Whom would you describe as a "quack" philosopher?
Žižek has made comments about so many different things, so publicly, that it’s hard to avoid finding something you disagree with. But it’s also hard to avoid finding something you agree with.
I like his books, but someone like Alan Watts is much more prone to quackery, IMO.
I don’t think I have ever described somebody as a quack philosopher.
I put the concept of “philosophical zombies” as quackery. At best, the p-zombie thought experiment shows that we haven’t really come up with a definition of consciousness that explains what we want it to explain. Some people use p-zombies as part of a larger argument against physicalism. Chalmers published a modal logic argument against physicalism using p-zombies. One of the tricky things about modal logic is that it requires a deeper understanding of modal logic in order for you (you, someone reading a modal logic argument) to make good decisions about which propositions you are willing to accept in a modal logic argument. Since most people only have an intuitive understanding of modal logic, it is a good way to win an argument but a bad way to explain your position.
I’d say that this work (p-zombies) is quackery in the sense that it’s consistently directed at something which I consider to be unproductive, which is the work of undermining or attacking physicalism / physical monism. At some point, in these discussions, you end up having some argument about the semantics of ontology and how you define “existence”. If your semantics for “existence” admits non-physical things to exist (like, if you’re a Platonist), and you’re having a conversation with someone who believes in physicalism, then I don’t think either person in the conversation is going to get much out of it, other than a better way to explain their own position.
Edit: I hope that paints a complete enough picture and covers the important parts of my complaints about p-zombies. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of philosophy and I may be missing something important, maybe there’s some really important argument p-zombies are used for, and maybe I don’t understand Chalmers; that’s always a risk. My main complaint here is that it seems to be some tool to make an argument against physicalism, but this tool doesn’t help you understand physicalism, or help you understand its alternatives. It’s just an argument that you can have between somebody who believes in physicalism and somebody who doesn’t, where neither person will agree with the other one after hearing the argument.
Quack: 1) A practitioner who suggests the use of substances or devices for the prevention or treatment of disease that are known to be ineffective.
2) A person who pretends to be able to diagnose or heal people, but is unqualified and incompetent.
The inside baseball term more relevant to what you're talking about, I think, is "talking past each other." https://www.jstor.org/stable/25655279
A quack philosopher would seem to me to be someone that claims to be doing philosophy or interpreting the ideas of a philosopher, but doing so in an egregiously wrong or misleading manner.
You also might want to check out this article for more on p-zombies, by the way: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
Oh, here’s the thing—it’s not actually important to argue about what the word “quackery” means. I’ve explained what I meant by “philosophical quackery”, and if you want to talk about the content of what I wrote, then by all means, respond to the content.
If, instead, you want to start a fight about what the word “quackery” means, and whether I was wrong to use it, then I’m out. That sounds like a waste of time.
I'm not sure what else there is to say here. If you call people something, perhaps it's important to actually know what that thing means? This seems to happen often in conversations critical of philosophy: terms are used unclearly, and the attempt to actually clarify those terms is hand-waved away as "I don't want to argue about definitions."
So I think your criticism here is not that there are quack philosophical works, but that there are unproductive ones that do nothing but restate established positions. Which is definitely a true thing.
“Quackery” is not some technical term here. It is a mistake to rely too much on technical definitions of words. If you rely too much on technical definitions and dictionary definitions for non-technical words, then you will probably misunderstand what people mean, relatively frequently.
I could also insert some comment about the history of philosophy and modernism / post-modernism, here. If you take the stance that a word means something independently, in some kind of platonic sense, then you agree with the modernists. If you take the stance that a word’s meaning comes from how it’s interpreted by people who read it, you agree with the post-modernists.
I’m just trying to use a word to convey some sort of meaning. If that word didn’t convey the intended meaning to you, I can use different words. Which I did.
> terms are used unclearly, and the attempt to actually clarify those terms is hand-waved away as "I don't want to argue about definitions."
Terms are generally used unclearly, it is unavoidable. When I say that “I don’t want to argue about definitions”, what I mean is that I want to talk about subject X, and I used the word “quackery” to describe it. I want to talk about subject X, not about the definition of “quackery”, which is irrelevant.
A discussion about the word “quackery” is immaterial because I can clarify things by re-explaining subject X using different words. I did that—but apparently you are not interested in clarifications, because your actions indicate a greater interest in fighting over whether I used the word “quackery” correctly.
Yes, and I thought I understood that meaning and addressed it when I said this is typically called "talking past each other."
> So I think your criticism here is not that there are quack philosophical works, but that there are unproductive ones that do nothing but restate established positions. Which is definitely a true thing.
Can you clarify how this isn't what you mean? How is what you're saying different from what I interpreted it as meaning?
No, because that’s just an argument about “who said what” and nobody cares about that stuff.
If you had some response you wanted to make about the content of what I said, then I missed it. I don’t know what your viewpoint is at all, except about what the definition of “quackery” is, which is apparently important. If you made some kind of response to the content what I wrote, I missed it.
I’ve said twice now that the phenomenon you described (and mislabeled as quackery) is called “talking past each other” and it’s a common criticism. I then linked you to a paper discussing this, and I agreed with you that this is a problem.
The definition of quackery is relevant here, because it implies that philosophical works exist which are deliberately “fake” or pretending to be philosophy when they aren’t. A doctor that is unproductive and wastes everyone’s time isn’t a quack, they’re just unproductive. The phenomenon you described is therefore not quackery, it’s just being unproductive in a way often referred to as “talking past one another.”
This is just a rehashing of the exact same thing I already said. I cannot make this any more clear.
But if (when?) it was possible to empirically discriminate between these beliefs, it would stop being philosophy and would become science ! (Assuming you see them as exclusive rather than nested.)
I guess that, unlike in the sub-field of philosophy that are mathematics, where starting with different axioms isn't as much of a deal (outside of turf wars of mathematics departments ?), the issue is that you have plenty of questions that most people deeply care about, so disagreements can turn quite violent indeed ?