Do you agree with Stephen Hawking that "philosophy is dead?"?

Hawking is wrong. The very statement of science displacing philosophy provokes the necessity for philosophic discussion.

I have wondered if provoking debate was his intention.

No I don’t agree with him on that at all. Philosphy is not just restricted to the realms of science, there is also moral philosophy and human rights philosophy.

As to what collective consciousness that has elevated? Just take a look at any civil rights movements and you will see the evidence of that. Philosophy is grand scope of sharing ideas, worldviews etc. And yes sometimes certain philosophies do contradict modern science. That only means that particular philosophical view point is flawed, not the entirity of philosophy.

Dead? No. Relevant? Maybe, maybe not.

I see philosophy as a luxury; a pastime for people who don’t have enough to do. Sort of like people who study art history.

Are philosophical discussions enjoyable? Often. Is it worthwhile to know philosophical antecedents to today’s issues? Maybe. Is philosophy (or for that matter, theology) worthy of understanding? Maybe.

Is philosophy practical? Applicable? Actionable? That’s a slightly different question, but I would answer, “probably not”.

People who have to work for a living don’t have time for philosophy.

Science can’t handle values, moral or aesthetic. Despite what Sam Harris says, there is no objective basis for morality.

Philosophy can’t give definitive answers to values questions, but it can offer multiple perspectives to help in making decisions. For example, morality can be looked at from a Kantian categorical imperative viewpoint and also from a utilitarian perspective, among others. There is something gained in understanding from looking at multiple points of view.

I think that there are some issues coming down the pike regarding artificial intelligence that will very much benefit from philosophy.

I hope SavoirFaire gets to answer this question, from the perspective of a philosopher.

No, I think he was just teasing us.

Not dead. Just not much money in it now.

He is only looking at philosophy related to his particular branch of physics and from that perspective he is mostly correct. For philosophers to apply their trade to modern physics will consequently require many years of training in theoretical physics. We can probably count the number of people qualified to be philosophers of physics on one or two hands. His presumption is that we don’t need to speculate the meaning of it all. He is quite wrong about that. We will likely need to apply logic and reason in ways that math alone simply will not be able to take us, meaning being just one.

Philosophy of a culture dictates it’s science

I don’t think it’s dead, just limited to very small spheres.

End of scientific theory

Interesting article, but I am skeptical. First of all you have to know what to measure. If you don’t take the relevant measurements, the data is worthless. Secondly, if you correlate everything with everything else you get a combinatoric explosion that becomes too large for any computing system. Bottom up reasoning can be useful, but it is nowhere nearly as efficient as top down reasoning. It will be interesting to see what can be achieved through pure data manipulation.

People have also been talking about the end of science from a theoretical point of view. Will we reach a point where we know all that we are capable of verifying with our measurements? They are still giving out Nobel Prizes, so I guess we have not yet reached that point.

@LostInParadise You might also find more interesting, the second article, with numerous real world examples.

Here it is

Thanks. The ability to process large amounts of data certainly changes things considerably, but sometimes people get carried away with how much of a difference it makes.

I came across this article, that shows the impact that computers will have on theoretical mathematics.

If algorithms replace scientists, who will write newer and better algorithms? Who will conceive of new, more powerful computer chips? And who will write and read scientific articles? Algorithms?

Imagine if Google could crack all the data from all the world’s particle accelerators, and come up with some algorithm that would make it all perfectly predictable. What would happen then? Would you not like to know what the equations are? What they say about the quantic world? What they predict? Of course the whole world would to know. And therefore Google or whoever would have to write down the model that predicts particles behavior. The source code of it. That is to say: The theory.