16 ms·

What, exactly, do philosophers do?

112 points by diodorus 9y ago

tw1010 9y ago
Philosophy is not like software engineering. There's a lot more reading that needs to be done before you can make a contribution. A lot of it progresses by just reading the works of the established masters, getting ideas, and publishing your thoughts about what they had to say. You don't start from scratch. You build on what is already there. Addition by addition the field progresses and removes bad ideas or clarifies good ideas and long-term that mountain of work has gotten us from plato to the rich field it is today.
- pishpash 9y ago
  What is the state of the art in today's philosophy? What's the latest truly novel idea?
  - stevenmays 9y ago
    Maybe Kripke? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Kripke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Kripke
    - keeler 9y ago
      Kripke is a good start. So is work by Jerry Fodor.
      - voidhorse 9y ago
        As these folks have said, Kripke and Fodor are not bad entry points for analytic philosophy if recency is your only concern--they might be hard to digest or understand properly however, as they are working with very specific problems and drawing on knowledge with a particular history to it. David Chalmers is good for philosophy of mind on the more analytic side. Quine is also important. So is Searle. Scott Soames' two volume work on the history of analytical philosophy is a great introduction to that side of the field and will get you up to speed with the the trajectory the led to what contemporary voices in the domain are grappling with now: https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Analysis-Twentieth-Century-Dawn/dp/069112244X https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Analysis-Twentieth-Cent... But that's just one side of philosophical thought, continental philosophy is very important as well. A good historical sketch of that milieu can be found in Delacampgne: https://www.amazon.com/History-Philosophy-Twentieth-Century/dp/0801868149/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1505757829&sr=8-4&keywords=delacampagne https://www.amazon.com/History-Philosophy-Twentieth-Century/... Some important recent voices from the continental side are probably Foucault, Zizek, Slotterdjik, Gadamer, Habermas, the Frankfurt School. Finally you could just ignore everything prior and read Wittgenstein. Personally, if we're talking GIANTS among the Giants the list goes something like: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Wittgenstein. (I am of course, limiting myself to Western thought). As with any field there are plenty of voices who have contributed a legion of ideas with varying amounts of success, but I'd say those names are the heaviest hitters. Wittgenstein is arguably still the most recent philosopher to have affected a paradigm shift. (though I think one could make a fairly convincing argument for including Foucault in those ranks as well). Philosophy in general is a very interesting field because it often benefits from discoveries in other disciplines, in addition to having often motivated/been the birthchamber of said disciplines (see for instance, the often symbiotic relationship between linguistics and the philosophy of language).
        mcguire 9y ago
        Sartre? And how could any such list leave out von Hartmann? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Robert_Eduard_von_Hartmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Robert_Eduard_von_Hartman... http://www.iep.utm.edu/hartmann/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/hartmann/ https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/selections/eduard-von-hartmann/ https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/selections/eduard-von-h...
        keeler 9y ago
        Hartmann is certainly not a giant on anyone's list. Even if you were to compare him to some of the "lesser" giants, such as Berkeley, Schopenhauer, or even Thomas Reid, it's not even close.
        mcguire 9y ago
        Aw, c'mon. He's single-handedly arguing the negative image of Mahāyāna Buddhism.
        voidhorse 9y ago
        I thank you for bringing Hartmann up, as I hadn't looked into his work and this is a reminder to do so. But anyway, I wouldn't include him for the same reason I wouldn't include Pierce, James, and some other american pragmatists, or more enigmatic figures such as Cioran and Bataille--namely because while my personal perspective on their thought is that it's excellent and deserves serious consideration, and they are some of my favorite philosophers to read, their work hasn't had as great a historical impact on the world stage as these other major figures.
        Ngunyan 9y ago
        >Personally, if we're talking GIANTS among the Giants the list goes something like: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Wittgenstein. (I am of course, limiting myself to Western thought). I would drop Sartre and add Heidegger instead in that list. And I favor Suarez over Aquinas.
  - mbrock 9y ago
    I'm not really the right person to answer, but some recent philosophy that's been influential to my thinking, and also to a lot of people in the humanities and art, is the "object-oriented ontology" as put forth by people like Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost (whose main object of investigation has been video games) and others. For something more obviously relevant to this crowd, you could look at the work of Hubert Dreyfus, a Heidegger scholar whose insights into the limits of viewing intelligence as symbolic cognition has actually been influential in the history of AI. It's not super recent, but maybe it takes some time for philosophy to become intelligible; when it is really interesting, it also probably seems weird when it's fresh. A few references for Dreyfus: 1. His recent paper "Why Heideggerian AI failed and how fixing it would Require making it more Heideggerian"; a quote below. http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf "As I studied the RAND papers and memos, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, the pioneers in CS had learned a lot, directly and indirectly from the philosophers. They had taken over Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a “universal characteristic”—a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed,—Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Russell’s postulation of logical atoms as the building blocks of reality. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program. At the same time, I began to suspect that the critical insights formulated in existentialist armchairs, especially Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s, were bad news for those working in AI laboratories– that, by combining rationalism, representationalism, conceptualism, formalism, and logical atomism into a research program, AI researchers had condemned their enterprise to reenact a failure." 2. David Chapman's curious autobiographical book review of a somewhat hokey book on "integral philosophy", that goes into his own story at MIT's AI lab and his encounter with Dreyfus's critique; quote below. https://meaningness.com/metablog/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artificial-intelligence https://meaningness.com/metablog/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artif... "In 1987, we wrote a computer program called Pengi that illustrated some of what we had learned from Dreyfus, Heidegger, and the Continental philosophical tradition. Pengi participated in a life-world. It did not have to mentally represent and reason about its circumstances, because it was embedded in them, causally coupled with them in a purposive dance. Its skill came from spontaneous improvisation, not strategic planning. Its apparently intelligent activity derived from interactive dynamics that—continually involving both its self and others—were neither subjective nor objective. Pengi was a triumph: it could do things that the old paradigm clearly couldn’t, and (although quite crude) seemed to point to a wide-open new paradigm for further research. AI was unstuck again! And, in fact, Pengi was highly influential for a few years." 3. Dreyfus's book about his reading of Heidegger, called Being-in-the-world, and if one wishes, a recent movie of the same name. Here is one of my many highlighted passages from the book, which is flattering to computer scientists, but also might make you wonder if there is any philosophy that is critiquing current AI research in a way that will seem prescient years down the road: "Having to program computers keeps one honest. There is no room for the armchair rationalist's speculations. Thus AI research has called the Cartesian cognitivist's bluff. It is easy to say that to account for the equipmental nexus one need simply add more and more function predicates and rules describing what is to be done in typical situations, but actual difficulties in AI—its inability to make progress with what is called the commonsense knowledge problem, on the one hand, and its inability to define the current situation, sometimes called the frame problem, on the other—suggest that Heidegger is right. It looks like one cannot build up the phenomenon of world out of meaningless elements."
  - supernumerary 9y ago
