JoshuaZ comments on Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn't - LessWrong

27 Post author: lukeprog 29 November 2012 09:00PM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 30 November 2012 05:38:45PM 3 points [-]

Most of your examples seem valid but this one is strongly questionable:

Tarski's convention T

This example doesn't work. Tarski was a professional mathematician. There was a lot of interplay at the time between math and philosophy, but it seems he was closer to the math end of things. He did at times apply for philosophy positions, but for the vast majority of his life he was doing work as a mathematician. He was a mathematician/logician when he was at the Institute for Advanced Study, and he spent most of his professional career as a professor at Berkley in the math department. Moreover, while he did publish some papers in philosophy proper, he was in general a very prolific writer, and the majority of his work (like his work with quantifier elimination in the real numbers, or the Banach-Tarski paradox) are unambiguously mathematical.

Similarly, the people who studied under him are all thought of as mathematicians(like Julia Robinson), or mathematician-philosophers(Feferman), with most in the first category.

Overall, Tarski was much closer to being a professional mathematician whose work sometimes touched on philosophy than a professional philosopher who sometimes did math.