When Philosophy is Disparaged

Rongqing Dai
Indepentent Philosopher, USA

Abstract

Human beings are paying a dire price for disparaging philosophy in all facets of life, especially in science where the most intelligent explorations of nature for the survival and advance of Homo sapiens species are supposed to be conducted. In this writing, I will demonstrate through examples how philosophically erroneous mistakes in mathematics and physics that were made at the turn of 20th century could last for more than a century without being identified, as well as an issue that has lingered for several centuries and still confuses the whole world with its philosophical complexity. In those examples, we could see that scientists with the aura of the smartest people on earth could easily be convinced by “simple, straight, and brilliant ideas”, which could bring aesthetically attractive convenience but would lead to various kinds of false knowledge and wrong practices, and then defend those ideas with all their lives for a long time, simply because the scientific community has not been prepared with strong philosophical capacity of reasoning.

Presentation