    I have been enjoying Bernard Stiegler(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler). Some writing that would be HN centric here: https://iainmait.land/posts/20170418-algorithmic-governmentality.html https://iainmait.land/posts/20170418-algorithmic-governmenta...
  - mcguire 9y ago
    That is, I think, the wrong question. Or rather, the wrong approach to take.[1] Philosophy is not that kind of human endeavor. There is no "state of the art"; instead, Plato is as state-of-the-art as he ever was[2][3] and every publishing philosopher has novel ideas (or at least hopes they do, although they might also like to learn that some ancient sage has expressed support for their notions). My personal way of viewing philosophy is as a conversation. A philosopher starts by finding other statements that they like or don't like. Then, they add their own thoughts, modifying previous ideas or attacking or supporting them, all with the best arguments they can muster. From all this, you, as an innocent bystander, can pick out the threads that best let you sleep well at night. [1] And if I've ever written a more philosophical paragraph, I don't know what it is. I wish to submit it to the Faculty of the College of Liberal Arts, blah, blah, blah. [2] I'm sure I'll be vigorously attacked by analytic philosophers at this point. There are very much schools who would like philosophy to be more akin to the sciences or (even better) mathematics (but without all the icky evidence and formal proofs and such). But then, the only particular sympathy I've had for analytic philosophy I've recently discovered due to an interest in Daoist philosophy. [3] Except for Epicurus. He seems to have won on some topics---his physics; if you're a materialist, you're Epicurean even if you don't already know it---and everything else seems to have been misplaced. Which is the interesting part, dang it.
    - azeirah 9y ago
      Isn't it so that whenever something within philosophy becomes state of the art, it stops being philosophy?
      - mcguire 9y ago
        As far as I know, the only way a question stops being philosophy is by someone thinking up a way to definitively answer it.
  - essive 9y ago
    Agreed that 'state of the art' is the wrong question - but, it is worth watching David Chalmers challenge progress in philosophy (bear with the first 20 minutes or so - it gets better). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUfz6oahp2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUfz6oahp2Q
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    I've fallen out of touch, but if you want fairly recent, Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfitt is good and is more modern stuff dealing with things that are soon to be very important (what is a person). He died recently which prompted me to get his On What Matters which has good reviews, but hasn't reached the top of my pile yet. My view is that philosophy is rather slow moving and gestates with societal changes rather than big thinking leaps. And I tend to agree with pg that philosophy went wrong a long time ago and descended into a war of definitions: http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
  - fmap 9y ago
    Martin Löf's lectures on type theory are pretty much the clearest explanation of modern mathematical logic that you'll find anywhere. Some of the technical results turned out to be false, or at least needed more work, but the analysis of inductive definitions and equality is and was groundbreaking. Since this is more mathematics than philosophy, the latest truly novel idea is also a few months old instead of a few decades. You really just have to start somewhere and work your way forward. :)
- yters 9y ago
  If philosophy is reasoning in its purest form, why so much reference to other work? Shouldn't it be like math where we logically conclude something and it is true regardless of what others think? If not, then it seems a less pure form of reasoning than math.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
    Because there is a good chance that whatever you want to say has already been said by at least a few other people and been refuted counter-argued or otherwise discussed. If you are not aware of all that accompanying discussion, you are likely to think you have come up with something profound when you actually haven't. This is why r/im14andthisisdeep/ is a thing. A lot of teens think they have an insight despite the fact that what they thought is neither profound nor novel. Also, a lot of philosophical reading helps set up frameworks or theoretical scaffolding that can serve as a layer of abstraction that you can build upon instead of everyone rediscovering the same ground principles.
    - duncanawoods 9y ago
      All true but I feel as currently taught it is hamstrung as a "historical study of great men / literary study of original sources" instead of teaching the key ideas distilled into the the most efficient and practical form. High school physicists are not ploughing through Principia Mathematica, instead they learn the laws of motion and move on. Physicists pretty much leave behind the original sources until you are at the bleeding edge. Why can't philosophy?
      - lg 9y ago
        because philosophical papers can stay 'at the bleeding edge' (under active debate) for a really, really long time.
      - kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
        Classical mechanics is 'done and dusted'. Aristotle or Plato are not. They can still be discussed and actively debated about today.
- amit_m 9y ago
  In the mathematical sciences, working on old problems using classical tools is typically considered career suicide. I can only imagine how depressing it must be to do academic research on age-old philosophical questions - an endless literature survey, at the end of which there is no light, because even if you "solve" the problem, many others will not find your solution satisfactory.
- mcguire 9y ago
  Could you provide a few examples of bad ideas that have been removed?
  - duncanawoods 9y ago
    If you read original sources you find a lot of weird nonsense that is quietly skipped over these days e.g. mystical numerology in Plato's republic, Aristotle's incendiary views on women and slaves etc.
- erikbye 9y ago
  Except for the reading part that's exactly like software engineering. Since when does a software engineer ever start from scratch? We all build on top of what was before. As for "the field does progress and removes bad ideas or clarifies good ideas", that's best practices. That's new and better programming languages and libraries. Better operating systems. And "that mountain of work" has gotten us from punch cards to the Internet.
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    One very large difference is the fact that software engineers can hit "run" at the end of the day, and will quickly find out whether or not their thing works. It's much harder to assess the quality of ideas in philosophy.
- hdhzy 9y ago
  Haha, the description sounds exactly like software engineering. Let me deconstruct: > There's a lot more reading that needs to be done before you can make a contribution. Just like software engineering unless you count Hello Worlds as contributions. But even then one can do simple things like that in philosophy. > A lot of it progresses by just reading the works of the established masters, getting ideas, and publishing your thoughts about what they had to say. Sounds like reading white papers and RFCs to me. > You don't start from scratch. You build on what is already there. The same. Just check how much transpilers and leftpad like libraries a JS Hello World app needs! And so on...
  - sametmax 9y ago
    Exactly. Except with engineering you can actually test if your idea works in practice.
vander_elst 9y ago
I know I going to get downvoted but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgoB2JMEowc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgoB2JMEowc
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Not by me - I read a lot of philosophy, and bullshit arguments are a problem. Not unlike programming, sometimes people get lost in trying to perfect their chosen framework or language without regard to its utility. Think of Brainfuck, which is technically very interesting because of its extreme simplicity while still being Turing-complete, but which would be a terrible choice for most practical problems. Having said that... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8
ue_ 9y ago
The article starts with a question which asks about the present very clearly, but then answers a different question of what philosophers did (i.e the past) without any reference to modern philosophers. Modern philosophers analyse older philosophical work and reply to contemporaries; for example there is an ongoing debate about the difference between "letting die" and "killing", and if it is an ethical difference then what significance it holds. Other philosophy seeks to blend together with sociology and psychology to analyse our current life (for example, the work of Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School), for example to ask what is capitalism and to what extent it is desirable. Some other philosophy works with economics to examine classical and modern ideas of the value of commodoties and its ontology. Some philosophers concern themselves with the ethics of killing and eating animals and by extension humans. Other philosophy works through linguistics to formulate theories of what we mean when we speak and the limits of language to describe reality. And other philosophy involves itself with natural science to formulate theories of causation and being. Yet other philosophy does other things. It's a broad field, and with advances in all related fields it's become a lot broader than it was since the enlightenment, even considering how natural science is no longer considered a philosophy.
