[FOM] Goedel on Philosophy

[John Steel]

My impression is that the Greeks would not have made a sharp distincion 
between Philosophy and Math. or Physics. Even in Newton's time,
wasn't Physics "Natural Philosophy"? In a sense, the branch
of Metaphysics known as Ontology has made great progress,
from fire-earth-air-water to strings. 

Philosophy can serve as the "penumbra" of ideas 
surrounding more concrete subjects like math or physics. Philosophy can 
help lead you to the right questions, or general approaches to answering 
them. Moving ideas from the penumbra to the more concrete level is 
progress. Godel's own work seems a good example of this.

This isn't the sort of progress Godel was talking about.
In this picture, there's always a penumbra, and it gets
called Philosophy. Working within that penumbra can be
useful.

John Steel


On Sun, 4 Mar 2007, Andrew Boucher wrote:

> 
> On  3 Mar 2007, at 5:42 PM, praatika at mappi.helsinki.fi wrote:
> 
> > Harvey Friedman <friedman at math.ohio-state.edu>:
> >
> >> Many Philosophers that I know do not believe in such a notion of
> >> "progress" in philosophy.
> >>
> >> I am wondering what FOM subscribers think about this.
> >
> > I certainly think that there can be genuine progress in philosophy.
> >
> > Influential theories become refuted for good (e.g., all the key  
> > theses of
> > logical positivism),  apparent dichotomies are shown to be non- 
> > exhaustive
> > (e.g. radical scepticism vs strong foundationalism in  
> > epistemology), false
> > background assumptions become exposed, etc.
> >
> 
> The examples seem primarily to be of the form:  philosophy advances  
> thesis x; then philosophy refutes thesis x.  I guess this is progress  
> of a sort - the same sort where one swats down flies which one has  
> released oneself.
> 
> 
> 
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