Y'know if Glen's resolution was true I'd expect more of the scientific papers I read to be referencing Quine and Aristotle rather than Landau and Lifschitz. Explicitly acknowledging their debt, if you will. So perhaps you could give me some concrete examples: which philosopher should mathematicians thank for suggesting that the properties of the Riemann zeta function were worth studying? Which philosopher should physicists thank for suggesting that it's worth hunting for the Higgs boson? -- Robert
On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 5:07 PM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: > Not contempt. I'm puzzled. Hence the question: > Why is it that philosophy does not build on prior work > in the same way mathematics does? > > The answer Glen gave is quite satisfying: they're not expected to, they're > on the frontier figuring out the right questions to be addressing. Math is > the cleanup squad. > > This makes philosophy much easier to understand: just wait until they > tickle your fancy, then apply formalism to make it last. Philosophy is not > constructive. I think I knew that but hadn't put it into words. > > -- Owen >
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