- euyyn 9y ago
  I see the importance of exploring those questions, for they pertain to current movements and political issues, like veganism or euthanasia. So (from my position of now knowing the work of any modern philosopher) have such philosophical explorations, in the past decades or century, produced answers? In the sense that, have they made a change in the way these important issues developed? What are the biggest ways they have affected other fields?
  - krrishd 9y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted, I'd like to see an answer to this as well. I'd suspect that they've provided quite a few important answers but I'm curious how much power/influence these ideas had in their times.
    - ue_ 9y ago
siculars 9y ago
Warn of the ever present existential threat, smoke, drink and seduce undergrads. ;)
- koolba 9y ago
  That doesn't sound any different than me studying CS.
  - deleted 9y ago
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- deleted 9y ago
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yarrel 9y ago
1. Spend an awful lot of time chasing tenure. 2. Spend an awful lot of time trolling each other on Facebook. 3. Occasionally rehash old ideas. 4. Even more occasionally come up with breathtaking insights into the nature of reality and what it means to be human. 5. Get annoyed if you point out any flaws in those insights. 6. Publish more than they used to.
- Diederich 9y ago
  > 2. Spend an awful lot of time trolling each other on Facebook. I think I would very much enjoy seeing some citations of this. (:
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    https://www.facebook.com/wouldprefernot/ https://www.facebook.com/wouldprefernot/
  - spiffyman 9y ago
    I'm friends with several philosophers since I took it fairly seriously in undergrad and befriended several grad students. From my perspective, the "trolling" is generally just pointing out interesting entailments of another philosopher's arguments. For example, in a recent thread philosopher X outlined philosopher Y's argument just to point out that he hopes it shows the "weird consequences" of the basis of Y's argument. Y showed up to point out that X had missed a key wrinkle. A bunch of others showed up to wrangle about the meaning of certain words. ... So basically the same thing philosophers do in their papers, just with fewer citations. (That's not me throwing shade -- just pointing out how the field seems to work. I loved and still love philosophy.)
- jff 9y ago
  You forgot to include "Endlessly write justifications of how important philosophy is" and "Misunderstand the abstracts of scientific papers, then write essays based on those misunderstandings"
  - ewjordan 9y ago
Koshkin 9y ago
It looks like philosophy is several different things: an "umbrella" term for any subject that is still in a "pre-science" state and has not matured enough to acquire a name of its own; a part of the name that stuck for purely historical reasons, as in "philosophy of mathematics"; a collection of miscellaneous (named) subjects, some of which are "science", while others are not (yet); a world-view (including cases when it is driven by a political agenda).
mcguire 9y ago
Construct elaborate logical edifices on their previously existing, unreasoned prejudices? (At the risk of having them take away my Junior Philosophers' Secret Decoder Ring.)
room271 9y ago
There are a few different areas of philosophy and it's useful to separate them out: 1) Logic (this is useful and also can be called maths) 2) Political Philosophy / Political Theory (crosses over with politics/history, again useful) 3) Ethics (useful and important but not necessarily worth academic study) 4) History of Philosophy (this is really the history of thought and useful and interesting. A lot of philosophy is really this) but unfortunately it blurs into attempting new thought 5) epistemology (useless, science is the better path) Source: I studied philosophy. It's important to remember that early philosophers tended to also be mathematicians and scientists.
OneTimePoster 9y ago
Philosophy discovers unknown relationships. Math categorizes relationships. Science tests relationships. Engineering exploits relationships. Remove any one of these and the whole damned process stops.
dvt 9y ago
Always warms my heart to see philosophy on top of HN. Philosophy is hard -- much harder than one would think. And people that contribute are incredibly smart -- far smarter than software engineers, by comparison. On the other hand, it's very political, and a lot of it is mental masturbation. Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field. Philosophy of Mind, apart from a few great minds (Chalmers, Nagel) is also equivocal. I went into undergrad with a primary focus on (meta-)logic[1] and I was taught by some of the world's premiere logicians (David Kaplan, Sam Cumming, a few others). But I fell in love with ethics -- a subject I'd never thought I'd enjoy as much as I did. I loved reading Moore, Foote, Anscombe, Geach. My best memories were attending graduate seminars -- studying the philosophy of language and trying to figure out how logical connectives work in regular discourse, or studying abduction and trying to stitch together Horn clauses that seem to point to one conclusion rather than another. Philosophers, in short, do all kinds of things: from pushing the boundaries of exotic logics, to solving ethical problems, to systematizing natural language or understanding the metaphysics of causality. The article just touches on all of the above (in fact, it doesn't discuss modern philosophy at all). If you're interested in philosophy, the SEP[2] is a great resource. [1] https://dvt.name/logic/ https://dvt.name/logic/ [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/ https://plato.stanford.edu/
- otakucode 9y ago
  When I went to college I took Computer Science as my major and Philosophy as a minor. Beyond the first year, the first day of every class was the same. Everyone introduced themselves and when I said I was a CS major everyone looked at me and wondered if I was in the right room... I love philosophy! For a CS person it is extremely relatable.
- Osmium 9y ago
  Not down-voting you, because it's an interesting comment, but: > far smarter than software engineers, by comparison. This is just a dumb, specious statement. Would expect better from a philosopher ;) Also, would be interested why you think: > Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field. What makes it bogus?
  - 9y ago
gerbilly 9y ago
I would say philosophy is a non experimental form of psychology. Spend five minutes of introspection to see how your mind appears to work, then build huge tottering edifices of analytical thought on those narrow observations. Profit?
dispo001 9y ago
The term has been repurposed into philo-historianism. IOW A modern philosopher is someone who studies real philosophers. Look how the field is void of any original idea and at its endless citation of dead people. Far to much value is attributed to "what they said" rather than the mind set that made them say it. This could happen to any field and to some benevolent and productive extend it does. We normally put the word history or historian behind or in front of it like computer science history, art history, the history of foobar. I have to ask: how does one write the "hello world" of philosophy? And please don't cite me a manual.
- rwnspace 9y ago
  >I have to ask: how does one write the "hello world" of philosophy? And please don't cite me a manual. Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum. I'm sure you could write that out in a faintly amusing way using 'import' or something. Your second sentence is right a lot of the time, but certainly not always. It's just that certain, foundation-shaking ideas are treated exceptionally and independently, or as not relevant to the very practice of thinking. As if the contents of the mind and the stomach (etc) vary independently.
genzoman 9y ago
ctrl+f starbucks. was disappoint.
excalibur 9y ago
> What, exactly, do philosophers do? They keep it hot. https://media.giphy.com/media/ytZHCP0IPPogE/giphy.gif https://media.giphy.com/media/ytZHCP0IPPogE/giphy.gif
nathan_long 9y ago
Last time I checked into philosophy, we couldn't prove that philosophers exist, so I'm going to call this question premature.
westoncb 9y ago
One often overlooked aspect of philosophy which HNers would appreciate, I think, is: with varying degrees of upfrontness about it, the aims of philosophers are not solely to deliver truth in the sense which non-philosophers understand it. (This is not in reference to academic scandal, btw.) When philosophers make this departure from pursuing the usual notion of truth, the motivation derives from an understanding that the adoption of one philosophical idea versus another can have profound impacts on people's lives (just consider how certain religious ideas can make people behave for instance)—so it's often partly about figuring out a set of ideas which would be most beneficial if adopted. The Pragmatists for instance were quite explicit about this (see William James' redefinition of 'truth' in Pragmatism for example)—and maybe others have been too, but I think the more common thing is to not be up front about it at all (which makes a certain amount of sense since that could impact the effect of their project to begin with). I haven't seen the details myself, but a philosophy professor friend pointed out to me that even Plato was pretty blatantly doing this.
