A Terribly Serious adventure: Philosophy and war at Oxford | Hacker News Reader

A Terribly Serious adventure: Philosophy and war at Oxford

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72 pointspepys38 comments

I’ve read the book under review and would recommend it.

Philosophy has always appealed to me but disappointed because it never seems to settle on answers. There’s a bit in the book where Kleene (I think?) is advising young academic philosophers to go into logic instead as at least there they’ll get answers.

Someone in the book describes philosophy’s truth value as less like scientific inquiry and more like poetry done in logical argument. That seemed like a potentially valuable way of looking at it.

I think this is the wrong conclusion. The issue is that "from no premises, come no conclusions" and philosophy has no internal mechanism to treat any premises as axiomatic. (Whereas, eg., the sciences treat empiricism, causes, experimentation, universal regularities, etc. all as axioms).

Science "has no answers" either if you deny its premises.

So all systems of "answers" are just systems where we find some set of propositions so nearly certain that we take them as axioms and hence believe what follows.

You can, and indeed should, do this with philosophy too. If you find that science has answers, then just take its premises as axiomatic -- and throw away all philosophy which denies them.

That arguments can be advanced against those premises has no epistemic status. Arguments can be advanced against any arguments. And move to "deny the premieses" is always available.

Sceptics regard this as interesting and important. It isnt. Knowledge, truth, belief, reality etc. are not set by what has arguments. The hidden premise to this scepticism is that "cognition & arugmentation are the foundation of knowledge & reality" -- deny this, and the whole manic schizophrenic enterprise disappears in a puff.

Philosophy, then, has tones and tones of answers.

Philosophy’s real problem is that it spun off all its useful and productive branches. Science used to be part of philosophy; now it’s a separate discipline. Theology and psychology were branches of (meta)physics, and now they’re separate fields. Computer science has split from logic. Math is its own thing. Grammar split from logic ages ago. There’s very little left for philosophy outside unproductive questions of epistemology (“Are we brains in jars on a shelf?”) or ethical debates. All the real fruit now lies elsewhere.

I think this bares little relationship to research philosophy. Social epistemology, the logic of imagination, hyperinstensionality, computational theories of cognition, physical church-turing thesis, philosophy of physics, of mind, of...

There is a significant amount of question-answering going on.

That these answers come to be fundamental to other disciplines is the success of philosophy, and obvious. Those other disciplines are where philosophical premeses are taken as certain.

«In 1889, Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office. He is widely quoted as having stated that the patent office would soon shrink in size, and eventually close, because…

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”»

Ethics are important.

The sentence is not finished.

I highlighted this from the book in question.

“From its earliest origins in ancient Greece, Western philosophy has gained its identity through a contrast with sophistry. If sophistry is non-rational, cynical, manipulative, then philosophy represents a rejection of it, by committing itself to rational, disinterested persuasion.”

That’s interesting, thank you.

Does it not leave inaccessible vast swathes of philosophy where, almost by definition, science cannot contribute answers? Such as the nature of numbers and other metaphysical things.

I haven’t heard of the areas you mention in a sibling comment, so I’ll look them up. Do you find that you need to refocus attention to areas where scientific premises are useful as axioms so that progress can be made?

The point of philosophy is to ask better questions, specifically questions that do not mystify the problem and thus perpetuate it. It's is not and has never been about answers. - love, a philospher

Who are the philosophers of today (the serious, intellectual, professional ones)? Who is at Oxford? Who is the Wittgenstein?

Is this a rhetorical question?

Look at the guest list here https://podcasts.apple.com/jp/podcast/philosophy-bites/id257...

And here https://podcasts.apple.com/jp/podcast/philosophy-for-our-tim...

And here

https://podcasts.apple.com/jp/podcast/philosophers-zone/id13...

Don't think it was rhetorical.

Philosophy has kind of fallen out of popular perceptions. Or worse, actively attacked as useless.

It isn't like few decades ago where Camus and Sartre were commonly known, even popular, and people would sit around having coffee and talking about interesting subjects.

It would be easy to grow up today and not know any philosophers.

I don't know any young philosophers I find interesting. But that's not so surpising, Wittgenstein wasn't known in his lifetime outside of philosophy circles.

Also, the thinkers in the linked piece were obsessed with language, i.e. they had a specific thing to work on. It's hard to think of a modern example of that in philosophy, a fertile area where there's lots to be said. Theory of mind/consciousness, e.g. Chalmers, Parfit, etc, might be an example but I don't think they're on the level of Peter Strawson, Wittgenstein, or Russell. Time will tell.

Some older people are Galen Strawson (Peter's son), Daniel Dennet, Thomas Nagel and Chomsky. Kripke and Derek Parfit died recently. They're all men. Sorry. I swear I don't hate women!

> They're all men. Sorry. I swear I don't hate women!

It's by no means your fault. I think it's only reasonable to say that Philosophy is a discipline which develops powerful "schools" of thought and that they actively dismiss people outside their school unless they become too big to ignore. So many women would not have been encouraged to continue in Philosophy as their experience leads them into distinct channels of thought.

