It was a while ago, but take the infamous story of the 2006 rape case in Duke University. If you check out coverage of that case, you get the impression every member of faculty that joined in the hysteria was from some humanities department, including philosophy. And quite a few of them refused to change their mind even as the prosecuting attorney was being charged with misconduct. Compare that to Socrates' behavior during the trial of the admirals in 406 BC.
Meanwhile, whatever meager resistence was faced by that group seems to have come from economists, natural scientist or legal scholars.
I wouldn't blame people for refusing to study in a humanities department where they can't tell right from wrong.
But rationalism is?
Imagine that you're living in a big scary world, and there's someone there telling you that being scared isn't particularly useful, that if you slow down and think about the things happening to you, most of your worries will become tractable and some will even disappear. It probably works at first. Then they sic Roko's Basilisk on you, and you're a gibbering lunatic 2 weeks later...
Those would, of course, be people with no formal training in history or philosophy (as the study of history where you aren't allowed to question Marxist doctrine would be self-evidently useless). Their training would be in the natural sciences or mathematics. And without knowing how to properly reason about history or philosophy, they may reach fairly kooky conclusions.
Hence why Rationalism can be though as the same class of phenomena as Fomenko's chronology (or if you want to be slightly more generous, Shafarevich's philosophical tracts).
Mereological nihilism and weak emergence is interesting and helps protect against many forms of kind of obsessive levels of type and functional cargo culting.
But then in some areas philosophy is woefully behind, and you have philosophers poo-pooing intuitionism when any software engineer working on sufficiently federated or real world sensor/control system borrows constructivism into their classical language to not kill people (agda is interesting of course). Intermediate logic is clearly empirically true.
It's interesting that people don't understand the non-physicality of the abstract and you have people serving the abstract instead of the abstract being used to serve people. People confusing the map for the terrain is such a deeply insidious issue.
I mean all the lightcone stuff, like, you can't predict ex ante what agents will be keystones in beneficial casual chains so its such waste of energy to spin your wheels on.
And did all the philosophers at all the other colleges convene and announce they were also using philosophy to determine if someone was raped?
I don't think that matters very much. If there's a strong enough correlation between being a reactive idiot and the department you're in, it makes a bad case for enrolling in that realm of study for educational motives. It's especially bad when the realm of study is directly focused on knowledge, ethics, and logic.
Note the "if" though, I haven't evaluated the parent's claims. I'm just saying it doesn't matter if they said they used philosophy. It reflects on philosophy as a study, at least the style they do there.
How much that affects other colleges is iffier, but it's not zero.
Would you have pondered for a little while, then responded, "Find out how many philosophers commented on the Duke rape case of 2006 and what their opinions were, then we'll know."
I've seen people make arguments against the value of modern academic philosophy based on their experience with professors or with whateversampling of writings they've come across. They usually get nowhere.
That's why I wanted to ground this discussion in a specific event.
... all of them? Or rather, the body as a whole. Pointing at one set of faculty at one university 20 years ago and using that as the sole point to say "modern philosophy doesn't seem that useful", is just not useful.
The faculty denounced the students without evidence, judged the case thought their emotions and their preconceived notions and refused to change their minds as new evidence emerged. Imagine having an academic discussion on a difficult ethical issue with such a teacher...
And none of that would have changed even, even if there somehow was a rape-focused conspiracy among the students of that university. (Thought the problem would have been significantly less obvious.)
> I wouldn't blame people for refusing to study in a humanities department where they can't tell right from wrong.
Man, if you have to make stuff up to try to convince people... you might not be on the right side here.
I guess I should have limited my statement about resisting mob justice to the economists at that university as the other departments merely didn't sign on to the public letter of denunciation?
Its weird that Wikipedia doesn't give you a percentage of signatories of the letter of 88 from the philosophy department, but several of the notable signatories are philosophers.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_Duke_lacros...
Edit: Just found some articles claiming that a chemistry professor by the name of Stephen Baldwin was the first to write to the university newspaper condemning the mob.
And you wouldn't even need to know about the cult to reach that conclusion. One should be able to find crazy stuff by a cursory examination of the "Sequences" and other foundational texts. I think I once encountered something about torture and murder being morally right, if it would prevent mild inconvenience to a large enough group of people.
I'm a fan of practical philosophical questions like how does quantum mechanics work or how can we improve human rights, and not into the philosophers talking about philosopers stuff.
I suspect a lot of the rationalists have gotten stuck here, and rather than seek out guidance or slowing down, changed tack entirely and decided to engage with the philosophers du jour, which unfortunately is a lot of slop running downstream from Thiel.
You realise that it's very hard to do well and it's intellectual quicksand.
Reading philosophers and great writers as you suggest is better than joining a cult.
It's just that you also want to write about what you're thinking in response to reading such people and ideally have what you write critiqued by smart people. Perhaps an AI could do some of that these days.
An AI can neither write about what you are thinking in your place nor substitute for a particularly smart critic, but might still be useful for rubber-ducking philosophical writing if used well.
I meant use the AI to critique what you have written in response to reading the suggested authors.
Yes, a particularly smart critic would be better. But an LLM is easily available.
As an example, I'm reading a book on Buddhism, and I'm comfortable with Kant, and AI is useful for explaining to me a lot of the ideas they have as they relate to transcendental idealism (Kant).
On the other hand, I still don't know what a body without organs is.
Being Christian, it helped me understand what I believe and why. It made faith a deliberate, reasoned choice.
And, of course, there are many rational reasons for people to have very different opinions when it comes to religion and deities.
Being bipolar might give me an interesting perspective. Everything I’ve read about rationalists misses the grounding required to isolate emotion as a variable.
You cannot work out what out to be from what is.
To want to be alive is irrational.
Nietzsche and the Existentialists understood that.
Arguably religions too.
This is some philosophy bullshit. Taking "rational" to be ~ "logical choice" the truthness of this statement depends on the assumed axioms, and given you didn't list them this statement is clearly false under rather simple "sum of all life is the value" system until that system is proven self-contradictory. Which I doubt you or the famous mouths you mentioned did at any point, because it probably is not.
The desire or instinct to be alive is necessary for the survival of a sentient species. (Sentient, not sapient)
It's the same as saying "why learn maths at university, it's cheaper just to buy and read the textbooks/papers?". That's kind of true, but I don't think that's effective for most people.