Tech bros are a mixture of wannabe John Galts, longtermists (a “philosophy” with deep pseudoscientific roots), and more-or-less open authoritarians or worse. All scientists I know thoroughly despise their “philosophies”.
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Also, the claim that logical positivists thoughts only science and mathematics were useful and philosophy a subjective BS is as wrong as it gets. They were philosophers doing philosophy, who had strong opinions how philosophy itself should be done. They only thought of metaphysics as meaningless.
sep 2, 2025, 8:12 am • 0 0 • view
Logical positivists were philosophers who birthed analytic philosophy, which didn't previously exist. "Prior philosophy" is an oversimplification, but topics outside its scope include metaphysics, theology, ethics, aesthetics, and the whole category of continental philosophy.
sep 2, 2025, 12:32 pm • 0 0 • view
Analytic philosophy predates logical positivism - it started with Frege, Russell and Moore, none of whome were logical positivists. Logical positivists didn't think aesthetics or ethics were outside the scope of philosophy (they did work on both) but outside the domain of knowledge. Big difference.
sep 2, 2025, 12:51 pm • 0 0 • view
Here Russell appears to be defending logical positivism. (I did not claim that they thought aesthetics and ethics were outside of philosophy. These were well established within philosophy.)
sep 2, 2025, 1:04 pm • 0 0 • view
Where do you see that in the article? I see the article questioning both the idea of verificationism and the wholesale rejection of metaphysics.
sep 2, 2025, 1:25 pm • 0 0 • view
My bad, on closer read, it's a logical positivism post-mortem after Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Russell wrote, "With what logical positivism has to say about empirical knowledge, I find myself, on some important points, no longer in agreement with most members of the school." (p. 1210)
sep 2, 2025, 2:27 pm • 0 0 • view
What I meant is that they thought aesthetics and ethics were outside of the meaningful, not outside of philosophy. They thought philosophy outside of narrow topics were meaningless.
sep 2, 2025, 1:09 pm • 0 0 • view
Incorrect. Outside the domain of knowledge, not outside the meaningful and not unimportant. They only considered traditional metaphysics meaningless.
sep 2, 2025, 1:24 pm • 0 0 • view
Ayer criticized ethics: 'Thus if I say to someone, "You acted wrongly in stealing that money," I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, "You stole that money.' This is described as "cognitively meaningless" but I agree now that "outside knowledge" is sufficiently similar.
sep 2, 2025, 6:47 pm • 0 0 • view
Emotivism does not state that ethics is unimportant, just outside of the domain of knowledge.Knowledge can tell you what to do to accomplish something or what will happen if somebody does it, which could illuminate consequences of ethical choices. But it doesn’t prescribe what you should want to do.
sep 2, 2025, 7:54 pm • 0 0 • view