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Philosophy and Computer Science Revisited
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?"
Actually, a course in the philosophy department on logic got me into computers. Years later I took a programming course and discovered it was the same thing as symbolic logic, mostly. The rest is history. It made my career. :-)
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
I'm almost 5 years out of school now and got degrees in both CS and Philosophy. In my humble opinion, there's a lot of intersection between the two, especially in regard to philosophy of the mind, but the really interesting part, I think, is how it helps me in my day to day work.
No, I'm not discussing the Critique of Pure Reason, espousing empiricism, or wondering if I really am just dreaming.
What I learned from my other major was discursive thinking: dissecting an idea to see what it means and what its ramifications are and how to deal with having more than one way to do it (TM) by choosing the best one.
Philosophy, for me, was all about discussion, so I'd had years of practice putting ideas up on the white board, understanding them, and maybe shooting them down years before I ever joined my first programming team.
(That, and being able to write incomprehensible comments vis a vis the English challenged folk with whom I sometimes work;))
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
But those are all general skills; my knowledge of philosophical theories or history or personalities are, frankly, never a part of my work life.
You could say the same thing about physics. I use neither theories of gravity and electromagnetism nor knowledge of famous physicists as part of my daily programming. But in the process of learning those things, I learned valuable lessons about experimentation and scientific thinking. Physics problems are well suited to the scientific method, philosophy problems are well suited to philosophical methods (well, sometimes).
Writing computer programs and writing analytical philosophy papers are more or less the same thing except computer programs are easier to test and may have better documented assumptions (APIs).
There are also striking personality correlations between computer scientists and philosophers. So if a CS major takes some philosophy courses, he may make some interesting new friends. But there's certainly no reason to merge the departments (unless they're also joined with the math department).
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Are computer science and philosophy related? Yes! I have BA in philosophy, and I focused on cognitive science and artificial intelligence, where the two meet head to head. Computer science needs philosophy in order to help evaluate the status of machines in terms of whether or not they have consciousness. And philosophy needs computer science to help answer open questions in the philosophy of mind.
Also, the two have a mutual interest in the study of information--what is it, how do you use it efficiently, how do you organize it, how do you process it, etc. If you have any interest in it, you should definitely check out Luciano Floridi--he's part of/started a movement he calls The Philosophy of Information that encompasses but AI and the philosophy of computing in general, including questions in ethics.
Currently I'm taking courses in computer science (and I work in IT), and I hope to start grad school in cognitive science next year. So yes, for me philosophy and computer science are intimately entwined.
I took a logic course from my university's math department. A few people majoring in philosophy took that very same course. They ran away scared after the teacher explained what a well formed formula in propositional logic is. And the sad thing is that that course was fairly easy compared to the course in computational logic I took last semester. I wonder what those philosophy majors would have done when faced with the notion of decidability. Mathematical (and/or computational) logic is really far away from what they teach in philosophy. Socrates might've been a man and therefore mortal, but he didn't study computer science.