What, exactly, do philosophers do?
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People forget that Boolean algebra comes from a work called "The Laws of Thought," where Boole tries to describe the algebraic operations underlying thought. If you think that isn't something "philosophers do," this is an ancient goal stretching back to Aristotle's logic, up through Descartes, and into figures such as Leibniz (who independently invented calculus and played an important role in giving us the binary number system), Chomsky, and Jerry Fodor. Philosophy is one of the disciplines in the interdisciplinary field of Cognitive Science.
Much of the most important work on the foundations of mathematics was done by philosophers with a mathematical bent (or mathematicians with a philosophical bent, depending on how you want to look at it). Set theory. Incompleteness. First-order logic was invented by Frege.
A lot of the technology we're using right now is traceable back to the work of philosophers.
I've always found that the best way to think of philosophy is simply as inquiry. As a line of inquiry progresses, it may bud off into a field in its own right. Physicists today would have been called Natural Philosophers in Newton's time. In fact, before Newton it was Descartes' physics that reigned supreme in the academy. Some lines of inquiry might not bud off despite significant advancements, such as logic.
Of course, I don't mean to say that philosophy and inquiry are purely synonymous. There's something vague about what the discipline of philosophy exactly is. But I don't think that's too terribly important. The question is what philosophers do. Some of the stuff philosophers "do" would probably strike some readers here as very "heads in the clouds" type stuff. But some of the other stuff, I think HN would find interesting. Check out work by Hillary Putnam. Or Jerry Fodor, if you're interested in "language of thought" type stuff that bears some similarity to Boole's project in The Laws of Thought. Chomsky recently published a newish collection of essays called What "Kind of Creatures Are We?", which is worth a look too.
also relevant: https://xkcd.com/435 - if it went further to the right Mathematics is just applied Philosophy.
I would have also given a different answer if the primary group here were, say, physicists, astronomers, and chemists. For them, the answers I would have given to the lawyers, political scientists, and historians would have likewise been "heads in the clouds" type stuff.
Philosophy has unseen tendrils in almost everything. You can only get someone to see it (or, really, care about it) when it's something they're already interested in.
I think it's pretty important, actually, because the more strictly we nail down the rules of what counts as Good Philosophy, the more it may actually diverge from really proper Inquiry into our original, pre-philosophical concerns. I'm probably unorthodox in thinking this, but I really do think the job of philosophy ought to be to answer or dissolve our pre-philosophical questions, in ways that address what we actually meant by those questions, rather than merely playing Philosophy as a disciplinary language-game.
There's lots I'd like to say on the topic, originating from 'psychoanalysing' the field with a little too much vigor, supporting it with social-structuralist bollocks, and throwing in criticisms of the academic publishing hamster-wheel. But a simple nod is better than a rant.
Besides this, I think the main thing a philosopher 'should do' is explicitly not just philosophy. Speaking at least two languages, being able to code, and actively participating in empirical work and creative endeavours should be seen as crucial to the education of a philosopher, for them to produce work of historical merit. The first two increase the likelihood of avoiding the Wittgensteinian errors of language and the latter two keep your brain moving and subsuming after parsing mountains of dense text.
Of course, if you want to be a philosophical historian, or an academic who academises in philosophy, take the well-trodden path. I think there are many philosophers who could write like wrought iron, but whose hearts just don't seem in it. Perhaps I'm just one of those guys who enjoyed Nietzsche a bit too much.
Edit: I feel compelled to mention that I trust my hard knowledge of the discipline about as far as I could throw it. It's well worth the CS-types around here taking the time to investigate the field - I recommend Kenny's 'A New History of Western Philosophy' if you've got time, or any old MOOC. After all, it's probably what you'd be up to if we didn't have computers.
Are the UEdinburgh MOOCs on Coursera ok?
If you don't want to just read Kenny's ANHWP, and I were to provide a reading list:
* Plato: Meno, Gorgias, Parmenides, Charmides, Apology. If you enjoy it, then try reading The Republic.
* Aurelius' Meditations. Democritus and Epicurus are worth reading about too, to summarise the Greeks. And Zeno's paradoxes.
* meaningness.com as an entry-point to Buddhist philosophy in general.
* Logicomix as an introduction to Russell & his project in Principia Mathematica.
* Mill's Utilitarianism, Hannah Arendt 'The Human Condition', and Henry George 'Progress & Poverty' for politics, history and economy, throw in a bit of Rawls. Schiller's 'The Robbers' is also very much worth reading.
* SEP articles for the classic writers: Augustine, Aquinas, Hume, Kant; then Kripke, Tyler Burge, and Searle present some interesting problems.
Other mentions off the top of my head: Dreyfus, Chalmers, Parfitt, Singer.
There are some great YouTube channels out there that teach to the intelligent adult. Gregory B Sadler, Mark Thorsby, Daniel Bonevac, Carneades.org are the ones I remember being useful. Some good series' are out there: Human, All Too Human; Alan Watts' TV series; The Reith Lectures...
