When Philosophy Lost Its Way | Hacker News Reader

When Philosophy Lost Its Way

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

83 pointsyk90 comments

With the rise of scientific thinking, we're seeing a rapid increase in the number of folks who identify as agnostic or athiest [1]. This is natural given that the tenets of most major religions can't be tested or validated via experimental methods.

The problem though is that absent these religious ideologies, we're left with a number of core questions that secular philosophy has been unable to answer convincingly. Namely:

- Where does value stem from? What is good? What is bad? - What is the meaning or purpose of life? - Why is there something instead of nothing? What was the original cause? Was there one? - What happens after we die?

This dovetails with a number of practical issues in today's world. (1) Lots of suicide and depression. There are 30 million prescriptions of Zoloft written in the United States. Many of these folks (I assume) aren't suffering some sort of pathological illness but find themselves looking at a world that appears to be devoid of meaning when these religious frameworks break down for them (i.e. nihilism) (2) Religious extremism that manifests in sectarian violence and war.

Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an inferior product compared to religions. It doesn't provide out-of-the-box answers to these really hard questions and as a result can be a very scary and lonely ideology.

Relevant point: I'd love to see academic philosophy working to shore up these areas and provide folks a better, clearer framework in which they can live meaningful, enjoyable lives that doesn't require a religious framework.

http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religio...

> Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an inferior product compared to religions. It doesn't provide out-of-the-box answers to these really hard questions and as a result can be a very scary and lonely ideology.

I'm not sure that it's the job of philosophy to construct comforting fairy tales, if it actually is the case that life has no inherent meaning or purpose.

At best, it can give you a guide to construct your own meaning.

Yes. To the question of why is the world here religion answers, "Because God created it." But no religion deals with the obvious follow up question, "Then who created God?" That question is not allowed in the religious framework. Science does not allow for such questions, either, but doesn't purport to answer the final question of why the world exists.

So do we go with religion, invent God, and take satisfaction in child-like explanation of why the world exists? Or do we go with science and merely acknowledge the mystery of what we humans are unable to fully understand (i.e., the world).

It works because most people don't think about these questions on a daily basis. So if you don't think about it except when somebody explicitly brings it up, then whether I believe God created the world doesn't really matter.

So religion works because on the rare occasion that I do wonder "how did this world come to be?" there's an easy answer, and I move on with my life.

Obviously if you find this question very interesting and make it your goal to investigate the matter, then this is an unsatisfactory answer, but the vast majority of people only pay attention to this question every once in a while anyway.

Religion tends to cover a lot of topics in this category - I'll blindly accept the answer because the question is insignificant to me most of the time.

It's not satisfying, but it's not dissatisfying either. It gets the question out of the way.

Obviously this doesn't move humanity forward, but from the perspective of the individual believer, a religion can be a very attractive package compared to the ambiguity of secularism.

I'm not sure I'm a fan of how that's framed. If the religion itself can't be verified, it's not like the answers will be any more convincing. I'm also not sure that delusion will be better for people long term. I'd rather we work on encouraging the creation of values via logic, and that we look for purpose through exploration of our interests... instead of some deity/deities. It could just be a temporary problem, and I'd say it's a pretty minor problem compared to the ones we had prior to secular thinking.

I tend to agree with the parent of your post, even though I agree with your sentiment. I don't think secular thinking will ever find satisfying answers to those questions, so it's going to be more about making peace with dissatisfying answers than finding satisfying ones.

Which makes some religions a "strictly better product". I'd guess that most people will have trouble making peace with the depressing existential reality that "you and the rest of humanity are a mote of dust in the universe," so religions will often give answers that let you sleep better at night, whether or not they are correct or true.

>Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an inferior product compared to religions. It doesn't provide out-of-the-box answers to these really hard questions and as a result can be a very scary and lonely ideology.

Inferior? I'd rather have no answer and keep looking than the wrong answer that stops the questions.

I think there's a really interesting debate in the bottom of there somewhere. There are some questions that do not have a satisfactory answer no matter how long you keep looking. You could dedicate your life to answering the meaning of life and you'd fail.

Would that mean you life was better lived than someone who believed in God and that religious meaning of life? Does such a pursuit return any value? It's interesting to think about.

>There are some questions that do not have a satisfactory answer no matter how long you keep looking.

This is true, but in my view, the act of looking has value in and of itself. It opens at least the opportunity for learning something new as opposed to being given and satisfied with an answer.

It is the difference between growth and stagnation.

I suppose someone could get bogged down in trying to find an unfindable answer, though...

You are right, interesting to think about.

Not just the wrong answer that stops the questions, but the wrong answer that consumes people's lives. If Christianity is wrong, then a lot of people have had their time and money consumed by it. All those Sunday mornings given away, all that money donated. Following a religion with anything other than lip service consumes resources.

To be fair, it also creates a great deal of value. Comfort, community, scholarship, good works. It could be argued that these things can be created outside of a religion and they'd be right but religions have created organizational frameworks for these kinds of value for thousands of years.

