest humans are not much smarter than dogs and the smartest can understand nuclear physics and complex math, makes you realize how barely out of the swamp we are (and our intelligence is).

My belief is that there are many concepts that would be dead simple/obvious to an even slightly higher intelligence that we struggle with because our brains aren't very good.
It's not really about that. It's that human have gross cognitive flaws that trap them in absurd beliefs for countless generations. That's why we're obviosly stupid.

The "great thinkers" of the past couldn't see outside obvious mental traps. For example:

- It is obvious that Earth is not the center of the universe to a fairly high probability. Basic logic and looking around gets you there.
- It is obvious that the God of religions is a human invention. Observing your own cognitive flaws and biases gets you there.
- No one ever really considered and followed through on the very simple idea that all derives from simple impersonal laws, including humans.

These are due purely to persistent human cognitive biases. Other intelligences, even of equal processing power, would not have made these mistakes.

Stephen Hawking? Has he been always an atheist?

I think it's much about being pc. Would Newton have become chief of the mint if he'd questioned god?

Guys asking too many inconvenient questions were (put in way of death or isolation here)

Saying that this is "obvious" is nothing more than a statement of your own "stupidity" (using your word) and your cognitive bias. Of course it's obviously true when you already believe the conclusion!

Not really. In fact, not at all. The leap from "cognitive bias" to some sort of conclusion about reality is a terrible step of logic.

Except that this a factually erroneous claim. Aristotlelian physics revolved around impersonal laws.

I dont see the appeal to go all pessimistic. You can make an argument for both sides here, after all we are the most intelligent species around. It is solely a matter of what you want to focus on.

To me how our mind works is just an observation, i dont necessarily give a damn whether its good or bad, thats just how it evolved to be until this specific point in time.

And i dont necessarily think it has to make much sense to talk about our biases as something that is purely negative. I think we navigate a complex world and some of these things actually have some level of truth or usefulness to them. They are not necessarily useful in thinking about complex matters etc, they might misguide us then, but maybe they can e.g help us to survive. Negativity bias is one example that does just that.