Philosophy, Science, and Religion
“What began to feel frustrating instead was a growing sense of the marginal place of philosophy more generally in UK culture… it is arguable that philosophy has drifted away, partly due to its own fault and partly due to the fault of the wider culture.”
That’s philosopher Robert Stern (Sheffield) in an interview at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?
Interviewer Clifford Sosis asks: “What can philosophers do to become relevant to the public again?”
Here’s Professor Stern’s reply:
That is a tricky question, and I am not sure I have an answer, as it partly depends on how one thinks the irrelevance has arisen in the first place. If it is just philosophy’s fault, perhaps we can fix it. However, I suspect the issue has a wider cultural grounding that we as philosophers cannot really control.
Looking at the problem historically, it may have this structure. In the pre-modern Christian world, religion was dominant with no separate role for philosophy; nonetheless, recognizable philosophical issues were widely raised in some traditions in a broadly theological context, where Scholasticism would be a prime example. Then in the early modern period, science now emerged as working independently of religion, and philosophy instead took up the role of being ‘handmaiden’ to science, to use John Locke’s famous phrase.
However, currently, on the one hand science increasingly sees no need for this assistance (think, for example, of Stephen Hawking’s contempt for philosophy); but on the other hand, philosophy cannot return to its relation to religion, as religion feels no need for it either. Philosophy can thus only make progress while working largely on its own. But then the result is that it becomes increasingly in-turned in a way that cuts it off from wider society, and thus makes it appear less and less relevant. As a result, the chance of philosophy catching the attention of the broader community drops away.
If my hypothesis is right, then there is perhaps little that we philosophers can do, until science or religion or both feel a need for us once more. I don’t think that is impossible—in fact, I think this need is very real on both sides. But I am a philosopher, so not the audience that needs to be convinced!
The interview, wide-ranging and interesting, is here, and covers much about Professor Stern’s life, including a sadly relevant discussion of whether he is afraid of death.
Personally, this crank finds it a bit ironic that Stephen Hawking would hold philosophy in such high dudgeon while occupying the same chair once held by the author of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
I suspect “the need” that Professor Stern speaks of is still there, lurking, considering as “The Hard Problem” seems essentially unresolved, perhaps intractably so.
As a philosophy student at the graduate level, I think people have lost interest and the art in asking profound questions about the world we inhabit. Due to the influence of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in grade school curriculum, the only currency that holds value are facts. Therefore, children are trained to inquire into facts and not inquire about their merits or the merits of their own inquiry let alone what that query even amounts to outside of some preconceived system of facts from which to find. We can see this playout with terms like misinformation and disinformation: things that are factually in error. Here in America those two terms epitomize the substrate of fact finding as opposed to the more fundamental substrate of what is a fact, how do we know facts, and do facts have moral value?
The answer as to who is the Other of recognition “philosophy”(ers) are after seems to be the same across each field. But I’m uncertain as to why it’s crucial that it may never appear. This is the most concrete (foundational deadlock) instance regarding the question of how is philosophy, and other fields, to encounter themselves as relevant to the others once again. Sterns case is not an isolated one.
Blaming the outside world for philosophy’s increasing irrelevance is all too easy.
Just look at AI at the moment: While the public is desperate for more insight into questions such as ‘does chatGPT understand what it is saying?’, philosophers are providing almost nothing of value to these debates. Even though they spent fifty years on these exact questions, their “insights” ring hollow and are rife with fundamental misunderstandings of how AI works.
It’s not much better in the ongoing challenge to give attention models better long-term memory and reasoning skills (eg through prompt chaining). This should have been *the* moment philosophers could demonstrate their value by applying insights from argumentation theory and philosophy of cognition/memory. After all, haven’t they spent centuries pondering the nature of memory, argumentation, and cognition? And with prompt based techniques the lack of IT knowledge should not be an impediment anymore for philosophers to engineer solutions. Yet we can draw the painful conclusion at this point that the philosophers have almost nothing of substance to bring to bear on this topic. The AI crowd is making more progress in a year than philosophers have made in decades.
If there was ever a time for philosophers to show their worth, it would have been the past few years. But they have either been catastrophically absent or of embarrassingly low quality.
i strongly agree with the idea that philosophy could be having a moment right now given what is happening right now in tech. one thing i’ve noticed, especially in the way many many EU philosophy projects are approaching research into AI, is that philosophers are basically opting out of doing serious philosophy altogether. philosophers seem to be proving their worth to the public (or to funds granting institutions) wrt AI research not by targeting fundamental questions and issues for which philosophical inquiry is best suited to tackle, but instead doing highly specific and surface-level engagement with questions of best practices for applications of this technology often under the heading of “ethics of ai”. not that philosophy can’t help with these questions, but i’ve seen so many projects where the role the philosopher is playing is more like a literature reviewer than a researcher.