I agree to some degree, but also it should be noted that religion merely provides a framework to do good deeds in. People still do good deeds outside a religious framework; it's just that having an existing framework in a town makes it easier to work with than start afresh.

I'd also add that those wrong answers also cause a lot of strife, for example, a lot of Catholics feel constantly guilty throughout their life. While Catholicism does provide community and comfort in some areas, it also provides sometimes wracking guilt in others. Not to mention how it treats you if you aren't part of the 'in' crowd (eg: homosexuals), where the 'community' part of the religion mutates into something monstrous.

If not having an answer leads some fraction of the population to suicide or depression, then having an answer (wrong, right, or otherwise) which results in fewer suicides and a reduction in fear and loneliness is not strictly worse. I agree that stopping inquiry is very bad, but suicides are also very bad. This isn't mathematics, it's a social issue, so the optimum response is very nuanced and difficult to discern.

It is people who stop the questions, not the religions. All world religions with some centuries on them have extensive philosophical and theological writings, some of the younger ones do too. It's a myth some find convenient to propagate that religions require you to uncritically swallow their ideas and yell at you if you slightly disagree. There are some people who do that, there are even places where they group together and form sects, but, well, have you noticed how non-religious people join in such activities quite freely, too?

Somewhere, though, in those religions is the answer 'Because, God wills it so or says it so.' Everywhere that happens is a dead question.

For an argument that that's exactly what we need philosophically, see "He Is There And He Is Not Silent" by Francis Schaeffer.

http://www.amazon.com/There-Silent-Paperback-Schaeffer-Franc...

I'd rather have no answer and keep looking than the wrong answer that stops the questions.

This is dependent on the type of person you are. Many people simply can't stand the lack of an answer[0]. This dovetails with the general tendency to accept the first explanation for anything that doesn't contradict what they already believe[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity_tolerance%E2%80%93in...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring

One might even call this phenomenon "the death of God"...

EDIT: I'm at -1 here, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead

You're ignoring the fact that religions haven't been able to convincingly answer any of these questions, either. Else there wouldn't be so many of them and they wouldn't be having highly intricate theological debates about the half-dozen types of millennialism and interpretations of whether and to what extent Mosaic law is still relevant, among many other things.

The idea that religion provides some sort of certainty is a complete falsehood trivially debunked by a cursory glance of theological discourse. It provides certainty only to those ignorant of it, just as those ignorant of secular philosophy who never deliberate any of these questions have quite likely settled on some ad-hoc worldview that works for them.

In practice, most of value theory is secular. The laws that underpin most contemporary states are secular. The meaning of life is an unanswered question, quite likely even an ironically meaningless question itself. The afterlife if any is also an unanswered question. Christians disagree between universalism, annihilationism, eternal torment and other dogmas on hell alone.

There are no out-of-the-box answers provided by anyone. Many religions actually conveniently avoid pondering them in any detail.

just as those ignorant of secular philosophy who never deliberate any of these questions have quite likely settled on some ad-hoc worldview that works for them

Compare this to the paucity of experimental data to back up software development methodologies and computer language design. Most software development shops just settle on some ad-hoc worldview that works for them.

There are no out-of-the-box answers provided by anyone.

There are definitely out-of-the-box answers being hawked by someone, Whether these answers are backed up by actual theology doesn't change the fact.

Oh, I fully agree on programming and software development. It's mostly pseudoscience and a swath of tacit unquestioned assumptions. Same with theoretical computer science the moment it steps out of discrete mathematics and combinatorics. It's quite unfortunate then that so many programmers are opposed to philosophy and the humanities, it would truly help them be more introspective. I would never imply that it is any different.

> The idea that religion provides some sort of certainty is a complete falsehood trivially debunked by a cursory glance of theological discourse.

You are missing the fact that most religious people aren't interested in theological discourse, much less debate.

>You're ignoring the fact that religions haven't been able to convincingly answer any of these questions, either. Else there wouldn't be so many of them and they wouldn't be having highly intricate theological debates about the half-dozen types of millennialism and interpretations of whether and to what extent Mosaic law is still relevant, among many other things.

The mere presence of debate does not preclude certainty about overarching principles. Various denominations might disagree about what's moral in a situation, but they can at least agree about why this specific kind of morality is important, and what reasoning and evidence should be relevant in the discussion, and how this morality plays into a larger conception of the Christian life. Elements like the Gospel, the Apostle's Creed, and the metaphysics of traditional deism can all be harnessed to conduct and resolve debate. There are more certainties than there are the opposite. And perfect certainty will never be achieved, even on a theological level. Since one of the charges of theology is to adapt and present Christianity to a changing world.

Unlike, say, secular moral discourse, especially manifest in political speech, which makes no effort whatsoever to establish shared principles. There are few, if any, first premises which can initiate debate. There are few agreed-upon standards for what counts as relevant evidence, or how certain values outweigh others.

Wading in secular moral philosophy, the situation becomes even more dire. No one could ever hope to walk into a secular philosophy class with modern material and achieve any guidance about how to conduct their life.

