From theories of gravity, something which I'm more familiar with, I'd say that scientific theories seem to progress in such a way that the older ones are special cases of newer ones.

To illustrate, the calculation of relative velocity involves the use of the Lorentz factor, but at nonrelativistic speeds, it tends to zero and can be ignored completely. — Agent Smith

Hilary Putnam makes a distinction between scientific equations and worldviews:

“Theories in a mature science typically include earlier theories as limiting cases. But it is important to notice that what they include as limiting cases are the equations of the earlier theories, not the world-views of these theories. There is no sense in which the world-view of Newtonian physics is a "limiting case" of the world-view of general relativity, or a "limiting case" of the world-view of quantum mechanics. There is no more evidence that science converges to one final world-view than there is that literature or morality converge to one final world-view.”

We couldn't use the concept 'sitting' if we had no concepts. But we could sit if we had no concepts (hamster example). And we do have concepts. So what is left is (a) sitting and (b) concepts. And the difference between them. And the OP still contains the identified mistake. And it still contains some things of value, despite that mistake. — Cuthbert

No, we can not use the word ‘sit’ to refer to a doing without concepts, or without some other organized framework of interrelationality ( sensori-motor schemas of movement and perception). All we can legitimately say is that we are always exposed to an outside that provides affordances and constraints relative to the direction of our functioning. Yes, there is an outside , but we cannot associate any intrinsic features with it , because what these features are is always relative to some other features , which are always in a state of reciprocal transformation, independent of our subjectivity. I dont agree with Quine that the relativist entanglement of fact and value finally reaches bedrock with physics.

Behaviorally, its absence makes little difference, apart for a few subtle impairments. But internally, the consequences are profound: those who lack this structure have no internal lives at all. — hypericin

This description is not that far removed from how enactivist cognitive science understands consciousness.
That is, they dispense with the internal-external, subjective-objective divide and argue that awareness is embodied , which means that it is an interaction , either with other persons or other aspects of one’s environment, which can include one’s bodily( affective) environment.
In this view consciousness is not some mysterious inner substance or module, it is an elaboration of organizational and functional characteristics of all living systems.

Wherever we would be sitting, it would not be on a concept. If we had no concepts we might still have somewhere to sit - as a hamster might sit somewhere, for example. Earthquakes can throw chairs around and they don't have the concept of a chair. The post you quoted has some interesting thoughts in it. I pointed out one of the things that is not quite in order. You suspected there was at least one. So there it is, for what it's worth. — Cuthbert

To get to ‘what a thing is’ non-conceptually , we would have to remove all words that conceptually determine what it is that is being done or seen ( and not just words. Conceptually is richer than just linguistic expression). So we can’t use ‘sitting’, ‘throwing’, a spatial ‘somewhere’ or temporal ‘some thing’, words like ‘hamster’ and ‘earthquake’. So what is left?

The concept of a chair is a concept. It does not follow that a chair is a concept. And in fact a chair is not a concept. We can do things with chairs that we cannot do with concepts. We can't sit on a concept, for example. That is a crucial difference between chairs and concepts — Cuthbert

Perception is conceptually saturated. So doing things with chairs is informed by this tacit background intelligibility. We throw chairs, or sit on them , or move them around. These performances presuppose an interpretation of what we are doing.

A philosophical understanding is possible if we try to conceive it as provisional, limited, conditioned, imperfect, rather than ultimate.
— Angelo Cannata

I think most philosophers believe that. — Jackson

Yep.

But by that logic we can never understand society - because we are a part of it. We can’t understand natural selection because we aren’t removed from it. Nor could we understand genetics, medicine, psychology etc because it all applies intrinsically to our being.

Yet we do have a good understanding of these things as they have lead to a knowledge database that reflects what seems to occur in each case. — Benj96

Recent approaches in cognitive psychology base knowledge on biological models of niche construction. According to this thinking, scientific and other kinds of knowledge are not representations of the world, they are constructed interactions. To know is to change one’s schematized interactions with one’s environment in accord with one’s needs and purposes. What we call
consciousness is merely a more complexly integrated form of organism-environment interactions that enact biological niches. So in knowing the world we are not ‘capturing’ or mirroring something pre-existing, we are changing it in complex ways. The role of memory in human conceptualization is not that of access to an unaltered past. Memory is always a reconstruction of the past.

Memory doest retrieve a pristine past , but it reveals a continuity between the past. and the present. My larger point is that the general functions of human conscious knowledge creation are only elaborations of the normative sense-making that all organisms achieve in the form of niche construction. Even for the simplest creatures , the world appears and matters to
them in a certain way relative to their needs and aims. The fact that cosmological history evinces a development from simple particles and interactions to more andmore complex relationships allows us to link human cogntive and organismic niche construction back to self-organizing processes characterizing pre-life history also. The evolution of the inorganic realm thus presupposes a kind of memory. In order to speak of regions of a universe that become more complex over time, we have to assume that something remains to be referred back to as development takes place.

