The argument is sometimes made that philosophy is the mother of all other academic traditions - once a philosophical idea reaches a sufficient level of promise or maturity, it spins off into its own discipline, as in the speciation of "natural philosophy" into specialized hard sciences. One might even point to psychology (or even more contentiously and partially, computer science) as a 20th century offshoots of philosophy.
That story seems excessively tidy and flattering, and in any case, its pessimistic corrolary is that most of today's philosophy is a junk drawer of dead-end intellectual projects that never yielded anything useful. The shoe certainly seems to fit most philosophical sub-disciplines, like metaphysics and ethics.
Anyway, the article is a fairly (though maybe inevitably) partisan read on the crisis of philosophy. The author pretty casually dismisses some views which are pretty popular among philosophers - examples include the idea that philosophical theories are rival, and can be disproven; and the view that philosophy is supposed to be therapeutic (the rejection of this view is especially surprising given that it was pretty much universal among the archetype philosophers, the Ancient Greeks). The author appears to favor the view that the point of philosophy is to "articulate cultural self-understanding" (or, "[promoting] cultural self-consciousness"). Seems reasonable enough I guess, but I'm not sure what it means.
I wouldn't say it's pessimistic because philosophy continues to spin off new disciplines. Linguistics and economics were considered subdomains of philosophy a century ago.
Sociology is still heavily laden with philosophy. Right now artificial intelligence is informed by things that were called "cognitive science" when they were in the philosophy department.
It may be that one day philosophy is reduced to re-treading metaphysics and ethics as insoluble problems. But we're not there yet, so I don't think it can be rightly called pessimistic just now.
And that's OK. It's not expensive, and it's useful to have a place for off-the-wall notions that probably won't pay off.
It's always going to be contentious, because even that small pot of money will attract many different grasping hands. But it seems a worthwhile tradeoff, Just In Case. At least as much as, say, the more abstruse areas of theoretical physics and mathematics.
Just as you must distinguish between philosophers and philosophy professors, you must distinguish between philosophy and academic ersatz. We all know what guides and drives academia. It's not always the love of wisdom (philo + sophis).
Why should metaphysics be a dead end? Given the facts of observation, what must be true of reality so that such facts can obtain? Metaphysics is tacit within the facts, and a metaphysical stance is tacit in one's claims. Everyone here would agree (except in some artificial, dishonest, rarefied moment of academic detachment from reality) that something cannot both be and not be the case. We could not possibly reason about reality otherwise. But why should logic take this position? Logic is concerned with correct reasoning, but reasoning is about reality. So the justification for the logical principle of contradiction can only be found in the metaphysical, that is, in the reality (or being) that we are reasoning about. It must be that reality (being) is such that it cannot both be and not be. It is the only way to maintain the faithfulness of reason to the real. Any attempt to undermine this correspondence undermines the very attempt to undermine this correspondence, as you would would no doubt be reasoning to such a conclusion. Thus we have the first methodological principle of first philosophy, that our conclusions cannot undermine the very means by which we reason to those conclusions. We are condemned to reason, so we better do it well as there is no other alternative, other than doing it poorly. This rules out skepticism and relativism off the bat (and incidentally, this is why even academic philosophers generally do not take these positions seriously). And ethics, of course, entails metaphysical propositions like anything else.
That these are difficult subjects often executed poorly does not mean they are bullshit as such.
I put it to you that most of us did not need a paragraph of ten-dollar words to dismiss skepticism and relativism, and that serious academic study of philosophy puts one at higher, not lower, risk of embracing such nonsense. Metaphysics may not be inherently bullshit, but empirically the study of it seems to be so in practice.
I hope we can all agree that science works reasonably well in gathering knowledge. Because we can use it to do things.
You are saying metaphysics is about the "why" of this.
I agree.
I disagree that there has been a way or method of producing metaphysics that seems to work well. The evidence is that we have so many incompatible systems that all claim to be true.
Apparently you assume that reality is subordinate to reason. But there's no need for that assumption, we have empirical data: every scientific revolution (and some social) featured conflict between reality and contemporary reason, and every time reason changed and adapted to the new picture of reality. New facts just drop and reason adapts to them. Slowly and painfully, but adapts. This means reality is primary and reason is secondary - a reflection of reality, subject to the anthropic principle.
Ethics is far from useless. It has important connections to open issues in society and e.g. birthed the effective altruism movement.
Metaphysics is useless similar to any foundational research. Theoretical (as opposed to applied) mathematics is also largely useless. Nobody expects to use transfinite set theory in practice. Or the cosmology of the early universe, for that matter. Or an interpretation of quantum mechanics. A lot of non-foundational research is also useless. Research on the evolutionary origins of the ichthyosaurs. Or the surface properties of Pluto.
The problem with Ethics is largely the same as the problem with the church that cost it all moral authority: despite being held up as the source of morality/ethical behavior it fails at actually promoting it. With that failure the open secret is that they are a side-show or distraction from actual power where the decisions, dodgy or otherwise get made.
