I'm not sure this logic makes any sense. Science is also very euro-centric, yet most of us here would argue that science is among the most objective disciplines out there.
[deleted]
If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
191–200 of 208 posts
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#192I'm not sure this logic makes any sense. Science is also very euro-centric, yet most of us here would argue that science is among the most objective disciplines out there.
Speak for yourself. I think the sciences are just as subjective as any other field. There are some semi-objective moments, but the bulk of the work is just cultural traditions playing out without any sort of introspection. Scientists tend to discourage any kind of meta-awareness which arguably makes it less objective than other practices. The fiction of objectivity inhibits study of the origins of knowledge.
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> History of philosophy is a major part of all philosophy programs Right or wrong, modern philosophers at top universities would claim that they teach history of philosophy for the same modest reason that physicists learn about Newton: so they can get some context about how various ideas developed and the reason for conventions. Analytical philosophers generally resist about having to teach history of philosophy. > t…
> "Analytical philosophers generally resist about having to teach history of philosophy." I actually agree with you on this. It's fine to draw inspiration from historical theories, but I'd prefer if we could focus more on the ideas themselves, and less on the history behind those ideas. That said, this is orthogonal to what the article is about. Given that so much of philosophy classes revolves around "History of Phi…
I, for one, studied both history and philosophy in undergrad/grad school. I find it very illuminating to anchor philosophy in a thorough understanding of its historical context. In fact, I find this informative in other fields, as well—economics, literature, textual analysis, science, etc.
That said, philosophy courses in university include a lot of historical survey because there's value in historically positioning schools of thoughts and their development across many philosophers who could be separated by culture and time, but nonetheless engage the same topic. Particularly in the Western tradition, it is fairly trivial to chronologically trace ideas through teachers and students, from one pivotal thinker to another, to the current state of Western thought. This at least helps students understand how we arrived to the present day, which I think is valuable.
Incorporating non-western philosophy would certainly make for a very positive increased coverage of human ideas, and could offer some interesting and challenging opportunities for philosophy students. There still needs to be a way to situate the information for students to grasp. Without including historical and cultural context, you could invite students to directly engage the texts and ideas alone, absent context, and produce their own comparative analysis of complementary and opposing arguments/conclusions. It could be interesting to present texts in a blind fashion, omitting identifying information about a philosopher, and see what students make of the texts without the bias of knowing where it came from historically and culturally.
While I agree it is beneficial to approach and study ideas based on their merits, and integrate non-western thought into philosophy courses that are centered on specific ideas, I think there is still value in some amount of segmentation to avoid overwhelming students. A survey of Middle Eastern and Eastern philosophy is just as valuable and informative as a survey of Western. They could all be required of philosophy majors, I think. We already have segmentation by topic, and could more easily integrate non-western thought that way.
Somewhat related, my own graduate experience led me to realize that professors and departments are very resistant to teaching, incorporating, or even approving research into anything that is outside their identified areas of expertise. This is, I think, a likely additive reason for why any given topic X doesn't make it into an academic department that is ostensibly focused on the field topic X fits into.
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because I was leading to my point about citation networks and didn't want to bore you to death about theory names like causal theories of reference and semantic externalism in philosophy of language.
Did any of these modern theories come from non-western parts of the world? "Causal theories of reference" looks interesting from an AI perspective. Do you know how it relates to the math discipline, causality (eg. Pearl)?
Does Australian count as non-western, in which case Armstrong's contributions debunk the entire article?! Joking aside, I don't really know of a lineage or pedigree for a major active research area that is non-western, but I am not and was not active in the history of philosophy.
Philosophers working in metaphysics and especially causation are aware of Pearl, and the literature on causation in Philosophy is very large, old, and active. It is also clear that Pearl is also aware of the literature in Philosophy on causation and conditionals as he does cite people like Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis.
