The argument is absurd. Claiming that universities are "poisoning minds" by teaching Aristotle and Descartes in 101 Intro to Philosophy courses is just silly. Those same universities teach modern philosophy courses that deal with the intersection of science and philosophy – judging by my one or two philosophy friends, philosophers are much more interested in the practical discoveries of psychology, math, and science than practitioners in those fields are interested in the most challenging branches of philosophy, which is a damn shame.
The reason Aristotle and Descartes are taught, the reason the roots of philosophical study are so important, is that philosophy at its highest is the process of directing inquiry at that which is not yet examined. Plato's Laws and Aristotle's Poetics mark some of the earliest attempts made by man to reason about the world simply through observation and lengthy reasoning. Descartes' work is even more breathtaking, in a sense, in that Descartes took the process of philosophers before him and developed a formalized explanation of how that process worked, then insisted that we could not fully understand the universe unless we applied this process to slowly revealing it. It was the birth of modern science, and it followed a profound philosophical insight.
Philosophy is a conversation that goes back thousands of years. Modern philosophy is so fascinating that of course there's a temptation to skip right to it – in my personal studies, I bounce back and forth between contemporary writers and writers from other centuries and millennia, letting the former refine my understanding of the latter and the latter provide context for the former. But the process of philosophy's development is important to teach, not to mention a somewhat exhilarating story when told properly.
Those contemporary articles the author scorns are proof that you can take two or three sentences from anything and make it sound much worse than it is. Yes, some of those subjects have been debated for years and years – that's a feature, not a bug. Philosophy's purpose is to search not for an answer to the surface questions (and when you're doing it right, everything becomes a surface question) but to dive deeper into questions of what lies beneath those questions, what assumptions we make when we use certain words or claim certain beliefs. We'll stop asking those questions when culture shifts enough that those questions cease making sense to ask – and if they do, it will be in large part because philosophy has helped reveal some unseen truths that led to a reorientation of society.
Look, Hacker News loves this stuff because people here are largely surface-oriented people. We love practical results, we love making things that directly affect a population's lives. LessWrong is best known for its connection to Eliezer Yudkowsky, a bright guy who's interested in putting an end to forms of death. This article's written by somebody who works for a Singularity institution. Those are what a lot of us think of when we think of philosophy – attempting to answer questions as old as mankind by devising a technical "solution" to them. Like plugging leaks and whatnot.
You have to understand that this isn't philosophy's sole purpose – in fact, this is a shallower purpose than philosophy's real one, which is to constantly search for deeper underlying truth. Philosophers should be aware of scientific developments, especially psychological ones, but only inasmuch as those developments completely invalidate a part of their studies, which isn't frequent. Philosophers aren't writing for the everyman; they're writing to continue a certain lofty ivory-tower discussion that slowly trickles down, through conceptual artists and writers and thinkers, to more practical-minded makers, down slowly towards people with more "mass-market" appeal, until what started as a very high-minded concept has shifted our way of thinking entirely.
Now, is that the only place philosophers should exist? No! The more philosophers, the more philosophy-oriented practitioners in whatever field, the better. But the solution is not for philosophy to become more scientific, it's for science to turn more philosophical. Insist that scientists and programmers and psychologists study philosophy. Teach philosophy to business majors. Remind students that inquiry lies at the heart of all understanding, all breakthroughs, and that therefore it's useful for nearly anything you'll undertake in your life. But don't critique philosophy for its approach. That sort of pure inquiry is still necessary, it's more difficult than ever – the geniuses of the 20th century are far more frustrating than the geniuses of ancient Greece and Europe – and it's under attack from many fronts, ranging from the blatantly anti-intellectual to the more subtly-so like this one.
The architect Christopher Alexander, who I greatly admire and whose work combines philosophical inquiry with practical reasoning with a fantastic mathematical rigor, makes the argument that what we typically think of as "practical" will never be enough to fully understand the nature of how the universe is organized. We can figure it out part by tiny part, but that's insufficient for thought or practice on any significant scale. He's a critic of our reliance on physics and constructing physical scientific models, not because they aren't the most cutting-edge way we know to study the universe – they are! no question about it! – but because they have their blind spots, just as every practice of inquiry throughout history has had its blind spots. For him, there is a practical intersection between math and philosophy, science and spirituality, that could be said to favor each side in a different way. But to emphasize one over any other simply because we value its "results" more would be just as disastrous as to favor the other instead. Each type of study is good at a very particular thing, and we should let it be good at that thing without insisting that it bow its head to the demands of the others.
The result of his thinking, incidentally, is that he comes out criticizing modern philosophy as well, but for much sounder and more incisive reasons than lukeprog does in this article.
This is a wonderful response. It illustrates exactly how philosophers want to think of themselves.
However when I compare with my actual interactions with philosophers, I am forced to believe that reality falls far short of the ideal. Whenever I have seen philosophers speculate on a topic that I knew something about, for instance math and science, I found that I could tell the difference between philosophers who learned something about the subject, and people who knew the subject who learned something about philosophy. In general the only useful comments were from the latter. (The most significant exceptions are in logic, where there is no real boundary between the logicians you find in the philosophy department, and the ones in the math department.)
If that is my reaction on subjects I know well, I have to suspect the same is true about other subjects as well.
This is a huge reason for philosophy's ongoing journey into irrelevance. Both scientists and philosophers have become over-specialized and tend to presume competency in one gives competency in another.
They are not only different subjects, but require very different modes of thought and background knowledge that often cause the experts in each sphere to talk completely past one another. Each demands that that all arguments submit to the peculiar rigor within their own discipline, causing ground-level miscommunication and exasperation.
I think you're the first person outside of my former research group that I've seen reference the Nature of Order. That made me very happy. It's too bad the books are so expensive – they deserve to be circulated more widely: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0972652914/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
I'm making my way through The Process of Creating Life. It's one of only two books that I've read in recent years that I can't read too much of at once – I get three pages in and have to stop, because of how excited I am about his arguments and its implications.
I was debating, at one point, scanning its pages and making a digital copy for my friends' sakes, but the work is so tremendous that I feel bad distributing it for free. I would love to work on a digital copy of the book formatted specifically for computers – seriously, if I know if any book that I'd recommend everybody read, it's this one.
(This doesn't constitute a recommendation, indeed, this book is way too expensive for its content.)
> I was debating, at one point, scanning its pages and making a digital copy for my friends' sakes ...
Pro tip: never say this online. It's a crime, you know? Granted, this book doesn't deserve to cost US$75.00, regardless of what's between its covers. But copying it would be a crime, one receiving a lot of attention right now.
> (This doesn't constitute a recommendation, indeed, this book is way too expensive for its content.)