todd8 9y ago
Consider these numbers from the College Board (SAT/GRE folks) [1]: Total of Reading, Math, Writing scores on SAT by college plans: 1488 -- Visual & Performing Arts 1476 -- Psychology 1587 -- Philosophy & Religious Studies 1606 -- Computer & Information Science and Support Services 1612 -- Engineering 1685 -- Physical Sciences 1714 -- Mathematical Sciences As anyone that has been around a US university lately knows, non-native English speakers are overrepresented in CS departments and consequently, this bring down the verbal and hence overall SAT scores for CS a bit. Furthermore, that's a pretty big category for CS that includes some of the far less theoretical areas. I've noticed, more than once, that Philosophy majors feel that they are somehow in a rarified domain where the things they do are far beyond the understanding of the rest of us. A bit like my father, a doctorate in Theology, that was worried that if I went to MIT I would end up being a super TV repairman. Academic papers and books in Philosophy are at times obtuse, but really no more difficult than reading a paper on, say, orogeny, out of my field, so slow going, but not impossible (it's the study of how geologic processes form mountains). Can Philosophy majors say the same thing about my books on Ring theory, Measure theory, Category Theory, Stats, Machine learning, Computability, Compilers, or Operating Systems? I've tried to understand general relativity (to no avail) and my struggles with quantum theory have given me a great respect for Physics majors--they deserve their place at the top of the academic IQ ladder, but Philosophy majors should perhaps take a peek at what some of the rest of us work on. [1] https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/total-group-2016.pdf https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/total-group-2016.pdf
keeler 9y ago
People forget that Alan Turing's essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published in Mind, a major philosophy journal. People forget that Boolean algebra comes from a work called "The Laws of Thought," where Boole tries to describe the algebraic operations underlying thought. If you think that isn't something "philosophers do," this is an ancient goal stretching back to Aristotle's logic, up through Descartes, and into figures such as Leibniz (who independently invented calculus and played an important role in giving us the binary number system), Chomsky, and Jerry Fodor. Philosophy is one of the disciplines in the interdisciplinary field of Cognitive Science. Much of the most important work on the foundations of mathematics was done by philosophers with a mathematical bent (or mathematicians with a philosophical bent, depending on how you want to look at it). Set theory. Incompleteness. First-order logic was invented by Frege. A lot of the technology we're using right now is traceable back to the work of philosophers. I've always found that the best way to think of philosophy is simply as inquiry. As a line of inquiry progresses, it may bud off into a field in its own right. Physicists today would have been called Natural Philosophers in Newton's time. In fact, before Newton it was Descartes' physics that reigned supreme in the academy. Some lines of inquiry might not bud off despite significant advancements, such as logic. Of course, I don't mean to say that philosophy and inquiry are purely synonymous. There's something vague about what the discipline of philosophy exactly is. But I don't think that's too terribly important. The question is what philosophers do. Some of the stuff philosophers "do" would probably strike some readers here as very "heads in the clouds" type stuff. But some of the other stuff, I think HN would find interesting. Check out work by Hillary Putnam. Or Jerry Fodor, if you're interested in "language of thought" type stuff that bears some similarity to Boole's project in The Laws of Thought. Chomsky recently published a newish collection of essays called What "Kind of Creatures Are We?", which is worth a look too.
- gfody 9y ago
  I would also plug Chomksy's New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind for anyone interested in this sort of thing. also relevant: https://xkcd.com/435 https://xkcd.com/435 - if it went further to the right Mathematics is just applied Philosophy.
  - 9y ago
rwnspace 9y ago
Disgruntled philosophy grad: not very much, in my estimation. Most of the good ones born in the last five decades have been swallowed by CS, at least in the West. There's lots I'd like to say on the topic, originating from 'psychoanalysing' the field with a little too much vigor, supporting it with social-structuralist bollocks, and throwing in criticisms of the academic publishing hamster-wheel. But a simple nod is better than a rant. Besides this, I think the main thing a philosopher 'should do' is explicitly not just philosophy. Speaking at least two languages, being able to code, and actively participating in empirical work and creative endeavours should be seen as crucial to the education of a philosopher, for them to produce work of historical merit. The first two increase the likelihood of avoiding the Wittgensteinian errors of language and the latter two keep your brain moving and subsuming after parsing mountains of dense text. Of course, if you want to be a philosophical historian, or an academic who academises in philosophy, take the well-trodden path. I think there are many philosophers who could write like wrought iron, but whose hearts just don't seem in it. Perhaps I'm just one of those guys who enjoyed Nietzsche a bit too much. Edit: I feel compelled to mention that I trust my hard knowledge of the discipline about as far as I could throw it. It's well worth the CS-types around here taking the time to investigate the field - I recommend Kenny's 'A New History of Western Philosophy' if you've got time, or any old MOOC. After all, it's probably what you'd be up to if we didn't have computers.
- smegel 9y ago
  Out of genuine interest, did your Phil degree lead to many career opportunities?
  - rwnspace 9y ago
    No: but learning Python and doing compTIA A+ has. I was thinking about doing a Masters focusing on analogy, or shifting over to cognitive studies where I could jump ship to STEMland. But being a poor student makes it too difficult for me to think and have a functioning life.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >Edit: I feel compelled to mention that I trust my hard knowledge of the discipline about as far as I could throw it. It's well worth the CS-types around here taking the time to investigate the field - I recommend Kenny's 'A New History of Western Philosophy' if you've got time, or any old MOOC. After all, it's probably what you'd be up to if we didn't have computers. Are the UEdinburgh MOOCs on Coursera ok?
TheLilHipster 9y ago
Philosophy is just so inaccessible to most people and is unrelatable to the layman. The most valuable philosophers of today IMO, are those that stay on the rails of pragmatism for the everyday struggles of the average citizen. Stefan Molyneux on youtube is a good example. He gets off the rails a little bit, but his core ideals of ethics and moral virtue is something I value quite highly in my everyday life.
kutkloon7 9y ago
It is very characteristic for philosophy to have a very clearly defined question, and a very long and pompous essay which does not provide an answer at first sight.
DanielBMarkham 9y ago
Programming is applied philosophy. That is, through inquiry we explore a previously unknown field (to us) and reduce common concerns to a formally-testable set of axioms (our tests) When programmers walk into a new field, it might as well be magic and noise -- things happen for reasons we can't understand and conversations occur in which we don't understand the context. When we leave a field, at least for the part we've coded, we're able to describe both the "fuzziness" of the area and the parts that work in a more predictable format. We turn mystery into science. Looking at it this way, and as a layperson outsider, modern philosophy went off-the-rails sometime after formal logic theory. We've forgotten the skill and benefits of general inquiry and instead tried to formalize philosophy itself as if it were already a science. (or as if there were some underlying science waiting for us to discover it)
essive 9y ago
Philosophy Degrees: Reid Hoffman - LinkedIn, Stewart Butterfield - Flickr, Peter Thiel - PayPal, Patrick Byrne - Overstock, Carly Fiorina - you all know her, Carl Icahn - Icahn Enterprises, Sheila Bair - FDIC, George Soros - Soros Funds, Herbert Allison Jr. - Fannie Mae, Gerald Levin - Time Warner, Ethan Cohen - you all know him, Rupert Murdoch, Rashida Jones, Philip Glass, etc... ...of course - just statistical - there's always some list for other degrees too....

