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Oh, come on. This is beneath you surely. Where are these "philosophers," this monolithic horde of abstraction-loving pinheads stuck in the 15th century, too benighted to see the Real Truth right under their noses, too stuck in debates over definitions to think practically about application and science??

You have a cartoon version of philosophy in your mind that is in sore need of remediation. These are precisely the kinds of questions that philosophers have been utterly preoccupied with for centuries. As if Bradley, Dewey, William James, never existed! As if the very idea of a pragmatic, "reality-based" science had not been proposed and debated rigorously for decade upon decade.

As if the subject-object problem wasn't at the core of the foundations of modern science!! Far from being some late, decadent conceit of a handful of disconnected postmoderns, the problem of objective knowledge is at the very core of modern science, at its very foundations, on to the present day.

Have you read a single volume of philosophy in the last decade? Are you not aware that the Grand Poo-Bah of modern philosophy of Science, Popper himself, redefines "Objective Knowledge" to deal with that very problem?

If you are content with a naive, self-contained scientism that remains dogmatically immune to philosophical critique, that's fine. You're certainly not alone. But let's dispense with the sweeping generalizations that have no bearing whatsoever on the reality of the history of philosophy, science or ideas in general.



> Have you read a single volume of philosophy in the last decade?

Do you have an opinion on the utility of suicide? But how can you, without having personally committing suicide? Am I getting thorough to you?

> You have a cartoon version of philosophy in your mind that is in sore need of remediation.

You mean the thesis that philosophers argue for centuries without ever resolving anything? That's hardly controversial.

> These are precisely the kinds of questions that philosophers have been utterly preoccupied with for centuries.

Q.E.D.


Yes, I think you've gotten through to me. You're willing to hold strong opinions regarding the core discipline of the Western Tradition in a state of abject ignorance, on the grounds that actually educating yourself on the topic before forming such an opinion is analogous to committing suicide in order to understand suicide.

That's as bizarre a rationale for willful illiteracy as I can think of. You seem content with it, and I wish you well.




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