Once we abandon the idea that knowledge is a representing or capturing of the world , we can begin to dissolve the gap we have created between what a natural world does and what human conceptualization does.

Currently art is considered subjective. Finding an objective explanation for art is one of the challenges philosophy has to yet solve. — Philosophim

Unless of course both art and science are intersubjective, but in different ways, as Thomas Kuhn argues. That’s why he concludes that if the idea of progress in the arts is ambiguous, then it is in science also:

“The most persuasive case for the concept of cumulativeness is made by the familiar contrast between the development of science and that of art. Both disciplines display continuity of historical development –
neither could have reached its present state without its past – yet the relation of present to past in these two fields is clearly distinct.
Einstein or Heisenberg could, we feel sure, have persuaded Newton that twentieth-century science has surpassed the science of the seventeenth century, but we anticipate no remotely similar conclusion from a debate between, say, Rembrandt and Picasso.
In the arts successive developmental stages are autonomous and self-complete: no obvious external standard is available for comparisons between them.

The creative idiom of a Rembrandt, Bach, or Shakespeare resolves all its aesthetic problems and prohibits the consideration of others. Fundamentally new modes of aesthetic expression emerge only in intimate conjunction with a new perception of the aesthetic problem that the new modes must aim to resolve. Except in the realm of technique, the transition between one stage of artistic development and the next is a transition between incommensurables. In science, on the other hand, problems seem to be set by nature and in advance, without reference to the idiom or taste of the scientific community. Apparently, therefore, successive stages of scientific development can be evaluated as successively better approximations to a full solution. That is why the present state of science always seems to embrace its past stages as parts, which is what the concept of cumulativeness means. Guided by that concept, we see in the development of science no equivalents for the total shift of artistic vision – the shift from one integrated set of problems, images, techniques, and tastes to another.”

Kuhn disagrees with this cumulate e model of science:

If we are to preserve any part of the metaphor which makes inventions and discoveries new bricks for the scientific edifice, and if we are simultaneously to give resistance and controversy an essential place in the development of science, then we may have to recognize that the addition of new bricks demands at least partial demolition of the existing structure, and that the new edifice erected to include the new brick is not just the old one plus, but a new building. We may, that is, be forced to recognize that new discoveries and new theories do not simply add to the stock of pre-existing scientific knowledge. They change it. (Kuhn M2, p. 7)19

Often a decision to embrace a new theory turns out to involve an implicit redefinition of the corresponding science. Old problems may be relegated to another science or may be declared entirely “unscientific.” Problems that, on the old theory, were non-existent
or trivial may, with a new theory, become the very archetypes of significant scientific achievement. And, as the problems change, so, often, does the standard that distinguishes a real scientific solution from a mere metaphysical speculation, word game, or mathematical play. It follows that, to a significant extent, the science that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible, but often actually incommensurable, with that which has gone before. Only as this is realized, can we grasp the full sense in which scientific revolutions are like those in the arts. (Kuhn M1, pp. 17)

Yes, exactly. That is what I was referring to. — Jackson

I think it was in Monk’s biography of Witt

[

↪Joshs So, would you say the Logical Positivists, and the Analytics whose main concern is with propositional and modal logic, are the odd ones out (are there others?) islands cut off from the diverse mainland of philosophy? — Janus

I would say that any school of philosophy that understands its inquiry in isolation from the biological and cultural niches that produce it will erect arbitrary walls between it and other schools of philosophy.

Philosophy today is much more comprehensive overall than in the past, but it is fragmented into myriad schools, each of which in their main focus and central concerns seem to have little understanding of, or interest in, the others. — Janus

There is indeed much fragmentation, but let’s see which schools of thought are capable of mutual interchange, based on successful efforts in the past. I can think of such linkages connecting hermeneutics, Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy, Existentialism, phenomenology, deconstruction, social constructionism, poststructuralism , critical theory , Marxism,philosophy of mind, cultural studies and philosophy of science.

quote="Janus;717114"]The idea of progress is the idea of movement towards something ever better. In the context of knowledge this means.more detailed, more comprehensive, more accurate.I think it is arguable that we see progress in this sense in science.[/quote]

It may be better to say that most scientists
today still buy into a notion of a cumulative progress in science, but that may be changing.

Philosophy is very different from science. In science people do not talk about past science. In philosophy, people still talk about Plato and Aristotle as live topics. — Jackson

And some regard it as nothing more than quaint and misguided ideas that are primitive and from which he have progressed.

I think Heidegger was on the right track when he said that in the movement of thought some things are occluded. Hence the importance of retrieval. — Fooloso4

I think the words of physicist Lee Smolen are relevant here.