I assume you're saying that without having read it? Because it is a marvelous and astonishing work – one that manages to simultaneously work out an abstract view of order while reasoning all the way to its practical outcomes – outcomes which Alexander's demonstrated in his decades of work as an architect. There's a reason it's so long, and it's that Alexander works rigorously through all his theories and their underpinnings until he can finally come up with practical ways of using them and, in using them, proving their correctness.
> Pro tip: never say this online. It's a crime, you know? Granted, this book doesn't deserve to cost US$75.00, regardless of what's between its covers. But copying it would be a crime, one receiving a lot of attention right now.
That's actually why I'm not making a copy of it. I don't say this about many books, but this one is entirely worth the outrageousness of its price (well, almost: I ordered used copies for 25-33% off). I plan to incorporate Alexander's ideas into works of my own, even hopefully write about them so they can reach a wider audience, but I respect the work far too much to think I have a right to give it away myself.
> I assume you're saying that without having read it?
No, I am saying the author doesn't want to disseminate his ideas, he wants to become rich. US$75.00 is simply too high a price for any book (not to say there aren't even more expensive books, but the same reasoning applies to them).
The only place where authors get away with this kind of pricing is when a college professor requires his class to buy his book, in which case the students have no choice. Outrageous but true.
This is not how you change the world, it's how you charge the world.
Also, even granted an avaricious motive and all other considerations aside, the author would probably make more money by pricing his book more realistically.
I haven't read it. However, if the work is that good, then the blurb is doing a terrible disservice to it.
"The processes of nature can make an infinite number of human faces, each one unique, [...]"
Starting off with something that's clearly untrue is not the best way to convince me that this book has deep insights. Maybe it's merely meant poetically.
I'm making my way through The Process of Creating Life. It's one of only two books that I've read in recent years that I can't read too much of at once – I get three pages in and have to stop, because of how excited I am about his arguments and its implications.
I bought the whole The Nature of Order series five years ago and have been ever since trying to find a person who has read it. A have returned to the books periodically, and again and again feel the same excitement that prevents reading too much at one sitting. I have not yet encountered another book that does the same.
In fact, I feel the same way about writing this reply. It is as the implications of the book are too - how should I describe it - something to be spelled out; somehow I do not feel I can do justice to the text by discussing it. I do not even know where to begin.
Perhaps it is best summarized by saying just read it. Yes, this is a lousy book review, and the price tag is not of the average variety, but this is a series of books for (of) life.
Your response has a higher content density than the original!
Working in scientific groups & having studied philosophy, I find that I'm constantly reminding my coworkers to ask if their clever question is in fact the right one, to question (and answer) what they'll accept as an explanation before searching for one. This sort of thinking doesn't come automatically from purely technical or scientific studies.
What a fantastic response! I'm so heartened to see this as the top comment. The article is completely absurd, of course, but unfortunately represents a bizarre sort of anti-intellectualism that is running rampant through academic communities which are coming closer and closer to declaring outright that philosophy as a discipline, and not just particular philosophers, is irrelevant and has been superseded by a specific form of dogmatic, reductionist science.
The breathtaking category mistake in this sentiment is not only disturbing from an abstract point of view, it is cause for deep concern for the future of human inquiry, if we continue to naively demand that all knowledge of the world be communicated in one form or another of bayesian/cartesian modeling, under a watered-down, diluted Popperian epistemological regime (exemplified in the OP's blog title, "Less Wrong".)
I have to take issue with one aspect of your response, though. I lay the blame for this trend, unsurprisingly, at the feet of Descartes himself. The article's sentiment towards Aristotle and Plato and indeed all previous philosophy is first expressed, with nearly the same dismissive arrogance (albeit couched much more subtly for political reasons) in Descartes' Discourse on Method. The Discourse is in fact a much more eloquent (naturally) and far-reaching version of the exact same argument in the OP. It is Descartes' naive dualism and reductionism, as well as his not-so-subtle dismissal of medieval and ancient philosophy, for precisely the same reasons found in this article, that laid the groundwork for the current large anti-intellectual, naively reductionistic trend.
Kudos on the Alexander citation -- I think if you dig deeply into his philosophical and metaphysical roots, you'll find a similar suspicion of naive Cartesian dualism, and a rejection of the simplistic mechanistic metaphors that animate it.
I believe it is in fact this rejection, coupled with a return to more confidence in formal realities, closer to the specific philosophical bent of works like Aristotle's Poetics, that is the basis Alexander's entire project. Note that Alexander has received more attention in many ways outside of his discipline (such as in the software community), for precisely his criticism of the radicalized Cartesian/modernist tendencies in contemporary architecture.
That's interesting! My understanding of Descartes comes from the book Descartes' Bones, which frustrated me in some ways but made an argument about Descartes that I found very interesting: when Descartes wrote his Discourse on Method, he was a Christian who felt his works very strongly connected with the existing works of the Church. He was not an advocate of discarding all non-mechanistic discovery so much as he advocated reexamining what we already knew. It was philosophers who came after him who began to argue that perhaps the mechanistic model could function in its own right, without connection to any other existing school of knowledge.
I haven't read Discourse myself yet, unfortunately: it's in a long queue of works which is currently taken up by Alexander's The Nature of Order, a wonderful but long read. I was led to believe that Descartes argued his new method should be added to existing ones rather than replace them entirely – am I wrong in thinking this way?
"I was led to believe that Descartes argued his new method should be added to existing ones rather than replace them entirely – am I wrong in thinking this way?"
Actually I think you are, but it is of course complicated. My read of the Discourse (certainly not original with me!) traces a sequence of subtle but nevertheless explicit rejections of each category of Descartes' own education: mathematics, physics, metaphysics, aesthetics, etc.
Descartes flatters his masters on the one hand while on the other "provisionally" rejecting every single one of them, never to return. This is the birth of modernism. The rejection of the past, the 'blank slate' of a hypothetical 'view from nowhere' acutely expressed in Descartes' notion of Radical Doubt (in the Meditations on First Philosophy). Descartes argues that, like a city built by multiple architects over many centuries, contemporary knowledge in the 17th Century was brilliant and confused all at once, at odds with itself and incapable of 'clear and distinct' ideas. Therefore he proposes that he himself embark on a provisional quest for certain knowledge, not because of his own genius, but because it is possible that a single philosopher with clarity of purpose can achieve what centuries of confused development cannot. It is an intoxicating proposition, and we moderns have yet to let go of its promise.
Awesome. With your interests and obvious clarity of expression, I'd suggest you pop the Discourse near the top of the queue! What's needful at this point in history, imo, is as many inquisitive, acute minds as possible re-engaging these debates in their original subtlety.
Can you briefly explain or point to something brief that explains the specific things that are significantly harmful or incorrect with relation to Descartes' Discourse on Method?