I've missed a ton, of course, this is just stuff I remember enjoying or gaining something from. I hope this list isn't too overwhelming. I'd start with the Greeks, then flick around some YouTube channels, then meaningness, then off into whatever takes your fancy. I don't really fancy digging through MOOCs so sorry I can't recommend any in particular.
My personal favourite philosophers/philosophical writers: Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Darwin, Hegel, Camus, CS Pierce, Feyerabend, Epicurus.
I went into undergrad with a primary focus on (meta-)logic[1] and I was taught by some of the world's premiere logicians (David Kaplan, Sam Cumming, a few others). But I fell in love with ethics -- a subject I'd never thought I'd enjoy as much as I did. I loved reading Moore, Foote, Anscombe, Geach.
My best memories were attending graduate seminars -- studying the philosophy of language and trying to figure out how logical connectives work in regular discourse, or studying abduction and trying to stitch together Horn clauses that seem to point to one conclusion rather than another.
Philosophers, in short, do all kinds of things: from pushing the boundaries of exotic logics, to solving ethical problems, to systematizing natural language or understanding the metaphysics of causality.
The article just touches on all of the above (in fact, it doesn't discuss modern philosophy at all). If you're interested in philosophy, the SEP[2] is a great resource.
Could you please elaborate on this?
Maybe I'm being unfair, but I just think science should be left to the scientists.
He is generally regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers of science.[11][12][13] Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favour of empirical falsification: A theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments.
As a practicing scientist who also did a thesis on the concept of Causality, with projects on Time, I did in fact have to interact with and learn significant physics to make a dent in my projects. My professors were themselves extraordinarily capable with respect to (at least theoretical) science. My graduate-level philosophy of science classes were significantly harder than my theoretical physics classes, in some regards. The insight with respect to what is 'experimentable', and to be able to trace logical consequences of scientific assumptions through to experimental effects, and then to challenge those most basic of scientific assumptions by designing and using an experiment made powerful by its relation to an underlying philosophically-derived framework was extraordinarily empowering. And that's on the philosophy side.
I'd also argue that the framework instilled by my philosophy of science education has made my work as a scientist significantly more generalizable, and thus more influential to my fields.
I hope one day I'll get a chance one day to take a class on Philosophy of Science I'll enjoy.
Science should be left to scientists, but the interpretation of science is still an individual responsibility.
I do like the joke that career philosophers know no maths aside from arithmetic and about half of Bayes' Theorem.
Henri Bergson, who had put a lifetime's study into a philosophical rumination on time, vigorously rejected special relativity, to the point that it is said that Einstein's Nobel award citation did not mention special relativity on account of Bergson's criticism. Nevertheless, Einstein was in no doubt about what was his most important work, and gave an acceptance speech that was all about relativity.
If Bergson had been more aware of what had been going in in physics, over the previous two decades, to come to terms with the (meta?)physical implications of Maxwell's equations, he might not have been blindsided by special relativity.
As the above is rather critical of Bergson, I will end by noting that near the end of his life, he stood up to the Vichy regime's persecution of Jews, even though he was not Jewish himself and could have remained aloof.
There are definitely philosophers, both in philosophy of physics and in philosophy of mathematics, who are far better thought of as just studying philosophy simpliciter. These philosophers tend to use relatively trivial examples from science and mathematics in a pretty flat-footed way in order to make philosophical arguments. For example, arguing in favor of Platonism on the basis of purported facts about mathematical objects rarely takes into account mathematical reasoning beyond what is accessible to an average 7 year old.
But there are also many philosophers who study the exact sciences (i.e., math and physics) that actually take the details extremely seriously. Take a look at graduates and faculty at the Pitt HPS department or the UC Irvine's LPS department (for just two examples). There are quite a few people who even get doctoral degrees in both philosophy and physics. And, at my not-at-all-HPS (but technical-leaning) department, one of my colleagues who is just finishing with philosophy already has a doctoral degree in math.
Now, obviously just bc one has a doctoral degree in the exact sciences does not thereby make them cautious in assessing what philosophical content there is to be found in studying the exact sciences. The point is just that there are plenty of philosophers who, in contrast with the experience you had (at UCLA?) in philosophy of physics, know the details well enough to have contributed original research in the exact sciences.
Two very legit philosophers of physics to check out are David Malament and Howard Stein.
There is a world of difference between science and philosophy of science. Karl Popper wasn't a scientist but that doesn't mean he can't inquire about the philosophy of science. Philosophers in "philosophy of science" aren't doing any science. You do realize that don't you?
In your top-level comment, you crow about how smart philosophers are and now you are just deriding philosophers as incapable of understanding science and basic mathematics?
"Always warms my heart to see philosophy on top of HN. Philosophy is hard -- much harder than one would think. And people that contribute are incredibly smart -- far smarter than software engineers, by comparison."
A coherent philosophy of science is required for science to be based on valid premises. I don't know what you mean by this, unless you're referring to something recent which I don't know about. The past philosophy of science has been extremely instrumental to creating the scientific method; Karl Popper is science household name.
>On the other hand, it's very political, and a lot of it is mental masturbation.