“… fundamental physics has been in a crisis, due to the evident need for new revolutionary ideas-which becomes more evident with each failure of experiment to confirm fashionable theories, and the inability of those trained in a pragmatic, anti- philosophical style of research to free themselves from fashion and invent those new ideas. To aspire to be a revolutionary in physics, I would claim, it is helpful to make contact with the tradition of past revolutionaries. But the lessons of that tradition are maintained not in the communities of fashionable science, with their narrow education and outlook, but in the philosophical community and tradition.”

Sometime in the ealy 20th century, the art world fell victim to slave morality. — Merkwurdichliebe

You mean Christianity?

hilosophy often serves as a kind of creative ground for the creation of new sciences -- it's called philosophy when no one agrees and it sounds absurd (Galileo), and it's called science after someone shows how clever they are (by hook or by crook, but people are often persuaded by accurate predictions or things which satisfy their desires so those are frequently focused upon -- but note it's not the truth of propositions, but rather there persuasiveness that's being put forward here)

I don't think there's really an essence between the disciplines -- rather, more like a continuum that as things become uncontroversial scientists begin to step in and expand while holding some fundamentals constant. — Moliere

Excellent points :100:

The scientific method is much stricter than any methodology philosophy has to offer, and for that reason its progress is more apparent. Moreover, philosophy challenges its own methods and becomes mired in its own complexities, often leading to mind twisting paradoxes, whereas science takes its method and moves forward, achieving concrete results. — Merkwurdichliebe

This is an old view of what science and philosophy do, harking back to Kant. Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of science is a representation of this modernist idea of scientific progress. With Putnam , Kuhn and Rorty we see a shift in thinking away from Kant toward a conceptual relativism that forms the basis of newer work in psychology. You are reading Nietzsche
as a modernist, but these days he tends to be read as a postmodernist.

If your position is remotely correct, you should easily be able to name at least one significant contribution made by eight world class philosophers. — Merkwurdichliebe

In case that quote by Thompson’s wasn't enough, I will organize contributions by contemporary philosophers in the form of a developmental hierarchy, beginning with the least advanced and ending with the most advanced thinkers. You focused on the past 100 years. Only one of the names on this list, Nietzsche, is disqualified.

Quine
Sellars
Putnam
Sartre
Wittgenstein
Kuhn
Rorty
Gergen
Nietzsche
Foucault
Deleuze
Husserl
Heidegger
Merleau-Ponty
Derrida

Let’s begin with Quine, Sellars and Putnam. They dissolved the fact-value distinction by showing how all statements of fact about any aspect of the empirical
world presuppose a valuative account within which they are intelligible. This has important implications for the understanding of the relation between our concepts and the world. Based on this. Putnam argues that all concepts are relative, and there is no fact of the matter that has intrinsic existence independent of all accounts.

Kuhn , Rorty and Gergen take us into the postmodern realm, not only arguing for conceptual relativism , but ethical and valuative relativism. Phenomenologists like Sartre showed psychologists how to integrate cognition and emotion, which under positivism, behaviorism
and cognitivism had been treated separately , with emotions treated as secondary phenomena in relation to cognition. Phenomenology also contributed to self-organizing approaches within the biological sciences, and to embodied cognitive models of perception.
There is much more to be said here , but this is a starting point.

In sum, ideas from the last 100 of philosophical work have made possible entirely new approaches within psychology and to some extent biology.

I was there at that time. I missed knowing Fine, but I did go climbing with Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who later wrote extensively about a subject I discussed occasionally with him: "flow" in human activities. In particular, in gymnastics and climbing. — jgill

Did you ever cross paths with Eugene Gendlin, who arrived at U. of C. in 1963?

If your position is remotely correct, you should easily be able to name at least one significant contribution made by eight world class philosophers. — Merkwurdichliebe

I thought I did.

this from Evan Thompson’s book, Mind in Life:

“One common thread running through the following chapters is a re-liance on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and developed in various directions by numerous others, most notably for my purposes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Moran 2000; Sokolowski 2000; Spiegelberg 1994). 1 ( ) My aim, however, is not to repeat this tradition's analyses, as they are found in this or that author or text, but to present them anew in light of present-day con-cerns in the sciences of mind. Thus this book can be seen as con-tributing to the work of a new generation of phenomenologists who strive to "naturalize" phenomenology (Petitot et al. 1999). The project of naturalizing phenomenology can be understood in different ways, and my own way of thinking about it will emerge later in this book. The basic idea for the moment is that it is not enough for phenomenology simply to describe and philosophically analyze lived experience; phe-nomenology needs to be able to understand and interpret its investiga-tions in relation to those of biology and mind science.

