5 ms·

It's hard to get that deep in a couple paragraphs. But there is a longer version here: http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.

by pg 15y ago

It's hard to get that deep in a couple paragraphs. But there is a longer version here: http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

jsomers 15y ago
I wrote a response to this (in defense of philosophy) a few years ago at http://jsomers.net/pg-philosophy.html http://jsomers.net/pg-philosophy.html. And here's the yc discussion about it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404707 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404707.
onan_barbarian 15y ago
I don't think you got much deeper in the long form. From what I recall, these critiques of philosophy are well-known in philosophy, especially reactions to Aristotle. A inexperienced reader would get the impression that Aristotle and the mistakes he engendered went unchecked for a couple thousand years, until brought to bay by the sterling efforts of Bertrand Russell and Paul Graham. From someone proposing a new approach to philosophy (!): 1. I would expect to see a little more on some of the less peculiar empiricists - Berkeley, in my dim memories, was the most obscure of that little grouping. 2. A less Cliff's Notes discussion of what's happened in analytic philosophy that strays beyond the brand names (Russell, Wittgenstein) wouldn't go astray either. Claiming it's all about 'language games' is a sophomoric 'out' to having to engage with any of the rest of analytic philosophy.
- pg 15y ago
  Can you give an example of something I wrote that you believe is false?
  - onan_barbarian 15y ago
    It's the omissions that are the problem, not errors. You have selectively ignored major areas of philosophy in order to make your ideas seem original and compelling.
    - pg 15y ago
      Even omissions should cause sentences in the essay to be false though. Is there really not one sentence you believe is false? (Also, would you mind being civil? I'm doing it; you can too.)
      - PakG1 15y ago
        Hmm, I know I'll get downvoted for this, but I don't think he's being uncivil, pg. He made an accusation against you, but he didn't do it in an uncivil manner. Asking him to be civil strikes me as weird, and possibly that you're being too defensive?
        16BitTons 15y ago
        PakG1, you have a good point. Accusing someone of "selectively ignoring" evidence is suggesting the person is not seeking truth at all. In civil discourse, one owes a response. In uncivil discourse, then the opponent often isn't asking a real question and the answer doesn't need to take it seriously. I think PG was taking onan_barbarian's comment seriously and asking a sincere question.
        Willwhatley 15y ago
        I do not suppose it to be possible to accuse anyone of anything in a civil manner. Accusation belongs to prosecutors, mothers in law, schoolteachers and other beings that are clearly on a higher plane than one. Civility is a difficult, but simple, art, necessitating primarily that one should wish to get along with another: onan does not seem to be going out of his to make himself agreeable to pg or anyone else in this exchange.
        PakG1 15y ago
        Forking the conversation, but going out of your way to make yourself agreeable is not efficient conversation. Now, the workplace and an Internet forum may differ in terms of environment, but if I applied "going out of my way to be civil" to the workplace, it would make for a lot of inefficient conversation and meetings. Being direct is much more preferable in the workplace, and as long as you leave out insults and profanity, it can be quite civil. That is what I'd expect in everyday life as well. My standards of comparing the workplace and other environments may not be shared. Perhaps you would prefer people use more phrases like "I think", "I feel like", or pose sentences as questions. I suppose that works well enough for me without destroying conversation efficiency too much. The word "accusation" has a broad spectrum of emotion, but perhaps a very narrow emotive connotation when heard by the accused.
