Luke, do you have any ideas how to reform philosophy education and professional practice without antagonizing a lot of current professional philosophers and their students and having the debate degenerate into a blue-vs-green tribal fight? Or more generally see much chance of success for such an attempt? If not, maybe you should reframe your posts (or at least future ones) as being aimed at amateur philosophers, autodidacts, CS and math majors interested in doing FAI research, and the like?
maybe you should reframe your posts (or at least future ones) as being aimed at amateur philosophers, autodidacts, CS and math majors interested in doing FAI research, and the like?
Yes, this is my intention. I don't think I can reform how philosophy is taught at universities quickly enough to make a difference. My purpose, then, is to help "amateur philosophers, autodidacts, CS and math majors interested in doing FAI research" so that they can become better philosophical thinkers outside the university system, and avoid being mind-poisoned by a standard philosophical education.
I don't think I can reform how philosophy is taught at universities quickly enough to make a difference.
Quickly enough? You think you can do it all??
Nobody would get offended by this.
Isn't that one of those things like "they couldn't hit an elephant at this distance" which people traditionally say right before being horribly surprised?
Provocative article. I agree that philosophers should be reading Pearl and Kahneman. I even agree that philosophers should spend more time with Pearl and Kahneman (and lots of other contemporary thinkers) than they do with Plato and Kant. But then, that pretty much describes my own graduate training in philosophy. And it describes the graduate training (at a very different school) received by many of the students in the department where I now teach. I recognize that my experience may be unusual, but I wonder if philosophy and philosophical training really are the way you think they are.
Bearing in mind that my own experiences may be quite unusual, I present some musings on the article nonetheless:
(1) You seem to think that philosophical training involves a lot of Aristotelian ideas (see your entries for "pre-1980 theories of causation" and "term logic"). In my philosophical education, including as an undergraduate, I took two courses that were explicitly concerned with Aristotle. Both of them were explicitly labeled as "history of philosophy" courses. Students are sometimes taught bits of Aristotelian (and Medieval) syllogistic, but those ideas are neve...
But then, that pretty much describes my own graduate training in philosophy.
You did indeed have an unusual philosophical training. In fact, the head of your dissertation committee was a co-author with Glymour on the work that Pearl built on with Causality.
You seem to think that philosophical training involves a lot of Aristotelian ideas
Not really. Term logic is my only mention of Aristotle, and I know that philosophy departments focus on first-order logic and not term logic these days. Your training was not unusual in this matter. First-order logic training is good, which is why I said there should be more of it (as part of mathematical logic).
In my own philosophy education, I was told that conceptual analysis does not work and that with perhaps the exception of Tarski's analysis of logical consequence, there have been no successful conceptual analyses of philosophically interesting concepts.
Good, but this is not the norm. Machery was also on your dissertation committee; the author of Doing Without Concepts, a book I've previously endorsed to some degree.
1980 that is both closely engaged with contemporaneous science and amazingly useful to read
Of course. There are a ...
The head of your dissertation committee was a co-author with Glymour on the work that Pearl built on with Causality.
I was, in fact, aware of that. ;)
In the grand scheme of things, I may have had an odd education. However, it's not like I'm the only student that Glymour, Spirtes, Machery, and many of my other teachers have had. Basically every student who went through Pitt HPS or CMU's Philosophy Department had the same or deeper exposure to psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, causal Bayes nets, confirmation theory, etc. Either that, or they got an enormous helping of algebraic quantum field theory, gauge theory, and other philosophy of physics stuff.
You might argue that these are very unusual departments, and I am inclined to agree with you. But only weakly. If you look at Michigan or Rutgers, you find lots of people doing excellent work in decision theory, confirmation theory, philosophy of physics, philosophy of cognitive science, experimental philosophy, etc. A cluster of schools in the New York area -- all pretty highly ranked -- do the same things. So do schools in California, like Stanford, UC Irvine, and UCSD. My rough estimate is that 20-25% of all philosophical...
You might be right that I'm reading too much into what you've written. However, I suspect (especially given the other comments in this thread and the comments on the reddit thread) that the reading "Philosophy is overwhelmingly bad and should be killed with fire," is the one that readers are most likely to actually give to what you've written. I don't know whether there is a good way to both (a) make the points you want to make about improving philosophy education and (b) make the stronger reading unlikely.