Ethics professor scandals in particular are a case which highlights the problem. While there may be sincere examples the scandal ridden ones are like cynical constitutional law professors: they clearly studied it to try to find loopholes around it instead of to uphold it.
Despite that the field of Ethics has vast theoretical potential in one subarea: understanding of incentives, including perverse ones and how to properly craft systems of them. "Alignment" is the buzzword for the latest moral panic about AI. One of the many problems with it aside is that humans sure as hell aren't aligned. See corruption for an example of what bad systems get you.
> the view that philosophy is supposed to be therapeutic
I think this is what is missing from most modern philosophy, that makes it so easy to dismiss as useless. In Ancient Greece most of the philosophers were strong people, that had personally done great things, or endured incredible hardships with the aid of their philosophy, and these real world tests stood as evidence of its value.
People strove to become a Stoic because the people they admired most in life had been guided by it.
I think philosophy ideas can and do have the ability to prove their own utility in the real world. To the extent that modern philosophy has mostly failed to do so, is probably because it is either wrong and/or useless, OR is just not developed far enough to get to that point.
> In Ancient Greece most of the philosophers were strong people, that had personally done great things, or endured incredible hardships with the aid of their philosophy, and these real world tests stood as evidence of its value.
Are you just describing Stoicism here? The only "strong man" ancient philosopher I can think of is Marcus Aurelius (not Greek, incidentally). Plato's Republic didn't come from his experience as a statesman. Aristotle's Metaphysics wasn't "proven to have utility in the real world." These people were very much "ivory tower" figures.
I don't think there are philosophic problems that require strength. There are pessimistic misconceptions indeed, but therapy here is finding optimistic truth, then there's no reason for pessimism anymore.
I hold the minority position that philosophy is a useful means of getting information about the world around us and it's only cultural factors that happened in the 1700s (movement against rationalism) that makes us blind to it.
That's hard to see when we talk about more recently popular philosophical topics like ethics or existentialism.
But hacker News also had an interesting discussion recently on Popper and the philosophy of science ( what counts as science). There was another discussion a while back in the philosophy of math - what is math, what if anything separates mathematical knowledge from other types of knowledge.
Viewed from this framework, I think most people would agree that philosophy is useful and an important means of ascertaining valuable knowledge.
I have a genuine question that seems to fit here. It's bugging me for a long time, so any feedback is very welcome.
I can see that the scientific method works well in producing knowledge. Because we can do something with it. Like fly to the moon, cure diseases, build nuclear weapons.
Philosophy however claims usually to also find knowledge. There are several methods, but none of them seems to have any evidence of working in any other circumstances than everyday heuristics. On the contrary, the lack of convergence in opinion seems to indicate that they do not work well.
There are plenty of takes what math "is" philosophically, and there are so many opponents and overcomers of Popper.
I agree that philosophy is nice to have, a playground for ideas, a collection of possibilities of systems of concepts. But I fail to see what points to it being a source of knowledge.
It's one thing to state "These systems are possible", and another to state "this system is the real one", specifically in ethics.
> That story seems excessively tidy and flattering, and in any case, its pessimistic corrolary is that most of today's philosophy is a junk drawer of dead-end intellectual projects that never yielded anything useful.
I think it is a matter even worse than being a junk drawer. It seems to be actively opposed to practicality and regards referencing the real world with scorn. That is frankly an ancient form of stupidity that goes back a very long time, to Ancient Greece at the very least. And it continues to today: any time that something becomes practical it gets banned from philosophy and philosophers stop writing on it.
> The shoe certainly seems to fit most philosophical sub-disciplines, like metaphysics and ethics.
But everyone asks questions from metaphysics. "Who am I?" "What is reality?" Everyone asks those questions, and everyone develops answers. (If you're claiming that the conclusions of philosophy on the topic are part of the junk drawer, I'm not necessarily going to argue. But the field itself is really relevant.)
And (almost) everyone asks questions from ethics. "What is the right thing to do? How do I tell? What is moral, and what is immoral?" (I say "almost" because some sociopath types may not in fact ask such questions, or ask them only as a smokescreen to advance an agenda.) And if you look at the world, we could really use a clear consensus on what is moral and how to tell. Again, though, I'm not saying that philosophy's answers aren't stuck in the junk drawer.
> But everyone asks questions from metaphysics. "Who am I?"
What do people even mean by this question? Because I don't think I was ever very concerned about that.
> "What is reality?" Everyone asks those questions, and everyone develops answers.
I guess I'm a bit of an oddity, because I was never that interested in the "big questions", and over time I developed the view that the answer to the questions most people seem to ask isn't really important or useful, but the useful part can be found in a physics textbook.
> But everyone asks questions from metaphysics. "Who am I?" "What is reality?"