The book Metaphysical Animals covers this in some detail and gives an interesting account of the Anscombe Wittgenstein relationship also.

How would that affect women differently than men?

One reason old philosophers were so famous was because of how difficult it was to be one (e.g., writing, having leisure time, corresponding with other philosophers).

We produce orders of magnitude more, so everyone gets to pick their favorite ideology instead.

This is really a great answer. Even someone without money in a less than stellar horse less carriage, who listens to orchestras on demand while eating and drinking any of dozens of different drinks and an equal variety of foods while going to their “mill” to make money for their meagre existence, laments the ideas of society and philosophy, but rather than write those thoughts on plentiful and cheap paper, simply groans and and suffers rather than engaging further in the social discourse with others.

Society could certainly do more and we could certainly be more engaged with one another, and poverty certainly does exist, but so many fail to realize that even the poor live better than the kings of old.

This always felt like a tired retrospective to me. Sure maybe they do in some absolute sense. But they aren't existing in that time period, so the only real yardstick to use is he current time/dynamics, arguments that shift scales to distort a viewpoint are not helpful.

There was also much more low hanging fruit back then. Making significant contributions to a field only required scratching the surface.

This feels more like a defense for some mid like a Plato than a Wittgenstein or Kripke.

That is said in every field at (almost) every time.

Just create new fields.

Statistically speaking, ChatGPT

Wittgenstein Russell and Frege were really the founders of "analytic" philosophy as a field or set of methods. Since their time philosophy has become increasingly specialised and I don't think there are contemporary equivalents. So much philosophy of [X] but whether or not that work is seen as serious by practitioners of [X] is debatable.

Robert Brandom at Pittsburgh is a bit of a grand old man of philosophy and still publishing - works in in philosophy of language and philosophy of logic as well as Hegel scholarship, and his "inferentialist" approach to linguistic meaning has been at least cited by people working in proof-theoretic semantics and linguistics. Martha Nussbaum in political philosophy and ethics and David Chalmers in philosophy of mind/cognitive science also come to mind. But again I'm not sure that Chalmers is taken seriously outside of philosophers' circles.

Oxford has a super strong set of people today: https://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/faculty-members

Could you identify one or a few that stand out?

Peter Millican is the world authority on Hume, and created the CS and Philosophy course at Oxford.

https://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/people/peter-millican

Nick Bostrum is an occasional favorite at NH because of his early thoughts about paperclip maximizers, superintelligence and simulation.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/find-an-expert/professo...

> Who are the philosophers of today (the serious, intellectual, professional ones)?

RMS

Had to Google this one: Richard M. Stallman.

gnu.org - contains everything you need to research his philosophy.

stallman.org - personal website, contains a lot of opinion, but I absolutely respect this man in all what he says.

emacs.org (redirects to https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/) - his non-philosophical work, one of two mainstream text editors for *nix.

As someone who majored in philosophy, it's kind of embarrassing that I would struggle to name names as to who might be likely to be seen as the most brilliant by future generations.

I suppose if I'm allowed to name someone who only died recently, I suspect that Derek Parfit will be remembered as someone who was simply brilliant. His teletransportation problem will remain a classic thought experiment and he'll be remembered for his work on population ethics, though it's less clear to me what the future will make of his main project: working out a unified moral theory.

On the other hand, I can name some^ names as to which philosophers are most likely to be seen as influential:

Currently, it's looking like Peter Singer, Toby Ord and Will MacAskill will all have had significant influence through the Effective Altruism movement. Similarly, Nick Bostrom has had significant influence through his book Superintelligence.

Dan Dennet had significant influence by being one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism. His direct influence peaked a long time ago, but it remains to be seen how responsible he will ultimately be seen for the West's decline in religion (or whether this will just be seen as as trend that was happening anyway).

^ Possibly biased

Seems like today all the hot takes are in Mind and AI. The area that is 'new' and still pushing understanding.

Dan Dennett, as one? Chalmers?

Derek Parfait is one of the greatest philosophers in my opinion. He died too young, but his philosophy can be called contemporary.

If you're interested, his book "Reasons and Persons" is central and quite accessible. Part 1 is boring to some, but can safely be skipped in that case.

Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Daniel Dennett, Martha Nussbaum, Jürgen Habermas, Peter Singer, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Alain Badiou...

I enjoyed this book, though it peters out at the end as its topic, the linguistic turn in philosophy, becomes unfashionable. I would have liked a bit more summary, perhaps connecting the period to Chomsky, Pinker and other linguists, who were influenced, even if they rejected this school. There are two other new books that overlap with the story here: “Metaphysical Animals” and “The women are up to something”, both about the four women philosophers (Murdoch, Foot, Anscombe, and Midgley) that play important but not central roles in this book. If you haven’t read Midgley and are interested in the relationship between science and philosophy, check her out. She recently (2018) passed away at age 99, only shortly after publishing her last book. I think the “coincidence” of three books about the same group of people coming out nearly simultaneously has a lot to do with Midgley passing—both because it was the end of an era and because Midgley gave a lot of interviews and made a lot of information about her life and friends available in her last years.

https://archive.is/A4IHT

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