The problem with philosophy is that it seems to make progress only very slowly. As an outsider, it seems that their fundamental questions are still at the same level as those of Socrates and Plato. It would have been nice if this article had addressed this issue. For instance, by discussing what are the most important insights of the last decade.
I suppose Marx is a good example of why philosophy can be more useful than it looks. Much as in AI, whenever a philosopher ends up making an important contribution it starts a new type of academic research (political economy in Marx's case) and is no longer considered to be philosophy.
Marx is a good example of why philosophy can be very dangerous. Marx's ideas have literally caused the deaths of millions in Soviet Russia, Communist China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, and probably others. Besides keeping people desperately impoverished in places like Venezuela.
I'm not saying we sholdn't do philosophy because it can be dangerous. Philosophy can also be very good. In fact, we need the good ideas to prove the bad ideas wrong. I am a big fan of philosophy.
But not at the point of a gun (i.e., not on the taxpayer's dime). Philosophers used to be self-funded or funded by patrons. As an aside, since philosophers have become primarily funded by governments and guns, we have a 10,000 fold increase in the number of philosophers, and no increase in the quality of output.
Blame Stalin on the myth of 'centralized planning' or whatever Marx dreamed up about more advanced forms of government. It was a pipe dream, because government is made up of people. And selfish, brutal sociopaths keep bubbling up into government. So the more control govt has, the more Stalin's we'll see.
I'm fairly certain capitalism in its current form isn't sustainable (cf Piketty), and I don't think government is intrinsically sociopathic.
The open question is if government with checks and balances is stable in the long term, or if it will fall apart and have one branch take over. Time will tell.
First, I am in a strong position to talk about philosophy.
Second, Marx made Stalin possible by setting up the necessary intellectual framework of class struggle, capitalism as oppressive, dialectical materialism (denial of reason and free will), etc.
If Marx's theories are philosophical and dangerous, then any refutation of Marx's theories is also philosophical and valuable. The only question then is whether we should try and find people who study those questions and how we should study them.
I'm uncomfortable attributing Marx to philosophy entirely...like many historical figures it seems like he's only a partial fit. Just pointing out where your reasons leads.
I totally agree. We should remember pretty much every major academic field we are studying has its root in philosophy. It is true philosophy seems barely standing on its own nowadays as it has branched out to many different fields over the past centuries. Standing on the shoulders' of giants? The biggest giant we have seen so far is philosophy.
I feel like a lot of outsiders see people like Zizek, and get the impression that philosophy today has a lot do with language and psychoanalysis. I'm not exactly sure what the insights are, but it at least feels like a very different brand than Socrates badgering people about what is justice.
I think that dichotomy is just a construct of the Anglo sphere, isn't it? I don't think philosophers outside the US and Britain ever referred to themselves as 'continental.'
Even so Analytic Philosophy was just a reaction against British Hegelians in the later 19th century, starting with Bertrand Russell. Those distinctions get thrown around way too crudely.
I'm not sure I would pick Nietzsche for the gold standard of philosophy. I've always had it that Plato, Kant, and Hegel were the big 3 (in terms of systematic ontologies).
Also, Dan Brown sells like crazy and is easy to read. Zizek, no one can read, and no one actually buys his books AFAIK. But at the level of 'sensationalism' perhaps I could see that.
This is a worthwhile point. People have a misconception about what philosophy is because pop 'philosophy' like Zizek is more about generating controversy than useful inquiry.
It's like someone who has only ever seen click bait dismissing journalism as pointless.
Frequently when philosophers solve a particular problem, it moves out of the realm of pure philosophy and into more "practical" fields, such as mathematics, the natural sciences, justice, or politics.
were statistics and controlled studies discovered in the domain of philosophy? Or were those discovered by mathemeticians, which simply replaced philosophy.
This is a false dichotomy. Frege was a mathematician and wrote philosophy attempting to explain what a number was. Questions about which domain this effort ought to be bucketed in don't have an answer.
Xeno's paradox is a simple one. It's solved by the physics law x(t)=vt (assuming no acceleration) and the application of a geometric series.
Statistical decision theory also supercedes many philosophical problems.
A number of lesswrong articles, typically addressing the nature of categories and how to reason based on them, also move into this territory and browsing lesswrong is probably worthwhile if you are interested.