I agree with you that dogmatism is probably a negative thing, unless the dogmatism enforces being non-dogmatic. My shallow reading of Popper and Descartes seems to indicate that they are dogmatic about not being dogmatic, so I really quite like their dogma.
Any other problems with reductionism would be especially interesting.
Any answers to the classic regress argument would also be appreciated, I am not very clever and neither are my acquaintances - we haven't seemed to find anyone to convince us why "A proves B" is epistemically useful...though surely there is some argument
[C PROVES why "A proves B"], and surely some argument
Well said. I fear your humility may be more like that of Socrates, and I'm about to be hoisted on the petard of my own unexposed ignorance. I have to run at the moment but I'll come back to this tomorrow and hopefully have something useful to contribute. Thanks for the parley!
"[Philosophy] has been superseded by a specific form of dogmatic, reductionist science."
Not sure of the 'specific form' of science you are refering to, but I would hardly call science dogmatic. True, it dogmatically follows the 'Scientific Method', but that is a process to get at the truth. It does not dogmatically accept any ideas. It questions and tests, and if a cherished idea is proven wrong -- out it goes. Clearly, philosophy can't do that. They still teach Plato in philosophy, but they no longer teach Ptolemy in science.
Science, as the broad quest for knowledge, scientia, is not dogmatic, or at least ideally it is not. But modern science certainly has dogmas, and gladly admits them. Methodological Naturalism is the biggie. It is useful as a kind of provisional phenomenological reduction that brackets some questions and some kinds of answers (formal, teleological, aesthetic), in favor of others (mechanistic, reductionistic).
In theory as long as the reduction remains provisional, it has tremendous explanatory power. In practice, it far too often becomes a de facto metaphysic, unwarranted and unproven within its own assumptions. There are plenty of critics of this tendency in the last hundred years, but mostly they have been ignored: Husserl, Bergson are two of the most prominent. A more obscure student of both Husserl and Heidegger, Hans Jonas, has been extremely helpful to me personally, particularly his Phenomenon of Life, as a rigorous critique of reductionism that retains a high view of science on the one hand and doesn't founder and wander off into religious/atheistic debates on the other.
I appreciate your responses in this thread, I feel I have learned something from them. I want to make sure I am reading you correctly here:
>>>as long as the reduction [of Methodological Naturalism] remains provisional, it has tremendous explanatory power. In practice, it far too often becomes a de facto metaphysic, unwarranted and unproven within its own assumptions.
It seems like Karl Popper is saying something identical here:
>>>"A naturalistic methodology (sometimes called an "inductive theory of science") has its value, no doubt.... I reject the naturalistic view: It is uncritical. Its upholders fail to notice that whenever they believe to have discovered a fact, they have only proposed a convention. Hence the convention is liable to turn into a dogma."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)#Karl_Po...
I will try to synthesize the two previous paragraphs here: "Methodological Naturalism assumes that what humans can observe is the only way to gain more knowledge about the observable AND unobservable world. It is helpful for addressing immediate concerns of the observable world. However, let's not pretend that its usefulness somehow makes it true. Predicting the FUTURE is difficult, so let's hedge our bets in case things start getting weird."
Do you agree that your statement and his are equivalent, or are there some differences? If there are no significant differences, is my statement a reasonable synthesis?
Popper seems to express my (and I'm assuming yours and his own) sentiment about naturalism with his concept of falsifiability, which science seems to have accepted. In my opinion that is science taking a very good thing from a modern philosopher.
>Methodological Naturalism assumes that what humans can observe is the only way to gain more knowledge about the observable AND unobservable world. It is helpful for addressing immediate concerns of the observable world. However, let's not pretend that its usefulness somehow makes it true. Predicting the FUTURE is difficult, so let's hedge our bets in case things start getting weird
The Thomist Philosopher Edward Feser often uses the metaphor of a metal dectector when discussing Methodological Naturalism. It runs roughly like... (paraphrased and typed quickly on IE6 [yes kill me])
"Science acts on the assumption of methodological naturalism and that's okay. It's like a metal detector that only detects metal but dectects it with great accuracy. What is wrong is that many times the method is made into a metaphysic which is philosophically hard to maintain and which simply does not follow from the facts.
That a metal dectector has never detected wood is obvious because the metal detector isn't for detecting word. The Baconian project ignored teleological forces because, per Bacon, such teleology is hard to analyze within a scientific framework. Science has therefore focused on Material and Efficent causation. However, just because a method effectly locates material and efficent causes doesn't mean that other causes don't exist just as a metal dectector not detecting wood does not mean that wood does not exist. Therefore the argument for reductive materialism from the successful, that is treating methodological naturalism as the whole and complete story, is fundementally in error and incomplete."
Great question. Instead of trying to reconcile my weak prose with a giant like Popper, I'll instead try to summarize my understanding of him, taken mainly from my reading Objective Knowledge and Conjectures and Refutations. Let me know if this helps.
With Popper it's important to put things in context. He's reacting to the developments in Positivism/Verificationism and the rather famous problems it had. Falsification is related to Methodological Naturalism in that both are provisional hedges against unwarranted leaps within science, the problem of induction in particular (see: Hume and induction), as well as the historic difficulties in establishing the relationship between subject and object -- what I think in my mind and what I know about the world external to my mind (see: well, Hume and Kant).
Popper's view is that science is must be understood as merely conventional, not declarations of objective truth about the state of the world. So, falsification is a way of acknowledging this limitation while establishing a language for moving science forward within its appropriate boundaries. We no longer say a scientific theory is "verified," or even that one "believes" it to be true (Popper doesn't "believe in belief") -- this would imply a direct statement of truth about the world. Rather, we say we have a conjecture that has not been falsified. All of science, as "Objective Knowledge," is really the collection of language in books and articles and journals (what Popper calls "World Three") that contain the most useful conjectures that have been accepted by convention into the community, that have not been falsified.
This is why the idea of "falsifiability" is so important. If something has no criteria by which it can be shown to be false, then it cannot qualify as a candidate for citizenship in World 3.
This works as a provisional, conventional set of boundaries around science and useful guideposts that show the best kind of science as rooted in empirical experience and observation.
It dogmatically accepts the method, and no other. That means it's either the correct method in every sphere, which is obviously false, or there are spheres in which it is not correct, in which case science is insufficient.
I do not think you have comprehended Luke's perspective. Your rebuttal is largely demonstrating the behaviors he is, aptly in my opinion, criticizing.
Your overly romantic definition of philosophical inquiry would relegate it to a metaphysics of the unknown at best, mysticism in the cloak of learned language at worst.
I cannot conceive of how you interpret any of what Luke is saying as being even covertly anti-intellectual. You appear to be projecting your own world view and social groupings onto this topic, and presupposing some conflicts between them.
