I get the impression that these people desperately want to study philosophy but for some reason can't be bothered to get formal training because it would be too humbling for them. I call it "small fishbowl syndrome," but maybe there's a better term for it.
The reason why people can't be bothered to get formal training is that modern philosophy doesn't seem that useful.
It was a while ago, but take the infamous story of the 2006 rape case in Duke University. If you check out coverage of that case, you get the impression every member of faculty that joined in the hysteria was from some humanities department, including philosophy. And quite a few of them refused to change their mind even as the prosecuting attorney was being charged with misconduct. Compare that to Socrates' behavior during the trial of the admirals in 406 BC.
Meanwhile, whatever meager resistence was faced by that group seems to have come from economists, natural scientist or legal scholars.
I wouldn't blame people for refusing to study in a humanities department where they can't tell right from wrong.
Which group of people giving modern training in philosophy should we judge the field by? If they can't use it correctly in such a basic case then who can?
> Did the Duke philosophy teachers claim they were using philosophy to determine if someone was raped?
I don't think that matters very much. If there's a strong enough correlation between being a reactive idiot and the department you're in, it makes a bad case for enrolling in that realm of study for educational motives. It's especially bad when the realm of study is directly focused on knowledge, ethics, and logic.
Note the "if" though, I haven't evaluated the parent's claims. I'm just saying it doesn't matter if they said they used philosophy. It reflects on philosophy as a study, at least the style they do there.
How much that affects other colleges is iffier, but it's not zero.
One week ago, if I asked you "how do we determine if modern philosophy is useful?"
Would you have pondered for a little while, then responded, "Find out how many philosophers commented on the Duke rape case of 2006 and what their opinions were, then we'll know."
Never in a million years. But if you said the departments were very disproportionately represented on different sides, I would think the main reasons would be either random cliques or that it shows something about critical thinking skills taught by those professors, or both, and I would be interested to hear more with the idea that I might learn something deeper than gossip.
Often, after you've figured out who's guilty, you'd need to look for more evidence until you find something that the jury can understand and the defense counsel can't easily argue against.
I've seen people make arguments against the value of modern academic philosophy based on their experience with professors or with whateversampling of writings they've come across. They usually get nowhere.
That's why I wanted to ground this discussion in a specific event.
> Which group of people giving modern training in philosophy should we judge the field by?
... all of them? Or rather, the body as a whole. Pointing at one set of faculty at one university 20 years ago and using that as the sole point to say "modern philosophy doesn't seem that useful", is just not useful.
No. The fact that they were wrong is almost irrelevant.
The faculty denounced the students without evidence, judged the case thought their emotions and their preconceived notions and refused to change their minds as new evidence emerged. Imagine having an academic discussion on a difficult ethical issue with such a teacher...
And none of that would have changed even, even if there somehow was a rape-focused conspiracy among the students of that university. (Thought the problem would have been significantly less obvious.)
I'm not sure what you are talking about. I have to admit, I mostly wrote my comment based on my recollections and it's a case 20 years ago I barely paid attention to until after the bizzaire conclusion. But looking trough Wikipedia's articles on the case[1] it doesn't seem I'm that far from the truth.
I guess I should have limited my statement about resisting mob justice to the economists at that university as the other departments merely didn't sign on to the public letter of denunciation?
Its weird that Wikipedia doesn't give you a percentage of signatories of the letter of 88 from the philosophy department, but several of the notable signatories are philosophers.
Edit: Just found some articles claiming that a chemistry professor by the name of Stephen Baldwin was the first to write to the university newspaper condemning the mob.
I figure there are two sides to philosophy. There's the practical aspect of trying to figure things out, like what it matter made of - maybe it's earth, water, air, and fire as the ancient Greeks proposed? How could we tell - maybe an experiment? This stuff while philosophical leads on to knowledge a lot of the time but then it gets called science or whatever. Then there's studying what philosophers says and philosophers said about stuff which is mostly useless, like a critique of Hegel's discourse on the four elements or something.
I'm a fan of practical philosophical questions like how does quantum mechanics work or how can we improve human rights, and not into the philosophers talking about philosopers stuff.
Imagine that you're living in a big scary world, and there's someone there telling you that being scared isn't particularly useful, that if you slow down and think about the things happening to you, most of your worries will become tractable and some will even disappear. It probably works at first. Then they sic Roko's Basilisk on you, and you're a gibbering lunatic 2 weeks later...
I think the argument is that philosophy hasn't advanced much in the last 1000 years, but it''s still 10,000 years ahead of whatever is coming out of the rationalist camp.
Nature abhors a vaccum. After the October revolution, the genuine study of humanities was extinguished in Russia and replaced with the mindless repetition of rather inane doctrines. But people with awakened and open minds would always ask questions and seek answers.
Those would, of course, be people with no formal training in history or philosophy (as the study of history where you aren't allowed to question Marxist doctrine would be self-evidently useless). Their training would be in the natural sciences or mathematics. And without knowing how to properly reason about history or philosophy, they may reach fairly kooky conclusions.
Hence why Rationalism can be though as the same class of phenomena as Fomenko's chronology (or if you want to be slightly more generous, Shafarevich's philosophical tracts).
Couldn't you take this same line of reasoning and apply it to the rationalist group from the article who killed a bunch of people, and conclude that you shouldn't become a rationalist because you probably kill people?
