He Put His Pants On One Leg At A Time And Occasionally He Didn't Have A Leg To Stand On

Richard Feynman is considered one of the the greatest theoretical physicists of all time, he was a great genius, brilliant, an engaging personality and from everything I've read a great guy.  A physicist once told me that the only other figure he knew of who might have matched him for intelligence was Sakarov - I'm not in any position to make that kind of claim.   He was not, however, God and where he was demonstrably ignorant, he was as ignorant as anyone else who is ignorant. That's one of the qualities of ignorance. it is a great leveler.  As someone who once gave a famous lecture called, There's Always Room At The Bottom, Feynman might have realized that.   He was not only, by his own demonstration, ignorant on the topic of philosophy, he was determinedly ignorant of it.  As I've quoted the historian of science,Paul Feyerabend before,

The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach, and so on.  But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth.

And considering that Feynman chose to put his dismissal of philosophy in an assertion that philosophers were ignorant of mathematics and mathematical thinking he was showing his profound ignorance of the history of mathematics.  Just off the top of my head,  I can think of Van Quine, George Cantor, Kurt Godel, Bertrand Russell, and many others in a list that would include such figures as Rene Descartes - one of the most significant mathematicians in history as well as one of the most significant figures in European philosophy.  

Polls such as the ones linked to above, often put Issac Newton at the #1 position as greatest physicist of all times (Feynmann is most often listed as #4 or there about).  Newton also has a place near the top of any greatest mathematicians list as, among other things, the co-inventor of calculus, the other inventor being the eminent German philosopher Gottfied Leibniz.  One of the most significant critics of their mathematical discoveries was a philosopher who I suspect Feynman would dismiss as do most extremely ignorant people, George Berkeley, most often, today, dismissed by the entirely ignorant for his purportedly  extreme idealism - look it up, in philosophy it doesn't mean what you almost certainly don't think think it does.   His critique of the logical foundation of Newton's calculus was so spot on and so profound that it took centuries for some of his points to be answered.  I recall reading that one of the deficiencies  in rigorous foundations Berkeley discovered in the early 18th century  wasn't adequately addressed until well into the 20th century.   

Berkeley didn't, of course, reject Newton's calculus, his argument was made to show that mathematicians have to, in the end, depend on things taken at faith and, at times, on the basis of authority.  And at times they go quite far on that basis.  That is something about mathematics which was confirmed, with recourse to philosophical thinking, in the early 20th century, to the crushing dismay of some of the most eminent of mathematicians and some extreme materialist-scientistic philosophers, Bertrand Russell, perhaps the quintessential example of that.   Berkeley's mathematical thinking and reasoning certainly proved he understood mathematics on a very profound level that engaged the minds of other mathematicians in a controversy that has lasted for centuries, the general point he was making now being confirmed.  Mathematics has no final basis in rigorous logic, there are things necessary to it that can't be finally based in logic.   It is funny that the same day I listened to the video I posted this morning I also listened to one in which Feynman admitted that physics, in the end, had to do the same thing.

Interestingly, he's engaged in philosophical thinking as he's answering it and he doesn't even realize it.   He certainly couldn't develop the distinctions he made between why and how things happen and are as they are without recourse to philosophical thinking.   It's remarkable how he could make such arguments and not realize what he was doing because he had a prejudice against philosophy.  

He played bongos OK, for a physicist but it wasn't very musically interesting,  No one can do everything equally well.  Berkeley's mathematical observations are a lot more accomplished.