From: exukjb@exu.ericsson.se (ken bell)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: A nice Question.
Date: 16 Oct 92 16:01:55 GMT
Article-I.D.: exu.exukjb.330.719251315
Organization: Ericsson Network Systems, Inc.
X-Disclaimer: This article was posted by a user at Ericsson.
              The opinions expressed are strictly those of the
              user and not necessarily those of Ericsson.

In article <1992Oct15.161117.21408@wixer.cactus.org> sparky@wixer.cactus.org (Timothy Sheridan) writes:
>From: sparky@wixer.cactus.org (Timothy Sheridan)
>Subject: A nice Question.
>Date: 15 Oct 92 16:11:17 GMT


>Can somone tell me what the difference between philosophy and science is?
>Is philosophy simply a freeer forum? Is science mearly a mechanics hobby?
>Do these two come face to face in Info-theory and AI?
>I see so many long postes in philosophy is there a reason for this?
>Is it the greatest asperation of a philosophy to become a science?

>Is philosophy more closely related to religon?
>Can anyone answer this poste in less than 100 lines? (perhaps that is a
>linguistic question)

I think it was Lord Russell who said that philosophy was the no-man's land
between science and theology. This is ok, although it doesn't really tell
us much about the activity or methods of philosophy. And I'm not going to
say anything about that here, as any good introduction to philosophy book
can take you a good ways in understanding that.

There are some who claim that philosophy must give way to science once
a method of settling disputes in a given domain of inquiry come to be
generally accepted. I think that's true to an extent. Philosophy certainly
does spawn new sciences and is indeed in my view the very womb of science.
But what distinguishes it from science is its self-transcendence, the fact
that it is a second-order discipline not directly about the world in any 
straightfowardly empirical sense.  The fact that the question, What is 
philosophy? is a philosophical question, and no simple one at that, is 
illustrative of its self-transcendence. 

Also, consider that questions like, What is Science? or Is science of any
value to society, and if so, what is that value?  are not, and cannot
be, questions for scientific intelligence. They require reflection of a 
different kind: How, e.g., would you "test" any theories given as answers
to them without already assuming some answer to them.  Philosophy is the 
search for conceptual ultimates--ultimate evidence, ultimate values, 
ultimate reality, etc--and so it's method is not and cannot be 
circumscribed in the way other disciplines necessarily are. In philosophy,
EVERYTHING IS OPEN TO QUESTION. That's not to say there are no answers in 
philosophy, even final ones, because just to say the philosophical 
positions are controversial is not to say that the people holding those 
positions don't have the correct position, which would be a non-sequitur. 
All the fact of controversy shows is that THEY ARE DISPUTED. [In fact, I
suspect my post here with be disputed by many philosophers in this group!]

 
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