112 points by diodorus 9y ago

Philosophy is not like software engineering. There's a lot more reading that needs to be done before you can make a contribution. A lot of it progresses by just reading the works of the established masters, getting ideas, and publishing your thoughts about what they had to say. You don't start from scratch. You build on what is already there. Addition by addition the field progresses and removes bad ideas or clarifies good ideas and long-term that mountain of work has gotten us from plato to the rich field it is today.

pishpash 9y ago
What is the state of the art in today's philosophy? What's the latest truly novel idea?
- stevenmays 9y ago
  Maybe Kripke? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Kripke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Kripke
  - keeler 9y ago
    Kripke is a good start. So is work by Jerry Fodor.
    - voidhorse 9y ago
      As these folks have said, Kripke and Fodor are not bad entry points for analytic philosophy if recency is your only concern--they might be hard to digest or understand properly however, as they are working with very specific problems and drawing on knowledge with a particular history to it. David Chalmers is good for philosophy of mind on the more analytic side. Quine is also important. So is Searle. Scott Soames' two volume work on the history of analytical philosophy is a great introduction to that side of the field and will get you up to speed with the the trajectory the led to what contemporary voices in the domain are grappling with now: https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Analysis-Twentieth-Century-Dawn/dp/069112244X https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Analysis-Twentieth-Cent... But that's just one side of philosophical thought, continental philosophy is very important as well. A good historical sketch of that milieu can be found in Delacampgne: https://www.amazon.com/History-Philosophy-Twentieth-Century/dp/0801868149/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1505757829&sr=8-4&keywords=delacampagne https://www.amazon.com/History-Philosophy-Twentieth-Century/... Some important recent voices from the continental side are probably Foucault, Zizek, Slotterdjik, Gadamer, Habermas, the Frankfurt School. Finally you could just ignore everything prior and read Wittgenstein. Personally, if we're talking GIANTS among the Giants the list goes something like: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Wittgenstein. (I am of course, limiting myself to Western thought). As with any field there are plenty of voices who have contributed a legion of ideas with varying amounts of success, but I'd say those names are the heaviest hitters. Wittgenstein is arguably still the most recent philosopher to have affected a paradigm shift. (though I think one could make a fairly convincing argument for including Foucault in those ranks as well). Philosophy in general is a very interesting field because it often benefits from discoveries in other disciplines, in addition to having often motivated/been the birthchamber of said disciplines (see for instance, the often symbiotic relationship between linguistics and the philosophy of language).
      - mcguire 9y ago
        Sartre? And how could any such list leave out von Hartmann? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Robert_Eduard_von_Hartmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Robert_Eduard_von_Hartman... http://www.iep.utm.edu/hartmann/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/hartmann/ https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/selections/eduard-von-hartmann/ https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/selections/eduard-von-h...
        keeler 9y ago
        Hartmann is certainly not a giant on anyone's list. Even if you were to compare him to some of the "lesser" giants, such as Berkeley, Schopenhauer, or even Thomas Reid, it's not even close.
        mcguire 9y ago
        Aw, c'mon. He's single-handedly arguing the negative image of Mahāyāna Buddhism.
        voidhorse 9y ago
        I thank you for bringing Hartmann up, as I hadn't looked into his work and this is a reminder to do so. But anyway, I wouldn't include him for the same reason I wouldn't include Pierce, James, and some other american pragmatists, or more enigmatic figures such as Cioran and Bataille--namely because while my personal perspective on their thought is that it's excellent and deserves serious consideration, and they are some of my favorite philosophers to read, their work hasn't had as great a historical impact on the world stage as these other major figures.
      - Ngunyan 9y ago
        >Personally, if we're talking GIANTS among the Giants the list goes something like: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Wittgenstein. (I am of course, limiting myself to Western thought). I would drop Sartre and add Heidegger instead in that list. And I favor Suarez over Aquinas.
- mbrock 9y ago
  I'm not really the right person to answer, but some recent philosophy that's been influential to my thinking, and also to a lot of people in the humanities and art, is the "object-oriented ontology" as put forth by people like Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost (whose main object of investigation has been video games) and others. For something more obviously relevant to this crowd, you could look at the work of Hubert Dreyfus, a Heidegger scholar whose insights into the limits of viewing intelligence as symbolic cognition has actually been influential in the history of AI. It's not super recent, but maybe it takes some time for philosophy to become intelligible; when it is really interesting, it also probably seems weird when it's fresh. A few references for Dreyfus: 1. His recent paper "Why Heideggerian AI failed and how fixing it would Require making it more Heideggerian"; a quote below. http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf "As I studied the RAND papers and memos, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, the pioneers in CS had learned a lot, directly and indirectly from the philosophers. They had taken over Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a “universal characteristic”—a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed,—Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Russell’s postulation of logical atoms as the building blocks of reality. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program. At the same time, I began to suspect that the critical insights formulated in existentialist armchairs, especially Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s, were bad news for those working in AI laboratories– that, by combining rationalism, representationalism, conceptualism, formalism, and logical atomism into a research program, AI researchers had condemned their enterprise to reenact a failure." 2. David Chapman's curious autobiographical book review of a somewhat hokey book on "integral philosophy", that goes into his own story at MIT's AI lab and his encounter with Dreyfus's critique; quote below. https://meaningness.com/metablog/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artificial-intelligence https://meaningness.com/metablog/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artif... "In 1987, we wrote a computer program called Pengi that illustrated some of what we had learned from Dreyfus, Heidegger, and the Continental philosophical tradition. Pengi participated in a life-world. It did not have to mentally represent and reason about its circumstances, because it was embedded in them, causally coupled with them in a purposive dance. Its skill came from spontaneous improvisation, not strategic planning. Its apparently intelligent activity derived from interactive dynamics that—continually involving both its self and others—were neither subjective nor objective. Pengi was a triumph: it could do things that the old paradigm clearly couldn’t, and (although quite crude) seemed to point to a wide-open new paradigm for further research. AI was unstuck again! And, in fact, Pengi was highly influential for a few years." 3. Dreyfus's book about his reading of Heidegger, called Being-in-the-world, and if one wishes, a recent movie of the same name. Here is one of my many highlighted passages from the book, which is flattering to computer scientists, but also might make you wonder if there is any philosophy that is critiquing current AI research in a way that will seem prescient years down the road: "Having to program computers keeps one honest. There is no room for the armchair rationalist's speculations. Thus AI research has called the Cartesian cognitivist's bluff. It is easy to say that to account for the equipmental nexus one need simply add more and more function predicates and rules describing what is to be done in typical situations, but actual difficulties in AI—its inability to make progress with what is called the commonsense knowledge problem, on the one hand, and its inability to define the current situation, sometimes called the frame problem, on the other—suggest that Heidegger is right. It looks like one cannot build up the phenomenon of world out of meaningless elements."
- supernumerary 9y ago
  I have been enjoying Bernard Stiegler(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler). Some writing that would be HN centric here: https://iainmait.land/posts/20170418-algorithmic-governmentality.html https://iainmait.land/posts/20170418-algorithmic-governmenta...
- mcguire 9y ago
  That is, I think, the wrong question. Or rather, the wrong approach to take.[1] Philosophy is not that kind of human endeavor. There is no "state of the art"; instead, Plato is as state-of-the-art as he ever was[2][3] and every publishing philosopher has novel ideas (or at least hopes they do, although they might also like to learn that some ancient sage has expressed support for their notions). My personal way of viewing philosophy is as a conversation. A philosopher starts by finding other statements that they like or don't like. Then, they add their own thoughts, modifying previous ideas or attacking or supporting them, all with the best arguments they can muster. From all this, you, as an innocent bystander, can pick out the threads that best let you sleep well at night. [1] And if I've ever written a more philosophical paragraph, I don't know what it is. I wish to submit it to the Faculty of the College of Liberal Arts, blah, blah, blah. [2] I'm sure I'll be vigorously attacked by analytic philosophers at this point. There are very much schools who would like philosophy to be more akin to the sciences or (even better) mathematics (but without all the icky evidence and formal proofs and such). But then, the only particular sympathy I've had for analytic philosophy I've recently discovered due to an interest in Daoist philosophy. [3] Except for Epicurus. He seems to have won on some topics---his physics; if you're a materialist, you're Epicurean even if you don't already know it---and everything else seems to have been misplaced. Which is the interesting part, dang it.
  - azeirah 9y ago
    Isn't it so that whenever something within philosophy becomes state of the art, it stops being philosophy?
    - mcguire 9y ago
      As far as I know, the only way a question stops being philosophy is by someone thinking up a way to definitively answer it.
- essive 9y ago
  Agreed that 'state of the art' is the wrong question - but, it is worth watching David Chalmers challenge progress in philosophy (bear with the first 20 minutes or so - it gets better). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUfz6oahp2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUfz6oahp2Q
- mattmanser 9y ago
  I've fallen out of touch, but if you want fairly recent, Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfitt is good and is more modern stuff dealing with things that are soon to be very important (what is a person). He died recently which prompted me to get his On What Matters which has good reviews, but hasn't reached the top of my pile yet. My view is that philosophy is rather slow moving and gestates with societal changes rather than big thinking leaps. And I tend to agree with pg that philosophy went wrong a long time ago and descended into a war of definitions: http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
- fmap 9y ago
  Martin Löf's lectures on type theory are pretty much the clearest explanation of modern mathematical logic that you'll find anywhere. Some of the technical results turned out to be false, or at least needed more work, but the analysis of inductive definitions and equality is and was groundbreaking. Since this is more mathematics than philosophy, the latest truly novel idea is also a few months old instead of a few decades. You really just have to start somewhere and work your way forward. :)
yters 9y ago
If philosophy is reasoning in its purest form, why so much reference to other work? Shouldn't it be like math where we logically conclude something and it is true regardless of what others think? If not, then it seems a less pure form of reasoning than math.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  Because there is a good chance that whatever you want to say has already been said by at least a few other people and been refuted counter-argued or otherwise discussed. If you are not aware of all that accompanying discussion, you are likely to think you have come up with something profound when you actually haven't. This is why r/im14andthisisdeep/ is a thing. A lot of teens think they have an insight despite the fact that what they thought is neither profound nor novel. Also, a lot of philosophical reading helps set up frameworks or theoretical scaffolding that can serve as a layer of abstraction that you can build upon instead of everyone rediscovering the same ground principles.
  - duncanawoods 9y ago
    All true but I feel as currently taught it is hamstrung as a "historical study of great men / literary study of original sources" instead of teaching the key ideas distilled into the the most efficient and practical form. High school physicists are not ploughing through Principia Mathematica, instead they learn the laws of motion and move on. Physicists pretty much leave behind the original sources until you are at the bleeding edge. Why can't philosophy?
    - lg 9y ago
      because philosophical papers can stay 'at the bleeding edge' (under active debate) for a really, really long time.
    - kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
      Classical mechanics is 'done and dusted'. Aristotle or Plato are not. They can still be discussed and actively debated about today.
amit_m 9y ago
In the mathematical sciences, working on old problems using classical tools is typically considered career suicide. I can only imagine how depressing it must be to do academic research on age-old philosophical questions - an endless literature survey, at the end of which there is no light, because even if you "solve" the problem, many others will not find your solution satisfactory.
mcguire 9y ago
Could you provide a few examples of bad ideas that have been removed?
- duncanawoods 9y ago
  If you read original sources you find a lot of weird nonsense that is quietly skipped over these days e.g. mystical numerology in Plato's republic, Aristotle's incendiary views on women and slaves etc.
erikbye 9y ago
Except for the reading part that's exactly like software engineering. Since when does a software engineer ever start from scratch? We all build on top of what was before. As for "the field does progress and removes bad ideas or clarifies good ideas", that's best practices. That's new and better programming languages and libraries. Better operating systems. And "that mountain of work" has gotten us from punch cards to the Internet.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  One very large difference is the fact that software engineers can hit "run" at the end of the day, and will quickly find out whether or not their thing works. It's much harder to assess the quality of ideas in philosophy.
hdhzy 9y ago
Haha, the description sounds exactly like software engineering. Let me deconstruct: > There's a lot more reading that needs to be done before you can make a contribution. Just like software engineering unless you count Hello Worlds as contributions. But even then one can do simple things like that in philosophy. > A lot of it progresses by just reading the works of the established masters, getting ideas, and publishing your thoughts about what they had to say. Sounds like reading white papers and RFCs to me. > You don't start from scratch. You build on what is already there. The same. Just check how much transpilers and leftpad like libraries a JS Hello World app needs! And so on...
- sametmax 9y ago
  Exactly. Except with engineering you can actually test if your idea works in practice.