The ability to debate and resolve issues is the marker of a healthy tradition. Not all issues can be resolved. But there should at least be a vehicle to coming to the best available answer. Studying, say, the progression of Catholic theological doctrine is a good example of this. But in our post-Reformation era, in which every theological debate ends up spawning a new Protestant denomination, your lack of confidence is understandable.

I do, of course, agree with you that our broader cultural approach to such issues is entirely arbitrary and resistant to intellectual progress.

Edit: Alasdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice, Which Rationality is a stellar treatment of this problem you're noticing:

http://www.amazon.com/Whose-Justice-Rationality-Alasdair-Mac...

Even Catholics are quite inconsistent. There's the oddly progressive Old Catholic Church that split off from the mainline at the turn of the 19th century over papal infallibility. There's the sedevacantists who think all Catholic activity after the Second Vatican Council is illegitimate. Even among those, they can't agree whether or not popes after Pius XII even can be legitimate if they recant their alleged heresy, or if it's all lost. The latter conclavists thus actually get to elect their own popes (who are antipopes from the perspective of the mainline).

Then amongst traditionalists and others, they can't agree on whether or not classical liberal principles are compatible with Catholic doctrine or not. Christopher Ferrara and others thinks that all of United States history was a giant mistake and that we should revert to pre-Enlightenment theocracy, Tom Woods and others argue that liberalism is what Catholicism logically leads to.

No, there isn't much certainty about overarching principles. That you can't conduct your own life based on secular morality is false. Most people don't conduct their lives on any explicit morality. The ones that have ever pondered these questions in depth have always been a minority. Everyone else has only trickled down breadcrumbs from some clergyman, or ignored it.

Morality from religion? Please. Who practices what Jesus personally told his believers to do?

"anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery." Matthew 5:32

Combine that with God's official "Thou shalt not commit adultery"

And especially for the protestants, directly by Jesus again:

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal." Matthew 6:19 "But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal."

And of course, who does this, as Jesus says:

"And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire." Matthew 18:9

Now explain why you don't do what Jesus and God personally, according to the holy books, tell you to do if you get the morality from the religion.

Even if you are a believer you have to see that it's a human consensus that decides what's moral at any particular point in time. That consensus was historically at some times at some places more influenced by some holy books, therefore the witch hunt ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.") and luckily it's not that much anymore, at least in Europe.

Have even more fun trying to accept the morality from Islam holy books. Note the whole Quran is claimed to be the actual "words of God.": "Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward." Quran (4:74)

While I agree that no religion can answer these questions convincingly, they just don't have to. That's what faith is all about. The answers provided by religions are intended to be "believed" and followed without much questioning. That's why I think there is not much room to discuss between science and religion: one can (and must) be questioned, while the other just can't.

But it was specifically said that providing those answeres was a benefit.

Debate means that all parties are wrong?

By that logic, if, say people disagree about whether cryptography is good, both sides haven't been able to answer the question.

The previous poster was trying to make the case that the questions themselves are significant, and as are the answers, not merely that religion tells people to accept and obey.

If that's the case, then the secularist world doesn't have to come up with actual answers either. They just have to tell people what to think and do, and then they'll have the authority structure they so desired.

It sounds nice to know that when you are born, society has a place for you. They have a job for you. They can tell you what to wear, what dance to learn, and what products to buy. They can tell you how to treat your neighbor, or how to regard the Chinese. They can tell you what the good death is like.

Religious ideologies have never answered these questions either.

Just because we have not yet answered these questions in a scientific manner does not mean that we cannot. But religion, being absolutist, cannot evolve in a way that scientific understanding can. A religion that evolves is a religion that was false to begin with.

Suicide and depression are largely a result of over diagnosis, which is to be expected when incentives align that way in a capitalist system.

The world is much, much more complex than you understand it to be.

> Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an inferior product compared to religions.

No, it really isn't. It's really strange that you talk of science, then just throw out that 'today we have more suicide and depression', when we know we have extremely poor historical records of both those things, particularly depression.

Just because it doesn't have some canned answers doesn't mean secular thought is an inferior product. Secular thought has brought us egalitarianism, for example - civil rights gains are not birthed from religion. It wasn't Jesus that brought us feminism, desegregation, or minority voting rights.

I believe that stephenhess's point was that secular thought was an inferior product in terms of its ability to provide certainty and meaning to people. If you look at some branches of existentialism, say (You validate your life by having a "final experience? Or, worse, by experiencing angst? Seriously? That's how I'm supposed to validate my existence?), then it becomes pretty hard to disagree with stephenhess (presuming that I understand his point correctly).

"civil rights gains are not birthed from religion"

I find this statement particularly ironic as we enter the holiday weekend in which we are called to remember the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr.

As Wikipedia says-- "He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs."

It's not that ironic. There were plenty of impassioned essays in the 19th century using the bible to support slavery, for example. And also to oppose slavery. It's not like christianity enshrines civil rights for all.

Similarly, it wasn't anything inherent to christianity that made King behave that way; King chose the parts he wanted to implement. Evidence for devout christians not following the non-violent tenets of the faith is hardly rare.

