I have a hunch that I can't confirm so I want opinions and insights on it.
First some relevant facts:
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Philosophy has been separated from science. Nowadays, the era of physicists and mathematicians being also philosophers at the same time has ended and the modern average STEM student has hardly been taught any philosophy. In fact, some famous modern physicists have very poor opinion of philosophy.
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The 20th century streak of breakthroughs in science, especially physics and engineering, has ended, and relatively little (in comparison) has come from some the 21st century's major research paths such as the search for dark matter/energy or for a theory of quantum gravity.
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The time during which the first two facts of the list transitioned to their modern state, the 20th century, was a time during which the capitalist order was shaken and afraid, while socialist theories and philosophy was getting verified and confirmed to be correct in the real world.
My hypothesis is therefore the following:
As socialism's successes were starting to seriously challenge the bourgeois theories of capitalism, bourgeois academics started to see science graduates practicing and engaging with philosophy, particularly economics graduates, as a threat.
But they couldn't tell economics students and no others that they didn't need philosophy, not only would that look suspicious but the intersections between economics and other sciences would have come back around to bite them eventually.
So they took the decision to convince all science graduates that they didn't need philosophy, that it didn't matter if their hypothesis aren't grounded in reality as long as the math gives the right answer.
Capitalist academia essentially condemned philosophy to only be studied by language and/or art academics and actively started to paint philosophy as being separated from science.
What do you all think?
I would dispute this:
There have been a huge number of breakthroughs in the last 25 years. They've been in, and fueled by Information Science and technology and accelerated by the advances in communications technology.
We haven't found a complete theory of Quantum gravity, but aided by supercomputers and we did successfully detect gravity waves. The paper publishing this result has more than 1000 authors from all over the planet acknowledging the scale of the collaboration that went in to achieving that result.
Do you know how much less efficient it would have been for 1000 academics from all around the world to collaborate on a project of that scale in 1910? 1970? even since 1999 things like practically free video conference calls anywhere anytime and storing petabytes of data, let alone sending petabytes of data across the world in a matter of hours have became possible.
New theories on dark matter/energy are spawned weekly from tweaking the variables in immensely complex computer simultations of the development of the universe until they find something that fits observed reality (or as close as the model can come).
The theories, technology and infrastructure that enables these have been largely developed and are continuing to develop at an accelerating pace over the last 25 years. I don't believe that STEM has stagnated. It's just advancing in different directions than it did 100 years ago.
I did a STEM degree in a capitalist country. I wasn't taught much philosophy as part of my STEM majors, but there were two (widely complained about) units that stood out. One unit involved some real hard philosophy about theories of scientific consensus, empiricism and paradigm change. We read Huhm, Locke, Derrida and a lot of Kuhn. The reception was mixed, a lot of the students doing it mainly hated that they had to write essays and read humanities texts. Some thought it was easy because there was no hard maths. Some thought it was intellectually interesting. Noone thought it would help get them a job.
The second was a management unit trying to hammer in a concept of a "triple bottom line" that tech projects had an effect not just on profit but also society and planet that needed to be considered, that for a project to succeed you needed to first deeply understand the context it was meant to have an effect in, and the best way to do that was something I later recognised as being directly ripped from Mao's mass line, talking to people, asking them what their problems actually were, coming up with a solution in your team and going back to them to see what they thought again and again until you came up with something they wanted to go ahead with. The context we looked at in the unit was fulfilling the housing and economic needs of waste pickers in Colombo, Sri Lanka, a project a UN affiliated NGO the unit coordinator was involved with was running. The lecturers were direly determined to beat some form of social conciousness into budding engineers and other assorted STEMlords and they were roundly hated for it. I have a very deep memory of being utterly appalled and ashamed as someone in my group, in a presentation they self assuredly went on stage and uncritically repeated genocidal propaganda about the main problem in the context being that there weren't enough jobs to go around because the Tamils (several hundred years ago) came and took them all. She was from South India. There was an undercurrent (which came, I think, largely from people's parents) that this was all kind of bullshit that people in PR would need to say while they ignored it to make their employers ungodly sums of money of which they'd take a substantial cut. I'm sad to say they were probably right.
I don't think that STEM students aren't getting exposed to relevant philosophy in capitalist systems, or if they're not, that simply doing so would solve the problem. It's that STEM students (mainly TE students if I'm being honest) know already that the roles in our capitalist society they aspire to will have them acting counter to the philosophies they are being taught if they want to succeed so knowing this they reject them when they are taught. It's not (just) a lack of teaching philosophy but an environment that makes practicing or deeply considering those philosophies, from the perspective of a financial return on the costly investment a university education is in capitalist societies, a waste of time at best and actively harmful to their chances of getting hired and promoted at worse.
