Philosophy is All

The Roots:

Today's xkcd:

The alt text says: Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".

I haven't tried that, but I suspect it's really true. Philosophy underlies all forms of human knowledge, as is demonstrated by the career of one philosopher I know. I think I recounted this once in the comments, but it deserves a post of its own.

He began as a student of chemistry, but in the first class he was told, "Really, chemistry is all about physics. So we'll start with physics... and not that boring old physics, but quantum physics."

Well, he thought, if chemistry is all physics, I should just be studying physics! So he changed majors, and went into physics.

First class in physics, he came into class and the professor said, "Really, physics is all math. So we'll start with math...." My friend walked out, and changed majors that very day to mathematics.

The math department didn't tell him that math was 'really' anything else, as mathematicians are pretty self-satisfied. So, for a long time he studied math.

After a while, though, he began to notice that some of the bedrock principles of math weren't accounted for by the math itself. He asked his advisor why we were assuming these bedrock principles.

"Well," his advisor said, "our bedrock principles really come from philosophy."

I know another philosopher who teaches 'philosophy of math.' I saw him once fending off a bunch of very angry young students. I asked him afterwards what that was about, and he said, "Oh, they were all from the math or artificial intelligence programs, and had just finished their first paper. They all gave the same answer to the problem I raised for them: their findings proved that there is a fundamental contradiction in one of the bedrock principles underlying mathematics, but there can't be a contradiction because this is a bedrock principle of mathematics."

Such is the life of a philosopher.

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