When Tyson laughs as he dismisses philosophy as "pointless" he reminds me nothing so much as a high school bully who has just visited an indignity on his victim. And, as in high school, nobody much seems to mind.
I don't know why this kind of thing is so popular among physicists who don't know any post-World War II philosophy of science or any pre-World War II history of science (one could do worse than starting here). See Stephen Hawking telling Google that "philosophy is dead" and Lawrence Krauss calling David Albert a "moronic philosopher" in a manner which suggests the phrase is pleonastic for him.
It's maybe not so weird how often philosophy's enemies end up just doing bad philosophy themselves.
Anyhow, it was very nice to read Damon Linker's take-down of Tyson's philistinism here. Depending on your meta-philosophical commitments you might be tempted to split hairs with respect to Linker's epistemology-centric characterization of the philosophical tradition. But what he writes isn't implausible, and he's clearly getting a very large part of the tradition correct.
Consider:
If the natural philosophers truly wished to liberate themselves from dogma in all of its forms and live lives of complete intellectual wakefulness and self-awareness, they would need to pose far more searching questions. They would need to begin reflecting on human nature as both a part of and distinct from the wider natural world. They would need to begin examining their own minds and motives, very much including their motives in taking up the pursuit of philosophical knowledge in the first place.
Philosophy rightly understood is the mind's rigorous, open-ended, radically undogmatic pursuit of this self-knowledge.
Even though I might quibble, that strikes me as pretty beautiful. And in any case, the end of the article will I think resonate with anyone in the hair-splitting biz:
If what you crave is answers, the study of philosophy in this sense can be hugely frustrating and unsatisfying. But if you want to understand yourself as well as the world around you — including why you're so impatient for answers, and progress, in the first place — then there's nothing more thrilling and gratifying than training in philosophy and engaging with its tumultuous, indeterminate history.
Not that many young people today recognize its value. There are always an abundance of reasons to resist raising the peskiest, most difficult questions of oneself and the world. To that list, our time has added several more: technological distractions, economic imperatives, cultural prejudices, ideological commitments.
And now Neil deGrasse Tyson has added another — one specially aimed at persuading scientifically minded young people to reject self-examination and the self-knowledge that goes along with it.
He should be ashamed of himself.
It's very nice to seem people with Linker's and Andrew Sullivan's and Rod Dreher's readerships sticking up for truth and beauty. Dreher rhetorically wonders how people would react if Sarah Palin told children that it was pointless to pursue the kinds of questions Linker flags.
I wonder more broadly how it became acceptable in contemporary academic culture to condescendingly dismiss whole areas of discourse with which you have the most fleeting familiarity. Many of us are hardly better than Tyson et. al. with respect to this kind of bullying. If we didn't so often go in for just this vice ourselves, we'd be in a much stronger position to respond when it's directed against us.
It's clearly no accident that two of the best responses to the anti-intellectualism of some famous physicists have been put out under the aegis of Simon Critchley's The Stone. See Gary Gutting and Jim Holt separately discussing the phenomena with respect to Kraus in two of their Stone pieces (here and here).
For all sorts of reasons (not least of which is our continued employment) it occurs to me how lucky we are that Critchley, Gutting and others have created a successful space for public philosophy where the null hypothesis is to assume that interlocutors are of good will and well informed.
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