http://willwilkinson.disqus.com/enMon, 19 Feb 2007 18:29:25 -0000http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2007/02/02/stephen-stich-quote-of-the-day/#comment-3710920Check out what Amartya Sen says under his picture. Now that's my kind of philosopher. The anti-Stich!beebeMon, 19 Feb 2007 18:29:25 -0000http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2007/02/02/stephen-stich-quote-of-the-day/#comment-3710919This is just an anecdotal observation, but there does seem a lot of dissatisfaction in American philosophy with their lack of public influence and irrelevance. You can see that over at Leier Reports and here, for instance. <br><br><a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/fodo01_.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/fodo01_.html</a>bjkasWed, 07 Feb 2007 08:08:42 -0000http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2007/02/02/stephen-stich-quote-of-the-day/#comment-3710918"The more exact is a science, such as physics, the more its conclusions become independent of the philosophical matrix out of which they have grown. For insofar as those conclusions are quantitative, they have a validity independent of the philosophy which<br>the individual scientist tags on them. Thus, science can be compared to the building of an edifice: The completed theory is like an edifice from which all the scaffolding (including philosophy) has been removed. The edifice, however, contains nothing philosophical. It is a mere structure in numbers. It is in this sense that one should take Hertz's famous dictum: 'Maxwell's theory [of electromagnetism] is Maxwell's system of equations," a dictum that I cannot repeat often<br>enough. Nothing remotely as fundamental has ever been said by a great physicist about the physical theory of an even greater physicist.<br><br>When cut to the bare bones, exact science is nothing more, nothing less than a system of equations. There would be no conflict whatever between science and theology were scientists truly mindful of this truth. But scientists are, like all of us, philosophers as well. The only way to avoid philosophy is to say nothing. The trouble is that nothing can sell a bad philosophy more effectively than attaching it to a splendid science. (Thus science is turned into one of the three S's of modern life: Sports, Sex, Science, all writ large). The converse is not true; no amount of science, insofar as it is science and not something more, can justify a single philosophical proposition<br>and much less a single theological statement, which has to be a proposition not about how the heavens go, but how to go to Heaven. Unfortunately, theologians, believing themselves to be in possession of eternal truths, are prone to discourse about mere temporalities, such as the physical universe, about whose measurments, large and small, science is <b>the sole</b> arbiter."<br>--Stanley Jaki, "Cosmic Rays and Water Spiders" The Limits of a Limitless Science, pp. 239-241.Rob LightSun, 04 Feb 2007 05:11:23 -0000http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2007/02/02/stephen-stich-quote-of-the-day/#comment-3710916Rutgers philosophy, represent!ChuckFri, 02 Feb 2007 23:18:08 -0000http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2007/02/02/stephen-stich-quote-of-the-day/#comment-3710917My kind too. Stich has written some of my favorite papers in contemporary analytic philosophy.ChrisFri, 02 Feb 2007 07:09:51 -0000