This continuum of deeply inscrutable pure truth pursued by inquiry at one end opposed to surface practical technical solutions developed by practitioners at the other is an artificial perspective. There is no opposition between these things. Often both are advanced in the same moment, and by the same work.
Descartes himself is an excellent example: he was intensely focused on devising exact formal methods. His philosophical results are now largely a historical marker on a road to nowhere. His formalisms are still used by every human practitioner of math from elementary school students on up.
I strongly encourage anyone who finds this discussion interesting to read the mentioned books by Pearl and Kahneman. They have transformed my thinking more than anything else I have learned in my entire life up to this point. These aren't mere technical tools, or interesting empirical results in some corner of practice.
I don't know of a short introduction to Kahneman's work, but the epilog to Pearl's book[1] is a short read and touches on the philosophical side of his thinking.
Kahneman is an easy and very enjoyable read, but do not underestimate the value of learning your mental model of your own cognition has no clothes.
Pearl's basic concepts are accessible, but finishing the book will require some effort for most, as will considering the implications rigorously. It's worth it however, because he provides a compete theory of knowledge that is both philosophically rigorous and algorithmically exact. His Turing Award lecture[2] should give you some sense of how staggeringly broad the implications of his formalism are.
Personally, I see that lukeprog demonstrates an anti-intellectualism when he states, 'Another paper arguing about the definition of "knowledge"? No thanks.'
I'm trying very hard to not be rude and laugh at the ridiculousness of eliminating certain philosophical studies/classes that lukeprog suggests.
Let me first say I lean more towards unalone's thoughts on this matter. But essentially, I believe what is going on here is an ideological battle that has occurred many times in the history of Western philosophy (to quote a certain someone). That is, what is the purpose of philosophy and who should it serve?
Philosophy, if it perfected anything, is the art of meta and intertextuality. Yes, even the latter. Read Euripides.
Philosophy has mathematical philosophers, it has scientific philosophers, it has gnostic philosophers, it has theological philosophers, and a long list of etcetera. But to narrow it down ideologically to one single thing the way lukeprog desires, is a foolish thing and unproductive to philosophy at its core. Why? Because any student of philosophy will tell you that asking 'What is knowledge?' is philosophy. Epistemology (the study of knowledge) is an important part of philosophy because philosophy is very much tied to culture as it is to history as it is to rationality and logic. To reduce philosophy to only its practical components and, this is the important part for me, oppressing certain philosophies is no better than trying to erase part of someone's culture.
But all this has already been discussed in philosophy with regard to Bertrand Russell's approach. The fact that all of us are having this discussion is philosophy. Some philosophies do not want to be science, and no one should force them to.
If you watch The Philosophers' Football Match (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8), for example, there is a meta discussion and intertextual reference going on that is never mentioned, but it exists. It gives as much insight into what philosophy is for each country as a study on truth tables or logic.
"Personally, I see that lukeprog demonstrates an anti-intellectualism when he states, 'Another paper arguing about the definition of "knowledge"? No thanks.'"
I see how this criticizes one branch of intellectual thought within one discipline. I don't see how it is anti-intellectual. Luke runs the singularity institute, an organization dedicated to a highly specific and speculative conception of humanity's future (and a mistaken one in my opinion). You're trying to convince me this is not an intellectual activity? That he's anti-intellectual? This is rubbish, and you're just being defensive because he's attacking a specific set of ideas you value.
"Epistemology (the study of knowledge) is an important part of philosophy because philosophy is very much tied to culture as it is to history as it is to rationality and logic."
If you had read Pearl, you would understand that it is foremost, an epistemological theory. Luke is not rejecting the study of knowledge as a whole, he is bemoaning that only computer scientists and statisticians are learning a theory of knowledge that he believes supersedes the majority of historical philosophical thought on the matter. I strongly agree with him on that point. I think there's still value in teaching Aristotle et all, but that exactly as you say above, the perspective should be historical.
I agree that Luke is being a bit hyperbolic in the language of his post, but the vast majority of people responding here do not understand what he is advocating because they simply HAVE NOT READ THE BOOKS HE IS SUGGESTING YOU READ. And so they attempt to argue against his suggestion, not even knowing what motivates it or its merits.
I briefly read some parts of Pearl's text you provided. Apart from my having an issue with his approach/tactics to explaining his thoughts, it reminded me of Mill's Methods (1843), which were 'influenced' by Avicenna's Book of Healing (1020).
And why should it 'supersede' (do you mean replace or 'is better than'?) previous philosophical thought?
What of Al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error, which 'influenced' Descartes' Meditations?
There is no need for a 'replacement'. If Judea Pearl specialises in cognitive science and artificial intelligence and wants to write on cause/effect in relation to them, that should be its own branch, not replace an epistemology class.
There are no apples and oranges in this conversation. Mistaken epistemology is mistaken. Fruit plays no part in it.
I'm sad that your response to Pearl's ideas is to cite a litany of influences you believe as exposing his ideas as not novel. This is a a pointless activity.
Theories are not equal alternatives. When a complete and clarifying framework is defined, we abandon the mistaken structures of the past. Knowledge does not endlessly bifurcate: unification is our most valuable intellectual activity. Your equivocation among competing alternatives is an exercise of socially attached apologetics.
Causal explanations form the basis of the entirety of western philosophy, from Aristotle's four causes onward. Accuracy is not a matter of taste.
This is a great statement, because it points to the fundamental problem with Descartes' legacy:
"His philosophical results are now largely a historical marker on a road to nowhere. His formalisms are still used by every human practitioner of math from elementary school students on up."
As if his "formalisms" could stand on their own without the philosophical foundations of his entire system. And yes this is what modernity after Hume did -- take Descartes' project forward long after the core assumptions had been completely undermined.
In many ways the history of modern philosophy since has been a quest to re-ground the Cartesian project with the kind of confidence he promised, and a succession of regressive rear-guard actions taken against the encroaching skepticism that threatened the entire enterprise at every turn. And finally we're left with a weird, cobbled-together Popperian/Kuhnian pragmatism that long ago gave up on "certainty" or "clarity" and settled for "less wrong."
No wonder philosophy is held in such low regard in scientific communities. It has done science no favors whatsoever in the last century, other than to progressively undermine its naive epistemological assumptions and redirect it back to some kind of Formal Realism -- at which point the scientific community yells "remember Galileo!!" and runs the other direction.
It's a sad state of affairs when we can't distinguish between the salutary philosophical insights of Aristotle and religious tyranny. It's going to take a long, long time to recast the entire narrative to where the two points of view can inform each other once again.
In what way are the notations Descartes introduced dependent upon his philosophical views?
"And finally we're left with a weird, cobbled-together Popperian/Kuhnian pragmatism that long ago gave up on "certainty" or "clarity" and settled for "less wrong."
