Do you ever wonder what the future of philosophy holds? The next millenium (assuming we survive it) will no doubt have many huge philosophical revelations. The future is probably more philosophically rich than the past... Doesn't it frustrate you to know we won't be around to see it? Whatever it is that will be discovered will no doubt seem so obvious after the fact. So what is right under our noses that we're not seeing?
Could you give a hint as to what you have in mind? Your post's tone seems to imply you have definite guesses...
I don't think it's possible to answere that question. The future is so unpredictable. There are an infinity of different possibilities for each moment.
I have no idea what the future holds. I just wish I could find out. I find all the past discoveries/ideas of philosophy so interesting I wonder what discoveries lie ahead.
I can't see why answering philosophical questions will get any easier in the future. Plato's ideas are still as good as most, and at the rate we're going in the West probably still will be in another few thousand years. Many Eastern philosophers would probably ask what there is left to solve, since they reached firm conclusions about it all long ago, albeit that their findings may not be third-person provable. It's hard to imagine what sort of scientific observation or experiment would help us make progrees on any of the deeper philosophical questions. We surely have as much relevant info. now as we ever have had or ever will have.
A guess I would venture a guess that in the future many more connections between differing scientific and philosophic fields will surface. I think this will be the case because I believe everything is in some way connected to everything else. Only time will tell though.
Philosophy and Science Unfortunately, most of Western philosophy is taking its cues from recent developments in science. In both metaphysics and philosophy of mind we see this trend most evident. Science may be a useful tool in predicting our experience, but it fails to tell us exactly why its claims manage to predict what they do. The future of philosophy may well be tied to scientific advances, but the former will (hopefully) not be dependent upon the latter. The big questions - e.g. those on: the nature of reality, the correspondence between it and language/mathematics, what personal identity consists in - might have already been answered (by Eastern philosophy, Socrates, and other ancient approaches). What is left for us to decide is, firstly, whether scientific advances tell us anything new or just represent theories for consideration. Secondly, we must continue to assess the philosophy of those before us and its utility in the present. Only if these conditions are met, I think, is it possible that we'll come up with anything new.
24 hours before Descartes said "I think therefore I am" people were probably saying the same thing "we know all we can". I'm just wondering when the next mind will be and how significant an impact he or she will make on philosophy... Also, think of all the future areas which philosophy will be a huge issue in. Cloning, teleportation, AI, computers that can compute at the same speed as a human brain, extra-terrestrial life, etc... If even one of these things (other than cloning, which already has) come to exist, that will lead to all new areas of philosophy.
Yes but this is all about ethics, a rather dull part of philosophy which, in the absence of anything spiritual, may as well be called social engineering. It remains to be shown that philosophy can tell us anything 'true' about morality or ethics without first presupposing some higher being that provides an objective yardstick for value judgements. IMO the study of ethics in the absence of an assumed higher being belongs in sociology rather than philosophy.
RE:Canute Everett's multiple universes theory is based on scientific observation (thus outside of Plato's realm). The philosophical conseqences of this experiment are sufficently deep.
Re: RE:Canute Fair point. But I don't think Everett was the first to have the idea, just the first to relate it specifically to scientific observation as opposed to some deductive system. And also it remains a conjecture, it's hard to see what scientific observation we might make to decide its truth or falsity.
What? There are lots of true philosophical questions raised, not just ethical ones. In teleportation, there is the question if you "soul" is teleported or if you are just copied and pasted, so to speak. The 'you' that comes out the other side may not actually be you, just a copy that thinks he's you. And if we were to find extra-terrestrial life that would have alot of implications on religious philosophy... And with the super computers, if we could download our consiousness on to a computer we could be immortal. There's alot more than just ethics being touched by those issues, should they arise in the future.
Hmm. You might be right. However all your examples are 'what ifs', and are purely philosophical for the time being. Teleportation would tell us nothing about the soul that we don't know already, aliens can easily be incorporated into most religions, and even if we make a computer conscious we won't have any way of testing whether we've succeeded (we can't even prove people are conscious).
I never said the future would hold answers, only more questions. But who's complaining!? That's what I mean by the future of philosophy is probably going to be very interesting!
RE:notme2000 Einstein said something like (paraphrase): the bigher the circle of ligth (knowledge) the bigger the perimeter of the darkness which surroundings it