I'm curious: if you couldn't have your whole mega-course (which seems more like the basis for a degree program than the basis for a single course, really), what one or two concrete course offerings would you want to see in every philosophy program? I ask because while I may not be able to change my whole department, I do have some freedom in which courses I teach and how I teach them. If you are planning to cover this in more detail in upcoming posts, feel free to ignore the question here.
Also, I did understand what you were up to with the Spirtes reference, I just thought it was funny. I tried to imagine what the world would have had to be like for me to have been surprised by finding out that Spirtes was the lead author on Causation, Prediction, and Search, and that made me smile.
Hinman, Fundamentals of Mathematical Logic
It's a graduate level text; to benefit from it adequately, one should have at least a pure math undergraduate major worth of training, including the first courses in naive set theory and formal logic. A text that's too advanced for one's level risks confusing the reader, introducing intuitive misconceptions and giving the illusion of understanding, so it's better to read up on something much more basic. This book might be a long term goal that contributes to shaping the curriculum, but then it should be understood that there are at least 20 books before it on the reading list.
Right; many of my selections presume prior training. I do think philosophy should be a Highly Advanced subject of study that requires lots of prior training in maths and the sciences, like string theory but hopefully more productive.
I agree that modern science provides valuable insights into philosophical problems. I also agree that Bayesian probability theory and machine learning are powerful models for approaching problems in epistemology. This is why I'm in grad school in machine learning, and not for philosophy. Furthermore, I'm not a big fan of ancient philosophers (especially ones who think categories are absolute), and I'd like to see the computational theory of mind excised from popular thought, in favor of something closer to embodied cognition. I actually really like the idea of incorporating modern theories and empirical discoveries into a philosophical curriculum.
Despite this, I have a strong negative reaction to your post, because it suggests there is One True Way to do philosophy and that everyone who does not follow the Ways of Bayes is doing it wrong. The last thing I want us teaching students is any kind of absolutism. It can only damage students to tell them that our current models are the true models, and all past thinkers were necessarily wrong. It would also damage students to restrict them to one philosophical viewpoint; as much as I like Bayesian reasoning and empiricism, I think ...
You are not supposed to teach them it's the One True Way, just that it's The Best Way Anyone Have Found So Far By A Fair Margin.
Without any comment on if the post is correct or not, I want to note that if the sequences have done their job LWers will not be pursuaded by this post. It looks at a large number of abstracts, picks a non representive (and small) sample and then quotes them to make them salient in the reader's mind.
It could have been made more convincing by using a less biased sampling such as generating 3 random numbers for each journal, than multiplying by the number of total articles in the journal and then posting the abstract for those articles.
Without any comment on if the post is correct or not, I want to note that if the sequences have done their job LWers will not be pursuaded by this post.
Hang on. Did you mean to say that the conclusion of this post is wrong? If the sequences did their job, then LWers should steelman the arguments, and be persuaded if-f the conclusion is correct, regardless of the arguments presented.
It's hard to steelman, for example, an incorrect proof of Fermat's Theorem in the way you describe.
Filling in the gaps in this post requires doing some research into the current state of philosophy. Some of the commenters are in fact trying to do just that. But it's much harder to lay an egg than to tell if one is rotten.
Let's add some data. Noûs is the second-highest rated general philosophy journal. Here are its 2012 articles, with abstracts/introductions:
...Dorsey. "Weak Anti-Rationalism and the Demands of Morality." The demandingness of act consequentialism (AC) is well-known and has received much sophisticated treatment. Few have been content to defend AC's demands. Much of the response has been to jettison AC in favor of a similar, though significantly less demanding view. [...] Given that AC requires agents to promote goodneess, and given that "goodness" here is most often construed as impartial and aggregative between persons, were I in a position to save others from death by sacrificing myself or my most important interests, I am morally required, on AC, to do so. More rare, however, is the suggestion that we should reconsider whether excessive demandingness is a true objection to any moral theory. [...] I argue here that the demandingness objection requires an unstated premise: the overriding rational authority of moral demands. I shall further argue that there is good reason to reject this premise.