What surprises me is that people are so willing to assume that such certainty is desirable. That quantified symbolic logic is both primary and desirable, and that probabilistic reasoning is at best an occasionally necessary but highly suspect tool.
What a sadly limited universe of discourse that is, being forever circumscribed by Godel. It is fortunate that we don't exist trapped in it. I see no reason to intellectually place myself in the same prison.
Sure -- Descartes mathematics in the abstract are surely not dependent on his foundationlism/rationalism. As such they are merely tautological. But the science that deploys that math in pursuit of practical knowledge is.
Agreed that 'certainty,' at least the kind that Descartes was advocating, is an abstraction in search of a definition, and as such not desirable. Godel and incompleteness is just one species of the problem. This is where I would rather see a reformed Baconian science, tempered with (rather than utterly rejecting) an Aristotelian view which had a more sophisticated language for dealing with ambiguity and the fluid borders between substances. Our physics has advanced far beyond simplistic atomism, why can't our philosophy of science?
Popper and falsification is a good rear-guard action against skepticism and making unwarranted philosophical leaps within the Cartesian taxonomy, but why can't we question the taxonomy itself? There are plenty of good starting points -- Whitehead and Bergson come to mind, as well as an open re-examination of medieval and pre-socratic philosophy, as Heidegger does in the Question Concerning Technology. On and on. It's not as if no one is asking these questions or refining philosophical language to deal with them -- it just seems that the scientific community would rather declare its own sovereignty and emancipate itself from first-order questions once and for all.
While I agree that philosophy has the ability to ask good questions, unfortunately it does not seem to be able to answer those questions in any meaningful way. Science also has the ability to ask good questions, but it knows how to answer them in a meaningful way (at least good science does). By meaningful, I mean provably true. Philosophy is very happy to take untested opinion as true. Which is provably dangerous.
I get the sense from reading your post that you think of Philosophers as Philospher-Kings, who sit at the top of humanity and think about important things and their ideas eventually trickle down to the Plebeians at the bottom. And once everyone agrees with the Philosophers, there will no longer be a need for Philosophy. Give me Science any day.
This is unfortunately true of many species of philosophers, and in many ways they are responsible for their own growing public irrelevance. Growing, if not fully accomplished!
So, I agree with your post to the extent that it applies to much of the last hundred years of philosophy. We see the results of this disparity in guys like Lawrence Krauss, who says much the same thing.
It's a hard argument to counter, not because it's a good argument, but because culturally and educationally we lack the common philosophical vocabulary to identify its problems, without running aground on local political issues. We are all children of Descartes and we are catechized our whole lives to think in reductionist terms and anticipate reductionist answers to every facet of human experience.
I completely disagree with your hard distinction between Science and Philosophy, but I don't have a quick-and-dirty answer for you. I know why you see this distinction, and there's truth in it, but also, to my mind, deep error. I would suggest you look at the history of philosophy of science, its origins in Bacon and Descartes and a much older philosophical debate that transcends questions of whether "good answers" are given and dives deeper into the nature of answers themselves. Any honest appraisal of this history of ideas I think must identify a larger meta-debate, not between "Science" and "Philosophy" but between two opposing Philosophies, two opposing Sciences, in fact.
I got the sense that he thinks of philosophers more in the fashion of scientists doing basic research in universities and R&D departments. People don't know their names, and they rarely have much direct impact, but their work is foundational to a lot of practical things that come later.
Philosophy is very happy to take untested opinion as true.
This is demonstrably false. Philosophy, almost by definition, is a process of rationally testing "opinion". Your post reeks of scientism and nothing more.
Enlighten me. What is the process of "rationally testing opinion"? (More opinion is not the right answer.)
Philosophy can make large, beautiful, perfectly logical structures of thought. But they necessarily must begin with an axiom, some foundation on which to build. If the axiom is wrong, the whole structure falls. No matter how beautiful it is. I submit that the problem with Philosophy is that it is only too happy to build on untested axioms.
There's nothing wrong with building on axioms if you understand that they are stipulated rather than foundational, and much philosophy has been done tearing down exactly the beautiful structures you identify as problematic. That just is rationally testing "opinion", which I put in quotes because it's a loaded word you introduced in place of axiom to undermine the position of philosophy. I remind you that Goedl's incompleteness theorem, which gives analytical rigor to your point, came out of early 20th century logic, and was in direct response to the philosophical program of the Vienna Circle, which again is philosophers. How, do you suppose, you could establish Goedl's incompleteness theorem with the scientific method?
Rational testing is analysis with logic and deconstruction and, to the applicable degree, empiricism.
Can you name one modern rigorous and precise discipline that does not have philosophic roots? We don't know what science today's philosophy might produce in the future.
I think that kings ought to be philosophers, metaphorically speaking: I trust politicians who prove they have at least some understanding of philosophical inquiry much more than I trust the ones who are skeptical. But philosophers themselves shouldn't be kings: hell, how would you pick the one to rule over the rest of them? The best philosophers are frequently the most controversial: the controversy surrounds them because of how challenging and provocative their thoughts are.
Here's the thing with "provably true" that I find worrisome: the process of proving something as rigorously as scientific research demands it is so slow, so painstaking, that if we relied entirely on science to inform our knowledge, we'd lose out on literal millennia of human experience. Now, there are some things for which scientific rigor is absolutely necessary: don't get me wrong, I think science is one of the best things ever. But it's not enough. It's a tool in an arsenal which employs many different techniques to get at knowledge, and as far as techniques go, it's a highly specialized one.
Philosophy is a much, much broader technique; in fact, it specializes in finding ways to look at even broader questions in exquisite detail. That makes it a very impractical tool if you're trying to, say, build a space ship. But it makes it a far more useful tool if you're trying to understand things as complex and abstract and subtle as, say, questions of how we acquire knowledge, or what it means to think. "Meaning" is something which science deals with very practically, and as a result its meaning will usually go only as deep as is needed to achieve a practical result. Once science begins worrying about satisfying deeper curiosities, well, it's no longer practical and your argument is moot.
You think philosophy is provably dangerous. Well, I think that science left unchecked is dangerous as well – it's such a powerful method of inquiry that it can convince you it's the only sort of inquiry that has any meaning whatsoever, which is a seductive promise (it's so simple! it could explain everything!) but not a true one. There have been certain controversies involving very bright scientific minds saying some very stupid things, and then attempting to "prove" that there's a scientific justification for what they're saying. It's especially frustrating because these scientific thinkers, who are so humble and questioning when examining the universe from their lens, are incapable of the same humility when offered any other perspective on their thoughts – even well-reasoned and meaningful ones.