Everyone also wipes their butts. But that doesn’t mean we need Departments of Butt Wiping and tenured professors who have spent their whole life time studying techniques of butt wiping.
It is based on a lecture given by Ayn Rand to the graduating class of West Point Military Academy in March 1974.
Some people will be alarmed by the name, Ayn Rand, so I will post few snippets and then you can choose to ignore or read the ~10 minutes essay.
The assignment I gave myself for tonight is not to sell you on MY philosophy, but on philosophy as such.
The best way to study philosophy is to approach it as one approaches a detective story: follow every trail, clue and
implication, in order to discover who is a murderer and who is a hero. The criterion of detection is two questions:
Why? and How? If a given tenet seems to be true - why? If another tenet seems to be false - why? and how is it
being put over? You will not find all the answers immediately, but you will acquire an invaluable characteristic: the
ability to think in terms of essentials.
Now some of you might say, as many people do: "Aw, I never think in such abstract terms - I want to deal with
concrete, particular, real-life problems - what do I need philosophy for?" My answer is: In order to be able to
deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems - i.e., in order to be able to live on earth.
You might claim - as most people do - that you have never been influenced by philosophy. I will ask you to
check that claim. Have you ever thought or said the following? "Don't be so sure - nobody can be certain of
anything." You got that notion from David Hume (and many, many others), even though you might never have
heard of him. Or: "This may be good in theory, but it doesn't work in practice." You got that from Plato. Or: "That
was a rotten thing to do, but it's only human, nobody is perfect in this world." You got that from Augustine. Or:
"It may be true for you, but it's not true for me." You got it from William James. Or: "I couldn't help it! Nobody
can help anything he does." You got it from Hegel. Or: "I can't prove it, but I feel that it's true." You got it from
Kant. Or: "It's logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality." You got it from Kant. Or: "It's evil, because it's
selfish." You got it from Kant. Have you heard the modern activists say: "Act first, think afterward"? They got it
from John Dewey.
Some people might answer: "Sure, I've said those things at different times, but I don't have to believe that stuff all
of the time. It may have been true yesterday, but it's not true today." They got it from Hegel. They might say:
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." They got it from a very little mind, Emerson. They might say: "But
can't one compromise and borrow different ideas from different philosophies according to the expediency of the
moment?" They got it from Richard Nixon - who got it from William James.
I have a BA in philosophy. Rather than learning the truth, I discovered that almost all philosophers were wrong about almost everything.
But in tracing the history of wrongness, wrestling with all the fashions of thinking, you learn to think with precision. That skill continues to help me.
I don't know how one could look at someone like Leucretius writing in 50 BCE about how traits are inherited from a doubled seed which can bring back features from a grandparent, how all life that we see originated from randomly scattered indivisible parts of matter, and that life proceeded by way of intermediate mutants that weren't as adaptable and thus died out because they couldn't reproduce and conclude that philosophers were wrong about almost everything.
Same guy in the same book described light as being made up of tiny indivisible parts moving very quickly - a reminder that proving the particle behavior of light was what Einstein won his Nobel for.
Or how about when they thought about the implications of indivisible parts of matter obeying physical laws as invalidating free will and thus concluded there must be a variable component to the behavior of such quantized parts of matter (which they termed The Swerve) - literally thousands of years before the experimental evidence for a probabilistic behavior to quanta and the relationship to the topic of superdeterminism.
I suspect part of the problem is that by continuing to prioritize the teaching of the philosophers that directly influenced later philosophers we extend the survivorship bias caused by the church in locking up Leucretius's naturalism 'heresy' and promoting Plato and Aristotle's intelligent design.
So most people at best learn that the Epicureans were talking about atoms and didn't believe in an afterlife and had some loose sense of hedonism, but never bother reading the off brand philosophy for themselves to realize "holy crap, these guys were objectively the most correct in antiquity on a number of major topics in astonishing detail and were broadly ignored in an age where impiety may no longer have been a death sentence like for Socrates but was certainly not winning popularity contests."
Wrong how? Philosophy is about tools for thought. Tools can have different use cases, pros/cons, and can be used wrong, but they are never really just wrong in a general sense. I might not agree with Kant's categorical imperative but it is still useful sometimes when thinking about ethics.
Also "learning the truth" in philosophy is more learning what "the truth" means and how it is applied. Personally I'm a fan of William James' pragmatism approach here but it is not commonly held.
You have to know what precision means to claim you think with precision. Most philosophy believes the false idea that one can't know reality, thus generally ends up a waste of time.
You can use the definition of knowledge from "Meno". If belive something, and have at least some justification for that belief, amd lastly, it happens to be true, then you know it. You may never find out that you knew it vs just believed it, but it is an attractive definition.
Ruins a person for much Internet discussion. Wrecking people's obnoxiously-confident pronouncements by leading them through the discussion of the definition of justice in Book I of Plato's Republic gets really boring after a while.
