Philosophy In Computer Science

(Image by Michael Dales)

I was meandering through the Slashdot archives this evening and came across this discussion about philosophy’s role in computer science. I think the conversation is illuminating on several levels. There are blatant IT professionals coming from one angle versus hard-core philosophers coming from another. While there’s a lot of overlap in perspective each person tends to accentuate a particular part of the (dis?)connection. I think the threads are worth reading both from a professional and an academic standpoint.

There are obvious links between the disciplines, notably the fact that concepts such as computability were born from the work of folks like A.M. Turing, but I often wonder if computer scientists think about this with any sort of regularity.