Anti-Climacus

DUMBASS QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"davniner: i have to eat now, but here's an interesting thought: philosophy is like the dark ages of human reasoning"

Riiight. As much as my Philosophy 202 GSI would disapprove of my using this argument, there'd be no science without philosophers. All the early Greeks, Euclid included-- amateur Philosophers. Don't even get me started about Pythagoras. Descartes, who, more than any other man, laid the groundwork for mathematics and physics that came after him, did his most important (and timeless) writing about Philosophy. Newton and Leibniz: both philosophers (Leibniz a particularly interesting one): Newton's groundbreaking treatise was called, after all, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

Two other points:

1. This argument is a variation on the one famously put forward by Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology, also rather notably completely mentally unstable. I'm not sure which association is worse: endorsing the arguments of a crazy man, or a sociologist.

2. It is clichéd, to be sure, but it bears repeating: had Einstein never lived, someone would've eventually figured out General Relativity; if Bach had never lived, there'd be no Brandenberg Concertos. And, in my opinion, the world would be a worse place without the latter than without the former. But I can understand why scientists (and future scientists) are reticent to accept this: even if they're great geniuses, they're never that far ahead of their time, and someone else would always eventually be able to do their work. Hell, they'll even be surpassed by someone else someday. But Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven, Socrates: those men are the sine qua non of civilization. If I were going into a profession where I'd be another unimportant cog, I'd be bitter too.