Progress in Philosophy
angryrainbowmermaids.blogspot.com
angryrainbowmermaids.blogspot.com
Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge—so I should contend— belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy
Without abstract ideas you would not be able to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems. You would be in the position of a newborn infant, to whom every object is a unique, unprecedented phenomenon. The difference between his mental state and yours lies in the number of conceptual integrations your mind has performed. You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles.
Your only choice, is whether your principles are true or false, rational or irrational, consistent or contradictory. The only way to know which they are is to integrate your principles.
What integrates them? Philosophy. A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by- your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: selfdoubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.
> I do deny the implication that philosophy should be judged by what gets exported from it—any more than physics or mathematics should be assessed in this mercenary and extrinsic way.
I find this strange. Shouldn't all knowledge be judged on the basis of whether their application yields valid results? If not, how should they be judged?
> I believe the turn away from schools, teachings and doctrines is itself one of the great instances of philosophical progress.
I agree. The existence of "schools" of thought (e.g. the Geocentric vs. Heliocentric schools of planetary motion) is a sign that the field of study is still nascent. Opinions should give way to theories as a science matures.
> It is not the point of philosophy to end philosophy, to ‘solve’ the deep questions so that people can stop thinking about them. It is the point of people to think about these questions, and the job of philosophers to rub their faces in that fact.
What? Yes, it is not the point of philosophy to end philosophy. But it's certainly not this either.
To me, the point of philosophy is to examine those aspects of existence that cannot be examined by other sciences, especially because the measurement or experimental methods or the resources to do so do not (yet) exist.
Not at all. Philosophy is about fundamental questions that fall outside the scope of the set of questions that can be settled by empirical validation. For example: "what is science?", "how can we know something?", "what does it mean for something to exist?", "why is there something rather than nothing?", "what is good and evil?", etc.
One important branch of philosophy is that of epistemology, concerned with the nature and acquisition of knowledge itself. You expressed two rather extreme epistemological views (extreme in relation to the positions of most non-naive philosophers on these topics):
-> That one can only judge knowledge on the basis of its applications;
-> That given good enough instruments and enough resources, science could answer all questions worth being asked.
Maybe the example questions above can convince you to think deeper about these positions.
These all are perfectly valid questions, and they deserve answers which are based on rigorous science. Philosophical discourse is just the first step in trying to find these answers or to establish the scientific framework (a model) that would allow to discover them in a completely rational way.
(It's also one that would theoretically obsolete the field of politics if it was ever answered scientifically).
Philosophy has already shown that moral is not derivable from facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem.
No, those are not meaningless goals, since they kind of determine how society works/should work, and are often the basis of fair political and legal systems. Here's how it worked in the past doesn't justify it working the same way now, and cultures throughout history have done all sorts of questionable things on the assumption they were in the right. It's the job of moral philosophers to figure out how to move forward from this, figure out what's right for society and go beyond tribalism and instinct.
I'd recommend to check out John Rawls and Amartya Sen on how you can reason about a fair society without assuming universal concepts of happiness, and with taking into account everyone's selfishness.
I also want to point out that what both of us do here is having a philosophical argument about moral code. It's not a new one, you can find related stances to your own one with respect to morality in Nietzsche, and with respect to meaning of terms and futility of discussion in Wittgenstein. But this is not the whole picture, other philosophers have already reacted to them and advanced the discussion. Like in other areas of knowledge, you better do thorough research first, otherwise you just reinvent the wheel.
In attempting to distance herself from Cowen's justification-by-significant-exports, Callard stresses internal measures of progress in philosophy, that inadvertently give the impression that the field is somewhat self-referential.
Callard does better, I think, when she proposes an alternative "export" to those in Cowen's list: the habit of critical and disciplined thinking about real-world issues that are never going to be settled once and for all - predominantly in the realm of moral philosophy, I assume (I hope this is not a misrepresentation or trivialization of Callard's point.) The ancients' relevance is that they got the ball rolling, and each generation could do a lot worse than beginning its debate over these issues by following in their footsteps.
That's why these days, philosophy is concerned mainly with a particular frontier: the human mind, especially its subconscious processes. Neuroscience is advancing at a steady clip, but it still doesn't have answers for things like how we acquire knowledge, how we know something is knowledge, how we process language, how we assign meaning to words and symbols, etc. Once the neuroscientists crack those nuts, I wonder what philosophers will retreat to. Morality and ethics, perhaps, about which gathering imperial data is difficult to impossible.
And yet, many people who ask questions like "what is good?" or "how can we know things?" or "is there free will, and if so, how does it work?" do so because they actually want to know the answers. If the purpose of philosophy isn't to find the answers, is philosophy the wrong place to be looking?
If you're claiming that there aren't any answers, well... that sounds like a strong philosophical position!
I would say, the main point is learning to ask these questions better. That includes: - getting a deeper understanding what the question means - learning how to assess candidate answers - learning which answers are wrong, and for which reasons - finding out what difference it makes to know the answer (sometimes it doesn't make any difference)
And also of the strange and wonderful epiphany I got when I started considering the ancient Greeks again. On the purity scale given by the xkcd, math is just applied philosophy.