I don't think it's an accident that a modern, secular framework hasn't arisen to replace traditional religion. For what resources could a framework draw upon? The founding principles of the Enlightenment have stricken notions of "value," "good," "bad," and "purpose" from the realm of knowledge. Modern rationality is anti-teleological. It precludes any exploration of first causes. When constrained by the epistemological standards of empiricism, theorizing about such subjects is impossible. For before it produced modern standards of scientific proof, it was a rebuke against Aristotle and Aquinas, whose methods represented the most fruitful exploration of "value," good," etc. Modernity's absence of such a framework is a feature, not a bug.

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has written in far more depth about this change. Anyone who's concerned with modernity's apparent difficulty in handling "meaning of life" questions would be advised to discover how exactly we landed in this situation:

http://www.amazon.com/After-Virtue-Study-Moral-Theory/dp/026...

MacIntyre's work was incredibly interesting to this layman. The main point I took away from it is that earlier moral theory asserted that the moral good was the same as in the sense of "this is a good chair". Looked at this way, the ancients had much simpler answers for moral questions than we do, because they all boiled down to "is this person fulfilling their purpose by this action?". Virtue ethics, which he's famously associated with, then brings back that question, with an intermediate step of "what are the traits of a person who is fulfilling their purpose as a person?", as a way of reducing the original question to a heuristic than can be applied to situations.

Where I think this has a problem is that people may disagree about the purpose of a person, or people in general. Just as a chair's purpose is most clearly set by the chair's builder, talking about a person's purpose intuitively implies a person's builder, or "Builder", if you will. A rock shaped by water and accident to look like a chair may serve as one, and so be a good chair, but being a good chair doesn't have any apparent bearing on whether it's a good rock. Without design and intent, purpose is a little fuzzy. Hence (I believe), MacIntyre became religious a while after writing _After Virtue_.

So, even though virtue ethics, if accepted as better than consequentialist ethical theories, makes moral questions simpler, it seems a bit arbitrary with regard to the actual answers, and two virtue ethicists might disagree on which are the important virtues without either being more correct than the other. Without a creator, virtue ethics is on only slightly firmer ground (in my opinion) than consequentialism, but with a creator, it provides strong moral guidelines while not requiring that those guidelines apply to the universe at large, or to said creator. That is, for a virtue ethicist, believing in a creator god grounds moral theory for humans in a way that neither deontology nor consequentialism can.

Losing focus and wondering about the start of the train of thought, stackoverfloing while recursing is a first order intrinsic problem.

I am not religious and I don't feel scared or lonely.

Religion provides wrong answers to all the core questions you raise. If your life is made better by getting wrong answers to these questions I am happy to oblige provided you send me a bank check for $100,000. My contact details are in my profile :p

I really don't think a world devoid of meaning is the main cause of depression. I would be much more inclined to look at more immediate, physical stressors as the causes of depression: working too much, working a job you hate, worrying about paying the bills, being socially isolated, not exercising enough, relationship problems, not getting enough sun, having a chemical imbalance in your brain, etc.

Stoicism (the actual Greek philosophy, not the pop culture perception) is very much concerned with the practical aspects of living a meaningful, enjoyable life. It's helped me immensely in dealing with the mental habits of depression. But it pales in comparison to the benefits of a steady job I like, a little pink pill, a loving partner, and playing sports regularly.

I agree, or rather I think that the 'meaning' religion offers is not a cause but more of a facilitator for all the good things you mention at the end of your comment.

So it's not the meaning itself primarily, but everything that comes from having a strong community based on a shared 'myth'.

Or to put it differently: religion is like an opinionated framework, and the non-religious world many of us live in now is like the node/express.js ecosystem.

For many of us (perhaps especially in the HN world), the latter is preferable. We can do our research and pick and choose what we like, and the end result might work as well or better than the framework, even if it might be a bit unorthodox. We figure out the things in life that make us happy, and stick with them.

But for others (and perhaps for many of us too), the freedom and the requirement to do your own research might not work so well.

Some end up with a bug-riddled system that crashes or is insecure. This may lead to depression or other (mental) health issues, or even worse, they get hacked and go straight to a cult solution (I've seen it happen, what with my background denomination being border-line cultish).

And some don't even get that far and spend their life paralyzed, agonizing over best practices, project structure, and whatnot, leading to anxiety, loneliness, and an almost permanent state of anhomie.

I've been in all these situations to various degrees, and sometimes I am almost seriously considering returning to the church-going life that provided me with structure, good habits, friendships, meaning, community, and a somewhat clearer and more solid worldview that was supported by everyone around me and not just the somewhat ad-hoc and unique framework that I've created myself.

I won't, for the same reasons that I'm currently building my own CMS over using Rails: it's more fun, and for some reason I just can't be part of something that I don't intellectually stand behind or that I can't always justify or understand (Rails 'magic').

tl;dr: many people do not have the ability, time, toolset or courage to figure out how to live 'the good life', so buying into a strong community built on some form of 'meaning' that encompasses all aspects of life is perhaps the best alternative.

