Stephen Hawking recently declared that philosophy is "dead" - meaning metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that aspires to the most general understanding of space and time and other fundamental stuff of the world. Get rid of sophistry and defining into oblivion, learn some math and read some physics, he said. Pick any science and philosophers can drag it into the mud.
Philosophers disagree and say just the opposite - physics needs metaphysics more than ever.
The inability of of physics to to fit consciousness into the material world by mapping activity to it has been a failure, writes Raymond Tallis in The Guardian. Well, that isn't physics, that is psychologists and neuroscientists trapped in an fMRI fetish, and, yes, String Theory is mathematical and philosophical gobbledy-gook but it's hardly the default belief in physics. String Theory is a proper name, it is not a Theory on a par with Einstein or Newton or Darwin.
Can't explain how the universe came out of nothing? FAIL. And physicists can't make every particle a relevant metaphor to people working for a living. FAIL.
Philosophy to the rescue? No, it's the undead lich of Paul Feyerabend, science's greatest enemy, haunting science and philosophy to this day.
Philosophy isn't dead yet by Raymond Tallis, The Guardian