Yet mind science has much to learn from the analyses of lived expe-rience accomplished by phenomenologists. Indeed, once science turns its attention to subjectivity and consciousness, to experience as it is lived, then it cannot do without phenomenology, which thus needs to be recognized and cultivated as an indispensable partner to the ex-perimental sciences of mind and life. As we will see, this scientific turn to phenomenology leads as much to a renewed understanding of na-ture, life, and mind as to a naturalization of phenomenology (Zahavi 2004b).”

in the appropriate branch of philosophy being priviledged here. Do we wait until this complex material filters down to the rest (assuming we have time for this process) or do we have to recognize that this is a 'boutique' interest with certain subcultures within academe? — Tom Storm

Client-centered therapy is very accessible to the public, and it is compatible with what Thompson is doing.

we can discuss technically about the problem if reality exists: this is one side, the rational side. Or we can discuss how the existence or non existence of reality involves our emotions: this is the emotional side. So far, they have been treated still as divorced fields — Angelo Cannata

you’ve been reading the wrong philosophy. Try this from Evan Thompson. (Mind in Life(

“In recent years, however, it has become increasingly clear to many researchers that cognitive science is incomplete. Cognitive science has focused on cognition while neglecting emotion, affect, and motivation . One common thread running through the following chapters is a re-liance on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and developed in various directions by numerous others, most notably for my purposes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Moran 2000; Sokolowski 2000; Spiegelberg 1994). 1 ( ) My aim, however, is not to repeat this tradition's analyses, as they are found in this or that author or text, but to present them anew in light of present-day con-cerns in the sciences of mind. Thus this book can be seen as con-tributing to the work of a new generation of phenomenologists who strive to "naturalize" phenomenology (Petitot et al. 1999). The project of naturalizing phenomenology can be understood in different ways, and my own way of thinking about it will emerge later in this book. The basic idea for the moment is that it is not enough for phenomenology simply to describe and philosophically analyze lived experience; phe-nomenology needs to be able to understand and interpret its investiga-tions in relation to those of biology and mind science.

Yet mind science has much to learn from the analyses of lived expe-rience accomplished by phenomenologists. Indeed, once science turns its attention to subjectivity and consciousness, to experience as it is lived, then it cannot do without phenomenology, which thus needs to be recognized and cultivated as an indispensable partner to the ex-perimental sciences of mind and life. As we will see, this scientific turn to phenomenology leads as much to a renewed understanding of na-ture, life, and mind as to a naturalization of phenomenology (Zahavi 2004b).”

scientific criteria features intersubjective agreement and predictability, while emotions can be messy and in conflict with other's emotions. Science is the same in Australia as it is in Germany, but emotions may vary from person to person — Tom Storm

One could adjust this to read:Because scientific criteria of intersubjective agreement and predictability are designed to be so generic, general and abstract , they cause us to overlook the fact that our individual interpretations of the ‘same’ agreed upon scientific meanings are messy and differ from others’ interpretations. We simply assume as obvious that Science is the ‘same’ in Australia as it is in Germany, and that it is only the emotions that vary from person to person, as if affective relevance were somehow separable from the intricate sense of the agreed upon meanings.

So how do we reconcile this? By looking beyond and within the generic abstractions we call ‘agreed-upon facts’ to the actual affectively relevant way that each of us contextually forms and uses the sense of an agreed-upon fact.

Does philosophy of science require a considerable depth of knowledge in that scientific discipline? — jgill

I suppose it depends on who is doing the philosophizing. I am very impressed with the work of Joseph Rouse. I can assure you his grasp of the physical and biological
sciences is quite substantial. I also like the work of Arthur Fine:

“Distinguished philosopher of science esteemed for work on the foundations of physics (particularly quantum mechanics) and for his studies of Einstein.”

“Having studied physics, philosophy, and mathematics, Fine graduated from the University of Chicago in 1958 with a Bachelor of Science in mathematics. He then, in 1960, earned a Master of Science in mathematics from the Illinois Institute of Technology with a thesis supervised by Karl Menger,[1]

Fine earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1963 under the direction of Henry Mehlberg.[2] Before moving to the University of Washington, Fine taught for many years at Northwestern University and, before that, at Cornell University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a past president of the American Philosophical Association and the Philosophy of Science Association and has for many years been on the editorial board of the journal Philosophy of Science, one of the leading publications in the field.In 2014, Fine was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.”

I also recommend Michel Bitbol:

“ His research interests are mainly focused on the influence of quantum physics on philosophy. He first worked on Erwin Schrödinger's metaphysics and philosophy of physics.[3]

Using theorems demonstrated by Jean-Louis Destouches, Paulette Destouches-Février, and R.I.G. Hughes, he pointed out that the structure of quantum mechanics may be derived to a large extent from the assumption that microscopic phenomena cannot be dissociated from their experimental context.[4] His views on quantum mechanics converge with ideas developed by Julian Schwinger[5] and Asher Peres,[6] according to whom quantum mechanics is a "symbolism of atomic measurements", rather than a description of atomic objects. He also defends ideas close to Anton Zeilinger's, by claiming that quantum laws do not express the nature of physical objects, but only the bounds of experimental information.

