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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

The incentives in academic philosophy aren't really around finding truth, but rather getting published so you can keep your tenure. There are a lot of academic philosophers that have crawled so far up their own asses they don't even know the way out any more. But they don't represent all of philosophy, even if they get a lot of attention.

Philosophy broadly defined is as vital and important as ever, though. I can't imagine a world in which trying to understand it is no longer important. Not everything there is to know about the world has been systematized enough to be considered a science, and any time you have a knowledge domain where the boundaries are fuzzy and poorly understood, there is going to be a place for philosophers to try and bring some order to it, even if it takes a few thousand years.

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What strikes me most about philosophy is in how core it is to everything we do — and this is something I didn’t realize for the longest time. The foundations of the economic, social, and political systems we live in are based upon philosophy; on theories of the nature of man laid down by thinkers such as Rousseau, Kant, and Smith. It turns out that “self evident truths” might actually be philosophical assertions. Philosophy is the first principle upon which many ideas we may initially take for granted rest upon, and I wonder if a general lack of explicit attention and examination on the subject is partially what enables some of the "post truth" attitudes we are seeing today. The more I learn, the more I can relate to "all I know is I know nothing."

This has been exactly my experience as well. I've been truly blown away at seeing the Genesis of many of the science and economics that so fascinates me as being born of philosophy.

"What strikes me most about philosophy is in how core it is to everything we do — and this is something I didn’t realize for the longest time."

Same. I used to take strong exception to the idea that philosophy was worth any amount of time to study... but then I realized any argument to reject it or degrade its utility is necessarily philosophical and changed my tune.

Makes sense. The ugly and skeptical philosophy of Socrates was very controversial compared to the beautiful words of the Sophists, but now we all consider the disciples of Socrates to be the best philosophers. Maybe we should start having more respect for the controversial outcasts.

I'm not so sure. Sometimes people are misunderstood geniuses. And sometimes people are outcasts because they really are kooks.

Maybe so indeed. Ideally I think the work should be judged on its merits rather than the acceptability of the source. That's obviously easy to say, less easy to do.

>The incentives in academic philosophy aren't really around finding truth, but rather getting published so you can keep your tenure.

Does that distinguish philosophy from the sciences or other areas of academia?

Other areas of academia have to face the real world or some kind of formalism sooner or later. That keeps them grounded to some (varying) level.

Other areas of sciences tend to have some "customer" outside themselves, where the sciences are applied. This also tends to be emphasized in the criteria for grant proposals in many domains nowadays.

IMHO the appropriate position of philosophy in modern academia would be as "metascience", i.e., their writings should be clearly useful to scientists across other sciences, they should be informative and relevant for people doing their own science outside of pure philosophy. IMHO it currently mostly isn't.

> IMHO the appropriate position of philosophy in modern academia would be as "metascience"

I don't think we should draw too many boundaries over what's 'appropriate' philosophy -- there's a lot of stuff to think about and a lot of people around to think it. I just hope that people don't think that obscure philosophy from academic journals is the only 'real' philosophy.

> There are a lot of academic philosophers that have crawled so far up their own asses they don't even know the way out any more

Which ones?

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