There's nothing wrong with political philosophy, and arguably political philosophy is some of the most important from certain perspectives (pragmatism?). There's also nothing wrong with mental masturbation; by the same measure art, abstract mathematics, theoretical computer science, theoretical physics, poetry and a vast array of human literature is also mental masturbation, yet few would deny its value.
I have a hard time dismissing Hegel and Marx because their work involved political philosophy.
Comparing a software engineer to someone contributing to the advancement of an entire field is not really a fair comparison. This is like comparing someone who has a job in "compliance and ethics" to someone making advancement in quantum computing.
Whereas in engineering, most examinations are problem sets -- where the worst that can happen is a clever gotcha' (see whiteboard interviews).
And I'm a huge Carmack fanboy.
It seems obvious that Carmack's ideas have been far more influential than most philosophers' ideas, but admittedly this is difficult to measure. Impact on society isn't, though.
“Every mathematician believes that he is ahead of the others. The reason none state this belief in public is because they are intelligent people.”
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/trump-b...
I don't think that changing Dworkin's or Singer's mind on an issue would proceed to strongly affect Gorsuch's views. I think he'd just find another philosopher to cite, because his ultimate views are political rather than moral.
Jokes aside, my personal opinion is that we have a lot of hubris on the average, and a lot of us probably consider ourselves smarter than we are. Or at least could do with an attitude that generates an openness to learning, which being humble does.
For this reason alone, it might be interesting to consider that there might be a smarter lot out there. And a bunch of people who are sort of smart in the same way as developers are (deductive reasoning, parsing problems very finely, etc) to boot.
I don't care of the smartness of any group, but I'd take the methods of rationality over whatever is taught in philosophy any day of the week. You can see sillysaurus3 trying to actually get to the bottom of your statement, and he's being a much better logician than you are.
As a biochemist I'm also allergic to the field of ethics, because it tends to be worried hand-wringing by people who have no technical understanding of the field.
As someone already stated here, modern philosophy more or less is nothing but a dick measuring contest.
QED
Methinks you don't know much about engineering if you think problem sets make up most of it.
I doubt we have the data to compare philosophers as opposed to programmers in terms of intelligence (and this is an empirical question), but consider Alan Turing: a highly competent early programmer (he was known to be an expert debugger as well) and (almost incidentally) hugely impactful in philosophy of mind as well.
On the other hand, in terms of impact, insight can be just as valuable as intelligence. Bryan Magee once asked Bertrand Russell about who he considered to be most intelligent person he's met: Russell's answer wasn't Einstein, but rather Maynard Keynes; Einstein's contribution came from his insight (incidentally one inspired by his reading of Kant and Schopenhauer) rather than from intelligence alone. This point (on insight vs. intelligence or "percepts" vs. "concepts") is one that Schopenhauer also harps to a great deal (in between his vituperation of Hegel, of course.)
This implies that if it is indeed true that philosophy has much greater impact on the world than programming, it doesn't necessarily imply anything about intelligence of philosophers relative to that of programmers. Indeed, it's quite possibly that some of most influential programmers (in terms of influence on the wider world) aren't always the smartest (consider startup founders, especially for startups solving social/economic/business as opposed to purely technical problems -- not always great programmers -- and their subsequent software specialist hires.)
Orthogonally, sometimes the influence of a programmer can be behind the scenes. Take epistemology for example: if you asked someone how they know something, it's quite possible that their answer might mention Google in some way or another (possibly fallaciously, of course) -- yet few think of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Craig Silverstein, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Jeff Dean in the same vein as Plato (with his Meno and Theaetetus) when discussing "why is that we say we know know X."
As for Carmack, consider how much virtual reality (and here I am not just thinking Oculus, but even more so the 3D labyrinths of the original ID Software Games) might end up influencing metaphysics in the long run.
If you think intelligence ought to convince people of things, then obviously rhetoricians are smartest.
And so on and so on. sniff
The vast majority of philosophers don't advance the field in any meaningful way.
The vast majority of people in any field don't advance the field in any meaningful way.
(Agree with both yourself and the OP: with great respect for philosophers, comparisons of 'relative smartness' of one field over another is not helpful or particularly meaningful.)
The part which is political is very relevant.
You might not like this one's politics, but his analysis of the politics of the Weimar Republic is cogent and very relevant to today's American and European politics. (It also applies to the Postmodernist Left.)
The problem is when you confuse what you need to do to succeed with the search for truth.
Yes there is. The primary method of argument is proof.
Just look at all the retracted papers that have been published. Erratum are surprisingly widespread for such a formal system.
So, their is cases of demonstrated lag between publishing and problems showing up. Therefore in the strictest possible terms, every published result is in some way suspects as they simply have yet to be disproved.
I am in no way suggesting this is some kind of reasonable standard. Just that math is slightly more subjective than often portrayed.
PS: This line of reasoning was simply in response to the suggesting that proof somehow inherently implied accuracy.
Actually, a lot of philosophy is "arguable". I don't think you can argue a lot with a mathematical proof.