Along with this view, quantum mechanics is no longer considered as a physical theory in the ordinary sense, but rather as a background framework for physical theories, since it goes back to the most elementary conditions which allow us to formulate any physical theory whatsoever. Some reviewers suggested half-seriously to call this view of physics "Kantum physics". Indeed, Michel Bitbol often refers to the philosophy of I. Kant, according to whom one can understand the contents of knowledge only by analyzing the (sensorial, instrumental, and rational) conditions of possibility of such knowledge.[7]

He was granted an award by the French "Académie des sciences morales et politiques" in 1997, for his work in the philosophy of quantum mechanics.

Later on, he concentrated on the philosophy of mind and consciousness,[8] defending a strongly anti-reductionist[9] and neo-Wittgensteinian view.[10] He collaborated with Francisco Varela on this subject.”

. Although neuroscience is in this grouping, the models relating to it are not biologically compatible. — jgill

I disagree. Phenomenologically informed enactivist models of neural functioning complement what Michael James Bennett calls “ a veritable sea change in the study of life. Over the past several decades evolutionary biology was shaken with a series of shockwaves that would culminate in what theorists today are starting to call an ‘Extended' and even ‘Postmodern' Evolutionary Synthesis in order to mark it off from the Modern Synthesis still dominant in the 1980s (Laland et al. 2015; Brucker and Bordenstein 2014). The hologenome theory of evolution – which posits that the organism and its micro-biome form a single, multifaceted unit of selection – signals perhaps better than any other theoretical development the advent of a new evolutionary synthesis. This is a synthesis founded in the increasingly important role afforded to symbiosis in explanations of the evolution of cells and species, from the endosymbiotic relationships responsible for the genesis of mitochondria from out of ancient bacterial alli-ances to the phylosymbiotic relationships between host species and their associated microbial communities constitutive of speciation as such (Brooks et al. 2017). One important consequence of these developments is a newfound appreciation for horizontal gene transfer and aparallel evolution in microorganisms, as well as cytoplasmic, environmental, behavioural and symbolic forms of transmission in almost everything else (Rosenberg and Zilber-Rosenberg 2016). These ‘new directions' work to disrupt and disperse two distinctions long taken to be self-evident and indispensable to evolutionary theory: between the organism and its genes, and between the organism and its environment. The critique and complication of each finds its positive complement in a new set of developments as well. Criticisms of genetic reductionism and the pan-adaptationist programme correspond to the elaboration of decentralised accounts of causality and transmission in Developmental Systems Theory and ‘Evo/Devo' (Oyama 2000); and criticisms of autonomous biological individuals, distinct genetic lineages and strictly vertical models of inheritance have developed alongside a newfound appreciation for the ubiquity of symbiosis, microbial alliances and horizontal gene transfer both as features of constituted organisms and as a source for variation and evolutionary discontinuities in the history of life as well (Gilbert et al. 2012).”

I should mention that one of the key figures in enactivist approaches to cogntivie science was Francisco Varela, who introduced the model of neurophenomenology:

“ Varela was trained as a biologist, mathematician and philosopher through the influence of different teachers, Humberto Maturana and Torsten Wiesel.

He wrote and edited a number of books and numerous journal articles in biology, neurology, cognitive science, mathematics, and philosophy. He founded, with others, the Integral Institute, a thinktank dedicated to the cross-fertilization of ideas and disciplines.

Varela supported embodied philosophy, viewing human cognition and consciousness in terms of the enactive structures in which they arise. These comprise the body (as a biological system and as personally experienced) and the physical world which it enacts.[5]

Varela's work popularized within the field of neuroscience the concept of neurophenomenology. This concept combined the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with "first-person science." Neurophenomenology requires observers to examine their own conscious experience using scientifically verifiable methods.

In the 1996 popular book The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, physicist Fritjof Capra makes extensive reference to Varela and Maturana's theory of autopoiesis as part of a new, systems-based scientific approach for describing the interrelationships and interdependence of psychological, biological, physical, social, and cultural phenomena.[6] Written for a general audience, The Web of Life helped popularize the work of Varela and Maturana, as well as that of Ilya Prigogine and Gregory Bateson.[7]

Varela's 1991 book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, co-authored with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, is considered a classic in the field of cognitive science, offering pioneering phenomenological connections and introducing the Buddhism-informed enactivist and embodied cognition approach.[8] A revised edition of The Embodied Mind was published in 2017, featuring substantive introductions by the surviving authors, as well as a preface by Jon Kabat-Zinn.”

