What is the most fundamental subject?

One of the things I dislike more than any other on this site is people who care so much about rep they bother to edit posts to complain they got neg rep. Does it really matter that much to you?

Fun Fact: Starting on any Wikipedia page at all, if you click the first link that isn't in brackets/quotation marks and keep following these links, you eventually get to the page 'Philosophy'. Works almost every time.

Fun Fact: Starting on any Wikipedia page at all, if you click the first link that isn't in brackets/quotation marks and keep following these links, you eventually get to the page 'Philosophy'. Works almost every time.

Oh my God it works!
Is it weird that I find that really amazing?!? Haha

What a brilliant rebuttal. I guess that's me put in my place.

There is a very good reason why most (if not all) undergraduate Mathematics courses have a logic module incorporated into them: logic is the foundation of human thought, and therefore is the foundation of mathematics. Now, I understand to the uninitiated - meaning you - anything that uses variables and symbols will automatically looks like 'maths', but this is not the case.

no

Cute sarcasm. Rebuttals are not necessary when you say something stupid (which your "maths precedes logic" statement certainly was), normally people just point and laugh; alas that is not possible here, so I opted for a succinct 'no'.

There is a very good reason why most (if not all) undergraduate Mathematics courses have a logic module incorporated into them: logic is the foundation of human thought, and therefore is the foundation of mathematics. Now, I understand to the uninitiated - meaning you - anything that uses variables and symbols will automatically looks like 'maths', but this is not the case.

I'll tolerant of your need to sate your very obvious superiority complex, but at least ensure that you're actually correct before doing so.

Oh... My bad! Apologies. I misread that rather badly.

I'd like to how anyone could possibly justify the claim that computer science is more fundamental than physics, philosophy, or maths.

See my post on page 3.

You make an interesting case for computer science being potentialy essential for particular developments in mathematics and physics; I don't know enough about the subject to evaluate it. But if we distinguish between the relationships between subjects' practical applications and those between their epistemic and conceptual featured (which is what 'fundamental' refers to), I think it's pretty clear that philosophy is the most fundamental.

We don't have to know anything about computer science to do philosophy; nor do we have to utilise the conceptual schema on which it relies. To do computer science, however, we have to employ the conceptual schema of philosophy and make philosophical assumptions. If the subject is to be anything other than utterly groundless speculation, therefore, we have philosophise first.

Thank you,
I think philosophy is very fundamental, but I see philosophy or at least 'philosophical reasoning' as bound up with serious academic study in most disciplines. I think there is all to often a tendency to consider philosophy as a discipline totally separate from all others, but in fact I believe most serious work done by philosophers are done by those who are also linguists or mathematicians or economists etc. Naom Chomsky was a linguist. Godel was a mathematician first then a philosopher. Rene Descartes was a mathematician come physicist and also a philosopher.

Philosophy is bound to a particular kind of enquiry- be it in mathematics, Computer science or Politics- and without a territory to explore there can be no discoveries in that field of philosophy.

This is why I think philosophy, whilst exploring the assumptions of some theoretical framework, cannot be said to be more fundamental than that particular framework- be it maths or science. Because without a subject of enquiry, there can be no philosophical questions to be asked. How can you walk where there is no ground? I see philosophy more as a tool, a kind of reasoning that explores the foundations; a philosoph is after all just a lover of wisdom... but in what field?

Ever heard of the Turing-Church thesis? This is a computer science thesis about the nature of functions which are calculable, which was proved by Turing to be equivalent to Godel's incompleteness theorem. For those who don't know, Godel's theorem states that mathematics is either incomplete or inconsistent; that there are facts in mathematics that are true and can never be proved to be so.