Yep. Though I'd rather generalize that to "The ethical teachings of Rationalists (Shut up and calculate!) can lead you to insane behavior."
And you wouldn't even need to know about the cult to reach that conclusion. One should be able to find crazy stuff by a cursory examination of the "Sequences" and other foundational texts. I think I once encountered something about torture and murder being morally right, if it would prevent mild inconvenience to a large enough group of people.
Philosophy is interesting in how it informs computer science and vice-versa.
Mereological nihilism and weak emergence is interesting and helps protect against many forms of kind of obsessive levels of type and functional cargo culting.
But then in some areas philosophy is woefully behind, and you have philosophers poo-pooing intuitionism when any software engineer working on sufficiently federated or real world sensor/control system borrows constructivism into their classical language to not kill people (agda is interesting of course). Intermediate logic is clearly empirically true.
It's interesting that people don't understand the non-physicality of the abstract and you have people serving the abstract instead of the abstract being used to serve people. People confusing the map for the terrain is such a deeply insidious issue.
I mean all the lightcone stuff, like, you can't predict ex ante what agents will be keystones in beneficial casual chains so its such waste of energy to spin your wheels on.
My thoughts exactly! I'm a survivor of ten years in the academic philosophy trenches and it just sounds to me like what would happen if you left a planeload of undergraduates on a _Survivor_ island with an infinite supply of pizza pockets and adderall
Why would they need formal training? Can't they just read Plato, Socrates, etc, and classical lit like Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka etc? That would be far better than whatever they're doing now.
Philosophy postgrad here, my take is: yeah, sorta, but it's hard to build your own curriculum without expertise, and it's hard to engage with subject matter fully without social discussion of, and guidance through texts.
It's the same as saying "why learn maths at university, it's cheaper just to buy and read the textbooks/papers?". That's kind of true, but I don't think that's effective for most people.
I'm someone who has read all of that and much more, including intense study of SEP and some contemporary papers and textbooks, and I would say that I am absolutely not qualified to produce philosophy of the quality output by analytic philosophy over the last century. I can understand a lot of it, and yes, this is better than being completely ignorant of the last 2500 years of philosophy as most rationalists seem to be, but doing only what I have done would not sufficiently prepare them to work on the projects that they want to work on. They (and I) do not have the proper training in logic or research methods, let alone the experience that comes from guided research in the field as it is today. What we all lack especially is the epistemological reinforcement that comes from being checked by a community of our peers. I'm not saying it can't be done alone, I'm just saying that what you're suggesting isn't enough and I can tell you because I'm quite beyond that and I know that I cannot produce the quality of work that you'll find in SEP today.
Oh I don't mean to imply reading some classical lit prepares you for a career producing novel works in philosophy, simply that if one wants to understand themselves, others, and the world better they don't need to go to university to do it. They can just read.
I think you are understating how difficult this is to do. I suspect there are a handful of super-geniuses who can read the philosophical canon and understand it, without some formal guidance. Plato and Dostoevsky might be possible (Socrates would be a bit difficult), but getting to Hegel and these newer more complex authors is almost impossible to navigate unless you are a savant.
I suspect a lot of the rationalists have gotten stuck here, and rather than seek out guidance or slowing down, changed tack entirely and decided to engage with the philosophers du jour, which unfortunately is a lot of slop running downstream from Thiel.
Trying to do a bit of formal philosophy at University is really worth doing.
You realise that it's very hard to do well and it's intellectual quicksand.
Reading philosophers and great writers as you suggest is better than joining a cult.
It's just that you also want to write about what you're thinking in response to reading such people and ideally have what you write critiqued by smart people. Perhaps an AI could do some of that these days.
I took a few philosophy classes. I found it incredibly valuable in identifying assumptions and testing them.
Being Christian, it helped me understand what I believe and why. It made faith a deliberate, reasoned choice.
And, of course, there are many rational reasons for people to have very different opinions when it comes to religion and deities.
Being bipolar might give me an interesting perspective. Everything I’ve read about rationalists misses the grounding required to isolate emotion as a variable.
This is some philosophy bullshit. Taking "rational" to be ~ "logical choice" the truthness of this statement depends on the assumed axioms, and given you didn't list them this statement is clearly false under rather simple "sum of all life is the value" system until that system is proven self-contradictory. Which I doubt you or the famous mouths you mentioned did at any point, because it probably is not.
> It's just that you also want to write about what you're thinking in response to reading such people and ideally have what you write critiqued by smart people. Perhaps an AI could do some of that these days.
An AI can neither write about what you are thinking in your place nor substitute for a particularly smart critic, but might still be useful for rubber-ducking philosophical writing if used well.
I find using an AI to understand complex philosophical topics one of my most unexpected use cases. Previously, I would get stuck scrolling through wikipedia full of incredibly opaque language, that assumes a background I don't have. But I can tell a bot what my background is, and it can make an explanation that is in the right level of complexity.
As an example, I'm reading a book on Buddhism, and I'm comfortable with Kant, and AI is useful for explaining to me a lot of the ideas they have as they relate to transcendental idealism (Kant).
On the other hand, I still don't know what a body without organs is.
This is like saying someone who wants to build a specialized computer for a novel use should read the turing paper and get to it. A lot has of development has happened in the field in the last couple hundred years.
I think a larger part of it is the assumption that an education in humanities is useless - that if you have an education (even self-education) in STEM, and are "smart", you will automatically do better than the three thousand year conversation that comprises the humanities.