vander_elst 9y ago

I know I going to get downvoted but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgoB2JMEowc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgoB2JMEowc

anigbrowl 9y ago
Not by me - I read a lot of philosophy, and bullshit arguments are a problem. Not unlike programming, sometimes people get lost in trying to perfect their chosen framework or language without regard to its utility. Think of Brainfuck, which is technically very interesting because of its extreme simplicity while still being Turing-complete, but which would be a terrible choice for most practical problems. Having said that... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8

ue_ 9y ago

The article starts with a question which asks about the present very clearly, but then answers a different question of what philosophers did (i.e the past) without any reference to modern philosophers. Modern philosophers analyse older philosophical work and reply to contemporaries; for example there is an ongoing debate about the difference between "letting die" and "killing", and if it is an ethical difference then what significance it holds. Other philosophy seeks to blend together with sociology and psychology to analyse our current life (for example, the work of Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School), for example to ask what is capitalism and to what extent it is desirable. Some other philosophy works with economics to examine classical and modern ideas of the value of commodoties and its ontology. Some philosophers concern themselves with the ethics of killing and eating animals and by extension humans. Other philosophy works through linguistics to formulate theories of what we mean when we speak and the limits of language to describe reality. And other philosophy involves itself with natural science to formulate theories of causation and being. Yet other philosophy does other things. It's a broad field, and with advances in all related fields it's become a lot broader than it was since the enlightenment, even considering how natural science is no longer considered a philosophy.

euyyn 9y ago
I see the importance of exploring those questions, for they pertain to current movements and political issues, like veganism or euthanasia. So (from my position of now knowing the work of any modern philosopher) have such philosophical explorations, in the past decades or century, produced answers? In the sense that, have they made a change in the way these important issues developed? What are the biggest ways they have affected other fields?
- krrishd 9y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted, I'd like to see an answer to this as well. I'd suspect that they've provided quite a few important answers but I'm curious how much power/influence these ideas had in their times.
  - ue_ 9y ago

siculars 9y ago

Warn of the ever present existential threat, smoke, drink and seduce undergrads. ;)

koolba 9y ago
That doesn't sound any different than me studying CS.
- deleted 9y ago
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yarrel 9y ago

1. Spend an awful lot of time chasing tenure. 2. Spend an awful lot of time trolling each other on Facebook. 3. Occasionally rehash old ideas. 4. Even more occasionally come up with breathtaking insights into the nature of reality and what it means to be human. 5. Get annoyed if you point out any flaws in those insights. 6. Publish more than they used to.

