Why is philosophy not considered pseudoscience?
If we split off logic as a discipline from philosophy, as a full-fledged science — chemistry-once split off from alchemy, what will remain on the skeleton of philosophy? Having passed this discipline perfectly at the University, having tried to study the issue independently with the help of academic literature, I could not get rid of the idea that modern philosophy is rudimentary and even pseudoscientific. The endless castles in the air built by her theories are simply not able to survive meetings with Occam's razor. Not to mention the cases when philosophical theories directly contradict the natural," evidence-based " sciences. Why is philosophy still considered a scientific discipline?
Pseudoscience is something that pretends to be a science without being one. That is, it is impossible to understand what pseudoscience is without understanding what science is.
And the question of the demarcation of science is a traditional philosophical question. And what is typical of philosophical questions? Lack of definitive, unambiguous answers.
So you basically can't make a statement about pseudoscience a statement about facts. You can only offer a draft solution to the issue and arguments in its favor, with which people can agree or disagree.
In any case, in practice, this demarcation is carried out at the level of individual disciplines, and not at the level of science in general. Historians disqualified Fomenko, doctors-homeopathy, physicists-ethers. Who should disqualify a philosophy if it does not consider itself to be any of the above? It doesn't pretend to be either physics or sociology. Philosophy is philosophy.
One of the most general definitions of the subject of philosophy is due. Another is non – empirical problems. And it is difficult for the proper and extra-empirical to come into conflict with the natural sciences.
The fact that you passed philosophy with an excellent degree, but you don't know it and therefore see some castles in the air, only speaks about the extremely low level of teaching the subject, which, apparently, was reduced to meaningless memorization of historical facts (such and such a philosopher said such and such a year), completely disconnected from the problems and practice (why he said it, what problem
Occam's razor, by the way, is a methodological principle, and the methodology of science is a philosophical discipline. Pseudoscientific, as long as you propose to leave only logic in the sciences.
The practical implications of philosophy are pervasive.
The modern world is shaped by political philosophers-Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and even if you can question their influence, Marx is absolutely indisputable in the sense of influence.
Right now we are facing the ethical problems of euthanasia and genetic engineering, and those who seek solutions to these problems are philosophers. Scientific and medical ethics are extremely important today.
There is an excellent answer about Spinoza's influence on modern science Alexander Zaitsev, but you can write something like this about every great philosopher.
The methodology of science does not exist in isolation from epistemology.
And the modern scientific method is mainly based on Popper, who, among other things, defended the necessity of metaphysics for science in a polemic with neo-positivists, since many scientific hypotheses are metaphysical, not derived from experience. Einstein did not deduce the curvature of space by mass from experience, this is metaphysics.
In the humanities, philosophy is not just everywhere, but also has not lost its authorship, unlike physicists, who for the most part automatically use the method, sociologists, art historians and philologists perfectly remember whose concepts they use – Weber, Foucault, Lacan, Barth and so on, on, on, dozens of names. For them, the subject is more complex and therefore it is much more important to reflect on the method and the data obtained.
And I wrote all this while maintaining the position that philosophy is not a science. Because there are other categories besides science and pseudoscience. Apparently, your teacher didn't tell you this, so I have to.
Returning to the issue of demarcation, it can be carried out in different ways. Philosophy is a science if the criterion is a critical tradition and academic quality. Philosophy is not a science if the criterion is considered to be the scientific method and scientific knowledge. It is pseudoscientific to say that philosophy is pseudoscience.
There are 3 areas of knowledge: mathematics, physics and other.
In mathematics, there are basic terms like “set”, which everyone seems to understand, but they don't really get into the jungle deeper than axiomatics. In physics, in the language of mathematics, theories are constructed that converge with a finite set of physical experiments, but the questions of the reasons for the world constructed in this way are not particularly considered. Also, questions about the nature of consciousness are not considered (what is it like to be a cat, an ant, or a swarm of bees, who gave us the opportunity to observe the world around us (qualia), whether the stone has consciousness, etc.). If you delete all the garbage from the “other”, then what remains is just a philosophy that deals with all sorts of interesting questions.
There is an opinion that if the language of mathematics is not the main one, then it is not a science. But philosophy gets into places where mathematics is not applicable, so such a quibble, well, I would call philosophy a science in short. If you go to graduate school, you will have a minimum PhD in philosophy, and it seems quite logical: the foundation of any science is philosophy. True, it will only be needed for the humanities “sciences”, in more precise sciences, they are mainly engaged in solving equations. By the way, here a friend mentioned the ether above, Atsyukovsky's” general etherodynamics ” is normally so the philosophical foundations are chewed up, this is how it is applied approximately (it's a pity that his etherodynamics does not really work, although everything is beautiful there)