> I have a BA in philosophy. Rather than learning the truth, I discovered that almost all philosophers were wrong about almost everything.
Have you studied any set theory? How about epistemology, or non-binary logic?
> But in tracing the history of wrongness, wrestling with all the fashions of thinking, you learn to think with precision. That skill continues to help me.
Precision: the state or quality of being precise; exactness.
I'm not sure the creds help you here, as undergrad philosophy graduates do not have a reputation for mature insight or depth, perhaps especially those reared in the contemporary climate where curricula are poorly structured, resembling something of a chaotic, superficial buffet that can only produce an incoherent residue of skepticism and relativism. Note that the very claim that almost all philosophers were wrong about everything is itself a truth claim, and therefore subject to the very same criteria that the claims of philosophers are. You haven't escaped the philosophical predicament.
Your argument seems like a form of the skeptical challenge, as it would apply to PhDs also. This makes it look less plausible though.
But besides, it's easy to demonstrate that large numbers of professional philosophers are wrong by looking at the PhilPapers surveys. Mutually incompatible beliefs are held in high numbers, across the board, by many professional philosophers. Both as a group and, to a lesser extent, individuals. They can't all be right, obviously. Is a philosophy BA in a better position to make this observation than the layman? I'd say so.
Nietzsche made same point. Even in his time, there was difference between Academic Philosophers, that kind of studies and regurgitator others, and "True Philosophers" that struck out into unbroken land, broke new trails. Often a characteristic of the "True Philosophers" was they were despised, un-respected, and cast out in their own time. He would point to people like Spinoza as truth seakers.
On other hand. Like others have said, the ancient Greeks did treat it like self help. Stoics, were all about just dealing with life.
The problem is language. We have a single word "philosophy" and try to make it into like 4 different subjects. It is dealing with life, getting through the day, but it is also about things that turn into a science like Math/Physics, and it is also ethics and language, etc...
Drawing on the recent article about Kant [1], if a concept is a mental categorisation of patterns within our sensory inputs, and reason is the mixing of such concepts according to some rules, and arriving at novel concepts that we have yet to experience as sensory inputs, then philosophy is a discipline that is in danger of a combinatorial explosion of concepts. While adhering to the general rules of reasoning, such higher order concepts are far removed from the real world because they are built up on multiple layers of abstractions. And it never need to stop because one can keep building abstractions on top of each other, and one has people to talk with who speak the same abstractions. I suspect this is is what has happened to philosophy.
I think past philosophers drew more from history and their own experiences (closer to the "metal" as it were) than the writings of other philosophers.
On that note, it is interesting that we've not seen any contribution from modern philosophy to alleviating some of the greatest existential crises the world is facing today: e.g. "How much inequality is acceptable, if so, why? What are the ethics of damaging public goods such as the atmosphere? To what extent should citizens be held accountable for the war actions of their representatives? How far back can a historical claim to land go? Should the law view natural persons (who possess a conscience) and artificial persons such as corporations (who do not) in the same way?"
> On that note, it is interesting that we've not seen any contribution from modern philosophy to alleviating some of the greatest existential crises the world is facing today
To be fair, there are tons of bad actors. All the "stop polluting this is unethical" in the world isn't going to just stop the polluters unless real pressure is brought upon them. Aside from that, people just have different opinions, albeit often speaking out of ignorance or lack of reflection. Philosophy can't really help with that. If more people were open to discuss things in good faith, I imagine a lot of problems would be quickly solved.
Not a philosopher myself but this essay accurately captured my feelings regarding the state of philosophy indeed. It's hard for an amateur to find actual contemporary philosophy work that is not either some cryptic reexamination of classical work or gimmicky self-help books from trending gurus.
Also that quote hit the spot, at personal level:
"As MacMullan writes in ‘Jon Stewart and the New Public Intellectual’ (2007):
It’s much easier and more comfortable to speak to someone who shares your assumptions and uses your terms than someone who might challenge your assumptions in unexpected ways or ask you to explain what you mean."
There are many reasons for philosophy’s stagnation, though the dual influences of specialisation and commercialisation, in particular, have turned philosophy into something that scarcely resembles the discipline as it was practised by the likes of Aristotle, Spinoza or Nietzsche.
A bit weird to use Nietzsche as an example here, considering that he had zero formal education in the discipline called "philosophy" and spent most of his life as a hermit writer with nearly-zero readers.
In any case, there is a ton of excellent philosophical work being done and put online today – it's just not accessible to the layman. Bob Brandom, for example, has a YouTube channel with hundreds of hours of video. Unfortunately, most of it is basically impenetrable to the average person.
As someone that enjoyed my BA in Philosophy but nonetheless decided to not continue on to a PhD, I'm of two minds on the topic of philosophy popularization. On the one hand, it's actually somewhat a relief that there is no charlatan figure like Jordan Peterson or Sam Harris out there ruining the perception of the field. When you interact with bona fide academic philosophers, there is a feeling of professionalism that washes over you. It's a reassuring feeling and one I almost never get when reading pop-philosophy books.
