Life as an Extreme Sport

Sagan on Science and Philosophy: A Simple Response to Neil deGrasse Tyson

As apparently everyone on the internet has already seen, Neil deGrasse Tyson has once again dismissed the value of philosophy as an endeavor, going so far as to encourage smart students to stay away from philosophy, with joke-y comments that it breaks a person.

I have only one brief response:

Because science is inseparable from the rest of the human endeavor, it cannot be discussed without making contact, sometimes glancing, sometimes head-on, with a number of social, political, religious and philosophical issues.

Of course, that’s not my original thought. That one? That one is from the introduction to Cosmos, and it belongs to Carl Sagan.