>A number of lesswrong articles, typically addressing the nature of categories and how to reason based on them, also move into this territory and browsing lesswrong is probably worthwhile if you are interested.
To summarize, for those who don't want to archive-dive LW:
Analytic philosophy has traditionally held that concepts/categories are logical: defined by a conjunction or disjunction of predicates in a formal language. Or at least, it holds that they ought to be once we stop being silly and think clearly.
Most everything we've ever learned in machine-learning and cognitive science instead tell us that concepts/categories are statistical, and that formal logic is therefore not only a brittle framework for real-world reasoning but thoroughly incapable of describing where its own constituent objects come from in the mind.
In addition to the math and statistics described by others here, a better understanding of biology has helped solve some problems in ethics. For example the beginning and end of personhood; the beginning is not before the fusing of gametes, and as the brain is the seat of consciousness, someone's "soul" does not lie in their heart or liver, loss of brain function is therefore the end of personhood.
Not sure this is the strongest argument for philosophy. Philosophy is valuable when it is directed to the inquiry of truth for the sake of discovering truth, not for some immediately practical application. This sort of exercise pushes against the limits of thought, and that leads to interesting and important places.
This isn't just true in philosophy. In the early 20th century physicists announced they had solved almost all of the problems in physics. One thing they hadn't got around to yet was figuring out the position of electrons at a given time. But it was popular to regard this is a trivial problem. How they bonded was a more practical issue, and they had solved that one. But those who pushed on with this seemingly trivial problem discovered that it wasn't trivial at all.
Turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns is not necessarily practical, but it is certainly valuable.
I would love to force people to pay for things I love to do. There's nothing wrong with teaching philosophy, but stealing money to do so is wrong and lazy. What if I'd rather my money go toward cancer research? This guy would deny me that opportunity. He's saying his preferences are more important than mine. There are plenty of ways to make money teaching philosophy: donations (see FDR on Youtube as an example), books, speaking at conferences--but that takes hard work and risk. And if you can't make a living, why not teach philosophy for free as an avocation? Contribute as if it's open source -- for the better of the community. Stealing money from people and justifying it after the fact seems unphilosophical.
I am a professor of philosophy at a public university. What is the value of
philosophy to the taxpayers who subsidize my teaching
Taxpayers funding STEM subjects is very clearly an investment. But we fund philosophers only because have convinced us we ought to. But as Nietzsche said, that which convinces is not true, it is merely convincing.
Philosophy has become disconnected with real-life concerns. Philosophers operate in a void, working on problems without context. Attempts to connect this work with real-life concerns usually involve taking an idea developed without context and trying to apply it to a field (computer ethics, philosophy of scientific methods, etc.).
This works poorly because the philosopher doesn't understand the field. A computer scientist is better qualified to talk about the ethics of Ladar Levison not cooperating with the FBI[1] than an ethicist. A chemist is more qualified to talk about the scientific method than an epistemologist. Specializations have eroded the area of expertise of philosophy to the point that philosophy is rarely relevant.
There's just no case I can think of where talking to a philosopher is likely to inform my decision-making process more than talking to an expert in the actual subject.
How much actual philosophy of science written since 1970 have you read? Right now, a constant conflict is that (many) non-philosophers of science think philosophy of science has gotten too empirical and too focused on particular scientific issues, to the detriment of philosophy (I don't believe this, but it shows how out of touch you are). Grad students in Phil Sci are expected to do graduate coursework in the scientific fields they study, and completing a masters is quite common.
As for working scientists, many have brilliant insights into the practice of science and its epistemology, but very many working scientists will offer you a warmed over version of Karl Popper as their philosophy of science.
How much of the philosophy of science written since 1970 was written by philosophers in the abstract, and how much of it was written by scientists? Just look at the "philosophers" mentioned on downthread from here; Carlo Rovelli: theoretical physicist, Noam Chomsky: linguist and cognitive scientist, Imre Lakatos: mathematician. All these people were formally trained in a more specialized field and later went into philosophy. This supports my point: a person who knows a specialized field is far more qualified to innovate in philosophy than someone who is philosophizing in a void and trying to apply it ex post facto.
I perhaps should have worded my post differently to clarify that my post is a criticism of philosophers (academics specializing in philosophy), not philosophy as it is more broadly practiced.