At the same time, this lack of interest in the public sphere also means that there is rarely any pushback to dumb arguments. Stuff like effective altruism grows and becomes popular not because it's a better argument than the alternatives, but mostly because the people most qualified to critique it...simply aren't paying attention.
The same thing can be said for most controversial issues like abortion, gun control, etc. – the people most qualified to answer these nuanced questions are basically uninterested in doing so in a public forum, or aren't given the time and attention for doing so.
> the people most qualified to answer these nuanced questions are
basically uninterested in doing so in a public forum, or aren't
given the time and attention for doing so.
That's a tragedy isn't it? For smart people to remain cloistered so
as to preserve their corner as pristine? It robs everyone,
particularly those who publish impenetrable work to an audience of 10
others. Real philosophy for me remains Socratic. Rude and unwelcome,
disconsolate and messy, ugly, loud and in the public square.
> A bit weird to use Nietzsche as an example here, considering that he had zero formal education in the discipline called "philosophy" and spent most of his life as a hermit writer with nearly-zero readers.
Virtually no philosophers historically had a "formal education in the discipline of called philosophy" and most went unread. He received the sort of classical education that was regarded at the time as a sufficient perquisite and went to the same school Fichte did. He was appointed at a very young age to a professorship of philology.
This reads as the sort of slanderous cope that the "scholarly oxen" Nietzsche refers to engage in as personal attacks against a man who proved most of them to be engaged in useless make-work. There is no philosopher in the 21st century who has contributed a hundredth of what Nietzsche did and many of them still continue to plough fields Nietzsche proved to be without foundation, like moral philosophy.
Why do people insist on reading the absolute worst interpretation of every comment on the internet? Honestly. It is so tiresome.
If I had to pick a favorite philosopher, it would be Nietzsche. No other thinker has influenced me more, and if you spent half a second searching Nietzsche and my username on HN, you’d see that. But if the man were alive today, he’d be writing a blog with 50 subscribers - because that’s about the level of readership he had during his life.
My point was that using Nietzsche as an example of what the philosophy field is like at the public, professional level is not a good example, as the man did most of his work in obscurity to begin with.
If someone is uninterested in publicly discussing a problem that involves public participation & cooperation, they are also unqualified to answer any questions about the problem.
Sure, on an individual level. But that sounds like a failure at the societal level to me. We shouldn’t want the only people sharing their expertise to be the most comfortable with publicity.
I’d call them both public pseudointellectuals that purport some philosophical knowledge but mostly don’t engage with the actual academic field, and instead just court controversy to sell books and speaking tours.
Just re-think philosophy as thinking in a philosophical way such as why, what is the foundation, what is the logic of this, what is the value … just like democracy we do not always have a king or a totalitarian one ring to rule them all. But the philosophical way survived.
And if one use sophist approach, it is the training then even debate, … not to mention how many leaders are PPE graduate
Many questions that aren’t definitively answerable are nonetheless worth repeating to ask each generation, since the alternative is an ossified answer treated as if it were definitive (ie a particularly stagnant religious dogma) or that we fall back on simplistic answers that further thought would trouble.
Questions of value and purpose and the use of power are chief among these.
Readit News
That story seems excessively tidy and flattering, and in any case, its pessimistic corrolary is that most of today's philosophy is a junk drawer of dead-end intellectual projects that never yielded anything useful. The shoe certainly seems to fit most philosophical sub-disciplines, like metaphysics and ethics.
Anyway, the article is a fairly (though maybe inevitably) partisan read on the crisis of philosophy. The author pretty casually dismisses some views which are pretty popular among philosophers - examples include the idea that philosophical theories are rival, and can be disproven; and the view that philosophy is supposed to be therapeutic (the rejection of this view is especially surprising given that it was pretty much universal among the archetype philosophers, the Ancient Greeks). The author appears to favor the view that the point of philosophy is to "articulate cultural self-understanding" (or, "[promoting] cultural self-consciousness"). Seems reasonable enough I guess, but I'm not sure what it means.
Sociology is still heavily laden with philosophy. Right now artificial intelligence is informed by things that were called "cognitive science" when they were in the philosophy department.
It may be that one day philosophy is reduced to re-treading metaphysics and ethics as insoluble problems. But we're not there yet, so I don't think it can be rightly called pessimistic just now.
I hold multiple degrees in philosophy and this is a correct description (for >95% of what happens in academic philosophy).
It's always going to be contentious, because even that small pot of money will attract many different grasping hands. But it seems a worthwhile tradeoff, Just In Case. At least as much as, say, the more abstruse areas of theoretical physics and mathematics.