Frankly, as a committed believer in a traditional religion, none of those questions are concretely finished there, either, after you take off the lid and start asking hard questions.

I agree with the thrust: religion provides an assurance, but not to the level you suggest it does.

"Where does value stem from? What is good? What is bad?"

Religion doesn't provide these answers, either. It merely moves the questions one level up the chain.

The Big Two of Roman-era philosophy—Stoicism and Epicureanism—tackled these issues without relying on god(s). Now, one may find their arguments unconvincing or their premises unjustified, but if the alternative is religion then they're likely at least as strongly supported and well reasoned as what you'll find there.

And it's not like no other systems/schools have attempted similar feats in the last 2000 years. Just pointing out that this isn't a new problem.

While Epicureanism was an atheistic philosophy, Stoics very much did believe in God. It's all through Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

I find Stoics to vary in their degree of belief in the divine, but generally to consider choosing a particular stance on it unnecessary to carrying on with the rest of their philosophy, often explicitly conceding the point for the sake of argument because it's not especially important. God/Nature/Fate tend to be treated as interchangeable for the purposes of the system, and nailing down which precisely is acting isn't a priority.

I haven't seen god(s) a major component of their philosophy, a kind of tepid and only occasionally-invoked pantheism aside.

[EDIT] "panentheism" to the intended "pantheism"

As Francis Schaeffer said, religion and philosophy are trying to answer the same questions. (Your second and third paragraphs agree with this.) But...

> With the rise of scientific thinking, we're seeing a rapid increase in the number of folks who identify as agnostic or atheist. This is natural given that the tenets of most major religions can't be tested or validated via experimental methods.

The tenets of most major philosophical positions can't be tested or validated via experimental methods, either.

Sauce for the goose...

> Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an inferior product compared to religions.

How would we know how good a product religions are if almost every single consumer was forced into them from a very young and gullible age by the biggest authority figures in their life, their parents?

> It doesn't provide out-of-the-box answers to these really hard questions and as a result can be a very scary and lonely ideology.

I think you could say the same about religion when it becomes unmasked (in times of great hardship) or under honest rational doubt (The defeated priest trope). The out of the box answers start looking ridiculous and don't seem to offer much hope.

Bergman's Winter Light really made me realize that religion isn't an answer but rather a framework designed to stop looking for answers using things such as tradition, community and moral certainties to ignore the deeper questions. It is useful until it breaks down and then it becomes apparent that we don't have any good alternatives and the resulting reality is rather bleak. One woman in the film finds faith in Love, at least that is a tangible emotion that can be felt, even if it is as misunderstood as anything else.

I think one of the failures of secular thought is to assume that the alternative to religion (universal and rule based) is also universal and rule based. Often depressive thoughts lean towards a thinking that "if EVERYTHING was like X, or if EVERYONE thought like X we would be okay and everyone would be happy". The knowledge that the world will never be like that, along with the desperate hope that it could be, is what imprisons someone in depression. Usually getting out of depression is either an acceptance of a out-of-the-box answer (like religion) or a change in ego where one learns that they define the meaning of life. I've always been partial to egoism in philosophy and ethics and I believe we are advancing the future to better suit it (virtual worlds, no need to work, more of a focus on creativity, leaving the binds of this planet, etc).

As an Atheist who has pondered your questions I'll have a shot:

- Where does value stem from? What is good? What is bad?

Our perceptions of value come from evolution so a fun Xmas/Thanksgiving dinner with the family is considered good by us, bad by the turkey.

- What is the meaning or purpose of life?

It doesn't have a definite one which leaves us free to choose what to go for. Having fun, helping others etc

-Why is there something instead of nothing? What was the original cause? Was there one?

Probably mathematics has to be and physics and hence us are a subset.

- What happens after we die?

Not quite sure - maybe nothing but maybe as Einstein wrote "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion" so from some perspectives you don't.

- clearer framework in which they can live meaningful, enjoyable lives that doesn't require a religious framework

Not sure about a clear framework but my take is that our instincts may be here through evolution but we can still go for the positive ones, love, happiness, beauty and the like.

I find it hard to believe that not having an answer about the uncaused causer (no religion can solve that either!), or the meaning of life, or why things exist, or what happens when we die, etc., remotely explains why people are depressed or commit suicide.

Where's the connection?

I can accept that being a member of a religious organization can have protective effects, not just psychologically, but also socially, financially, or logistically (people can take care of your kids or give you legal and tax advice.

But how does that remotely link not knowing the mysteries of life to depression and suicide?

Not to mention, religion isn't even able to answer any of those questions.

They just tell you accept things. If that's the case, it's not the answer that matters, it's the presence of an authority structure that tells you what to believe so you don't have to make decisions for yourself.

Sure, for those people, we can bring structure and authority back in their lives. A social authority can tell you what to believe, where you belong, and what's right and wrong. It doesn't even need to explain anything. It just needs to command authority, because that's what religion does.

I find it hard to believe that Christians solve for any of these questions any better than Buddhists or Muslims or Sikhs.

