4 ms·

What is the state of the art in today's philosophy? What's the latest truly novel idea?

by pishpash 9y ago

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. :)

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. :)