Why should metaphysics be a dead end? Given the facts of observation, what must be true of reality so that such facts can obtain? Metaphysics is tacit within the facts, and a metaphysical stance is tacit in one's claims. Everyone here would agree (except in some artificial, dishonest, rarefied moment of academic detachment from reality) that something cannot both be and not be the case. We could not possibly reason about reality otherwise. But why should logic take this position? Logic is concerned with correct reasoning, but reasoning is about reality. So the justification for the logical principle of contradiction can only be found in the metaphysical, that is, in the reality (or being) that we are reasoning about. It must be that reality (being) is such that it cannot both be and not be. It is the only way to maintain the faithfulness of reason to the real. Any attempt to undermine this correspondence undermines the very attempt to undermine this correspondence, as you would would no doubt be reasoning to such a conclusion. Thus we have the first methodological principle of first philosophy, that our conclusions cannot undermine the very means by which we reason to those conclusions. We are condemned to reason, so we better do it well as there is no other alternative, other than doing it poorly. This rules out skepticism and relativism off the bat (and incidentally, this is why even academic philosophers generally do not take these positions seriously). And ethics, of course, entails metaphysical propositions like anything else.
That these are difficult subjects often executed poorly does not mean they are bullshit as such.
You are saying metaphysics is about the "why" of this.
I agree.
I disagree that there has been a way or method of producing metaphysics that seems to work well. The evidence is that we have so many incompatible systems that all claim to be true.
Metaphysics is useless similar to any foundational research. Theoretical (as opposed to applied) mathematics is also largely useless. Nobody expects to use transfinite set theory in practice. Or the cosmology of the early universe, for that matter. Or an interpretation of quantum mechanics. A lot of non-foundational research is also useless. Research on the evolutionary origins of the ichthyosaurs. Or the surface properties of Pluto.
Ethics professor scandals in particular are a case which highlights the problem. While there may be sincere examples the scandal ridden ones are like cynical constitutional law professors: they clearly studied it to try to find loopholes around it instead of to uphold it.
Despite that the field of Ethics has vast theoretical potential in one subarea: understanding of incentives, including perverse ones and how to properly craft systems of them. "Alignment" is the buzzword for the latest moral panic about AI. One of the many problems with it aside is that humans sure as hell aren't aligned. See corruption for an example of what bad systems get you.
That's not a great track record.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/sam-bankman...
I think this is what is missing from most modern philosophy, that makes it so easy to dismiss as useless. In Ancient Greece most of the philosophers were strong people, that had personally done great things, or endured incredible hardships with the aid of their philosophy, and these real world tests stood as evidence of its value.
People strove to become a Stoic because the people they admired most in life had been guided by it.
I think philosophy ideas can and do have the ability to prove their own utility in the real world. To the extent that modern philosophy has mostly failed to do so, is probably because it is either wrong and/or useless, OR is just not developed far enough to get to that point.
Are you just describing Stoicism here? The only "strong man" ancient philosopher I can think of is Marcus Aurelius (not Greek, incidentally). Plato's Republic didn't come from his experience as a statesman. Aristotle's Metaphysics wasn't "proven to have utility in the real world." These people were very much "ivory tower" figures.
That's hard to see when we talk about more recently popular philosophical topics like ethics or existentialism.
But hacker News also had an interesting discussion recently on Popper and the philosophy of science ( what counts as science). There was another discussion a while back in the philosophy of math - what is math, what if anything separates mathematical knowledge from other types of knowledge.
Viewed from this framework, I think most people would agree that philosophy is useful and an important means of ascertaining valuable knowledge.
I can see that the scientific method works well in producing knowledge. Because we can do something with it. Like fly to the moon, cure diseases, build nuclear weapons.
Philosophy however claims usually to also find knowledge. There are several methods, but none of them seems to have any evidence of working in any other circumstances than everyday heuristics. On the contrary, the lack of convergence in opinion seems to indicate that they do not work well.
There are plenty of takes what math "is" philosophically, and there are so many opponents and overcomers of Popper.
I agree that philosophy is nice to have, a playground for ideas, a collection of possibilities of systems of concepts. But I fail to see what points to it being a source of knowledge.
It's one thing to state "These systems are possible", and another to state "this system is the real one", specifically in ethics.
I think it is a matter even worse than being a junk drawer. It seems to be actively opposed to practicality and regards referencing the real world with scorn. That is frankly an ancient form of stupidity that goes back a very long time, to Ancient Greece at the very least. And it continues to today: any time that something becomes practical it gets banned from philosophy and philosophers stop writing on it.
But everyone asks questions from metaphysics. "Who am I?" "What is reality?" Everyone asks those questions, and everyone develops answers. (If you're claiming that the conclusions of philosophy on the topic are part of the junk drawer, I'm not necessarily going to argue. But the field itself is really relevant.)
And (almost) everyone asks questions from ethics. "What is the right thing to do? How do I tell? What is moral, and what is immoral?" (I say "almost" because some sociopath types may not in fact ask such questions, or ask them only as a smokescreen to advance an agenda.) And if you look at the world, we could really use a clear consensus on what is moral and how to tell. Again, though, I'm not saying that philosophy's answers aren't stuck in the junk drawer.