. I would go so far as to argue that philosophy and art have declined over the past century, all while scientific advances have increased extensively. — Merkwurdichliebe

I believe that the root of our disagreement is that you and I are not reading the same philosophers or scientists. Tell me what you think constitutes the last significant innovation in philosophy, and the most important recent advances in the sciences (not technology, but basic theoretical models like Relativity or Darwinian evolution).

Science and philosophy are completely separate. That is why universities usually have separate buildings for each. In your reasoning, there is no reason we cant say the same of advances in art and music or althetics - as rendering philosophy into more conventional language. — Merkwurdichliebe

Science and philosophy are completely separate because they have different buildings? Their textbooks are different colors, too. As for the arts and music , ever wonder why historical movements like Classical era, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modernist and postmodernist includes the sciences, philosophy ,the arts, music and literature? Because all these cultural
modes of creativity are interdependent;reciprocally sharing, translating and reproducing what the others are producing via their one vocabulary.

And this from Evan Thompson’s book, Mind in Life:

“One common thread running through the following chapters is a re-liance on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and developed in various directions by numerous others, most notably for my purposes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Moran 2000; Sokolowski 2000; Spiegelberg 1994). 1 ( ) My aim, however, is not to repeat this tradition's analyses, as they are found in this or that author or text, but to present them anew in light of present-day con-cerns in the sciences of mind. Thus this book can be seen as con-tributing to the work of a new generation of phenomenologists who strive to "naturalize" phenomenology (Petitot et al. 1999). The project of naturalizing phenomenology can be understood in different ways, and my own way of thinking about it will emerge later in this book. The basic idea for the moment is that it is not enough for phenomenology simply to describe and philosophically analyze lived experience; phe-nomenology needs to be able to understand and interpret its investiga-tions in relation to those of biology and mind science.

Yet mind science has much to learn from the analyses of lived expe-rience accomplished by phenomenologists. Indeed, once science turns its attention to subjectivity and consciousness, to experience as it is lived, then it cannot do without phenomenology, which thus needs to be recognized and cultivated as an indispensable partner to the ex-perimental sciences of mind and life. As we will see, this scientific turn to phenomenology leads as much to a renewed understanding of na-ture, life, and mind as to a naturalization of phenomenology (Zahavi 2004b).”

And correlation one can percieve between scientific and philosophical progress is pure contrivance — Merkwurdichliebe

Ok, here’s some contrivance for you:

The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Francisco J. Varela Evan Thompson Eleanor Rosch

Conversations in Postmodern Hermeneutics, Shaun Gallagher, Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences

Critical Neuroscience, A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience,Edited by S. Choudhury and Jan Slaby

Heidegger and social cognition , Shaun Gallagher

Phenomenological Contributions to a Theory of Social Cognition, SHAUN GALLAGHER,Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences University of Central Florida

Redrawing the Map and Resetting the Time: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Shaun Gallagher

Neurophilosophy and neurophenomenology, Shaun GALLAGHER

Heidegger's attunement and the neuropsychology of emotion, MATTHEW RATCLIFFE

Phenomenology, Naturalism and the Sense of Reality, MATTHEW RATCLIFFE

What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge? Joseph Rouse Wesleyan University

FROM REALISM OR ANTI-REALISM TO SCIENCE AS SOLIDARITY Joseph Rouse, Wesleyan University

Postmodernism and our understanding of science, Joseph Rouse

Heidegger on Science and Naturalism, Joseph Rouse

Merleau-Ponty and the Existential Conception of Science, Joseph Rouse

Mind in Life: BIOLOGY, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND THE SCIENCES OF MIND , Evan Thompson

Consciousness in the Neurosciences: A conversation of Sergio Benvenuto with Francisco Varela

The Tangled Dialectic of Body and Consciousness: A Metaphysical Counterpart of Radical Neurophenomenology:Michel Bitbol

And this from Evan Thompson’s book, Mind in Life:

“One common thread running through the following chapters is a re-liance on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and developed in various directions by numerous others, most notably for my purposes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Moran 2000; Sokolowski 2000; Spiegelberg 1994). 1 ( ) My aim, however, is not to repeat this tradition's analyses, as they are found in this or that author or text, but to present them anew in light of present-day con-cerns in the sciences of mind. Thus this book can be seen as con-tributing to the work of a new generation of phenomenologists who strive to "naturalize" phenomenology (Petitot et al. 1999). The project of naturalizing phenomenology can be understood in different ways, and my own way of thinking about it will emerge later in this book. The basic idea for the moment is that it is not enough for phenomenology simply to describe and philosophically analyze lived experience; phe-nomenology needs to be able to understand and interpret its investiga-tions in relation to those of biology and mind science.