And I'm sorry, but when Lacan compare the penis to square root of -1, it's hard to come back to scientists and sell the rigor of philosophy. Same when philosophers use and abuse Gödel's incompleteness theorems or the quantum observer effect to justify ludicrous claims.
Except the most popular abuser of Gödel's conclusions by far is a physicist and mathematician.
The barriers to entry are no less difficult from it's absence, but the barriers to accuracy are defiantly lower.
Only in logic, I think. Is there proof in ethics? (which is not to say that I think it is an invalid field of discourse.) One can demand internal consistency in a philosophical argument, but not necessarily proof.
In the interminable squabbles over consciousness and the mind, the physicalists and the dualists each seem to think they have ruled out their opponents' position, but they can't both be right.
> far smarter than software engineers, by comparison.
This is just a dumb, specious statement. Would expect better from a philosopher ;)
Also, would be interested why you think:
> Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field.
What makes it bogus?
As someone who studied both computer science and philosophy ( CS and Philosophy degrees ), no.
> Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field.
What?
> Philosophy of Mind, apart from a few great minds (Chalmers, Nagel) is also equivocal.
What?
Not sure how to respond to your comment since you are all over the place. But there are plenty of smart minds in software engineering/computer science and plenty of dumb minds in philosophy.
Not sure where you get the idea that philosophers are smarter than "software engineers" and what metric you are using to determine it. But if you have a metric, I'd love for you to lay it out.
I think you're mostly talking about analytic philosophy.[1] That's dominant in English-speaking countries, and in the process of dominating most everywhere else. But Continental philosophy[2] also exists, and has pretty different concerns and methodologies.
I encourage everyone to check out both.
Not sure what you are talking about. Godel and Turing demonstrating the limits of some systems are actually giving philosophy of science results. I don't see any bogus in their work.
The Halting Problem doesn't really touch on phil-of-sci concerns, which are chiefly about how to do empirical reasoning correctly. You don't need to deductively solve deductively unsolvable problems to do empirical prediction and control correctly.
How can you possibly think this subjective, anecdotal statement is going to land well?
Scott Soames' two volume work on the history of analytical philosophy is a great introduction to that side of the field and will get you up to speed with the the trajectory the led to what contemporary voices in the domain are grappling with now: https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Analysis-Twentieth-Cent...
But that's just one side of philosophical thought, continental philosophy is very important as well. A good historical sketch of that milieu can be found in Delacampgne: https://www.amazon.com/History-Philosophy-Twentieth-Century/...
Some important recent voices from the continental side are probably Foucault, Zizek, Slotterdjik, Gadamer, Habermas, the Frankfurt School.
Finally you could just ignore everything prior and read Wittgenstein. Personally, if we're talking GIANTS among the Giants the list goes something like: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Wittgenstein. (I am of course, limiting myself to Western thought).
As with any field there are plenty of voices who have contributed a legion of ideas with varying amounts of success, but I'd say those names are the heaviest hitters. Wittgenstein is arguably still the most recent philosopher to have affected a paradigm shift. (though I think one could make a fairly convincing argument for including Foucault in those ranks as well).
Philosophy in general is a very interesting field because it often benefits from discoveries in other disciplines, in addition to having often motivated/been the birthchamber of said disciplines (see for instance, the often symbiotic relationship between linguistics and the philosophy of language).
And how could any such list leave out von Hartmann?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Robert_Eduard_von_Hartman...
http://www.iep.utm.edu/hartmann/
https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/selections/eduard-von-h...
But anyway, I wouldn't include him for the same reason I wouldn't include Pierce, James, and some other american pragmatists, or more enigmatic figures such as Cioran and Bataille--namely because while my personal perspective on their thought is that it's excellent and deserves serious consideration, and they are some of my favorite philosophers to read, their work hasn't had as great a historical impact on the world stage as these other major figures.
I would drop Sartre and add Heidegger instead in that list. And I favor Suarez over Aquinas.
For something more obviously relevant to this crowd, you could look at the work of Hubert Dreyfus, a Heidegger scholar whose insights into the limits of viewing intelligence as symbolic cognition has actually been influential in the history of AI. It's not super recent, but maybe it takes some time for philosophy to become intelligible; when it is really interesting, it also probably seems weird when it's fresh.
A few references for Dreyfus:
1. His recent paper "Why Heideggerian AI failed and how fixing it would Require making it more Heideggerian"; a quote below. http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf
"As I studied the RAND papers and memos, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, the pioneers in CS had learned a lot, directly and indirectly from the philosophers. They had taken over Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a “universal characteristic”—a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed,—Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Russell’s postulation of logical atoms as the building blocks of reality. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program.
At the same time, I began to suspect that the critical insights formulated in existentialist armchairs, especially Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s, were bad news for those working in AI laboratories– that, by combining rationalism, representationalism, conceptualism, formalism, and logical atomism into a research program, AI researchers had condemned their enterprise to reenact a failure."
