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Scientists on Philosophy
The scientists’ verdict on philosophy comes from outside it and aims at the discipline as it stands, and its use to science. Its word is “philosophy is dead”.
In 1988 Hawking regretted that philosophers had “not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories”; in The Grand Design (2010, with Leonard Mlodinow) “philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.” Steven Weinberg had argued, in “Against Philosophy” (Dreams of a Final Theory, 1992), that he knew of no one in postwar physics “whose research has been significantly helped by the work of philosophers”, while not denying “all value to philosophy, much of which has nothing to do with science”. Lawrence Krauss said in 2012 that “science progresses and philosophy doesn’t”, and days later withdrew any “blanket condemnation of philosophy as a discipline”. Neil deGrasse Tyson asked in 2014 why philosophers concern themselves “with the meaning of meaning”.
Weinberg’s complaint is about philosophy’s use to working physicists, and Krauss withdrew his. The replies:
- Tim Maudlin (2012): philosophy of physics “has become seamlessly integrated with the foundations of physics work done by actual physicists”.
- Massimo Pigliucci (2014): asking what philosophy of science has done for science lately is “a category mistake”; it is “epistemology applied to the scientific enterprise”.
- Carlo Rovelli (2018): “Those who deny the utility of philosophy, are doing philosophy”, and, the other way round, philosophers who discount science “do a serious disservice to intelligence and civilisation”.
Maudlin’s point has a history behind it. By the 1960s, as Christian Wüthrich puts it, “most of the people working in fundamental physics had turned away from the foundational problems of quantum mechanics”; a few, among them John Bell, Abner Shimony and Hilary Putnam, kept at them, and today, in his account, most philosophers and many physicists recognise that a central foundational problem remains.
The claim itself is older than the physicists. Nietzsche met it in 1886, writing against “the declaration of independence of the scientific man, his emancipation from philosophy” (Beyond Good and Evil §204, tr. Zimmern).