> Right now, a constant conflict is that (many) non-philosophers of science think philosophy of science has gotten too empirical and too focused on particular scientific issues, to the detriment of philosophy
I know, and that's exactly why I'm disagreeing with these people. As far as I'm concerned, philosophy that hasn't specialized in this way is mostly useless.
I feel confident in saying that most of it was written by philosophers. I don't have anything to cite for that, unfortunately.
When you say you're not criticizing philosophy, just academic philosophers, I wonder who are the people doing philosophy outside of academic philosophy that you're talking about?
I feel differently from most people in this thread. Academia is not industry, and is not really driven by a capitalist market. You can debate that philosophy, and many other theoretical fields, have very little value in the market, and perhaps they do. But in reality, the richest countries are the ones that have strong research curriculums, with people studying things that are not immediately beneficial or even useful.
I'd want to live in a society where people can work in all kinds of fields that study nature and the human intellect, and not just jobs that are needed because of some economical reason.
There's a vast difference between maximizing society's total productivity and maximizing the amount of time people spend working on increasing economic output. Namely, the amount of technology used.
Since most of us on Hacker News work in some form of technology, I'd say its in our economic interest not to apply terms of moral condemnation like "decadent" to forms of society that generate more demand for our skills ;-).
I'm not saying that philosophy professors don't increase economic output. I'm saying they don't contribute anything at all.
In general---I think there are some good ones. And I think a lot of the contribute positively through their teaching, just not their research and publications. But note that the primary focus and goal of professors at top-tier universities is research.
Also, I disagree with your dichotomy between "economic output" and "society's total productivity," but that's a separate issue.
Also, I'm not going to be dishonest for the sake of narrow economic interest, which is what you are asking me to do.
>Also, I'm not going to be dishonest for the sake of narrow economic interest, which is what you are asking me to do.
Actually, I was being ironic. I don't believe that "decadent" is really a genuine moral condemnation at all, instead merely meaning, "A society that doesn't suit my survivalist tastes because it is too civilized." Or at least, that's what I observe about common applications of the word "decadent".
> But in reality, the richest countries are the ones that have strong research curriculums, with people studying things that are not immediately beneficial or even useful.
Is this because studying those creates a rich country, or because people of rich countries have a tendency to study these things?
My problem with philosophy is that it appears to have few standards for what constitutes a correct answer to a question, or for what constitutes a well-formulated question.
So, take, for example, theories of truth. Last I've heard, "correspondence theories" (a sentence is "true" when it corresponds to certain states of the external world, called "facts") are actually considered very problematic, precisely because they leave little way of characterizing "truth" in such "a priori" fields of knowledge as mathematics and philosophy. Instead, what's currently popular are minimal or deflationary theories of truth (a sentence "X is true" means just X). Problem is, this theory appears to say nothing at all about truth; as Wittgenstein lambasted, it only says something about words.
So yes, if I say that "X is true" and "X" are equivalent sentences, I've said something about sentences, but I haven't said a damned thing about the contents of the statement X itself!
Mathematical statements, at least analytically speaking, are mostly actually hypotheticals conditioned on an enumerable set of axioms and a formal logic; with those, we can use a coherence theory of truth, in which a statement is true iff it does not contain an internal contradiction. But then you've thrown out most forms of mathematical Platonism, which is, and I do loathe this, the most popular philosophical interpretation of mathematics.
(I loathe it because mathematical Platonism is so often used as a starting example to support a fully general philosophical Platonism, in which statements about theories of truth or morality or knowledge are made in reference to Philosophical Abstract Objects. These have no extension inside space-time and also are not any kind of mental or computational manipulations or constructions (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/), and are taken as necessarily constituting the only correct answers to philosophical questions, thus neatly yielding a kind of unique epistemological authority for the philosophical process of arguing and analyzing sentences, which is utterly absurd from a naturalistic perspective.)
I'm surprised no one has yet cited pg's "How to do Philosophy" (http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html). I like his implicit explanation: the healthier parts of what used to be philosophy have been turned into the sciences (and some social, experimental sciences) while the less healthy parts have remained (disconnected questions about what reality is, which feels like a variant of "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?).
Most of the comments on this thread so far feel like defenses of science, rather than philosophy (e.g. "Philosophy is valuable when it is directed to the inquiry of truth for the sake of discovering truth").
