/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20749318]

Is there any use in studying philosophy? Wittgenstein makes me doubt it...

[Anonymous No.20749337]

Why does he make you doubt it?

[Anonymous No.20749340]

It can help elucidating your thoughts. As something higher, no. Wittgenstein ended it.

[Anonymous No.20749357]

>>20749318
Is speaking, typing words on this board, or communicating with anyone in any way useful. Wittgenstein makes me doubt this.

[Anonymous No.20749360]

>>20749318
Niggers like you looking for "uses" don't need to bother.

[Anonymous No.20749393]

>>20749337
Because from what I understand certain kind of questions are just non sense because we use incorrectly the language and are not meant to be answered. Doesn't that negates the sense of metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics?

[Anonymous No.20749407]

>>20749360
Sorry uses is not the right word, does it make sense? I mean I really am interested in philosophy and I am deciding if I should pursue it more seriously

[Anonymous No.20749416]

>>20749318
NGMI. if you have to ask how "useful" it is, you should not even bother with philosophy. i read it because i enjoy it and i love learning as much as possible about the world, as well as the process of building a worldview around it. as >>20749360 said, niggers like you should not even bother.

[Anonymous No.20749419]

He clearly doesn't make you doubt in the right way if you ignorantly hold onto your axioms.

[Anonymous No.20749420]

>>20749340
Wittgenstein himself was one of the biggest critics against this claim made by young Wittgenstein.

>>20749318
It's important for understanding intellectual and political history. Also for clarifying political and religious thinking.

Philosophy gave birth to modern science. It's most practical role today is in continuing to assist thinking in the sciences. Yes, most philosophy programs are still very backwards looking, and philosophy is still, unfortunately, taught as a list of great names you plow through with little topical organization.

That said, a lot of philosophy programs, having absolutely abysmal placement rates for PhDs, have started integrating with the sciences. Philosophers of mind get the equivalent of an MS in cognitive neuroscience, philosophers of physics or those who work in ontology might get the equivalent of an MS in physics. Logicians learn to code, and have an important role to play at the bleeding edge of computer science (reversible computers for example, which take advantage of Landauer's Principal to compute at very low energy).


This has been slow to catch on but is out there. A bunch of physicists who work in quantum foundations have also earned second PhDs in philosophy.

Biosemiotics and information science is another area where philosophy is important.

You need philosophy of science to avoid people claiming all sorts of shit is unfalsifiable and this immediately moot. The problem with the Popper worship here is that Quine showed that nothing is falsifiable. Also, it is dumb to drop all falsified theories instead of positing unseen variables. Newton's Laws got falsified by orbits early on, but the discovery of new planets explained the variance centuries later.

Atoms were considered unscientific by Mach. Quarks and multiverse we're considered unscientific. Yet quantum chromodynamics is hugely successful and inflation has tons of observational support but predicts level one and two multiverses and solves the "fine tuning problem."

So, no, philosophy is still needed. You need it for issues in science like haecceitism and for new logic for computing. Same with math. It seems disconnected and like abstract navel gazing, but then you get something like the chaos theory revolution and the tools become essential.

[Anonymous No.20749452]

If by studying you mean reading on your own: yeah you should do that if it interests you. Even if it is a dead end unproductive field that didnt answer anything it set out to, there is still some entertainment value in exploring what others thought.

If you mean as a degree: absolutely not. Modern university is one big IQ test where if you pick anything outside medicine and engineering you are essentially writing "I am a big fucking retard" on your forehead and pretty much cementing yourself in the minwage gulag of suffering. No one is ever going to take you seriously or give you a real job. You will be seen as one of 'those'.

>>20749420
In professional sense, philosophers only create problems, they dont solve any. There exists no physics or mathematics paper that cites a philosopher. No, there are no scientific institutions that hire philosophers. No, a philosophy phd still cant solve 1st or 2nd year math/coding/physics degree homework.

