Off the top of my head: Karl Popper, due to his influence on the scientific method. (Perhaps it’s not as valuable today as it was back then, due to bayesianism, but still.)
Edit: Also, epistemology is a branch of philosophy.
Yes, historically, Popper performed a valuable service, by showing (imperfectly) what distinguishes science from nonsense. (Stove characterises Popper as someone who overreacted to the fact that scientists sometimes make mistakes, but that is less than his due.)
But it’s interesting that one can say that about Popper, and a few other philosophers—that they were at least partly right, and where they were wrong, they were at least wrong, rather than “not even wrong”. They created something to be corrected and improved on, not trash to be thrown out.
A colleague in theoretical computer science once showed me a Ph.D. thesis that a logician of his acquaintance had sent him. He found it rather strange in form, compared with the sort of mathematical thesis he was accustomed to reading. I looked at it and laughed. It followed precisely the standard form for a thesis in philosophy. (I think Pirsig describes this in “Zen and the Art...”) In chapter 1, the author states the subject he is going to address. In chapters 2 to 8 he writes a detailed history of everything of significance that has ever been written on the subject. In chapter 9 he introduces his own modest contribution, and in chapters 10 to 12 indicates how it relates to the history. A scientific thesis, on the other hand, begins with a similar chapter 1, surveys the previous literature in chapter 2, going back only far enough to establish the context for his work, and the remainder is all about the author’s own work.
No subject is worth anything whose entry qualification is a thesis of the first form. It would be interesting to write press-release style digests of current papers in philosophy, summarising their findings in bite-sized chunks:
What we studied.
What we discovered.
How we discovered it.
Why it matters.
I don’t think it could be done other than as a work of satire. Maybe it should be. Any iconoclastic grad students in philosophy want to give it a go?
Off the top of my head: Karl Popper, due to his influence on the scientific method. (Perhaps it’s not as valuable today as it was back then, due to bayesianism, but still.)
Edit: Also, epistemology is a branch of philosophy.
Yes, historically, Popper performed a valuable service, by showing (imperfectly) what distinguishes science from nonsense. (Stove characterises Popper as someone who overreacted to the fact that scientists sometimes make mistakes, but that is less than his due.)
But it’s interesting that one can say that about Popper, and a few other philosophers—that they were at least partly right, and where they were wrong, they were at least wrong, rather than “not even wrong”. They created something to be corrected and improved on, not trash to be thrown out.
A colleague in theoretical computer science once showed me a Ph.D. thesis that a logician of his acquaintance had sent him. He found it rather strange in form, compared with the sort of mathematical thesis he was accustomed to reading. I looked at it and laughed. It followed precisely the standard form for a thesis in philosophy. (I think Pirsig describes this in “Zen and the Art...”) In chapter 1, the author states the subject he is going to address. In chapters 2 to 8 he writes a detailed history of everything of significance that has ever been written on the subject. In chapter 9 he introduces his own modest contribution, and in chapters 10 to 12 indicates how it relates to the history. A scientific thesis, on the other hand, begins with a similar chapter 1, surveys the previous literature in chapter 2, going back only far enough to establish the context for his work, and the remainder is all about the author’s own work.
No subject is worth anything whose entry qualification is a thesis of the first form. It would be interesting to write press-release style digests of current papers in philosophy, summarising their findings in bite-sized chunks:
What we studied.
What we discovered.
How we discovered it.
Why it matters.
I don’t think it could be done other than as a work of satire. Maybe it should be. Any iconoclastic grad students in philosophy want to give it a go?