2. David Chapman's curious autobiographical book review of a somewhat hokey book on "integral philosophy", that goes into his own story at MIT's AI lab and his encounter with Dreyfus's critique; quote below. https://meaningness.com/metablog/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artif...
"In 1987, we wrote a computer program called Pengi that illustrated some of what we had learned from Dreyfus, Heidegger, and the Continental philosophical tradition. Pengi participated in a life-world. It did not have to mentally represent and reason about its circumstances, because it was embedded in them, causally coupled with them in a purposive dance. Its skill came from spontaneous improvisation, not strategic planning. Its apparently intelligent activity derived from interactive dynamics that—continually involving both its self and others—were neither subjective nor objective. Pengi was a triumph: it could do things that the old paradigm clearly couldn’t, and (although quite crude) seemed to point to a wide-open new paradigm for further research. AI was unstuck again! And, in fact, Pengi was highly influential for a few years."
3. Dreyfus's book about his reading of Heidegger, called Being-in-the-world, and if one wishes, a recent movie of the same name. Here is one of my many highlighted passages from the book, which is flattering to computer scientists, but also might make you wonder if there is any philosophy that is critiquing current AI research in a way that will seem prescient years down the road:
"Having to program computers keeps one honest. There is no room for the armchair rationalist's speculations. Thus AI research has called the Cartesian cognitivist's bluff. It is easy to say that to account for the equipmental nexus one need simply add more and more function predicates and rules describing what is to be done in typical situations, but actual difficulties in AI—its inability to make progress with what is called the commonsense knowledge problem, on the one hand, and its inability to define the current situation, sometimes called the frame problem, on the other—suggest that Heidegger is right. It looks like one cannot build up the phenomenon of world out of meaningless elements."
Philosophy is not that kind of human endeavor. There is no "state of the art"; instead, Plato is as state-of-the-art as he ever was[2][3] and every publishing philosopher has novel ideas (or at least hopes they do, although they might also like to learn that some ancient sage has expressed support for their notions).
My personal way of viewing philosophy is as a conversation. A philosopher starts by finding other statements that they like or don't like. Then, they add their own thoughts, modifying previous ideas or attacking or supporting them, all with the best arguments they can muster. From all this, you, as an innocent bystander, can pick out the threads that best let you sleep well at night.
[1] And if I've ever written a more philosophical paragraph, I don't know what it is. I wish to submit it to the Faculty of the College of Liberal Arts, blah, blah, blah.
[2] I'm sure I'll be vigorously attacked by analytic philosophers at this point. There are very much schools who would like philosophy to be more akin to the sciences or (even better) mathematics (but without all the icky evidence and formal proofs and such). But then, the only particular sympathy I've had for analytic philosophy I've recently discovered due to an interest in Daoist philosophy.
[3] Except for Epicurus. He seems to have won on some topics---his physics; if you're a materialist, you're Epicurean even if you don't already know it---and everything else seems to have been misplaced. Which is the interesting part, dang it.
He died recently which prompted me to get his On What Matters which has good reviews, but hasn't reached the top of my pile yet.
My view is that philosophy is rather slow moving and gestates with societal changes rather than big thinking leaps. And I tend to agree with pg that philosophy went wrong a long time ago and descended into a war of definitions:
Since this is more mathematics than philosophy, the latest truly novel idea is also a few months old instead of a few decades. You really just have to start somewhere and work your way forward. :)
If you are not aware of all that accompanying discussion, you are likely to think you have come up with something profound when you actually haven't. This is why r/im14andthisisdeep/ is a thing. A lot of teens think they have an insight despite the fact that what they thought is neither profound nor novel.
Also, a lot of philosophical reading helps set up frameworks or theoretical scaffolding that can serve as a layer of abstraction that you can build upon instead of everyone rediscovering the same ground principles.
High school physicists are not ploughing through Principia Mathematica, instead they learn the laws of motion and move on. Physicists pretty much leave behind the original sources until you are at the bleeding edge. Why can't philosophy?
Sometimes, however, they do borrow eachother's tools at least.
until it's not, at which point it moves out of the domain of Philosophy and into physics, math, psychology, what have you.
(No, the "philosophical atoms" of Democritus weren't atoms as we now know them. For one thing, the word "atom" means "uncuttable", as Democritus imagined atoms to be the indivisible units of matter, and, more importantly, he had no larger experimental and explanatory framework to slot his ideas into, so he couldn't come up with ideas like molecules and chemistry that, to us, follow quite naturally from the notion matter is made of atoms.)
And philosophers DO consult the original sources. Those would be basic logic and rhetoric. Then they take those and they first build epistemology. Then they use that epistemology to build a framework of metaphysics. Eventually they build the most abstract, highest level piece - ethics. At each step there are varying options, and it is rare that you can point to any of the options as 'clearly true'.
We already know mathematics and similar cannot address everything. A 3-body system of perfect sphere interacting solely under universal gravitation is already in itself so sensitive to initial conditions that the error on any prediction you make grows faster than anything computable. So how is humanity to deal with things that happen on the scale of trillions of trillions of entities interacting in non-linear ways constantly? That's the world we actually live in, and the tools to address it won't come from math. And probably not physics (although maybe).