Yet mind science has much to learn from the analyses of lived expe-rience accomplished by phenomenologists. Indeed, once science turns its attention to subjectivity and consciousness, to experience as it is lived, then it cannot do without phenomenology, which thus needs to be recognized and cultivated as an indispensable partner to the ex-perimental sciences of mind and life. As we will see, this scientific turn to phenomenology leads as much to a renewed understanding of na-ture, life, and mind as to a naturalization of phenomenology (Zahavi 2004b).”

The CGL is for working with pressurized gas. It is wonderfully predictive. :smile: — Tate

Still, there must be aspects of the model that assume
chance, random and arbitrary features. Look to these for the impetus for better reformulations of the model.

see what you mean. But think of the combined gas law. It works. What's the concept behind it? It has to do with kinetic vs potential energy. Maybe that will change, and maybe as it does our prediction skills will improve. But the CGL is already predictive as hell. — Tate

Is this what they used to use to attempt to describe smoke and cloud patterns? When chaos theory was introduced it brought order and predictability to the modeling of such phenomena that the previous concepts could not. One has to be careful when one claims that a model is predictive as hell to take into account the extent to which it consigns aspects of the world to chance and randomness. This is a way to have one’s cake and eat it too , by blaming the world for the limitations of one’s theory while claiming it to be wonderfully predictive.

about truth, knowledge, metaphysics, ontology, being, it seems that we need to ignore emotions: we cannot rely on our emotions to determine if reality exists, if doubting is productive, if knowledge is possible, what being means.
Even when we consider the possibility of emotions in AI machines, discussions are not based on our emotions, but on scientific criteria. So, it seems to me that today there are two kinds of philosophy, divorced from each other. It reminds me the divorce between analytical and continental philosophy. — Angelo Cannata

The divorce you’re talking about is the same Cartesian split that divides the subjective from the objective. It depends on a fact-value divide. When one accepts
that there are no value-free facts, one realizes that
being and knowledge are valuations. Desires, motives and emotions are intrinsic to facts. This has been recognized by Nietzsche, Wittgenstein Sartre, Heidegger and many others.

We are part of the universe, Josh. Everything we do is the universe doing what it does. — Tate

What I meant specifically is that laws of physics are conceptual creations that may come to be seen eventually as a relic of a certain era of physics.

Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Kuhn, Rorty, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Wittgenstein
— Joshs

Name five contributions from any of those philosophers that have significantly advanced philosophy. Then we can argue about what constitutes a significant philosophical advancement. — Merkwurdichliebe

You would first have to have read and understood these writers, or those contributing today to the leading edge of empirical research who find the work of these philosophers indispensable to their investigations. My simply naming contributions, which I could easily do, would make no sense otherwise.

So that must mean there must have been very few significant scientific advances in the past 100 years.
— Joshs

I disagree. I would be interested to see how you came up with that meaning from what i wrote. — Merkwurdichliebe

You assume science advances but philosophy hasn’t in the past 100 years. I am arguing that all scientific paradigms are examples of philosophical discourse , worldviews rendered into a more conventional language.

So the advance of science presupposes the advance of philosophy. Furthermore, in any historical period one can find cross-over writers who move back and forth between a scientific and philosophical form of exposition, showing the rest of us the relevance of philosophical work to science. Today there are numerous such writers working on important advances in psychological theory pertaining to everything from neuroscientific modeling ( Varela, Thompson) to schizophrenia, ptsd, autism, depression , grief, models of emotions , skilled action, perceptual recognition, psycholinguistics, consciousness studies and empathy (Shaun Gallagher, Matthew Ratcliffe , Andy Clark, Michel Bitbol, Dan Zahavi, Jan Slaby, Alva Noe, Thomas Fuchs, Hanne De Jaegher). We can add to this list philosophers of science like Joseph Rouse.

These writers have written often of the crucial importance to their work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, the American Pragmatists, Heidegger, Kuhn, Wittgenstein and others I mentioned.

I haven’t even mentioned current physicists who recognize the vital relevance of philosophy for the sciences:

I’ll end with this quote from Lee Smolen:

Philosophers of the past “sometimes understood the problems we face more deeply than many of my colleagues today. For example, Leibniz was, to my understanding, the first to struggle with the main question that we face in trying to make a quantum theory of gravity-how to make a background independent description of a closed universe that contains both all its causes and all its observers. And Peirce was the first to articulate and try to solve the puzzle at the heart of the current debates in cosmology and string theory: what chose the laws that govern our universe? And what chose the initial conditions?”

“… in many cases philosophers are working on the same questions I work on-and developing ideas related to the ideas I hope to establish-but from a bracingly different perspective.”