But I wouldn't argue that because of this, we ought to cut funding to science, or insist that science change its techniques. No: science should do what it's good at, period. But so should philosophy. And so should mathematics, or theology, or history, or whichever other method of inquiry might yield useful and important breakthroughs. The dangerous part of science is its claim that it ought to dominate other fields of study, which practically speaking I find no different from the claim made by fundamentalist Christians that their religion should dominate all fields of study. There's a similar belief that their worldview is so right, so all-pervasive, that no other argument could possibly suffice to dethrone it.
"Here's the thing with "provably true" that I find worrisome: the process of proving something as rigorously as scientific research demands it is so slow, so painstaking, that if we relied entirely on science to inform our knowledge, we'd lose out on literal millennia of human experience."
"Philosophy is a much, much broader technique; in fact, it specializes in finding ways to look at even broader questions in exquisite detail. That makes it a very impractical tool if you're trying to, say, build a space ship. But it makes it a far more useful tool if you're trying to understand things as complex and abstract and subtle as, say, questions of how we acquire knowledge, or what it means to think."
To be blunt: you need to read Pearl (and Kahneman), because it is clear you are not familiar with the ideas you are arguing against.
> Philosophy's purpose is to search not for an answer to the surface questions (and when you're doing it right, everything becomes a surface question) but to dive deeper into questions of what lies beneath those questions, what assumptions we make when we use certain words or claim certain beliefs.
I really see this as a problem. It should be possible to teach critical thinking with more engagement with the world. Anyone can poke holes. It's much harder and more worthwhile to submit patches.
Reminds me of something I recently read:
>If you had gone to Epictetus and said, "I want to live a good life. What should I do?" he would have had an answer for you: "Live in accordance with nature." He would then have told you, in great detail, how to do this.
>If you went to a twentieth-century analytic philosopher and asked the same question, he probably would have responded not by answering the question you asked but by analyzing the question itself: "The answer to your question depends on what you mean by "a good life," which in turn depends on what you mean by "good" and "a life." He might then walk you through all the things you could conceivably mean in asking how to live a good life and explain why each of these meanings is logically muddled. His conclusion: It makes no sense to ask how to live a good life. When this philosopher had finished speaking, you might be impressed with his flair for philosophical analysis, but you might also conclude, with good reason, that he himself lacked a coherent philosophy of life.
No philosopher worth her salt would try to answer this question as formed because of the large number of buried assumptions in it that presuppose the form of the correct answer, and that answers not meeting that form are, by definition, incorrect. Your question is a sophisticated version of "have you stopped beating your wife?"
What "truth" has mathematics itself produced from that search which is well-defined, non-trivial, and correct?
Is it a loaded question? I think it isn't, and it has a lot of valid answers. Here are some recent ones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_ma.... Why the corresponding question for philosophers should be loaded? Are they exempt from settling things?
First, Goedl's Incompleteness Theorem comes out of philosophy through the early 20th century's focus on logic and positivism. I'm sure you consider that well-defined, non-trivial, and correct.
Second, there is no requirement for philosophers to "settle things", and it's undemonstrated that, in order to settle things, the answer must be well-defined, non-trivial, and correct. One example of that is Wittgenstein's dismissal of a significant number of previous philosophical problems as empty language games. The field advances; it doesn't "settle things" in the sense that mathematics lays down proofs upon which the edifice later builds. Sometimes the advance is dismissing large portions of what went before as mistaken.
I don't consider Godel's theorem to be philosophy. Its status is similar to Cantor's theorem stating that reals are uncountable. Surely is inspired by philosophy and has philosophical consequences, but it is a part of mathematics. Trivia: Godel used the Chinese remainder theorem in his proof http://mathoverflow.net/questions/19857/has-decidability-got.... I acknowledge that philosophy can be inspiration for mathematics, but this is rather unsatiating, as very many things can be.
You might not, but philosophers certainly do--I learned it in my philosophy classes on logic. I also learned there about Cantor's diagonalization proof. More generally, in the early 20th century there was a huge overlap between mathematics and philosophy. You had Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, you had the Vienna Circle, you had Carnap and logical positivism... It's really not possible to cleanly categorize Goedl's proof into either math or philosophy--they weren't disjunct categories then, and they're not now, either. More importantly, if you approached any of those figures and asked whether they were separate things, they'd have thought the question nonsensical. Philosophy was, and still is, the home of logic in the academy, and the fact that logic and math frequently seem like different sides of the same coin doesn't settle the issue either way.
Many philosophers have questioned the scientific definition of "correctness". For example Heidegger who argued that scientific truth is an approximation and measurement of things that we already presume to exist. These discoveries may be correct, and they may be true. But what about the more primordial truth (i.e. being) which we take for granted before we even begin a scientific inquiry? This is what he investigates, so pretty much all scientific definitions of correctness don't apply here. But it is very hard to convince followers of scientism that this investigation has any meaning, because they've already closed their minds to this form of thinking.
> Many philosophers have questioned the scientific definition of "correctness".
This concisely and aptly summarizes the reason for philosophy's low standing among intellectual disciplines.
Philosophers are manifestly unqualified to debate the scientific definition of anything, much less "correctness". Beyond this, a suitable definition is too short to be of interest to a philosopher, someone for whom the number of words uttered is always ranked higher than the intellectual content of each word taken separately.
A scientific idea is "correct" if it can be successfully compared to reality.
How hard is that? I hasten to add that no scientific idea ever becomes true for all time -- all such ideas are subject to falsification by new evidence, by new comparisons to reality.
> But it is very hard to convince followers of scientism...
Ah, yes, the "science is just another religion" gambit. It speaks volumes about the depth of modern philosophical thought.
Philosophers compare their ideas to those of other philosophers. Scientists compare their ideas to reality.
> A scientific idea is "correct" if it can be successfully compared to reality.
But this is similar to saying what is real is what corresponds to reality. Do you see the circularity here?
The philosophers who engage in questioning the "real" are not doing it for the reasons scientists engage in discovering "correct" phenomena. The longing for a deeper meaning and clarity beyond scientific inquiry is a spiritual longing. These philosophers are trying to describe ways in which human beings fit in the world, how we can deal with the groundlessness of our existence, what choices we have in light of the anguish that comes from our mortality.
The problem is that many people view this as a competition against science or "exact" thinking. It is not.
I think this quote from Leo Strauss sums up my point:
"Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm. It is the highest form of the mating of courage and moderation. In spite of its highness or nobility, it could appear as Sisyphean or ugly, when one contrasts its achievement with its goal. Yet it is necessarily accompanied, sustained and elevated by eros. It is graced by nature's grace."
> But this is similar to saying what is real is what corresponds to reality. Do you see the circularity here?
The circularity is in your wording, not in the thing itself. A scientist has an idea, one expressed clearly enough that two or more similarly trained individuals can understand the claim. The idea is tested against reality, in a way (again) that similarly equipped observers can agree that the result means what it seems to mean.