Portmore. "Imperfect Reasons and Rational Options." Agents oft
Ok. This excerpt gives me a much higher opinion of the piece in question and substantially reduces the validity of my criticisms. Since this was the article that most strongly seemed to support the sort of point that Luke was making, I'm forced to update strongly against Luke's selected papers being at all representative.
I have a feeling I will have a lot to say about this posting, but I will start with one small issue: what is the watershed that occurred in metaphycs circa 1980? I'm pretty sure the Wikipedia article isn't going to tell me, because I wrote the "history and schools" section.
When you say things like "More machine learning, more physics, more game theory, more math", what I hear is, "more of anything that's not philosophy".
For example, Machine Learning alone is a topic whose understanding requires a semi-decent grounding in math, computer science, and practical programming. That's at least a year of study for someone with an IQ over 150, and probably something like three or four years for the rest of us. And that's just one topic; you list others as well. It sounds like you want us to just stop doing philosophy altogether, and stick to the more useful stuff.
Imagine people who are trying to write books, without knowing the alphabet. They keep trying for ages, but produce nothing that other person could unambiguously read.
So someone comes and says: "You should learn alphabet first."
And they respond: "We are interested in writing books, not learning alphabet. The more time we spend learning alphabet, the less time we will have for actually writing books. We desire to become writers, not linguists." (Famous writers are high status, linguistics is considered boring by most.)
Similarly it seems to me that many philosophers are too busy discussing deep topics about the world, so they don't have time to actually study the world. To be fair, they do study a lot -- but mostly the opinions of people who used the same strategy, decades and centuries ago. Knowing Plato's opinions on X is higher status than knowing X.
This would be acceptable in situations where science does not know anything about X, so the expert's opinion is the best we can have. But in many topics this simply isn't true. Learning what we already know about X is the cost of ability to say something new and correct about X. The costs are higher than 2000 years a...
Yeah, it sucks that you can't do good philosophy without knowing a ton of other stuff, but that's life. We don't listen to electrical engineers when they complain about needing to know nitty-gritty calculus, and that's a year of study for someone with an IQ over 150. Sometimes fields have prerequisites.
And we independently observe that almost no one can do good philosophy at all, so the theory checks out.
Nothing better than a hypothesis that makes correct empirical predictions!
If that is true, then virtually no one can do good philosophy at all, because absorbing all the prerequisites will take a large portion of most people's lifetimes.
It doesn't really take that long to learn things. But good philosophy already looks like this - my favorite political philosophy professor threw out references to computing, physics, history, etc. assuming students would get the references or look them up. Much like pride is the crown of the virtues, philosophy should be the crown of the sciences.
Philosophical training should begin with the latest and greatest formal methods....and the latest and greatest science
We certainly don't start science students off with the latest and greatest science, because there's a boatload of other science they have to study before it'll do them any good. In practice,almost everything we teach undergrads in hard science fields is pre-1980, because of the amount of time it takes to get a student up to speed with where the frontier of the field had progressed to by 1980.
Point, but:
1) The science that lukeprog is concerned with comes from subfields that are substantially younger than most major fields in the hard sciences, e.g. the heuristics and biases program is much younger than Newtonian mechanics.
2) Old hard science at least has the benefit of working within a certain domain, e.g. Newtonian mechanics is valuable because it is still applicable to macroscopic objects moving slowly, and any future theory of physics is constrained by having to reduce to Newtonian mechanics in certain limits. The older results in the science that lukeprog is concerned with are misleading at best and dangerously wrong at worst.
In other words, I think what lukeprog is advocating is less analogous to teaching undergraduates about string theory before Newtonian mechanics now and more analogous to teaching undergraduates about thermodynamics before phlogiston theory in the 1800s (edit: and I see JoshuaZ made this point already).
So if I had to design an intro to philosophy/first-year philosophy course (and I will), at the moment I would do this:
There are four ideas in philosophy which stand above the others as ideas which have shaped our thinking and our civilization to the point where you've probably heard of these before you came to class: Plato's theory of forms, Aristotle's theory of causes, Descartes' 'Cogito ergo sum', and Kant's categorical imperative. The aim of this course is to understand what philosophy is, and why one should engage in it.