But how do you view Philosophy of Science, which discusses how one should acquire scientific knowledge and what does it mean? It is still a relevant discussion, as witnessed in the endless debates about String Theory.
I'm normally the sort to find things like philosophy useless, but I think philosophy might be an exception to my general trend.
I think that if philosophy education works (a big if), then it will be very valuable in that it teaches people to recognize legitimate questions and encouraging them to think rationally about them.
Very often on HN, a story will drive a lot of comments pushing a moral point. But the supposedly moral point is usually just a popularity contest and posturing - "I hate the person doing this SOO MUCH!!!" or "I'm so empathetic for supporting this position". And any attempt to get past that to actual moral philosophy nearly always results in nothing more than ad-hominems being thrown and completely emotional (and inconsistent) arguments being made.
Other issues which often have a fundamentally philosophical element that are relevant here include many issues of measurement (e.g., job interviews and hiring).
The article by an American reflects a less respectful attitude towards Philosophy in the U.S. compared to other English-speaking countries such as the U.K. Remember how the book and movie "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" were retitled "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone" for the U.S. markets, perhaps catering to an American preference for instant gratification (sorcery) over abstract thought (philosophy).
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadI'm not saying we sholdn't do philosophy because it can be dangerous. Philosophy can also be very good. In fact, we need the good ideas to prove the bad ideas wrong. I am a big fan of philosophy.
But not at the point of a gun (i.e., not on the taxpayer's dime). Philosophers used to be self-funded or funded by patrons. As an aside, since philosophers have become primarily funded by governments and guns, we have a 10,000 fold increase in the number of philosophers, and no increase in the quality of output.
I don't know that for certain, maybe he's just actually curious, that's why I just answered his question instead of saying this to him.
Many people think of communism when they hear the word "Marx". Few have read his arguments.
Of course, someone who quotes Objectivism in their profile is not in a strong position to talk about philosophy ;)
The open question is if government with checks and balances is stable in the long term, or if it will fall apart and have one branch take over. Time will tell.
Second, Marx made Stalin possible by setting up the necessary intellectual framework of class struggle, capitalism as oppressive, dialectical materialism (denial of reason and free will), etc.
I'm uncomfortable attributing Marx to philosophy entirely...like many historical figures it seems like he's only a partial fit. Just pointing out where your reasons leads.
Even so Analytic Philosophy was just a reaction against British Hegelians in the later 19th century, starting with Bertrand Russell. Those distinctions get thrown around way too crudely.
Also, Dan Brown sells like crazy and is easy to read. Zizek, no one can read, and no one actually buys his books AFAIK. But at the level of 'sensationalism' perhaps I could see that.
It's like someone who has only ever seen click bait dismissing journalism as pointless.
Statistics today can answer the question of causality in many cases, especially the controlled studies, and that use to be the domain of philosophy.
Statistical decision theory also supercedes many philosophical problems.
A number of lesswrong articles, typically addressing the nature of categories and how to reason based on them, also move into this territory and browsing lesswrong is probably worthwhile if you are interested.
To summarize, for those who don't want to archive-dive LW:
Analytic philosophy has traditionally held that concepts/categories are logical: defined by a conjunction or disjunction of predicates in a formal language. Or at least, it holds that they ought to be once we stop being silly and think clearly.
Most everything we've ever learned in machine-learning and cognitive science instead tell us that concepts/categories are statistical, and that formal logic is therefore not only a brittle framework for real-world reasoning but thoroughly incapable of describing where its own constituent objects come from in the mind.
This isn't just true in philosophy. In the early 20th century physicists announced they had solved almost all of the problems in physics. One thing they hadn't got around to yet was figuring out the position of electrons at a given time. But it was popular to regard this is a trivial problem. How they bonded was a more practical issue, and they had solved that one. But those who pushed on with this seemingly trivial problem discovered that it wasn't trivial at all.
Turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns is not necessarily practical, but it is certainly valuable.
Can you be more specific? Searching gives a bunch of documentaries about FDR the president, don't know if that's what you mean.
This works poorly because the philosopher doesn't understand the field. A computer scientist is better qualified to talk about the ethics of Ladar Levison not cooperating with the FBI[1] than an ethicist. A chemist is more qualified to talk about the scientific method than an epistemologist. Specializations have eroded the area of expertise of philosophy to the point that philosophy is rarely relevant.