A philosopher will never be equivalent to a physicist or a mathematician because physicists and mathematicians have near absolute prediction power while philosophers are as useful and legitimate in these fields as gypsy fortune tellers, with a predictive power to match.

[Anonymous No.20749466]

>>20749420
Also, philosophy bleeds into science anyhow. Copenhagen was long seen as incoherent, and it only makes sense through the lens of logical positivism, which collapsed due to contradictions. But these unexamined assumptions held science back.

Same goes for the commitment to an single objective external world that can be described using a "view from nowhere," or "God's eye view." This is arguably incoherent, as critics of Kant pointed out, but it is the default ontology of science. But science is about epistemological methods, it makes no ontological claims. However, the claims of physicalism slip through nonetheless and muddy the waters. Physicalism itself might be incoherent (Hemple's Dilemma), because its adherents change their definition of what is physical based on whatever has observational support.

This wouldn't be a problem if they didn't also dismiss viable theories because they conflict with a physicalist ontology.

Delayed Wigner's Friend experiments are throwing the idea of an objective world accessible to all observers into serious doubt. Information theoretic approaches to physics, which have been highly successful, imply that nothing exists "as it is for itself," but only as it relates to other things. See also: "It From Bit," and the "Participatory Universe."

Oddly enough, philosophical navel gazing about if a universe of just two totally identical spheres exactly two miles apart can exist have helped to answer questions about the participatory nature of physics. But to keep pushing on this frontier you need to examine the philosophical assumptions packed into physicalism, and pull apart which parts are based on scientific methodology, and which are unexamined dogma. Einstein's great achievement with unifying space and time was all about questioning unquestioned philosophical dogma.

A theory of quantum gravity seems likely to posit unobservable other universes at this point.

[Anonymous No.20749474]

>>20749318
Yeah. It teaches you how to think , how to distinguish between opinion and knowlege, how to argue effectively, etc

[Anonymous No.20749498]

>>20749452
This is dumb as shit. Go read Einstein. He cites philosophers all the time. Mach was primarily a philosopher in terms of influence and is constantly cited in physics.

There are numerous physics journals on haeccity and they all cite Leibnitz' Law. I believe Aristotle is still the most cited person in biology. There is an entire subdiscipline of biology based on Pierce, and because Pierce was deeply inspired by Hegel, he gets cited too.

Here is a 400 page paper by an MIT and Harvard trained engineer on the relevance of Hegel to information science: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://engineering.lehigh.edu/sites/engineering.lehigh.edu/files/_DEPARTMENTS/ise/pdf/tech-papers/21/21T_004.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj6pfCv4Zv5AhXIKkQIHUb_DpQQFnoECAYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1ADs1mjjSyXaozdE2kmRX9

When Paul Davies' wanted to write a compilation on information science he reached out to physicists and biologists, but also philosophers for submissions.

Also, pic related.

[Anonymous No.20749505]

>>20749466
Why would any scientific institution hire a philosopher instead of a gypsy fortune teller, when at the end of the day they have the same predictive power?
No one in the 21st century who is publishing scientific papers left the lab thinking to himself
>hmm i wonder what will a philosopher think about my paper
You can namedrop quantum chromodynamics all you want but anyone in physics can just ask you to calculate angular velocity off of a graph in linear time and after you fail he wont speak to you about physics ever again, as this is something first year students are doing in their sleep.

>>20749474
This is just the marketing for all humanities degrees but no one can prove it. And no one serious takes the marketing seriously.

[Anonymous No.20749518]

>>20749498
And also.

Also, implying there are any employed philosophers of mathematics who haven't taken undergrad and graduate level mathematics. The field is incredibly narrow so almost anyone with a post is someone who could get accepted to a top mathematics program. You can't do phil of math without knowing math. Some people who do philosophy of math have their actual PhD in mathematics and pivoted later.

[Anonymous No.20749522]

>>20749505
>Professional philosophers of physics haven't passed graduate physics classes...