The course will discuss the writings of these four philosophers:
Plato- Selections from Plato's Republic and Phaedo
Aristotle- Physics book I and II, and III.1, and De Anima II.1, 5.
Descartes- The Meditations
Kant- Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
That's my thought. I'm a frequent reader, and sometimes poster on Less Wrong. I'm also going to be teaching undergraduates philosophy in about two years, and right now my idea of how to go about doing this is very different from yours. I very much do not want to do a bad job, or hurt my students, so if I'm wrong, I should be convinced otherwise.
Maybe it wasn't your purpose, but there's no argument in this post. Please, please, please present an argument. You (or whoever wants to try) would be doing me a very great benefit by correcting me on this, if indeed I am wrong.
I think you need to focus in on what your goals are. Lukeprog's idea of an intro to philosophy class sounds like a boot camp for aspiring professional philosopher-kings and intellectual revolutionaries. Yours sounds like a historical overview of the effects of a scattered set of ideological trends upon human culture. There isn't any clear unifying content of your imagined course, as there would be if you focused, say, just on game-changing epistemological texts (like the much more engaging and well-written Berkeley in lieu of Aristotle) or just on game-changing meta-ethical ones.
On the other hand, if your goal is to make students think critically and rigorously about very deep issues, not just to expand their historical horizons, then you may want to choose more accessible secondary literature. John Perry's A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality is a superb candidate; a short, accessible dialogue packed with arguments much clearer and more human than those you'd find in a Platonic dialogue.
I think the most important thing an introductory philosophy class can do is to taboo philosophy. Ask instead: What can I get away with teaching a bunch of undergraduates under the umbrella term 'philosophy' that will be most useful to human beings (or specifically to the sorts of human beings who are likely to study 'philosophy'), and that they are least likely to acquire by other means? Your goal shouldn't be to make them understand what people tend to classify as 'philosophy' vs. 'non-philosophy;' it should be to maximize their ability to save the world and live fulfilling lives. I don't think reading Berkeley need be unhelpful for saving the world; but it all really comes down to how you read Berkeley.
That's a very large question, and my answer will depend on where you're coming from and where you want to take this discussion. You probably have your own intuitive conception of where, in some general terms, you'd like the world to go. 'Philosophy' is a largely artificial, arbitrary, and unhelpful schema, and you owe it no fealty. So my main goal was not to persuade you to adopt my own vision of a happier and more rational world. It was to motivate you to reframe what teaching a 'philosophy' class is in a way that makes you more likely to exploit this opportunity to move the world infinitesimally closer to your own vision for the world.
If I were teaching an Intro to Philosophy class, I might break it down as follows:
Part 1: Destroy students' complacence. Spend a few weeks methodically annihilating students' barriers, prejudices, thought-terminating clichés, and safety nets. Don't frame the discussion as 'philosophy.' Frame it as follows:
"OK, we're trying to understand the world, and get what we want out of life. And we can't just rely on authorities, common sense, or usual practice; those predictably fail. So we'll need to reason our way to understanding the world. But our re...
10 weeks is pretty short! Sounds like a good challenge. I was assuming 16 weeks while trying to lay out a simple curriculum last night, and I got the following structure:
I. The Problem of Doubt
- Week 1: What are we doing here?
- Week 2: Case studies in ignorance and error
- Week 3: Case studies in irrationality and arbitrariness
- Week 4: Evaluating arguments
- Week 5: Descartes and certainty
- Week 6: Reasoning with uncertainty
II. The Problem of Death
- Week 7: Test case: The immortality of the soul
- Week 8: How to want to change your mind
- Week 9: Test case: The self
- Week 10: Learning how to learn things
III. The Problem of Life
- Week 11: Vagueness, ambiguity, and semantics
- Week 12: Meta-ethical confusions
- Week 13: Rationality and decision theory
- Week 14: Existentialism, nihilism, and pragmatism
- Week 15: "Know thyself" and discovering your values
- Week 16: Saving the world
Minor nitpick:
Those aren't the world's top 5 philosophy departments, those are the top 5 for the United States. In the rankings for the English-speaking world, Oxford is #2 after NYU (after that the rankings are the same until you get down to ANU and Toronto, which are tied with a bunch of other schools for #15).