Diederich 9y ago
> 2. Spend an awful lot of time trolling each other on Facebook. I think I would very much enjoy seeing some citations of this. (:
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  https://www.facebook.com/wouldprefernot/ https://www.facebook.com/wouldprefernot/
- spiffyman 9y ago
  I'm friends with several philosophers since I took it fairly seriously in undergrad and befriended several grad students. From my perspective, the "trolling" is generally just pointing out interesting entailments of another philosopher's arguments. For example, in a recent thread philosopher X outlined philosopher Y's argument just to point out that he hopes it shows the "weird consequences" of the basis of Y's argument. Y showed up to point out that X had missed a key wrinkle. A bunch of others showed up to wrangle about the meaning of certain words. ... So basically the same thing philosophers do in their papers, just with fewer citations. (That's not me throwing shade -- just pointing out how the field seems to work. I loved and still love philosophy.)
jff 9y ago
You forgot to include "Endlessly write justifications of how important philosophy is" and "Misunderstand the abstracts of scientific papers, then write essays based on those misunderstandings"
- ewjordan 9y ago

Koshkin 9y ago

It looks like philosophy is several different things: an "umbrella" term for any subject that is still in a "pre-science" state and has not matured enough to acquire a name of its own; a part of the name that stuck for purely historical reasons, as in "philosophy of mathematics"; a collection of miscellaneous (named) subjects, some of which are "science", while others are not (yet); a world-view (including cases when it is driven by a political agenda).

mcguire 9y ago

Construct elaborate logical edifices on their previously existing, unreasoned prejudices? (At the risk of having them take away my Junior Philosophers' Secret Decoder Ring.)

room271 9y ago

There are a few different areas of philosophy and it's useful to separate them out: 1) Logic (this is useful and also can be called maths) 2) Political Philosophy / Political Theory (crosses over with politics/history, again useful) 3) Ethics (useful and important but not necessarily worth academic study) 4) History of Philosophy (this is really the history of thought and useful and interesting. A lot of philosophy is really this) but unfortunately it blurs into attempting new thought 5) epistemology (useless, science is the better path) Source: I studied philosophy. It's important to remember that early philosophers tended to also be mathematicians and scientists.

OneTimePoster 9y ago

Philosophy discovers unknown relationships. Math categorizes relationships. Science tests relationships. Engineering exploits relationships. Remove any one of these and the whole damned process stops.

dvt 9y ago

Always warms my heart to see philosophy on top of HN. Philosophy is hard -- much harder than one would think. And people that contribute are incredibly smart -- far smarter than software engineers, by comparison. On the other hand, it's very political, and a lot of it is mental masturbation. Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field. Philosophy of Mind, apart from a few great minds (Chalmers, Nagel) is also equivocal. I went into undergrad with a primary focus on (meta-)logic[1] and I was taught by some of the world's premiere logicians (David Kaplan, Sam Cumming, a few others). But I fell in love with ethics -- a subject I'd never thought I'd enjoy as much as I did. I loved reading Moore, Foote, Anscombe, Geach. My best memories were attending graduate seminars -- studying the philosophy of language and trying to figure out how logical connectives work in regular discourse, or studying abduction and trying to stitch together Horn clauses that seem to point to one conclusion rather than another. Philosophers, in short, do all kinds of things: from pushing the boundaries of exotic logics, to solving ethical problems, to systematizing natural language or understanding the metaphysics of causality. The article just touches on all of the above (in fact, it doesn't discuss modern philosophy at all). If you're interested in philosophy, the SEP[2] is a great resource. [1] https://dvt.name/logic/ https://dvt.name/logic/ [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/ https://plato.stanford.edu/

otakucode 9y ago
When I went to college I took Computer Science as my major and Philosophy as a minor. Beyond the first year, the first day of every class was the same. Everyone introduced themselves and when I said I was a CS major everyone looked at me and wondered if I was in the right room... I love philosophy! For a CS person it is extremely relatable.
Osmium 9y ago
Not down-voting you, because it's an interesting comment, but: > far smarter than software engineers, by comparison. This is just a dumb, specious statement. Would expect better from a philosopher ;) Also, would be interested why you think: > Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field. What makes it bogus?
- 9y ago

gerbilly 9y ago

I would say philosophy is a non experimental form of psychology. Spend five minutes of introspection to see how your mind appears to work, then build huge tottering edifices of analytical thought on those narrow observations. Profit?

dispo001 9y ago

The term has been repurposed into philo-historianism. IOW A modern philosopher is someone who studies real philosophers. Look how the field is void of any original idea and at its endless citation of dead people. Far to much value is attributed to "what they said" rather than the mind set that made them say it. This could happen to any field and to some benevolent and productive extend it does. We normally put the word history or historian behind or in front of it like computer science history, art history, the history of foobar. I have to ask: how does one write the "hello world" of philosophy? And please don't cite me a manual.

rwnspace 9y ago
>I have to ask: how does one write the "hello world" of philosophy? And please don't cite me a manual. Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum. I'm sure you could write that out in a faintly amusing way using 'import' or something. Your second sentence is right a lot of the time, but certainly not always. It's just that certain, foundation-shaking ideas are treated exceptionally and independently, or as not relevant to the very practice of thinking. As if the contents of the mind and the stomach (etc) vary independently.

genzoman 9y ago

ctrl+f starbucks. was disappoint.

excalibur 9y ago

> What, exactly, do philosophers do? They keep it hot. https://media.giphy.com/media/ytZHCP0IPPogE/giphy.gif https://media.giphy.com/media/ytZHCP0IPPogE/giphy.gif

nathan_long 9y ago

Last time I checked into philosophy, we couldn't prove that philosophers exist, so I'm going to call this question premature.

westoncb 9y ago

One often overlooked aspect of philosophy which HNers would appreciate, I think, is: with varying degrees of upfrontness about it, the aims of philosophers are not solely to deliver truth in the sense which non-philosophers understand it. (This is not in reference to academic scandal, btw.) When philosophers make this departure from pursuing the usual notion of truth, the motivation derives from an understanding that the adoption of one philosophical idea versus another can have profound impacts on people's lives (just consider how certain religious ideas can make people behave for instance)—so it's often partly about figuring out a set of ideas which would be most beneficial if adopted. The Pragmatists for instance were quite explicit about this (see William James' redefinition of 'truth' in Pragmatism for example)—and maybe others have been too, but I think the more common thing is to not be up front about it at all (which makes a certain amount of sense since that could impact the effect of their project to begin with). I haven't seen the details myself, but a philosophy professor friend pointed out to me that even Plato was pretty blatantly doing this.