> Even though they spent fifty years on these exact questions, their “insights” ring hollow and are rife with fundamental misunderstandings of how AI works.
Well that’s definitely not true.
Philosophy is dying! The church is dying! Opera is dying! Theatre is dying! Yet engaged meaning making still happens. Humans are still spiritual and like to gather together to be spiritual together. Creative music and storytelling still happens. I am a theologian/playwright/pastor/short fiction writer and cannot say if philosophy is dying – but I can say meaning making still happens and does so in a variety of ways. So, what does philosophy need to look like today?
Yes, all those art forms and fields of human endeavour appear to be “dying”. But they don’t really “die” at all since they are consistently revived – as these trends seem to go in cycles. I personally believe philosophy has as much to offer in these highly technological times as ever before – and futher think it will need to become pertinent again as a result of huge efforts by philosophers themselves.
Yes, science does seem to reign supreme now (and I have a massive, healthy respect for it) – but it doesn’t deal with many of the subjects that philosophy specialises in. How do people behave and why? How do societies function? And of course many other diverse matters – which fascinate so many people. As well as shape events and human advances. Philosophy as an “assistant” to science? Maybe, to a degree – but I think its value is far higher than that.
And as a counterweight to religion as well? Yes, most certainly … especially these days as religion has long lost its foothold (well, mainly in the western world); thus potentially giving philosophy and not only science) a far greater role than ever before. So why should we presume it’s dying? It may be in the doldrums for now – but once again I must say it’s up to the efforts plus GENUINE AUTHENTICITY of present-day philosophers to bring it to the fore once more.
An exception is Stephen Meyer on his input on Intelligent Design. His expertise on DNA coding and the mathematical and philosophical implications is very eye opening. Most philosophers might be intimidated by science that inhibit them from getting involved. Meyer’s background in molecular biology and philosophy of science provide a good resume to tackle hard philosophical problems. Perhaps philosophers of the future need two PhDs to offer their inputs.
Philosophers need to get over the fact that Stephen Hawking was rude to them.
One high-profile scientist saying dismissive things about philosophy is not a good way to assess the overall state of philosophical engagement with science. (Especially when that scientist had largely turned public intellectual by that stage, and clearly was intentionally ginning up controversy in order to sell books.) Better would be to look at contemporary philosophy of science – and when I Iook, I see a vibrant interdisciplinary field characterized by increasing levels of scientific expertise and increasing levels of engagement and collaboration between scientists and philosophers. Dennett is probably the highest-profile example of a philosopher whose work is taken very seriously by the scientific communities with which he engages, but there are many more. It’s true that some scientists are skeptical or dismissive of philosophy, but many are not, and I think one does better at overcoming that skepticism and dismissal by modelling good philosophical engagement with science rather than by complaining about it. (It’s also true that not a few scientists I’ve talked to are skeptical of philosophy because they’ve had bad experiences of philosophers making sweeping statements about areas of science that they are ignorant about – if I had five dollars for every time I’ve heard a philosopher dismiss string theory despite knowing not the first thing about it, I might not be rich but I’d certainly be buying the drinks this evening.)
It is true that the price of admission to serious academic discussions of a scientific field is to acquire a reasonably high level of competence in that field – I would say roughly graduate-level, at least in my own areas – but that seems entirely proper. (Philosophers are rightly dismayed by the occasional ignorant intervention by physicists into the mind-body or free will problems.) And it is true that scientists have little time for philosophers who want to argue that something is deeply wrong with the modern scientific project (e.g., that it is too mathematized and so too distant from the human condition), such that philosophy is needed to fix it. But since I think they’re right that there is nothing deeply wrong with the modern scientific project, I think this is fair enough. (There is lots that is shallowly-to-intermediately wrong – the replication crisis, for instance – and philosophers and scientists are collaborating very fruitfully in many of these areas.)
Philosophers; if you think you have contributions to make to science, don’t sit around complaining that science doesn’t want to hear from you. Do some serious homework , and then actually engage. There are rich seams of interdisciplinary topics to mine right across the sciences; there are some institutional barriers to overcome but they can be overcome. Come on in, the water’s lovely.
in a reply higher up in the discussion i complained about the rise of surface level philosophical engagement in “ethical” issues about artificial intelligence, but a great example of what good and exciting philosophical work that also demonstrates its value outside our discipline is all the great stuff happening in the philosophy of science right now, and i think you’re right to push back on the narrative that since a few notable scientists have disparaged philosophy we thereby have lost favor with the scientific community and its project
I think that for us to be relevant to the wider culture, we need to be producing a lot more work that the wider culture can read (or watch) and understand. If we want to have an influence in the fields of science and religion, we need to be producing a lot more work that people interested in science and religion can read (or watch) and understand. We need to be fighting for our cultural survival at this point. Most people have no idea what we do or why we matter.
