Philosophy’s modern image of itself as a bulwark against disruptive inquiry

 

What Locke said in the 18th century in England still holds a lot of sway in philosophy today, I think. 

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1609) the English philosopher John Locke wrote of the role of philosophy as serving as the under-laborer to the master-builder that is science. He meant that because science is so great, the only role left for philosophers was to clear the rubbish that kept people from believing in what scientists claim.

What he effectively implied was that philosophy was meant to be a bulwark against innovative philosophical contemplation or critique of the assumptions of science.

The problem with this view is that science has no actual view of reality. The scientists he idealized as “master-builders” could only tease out laws from their observations. They were helpless to see how those laws fit into a larger picture. 

The logical positivists furthered this idea by Locke, and the linguistic philosophers who followed them (led initially by Ludwig Wittgenstein) literally saw the role of philosophy as a kind of therapy for the ‘disorder’ of questioning metaphysical assumptions. See Ernest Gellner's Words and Things: An Examination of, and an Attack on, Linguistic Philosophy (1959).

So my philosopher colleagues were trained to see their role as preventing ideas like EOP (that integrates the achievements of science into a larger vision) from coming to the fore. This will not last, for people will eventually see it.