The outcome is either that the original idea is supported by, or falsified by, the comparison to reality. And the distinction between the idea, and its test against reality, is nowhere confused -- not among scientists, anyway.
> The philosophers who engage in questioning the "real" are not doing it for the reasons scientists engage in discovering "correct" phenomena.
That's for sure -- philosophers much prefer arguing about the meaning of reality, to dealing with reality on its own terms. Many modern philosophers, following this trend, slide into deconstructive postmodernism without ever realizing that they've crossed the threshold of absurdity (by posing the argument that all experience is subjective and there is no objective reality as scientists claim, but without realizing that their argument justly applies first to the words they've just uttered).
Oh, come on. This is beneath you surely. Where are these "philosophers," this monolithic horde of abstraction-loving pinheads stuck in the 15th century, too benighted to see the Real Truth right under their noses, too stuck in debates over definitions to think practically about application and science??
You have a cartoon version of philosophy in your mind that is in sore need of remediation. These are precisely the kinds of questions that philosophers have been utterly preoccupied with for centuries. As if Bradley, Dewey, William James, never existed! As if the very idea of a pragmatic, "reality-based" science had not been proposed and debated rigorously for decade upon decade.
As if the subject-object problem wasn't at the core of the foundations of modern science!! Far from being some late, decadent conceit of a handful of disconnected postmoderns, the problem of objective knowledge is at the very core of modern science, at its very foundations, on to the present day.
Have you read a single volume of philosophy in the last decade? Are you not aware that the Grand Poo-Bah of modern philosophy of Science, Popper himself, redefines "Objective Knowledge" to deal with that very problem?
If you are content with a naive, self-contained scientism that remains dogmatically immune to philosophical critique, that's fine. You're certainly not alone. But let's dispense with the sweeping generalizations that have no bearing whatsoever on the reality of the history of philosophy, science or ideas in general.
Yes, I think you've gotten through to me. You're willing to hold strong opinions regarding the core discipline of the Western Tradition in a state of abject ignorance, on the grounds that actually educating yourself on the topic before forming such an opinion is analogous to committing suicide in order to understand suicide.
That's as bizarre a rationale for willful illiteracy as I can think of. You seem content with it, and I wish you well.
This is naive scientific triumphalism of the first order, utterly illiterate with regards to the philosophical foundations of science, the rigorous and multi-layered debates over the status of scientific statements that have been ongoing for centuries to the present day: from Bacon, Gallileo and Descartes (with deep roots in Lucretius, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, Epicurus, Heraclitus) through Spinoza, Leibniz and Newton himself, on into such titans as Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Bergson, Heidegger, Russell, Whitehead, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Quine.
And yet! And yet! It was all so simple, gads and forsooth!!
I give you the final word, gentle reader, it was all for naught, these men with their devotion to rigor and clarity of thought, their conversations spanning centuries, their volumes of pointless abstraction, Hegel with his historicism and Kant with his categories, cynical Kuhn and his paradigms, pragmatic Popper with his Worlds 1 and 2, Whitehead with his ingressions pseudo-Aristotelian speculations and Bergson teasing out duration and intuition.
Throw out your Rutledge Encyclopedia: and behold the simplicity they all failed to grasp:
A scientific idea is "correct" if it can be successfully compared to reality.
How hard is that indeed!! Not hard at all. Simplicity itself, devastating in its directness and comprehensive competence, lovely in its completeness. Centuries of debate quelled in a single utterance. Well done.
Look, I sympathize. Philosophy, as the core discipline of human thought, has established beyond any doubt that there are limits to empirical human inquiry, and scientists don't like that idea. The standard response of scientific cheerleaders like, for instance, Lawrence Krauss, is to simply sniff at the entire enterprise, and assume there must be some problem with "those philosophers," rather than entertain the notion that there may, in fact, be limitations to reason and scientific inquiry.
This is fine. If you're too lazy and content in your own unexamined assumptions to read a few hundred pages of the men who did the hard work that gave you your entire livelihood, it will not affect your ability to do practical research.
But let's be clear about some of the practical implications of that position:
* Science does not need to be rational in any meaningful sense. (Go ahead and try to reinvent that idea without falling ass-backwards into the same problems "those philosophers" have been working through for centuries. Go ahead, I'll wait.)
* It does not need to be consistent within its own assumptions.
* Science is de facto "true", simply by virtue of being practiced by someone who claims to be doing science.
* Since we've now abdicated the rigorous discipline of establishing secure definitions, the notion of empirical science is now free-floating, ad hoc, and vulnerable to redefinition at any turn. The only thing required is for a group of men who call themselves "scientists" who have a different agenda to take control of a majority of significant journals or the community at large and impose their definition by fiat.
Philosophy may seem to be arcane and needlessly obsessed with definitions. And when its obscure language intrudes into the hard work of real empirical research, it can seem to be a giant non sequitur that can be easily ignored, as science moves forward (whatever "forward" means, now that we can't establish what is truly salutary and what is not).
But such willful ignorance not only skirts the fact that it was such philosophical examination of the limits and range of human knowledge that actually established science to begin with, that sort of ignorance sets enormously dangerous precedents, a sort of intellectual stare decisis for the future of human inquiry. It opens the door to sophistry, demagoguery and ultimately pure irrationalism.
History is long, and intellectual tyranny is opportunistic. Whatever integrity and above-board intentions you think scientists can maintain in the long-term, on good will alone and not deep self-awareness of core philosophical discipline is absurdly naive. Without a community committed to rationality (which is what philosophy does even if it only sets up negative limitations that seem unsatisfactory to scientists who want carte blanche to do whatever they want), then the entire discipline in the long term most likely will be taken over by non-rational concerns: commercial, military, governmental or even religious.
Absent the basic language provided by philosophy that can give at least some basic definitions and intellectual rigor for what is and isn't "science" (again, good luck reinventing all that), welcome back to the pre-socratic age of sophistry, demagoguery and a new Dark Ages. Just give it a century or so -- buy hey, you won't be around, so why worry?
"These discoveries may be correct, and they may be true."
This is the problem with Philosophy. You can take something correct and true, and disregard it. Worse, it is disregarded in favor of what is essentially an opinion.
Looking for philosophical truths that are well-defined and correct is a bad starting point. If something can be described of as correct or incorrect, then there would not be much of a philosophical discussion since you would be able to find the answer.
Philosophy is looking to ask the deeper questions: the questions that do not have a yes/no answer, and cannot be well defined (or to put it more accurately: truths that can be well defined, but in so many different ways that it is difficult to choose one definition).
However, just because these questions do not have yes/no answers and are not well-defined, does not make them trivial!