impendia 15y ago
So there is some discussion in the other thread, but I'll add my own. You ask that philosophy be useful. Here then, is a useful question: Suppose that my mother has Alzheimer's disease, and that I find the prospect of caring for her inconvenient, undesirable, and/or expensive. Do I have a responsibility to care for her anyway? It is "useful" because it could potentially describe a real-life situation in which one might have to make a decision. Analyzing this quickly leads one to a general discussion of ethics. As you point out, definitions are imprecise. What does it mean to say I have a "responsibility", or that I "ought" to do something? Logic and observation can get one to "If I do nothing, then my mother will suffer and/or die", but this is not the heart of the matter. I think there is no hope of a "solution", in the same way, say, that Fermat's Last Theorem was proved. But does that mean that studying ethics, and what the usual lineup of dead white males had to say about it, isn't worthwhile?
- pg 15y ago
  That sort of question is certainly important. I worry though that like most of ethics this is one of those cases where philosophers don't get any better answers than your grandmother.
  - impendia 15y ago
    Hm. I agree with your worry completely. Still, personally I found great value in studying the subject. I find it difficult to say precisely what, though.
  - siglesias 15y ago
    Paul, I don't think my grandmother could give me a very good justification for why she eats meat. I, however, armed with Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation could show that eating meat needs to be justified and that I can't justify it. Same goes for whether profiting from closed source software is ethical. Same goes for whether homosexuality is evil. These are all cases in which it would be possible to show, systematically, how one's views are contradictory, or really empirical questions. This appears to be a philosophical task, not a common sense one.
YuriNiyazov 15y ago
Do you believe that most of the stuff covered under philosophy of mind (Dennett, Searle, Block, Chalmers, Jackson, etc.) is not worth studying? Edit: reduce strength of statement.
- forensic 15y ago
  An easy way to show the importance of philosophy is to show all the powerful sciences it spawned and provided theoretical underpinnings for. Not the least of which is cognitive neuroscience.
- pg 15y ago
  I don't think this field escapes the problems of philosophy in general.
shoham 15y ago
Very interesting article; although here's what I think gets missed when folks teach and talk about Philosophy since Russell: anything that smells even vaguely religious just doesn't count -- don't read it -- too spooky, too irrational. The only reason Greeks get away with it is, I think, because nobody takes the Greek gods seriously anymore (or at least no one is worried about too many people doing so, and causing trouble in the name of Zeus!) So no King Solomon, no Vedas and probably no Confucius either, as secular as he tended to be. You mentioned at the end of the article that"...philosophy was hopelessly intermingled with religion. It didn't shake itself free till a couple hundred years ago..." I'd have to counter that philosophy without religion is generally new, hollow and unworthy of much study -- which in some ways I think is your point. I'm genuinely curious: Why (or if) you think that this decoupling is a good thing? So few other disciplines (only Religious Studies, and perhaps The Arts) ever touch upon the idea of spirit at all -- which I think is at the core of Philosophy -- the nexus of Sapience and Sentience. If one is not a fan of religion on principle (its over-adherence to both dogma, and dominance are two criticisms that I have), then certainly this is a strength of Philosophy -- the decoupling of religion from matters of the spirit/soul. Spinoza's The Ethics; and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil are two interesting books for students of Philosophy to consider.

