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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
by 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 agoWhat is the state of the art in today's philosophy? What's the latest truly novel idea?
- stevenmays 9y agoMaybe Kripke? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Kripke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Kripke
- keeler 9y agoKripke is a good start. So is work by Jerry Fodor.
- voidhorse 9y agoAs 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 agoSartre? 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 agoHartmann 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 agoAw, c'mon. He's single-handedly arguing the negative image of Mahāyāna Buddhism.
- voidhorse 9y agoI 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 agoI'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 agoI 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 agoThat 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.
- essive 9y agoAgreed 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 agoI'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 agoMartin 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 agoIf 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 agoBecause 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 agoAll 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 agobecause philosophical papers can stay 'at the bleeding edge' (under active debate) for a really, really long time.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoClassical mechanics is 'done and dusted'. Aristotle or Plato are not. They can still be discussed and actively debated about today.
- amit_m 9y agoIn 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 agoCould you provide a few examples of bad ideas that have been removed?
- duncanawoods 9y agoIf 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 agoExcept 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 agoOne 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 agoHaha, 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 agoExactly. Except with engineering you can actually test if your idea works in practice.