The Greeks invented philosophy. Nobody thought philosophically before the Greeks invented it. People thought rigorously before the Greeks, but the rigor took a different form. That form is so different from philosophy that we have a different name for it. That word is theology.
When the people of the world tried to think rigorously before the Greeks invented a way to take the theology out of it, they could not stop themselves from invoking deities or moral importunings and all of that alongside their attempts at rigor. Theological rigor is different than philosophical rigor. In a very real way, philosophy is just applied theology.
Patterns for the sake of patterns is a hallmark of ancient theology. The ancient Hebrews believed they needed to sacrifice dozens to hundreds of animals daily at their great temple in order to stay in God's good graces. The Aztecs did one further and sacrificed humans. The patterns, the rituals, calmed the mind and served as a bulwark against the chaos and insanity that would surely reign and did reign whenever war or famine tore them away from them.
Philosophy, the love of wisdom, saved people from that. Without those amazing men who dared to think differently, often at the cost of their lives, Socrates was made to drink poison for his heresy, we wouldn't have the modern world. Ancient Greece wasn't a philosophical wonder island of reason and logic. Philosophy had to coexist with their existing mystery pantheistic sacrifice-demanding religion. Those thought processes that they invented had to catch fire and spread the same way any idea needs to.
It seems so strange, so weird, so crazy to consider, kind of like the idea that all current humans descended from a common ancestor. But before the Greeks, people didn't really consider the true nature of things. They just accepted whatever ideas sounded good and soothing.
I don't think that this would be a good characterization of the relationship between mathematics and philosophy. Philosophy uses quite a bit of math, especially to make arguments rigorous, making philosophy more like physics in this regard. On the other hand philosophy of course also tries to investigate and explain the nature of mathematics, so in some sense this puts mathematics on top of philosophy but I am not sure that this justifies calling it applied philosophy.
In one relatively small collection of nations, a mode of thought that was completely novel to the rest of the world was dreamed up. That way of thinking completely changed the world, so much that that way of thinking seems totally normal today.
When modern theological philosophers try to explain the Trinity, they use Greek ideas. In fact, the whole idea of the Trinity just falls out of a philosophical way of looking at it. The Eastern Christian Church doesn't use the doctrine.
Any time we talk about "the West," we're talking about a way of looking at things that originated with ancient Greece.
On the other hand, I completely take your point that the ancient Greek philosophers showed us an alternative to the tyranny of doctrinaire and theological rule.
This is a very bold statement, and it's most likely incorrect - given that the Greeks were relative newcomers to the world of civilizations to begin with, and also the fact that the modern humans have been in existence for many dozens of millennia.
Before the Greeks, there was this giant wall at which you had to stop, we call them 'mystery religions' because that's what they all had at the heart of them, this immense wonder about 'what it's all for', that they couldn't help but attribute to whatever god they had concocted up.
After the Greeks, humanity had tools to investigate that mystery rationally. Today we call those tools philosophy.
If you go look at the culture of the ancient Egyptians, long in the tooth by the time the Greeks came around, you don't see anything like Greek rationalism. Their thoughts are circular, their reasoning hung up around their mystery religion, never to escape it. The Egyptians had 5000 years to invent philosophy but they never did.
It interests me because while there's consensus on what's true in the hard sciences, there isn't any outside of it. People have passionate and utterly divergent opinions on politics, which they don't have about mathematics or physics. There has to be a way to live in a world where people disagree massively about politics, or idealistically, where we can resolve the disagreements. I find this more interesting than most specific issues in politics.
I recommend Less Wrong or Nassim Taleb.
Journalism is only the "first draft of history" and often gets it wrong. We should therefore be more uncertain about most things we read, particularly breaking news.
I do not have the time to address every bit of nonsense in this gish gallop so I'll stick to 2:
1. What is the measure of philosophic truth? It is implied strongly that "success" is determined by acceptance of ideas by others. Usefulness, accuracy, precision, ethics, are not important: what is important is that your ideas spread like a virus. If true, then philosophy is really, like the Sophists of old, just about rhetoric. And if manipulating people through words is your thing, then studying advertising and marketing would be a much more effective investment.
2. A key argument was "philosophy is so much better now than it used to be." I find the fact philosophy is not nearly as bad as it used to be, though arguably true, not very compelling. A better question would be "Is it good enough?" I have not yet found convincing evidence that is the case.
More complicated, and more to it, but certainly not of higher quality.
That said, I do think that more philosophical research is needed in the area. Unfortunately, most philosophers have focused on formal logic, even though informal fallacies are much more common.
- What is the nature of reality? - How does one acquire knowledge? - How can I trust what I know? - What is a good life to live? - How should I act on a daily basis? - What should I expect from others? - How the society should be structured? - What is the purpose of art?
Whenever I hear arguments about the contemporary relevance of philosophy, I ask myself "could these same arguments be applied to Alchemy and Astrology?" These were precursors to modern chemistry and astronomy, and their practitioners made many significant discoveries that we still use today. However, we have updated their methods significantly so though they are still known and read about, but not actively used.
I have not seen solid reasoning and evidence to suggest that philosophy is not in a similar situation.