The students who did genuinely engage with those units were disproportionately also those who planned to pursue academia. Part of that I think is that you can't go into academia without getting really good marks, and aren't encouraged to without forming good relationships with lecturers, and you don't get good marks or form good relationships with lecturers if you don't genuinely engage with unit's content, so they were already predisposed to. Part of it is that intense intellectual curiosity is one of the key drivers for both going into academia and engaging with unit content. But part of it as well, is that academia is a really raw deal. You need to work hard in bad conditions and risk failing out through your honours/masters, phd and early postdoctoral research. A lot of brilliant, hard working, intensely motivated people do and are left with broken dreams, wasted years, damaged employability, and probably significant trauma and debt. And if you put in the work, manage to publish and don't fail out, a PHD is still less employable than 5 years industry experience, good paying academia jobs are rare as hens teeth, and the salary caps lower. So people still pursuing it all usually have some sort of strong ideology driving them, financial security, and intellectual curiosity, all of which predispose someone to being interested in philosophy. So why are academic scientists and mathematicians still skeptical of philosophy? In my experience, they're less sceptical than you might think. If you get one chatting until the wee hours (not hard) they'll likely steer the topic to philosophical questions about what we are and why anything and where's it all going.
Universities today are structured like businesses, most project funding and contract extensions are granted by business people and there's huge pressure to hit KPIs by publishing positive results that make money or lose the positions which they have worked and sacrificed and risked for a decade or more to find. That's an environment that wears away at ideological drive as you make compromise after compromise, in direction and ethics to keep meeting KPIs, which are competitively defined by the output of your peers.
There's also significant cultural pressure. Scientists and mathematicians spent their socially formative late teen and young adult years in classes with the burgeoning STEMlords going into industry, being first exposed to those concepts among peers who disdained them. Those that went into academia spend their days teaching those students.
Despite these pressures, I think most scientific and mathematical researchers are deeply altruistic, ideological and philosophical. The vast majority of them believe deeply, some cynically with all the wariness, guilt and scarred trauma of a lapsed catholic, some with as much zeal as they had in their first year of uni, in the inherent value of driving the sum total of human knowledge forwards and changing the world for the better through research, or simply in the inherent beauty of exploring the limits of their field. This extends to even those you might not expect it to. The builders of the internet created a libertarian open source philosophy to tell themselves that they were changing the world for the better. Even some STEMlords of silicon valley have found their own ways to rechannel that drive and recast their into their corporate programming jobs into something beautiful and sacred through singularity cults like LessWrong and the Fellowship of Friends.
And science is still getting done. Breakthroughs are being made and the tech and infrastructure built on those breakthroughs accelerates the pace. As little as we may like it, these philosophies are driving research. People who believe deeply in using research to make the world a better place are philosophizing, but the philosophies they come create are ones that fit their material conditions, cast what they are doing as right. They reshape the nascent philosophies they brought from the old superstructure into ones that fit their new material conditions. The superstructure feeds into the base and the base creates the superstructure. The material conditions of comfortable STEM academics and professionals do not lead to socialist philosophies. Less comfortable ones can and there are always exceptions. Socialists with STEM degrees built the website we're posting on. Advances in information technology under capitalism aren't necesarily improving material conditions. Communications technology has made a lot of workers lives a lot harder. Not being on call is a luxury to a lot of workers. Information scientists and engineers are automating information tech and engineering workers out of jobs. A new wave of automation is driving the proletarianisation of a vast swathe of previously comfortable tech workers and as their material conditions change their philosophies will too. Capitalism is sowing the seeds of its own destruction and if we succeed, in the same way that factory workers in the 20th century were ripe for socialist radicalisation STEM workers and will be too. If we want to see socialist science done it's up to us to make it happen.
Two very well-thought and well-written posts that I will be mulling for a long time. Thank you for taking the time and putting forth no small effort to share your thoughts.
In a way, what you said seems to reflect the visible universe: what we see now is but a snapshot of a moment in time that already unfolded. What's happening now is yet to be seen. Evolution is born of some conflict, stress or struggle, so it makes sense what you said about the philosophies that have unfolded. I'd like to say more, but I'm very tired and do need to reflect more.