“… fundamental physics has been in a crisis, due to the evident need for new revolutionary ideas-which becomes more evident with each failure of experiment to confirm fashionable theories, and the inability of those trained in a pragmatic, anti- philosophical style of research to free themselves from fashion and invent those new ideas. To aspire to be a revolutionary in physics, I would claim, it is helpful to make contact with the tradition of past revolutionaries. But the lessons of that tradition are maintained not in the communities of fashionable science, with their narrow education and outlook, but in the philosophical community and tradition.”

The universe doesn’t obey the laws of physics; it merely does what it does. — Art48

Or perhaps this is merely what WE do.

There have been very few significant philosophical advances in the past 100 years. At this point in history, philosophy is definitely not advancing. — Merkwurdichliebe

So that must mean there must have been very few significant scientific advances in the past 100 years. Either that or your knowledge of philosophical advances over the past century(Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Kuhn, Rorty, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Wittgenstein) is poor.

Copernican heliocentricity?
Newton's gravity?
Darwinian evolution?
Germ theory of disease?
Boltzman's thermodynamics?
Einsteinian Relativity theories?
Hubble's Red Shift (expanding universe)?
Heisenberg's quantum uncertainty?
Universal Turing Machine?
Shannon's Information Entropy?
Frick and Watson's double helix? — 180 Proof

There have been theses written about the philosophical underpinnings of all of these scientific advances, such as the association between Newton and Descartes, Einstein and Kant, Darwin , Hegel and Schelling, Nietzsche and Freud, Watson and Peirce, Turing and Leibnitz.

Assume for a moment that science is a huge ocean liner moving slowly through a deep sea. Where do you see philosophy in this picture? — jgill

That’s a hard picture for me to swallow. I prefer to think of the history of science as a succession of different crafts , each more complex and sophisticated than the previous. The succession of crafts does not simply represent changes in the theoretical content of science, but also changes in the self-conception of scientific practice and method( e.g. hypothetico-inductive vs deductive).

Now let us imagine this historical succession of crafts not as a single line but as a series of parallel lines. Each craft can see similar boats on the port and starboard sides.

What makes the parallel boats similar is that they express variations on a common philosophical theme that marks the unity of an era of science and philosophy. What makes them different is that the language they use to express these ideas can be more or less conventional, operational, instrumental. At one extreme is a boat expressing the grand philosophical narratives of the era. At the other extreme is a boat expressing the applied technologies of the era. Each is a variation on a common theme.

I think there has been progress in philosophy.

Not too much, and the steps of progress are hindered by counter-arguments, but the hindering is done mainly by lay philosophers, not by professional ones.

Steps I know of: — god must be atheist

It might be a lot simpler just to list the paradigm shifts in empirical science over the past 400 years. If you examine the changing presuppositions underlying these shifts in scientific understanding closely enough you will realize that you are looking at none other than the history of progress in philosophy.

somebody answered the topic's question, and it got no attention. — god must be atheist

What was the answer?

One difference between philosophy and science is that philosophy insists on logical certainty, which is a category error when applied to the empirical world. This is why progress is so scant. — hypericin

Only certain approaches to philosophy are concerned with , or believe in , the value or coherence of logical certainty. On the whole the history of philosophy runs in parallel with the history of science , so if one progresses, the other must also. They are joined at the hip.

I think you are talking about the past, and in fact quite far back. I will quote myself from an earlier post: "Science started to be a separate subject a long time ago, even before the term "science" was formulated in the 19th century, acquiring such names as "epistemology" in early 16th century, etc. So, today they are two different fields of knowledge." — Alkis Piskas

I saw your quote , and I am not talking about the past. There have been , and always will be empirical accounts that are or less philosophical, more or less theoretical , more or less applied. Science doesnt differ from philosophy in terms of method , such as objectivity or testability, given that there are no universally shared methods among scientists. It is a matter of the conventionality of the language, how deeply the presuppositions underlying one’s account are explicitly articulated in the account.

Every major historical advance in the sciences is paralleled (and usually preceded) by a corresponding advance in philosophy. If science and philosophy were on independent tracks this could not be the case.

Philosophy's job is not to answer the 'big questions' and progress is not to be measured by any answers given. Philosophy's job is to provide the tools to innoculate us against the mystification caused by deep grammatical trickery. — Cuthbert

I assume you’re paraphrasing Wittgenstein. That was not always the way that philosophy understood its job. And Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy did not originate with him. He was part of a movement in philosophy that goes back at least as far as Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. Is philosophy’s job as Witt understands it compatible with science’s job as it understands it? That depends. Wittgensteinian philosophy is critical both of traditional views of science and of philosophy. But what of postmodern science( yes, there is such a thing)?
I suggest these newer approaches to science, coming both from philosophers of science and scientists themselves, internalize your description of the job of philosophy as Witt sees it.