Paul Graham's essay "How to do philosophy" complements this piece well: http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html.

This:

The second event was the placing of philosophy as one more discipline alongside these sciences within the modern research university. A result was that philosophy, previously the queen of the disciplines, was displaced, as the natural and social sciences divided the world between them.

may also be a problem because the healthier parts of philosophy, concerning "Why?" or "How?", got turned into science. The less healthy parts got turned into philosophy.

This is a big factor IMHO. Philosophy is trying to live somewhere between science and theology and there just isn't much room there anymore. Worse, a lot of that space is filled with dubious areas of study or rat holes (example: Bertrand Russel's Principia Mathematica) so philosophers find themselves hemmed in at both sides.

Yet philosophy is at the base of how we do science. The principles of falsification or Kuhns Paradigms are quite important in how we understand "the body of knowledge" that science helps us build.

In my world philosophizing is not the same as being a philosopher. You can be an excellent philosophizer without having any degree and you can be a horrible one with all the degrees in the world.

It wasn't displaced, it delegated|dispatched|forked and is having a hell of a time piecing the puzzle and getting rid of the excess.

The author's conception of philosophy seems to be heavily biased towards Western analytic philosophy whose pretension towards logically underpinning sciences and reliance on formal methods means that is more of a theoretical computer science or physics. Plenty of Continental philosophy: post-structuralism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, and non-Western philosophy (such as decolonial thought) speaks to and about daily life.

Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I don't see post-structuralism or deconstruction as having all that much to say about daily life. (Almost) nobody actually lives that way. That is, when you go out for a beer with your friends, you talk to them as if humans can actually communicate, and as if the message sent will be (approximately) the message received.

WRT post-structuralism, consider the stereotypical interdepartmental procedure coordination meeting, not beer with buddies.

I go out for a beer with my friends and talk to them about post-structuralism. ;)

Sure. But you probably don't deconstruct what they say during the conversation (except for example or for entertainment).

That's true. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have an _impact_ on daily life. In other words, descontruction, specifically, is an analysis technique. The outcome of doing said analysis is separate from doing the analysis.

This is a fair point, in the that conventional definition of post-structuralism as representation being bound to an interpretative context can be difficult see in daily life. However, such a view's application in Foucault's work I see manifest in my life all the time. For example, the concept of governmentality explains how we come to internalize the mandates of the state or capitalist power structure to say obey traffic laws (even when a cop is not there to observe and violating the law would not lead to harm). I should augment my list to say critical theory and Marxism as well. Such schools could explain a great deal about increasing income inequality, patent law, the insufficiency of 'nation' as a unit of analysis in a globalized economy...

I thought that continental philosophy was having the same if not a harder time staying relevant?

It depends who you ask. Anglo-American philosophy departments tend to stay pretty far away from it, but it has a decent-sized popular audience--and literary studies, art criticism, and related disciplines often draw pretty heavily from it.

As a philosophy major turned engineer turned CEO, I agree with the article about the fall of philosophy in academia. As my concentration advisor half-joked in one of our first courses, "you are majoring in mental mabation." However, I do not agree that philosophy has been entirely relegated to universities. Thought many of those who self-identify as philosophers reside in academia, not everyone who _behaves_ as a philosopher resides there. Philosophy literally translates from the Greek to lover of wisdom. Those who pursue knowledge and understanding, regardless of title, are philosophers. In fact, many of the non-technical articles on HN are philosophical. Asking how to build a company culture or what it means to be successful in the context of a startup are both philosophical inquiries. Balancing the tradeoff between competing interests (e.g. financial vs. mission-driven, personal gain versus organizational gain) come down to questions your values, questioning "what is good". There are few questions as emblematic of philosophy.

So rather than working at the edges of social and natural sciences, looking at the unknown and feeding back (perhaps not as much as it could), as western analytic philosophy does now, they seek a return to a time when a philosopher was prized for obscurantism and bon mots rather than an increase in clarity?

So... they haven't heard of people like Slavoj Žižek? Is that what they want all of philosophy to be like?

Zizek is to Nietzsche as Dan Brown is to Shakespeare.

So you don't like Zizek. Thats fair. But comparing him to Nietche is not.

He is a philosophy popularizer. He writes a lot about some of the greats, himself, like almost all other contempararies not being one himself.

My impression is not that his academic writings are 'pop', in any way comparable to Dan Brown. I have only read a little but he has published. Some of it is essayistic in nature some of it quite heavy.

I get your point. But just because your a not one of the absoulte greatest there ever was, it doesn't him instantly become a superficial literary con-artist the way dan brown has become to be regarded.

Also he seems quite well read and a great analyzer. Not that i agree with all he says, but he is not trying to push agendas as other pop-philosophers are.

A better example of some one being "Dan Brownish"would be sam harris. He is not respected in any way in the acedemia of philoshophy, he doesn't reference the history og the historiagrahy of the field, and simply doesnt seem on-level despite writing a lot of pop-philosophy and being regarded publicy as a true academic.

Zizek is actually a respected academic.

