* Edit: Made my interpretation a little less inflammatory.
Philosophy should not necessarily be a practical endeavor – it concerns itself with being, life, and existence on their most abstract and difficult levels. There is a place for functional philosophy, and plenty of places where modern scientific discoveries can aid a line of philosophical inquiry, but suggesting we scrap Plato and Kant for "practical" thinkers is a dangerous way of thinking. I don't want to comment more until the article loads for me, but there's a place for practical consequence and it's elsewhere.
To a very pro-science layperson they seem especially absurd.
Obviously, that summary I gave is an exaggerated parody – and that's the problem with judging a philosophical paper based on its abstract. "Is there a contradiction with atheists liking Bach?" is a simple question that might reveal very interesting insights at length. Remember that this isn't a magazine article, in which such a question will be insipid and asked only to provoke controversy and sales – in all likeliness, that question is asked to provoke further questions, further examination, that might lead to something truly provocative. But I can't know for sure, because I only have the abstract – and that's all this guy has either, and he knows that's all he has, which means this article is either self-promotion on the author's part, or it's proof that the author doesn't understand philosophy to a worrying extent. Probably a combination of the two.
I see a parallel between this discussion and the science vs. religion debates that frustrate reasonable people on either side. You can't enter a debate with another field by starting with the assumption that your side has all the answers, and should therefore be the absolute center of the discussion. You have to be able to acknowledge what the other side is good for, what they can do that you're incapable of, before you start to make any kind of meaningful critique. It's wrong to attack science without acknowledging what science is good at, it's wrong to attack religion without some understanding of what lies at the heart of religious practice, and it's wrong to attack philosophy for its pursuit of deep abstraction when that's precisely what makes philosophy so valuable.
Going after philosophy because it generates stupid abstracts is like going after science because it promotes nihilism: when you make that argument, you admit to knowing so little about the field you're attacking that essentially your critiques are invalid by default.
Generally, I think philosophy is like mathematics in that while its purest application is very obscure and very hard to understand without a whole lot of effort, that pure application results in practical breaththroughs on almost every level of "practical" research. I wish that pure philosophy was taught to more people, just as I wish that we taught kids more than the boring "practical" math that convinces them math sucks and patterns are boring. It's a pursuit that benefits nearly everybody who learns from it: reshapes our mind, teaches us new ways to observe the world. And if we had scientists, psychologists, programmers, and politicians learning philosophy, then there'd be less pressure on the actual philosophers to start studying something practical.
For me that's the change that should be made: not more practical philosophy, but more philosophical practice.
Btw, I've read your comments on this thread, and it seems like you're very knowledgeable about the field of philosophy, but not particularly knowledgeable about LessWrong. I'm only slightly knowledgeable about philosophy, but I highly recommend you read more of LessWrong - it's an amazing resource of knowledge and of philosophical discussions (albeit with a more practical-minded bent most of the time). Lukeprog, the author of the above post, is a very respected member of that community as far as I know, and I honestly think you are underestimating him.
There are no two subjects farther apart than philosophy and mathematics. They represent extrema on a spectrum that lies between absolute intellectual rigor and absolute intellectual onanism:
A mathematical idea is interesting to the degree that it addresses other mathematical ideas, perhaps proves a theorem of interest to other mathematicians.
A philosophical idea is interesting to the degree that it avoids addressing anything that might resolve an open question or (God forbid) cause the cessation of the endless chatter that identifies the true philosopher.
> ... that pure application results in practical breaththroughs on almost every level of "practical" research.
You're still describing philosophy, yes? There's no research in philosophy, practical or otherwise -- research is by definition an effort to correlate an idea with reality, and reality-testing is not philosophy's domain.
That's one of the reasons why the "philosophy should be practical" argument is weird. Philosophy is practical, but its practical outcomes are philosophical in nature: that is, it drives people to consider aspects of life and existence that they wouldn't consider otherwise. Saying philosophy should be scientifically practical is like saying that science should help people find a closer connection with Jesus Christ: science does indeed drive some people to deep religious faith, but science that's only designed to make people think Jesus was an alright dude isn't science so much as it's religious propaganda posing as science. That's what this argument is: scientific propaganda pretending to be philosophy.
The thing is, I love science! I really do! Science is amazing! But so is philosophy – so much so that personally I like it much more than I like science. Which is why I'd rather see philosophy stay philosophy, you know?
(Incidentally, if you're interested in talking art, please do email me – I enjoy talking about my work, particularly with people skeptical about whether art's practical. :D)
A life without art would be quite empty indeed, everyone does art and consume art in some way or another, and in the same way everyone does philosophy (eg: thinking about the existence, the meaning of life, etc) at some point, we can't really avoid it. But I don't see the point in having people dedicating their lives to philosophy. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is hardly any progress. In school I learned that every philosopher, to understand other philosophers, must walk the same path they walked, and every philosopher creates its own path from zero. So what's the point? There is never any progress, other than what they can grab from science. I think it was Aristotheles who decided planets where perfect spheres, because that made more sense. I know, at that time there was little to no science, and everything was mixed up. But I see philosophers are still doing that. The other day I saw a video about determinism by a philosophy professor in a university. The guy didn't fully understand quantum mechanics, he just overheard everything was random at that level, and made stupid conclusions. That's the image I have about philosophy.
"Stop (all) basic research while there's still applied science to be done."
"We shouldn't be spending money on space exploration while there are still people that are starving/homeless/poor."
"Why are people working on a cure for <<insert non-terminal disease>>, when we still don't have a cure for cancer?"
Hell, look at the critics of scientific education who say things like "Why does my kid need to study fruit flies? What if I want my kid to study humanity instead?" You'd respond that not only does that argument miss the value of studying fruit flies, but it misses the deeper reason why we study science at all.
By the time you reach Hegel it's all getting a bit silly; and there's a lot of early philosophy that can be dumped because we can directly interrogate reality on things that previous philosophers cannot.
It's like raging about maths or fundamental science. Turing's paper is a work which must be so far outside the ordinary fellow's experience as to be nearly an insult. It also invented the modern computer as a side-effect.
I think many of the problems could be phrased in a way to convince most people (that think about this kind of thing) as well.