Is philosophy dead?

I recently followed some discussion threads that started a couple of years ago with Steven Hawkings' assertion: "Philosophy is dead", Hawkings asserts that the truth about the universe is in the hand of the physicists, and philosopher don't keep up with science.   Well, reading it I thought of taking out my BA in Philosophy diploma and hide it, since with the death of philosophy this diploma becomes worthless (maybe I should also retroactive loose my graduate studies, since the acceptance was based on that diploma!).    Some philosophy professors make  defensive claims restricting the death to certain subsets of philosophy.  

My view is that philosophy deals with meta issues,  it does not deal with scientific experiments, but in trying to understand what is a valid argument about the world, and how conclusions are derived from assumptions and assertions.  Many of the concepts we use in computer science: class, object, event, instance and many more actually exist in philosophy much earlier than the invention of computer science.  The recent discussions about causality vs. correlation has long time roots in philosophy literature. 

During my academic studies I have taken courses in various departments: computer science, business school, education, mathematics, but as I have written several years ago, I value the studies in philosophy most.  I think that the study in philosophy has trained  me in both creative thinking and out-of-the-box thinking. I realized early in the studies that this is what you are expected to do in order to get really good grades.   

So I'll trust Hawkings and his colleagues when they talk about physics, and proudly live the philosophy diploma on my virtual wall.  

On Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand had a significant impact on me when I was young.  I read her books while being a teenager, and was captured by her ideas.   Recently, her two famous books "The fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" gained new translations to Hebrew, which was a good opportunity to read them again after many years.  

In retrospect, there was something naive in my attitude to Ayn Rand's book as a young person, there is also a lot of misinterpretations of her ideas in the universe, one of them is the claim that this is a basis for conservative thinking. Ayn Rand was far from being conservative in the political sense.    

However, two things I have taken from Ayn Rand, escorted me all my life:

The ability to "swim against the current"  and take what other people think of me with a grain of salt (including my managers over all  the history),  and the strive for excellence in the mediocre culture around us.  

These two are blended together in Ayn Rand's books. 

 She puts the individual in the middle, rather than the society, and puts in the center of her stories individuals with some kind of excellence. 

Our current society seems to prefer mediocre people that meet metrics, rather than individuals who break out of the box (thus the metrics don't follow them).      A food for thought.

On event processing and philosophy

In case you don't know I have a BA in Philosophy, at later phases in life I also studied for MBA, and for Ph.D. in computer science, but I still have a soft spot for philosophy, it was the most fun to study, and I also think that it has been very useful for me to learn clear and exact thinking, this is an important asset I got from these studies. As I moved away, I did not keep much contact with philosophy, although during my Ph.D. studies I took an advanced logic course in the philosophy department with the late Professor Hugues Leblanc, one of the giant scholars I have ever met, one of the leading logicians of our times, and a great person.

Recently I had an Email exchange with an interesting person, Ken Archer from Telogical systems, whom I met in Nashville earlier this month. Ken has participated recently in a tutorial on ontology of events, given by philosophers, I have copied the description he sent me:

These were philosophical ontologists in dialogue with ontology engineers (primary in biomedical domains, where ontologies have found relatively high acceptance). The philosophers’ starting premise was that the top level distinction in ontology is between continuants (entities that endure through time while maintaining their identity) and occurrents (entities that happen, unfold or develop in time). Continuants and occurrents are orthogonal to each other, as continuants participate in occurrents (e.g. surgeons and patients participate in surgery). Following from this premise was the claim that, while continuants have received much attention historically in philosophy, occurrents have not. As a result, we are much more comfortable talking and generalizing about continuants (objects) than we are about occurrents (processes, events), and we often tend to reify occurrents into continuants as a result.

From this starting point, the philosophers embarked on a philosophical ontology of occurrents that they said reflected the best results of current philosophical research. The bulk of what they had to say can be found in the Basic Formal Ontology, beginning on page 59 (the diagram for their occurrent ontology is copied below). I’ve found the Basic Formal Ontology to be very helpful in all of my modeling. As a result, these philosophers would definitely say that we can talk of types of events or processes, as we do in event processing, and argue that the reason we tend not to speak of types of events/processes is this bias for continuants over occurrents. The research project of these ontologists, then, is to provide an upper ontology of occurrents.

I think that while we are constructing our terminology and conceptual models, we can go back to the roots and look at the formal ontology work. I need some free time to digest it, but it looks interesting.

More on this - later.