On the straits of philosophy 11 Apr 2010 My recent post on “Mammals” led one commentator at Panda’s Thumb to reiterate the old joke about philosophy being like mathematicians but without erasers and rubbish bins, and more serious comments about philosophy having a GIGO problem. Coincidentally, Jason Stanley has a piece in the Times Higher Education Supplement bemoaning the decay of philosophy in the humanities. Noumenal Realm has a good discussion of the problem. NR discusses what he/she calls “anti-philosophy” and the bad rep it has, giving this list Philosophy doesn’t apply to the real world Philosophy (undefined) is no longer relevant, but [x’s philosophy] tells us that that [x’s philosophy] is right and relevant (insert any of the following names: Zizek, Nietzsche, Marx, Butler, Freud, Deepak Chopra, Jesus, some long haired lunatic &c …) Philosophy has been defeated by [x] (insert name from list above, maybe add in Rorty, Wittgenstein, Semiotics, sociology of scientists, ’science’ genera, and Jesus again) Philosophy doesn’t need much funding Philosophy doesn’t deserve funding Philosophy doesn’t fit into the goals of the new style of academic management: impact, impact impact are the three distinct and all encompassing goals of academia Philosophy has turned too literary/linguistic/logical/mathematical/historical/academic/elitist/scientific Other subjects have taken the work of conventional philosophical concerns to render it obsolete: Sociology, Political Science, Mathematical logic, Cognitive science and linguistics, psychology and the neurosciences, history of science Interdisciplinarity has undermined and diluted philosophy to a buzzword that fits in to some doctrinal quota Contemporary philosophy has detached from theology Contemporary philosophy has too many associations with atheism Most of these are wrong, some are true but validate philosophy. Interdisciplinarity in particular is a chimera and illusion, more often honored verbally than substantively (and I speak as someone who tries very hard to be interdisciplinary). Here, parenthetically, is a historian of philosophy who says some Good Things about the dead philosophers we study, and two ways to do that badly, which he (Justin Smith) calls the “Continental” and “Bennettian”. I think of the latter as the standard analytic view: that when we discuss the arguments of the past we are talking to colleagues, as if they were Cambridge dons sitting on the adjacent armchair. We can surely abandon that without the equal error of treating the texts as something we can read as modern resources. They are what they are, and we should understand them just because they are our past, and not because they are some sort of modern trigger for an association of ideas. So, what is wrong with philosophy? Can we defend it? Two things come to mind. One is that we have no a posteriori idea about what will be helpful, useful or fruitful. Philosophy explores ideas that are current, ancient, newly thought of or modified. When those ideas turn out to be testable factually, then they cease to be philosophical and become scientific, but that doesn’t mean that we have necessarily resolved all the issues of those ideas. That we now know what gravity is (or know more) doesn’t mean that we have somehow resolved the philosophical issues of essence or existence. By discussing in technical detail a range of conceptual issues we set up a situation not unlike that in mathematics, where we know some of it will be useful down the track, but not what. And by engaging in scientific matters, philosophy is at the epistemic coalface, where the knowledge is being generated. Science is not the end of such work, but the beginning. Does a comprehensive physics tell us what the world is composed of? Partly, but the metaphysics of science is not the totality of metaphysics (or whether it is is another, nonscientific, question worth asking). There are basically three types of philosophical question: What is there? [Metaphysics] How do we know? [Epistemology] What is it worth? [Moral and Aesthetic Philosophy] These do not evaporate into other disciplines, and they are questions worth asking using the traditions and techniques of philosophy. Those who denigrate the asking of these questions by philosophers are not able to evade them. They still need to be asked, and they are. My experience of scientists who ask metaphysical and epistemological questions is that they either do it badly, or they do it well based on professional philosophical method and traditions. But they still do philosophy, as do political thinkers, literary critics and other humanists. Philosophy
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Nice intro talk. What is there? [Metaphysics] The hardest to deal with because of the unknown unknowns. How do we know? [Epistemology] Something that every college student should learn in their first semester if they haven’t had it taught to them well before then. Learning how to think and learn about any subject is critical for everyone, not merely philosophers. If people do understand this, they will also be willing to listen when philosophers start to talk about metaphysics or ethics and aesthetics because they will be able to tell the difference between those who carefully developed a foundation and their arguments and those who were just piling up rubbish. What is it worth? [Moral and Aesthetic Philosophy] Like metaphysics, something that cannot be covered in a first course, but
Nice post, John. To the list of questions you might add “What does (or ought) it mean?” This question doesn’t have a specific field (it isn’t epistemological, or metaphysical) dedicated to it, but it covers a huge amount of the conceptual work that philosophers do across all the domains we study. I also think that philosophy attempts to answer a whole set of why questions. In fact value theory might be seen to be in the business of answering why questions and explaining why things are valuable just as much as in the business of saying what is valuable in the first place. Not that that should replace you third question on the list. Into classes are about framing in ways that are comprehensible to non-philosophers, and I think your three questions are a nice frame. I think your second response to the challenges to philosophy is best. To suppose philosophy is valueless is to presuppose a value theory that itself requires philosophical defense (I tried to make this point in my post on science fanboys).
There are obviously a lot of ways to frame these issues. One way that is highly meaningful to me and explains a lot about the perpetually problematic status of the philosopher is this: philosophy is about what I can understand while, even though they are conducted by individuals and obviously involve thinking, the sciences are finally about what we can understand (and that’s assuming understanding is the right word for what the sciences produce). Which is why the scientists can never completely avoid doing philosophy so long as they attempt to be self-conscious about their own activities; but also why philosophy, inevitable though it may be, is always somewhat ridiculous since it is premised on a vanity that is both cosmic and comic.
One useful way of looking at philosophy is as a discipline whose ultimate goal is its own obsolescence. Many different things we think of today as not part of philosophy were at one point classified as under the same heading (psychology, mathematics, linguistics etc.). These areas became rigorous and well-understood enough that they could split off into their own disciplines and thus ceased to be classified as philosophy. Part of the reason that philosophy gets a bad rep is similar to the reason that so many people claim that we’ve made no progress with artificial intelligence: once we can make a computer that can duplicate some aspect of intelligence we declare that to not be part of intelligence and the study of that problem to be a different discipline (this has happened for example with chess playing, optical character recognition, speech recognition and other areas).
I prefer to think of it this way: when facts solve the question, it’s become science. When they don’t, it’s philosophy. When facts will never solve the question, it’s eternally philosophy.
I’m not completely sure I agree with that. In particular, mathematics spun off from philosophy but one would be hard pressed to classify mathematics as a science. The defintion of “fact” may also be relevant.
I wouldn’t want to put in terms of facts simpliciter (since I think facts settle all matters in one way or another), but I think John probably meant empirical facts. I also don’t think math spun off from philosophy in any real way. Many philosophers did math and in many ways math is a branch of (or close relative of) logic. It is worth noting that philosophy does not seek its own obsolescence. Moral questions, metaphysics, epistemology, etc. will all remain philosophical (of course empirical facts are important to doing good work in these areas. Even in phil science, the conceptual questions will always be philosophical in nature and not settled solely by empirical facts. As John was emphasizing, the questions we ask are not empirical and so we shouldn’t think that any advances in empirical science will make obsolete philosophical analysis of the concepts in that empirical discipline.