So I find the "free-ride" a little harsh. What happens over time is that more and more questions that used to be purely "philosophical" have more and more empirical answers.
I think it might be useful for Philosophy to be less its own specialty and more an umbrella for the whole enterprise of "love of wisdom".
I sometimes think this might be a bit of a positivist myth. Most of the domains where we've gained a great deal of empirical knowledge are domains which people always investigated empirically, albeit less systematically and with fewer available resources (e.g. astronomy). On the other hand, most of the big philosophical puzzles that Aristotle engaged with remain largely untouched by developments in science. E.g. Is it possible to make true statements about the future? How is change possible?
How so? For example: http://www.astronomynotes.com/history/s3.htm
Looks like an astronomy problem to me. Aristotle is also considered one of the early astronomers.
>On the other hand, most of the big philosophical puzzles that Aristotle engaged with remain largely untouched by developments in science
Exactly my point. Of the problems they worked on (and they worked on everything they could think of), the ones that we have solved we now consider science, the ones that are still unresolved we consider philosophy.
Sort of like the definition of AI: if we solve it, it's no longer considered AI.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. My point was that Plato and Aristotle (and other early astronomers) realized that astronomy had to be based on observation. No-one (except perhaps a few cranks that no-one remembers) has ever tried to do "armchair astronomy".
>the ones that we have solved we now consider science, the ones that are still unresolved we consider philosophy.
I think the distinction is really just the distinction between empirical science and metaphysics, which is a distinction that Aristotle would also have made, though perhaps in slightly different terms. For this reason, I think the image of armchair philosophy gradually yielding ground to science is wrong. Broadly speaking, philosophers have always worked on philosophical problems using philosophical methods, and scientists have always worked on scientific problems using empirical methods. There hasn't been any great shift from one to the other. What has occurred of course is a shift in prestige: society currently values empirical science much more than it values philosophy.
The point is that this wasn't the case, philosophy was the umbrella that included everything.
Heck, just look at the title "Doctor of Philosophy", which is the name for doctorates in both the sciences and the humanities. Not just for doctorates in today's specific sub-discipline of philosophy.
Philosophy has been pivotal in shaping human civilization, laws, morals, government, arts, and even science itself.
That's a pretty bold claim to make without citing any specific examples.
Actually, cognitive scientists emerged after millennia of philosophic treatments of the matter (although they approach things with a different methodology of course).
That said, I don't think we have many, if any, philosophers today. All the main perspectives in philosophy have been played out from the time of Pre-Socratic philosophers to the 20th century.
Today we mostly have tame and bland tenured academics in Philosophy departments -- a pale shadow of philosophers of yore, and not so original to boot.
Do you think you have free will? Some philosophers argue convincingly that you don't. And if there's no such thing as free will, where does that leave the notion of punishment in the criminal justice system? I think that's "content" if there ever was such a thing.
Should we be socialists or capitalists? Is one system better than the other? What does it mean for an economic system to be "better" than another anyway? On the basis of philosophical arguments regarding these questions, people have been inspired to violently murder those who they see as perpetuating injustice. Surely, then, these arguments are not just "abstract" and "without content".
It's very difficult to explain why science is as successful as it is, or why we should put our trust in the results of scientific inquiry. The history of science is littered with mistakes, after all; who's to say that the expert scientific consensus isn't wrong today? So when you encounter someone on the street who says "I think global warming is nonsense," what sorts of arguments will you use to try and persuade them otherwise?
The problems of philosophy don't go away just because you're not looking at them.
Most socialists viciously reject all association with the kind of nonmaterialist, non-scientific, ahistorical kind of philosophy you're trying to justify here. We use "metaphysics" as an insult and "liberal metaphysics" especially to sneer at our opponents for trying to draw moral justification from a kind of Platonic realm of Forms rather than from the material needs of human beings.
I'm sure you have some thoughts to add in response, but my point is that socialism itself, as usually taught, is not a very good example to make your point with.
I'm also aware that some socialists hold views of agency that render the notion of "persuading someone to be a socialist via argumentation" incoherent. Hopefully such debates don't prevent me from using the history of socialist thought as an illustrative example of philosophy that is decidedly not "abstract argumentation without content".
Also, you seem to be unaware of the diversity of thought in contemporary moral realism, if you think that all moral realism is equivalent to Platonism.
