Philosophers just flail about within the space of unfalsifiable

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>>9234627
>>9234627
>If you point this out to philosophy fans, they will go crazy because you're challenging their dominance of the discourse.

As someone interested in philosophy, I have to disagree with this stereotype. I'm all about interdisciplinary strategies. Philosophy is pretty robust, but it's "rules" are open enough that it can merge with and gain from science, anthropology, history, art, mathematics, etc.

I think it's important to recongize the limits of a field though. Science's "rules" are much tighter than philosophy or art. So it's a bit hamstrung when it comes certain topics (ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, politics, popular culture).

A lot of the New Atheist crowd seems convinced that Scientific Materialism is answer to everything. You can see this in the attacks people like Dawkins and Hitchens make on the humanities.

I can't speak on Dennet, but I really don't think history will respect Dawkins or Hitchens as anything more than pop culture figures. It doesn't seem like they've contributed much of anything to Science (not an expert on that, personally), or Philosophy (very certain of this) or The Philosophy of Science (which they seem very ignorant of).

On the other side of things, there are people in the humanities who shun science as a dead end. They're missing out and they can be equally obnoxious.

I think anyone interested in Philosophy ought to have at least a basic understanding of the Philosophy of Science. "What is this Thing called Science" is a great place to start. It even has a nice cat on the cover.

>>9234699

I am speaking in the most general terms possible though. I posted dennet's book because it triggered me when I saw it on sci (inb4 trolling, I'm a litizen)

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>>9234627
Educate yourself, cretin.

>>9234705
Yeah, I get you. The whole "I don't need Science, Philosophy has all the answers" and it's counterpart "I don't need the Humanities, Science can answer everything" are both really obnoxious.

I mean, maybe Philosophy can answer everything, but only if you include inside of it "Natural Philosophy" as Newton and Aristotle liked to call it, aka Science.

I think a lot of the tension between Science and the Humanities is a result of university programs which encourage extreme specialization, turning you into an expert on a small topic. STEM majors have to spend countless hours burrowing down into a single thing (liver cancer in rats, the applied uses of cobalt, etc), and Humanities majors generally don't have access to Science courses beyond the most basic topics.

>>9234699
Dawkins' Selfish Gene/Extended Phenotype stuff was genuinely influential in evolutionary biology. but he should have stuck with that and not got all obnoxiously antitheist.

>>9234627
Philosophy is a poor man's Religion

>>9234627
I never heard of this book before seeing it posted here and I imagine I will never hear of it again either

>>9236315
cool life