See the axis · The point of philosophy

ObjectionAttacks the position

Science has taken over

Philosophy set out to understand the world; the sciences now do that in its place, domain after domain, and all that is left to it is what no method has yet conquered.

Objects to

Hawking and Mlodinow · The Grand Design · 2010

  1. Philosophy began as the whole of knowledge: nature, the soul, the city all fell to it. Yet every time one of its questions found a method of empirical inquiry, it became a science and left its fold: physics in the seventeenth century, then chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology.
  2. The movement continues before our eyes: the mind, once questioned by metaphysics, passes to neuroscience and cognitive science; human nature, to anthropology and evolutionary biology; morality itself becomes a matter of empirical inquiry. The 'great questions' are carved up into problems that laboratories investigate.
  3. What remains to philosophy are the questions that have no method yet, or never will: less a domain than a remainder. Philosophy is dead, a contemporary physicist rules; the phrase is polemical, but the observation it leans on is simple: philosophy has allegedly not kept up with modern developments in science, and on knowledge of the world, the torch has changed hands.

Therefore So, for the explanation of the world, whoever wants to understand does science, or reads it: the history of philosophy's claim to knowledge would be one of a long dispossession, and to cling to it would be to mistake a discipline for its past.

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