Zizek has published a large amount of works that are taken very seriously. I don't like a lot of the things he says either, but calling him Dan Brown would only be true if Dan Brown was accepted as a serious scholar.

> they seek a return to a time when a philosopher was prized for obscurantism and bon mots rather than an increase in clarity?

I have yet to encounter any other philosopher who was able to present an idea as clearly as William James did, and he was operating during the time of which you speak. Now, I have not read all that much philosophy in-depth, precisely because so much of it seems divorced from everyday reality and because so much of it is filled with enough jargon that one must already be on the path to becoming an academic philosopher to get much out of it. With James, on the other hand, I've found that whenever I disagree with him (which admittedly is not too often) I can always point to exactly where my thinking diverges from his, and why.

The following quotes from the article very much reminded me of what I like about him:

> Philosophy, understood as the love of wisdom, was seen as a vocation, like the priesthood. It required significant moral virtues (foremost among these were integrity and selflessness), and the pursuit of wisdom in turn further inculcated those virtues. The study of philosophy elevated those who pursued it. Knowing and being good were intimately linked. It was widely understood that the point of philosophy was to become good rather than simply to collect or produce knowledge.

> Our claim, then, can be put simply: Philosophy should never have been purified. Rather than being seen as a problem, “dirty hands” should have been understood as the native condition of philosophic thought — present everywhere, often interstitial, essentially interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary in nature. Philosophy is a mangle. The philosopher’s hands were never clean and were never meant to be.

I have heard James referred to as the last philosopher who thought that philosophy was something practical that everybody ought to consider in daily life. Not in a pop-psych sense where complex things were oversimplified into one weird trick, but in the sense of putting thought into the actions that one takes, paying attention to the habits and attitudes that one cultivates.

I take the opposite perspective to the one found in your comment. There were certainly philosophers of James's time and before who were deliberately obscure and slippery, but there's no way for most of us to tell if their modern-day counterparts are behaving as badly because the terminology and its underlying concepts are so formidable. They may have been hammered out in the pursuit of clarity--though I am skeptical about this--but the effect is the same as building a brick wall to keep out the layman. I will not even say that it does not have its place, but I think it's a shame that the entire field is so specialized. It's as if everyone were required to be a mechanic in order to drive a car. That is something that makes sense when a field is new, not as it matures.

There's a broad strand of discourse within philosophy on exactly the topic of its incorporation into the academy. Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, et al come immediately to mind.

Quite a lack of research on the author's part to come to such a conclusion.

> Before its migration to the university, philosophy had never had a central home. Philosophers could be found anywhere — serving as diplomats, living off pensions, grinding lenses, as well as within a university.

I think we've come back to this. While philosophy in the academy might be navel-gazing and disconnected, blogs and regular people talk about philosophy all the time. Philosophy is something we engage in before we've fully wrapped our heads around a problem, or know how to test it or formalize it. It's all the gaps between formal logical reasoning and science, and there are a lot of those gaps.

Read something like [1], written by someone who's a doctor by trade, and you can see the hands-dirty philosopher is still out there.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

The article is rubbish. Philosophy has answered many questions. Natural Philosophy (science) has now taken over the position of prime means of inquisition into the truth. There is still space left for Philosophy just less of it than there used to be, and don't forget than many people in Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience are effectively doing Philosophy inside their disciplines.

This isn't "the death of philosophy", this is philosophy having succeeded brilliantly. The sciences are offspring that any parent should be eminently proud of.

I actually thing we're in a philosophy boom, with recent developments in quantum mechanics and the synthesis between the two subjects. There is a lot of research in this area, about quantum mechanics, thought experiments (Chinese room), turing tests, complexity/computational theory of mind (Bostrom simulation argument, singularity) and connection to free will and other philosophical concepts. Philosophy becoming more STEM-like.

We're in a period of recovery after philosophy went down a nihilistic post modern rat hole in the early twentieth century. Actually doing better than some other fields.

A lot of cutting-edge computer science and math is intimately connected with the more abstract reaches of philosophy (category theory, etc).

You classify category theory as philosophy rather than math? Can you explain why?

The best available evidence we (humans) have suggests that we're finite beings...and we don't much like the idea of that...

The angst that accompanies knowing that what you were conscious of before your birth likely approximates what you will be conscious of following your death has driven thinkers to posit myriad explanations...none are completely testable, but the scientific postulates are at least open to the rigors of the scientific method, most notably peer review...

If either science or philosophy must be subsumed, I'd rather it be philosophy...

Personally, I prefer a life containing both...

The purpose of philosophy is to ask questions not provide answers. And so as long as there are phenomena to observe there are questions to ask and thus philosophy apply.

I think a lot of the confusion about the need for philosophy stems from academia thinking about philosophy the way it does. Here you usually will critique some existing philosophers to provide a more concise thesis. However life does not happen in academia and so a lot gets lost when it's confined to the university world

There is a world of difference between studying philosophy and then philosophizing. Just because you know the ins and outs of Kant, Nietzsche doe not mean you are a good philosophical thinker.