Furthermore, the Philosophical Gourmet Report doesn't try to compare English-speaking and non-English-speaking universities.
Playing Devil's Advocate...
As Eliezer has argued, it would be greatly beneficial if science were kept secret. It would be wonderful if students had the opportunity to make scientific discoveries on their own, and being trained to think that way would greatly advance the rate of scientific progress. Making a scientific breakthrough would be something a practicing scientist would be used to, rather than something that happens once a generation, and so it would happen more reliably. Rather than having science textbooks, students could start with old (wrong) science textbooks or just looking at the world, and they'd have to make all their own mistakes along the way to see what making a breakthrough really involves.
This is how Philosophy is already taught! While many philosophers have opinions on what Philosophical questions have already been settled, they do not put forth their opinions straightforwardly to undergrads. Rather, students are expected to read the original works and figure out for themselves what's wrong with them.
For example, students might learn about the debate between Realism and Nominalism, and then be expected to write a paper about which one they think is corre...
It would be wonderful if students had the opportunity to make scientific discoveries on their own, and being trained to think that way would greatly advance the rate of scientific progress.
While a nice idea, it's hardly workable. There are roughly two types of science consumers: researchers and users. The users do not care what's under the hood, they just need working tools. Engineering is an example. Making them discover the Newton's laws instead of teaching how to apply them to design stable bridges is a waste of time. Researchers build new tools and so have to understand how and why the existing tools work. This is a time-consuming process as it is (20+ years if you count all education levels including grad studies). Making people stumble through all the standard dead ends, while instructive, will likely make it so much longer. The current compromise is teaching some history of science while teaching science proper.
This is how Philosophy is already taught!
Indeed. And look where it led. The whole discipline appears largely useless to the outsiders, who hardly care what misinformed opinion some genius held 1000 years ago.
r/philosophy is not amused by this:
http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/14e815/train_philosophers_with_pearl_and_kahneman_not/
As a philosophy student with a great interest in math and computing, I can definitely attest to the lack of scientific understanding in my department. Worse, it often seems like some professors actively encourage an anti-scientific ideology. I'm wondering if anybody has any practical ideas on how to converse with students and professors [who are not supportive or knowledgeable of the rationalist and Bayesian world-view] in a positive and engaging way.
The things on your curriculum don't seem like philosophy at all in the contemporary sense of the word. They are certainly very valuable at figuring out the answers to concrete questions within their particular domains. But they are less useful for understanding broader questions about the domains themselves or the appropriateness of the questions. Learning formal logic, for example, isn't that much help in understanding what logic is. Likewise, knowing how people make moral decisions is not at all the same as knowing what the moral thing to do would be. I gather your point is that it's only certain concrete questions that have any real meaning.
This naive logical positivism is dismaying in a blog about rationality. I certainly agree that there is plenty of garbage philosophy, and that most of Aristotle's scientific claims were wrong. But the problem with logical positivism is that its claim about what's meaningful and what isn't fails to be a meaningful claim under its own criteria.
Your dismissal of certain types of philosophy inevitably rests on particular implicit answers to the kinds of philosophical questions you dismiss as worthless (like what makes a philosophical idea wrong?). Dismissing those questions—failing to think through the assumptions on which your viewpoint rests—only guarantees that your answers to those questions will be pretty bad. And that's something that you could learn from a careful reading of Plato.
Learning formal logic, for example, isn't that much help in understanding what logic is.
It certainly doesn't hurt! Learning formal logic gives you data with which to test meta-logical theories. Moreover, learning formal logic helps in understanding everything; and logic is one of the things, so, there ya go. Instantiate at will.
Likewise, knowing how people make moral decisions is not at all the same as knowing what the moral thing to do would be.
Sure. But for practical purposes (and yes, there are practical philosophical purposes), you can't be successful in either goal without some measure of success in both.
I gather your point is that it's only certain concrete questions that have any real meaning.
Where does lukeprog say that? And by 'meaning' do you mean importance, or do you mean semantic content?
But the problem with logical positivism is that its claim about what's meaningful and what isn't fails to be a meaningful claim under its own criteria.