I'm well aware of moral naturalism, and ascribe to it myself. However, defenses of "philosophy qua philosophy" and that sort of ilk are almost never about any form of naturalism. If you are a fan of seriously naturalistic philosophy, done well and in accordance with the best scientific evidence, than you probably belong on the Science side of the insipid "science versus philosophy" flame-wars, and your favorite philosophers actually spend portions of their books arguing exactly that. Because they have to, over and over again, ad nauseum.
Because otherwise, the Platonism-of-the-gaps people will rush in and declare Platonism About Everything, which is what they really want.
So for instance, I think that Derek Parfit really needs to see a therapist, because if you actually assert that "if naturalism were true, ... I would have wasted much of [my life]"[1], then you've got a problem. You should not need Platonism about X, for any value of X; you should be disinterestedly considering whether Platonism is true (I damn well think it's not).
[1] -- http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/08/on-wasted-philosophic-liv...
Huh. Well, I'm an error theorist. ;)
>If you are a fan of seriously naturalistic philosophy, done well and in accordance with the best scientific evidence, than you probably belong on the Science side of the insipid "science versus philosophy" flame-wars
I don't see why I have to pick one side or the other...
I consider my outlook to be thoroughly naturalistic, yet I still find myself frequently defending philosophy to people who misunderstand it. That doesn't mean I support all types of philosophical work that are being done, or that I think all philosophical questions are equally valuable.
>Because otherwise, the Platonism-of-the-gaps people will rush in and declare Platonism About Everything, which is what they really want.
Who are these Platonism-of-the-gaps people? I sort of see where you're going with this, and I agree with you that a lot of what is done in analytic philosophy is misguided, but I also want to be careful to avoid using the word "Platonism" as a pejorative for everything I disagree with.
Thanks for that Parfit quote, by the way. I think that's pretty hilarious.
I would go ahead and label them as the entire "robust realist" school of thought in meta-ethics, and we can then throw in large portions of the people doing philosophy of mathematics (the original Platonism in modern philosophy), many people's positions on semantics in philosophy-of-language (ie: they think of semantics in a way that requires Platonic propositions to exist in order to give semantic content, as opposed to merely pragmatic content, to sentences), and of course the endless droning claims of dualism in philosophy of mind.
I would grant these people a lot more charity if they could all get together and agree on what exactly the Immaterial or Platonic Stuff is supposed to actually be, and how it comes into contact with the physical world, not only through supervenience but through some form of actual causation. Instead, since they don't have a unified account of the Immaterial, it looks (admittedly, from the outside) as if they're just working in separate fields and positing various forms of Immaterial Stuff as disparate "solutions" for all the problems they refuse to allow to be solved naturalistically.
Naturalism can at least shunt off the hard work of explanation to actual sciences, and when that work gets done, naturalism ends up with philosophical accounts that don't require new and different forms of spooky stuff for each and every thing we want to explain.
I find it disappointing that non-naturalism is seeing a resurgence in metaethics, especially since I'm not even a moral realist to begin with. It's clearly just a lot of people grasping at straws.
For modern lines of development regarding Platonism (or something like it) in the philosophy of math, you might want to check out Ladyman and Ross's "Every Thing Must Go". They attempt to argue from insights from quantum mechanics that relations are real, but objects are not. I haven't read the whole book, but I believe they're explicit in stating that their position is not Platonism as it's classically understood, even though their position sounds suspiciously similar to it.
Even though I'm not a dualist of any kind, philosophy of mind is still the area where I'm the most sympathetic and forgiving towards spooky explanations. Consciousness is pretty weird, after all. So when someone wants to defend property or even substance dualism, I think they're wrong, but not crazy; and yet physicalism completely dominates in philosophy of mind, while moral non-naturalists get a free pass on their weak "well, it SEEMS like there are morals, therefore morals" arguments. It just feels completely backwards to me.
Anyway, I'm not quite sure what prompted you to take the discussion down this path. There is much in contemporary analytic philosophy that I find problematic and even indefensible, but when I'm trying to impress upon people the importance and relevance of philosophy, I don't mention the shortcomings until the person has a deep enough understanding to take a nuanced view of these issues. This is just like how, if you're trying to convince the global warming skeptic that the scientific consensus is to be trusted, you don't start off by talking about the replication issues in psychology. When I talk about philosophy with people, my main goal is to convey the point that there are important philosophical questions that are worth thinking seriously about.