What do people even mean by this question? Because I don't think I was ever very concerned about that.
> "What is reality?" Everyone asks those questions, and everyone develops answers.
I guess I'm a bit of an oddity, because I was never that interested in the "big questions", and over time I developed the view that the answer to the questions most people seem to ask isn't really important or useful, but the useful part can be found in a physics textbook.
Everyone also wipes their butts. But that doesn’t mean we need Departments of Butt Wiping and tenured professors who have spent their whole life time studying techniques of butt wiping.
It is based on a lecture given by Ayn Rand to the graduating class of West Point Military Academy in March 1974. Some people will be alarmed by the name, Ayn Rand, so I will post few snippets and then you can choose to ignore or read the ~10 minutes essay.
The assignment I gave myself for tonight is not to sell you on MY philosophy, but on philosophy as such.
The best way to study philosophy is to approach it as one approaches a detective story: follow every trail, clue and implication, in order to discover who is a murderer and who is a hero. The criterion of detection is two questions: Why? and How? If a given tenet seems to be true - why? If another tenet seems to be false - why? and how is it being put over? You will not find all the answers immediately, but you will acquire an invaluable characteristic: the ability to think in terms of essentials.
Now some of you might say, as many people do: "Aw, I never think in such abstract terms - I want to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems - what do I need philosophy for?" My answer is: In order to be able to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems - i.e., in order to be able to live on earth. You might claim - as most people do - that you have never been influenced by philosophy. I will ask you to check that claim. Have you ever thought or said the following? "Don't be so sure - nobody can be certain of anything." You got that notion from David Hume (and many, many others), even though you might never have heard of him. Or: "This may be good in theory, but it doesn't work in practice." You got that from Plato. Or: "That was a rotten thing to do, but it's only human, nobody is perfect in this world." You got that from Augustine. Or: "It may be true for you, but it's not true for me." You got it from William James. Or: "I couldn't help it! Nobody can help anything he does." You got it from Hegel. Or: "I can't prove it, but I feel that it's true." You got it from Kant. Or: "It's logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality." You got it from Kant. Or: "It's evil, because it's selfish." You got it from Kant. Have you heard the modern activists say: "Act first, think afterward"? They got it from John Dewey. Some people might answer: "Sure, I've said those things at different times, but I don't have to believe that stuff all of the time. It may have been true yesterday, but it's not true today." They got it from Hegel. They might say: "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." They got it from a very little mind, Emerson. They might say: "But can't one compromise and borrow different ideas from different philosophies according to the expediency of the moment?" They got it from Richard Nixon - who got it from William James.
But in tracing the history of wrongness, wrestling with all the fashions of thinking, you learn to think with precision. That skill continues to help me.
Same guy in the same book described light as being made up of tiny indivisible parts moving very quickly - a reminder that proving the particle behavior of light was what Einstein won his Nobel for.
Or how about when they thought about the implications of indivisible parts of matter obeying physical laws as invalidating free will and thus concluded there must be a variable component to the behavior of such quantized parts of matter (which they termed The Swerve) - literally thousands of years before the experimental evidence for a probabilistic behavior to quanta and the relationship to the topic of superdeterminism.
I suspect part of the problem is that by continuing to prioritize the teaching of the philosophers that directly influenced later philosophers we extend the survivorship bias caused by the church in locking up Leucretius's naturalism 'heresy' and promoting Plato and Aristotle's intelligent design.
So most people at best learn that the Epicureans were talking about atoms and didn't believe in an afterlife and had some loose sense of hedonism, but never bother reading the off brand philosophy for themselves to realize "holy crap, these guys were objectively the most correct in antiquity on a number of major topics in astonishing detail and were broadly ignored in an age where impiety may no longer have been a death sentence like for Socrates but was certainly not winning popularity contests."
Also "learning the truth" in philosophy is more learning what "the truth" means and how it is applied. Personally I'm a fan of William James' pragmatism approach here but it is not commonly held.
So...Falsifiability?
Dead Comment
Have you studied any set theory? How about epistemology, or non-binary logic?
> But in tracing the history of wrongness, wrestling with all the fashions of thinking, you learn to think with precision. That skill continues to help me.
Precision: the state or quality of being precise; exactness.
Something seems off here.
I'm not sure the creds help you here, as undergrad philosophy graduates do not have a reputation for mature insight or depth, perhaps especially those reared in the contemporary climate where curricula are poorly structured, resembling something of a chaotic, superficial buffet that can only produce an incoherent residue of skepticism and relativism. Note that the very claim that almost all philosophers were wrong about everything is itself a truth claim, and therefore subject to the very same criteria that the claims of philosophers are. You haven't escaped the philosophical predicament.