Lukeprog and Eliezer are not logical positivists in the relevant sense. And although logical positivism is silly, it's not silly for obvious reasons like 'it's self-refuting;' it isn't self-refuting. The methodology of log...
The things on your curriculum don't seem like philosophy at all in the contemporary sense of the word.
Reforming phil. and leaving it alone are not the only options. There is also the option of setting up a new cross-disciplinary subject parallel to Cognitive Science
Your examples of bad philosophy ... your reasons why they are bad ... aargh! Apparently it's bad to (1) reason about psychology (2) use the ideas of ancient philosophers (3) argue about definitions (4) mention religion at all. (I'm just guessing that this is the problem with the last item in the list.)
So far as I can see, the only problem you should have with papers 1 and 3 is that they're not sexy enough to hold your interest. They're not bursting at the seams with citations of experimental psychology or computational epistemology. Really, you shouldn't dismiss paper 2 as you do either, but I concede that seeing value in the psychological reflections of antiquity would require unusual broadmindedness. (Paper 4 is just oddball and I won't try to defend it as a representative of an important and unjustly maligned class of philosophical research.)
Concerning your curriculum for philosophy students, well, such zeal as yours is the basis for the renewal of a subject, but in the end I still think something like Plato and Kant would be a better foundation than Pearl and Kahneman. Causal diagrams and behavioral economics do not touch the why of causation or the how of conscious knowledge. If they were not complemented by something that promoted an awareness of the issues that these formalisms inherently do not answer, then philosophically they would define just another dogma parading itself as truth.
something like Plato and Kant would be a better foundation than Pearl and Kahneman. Causal diagrams and behavioral economics do not touch the why of causation or the how of conscious knowledge.
Please help me compare: what useful things does Plato say about the why of causation, and why should I believe him? How can I use Plato's knowledge about causality to achieve things in the real world (except for impressing people by quoting him)?
This seems to be more indicative that if one thinks hard enough about any world view it will seem to be useful and make sense. This is essentially as much of an argument to take Aristotle seriously as C. S. Lewis's claim that "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." is an argument to take Christianity seriously.
This doesn't answer the question or even the type of question as phrased by Viliam. The claim isn't that you can use a systematic approach to make your own thoughts ordered in some fashion, but how to make the claims pay rent.
I think you'd have an easier time justifying the thesis 'Kant was wrong about everything' than 'Kant was not super-super-crazy-influential.' Consider:
Kant ⇒ Schopenhauer ⇒ Nietzsche ⇒ all the postmodernists and relativists
Kant ⇒ Schopenhauer ⇒ Wittgenstein ⇒ most of the positivists
Kant ⇒ Schopenhauer ⇒ Nietzsche ⇒ Freud
Kant ⇒ Fichte ⇒ Hegel ⇒ Marx
Kant ⇒ von Mises ⇒ the less fun libertarians
My conclusion, by Six-Degrees-of-Hitler/Stalin/RonPaul ratiocination, is that Kant is directly and personally responsible for every atrocity of the 20th century.
Below this line is the part I cut from the original article.
Below are some quotes from the abstracts of recent papers appearing in the top 5 philosophy journals, along with my reactions.
Abstract #1:
Theoretical and practical deliberation are voluntary activities, and like all voluntary activities, they are performed for reasons. To hold that all voluntary activities are performed for reasons in virtue of their relations to past, present, or even merely possible acts of deliberation thus leads to infinite regresses and related problems. As a consequence, there must be processes that are nondeliberative and nonvoluntary but that nonetheless allow us to think and act for reasons, and these processes must be the ones that generate the voluntary activities making up ordinary deliberation... (Deliberation and Acting for Reasons)
What are you doing? We have experimental psychology now.
Abstract #2:
This article examines Aristotle's model of deliberation as inquiry (zêtêsis), arguing that Aristotle does not treat the presumption of open alternatives as a precondition for rational deliberation... (Deliberation as Inquiry)
Please move to the history department. Philosophy is supposed to be ...
This post has a number of useful insights, but I'm not so sure about this:
Beginning with Plato and Kant (and company), as most universities do today, . . . teaches people to revere failed philosophical methods that are out of touch with 20th century breakthroughs in math and science.