However, there is a slight difference in concerns on the topic of causation/causality. Philosophers are usually interested in providing a reductive account of causation by providing necessary and sufficient conditions for causation, as apposed to modelling known causal structures to predict what interventions might have on novel systems. That said I do know that L.A. Paul, Ned Hall, Hitchcock, and Menzies have done some work trying to incorporate the insights from the causal modelling approach done by Pearl and colleagues.
Some links in case you want to explore further. Standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an amazing free resource if you want to look something up:
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I clicked around to see which topics were actually taught to undergraduates in the first philosophy program Google showed me (happened to be Yale): http://philosophy.yale.edu/undergraduate-program/undergradua... The first five: * An examination of major figures in the history of Western philosophy * An examination of attempts to reconcile the evils of this world with the existence of a perfectly good God, with specia…
Interesting! So first they teach their undergrads a year or two of completely outmoded Greco-Roman and religious stuff based on bad metaphysics, and then they manage, near the end, if the student hasn't dropped out, to throw in an introduction to formal logic and actual modern philosophizing. This does a lot to explain why so many highly-educated people believe in outmoded stuff based on bad metaphysics when it comes…
> This does a lot to explain why so many highly-educated people believe in outmoded stuff based on bad metaphysics when it comes to philosophy: it's what was taught in their classes!
How many of these highly educated people who believe in outmoded stuff based on bad metaphysics when it comes to philosophy actually took >1 philosophy courses that helped them arrive at these ideas? I am willing to wager vanishingly few. More likely, they never engaged much philosophy at all, and certainly didn't learn anything about metaphysics, epistemology, etc. They're probably just basing these outmoded ideas on intuition, received beliefs from childhood, and various other sources.
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've only taken three philosophy classes in college so I'm by no means an expert. However, the distinction I see between philosophy as a study and philosophy as a way of life is that the latter is a consumer version of the previous. In philosophical discipline, we talk about the nature of things. For example, "what does it mean to be virtuous", "what is the fundamental mechanics behind what is good and bad", "how do…
That's interesting. I've been reading an medieval Indian philosophy called non-dual Shaiva Tantra. The philosophy, or called the View, is only one part of it. The practice of philosophy and the way of life is not separated from the View, and yet it also addresses those fundamental questions that you are talking about with the Western philosophers. There is no dumbing down. A large part of it is that, in the non-dual…
I'm not familiar with medieval Indian philosophy but that sounds more like a set of principle derived from a religion than a philosophy, much like zen buddhism. Again, that's my observation solely based on your short description. That is to say that I could — most likely — be completely wrong. The point I was attempting to make was that philosophy is more about process than the verdict. A good analogy would be math. What is important is not that 1+1=2, rather the fundamental law of addition. In addition, all other proofs in math use previously proven facts as building blocks. In the same way, philosophers use “a priori” and use them to build up to another truth. Syllogism is a good example of this. Where as in lifestyle philosophy, what is shown is the result, not the process that took to arrive at the truth. I would argue that what matters more is that you know how you arrived at that truth, rather than being told the truth and practicing that truth.
Disclaimer: My view of philosophy has heavy western bias because of the three classes I took (they were all about western philosophers).
As a side, I thought alchemy was a pseudo-chemistry aimed at finding elixir of life (immortality juice) and philosopher's stone (turning things into gold). I believe Newton was an alchemist himself and he harmed himself in his fruitless pursuit. I never knew there was a philosophy of alchemy. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think prevents people from engaging is modern philosophy-of-mind research by building on Nagarjuna or Candrakirti?
There are many neuroscience departments that actively perform meditation research (UCSB, Yale, UW-Madison), but my personal experience is that eastern philosophers who were experts in meditation, logic, or observation are sorely understudied in Philosophy departments, despite the extraordinarily clear parallels between modern neuroscience research and their philosophical propositions.
I don't necessarily dispute this, but it's a hard sell if you can't identify some sort of institutional reason these ideas are ignored. There are thousands of young philosophy researchers, and they could make a name for themselves applying this stuff if it was well received. And it's not clear to why it would be unjustly discriminated against.