todd8 9y ago

Consider these numbers from the College Board (SAT/GRE folks) [1]: Total of Reading, Math, Writing scores on SAT by college plans: 1488 -- Visual & Performing Arts 1476 -- Psychology 1587 -- Philosophy & Religious Studies 1606 -- Computer & Information Science and Support Services 1612 -- Engineering 1685 -- Physical Sciences 1714 -- Mathematical Sciences As anyone that has been around a US university lately knows, non-native English speakers are overrepresented in CS departments and consequently, this bring down the verbal and hence overall SAT scores for CS a bit. Furthermore, that's a pretty big category for CS that includes some of the far less theoretical areas. I've noticed, more than once, that Philosophy majors feel that they are somehow in a rarified domain where the things they do are far beyond the understanding of the rest of us. A bit like my father, a doctorate in Theology, that was worried that if I went to MIT I would end up being a super TV repairman. Academic papers and books in Philosophy are at times obtuse, but really no more difficult than reading a paper on, say, orogeny, out of my field, so slow going, but not impossible (it's the study of how geologic processes form mountains). Can Philosophy majors say the same thing about my books on Ring theory, Measure theory, Category Theory, Stats, Machine learning, Computability, Compilers, or Operating Systems? I've tried to understand general relativity (to no avail) and my struggles with quantum theory have given me a great respect for Physics majors--they deserve their place at the top of the academic IQ ladder, but Philosophy majors should perhaps take a peek at what some of the rest of us work on. [1] https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/total-group-2016.pdf https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/total-group-2016.pdf

keeler 9y ago

People forget that Alan Turing's essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published in Mind, a major philosophy journal. People forget that Boolean algebra comes from a work called "The Laws of Thought," where Boole tries to describe the algebraic operations underlying thought. If you think that isn't something "philosophers do," this is an ancient goal stretching back to Aristotle's logic, up through Descartes, and into figures such as Leibniz (who independently invented calculus and played an important role in giving us the binary number system), Chomsky, and Jerry Fodor. Philosophy is one of the disciplines in the interdisciplinary field of Cognitive Science. Much of the most important work on the foundations of mathematics was done by philosophers with a mathematical bent (or mathematicians with a philosophical bent, depending on how you want to look at it). Set theory. Incompleteness. First-order logic was invented by Frege. A lot of the technology we're using right now is traceable back to the work of philosophers. I've always found that the best way to think of philosophy is simply as inquiry. As a line of inquiry progresses, it may bud off into a field in its own right. Physicists today would have been called Natural Philosophers in Newton's time. In fact, before Newton it was Descartes' physics that reigned supreme in the academy. Some lines of inquiry might not bud off despite significant advancements, such as logic. Of course, I don't mean to say that philosophy and inquiry are purely synonymous. There's something vague about what the discipline of philosophy exactly is. But I don't think that's too terribly important. The question is what philosophers do. Some of the stuff philosophers "do" would probably strike some readers here as very "heads in the clouds" type stuff. But some of the other stuff, I think HN would find interesting. Check out work by Hillary Putnam. Or Jerry Fodor, if you're interested in "language of thought" type stuff that bears some similarity to Boole's project in The Laws of Thought. Chomsky recently published a newish collection of essays called What "Kind of Creatures Are We?", which is worth a look too.

gfody 9y ago
I would also plug Chomksy's New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind for anyone interested in this sort of thing. also relevant: https://xkcd.com/435 https://xkcd.com/435 - if it went further to the right Mathematics is just applied Philosophy.
- 9y ago

rwnspace 9y ago

Disgruntled philosophy grad: not very much, in my estimation. Most of the good ones born in the last five decades have been swallowed by CS, at least in the West. There's lots I'd like to say on the topic, originating from 'psychoanalysing' the field with a little too much vigor, supporting it with social-structuralist bollocks, and throwing in criticisms of the academic publishing hamster-wheel. But a simple nod is better than a rant. Besides this, I think the main thing a philosopher 'should do' is explicitly not just philosophy. Speaking at least two languages, being able to code, and actively participating in empirical work and creative endeavours should be seen as crucial to the education of a philosopher, for them to produce work of historical merit. The first two increase the likelihood of avoiding the Wittgensteinian errors of language and the latter two keep your brain moving and subsuming after parsing mountains of dense text. Of course, if you want to be a philosophical historian, or an academic who academises in philosophy, take the well-trodden path. I think there are many philosophers who could write like wrought iron, but whose hearts just don't seem in it. Perhaps I'm just one of those guys who enjoyed Nietzsche a bit too much. Edit: I feel compelled to mention that I trust my hard knowledge of the discipline about as far as I could throw it. It's well worth the CS-types around here taking the time to investigate the field - I recommend Kenny's 'A New History of Western Philosophy' if you've got time, or any old MOOC. After all, it's probably what you'd be up to if we didn't have computers.

smegel 9y ago
Out of genuine interest, did your Phil degree lead to many career opportunities?
- rwnspace 9y ago
  No: but learning Python and doing compTIA A+ has. I was thinking about doing a Masters focusing on analogy, or shifting over to cognitive studies where I could jump ship to STEMland. But being a poor student makes it too difficult for me to think and have a functioning life.
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>Edit: I feel compelled to mention that I trust my hard knowledge of the discipline about as far as I could throw it. It's well worth the CS-types around here taking the time to investigate the field - I recommend Kenny's 'A New History of Western Philosophy' if you've got time, or any old MOOC. After all, it's probably what you'd be up to if we didn't have computers. Are the UEdinburgh MOOCs on Coursera ok?

TheLilHipster 9y ago

Philosophy is just so inaccessible to most people and is unrelatable to the layman. The most valuable philosophers of today IMO, are those that stay on the rails of pragmatism for the everyday struggles of the average citizen. Stefan Molyneux on youtube is a good example. He gets off the rails a little bit, but his core ideals of ethics and moral virtue is something I value quite highly in my everyday life.

kutkloon7 9y ago

It is very characteristic for philosophy to have a very clearly defined question, and a very long and pompous essay which does not provide an answer at first sight.

DanielBMarkham 9y ago

Programming is applied philosophy. That is, through inquiry we explore a previously unknown field (to us) and reduce common concerns to a formally-testable set of axioms (our tests) When programmers walk into a new field, it might as well be magic and noise -- things happen for reasons we can't understand and conversations occur in which we don't understand the context. When we leave a field, at least for the part we've coded, we're able to describe both the "fuzziness" of the area and the parts that work in a more predictable format. We turn mystery into science. Looking at it this way, and as a layperson outsider, modern philosophy went off-the-rails sometime after formal logic theory. We've forgotten the skill and benefits of general inquiry and instead tried to formalize philosophy itself as if it were already a science. (or as if there were some underlying science waiting for us to discover it)

essive 9y ago

Philosophy Degrees: Reid Hoffman - LinkedIn, Stewart Butterfield - Flickr, Peter Thiel - PayPal, Patrick Byrne - Overstock, Carly Fiorina - you all know her, Carl Icahn - Icahn Enterprises, Sheila Bair - FDIC, George Soros - Soros Funds, Herbert Allison Jr. - Fannie Mae, Gerald Levin - Time Warner, Ethan Cohen - you all know him, Rupert Murdoch, Rashida Jones, Philip Glass, etc... ...of course - just statistical - there's always some list for other degrees too....