And that is a problem - what I'd expect from the practitioners of philosophy is to give a concise summary of what exactly is the current state of art answer. Given all that discussion, does the argument make sense (and thus the refutations have been found wanting) or do the refutations prevail?
Okay, there are some topics that are still highly up for debate, or it's acknowledged that the answer must be subjective (as some of the ethical debates do) - in that sense, just make a summary of the strongest currently known arguments pro and contra.
Discussion is a process for getting to results, but the discussion is not a sufficient result by itself - where are the conclusions? Such discussions are a tool for people within a field to produce the results, but the value of the field is limited to what is the outcome of the discussions that can be provided to practicioners of other fields, the final results that they can use in their reasoning. Where is the truth that has been found? Okay, it may be partial, or refuted in future as we obtain more knowledge, but up to our current knowledge, why doesn't the field provide the results of that discussion, removing all the refuted arguments (possibly moving them to a "FAQ list" of "yes, we've thought of that objection and it doesn't matter"), and summarizing (with fine-tuning, improvements and clarification, instead of expanding with more and more comments) the arguments that have been confirmed as irrefutable since Aristotle.
Instead of that, the philosophical community tends to provide all the historical discussion and pretend that that's a satisfactory result of research - it's not. We don't read Newton's Principia and comments of other authors on that to understand physics, we have resources that summarize all that's valid in Principia, that remove all that's not valid in it, that augment what could be improved, and make the original work obsolete for study unless you're a historian. The relationship between Principia and Kepler's findings is interesting from a historical perspective, but orthogonal to the actual content. Why then are we reading e.g. Kant's response to Hume instead of producing (Back then! I'm not talking about a textbook for students, but as something the research field would be expected to write for themselves right after Kant's publications) something like "Hume - revised" where all the Hume's opinions are mercilessly edited (because we shouldn't care about all Hume's opinions, but only those of his opinions that happened to be correct), removing the parts that have been refuted, leaving the parts where Kant's response was found insufficient, and replacing the parts which Kant was able to clarify with Kant's words, with a footnote to attribute authorship. If a refutation matters, then the original work should be altered (Where is the "Nicomachean ethics, 114th revised edition"?), and if a refutation doesn't matter, then you shouldn't be ever reading it in serious literature without a preface noting "this is a historically interesting but erroneous argument, counter-refutation in page xyz). The discussion is something that should matter only for those making new philosophy, but not those studying and applying ("consuming"?) the existing philosophy.
Instead https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/ states "There is no consensus, of course(!), over whether Kant's response succeeds, but there is no more consensus about what this response is supposed to be". Emphasis on the "of course" is mine, because I find that part informative, illustrative, and outrageous - if this is currently considered a reasonable state of art description, then the field seems to explicitly acknowledge that it's worthless, that it's not even attempting to provide any actual answers out of these discussions.
An interesting property of Searle's argument is that, if true, it means that the "strong AI" program is worthless; no discrete system that involves following rules (including neural networks and statistical models) can really "understand" anything.
The reason this came to mind is that Searle includes a large section addressing most (possibly all) of the responses to his argument by counter-counter-arguments. The SEP (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/) has a lovely discussion of the problem and responses since 1980, which seems to fulfil your desire for a "concise summary of what exactly is the current state of art answer". (Unfortunately, that isn't the case in general; the SEP page on Zhuangzi (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/) simply presents one approach, although it's one I haven't seen anywhere else.)
Unfortunately, while Searle presents counter-refutations to the refutations of his argument, and others since have added more and deeper levels of refutations, none have, to my knowledge, been universally acknowledged as prevailing. I personally don't buy Searle's argument (if you accept it, and especially his response to the "systems response", you will have to admit that no one understands Chinese), but that's neither here nor there; others do, and others find failures in his argument that I think are silly.
This is the case with most all philosophy. The only way for a philosophical point to be incorrect is for it to be logically inconsistent with other parts of the same argument, and that is almost never the case in any real arena. A similar sort of situation holds occasionally over in mathematics, say, where Euclid's fifth axiom was argued over for most of 2000 years; eventually it was discovered that you can invert it and produce a similar system that is intuitively inobvious, but logically consistent (and useful). Likewise, which philosophical points you accept depends entirely on what axioms you start with (and unfortunately, philosophical axioms are harder to pin down than geometry's).
My bottom line is that the historical discussion is the point of philosophy. Understanding complex arguments, even if they aren't "true" or if you don't agree with them, is considerably more than worthless.
It is not like every math paper starts out with the axioms of Peano arithmetic.
Does your question still make sense?
I can only imagine how depressing it must be to do academic research on age-old philosophical questions - an endless literature survey, at the end of which there is no light, because even if you "solve" the problem, many others will not find your solution satisfactory.
It's much harder to assess the quality of ideas in philosophy.
> There's a lot more reading that needs to be done before you can make a contribution.
Just like software engineering unless you count Hello Worlds as contributions. But even then one can do simple things like that in philosophy.
