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When Philosophy Lost Its Way

3 points| emanuelev | 10 years ago |opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

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brudgers|10 years ago

Philosophy adopted the scientific modus operandi of knowledge production, but failed to match the sciences in terms of making progress in describing the world.

Science is what traditionally is called "natural philosophy". The idea that science is not a form of philosophy is a useful abstraction but it's an interface not an atomic type (the same is true for academic philosophy). Or to put it another way, academic philosophy and hard science both often rely on forms of formal reasoning that makes their practice continuous with mathematics and its system of formal reasoning.

Linnean taxonomies of intellectual endevours are useful. Like all models they're wrong.