It seems that you apply the 'natural sciences' pattern of knowledge generation to philosophy, and conclude that philosophy doesn't produce knowledge. But this stance needs justification. And as soon as you write down arguments that this is the right way to judge philosophy, you are actually doing philosophy yourself.
I'd like to ask you how you find out if a question is meaningful? And please don't answer "if it can be answered by science", because then you have a circular argument.
2. Argument over progress in philosophy is a debate borne of logical positivism, and it valorizes the goal of accumulating one ever-larger shared pool of knowledge as the only one that matters. But why does it matter?
Throughout history philosophers have often been more interested in personal development than grand collaboration. Empiricism just happens to have this property of creating tangible objects that others may study, which makes it apparently dominant in a world dominated by "whiz-bang" science - we're always looking at the next big thing. But merely knowing physical properties of the world does nothing to inform us of how to use them in a productive manner. That's where philosophy will perpetually re-enter as a way to add holistic breadth: the principles are often old, but they need a new adaptation to the circumstances brought about by technical changes.
And that also means that philosophers tend to be unpopular. If their nature is always to question how we're doing things, the natural consequence is that they are outcast for "rocking the boat". This is why it is important to draw some distinction between philosophy, the contemporary academic job title, and philosophy when it is practiced by ordinary people every day. The former is a strange outgrowth of the post-Enlightenment enterprise, the latter is something anyone can claim. Defining oneself as "artist", "maker", "entrepreneur" - these ideas encode philosophical purpose.
Then you repeat the Sophist's answer, a philosophical school. Unfortunately for you, philosophy has much much more to say about truth than what the Sophists said. For example, they invented logic, and explained how to identify fallacies. So "just about rhetoric" has been shown to be wrong. This invalidates your argument 1.
Your question in 2 is again deeply philosophical: when is any knowledge "good enough"? Go on and treat this question seriously, then you will find out that some philosophers did the same already, and that you might learn something from them.
Yes; if you like a philosophical idea that's usually sufficient for you to have 'adopted' or 'accepted' it. Yet, in addition, philosophical problems have been solved. It's just that ipso facto they then become part of science or some other discipline, so we don't notice so easily. For example, the theory of evolution was an example of philosophical progress (a new way of thinking about something, in this case life). But it's now part of biology. Another example is that Karl Popper solved the problem of induction. It's controversial that he did so. But if it shelves off into some other field, e.g. AGI, then perhaps his achievement will be more widely accepted as such.
Good philosophy opens up more new questions than it answers.
When applied properly to problem-solving or system analysis or conceptual ideation it can be amazingly powerful and provide you with a perspective that is wider than those who don't.
I have studied philosophy since I was very little but I always had one goal and that was to make it applicable to my life not just serve as an intellectual discipline devoid from any reality.
At its core, philosophy is nothing more than a disciplined approach to acquire knowledge about anything that the human mind is curious. The approach is usually through systematic questioning and applying logic* to the received answers, and iterating till satisfied.
What happened was things changed. When "philosophy" first burst onto the scene, everything that man was curious about was ripe for exploration - life, universe, creation, numbers, sexuality, morals, shapes, thoughts, politics - everything. A cursory look at the kinds of topics that were discussed by ancient philosophers (not just the Greeks) should show the same. In time, all these pieces of knowledge got specialized and got separated into their own fields. Now, physics deals with the universe, maths deals with numbers and so on. Knowledge is not a Pangea anymore.
All the low hanging fruits have been picked, eaten, digested and turned into manure. That is how the specialization happened. The deep and meaningful questions in each of these fields can only be asked if one is well versed in them. Human knowledge has outgrown the human capacity to be Renaissance men. Thus, we can't expect an outsider like Berkeley take down calculus anymore (but I guess they still do), and such tasks must be left to the experts with a philosophical bent.
This leaves "philosophy" with very little to tackle. To me it seems only the question of existence and the meta question about nature of knowledge are left untouched by other fields, but I suppose theology often trespasses. I think this is why most people feel philosophy is boring and useless - the questions are either too abstract or they produce nothing but never ending debates and flamewars with no results that improve the knowledge.
Philosophy has evolved. Philosophers must evolve too. I honestly have no idea what philosophers do (probably graduate and teach, and the cycle continues?) but they are left with two things to do to make themselves relevant again (not sure if they feel irrelevant) - pick a field of interest, learn it deeply and ponder over it, or infuse philosophical outlook to the students of various fields who would be better equipped to do the pondering.
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* For sake on convenience, I consider logic as a tool that already exists. To me logic is philosophy in its own right, and it bootstraps philosophy.
Progress in Continental Philosophy probably ended at the same time, when it came up against our new found ability to test what is true. Now the remnants of it (that I know of), Neo-Marxism and Postmodernism spend all their time trying to attack the foundations of Empiricism. Because until that is done, they can't really move forward.
I feel that all the worst parts of human history and many lingering pseudosciences came out of the Continental tradition. Communism, Fascism, Anti-enlightenment, Psychoanalysis, and many schools of Sociology. And while Sociology has potential, Marxism is to modern Sociology what Alchemy is to Chemistry.