European Unions

[Justin Schwartz]

I agree with Carrol's first point, that technical matters have to be 
discussedtechnically before they can be translated for "the million" and the 
rest who should care. It's also true that there is a lot of needless 
doubletalk, but accessibility to all is only a virtue in certain contexts. 
Btw, Hawking's remarks about philosophy reflect a narrowly Cantabridgean, 
and indeed, a narrowly Trinity College take on philosophy. There is more to 
20th c philosophy than Wittgenstein. Much 20th century philosophy is deeply 
informed by a profound understand of real science, including Cambridge 
philosophy, if Hawkings would talk even to other members of the Cambs phil. 
dept. D.H. Mellor, a colleague of his, knows his physics. Russell wrote 
excellent books on relativity. My advisor in Hist & Phil of Science, Mary 
Hesse, is scientifically informed. The original logical positivists, Carnap 
and Reichenbach, were no slouches. Frank was a physicist. Bridgeman won a 
Nobel Prize in physics. My own teachers at Michigan, Larry Sklar and Peter 
Railton, are up on quantum and stat mech as well as relativity. I could go 
on. --jks

"ordinary people" (i.e.
>non-specialists),  whose only access to truth is through its formulation
>in their language by those who have first discussed it among themselves
>in a more complex language. Stephen Hawking, contemplating the
>achivement in physics and cosmology of TOE, speculates on what that
>would make possible:
>
>". . .in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too
>technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a
>few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so
>much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosoher of this century,
>said, 'The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of
>language.' What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from
>Aristotle to Kant!
>
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