Santiago Zabala & Creston Davis write in Aljazeera:
At a recent Google Zeitgeist conference, Stephen Hawking boldly pronounced that “philosophy is dead”.
It is dead, he thinks, because philosophy is passé. Hawking believes philosophy is like a guy who shows up at a cocktail party just after the guests have left. Why would one of the most intelligent humans alive say such a provocative thing? His reasons are obvious: “Philosophers,” Hawking says, “have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.”
According to Hawking, the conversation about the truth of the world rests in the hands of elite physics professors funded by multinational corporations and national governments. Should we believe this pronouncement just because it comes from an eminence such as Hawking? Could it be that some categorical mistake has been committed by the likes of Hawking who, in our opinion, mistakes philosophy for theology?
The debate over the death of philosophy begun by Hawking not only rests on wrong premises, but also searches for an inadequate solution. First, philosophy is still taught in universities, and second, philosophers continue to write books that disagree on the meaning of our existential relation with the world. We submit that a more precise question needs to be addressed: Which philosophy is dead?
The question over the death of philosophy is certainly not new. In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant posited ideas such as “categories of the mind” and “transcendental apperception” that were themselves beyond philosophical interrogation, while last century saw Martin Heidegger arguing that philosophy ended with its dissolution into different disciplines (aesthetics, ethics, logics) and into particular sciences (physics, psychology, biology), and ignoring those fundamental questions that determine our lives. Click Link for Full Article;
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/06/201361082357860647.html
Posted By F. Sheikh
Science comes out of philosophy, and scientists are evolved philosophers, hence, Hawking must have said this in some context – perhaps he was talking about philosophers who contemplate only on the metaphysical matters and are bent on elaborating imaginary entities like God, spirits and afterlife. I kind of understand what he means.
When Hawking says “Philosophy is Dead,” he is in fact philosophizing. The day philosophy will die all knowledge will be dead; even science will come to an end.
Mirza