> A lot of it progresses by just reading the works of the established masters, getting ideas, and publishing your thoughts about what they had to say.
Sounds like reading white papers and RFCs to me.
> You don't start from scratch. You build on what is already there.
The same. Just check how much transpilers and leftpad like libraries a JS Hello World app needs!
And so on...
1) Logic (this is useful and also can be called maths) 2) Political Philosophy / Political Theory (crosses over with politics/history, again useful) 3) Ethics (useful and important but not necessarily worth academic study) 4) History of Philosophy (this is really the history of thought and useful and interesting. A lot of philosophy is really this) but unfortunately it blurs into attempting new thought 5) epistemology (useless, science is the better path)
Source: I studied philosophy.
It's important to remember that early philosophers tended to also be mathematicians and scientists.
;)
When philosophers make this departure from pursuing the usual notion of truth, the motivation derives from an understanding that the adoption of one philosophical idea versus another can have profound impacts on people's lives (just consider how certain religious ideas can make people behave for instance)—so it's often partly about figuring out a set of ideas which would be most beneficial if adopted.
The Pragmatists for instance were quite explicit about this (see William James' redefinition of 'truth' in Pragmatism for example)—and maybe others have been too, but I think the more common thing is to not be up front about it at all (which makes a certain amount of sense since that could impact the effect of their project to begin with).
I haven't seen the details myself, but a philosophy professor friend pointed out to me that even Plato was pretty blatantly doing this.
Looking at it this way, and as a layperson outsider, modern philosophy went off-the-rails sometime after formal logic theory. We've forgotten the skill and benefits of general inquiry and instead tried to formalize philosophy itself as if it were already a science. (or as if there were some underlying science waiting for us to discover it)
Total of Reading, Math, Writing scores on SAT by college plans:
1488 -- Visual & Performing Arts
1476 -- Psychology
1587 -- Philosophy & Religious Studies
1606 -- Computer & Information Science and Support Services
1612 -- Engineering
1685 -- Physical Sciences
1714 -- Mathematical Sciences
As anyone that has been around a US university lately knows, non-native English speakers are overrepresented in CS departments and consequently, this bring down the verbal and hence overall SAT scores for CS a bit. Furthermore, that's a pretty big category for CS that includes some of the far less theoretical areas.
I've noticed, more than once, that Philosophy majors feel that they are somehow in a rarified domain where the things they do are far beyond the understanding of the rest of us. A bit like my father, a doctorate in Theology, that was worried that if I went to MIT I would end up being a super TV repairman.
Academic papers and books in Philosophy are at times obtuse, but really no more difficult than reading a paper on, say, orogeny, out of my field, so slow going, but not impossible (it's the study of how geologic processes form mountains). Can Philosophy majors say the same thing about my books on Ring theory, Measure theory, Category Theory, Stats, Machine learning, Computability, Compilers, or Operating Systems?
I've tried to understand general relativity (to no avail) and my struggles with quantum theory have given me a great respect for Physics majors--they deserve their place at the top of the academic IQ ladder, but Philosophy majors should perhaps take a peek at what some of the rest of us work on.
[1] https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/total-group-2016.pdf
Far to much value is attributed to "what they said" rather than the mind set that made them say it.
This could happen to any field and to some benevolent and productive extend it does. We normally put the word history or historian behind or in front of it like computer science history, art history, the history of foobar.
I have to ask: how does one write the "hello world" of philosophy? And please don't cite me a manual.
Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum. I'm sure you could write that out in a faintly amusing way using 'import' or something.
Your second sentence is right a lot of the time, but certainly not always. It's just that certain, foundation-shaking ideas are treated exceptionally and independently, or as not relevant to the very practice of thinking. As if the contents of the mind and the stomach (etc) vary independently.
(At the risk of having them take away my Junior Philosophers' Secret Decoder Ring.)
The most valuable philosophers of today IMO, are those that stay on the rails of pragmatism for the everyday struggles of the average citizen.
Stefan Molyneux on youtube is a good example.
He gets off the rails a little bit, but his core ideals of ethics and moral virtue is something I value quite highly in my everyday life.
Spend five minutes of introspection to see how your mind appears to work, then build huge tottering edifices of analytical thought on those narrow observations.
Profit?
They keep it hot. https://media.giphy.com/media/ytZHCP0IPPogE/giphy.gif
2. Spend an awful lot of time trolling each other on Facebook.
3. Occasionally rehash old ideas.
4. Even more occasionally come up with breathtaking insights into the nature of reality and what it means to be human.
5. Get annoyed if you point out any flaws in those insights.
6. Publish more than they used to.
I think I would very much enjoy seeing some citations of this. (:
... So basically the same thing philosophers do in their papers, just with fewer citations.
(That's not me throwing shade -- just pointing out how the field seems to work. I loved and still love philosophy.)
That said, metaphysics is pretty much the worst of philosophy, because it has been so thoroughly rendered useless by all that we've actually learned about the physical world. Other subfields are substantially more interesting and less underinformed.
