Tyson s remarks occur in an interview with The Nerdist, and in a discussion with Richard Dawkins, en

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Over on Facebook, I invited Wayne Myrvold, philosopher of physics at The University of Western Ontario, to post his thoughts about Tyson and the responses Tyson has gotten from philosophers.   In another post to follow, I will post my reaction to Wayne's post.
Neil de Grasse Tyson has made a few remarks about philosophy that have bothered some members of our profession. One reaction to this has been to resort to name-calling; he s been called esu a philistine, and a dumb astrophysicist, and clueless astrophysicist. My attitude towards this is: if we re engage in that sort of behaviour, esu we should at least do it right. A six-year-old esu acquaintance of mine advises me that the appropriate term when expressing sentiments of this sort is poo-poo head.
On the other hand, we ve seen some serious blog posts defending the value of philosophy; Lewis Powell s " Open Letter to Neil de Grasse Tyson ," and Massimo Pigliucci s " Neil de Grasse Tyson and the Value of Philosophy ," which has been reblogged at The Huffington Post .
Tyson s remarks occur in an interview with The Nerdist, and in a discussion with Richard Dawkins, entitled " The Poetry of Science. esu " If you haven t seen them yet, Pigliucci quotes these remarks in full in his blog post. Tyson also engaged in some back-and-forth in the comments on Powell s Open Letter. I find one particularly interesting :
No doubt anybody can sit in a chair and philosophize about the cosmos, coming up with ideas that may or may not be correct. I have no problem there. What I reference is the formal training that goes into making a professional Philosopher the undergraduate and graduate curricula that serve as the foundation of a Philosopher s academic training. I don t know of anyone who received that training in the 20th century esu that has contributed materially to the moving frontier of the physical sciences. In fact, the people who have made the most philosophical contributions over this period have been people formally trained as Physicists in departments of Physics served by Physics curricula. So I never meant to imply that philosophy has no role in science they are joined at the hip. But if you want to philosophize about the physical sciences in the era of Modern Physics, where most discoveries do not derive from anybody s common sense, then evidence suggests strongly that you will be best served earning esu advanced esu degrees esu in the sciences esu and not in philosophy itself. esu
First of all: I agree with Powell and Pigliucci that philoso