There's just no case I can think of where talking to a philosopher is likely to inform my decision-making process more than talking to an expert in the actual subject.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit
As for working scientists, many have brilliant insights into the practice of science and its epistemology, but very many working scientists will offer you a warmed over version of Karl Popper as their philosophy of science.
I perhaps should have worded my post differently to clarify that my post is a criticism of philosophers (academics specializing in philosophy), not philosophy as it is more broadly practiced.
> Right now, a constant conflict is that (many) non-philosophers of science think philosophy of science has gotten too empirical and too focused on particular scientific issues, to the detriment of philosophy
I know, and that's exactly why I'm disagreeing with these people. As far as I'm concerned, philosophy that hasn't specialized in this way is mostly useless.
When you say you're not criticizing philosophy, just academic philosophers, I wonder who are the people doing philosophy outside of academic philosophy that you're talking about?
I'd want to live in a society where people can work in all kinds of fields that study nature and the human intellect, and not just jobs that are needed because of some economical reason.
Since most of us on Hacker News work in some form of technology, I'd say its in our economic interest not to apply terms of moral condemnation like "decadent" to forms of society that generate more demand for our skills ;-).
In general---I think there are some good ones. And I think a lot of the contribute positively through their teaching, just not their research and publications. But note that the primary focus and goal of professors at top-tier universities is research.
Also, I disagree with your dichotomy between "economic output" and "society's total productivity," but that's a separate issue.
Also, I'm not going to be dishonest for the sake of narrow economic interest, which is what you are asking me to do.
Actually, I was being ironic. I don't believe that "decadent" is really a genuine moral condemnation at all, instead merely meaning, "A society that doesn't suit my survivalist tastes because it is too civilized." Or at least, that's what I observe about common applications of the word "decadent".
Is this because studying those creates a rich country, or because people of rich countries have a tendency to study these things?
So, take, for example, theories of truth. Last I've heard, "correspondence theories" (a sentence is "true" when it corresponds to certain states of the external world, called "facts") are actually considered very problematic, precisely because they leave little way of characterizing "truth" in such "a priori" fields of knowledge as mathematics and philosophy. Instead, what's currently popular are minimal or deflationary theories of truth (a sentence "X is true" means just X). Problem is, this theory appears to say nothing at all about truth; as Wittgenstein lambasted, it only says something about words.
So yes, if I say that "X is true" and "X" are equivalent sentences, I've said something about sentences, but I haven't said a damned thing about the contents of the statement X itself!
Mathematical statements, at least analytically speaking, are mostly actually hypotheticals conditioned on an enumerable set of axioms and a formal logic; with those, we can use a coherence theory of truth, in which a statement is true iff it does not contain an internal contradiction. But then you've thrown out most forms of mathematical Platonism, which is, and I do loathe this, the most popular philosophical interpretation of mathematics.
(I loathe it because mathematical Platonism is so often used as a starting example to support a fully general philosophical Platonism, in which statements about theories of truth or morality or knowledge are made in reference to Philosophical Abstract Objects. These have no extension inside space-time and also are not any kind of mental or computational manipulations or constructions (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/), and are taken as necessarily constituting the only correct answers to philosophical questions, thus neatly yielding a kind of unique epistemological authority for the philosophical process of arguing and analyzing sentences, which is utterly absurd from a naturalistic perspective.)
Most of the comments on this thread so far feel like defenses of science, rather than philosophy (e.g. "Philosophy is valuable when it is directed to the inquiry of truth for the sake of discovering truth").
by Robert Hass
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177014
I think that if philosophy education works (a big if), then it will be very valuable in that it teaches people to recognize legitimate questions and encouraging them to think rationally about them.
Very often on HN, a story will drive a lot of comments pushing a moral point. But the supposedly moral point is usually just a popularity contest and posturing - "I hate the person doing this SOO MUCH!!!" or "I'm so empathetic for supporting this position". And any attempt to get past that to actual moral philosophy nearly always results in nothing more than ad-hominems being thrown and completely emotional (and inconsistent) arguments being made.
Other issues which often have a fundamentally philosophical element that are relevant here include many issues of measurement (e.g., job interviews and hiring).