[Anonymous No.20749540]

>>20749522
No one at DARPA is hiring philosophers. No one at aerospace corporations that have trillion dollar black budgets is hiring philosophers. You might not like it but this is why we fund things like physics and engineering. So our scramjet engines fly faster and so our reactors make more power. This is the place for physics and mathematics in our society. Killing near peer power's pilots and penetrating their air defense. This is why we build science institutes.

It has nothing to do with which feelings Kant or Hegel had about anything or which isms you subscribe to this week. No one cares. And no one is setting aside billions of dollars for your project in isms.

[Anonymous No.20749553]

>>20749505
>You can namedrop quantum chromodynamics all you want but anyone in physics can just ask you to calculate angular velocity off of a graph in linear time and after you fail he wont speak to you about physics ever again, as this is something first year students are doing in their sleep.

An undergrad on the left side of the Dunning-Kreuger slope might. Becker, Tegmark, Greene, Wilczek, etc. reference philosophy all the time. Pic related.

Same with other fields, Donald Hoffman for example.

But I think that Anyone overstates the case. Employment for philosophy PhDs is abysmal. By my reckoning, it seems like more people who write about the philosophy of x science have degrees in that discipline than in philosophy, by an impressive margin.

Maybe some programs do actually give their candidates coursework in a science, but most do not. At best it is optional outside of a few niche places like UC Irvine. Professionally, it's normally going to make more sense to get a degree in the science and take philosophy courses on the side than vice versa.

[Anonymous No.20749601]

>>20749318
Yes, it's pointless, but if it's pointless then everything's pointless. God isn't real and science will just give us more potential destructive power furthermore, your society has no future, its death is certain.

How are you gonna pass the time huh?

[Anonymous No.20749607]

>>20749553
>popsci literally whos, usually professors, sometimes interact outside their field to attract fresh meat to their courses
Listen. Professional physicists dont do this. Real physicists usually work for aerospace industry or national security for the government. Exactly 0% of their pay depends on winning popularity contests or grabbing highschooler attention. Physics professors are looked down upon among the physicists because we have real jobs out there unlike humanities academia.

tl;dr Why do I need a philosopher's take on pic related?

[Anonymous No.20749632]

Semi-related: does anyone have that image saying Wittgenstein was a massive sperg and the original Tractatus manuscripts had drawings of naked cat girls that he wanted in the published version? I forgot the source cited there and can't find that info anywhere else (which makes me think it was made up, but it's still funny)

[Anonymous No.20749644]

>>20749318
The value of philosophy is to be sought in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects arouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, however, we find that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty which is the true answer to the doubts that it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities, which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.

[Anonymous No.20749667]

>>20749607
>Why do I need a philosopher for analytical geometry?
Great point. Surely no philosopher could figure that stuff out. Imagine some humanities buffoon like Descartes going on about "cognitive ergo sum," being able to help with that.

[Anonymous No.20749675]

>>20749318
Philosophy teaches critical thinking
If you just want easy answers go join a cult

[Anonymous No.20749702]

>>20749667
>treating ancient polymaths as sociologists/psychologists/philosophers first
Alright then but name one relevant modern philosopher tho. One philosopher of today that is oh so quoted and cited by physicists nonstop.

Idk man it seems painfully obvious to me that just like philosophers displaced priests as credible authority on things during the age of humanism/secularism, today its hard sciences displacing both priests and philosophers and you pretty much have to be a retard to study philosophy or religion in 21st century, no one is asking religion/soft sciences/humanities degrees for their opinions because none of their shit works.

[Anonymous No.20749710]

>>20749607
You don't get modern applied physics without the theoretical physics of the past decades. This has always been the case.

Sure, engineers build more efficient engines. Good luck doing that without Boltzmann's theoretical equations, and good luck resolving the Gibbs Paradox or getting to Tsallis entropy without doing some philosophical thinking about what is and isn't subjective in your formulas.

[Anonymous No.20749760]

Its actually no suprise that logical positivism, materialism and physicalism is so detested here when sperges like Guenon and literal magic users like Evola are celebrated here.