A great example of where philosophy affects your life daily is political philosophy. Ask yourself if you are liberal, conservative or something else? None of these schools of thought can be described as 'right' or 'wrong'. They are all different ways of looking at the question of how a society should function.
Yet discussing this question is incredibly important, and the discussions that political philosophers have trickle down into your mainstream politics (a fantastic recent example that we are all aware of is the Tea Party Movement, which itself is saying that we should use the philosophy of hardline conservatism). Political parties did not just sprout out of nowhere: they involved people having incredibly thoughtful discussions.
You may be saying that although some philosophy affects your life (eg. politics), other stuff just seems to be pointless. For example, you might argue that discussing the meaning of 'right or wrong' is pointless and that we should just get on with life. However, the way that we treat someone that has done a 'wrong' will depend on our political system (for example, you may follow a school of thought that says we should place rehabilitation before punishment, or vice versa), and therefore to ask how our political system should treat these people that has done a 'wrong', we should ask what it means to say that something is 'wrong' in the first place (eg. if you do not intend an outcome, have you done a wrong?), or what it means to place 'blame' on someone (eg. does blame mean that we do not approve of their action, or that they should not approve of their own action?). These are not just abstract thoughts, but practical considerations that filter through to the very political system that you live in.
If you would like some other examples of philosophy affecting your day to day life, then I would recommend looking up these topics:
* Medical ethics: when does life start (conception? a heart beat? birth?)? Is it right to take the life of a featus after life has started? What about when rape is involved? What about when the mother is at risk of death if a pregnancy is to go ahead?
* What is a person? Should we follow someones directives after a personality change (what change would a person need to make before they invalidate their own do not resuscitate order)? If a person has changed, are their contracts or will still valid?
* What does it mean to say we are free? Is freedom something we should strive to achieve? Is freedom a human right? Is privacy something we should strive to achieve? Is privacy a human right? What about where these rights conflict?
* What is law? When do we say something has lawful authority? Does law need to be moral? Does law need to be fair? Is it ok to follow the law, even if we think it will do something that is morally wrong?
I'm happy to give more examples, or to go into more detail about why these questions are important.
NOTE: I studied law at university and decided to take a module on moral philosophy and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Philosophy is about having discussions on difficult questions and gives you the skills to do so; this has affected everything I have done since. Once you start asking philosophical questions, they will start popping up in everything you do. I regularly find myself asking questions about nature and philosophy when coding just because I can see how it can trickle down to have a tangible impact on what I'm creating. If there is one thing I would urge you to do this christmas holiday, it would be to read a philosophy book (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a great place to start), it might just change your life.
The reason Aristotle and Descartes are taught, the reason the roots of philosophical study are so important, is that philosophy at its highest is the process of directing inquiry at that which is not yet examined. Plato's Laws and Aristotle's Poetics mark some of the earliest attempts made by man to reason about the world simply through observation and lengthy reasoning. Descartes' work is even more breathtaking, in a sense, in that Descartes took the process of philosophers before him and developed a formalized explanation of how that process worked, then insisted that we could not fully understand the universe unless we applied this process to slowly revealing it. It was the birth of modern science, and it followed a profound philosophical insight.
Philosophy is a conversation that goes back thousands of years. Modern philosophy is so fascinating that of course there's a temptation to skip right to it – in my personal studies, I bounce back and forth between contemporary writers and writers from other centuries and millennia, letting the former refine my understanding of the latter and the latter provide context for the former. But the process of philosophy's development is important to teach, not to mention a somewhat exhilarating story when told properly.
Those contemporary articles the author scorns are proof that you can take two or three sentences from anything and make it sound much worse than it is. Yes, some of those subjects have been debated for years and years – that's a feature, not a bug. Philosophy's purpose is to search not for an answer to the surface questions (and when you're doing it right, everything becomes a surface question) but to dive deeper into questions of what lies beneath those questions, what assumptions we make when we use certain words or claim certain beliefs. We'll stop asking those questions when culture shifts enough that those questions cease making sense to ask – and if they do, it will be in large part because philosophy has helped reveal some unseen truths that led to a reorientation of society.
Look, Hacker News loves this stuff because people here are largely surface-oriented people. We love practical results, we love making things that directly affect a population's lives. LessWrong is best known for its connection to Eliezer Yudkowsky, a bright guy who's interested in putting an end to forms of death. This article's written by somebody who works for a Singularity institution. Those are what a lot of us think of when we think of philosophy – attempting to answer questions as old as mankind by devising a technical "solution" to them. Like plugging leaks and whatnot.
You have to understand that this isn't philosophy's sole purpose – in fact, this is a shallower purpose than philosophy's real one, which is to constantly search for deeper underlying truth. Philosophers should be aware of scientific developments, especially psychological ones, but only inasmuch as those developments completely invalidate a part of their studies, which isn't frequent. Philosophers aren't writing for the everyman; they're writing to continue a certain lofty ivory-tower discussion that slowly trickles down, through conceptual artists and writers and thinkers, to more practical-minded makers, down slowly towards people with more "mass-market" appeal, until what started as a very high-minded concept has shifted our way of thinking entirely.
Now, is that the only place philosophers should exist? No! The more philosophers, the more philosophy-oriented practitioners in whatever field, the better. But the solution is not for philosophy to become more scientific, it's for science to turn more philosophical. Insist that scientists and programmers and psychologists study philosophy. Teach philosophy to business majors. Remind students that inquiry lies at the heart of all understanding, all breakthroughs, and that therefore it's useful for nearly anything you'll undertake in your life. But don't critique philosophy for its approach. That sort of pure inquiry is still necessary, it's more difficult than ever – the geniuses of the 20th century are far more frustrating than the geniuses of ancient Greece and Europe – and it's under attack from many fronts, ranging from the blatantly anti-intellectual to the more subtly-so like this one.
The architect Christopher Alexander, who I greatly admire and whose work combines philosophical inquiry with practical reasoning with a fantastic mathematical rigor, makes the argument that what we typically think of as "practical" will never be enough to fully understand the nature of how the universe is organized. We can figure it out part by tiny part, but that's insufficient for thought or practice on any significant scale. He's a critic of our reliance on physics and constructing physical scientific models, not because they aren't the most cutting-edge way we know to study the universe – they are! no question about it! – but because they have their blind spots, just as every practice of inquiry throughout history has had its blind spots. For him, there is a practical intersection between math and philosophy, science and spirituality, that could be said to favor each side in a different way. But to emphasize one over any other simply because we value its "results" more would be just as disastrous as to favor the other instead. Each type of study is good at a very particular thing, and we should let it be good at that thing without insisting that it bow its head to the demands of the others.
The result of his thinking, incidentally, is that he comes out criticizing modern philosophy as well, but for much sounder and more incisive reasons than lukeprog does in this article.