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Is Philosophy Still Useful in the Age of Science?
But there's a more fundamental question that nags at me: is philosophy pointless? Clearly a fair chunk of people think so. A YouGov poll found 16% of UK adults thought it a waste of time, with 30% responding “Don't know” and 54% viewing it favourably.¹ A survey from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences ...
In the 18th century, philosophy shifted from participating in scientific inquiry to reflecting on its foundations and implications, with Hume's problem of induction arising as a response to Newtonian mechanics, and Kant trying to preserve metaphysics by grounding it as 𝘢 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘳𝘪 conditions for science. Nowadays, philosophers generally defer to scientists in investigating outstanding questions about the natural world, though they occasionally synthesise current scientific knowledge on a subject if they feel science is pointing in the wrong direction. The development of formal semantics, linguistics and computational language models has certainly changed the debate, though again it's not clear to what extent modern science has displaced, built upon or added to their earlier work.
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