This is interesting, because the “dead simply don’t die” problem definitely exists in the popular perception. If you ask a man on the street to name a philosopher, you’re much more likely to get Plato or Socrates than Kant, or Nietzsche, or Dennett. This is in stark contrast to physics, where (I imagine) “name a physicist” would get you Einstein, Hawking, or maybe Newton.
But one might argue that there wasn’t anything properly called ‘physics’ before Newton—Bringing up Newton for Physics is isomorphic to bringing up Socrates for philosophy. Someone calling Aristotle a ‘physicist’ would be off-base, despite his having written a book called ‘physics’.
This is interesting, because the “dead simply don’t die” problem definitely exists in the popular perception. If you ask a man on the street to name a philosopher, you’re much more likely to get Plato or Socrates than Kant, or Nietzsche, or Dennett. This is in stark contrast to physics, where (I imagine) “name a physicist” would get you Einstein, Hawking, or maybe Newton.
But one might argue that there wasn’t anything properly called ‘physics’ before Newton—Bringing up Newton for Physics is isomorphic to bringing up Socrates for philosophy. Someone calling Aristotle a ‘physicist’ would be off-base, despite his having written a book called ‘physics’.