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because I was leading to my point about citation networks and didn't want to bore you to death about theory names like causal theories of reference and semantic externalism in philosophy of language.
which would you recommend for a beginner to read. looks interesting
I would check out Philosophy Bites, which is a podcast interviewing active research philosophers in 15-20 minutes about their topics.
http://www.philosophybites.com/
Check out Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is free and edited by active research philosophers on pretty much every major topic and figure.
Naming and Necessity by Kripke is about reference and the causal theory of reference, but it assume a decent amount (in case that is what you were asking for specifically).
The Very Short Introductions series have some really good booklets if you want quick ways to jump into a topic.
A few other books:
B Russell The Problems of Philosophy. OUP (dated, but a classic general introduction)
Simon Blackburn Think. Oxford (nice general introduction)
Tim Crane The Mechanical Mind. Penguin (Nice introduction to phil of mind)
A J Ayer Language, Truth, and Logic. Penguin (dated, but a classic)
D Hume Enquiries
T Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Univ of Chicago Press
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of those thousands of years of work are not even remotely based on the scientific method. Such work is of historical relevance, and not much else.
This statement is, to me, demonstrative of a lack of understanding of the source material and an unwillingness to engage with 'new' ideas purely out of bias. The scientific method is a way of approaching reality that has lead to extremely useful discoveries--but, in my opinion, the hard problem of consciousness cannot be solved via the scientific method because consciousness, the experience of qualia, is not external…
> the hard problem of consciousness cannot be solved via the scientific method
Then why are you arguing about the choices of a nominally scientific institution? If you want to practice mysticism, you're free to do so, but it's strange to argue that academic institutions (which are, ideally, based in fact) should do the same.
> consciousness, the experience of qualia, is not externally observable.
Unless you believe in otherworldly mystical forces producing consciousness, we have neuroscience. There's no reason, in principle, that the behavior of the brain should not be entirely observable.
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both India and China have extremely rich philosophical logic traditions, along with extremely well developed philosophies of mind and epistemology. Attributing philosophy of mind as "western" is the problem the article is speaking to--our Philosophy departments are so ignorant of thousands of years of work that they often duplicate already solved problems or ignore perspective changing constructs. If people are actua…
What do you think prevents people from engaging is modern philosophy-of-mind research by building on Nagarjuna or Candrakirti?
I wonder... [Generic speculation follows] Assuming the query was not rhetorical, I would wager that at least as far as analytic philosophy is concerned, it's the vast differences in vocabularies (linguistic/conceptual). Take any pair of contemporary analytic philosophy papers wherein the first argues for some position (by way of e.g. distancing the position from specific others etc etc.), and the second is mostly a critique of some point or another of the first one. Both are sound contributions. The vocabulary becomes really particular and peculiar, however, with arguments sometimes built as rebuttals / solutions to previous arguments, some specific nuance being argued; particular terms are used everywhere. There could be quite a bit of formal language involved, but usually linguistic terms will be heavily relied upon, too.
Then, if you wished to be able to understand the two papers, you would have to trace back to previous arguments etc., and most certainly the understanding of the second would come after being able to absorb the first one. This in itself is of course not a unique thing at all, but I think what with philosophers not purely relying on formal logic, the terms constructed/used become very specific and numerous; these terms are words in a language and so a specific linguistic framework is heavily relied upon (this is the crucial point).. if that makes sense.
An eclectic parallel could be Mochizuki's (Japanese mathematician) (proposed) proof of the abc conjecture[1]. It's quite massive, with multiple papers of his establishing a specific theory[2] used for the proof. The proof has been presented in 2012 and it's still being evaluated. His way was very custom, and this poses a practical problem.
What I meant to say is that it's probably not at all easy to present some new ideas in (say) analytic philosophy which employ a number of new notions (or just notions under new names). This is of course not ideal at all, but it's a tricky thing. [edit expanded some words]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCll...