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Philosophy and Computer Science Revisited

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the philosophy-goes-nicely-with-many-things dept.

Soren Kierkegaard writes "While reading the two-and-a-half-year-old Slashdot post on Does Philosophy have a role in Computer Science, it occurred to me that over these past few years Philosophy has a more prominent role in Computer Science then ever before. Cognitive Science and Computer Ethics are more established disciplines in universities, and the numbers of philosophy graduates double majoring in computer science and information systems are climbing. Is a merger of Philosophy, a discipline steeped in history and intelligent thought, and Computer Science, a discipline that looks to the future, the best of both worlds?"

1 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. A few years ago I would have said yes... by pfbram · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    I have a BS in CSci, a BA in the liberal arts, and have taken a few philosophy courses.

    I've become much more jaded about philosophy because it began to dawn on me after taking a grad course in philosophy that engineering/IT is about SOLVING general computational problems. We're looking for relationships between numbers, values, methods of computation, etc. which have a general purpose utility. In most cases, these pipes/algorithms are designed to be somewhat blind to the content going through them. It's a quest to solve general problems.

    Philosophy, on the other hand, often "forgets" that its problems are often computational/logic, perhaps even totally unrelated to the subject being treated -- rather, there is a more general and underlying logical problem that gives rise to what appears to be a problem in ethics, a paradox in something or the other. Philosophers, in my experience, can get mired in a specific subject domain, when the problem is actually a general logic issue. I could provide many examples from the philosophy of mind, but I don't want to distract from this basic distinction between what computer science/algorithmics tends to be about -- and how philosophers tend to get mired in circular/uncomputable particulars. The last problem with philosophy is that, I think, it doesn't actually WANT to solve problems -- lest it put itself and its faculty out of business as a relic of a previous age.