Modern philosophers analyse older philosophical work and reply to contemporaries; for example there is an ongoing debate about the difference between "letting die" and "killing", and if it is an ethical difference then what significance it holds. Other philosophy seeks to blend together with sociology and psychology to analyse our current life (for example, the work of Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School), for example to ask what is capitalism and to what extent it is desirable. Some other philosophy works with economics to examine classical and modern ideas of the value of commodoties and its ontology. Some philosophers concern themselves with the ethics of killing and eating animals and by extension humans. Other philosophy works through linguistics to formulate theories of what we mean when we speak and the limits of language to describe reality. And other philosophy involves itself with natural science to formulate theories of causation and being. Yet other philosophy does other things.
It's a broad field, and with advances in all related fields it's become a lot broader than it was since the enlightenment, even considering how natural science is no longer considered a philosophy.
So (from my position of now knowing the work of any modern philosopher) have such philosophical explorations, in the past decades or century, produced answers? In the sense that, have they made a change in the way these important issues developed? What are the biggest ways they have affected other fields?
I'd suspect that they've provided quite a few important answers but I'm curious how much power/influence these ideas had in their times.
Since philosophy often involves questioning basic assumptions that almost everyone takes for granted it retains the possibility to be disruptive or even dangerous.
I'm under the impression that philosophical investigation has been largely ignored in science, though I don't have enough information to give a definitive answer.
Principles in law seem to me to be unclear and not guided along any particular philosophy, despite in the UK at least PPE (politics, philosophy, economics) being a common choice of university degree for politicians. I have seen utterly terrible and fallacious and evidence-lacking arguments used to create hideous laws, as the arguments are public record in England and Wales.
I'd say that philosophy doesn't have nearly as much impact as it should do, and anyone who disagrees with this should recognise that the ability to think critically is taught in any and all philosophy.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Yes, they're guidelines. Communities often have norms that aren't written down in laws, and people that behave outside of those norms end up feeling some friction. You can argue about whether or not that's fair, but that's part of human psychology. Another aspect of human psychology one needs to take into account is figuring out what is effective in creating the change you want. That's key to me wondering whether this comment is worth writing, because I don't think it's the best way to convince you that you may be making things harder for yourself than you could otherwise. Unfortunately I can't think of a better way to do so right now. (Indeed, having followed your comments yesterday in another thread, I hesitated to even make my initial comment.)
I think that's likely what drives some of the drive-by downvoting culture, as you put it. I remember a comment (likely by 'dang, but I can't find it at the moment) along the lines of how much effort it takes to respond well to comments like the last two you posted in this subthread. You asked why you you were downvoted (against the guidelines, and then again violated the guidelines with your edit), and when that was pointed out, stated that the guidlines are just that, so you shouldn't have been down voted. I'm really not sure how to answer you honestly in a way that you would accept, and take it upon yourself to accept some responsibity for the consequences of your comments, regardless of whether you personally agree with them. Communication involves every participant. I can affect my comments and responses, crafting them the best I can for productive conversation. I can't control how they'll be taken, but given what I understand of those I'm in discussion with, I can (and should) take that knowledge into account when I'm writing. To do otherwise just makes me ineffective and frustrated, and to do so repeatedly makes me appear a fool to those observing me, and they'll be even less likely to respond to me charitably.
Here's a comment by 'dang on the topic of downvoting:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440694
Also, if you search the archives, there's plenty of discussion on this, including people voicing exactly your concerns. While I sympathize with a "we shall overcome" attitude (I harbor some of that myself), expecting this to change just by continuing to call it out will likely work against you. Personally, I think encouraging better behavior while abiding by the guidelines is likely to make HN a better place. Finding the balance between encouraging good behavior and calling out bad is admittedly difficult.
As a concrete example, here's a suggestion for rewriting one of your comments:
You wrote:
> Why the downvotes for my comment? And why is this comment downvoted? If you don't think my comment above was substantive or helpful, please tell me so that I can improve the quality of my posts.
An alternative would be to just eliminate those first two sentences:
> If you don't think my comment was substantive or helpful, please tell me so I can improve the quality of my posts.
If within the editing time, you can append that to your post rather than starting a new comment. Try to frame it as best you can to not sound defensive.
I do wish you the best and hope that you can read this in the spirit in which its intended. I want everyone (including you and me) to have a positive, constructive experience on HN, and that's why I've taken the time to write this lengthy comment.
Another example is the discussion about the algorithm's decisions in kill some/save many scenarios in autonomous driving.
In philosophy, the Trolley Problem and its many variants are about exactly these sort of problems.
I wouldn't say that philosophy has given any "answers" to these problems, but the debate (and politics/law/software) would certainly be different, or just not happening, without these efforts.
Effective Altruism is another well-known concept that can be called "applied philosophy". As are "responsibility to protect" ("do world power have a duty to protect people in other countries from, for example, genocide"), and anything in economics and criminal law that requires some sort of common understanding of what is "just".
Math categorizes relationships.
Science tests relationships.
Engineering exploits relationships.
Remove any one of these and the whole damned process stops.
Having said that... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8