I’ve been conducting interviews lasting an hour per participants with natural scientists for a project I am doing in experimental philosophy. While there is obviously some self-selection going on, one thing that strikes me is how thoughtful these people are about philosophical matters, and how interested they are. You can see it in published physicists such as Sean Carroll, who are not in the least dismissive of philosophy and use philosophical tools in their own work, and of course also in people such as SJ Gould, Ernst Mayr, and many others.
But our (anonymous) participants are people who helped to put the Mars Rover on Mars, launched a shuttle to Europa, have worked with large hadron colliders, have discovered (in a team) the latest gravitational waves, LIGO, etc. They are all very interested in philosophy. They’ve read philosophers. Thomas Nagel is for instance quite popular and David Chalmers’s name was also floated around. We should not focus on the negative comments by Hawking and a few others. The overall picture is one of fascination with questions about e.g., consciousness, free will, the ultimate fate of the universe, whether evolution is collaborative or antagonistic, etc etc. I am feeling quite optimistic having conducted all these interviews. (Our paper will be written some time this winter and you will be able to see the results once it appears. The focus was not on their views of philosophy, but we got a lot of interesting observations on this nonetheless).
“ I think that for us to be relevant to the wider culture, we need to be producing a lot more work that the wider culture can read (or watch) and understand.”
My work got into Devs; does that count? 🙂
Philosophy is not dead, its just not sexy today like it was…it ebbs and flows. But tell me that you do not see its influence, ill argue with you. Marxism flourishes it would appear. The school of Nietzche continues to offer much to society. Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Heidigger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Derrida and a cast of 100s thoughts are all around us. Religion in the West still uses Philosophy as articulation and inspiration in its theological pronouncements.
The better POV from this author should be everyone is using philosopy on their own without Philosophy training. And sometimes they do an excellent job at its articulation.
Philosophy has always been with us. Maybe some of us get through some existential crisis without even knowing what that is or what it means, but philosophy has always been with us indeed. I believe the problem is that It has become so especialized that we can’t recognize it anymore as just educational knowledge. Take Diogenes’ great demagogue for example. It is considered a sign of immaturity, idiocy or ignorance. But to someone who understands why this concept has been with Western civilization for so long. It is also sign of independence, self-reliance and strength. So indeed, we love and are interested in philosophy. We just can’t distinguish the simple from especialized knowledge of today.
Thanks!
People are plenty interested in philosophical topics. I see memes and posts about the meaning of life, whether fetuses are persons, whether money is “real,” whether this is all a dream or simulation, whether people experience color the same way, how to define gender, Marx, the epistemology of magical beliefs, the veracity of testimony, etc. It seems like people still wonder about the things that philosophers wonder about. The lack of interest is in the academic philosophical community itself, perhaps in the methods of philosophy (some doubt that they are necessary, or that they lead to any results).
Perhaps the writing styles of philosophy have a limited reach, too. Analytic philosophers seem to me to operate in two rhetorical modes: (i) STEM-adjacent, which aims for precision, and (ii) Cool-professor, which aims for easy readability for “general audiences.” Perhaps STEM-adjacent is best kept around, but I have my doubts about Cool-professor. At the very least, it seems like it needs to diversify its department. What about philosophy for artists and literary types? What about philosophy for spiritual seekers? What about philosophy for people without a college education? Why couldn’t a philosopher write about their AOS for non-philosophers, but do it in a more specific and targeted way?
Lack of awareness might be another problem which is related to these. In order to get yourself out there as an academic to the extent that people outside of academia know who you are, you may have to write and publicize yourself one way, but that way may not be interesting to those outside of academia or those in certain branches of academia.
I am just speculating though.
Making philosophy relevant again can be one and the same as saying making black and white TV relevant again. My point is, how can something be made relevant again when the new things that succeed what was once relevant before is now what is widely accepted and preferred. Philosophy was popular in a time when philosophers, “lovers of knowledge” were the ones who were the big thinkers, they were the ones who tackled the big questions of life and the universe and came up with amazing literature that articulated captivating stories that were both logical and rational that answered our questions in a way that left us in awe and wonder which ignited our imaginations. In the modern world we live in a bifurcated reality where science and technology is God. God as in the dominant forces that governs this era. However I believe philosophy can reestablish itself in the literature of theology to enhance religious leaders and denomination who plays the role of spiritual teachers in their perspective communities to speak, teach, preach with messages that is able to leave its audience in awe and wonder of the world in a positive way of course. Or rather combine the practices of rhetoric and philosophy together, even to literature and storytelling and writing.
Personally, I believe that philosophy is innate in all aspects of this world, whether it is a handmaiden of science or not. I also believe that the ultimate end of philosophy is religion. As religion is supposed to be the collective activity of the wise, the application of meaningful contemplation and truth-seeking must be manifested through religion, the moral dictator of society. Science provides grounding and is the dictator of what should be perceived as real and what is not, as we are both immaterial and material beings. The interplay of these makes us grounded in our existence.