But besides, it's easy to demonstrate that large numbers of professional philosophers are wrong by looking at the PhilPapers surveys. Mutually incompatible beliefs are held in high numbers, across the board, by many professional philosophers. Both as a group and, to a lesser extent, individuals. They can't all be right, obviously. Is a philosophy BA in a better position to make this observation than the layman? I'd say so.
On other hand. Like others have said, the ancient Greeks did treat it like self help. Stoics, were all about just dealing with life.
The problem is language. We have a single word "philosophy" and try to make it into like 4 different subjects. It is dealing with life, getting through the day, but it is also about things that turn into a science like Math/Physics, and it is also ethics and language, etc...
We are just trying to fit too much into one word.
I think past philosophers drew more from history and their own experiences (closer to the "metal" as it were) than the writings of other philosophers.
On that note, it is interesting that we've not seen any contribution from modern philosophy to alleviating some of the greatest existential crises the world is facing today: e.g. "How much inequality is acceptable, if so, why? What are the ethics of damaging public goods such as the atmosphere? To what extent should citizens be held accountable for the war actions of their representatives? How far back can a historical claim to land go? Should the law view natural persons (who possess a conscience) and artificial persons such as corporations (who do not) in the same way?"
[1] https://ralphammer.com/immanuel-kant-what-can-we-know/
To be fair, there are tons of bad actors. All the "stop polluting this is unethical" in the world isn't going to just stop the polluters unless real pressure is brought upon them. Aside from that, people just have different opinions, albeit often speaking out of ignorance or lack of reflection. Philosophy can't really help with that. If more people were open to discuss things in good faith, I imagine a lot of problems would be quickly solved.
Also that quote hit the spot, at personal level:
"As MacMullan writes in ‘Jon Stewart and the New Public Intellectual’ (2007):
It’s much easier and more comfortable to speak to someone who shares your assumptions and uses your terms than someone who might challenge your assumptions in unexpected ways or ask you to explain what you mean."
Thank you to the author for this pleaser read!
A bit weird to use Nietzsche as an example here, considering that he had zero formal education in the discipline called "philosophy" and spent most of his life as a hermit writer with nearly-zero readers.
In any case, there is a ton of excellent philosophical work being done and put online today – it's just not accessible to the layman. Bob Brandom, for example, has a YouTube channel with hundreds of hours of video. Unfortunately, most of it is basically impenetrable to the average person.
https://www.youtube.com/@BobBrandomPitt
As someone that enjoyed my BA in Philosophy but nonetheless decided to not continue on to a PhD, I'm of two minds on the topic of philosophy popularization. On the one hand, it's actually somewhat a relief that there is no charlatan figure like Jordan Peterson or Sam Harris out there ruining the perception of the field. When you interact with bona fide academic philosophers, there is a feeling of professionalism that washes over you. It's a reassuring feeling and one I almost never get when reading pop-philosophy books.
At the same time, this lack of interest in the public sphere also means that there is rarely any pushback to dumb arguments. Stuff like effective altruism grows and becomes popular not because it's a better argument than the alternatives, but mostly because the people most qualified to critique it...simply aren't paying attention.
The same thing can be said for most controversial issues like abortion, gun control, etc. – the people most qualified to answer these nuanced questions are basically uninterested in doing so in a public forum, or aren't given the time and attention for doing so.
That's a tragedy isn't it? For smart people to remain cloistered so as to preserve their corner as pristine? It robs everyone, particularly those who publish impenetrable work to an audience of 10 others. Real philosophy for me remains Socratic. Rude and unwelcome, disconsolate and messy, ugly, loud and in the public square.
Virtually no philosophers historically had a "formal education in the discipline of called philosophy" and most went unread. He received the sort of classical education that was regarded at the time as a sufficient perquisite and went to the same school Fichte did. He was appointed at a very young age to a professorship of philology.
This reads as the sort of slanderous cope that the "scholarly oxen" Nietzsche refers to engage in as personal attacks against a man who proved most of them to be engaged in useless make-work. There is no philosopher in the 21st century who has contributed a hundredth of what Nietzsche did and many of them still continue to plough fields Nietzsche proved to be without foundation, like moral philosophy.
If I had to pick a favorite philosopher, it would be Nietzsche. No other thinker has influenced me more, and if you spent half a second searching Nietzsche and my username on HN, you’d see that. But if the man were alive today, he’d be writing a blog with 50 subscribers - because that’s about the level of readership he had during his life.
My point was that using Nietzsche as an example of what the philosophy field is like at the public, professional level is not a good example, as the man did most of his work in obscurity to begin with.
Man in the arena and all that.
And if one use sophist approach, it is the training then even debate, … not to mention how many leaders are PPE graduate
Are any of them potentially answerable in a definitive fashion?
One question I keep asking is:
>What does an algorithm look like?
in the context of whether visual programming systems make sense and are workable.
Questions of value and purpose and the use of power are chief among these.