Philosophy is dead: science now answers the big questions
"Philosophy is dead"
The big questions about the universe and our existence now belong to science, no longer to philosophy.
Philosophy has not kept up with the progress of physics: scientists are now the ones advancing knowledge.
"Philosophy is dead: science now answers the big questions" is an argument by Stephen Hawking (Hawking and Mlodinow, The Grand Design, 2010, ch. 1) on the question "Can science explain everything?" (answer: it can explain everything). Its claim: The big questions about the universe and our existence now belong to science, no longer to philosophy. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.
For centuries, "why is there something rather than nothing?" and "why do we exist?" were philosophers' questions. In 2010, the physicist Stephen Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinow open a popular book by declaring that philosophy is dead, because it has not kept up with modern physics. In their view, scientists now carry the torch. The book aims to show that physics can answer these questions without invoking a creator. Is this a report on the state of knowledge, or a lecturer's soundbite? And can this very book do without philosophy?
click a premise to reject it
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, one can accept that philosophy lags behind physics and that physics is progressing on the origin of the universe, while keeping questions that physics does not treat: what is an explanation, what does "to exist" mean, why these laws? Being behind on one side does not empty the question.
Objections
3Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.
CChristopher Norris 2011 · attacks premise 2Norris, a philosopher, replies that Hawking's book itself does philosophy, without saying so. Its "model-dependent realism" (a physical theory is a model, and the model cannot be compared with an independent reality) takes up, he says, debates in the philosophy of science since Kant. If Hawking accuses philosophers of ignoring science, one can answer that he ignores philosophy: a "tu quoque".
Hawking replies
Norris, a philosopher, replies that Hawking's book itself does philosophy, without saying so. Its "model-dependent realism" (a physical theory is a model, and the model cannot be compared with an independent reality) takes up, he says, debates in the philosophy of science since Kant. If Hawking accuses philosophers of ignoring science, one can answer that he ignores philosophy: a "tu quoque".
Ludwig Wittgenstein 1921 · attacks premise 3Wittgenstein writes that even if every possible scientific question were answered, the problems of life would still not be touched. For him, what is puzzling is not how the world is but that it is, and no further fact in the world explains that. This is not a reply to Hawking, which never took place: it is a reason to doubt P3.
no reply
Wittgenstein writes that even if every possible scientific question were answered, the problems of life would still not be touched. For him, what is puzzling is not how the world is but that it is, and no further fact in the world explains that. This is not a reply to Hawking, which never took place: it is a reason to doubt P3.
Lawrence Krauss 2012 · attacks premise 3The debate over Krauss's book, which defends the same idea in 2012, is the same: is the "nothing" physics talks about (the quantum vacuum) the "nothing" of the question? Philosophers of physics such as David Albert say no. See that argument's page.
no reply
The debate over Krauss's book, which defends the same idea in 2012, is the same: is the "nothing" physics talks about (the quantum vacuum) the "nothing" of the question? Philosophers of physics such as David Albert say no. See that argument's page.