I started being much happier about philosophy in general once I realized a very important truth: "unlike hard sciences, philosophy only affects philosophers"
For example the toplevel article says things like "independent existence in an objective reality".. this sounds important, right? Perhaps depending on the truth of the intuitionism, we might discover some facts about real world?
Nope. The whole "is intuitionism true" question only affects the person thinking about it. The whole books are written that basically quibble about dictionary definitions of "fundamental principles", "objective reality", "mental activity" and other complex words.
(This is especially visible in discussion of "consciousness": there are tons of texts about it, and yet none of them matter in any practical way. The practical applications -- generative text models, NLP, neuroscience, etc.. -- just ignore all the philosophic cruft)
I have no doubt it had an impact on Curry personally, but it does not it has direct impact to on the the computer science. The Curry–Howard correspondence is formulated entirely in mathematical terms, and no philosophy is required to understand and use it.
For example, Robert Goddard, who invented first liquid-fueled rocket, became interested in space when he read Wells' "The War of the Worlds". So did Wells' work had an impact on rocket science? Certainly. Does it mean you should read "The War of the Worlds" if you want to build rockets? Probably not.
The philosophy has an impact in the mental model and the learnability of the mathematical theories. Technically you could learn and use the mathematics without knowing the philosophy behind it but in practice almost nobody does that.
It's like knowing design patterns in OO: it's ultimately all software right? But software exists first in the mind of the programmer, and what's written in the IDE is just a shadow of what the programmer imagined. This makes one appreciate the point that there are things in software that exists entirely inside our heads
> "unlike hard sciences, philosophy only affects philosophers"
Studying history will very quickly dissuade you from this notion, over and over again. For the perhaps most striking example, consider how different the 20th century would have looked like if a certain philosopher named Marx hadn't tried to marry the works of another philosopher, Hegel, with economic theory.
And yet, it was not Marx or Hegel who took over the country and started campaign on Red Terror. And Lenin did not need to cite Das Kapital to start Russian Civil War. (I have no doubt he was inspired by it though)
(It's an interesting thought experiment what would have happened if there were no Karl Marx. February Revolution would have happened anyway.. but would bolsheviks still exist? Would Lenin still do all the things he did anyway, or would he become a civil servant instead?)
And for the most striking example, consider how different the 20th century would have looked if Academy of Fine Arts Vienna would have accepted a certain applicant from Linz. Does this mean fine arts educational institutions are very important in the political life?
Lenin wasn't only "inspired" by Marx, he wasn't even the first Russian socialist. Marxism was simply the framework that a lot of the socialist revolutionaries at that time were operating in (including ones that Lenin ended up opposing later).
Sure, given the economic and political realities of Russia at that time, something might have happened even if Marx hadn't existed, but it might have looked very different.
Philosophy matters to the world because other people read philosophy and are inspired by it to change something about the world. The French Revolution, US independence, Latin American independence and so on were all undertaken in no small part by people who had read a lot and were trying to make some of their ideals reality.
For example the toplevel article says things like "independent existence in an objective reality".. this sounds important, right? Perhaps depending on the truth of the intuitionism, we might discover some facts about real world?
Nope. The whole "is intuitionism true" question only affects the person thinking about it. The whole books are written that basically quibble about dictionary definitions of "fundamental principles", "objective reality", "mental activity" and other complex words.
(This is especially visible in discussion of "consciousness": there are tons of texts about it, and yet none of them matter in any practical way. The practical applications -- generative text models, NLP, neuroscience, etc.. -- just ignore all the philosophic cruft)