M. Anthony Mills has a very nice reply to Neil deGrasse Tyson's dismissal of philosophy. Among the points he makes, Mills notes:
Helmholtz, Mach, Planck, Duhem, Poincaré, Bohr, and Heisenberg are a few noteworthy modern scientists “distracted” enough to engage in philosophical question-asking. Einstein himself read philosophy voraciously beginning from an early age (he read Kant when he was 13) and engaged in lively disputes with many leading philosophers of the era. Mach’s empiricism, Poincaré’s conventionalism, and Duhem’s holism all influenced Einstein’s thinking. Such cross-pollination between philosophy and science did not stall the progress of physics, but instead led to one of the greatest scientific revolutions in history.
Lest we think that only noteworthy modern physicists engaged in philosophical question-asking with actual philosophers, let me point out some noteworthy modern biologists who have done likewise -- a list off the top of my head, so no doubt missing some (and thus, please feel free to add names in the comments). And to be clear, I am citing here only some of the most famous ones -- there are many less famous ones who have nonetheless had important and influential (in both directions) exchanges with philosophers.
- Michael Ghieselin - nature of species, sexual selection, and more
- Stephen Jay Gould - importance of constraints, contingency, species selection, adaptationism, and more
- Eva Jablonka - epigenetic inheritance and more
- Richard Lewontin - fitness, natural selection (especially levels of selection), adaptationism, and more
- Ernst Mayr - concepts of species, nature of speciation, and more
- Joan Roughgarden - natural selection, social selection (different from MW's), and more
- Mary Jane West-Eberhard - development, social selection (different from JR's), and more
In other words, biologists and philosophers have had productive exchanges about important biological concepts, theories, processes, and (although I haven't emphasized it here) methods.
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