The best thing that can happen for philosophy is to remove it from academia and put it back into it's rightful context. To question, ponder, explore phenomena and provide perspective no matter the subject.

WRT becoming smart as per the article rather than good, one point missed in the article is living in the university system means devotion and belief in the class pyramid at the predefined authoritarian apex angle and all that. You can be whatever you want when you're an individual, but when your identity as a philosopher is as a cog in the hierarchical machine, you and your ideas must be strictly limited to fit a cog shaped hole at a precise level, not too high so as to threaten those in positions above you, not too low as to be inadequate.

Philosophy is simply irrelevant.

Discoveries in physical sciences lead to new technology or just to a better understanding of how the world works and how we fit in it.

Research in social sciences, when the political courage exists to pursue it, can lead to better policy, and better lives for everyone.

Philosophy just seems to be a bunch of circle jerking around esoteric terms and concepts with no trickle down benefits. If Philosophy departments around the world simply shutdown over night, would anyone notice? Would anyone be the worse of? Even in the long term? Probably not. Well maybe would be philosophy students would pursue more employable fields for their undergraduate study, increasing the labor pool and competition for jobs.

Philosophy is irrelevant? That's really quite a bizarre statement to make.

Philosophy is quite useful in defining AI (philosophy of mind) and quantum physics (philosophy of physics) to name a few. Your comment is beyond narrow minded and ignorant; I should seriously hope you don't hold such views.

I most certainly do hold this as my view, and it's had zero negative impact. In fact only positive impact as I'm not spending time wasting on thinking for the sake of thinking. Philosophy is a mental trap that produces no value.

One of my favorite books is Candide. The book ends with Candide tending to his garden. This is how I live my life. It works pretty well.

How many modern philosophers use their knowledge to live good lives and improve the lives of others?

I would argue that philosophy isn't a choice, if ones mind works philosophically, one will think about philosophy.

As an armchair philosopher, I'd say my ideas have helped my live my life in a more positive way, and has helped me to expose others to ideas that can be fun to think about and helpful for dealing with various life situations.

"Philosophy is a mental trap that produces no value." Then you find no value in the past 1000 years of Western thought?

Philosophy helps me live a good life - I have a pretty good bullshit detector. Your post set it off quite well.

It think it was instrumental in helping us get to where we are. My comment is more around modern philosophy. Now we understand the importance of empirical observation and the benefits of liberty and fair laws we've probably maximized the value we get out of talking about how to think. Like I asked before, do you think that there would be a negative impact if philosophy departments disappeared overnight? What would they be?

I don't have anything against philosophy. But I can't help but think if you want to understand quantum physics you should study quantum physics. And if you want to understand AI you should study AI. Starting with philosophy rather than the evidence is a good way to get entrenched in world views that don't make sense.

In AI the dominant attitude is that the mind can be considered a machine and that consciousness can be ignored. It dodges the philosophical questions entirely in the name of practicality. If anyone's going to find the answer to how consciousness works it will be neuroscientists, so in the meantime what's the point of debating it on philosophical grounds?

Similarly quantum physics didn't originate from philosophers who thought "It just doesn't seem right that the universe is deterministic! At a microscopic level electron positions must be probabilistic". No, these are things scientists figure out and philosophers reconcile.

It's not clear that AI researchers or quantum physicsts would lose anything by ignoring philosophers.

because they are in fact doing philosophy at the limits of their fields. when people debate which theories might fit the phenomena best, they are doing philosophy.

>Philosophy is quite useful in defining ... quantum physics

Could you point to a good treatment of this? My experience with people waxing philosophical about quantum has almost always been negative, to the point where I regret the conversation ever taking place.

Ohh man, this is too good!

While I vehemently disagree with you (without much emotional connection though. Don't mind losing this one), this is STRAIGHT out of 19th century Russian novels. In particular, I'm thinking Turgenev's 'Fathers And Sons'[1]. In it, the university-educated, 'modern' characters, the nihilistic scientific men present very similar views. 'Science can explain away everything, that is what reality is', they proclaim, dismissing any sort of philosophical arguments (rather arrogantly, IMHO, but we can argue over that). It's kind of longwinded (aren't they all, with the exception of Chekov?), but HIGHLY recommended. You get the same sense of change and revolution, and 'waiting for great things to happen' in the novel as I often see in futurists these days.

I don't want to cheapen the experience, but this high-school-level summary sums it up reasonably well[2]:

>The main character of Fathers and Sons, Bazarov, does not want to occupy a philosophical position. Yet nihilism, whether he likes it or not, is a philosophy, a philosophy of destruction and renunciation. Bazarov is such an intellectual character that throughout the novel we see him struggle to understand each new situation in which he is put. Yet, from his intellectual point of view, he renounces romance and many other human values that make life worth living. Part of the drama of the novel is watching how Bazarov can go on living with his philosophy.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fathers_and_Sons_(novel)

2. http://www.shmoop.com/fathers-and-sons/philosophical-viewpoi...

  > Philosophy just seems to be

You may want to investigate what philosophy _is_, rather than what it seems to be.

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