Saturday, February 26, 2005

Honderich on Philosophy and Science

As it seems to me, the virtue of philosophy is that it is logically more hard-headed than science. The virtue of science is that it knows a lot more about the empirical nitty-gritty of the world and the ways it works. That philosophy is logically more hard-headed has nothing to do with Formal Logic. Philosophy is somewhat better at keeping its eye on the ball. When it is good, it also does not beg questions or operate with circular or elusive notions. It is not subjective in an ordinary sense, doesn't run things together, separates things from the relations they are in, is explicit, is intolerant of nonsense, attends closely to making all of its propositions consistent, and so on and so forth.

Ted Honderich, "Consciousness and Inner Tubes".