As someone who is currently studying philosophy at the undergraduate level--and thus has first-hand knowledge of what it is like to start with Plato and Kant--I don't quite see where you're getting the claim that starting with ancient philosophers either (1) in fact teaches students to revere them/their methods, or (2) is at least meant to teach students to revere them/their methods. My own experience, what I've heard from fellow students, and the academic papers that we are actually assigned to read all run counter to your claim.
First, one of the primary, if not the main, purposes in starting with ancient philosophers is precisely to discuss how and where they went wrong. The professor does not just tell us whether a certain philosopher is right/wrong, but has the students critically evaluate that philosopher's claims both in papers and in discussions. Second, there are numerous academic articles...
So I have a couple of problems with this post.
Firstly, I think that luke simply has a very different idea of what philosophy ought to be doing compared to most philosophers. For example, most philosophers think that doing a fair amount of what is (more or less explicitly) History of Philosophy is a) of independent interest b) useful for training new philosophers and c) potentially fruitful.
I'm not terribly convinced by a), I have some sympathy with b) (many classic philosophers are surprisingly convincing and it's worth taking the time to figure out why they're wrong), and I strongly disagree with c) (if they had good insights, there should be better presentations of them by now!). I think the disagreement about a) is the most important, however, as it indicates a simple difference in what people are trying to do with philosophy.
On that ground it just seems childish of luke to criticise Article #2 on the grounds that it's really history: of course it is, that's part of what philosophy departments do. So luke wants to change the way philosophy tends to be done, fine, but it's churlish to assume that that's the way things already are and that the current practitioners are just bad a...
I am curious about the qualifier "pre-1980." Do you think later work in these disciplines is noticeably better?
Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
I've complained before that philosophy is a diseased discipline which spends far too much of its time debating definitions, ignoring relevant scientific results, and endlessly re-interpreting old dead guys who didn't know the slightest bit of 20th century science. Is that still the case?
You bet. There's some good philosophy out there, but much of it is bad enough to make CMU philosopher Clark Glymour suggest that on tight university budgets, philosophy departments could be defunded unless their work is useful to (cited by) scientists and engineers — just as his own work on causal Bayes nets is now widely used in artificial intelligence and other fields.
How did philosophy get this way? Russell's hypothesis is not too shabby. Check the syllabi of the undergraduate "intro to philosophy" classes at the world's top 5 U.S. philosophy departments — NYU, Rutgers, Princeton, Michigan Ann Arbor, and Harvard — and you'll find that they spend a lot of time with (1) old dead guys who were wrong about almost everything because they knew nothing of modern logic, probability theory, or science, and with (2) 20th century philosophers who were way too enamored with cogsci-ignorant armchair philosophy. (I say more about the reasons for philosophy's degenerate state here.)
As the CEO of a philosophy/math/compsci research institute, I think many philosophical problems are important. But the field of philosophy doesn't seem to be very good at answering them. What can we do?
Why, come up with better philosophical methods, of course!
Scientific methods have improved over time, and so can philosophical methods. Here is the first of my recommendations...
More Pearl and Kahneman, less Plato and Kant
Philosophical training should begin with the latest and greatest formal methods ("Pearl" for the probabilistic graphical models made famous in Pearl 1988), and the latest and greatest science ("Kahneman" for the science of human reasoning reviewed in Kahneman 2011). Beginning with Plato and Kant (and company), as most universities do today, both (1) filters for inexact thinkers, as Russell suggested, and (2) teaches people to have too much respect for failed philosophical methods that are out of touch with 20th century breakthroughs in math and science.
So, I recommend we teach young philosophy students:
(In other words: train philosophy students like they do at CMU, but even "more so.")
So, my own "intro to philosophy" mega-course might be guided by the following core readings:
(There are many prerequisites to these, of course. I think philosophy should be a Highly Advanced subject of study that requires lots of prior training in maths and the sciences, like string theory but hopefully more productive.)
Once students are equipped with some of the latest math and science, then let them tackle The Big Questions. I bet they'd get farther than those raised on Plato and Kant instead.
You might also let them read 20th century analytic philosophy at that point — hopefully their training will have inoculated them from picking up bad thinking habits.
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