by pg 15y ago

It's hard to get that deep in a couple paragraphs. But there is a longer version here: http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

jsomers 15y ago

I wrote a response to this (in defense of philosophy) a few years ago at http://jsomers.net/pg-philosophy.html http://jsomers.net/pg-philosophy.html. And here's the yc discussion about it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404707 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404707.

onan_barbarian 15y ago

I don't think you got much deeper in the long form. From what I recall, these critiques of philosophy are well-known in philosophy, especially reactions to Aristotle. A inexperienced reader would get the impression that Aristotle and the mistakes he engendered went unchecked for a couple thousand years, until brought to bay by the sterling efforts of Bertrand Russell and Paul Graham. From someone proposing a new approach to philosophy (!): 1. I would expect to see a little more on some of the less peculiar empiricists - Berkeley, in my dim memories, was the most obscure of that little grouping. 2. A less Cliff's Notes discussion of what's happened in analytic philosophy that strays beyond the brand names (Russell, Wittgenstein) wouldn't go astray either. Claiming it's all about 'language games' is a sophomoric 'out' to having to engage with any of the rest of analytic philosophy.

pg 15y ago
Can you give an example of something I wrote that you believe is false?
- onan_barbarian 15y ago
  It's the omissions that are the problem, not errors. You have selectively ignored major areas of philosophy in order to make your ideas seem original and compelling.
  - pg 15y ago
    Even omissions should cause sentences in the essay to be false though. Is there really not one sentence you believe is false? (Also, would you mind being civil? I'm doing it; you can too.)
    - PakG1 15y ago
      Hmm, I know I'll get downvoted for this, but I don't think he's being uncivil, pg. He made an accusation against you, but he didn't do it in an uncivil manner. Asking him to be civil strikes me as weird, and possibly that you're being too defensive?
      - 16BitTons 15y ago
        PakG1, you have a good point. Accusing someone of "selectively ignoring" evidence is suggesting the person is not seeking truth at all. In civil discourse, one owes a response. In uncivil discourse, then the opponent often isn't asking a real question and the answer doesn't need to take it seriously. I think PG was taking onan_barbarian's comment seriously and asking a sincere question.
      - Willwhatley 15y ago
        I do not suppose it to be possible to accuse anyone of anything in a civil manner. Accusation belongs to prosecutors, mothers in law, schoolteachers and other beings that are clearly on a higher plane than one. Civility is a difficult, but simple, art, necessitating primarily that one should wish to get along with another: onan does not seem to be going out of his to make himself agreeable to pg or anyone else in this exchange.
        PakG1 15y ago
        Forking the conversation, but going out of your way to make yourself agreeable is not efficient conversation. Now, the workplace and an Internet forum may differ in terms of environment, but if I applied "going out of my way to be civil" to the workplace, it would make for a lot of inefficient conversation and meetings. Being direct is much more preferable in the workplace, and as long as you leave out insults and profanity, it can be quite civil. That is what I'd expect in everyday life as well. My standards of comparing the workplace and other environments may not be shared. Perhaps you would prefer people use more phrases like "I think", "I feel like", or pose sentences as questions. I suppose that works well enough for me without destroying conversation efficiency too much. The word "accusation" has a broad spectrum of emotion, but perhaps a very narrow emotive connotation when heard by the accused.

impendia 15y ago

So there is some discussion in the other thread, but I'll add my own. You ask that philosophy be useful. Here then, is a useful question: Suppose that my mother has Alzheimer's disease, and that I find the prospect of caring for her inconvenient, undesirable, and/or expensive. Do I have a responsibility to care for her anyway? It is "useful" because it could potentially describe a real-life situation in which one might have to make a decision. Analyzing this quickly leads one to a general discussion of ethics. As you point out, definitions are imprecise. What does it mean to say I have a "responsibility", or that I "ought" to do something? Logic and observation can get one to "If I do nothing, then my mother will suffer and/or die", but this is not the heart of the matter. I think there is no hope of a "solution", in the same way, say, that Fermat's Last Theorem was proved. But does that mean that studying ethics, and what the usual lineup of dead white males had to say about it, isn't worthwhile?

pg 15y ago
That sort of question is certainly important. I worry though that like most of ethics this is one of those cases where philosophers don't get any better answers than your grandmother.
- impendia 15y ago
  Hm. I agree with your worry completely. Still, personally I found great value in studying the subject. I find it difficult to say precisely what, though.
- siglesias 15y ago
  Paul, I don't think my grandmother could give me a very good justification for why she eats meat. I, however, armed with Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation could show that eating meat needs to be justified and that I can't justify it. Same goes for whether profiting from closed source software is ethical. Same goes for whether homosexuality is evil. These are all cases in which it would be possible to show, systematically, how one's views are contradictory, or really empirical questions. This appears to be a philosophical task, not a common sense one.

YuriNiyazov 15y ago

Do you believe that most of the stuff covered under philosophy of mind (Dennett, Searle, Block, Chalmers, Jackson, etc.) is not worth studying? Edit: reduce strength of statement.

forensic 15y ago
An easy way to show the importance of philosophy is to show all the powerful sciences it spawned and provided theoretical underpinnings for. Not the least of which is cognitive neuroscience.
pg 15y ago
I don't think this field escapes the problems of philosophy in general.

shoham 15y ago

Very interesting article; although here's what I think gets missed when folks teach and talk about Philosophy since Russell: anything that smells even vaguely religious just doesn't count -- don't read it -- too spooky, too irrational. The only reason Greeks get away with it is, I think, because nobody takes the Greek gods seriously anymore (or at least no one is worried about too many people doing so, and causing trouble in the name of Zeus!) So no King Solomon, no Vedas and probably no Confucius either, as secular as he tended to be. You mentioned at the end of the article that"...philosophy was hopelessly intermingled with religion. It didn't shake itself free till a couple hundred years ago..." I'd have to counter that philosophy without religion is generally new, hollow and unworthy of much study -- which in some ways I think is your point. I'm genuinely curious: Why (or if) you think that this decoupling is a good thing? So few other disciplines (only Religious Studies, and perhaps The Arts) ever touch upon the idea of spirit at all -- which I think is at the core of Philosophy -- the nexus of Sapience and Sentience. If one is not a fan of religion on principle (its over-adherence to both dogma, and dominance are two criticisms that I have), then certainly this is a strength of Philosophy -- the decoupling of religion from matters of the spirit/soul. Spinoza's The Ethics; and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil are two interesting books for students of Philosophy to consider.