This board is astrology and harry potter but for men

[Anonymous No.20749761]

>>20749702
Just one of Tim Maudlin's books has been cited 1,088 times, including many physics journals.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&hl=en&as_sdt=80005&sciodt=0,11&cites=6104745007660246447&scipsc=

[Anonymous No.20749784]

>>20749760
I agree with this sentiment, but I don't think that's 100% why logical positivism gets shit on. It's that their works are incredibly sure of themselves and dismiss all sorts of areas of inquiry as nonsense.

Then people read these for the first time, without the context of what later happened to logical positivism, and begin asserting these same errors as analytical truths. It's notable that the two greatest logical positivists, Wittgenstein and Quine, were the ones to destroy it, using its own methods.

[Anonymous No.20749802]

>>20749761
I see.. it has been cited by Sokal as a parody citation. And once more in "abuse of science by postmodernists".

I dont understand if you can differentiate between actual/professional physics and pop science quantum namedrop ismism. Academia isnt prestige in physics. Those who cant do physics, teach physics.

Take an actual work of physics (or math, or engineering) that quotes 21st century philosophers. Take a professional paper in aeronautics or hypersonics for example, one that has more equations than words, more numbers than letters. Take a real piece of modern physics.
I can bet my left nut you wont find a single philosopher being cited.

[Anonymous No.20749825]

>>20749318
no. stop wasting your time and read books that are relevant to your life, or at least think will be relevant. Philosophy is most of the time nothing but mental masturbation.

[Anonymous No.20749900]

>>20749802
Cherry picking, there are plenty from physics journals there. The one on Bell Inequalities has 2,000+ citations.

You seen infatuated with "hard math," as some sort of standard of difficulty and "realness." I can assure you that Lawvere's work on Hegelian Dialectical has enough mathematical notation to make your head spin and is as of yet not used practically.

[Anonymous No.20749929]

>>20749318
Why does he make you doubt it?

[Anonymous No.20750188]

>>20749632
you're new like most people on this board so you don't remember that posting fabricated anecdotes about wittgenstein's autism used to be a popular sport here

[Anonymous No.20750196]

>>20750188

[Anonymous No.20750205]

>>20750196

[Anonymous No.20750266]

>>20749929
>>20749393 this

[Anonymous No.20750307]

>>20749318
Why does he make you doubt it?

[Anonymous No.20751451]

>>20749318
The most relevant use of philosophy: to prevent yourself from killing yourself.

[Anonymous No.20751493]

>>20751451
>the only use of philosophy is to commit evil
Really makes you think huh.

[Anonymous No.20751548]

uses for philosophy as it is taught, in order of popularity
1. Become a professional moral purist, sort of an academic HR lecturer, but for all humanity, helps if you're brown and/or disfigured
2. Become a professional moral contrarian, same as 1 but you try to contradict the method of your peers while presenting the exact same conclusions, like internet communists or Mencius Moldbug
3. Historian, the effective fate of people who wish to study philosophy but won't do anything modern, good if you're terrified of the world outside uni, bad if you ever want any money
4. Lawyer, arguably the single most powerful profession on the planet, but you'll need a law degree, showmanship, extensive knowledge of court precedent, and phil only teaches some of it

[Anonymous No.20751580]

>>20749498
>>20749518
>heh, stupid STEMtards, aren't omniscient...
>*goes back to playing performative word salad*

[Anonymous No.20751586]

>philosophy degree is great because you need to get another degree you could have gotten straight away in the first place
so just dont get the degree in philosophy
simple as
all you are doing when you graduate philosophy, is signal employers you grew up so sheltered and delusional that you are casually confusing hobbies and jobs, that you are not intelligent enough and reliable enough and capable enough to figure out that the only sustainable way to do your hobbies is to get your jobs done first

philosophy degree is simply signalling character flaws

[Anonymous No.20751611]

>>20749318
Why does he make you doubt it?