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How to Do Philosophy

paulgraham.com

121–130 of 241 posts

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#121
Having studied philosophy (and maths and CS) myself, I mostly agree with your essay. However, here are a few things in defense of studying philosophy:

1. Just as it can be useful to be able to consider what makes a _good_ burrito, it can be useful to consider what makes a _tortilla_ (as opposed to pita or lavash or other flat breads). A large part of metaphysics is about carving up and categorising concepts and analysing and clarifying distinctions. These skills (taken in moderation) turn out to be quite useful in everyday life.

2. Symbolic logic is great exercise for the brain. Analytic philosophy is great for learning to write precisely. Becoming a better thinker and writer will serve you well. (Philosophy is a good way to get these skills, but not the only way.)

3. Philosophy is the subject which encompasses studies that are not yet mature enough to be their own disciplines. Some such subjects may never mature, but others will (think Kuhnian protoscience, iff you like Kuhn). Most maths and sciences have spun off from philosophy. The boundaries are fascinating: go read the so-called natural philosophers (the term "scientists" is anachronistic) like Descartes, Galileo, Huygens, Newton, and Leibniz.

4. There's a wealth of "philosophy of $foo" subjects to study. The degree of BS involved in Phil($foo) seems proportional to the degree of BS in $foo. Pick the right $foo, and study _both_ $foo and Phil($foo), and you've likely found someting meaningful to study.

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#122
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, the problem is that you are simply wrong. I do not believe in the soul, and I cannot say for certain that it does not exist. I CAN say for certain that we are just cells and molecules. Our brains are composed of neurons, which are simply complex chemical reactions. The cell is basically a test tube, separating off the chemicals from everything else. A certain threshold of a chemical interacts with a molecule on…

DNA evolved from RNA and it took billion years to do just that. DNA tried to perfect it self through its evolution. Your human body to evolve during its growth a lot of cells are destroyed of course while you are shaping. So basically we are all derivatives of that process. Everybody knows that. The point is that philosophy is not about getting a claim and considering it substantial to eliminate other probabilities.…

The point is that philosophy is not about getting a claim and considering it substantial to eliminate other probabilities.

But this is precisely what PG identified as being wrong with philosophy as it is currently taught.

Metaphysics is not feasible they are part of a material world.

What?

they react with it of course but it exists whether you can accept it or not.

If it reacts with the material world, it leaves the realm of philosophy, and enters the realm of testability (and hence, science). It ceases to be metaphysics, and becomes normal physics.

Everyone is trying to understand what happened to all that antimatter that was created during the bing bang. For every molecule there is another anti.

As I understand it, we have a pretty good idea as to what happened to all the anti-particles. Nature seeks the state of equilibrium at all times. Anti-particles would be attracted to their opposites, and destroy each other; this would be detected today as the cosmic background radiation, and represents the boundary in time at which the universe ceases to be opaque.

The question should be, why is there more matter than anti-matter? This is the actual question that is being pondered by cosmologists.

And what about time? who can explain that mystical concept?

Einstein.

In all these strange ideas, it's impossible to be satisfied that everything is only molecules.

These ideas happen to be testable in a laboratory, and the results are reproducable.

If everything is a chemical random chain reaction how can we all have similar ideas or visions of the future?

Because we communicate with each other. You didn't learn what you know today in a total vacuum. You were raised in a family. You went to school. Everything you know and value in your life is through indoctrination via institutions external to you. As you grow older, you internalize them. And as we all know from studying everything from perceptrons to propeganda, the more you beat something into someone's brain, the more they're going to accept it as truth.

This is what happened in philosophy. Three Greeks decided to write down what they thought they knew. Three people. Only three. Yet, they shaped the course of ALL humanity, directly or indirectly. We're still feeling the repurcussions of their thoughts today. The very fact we're having this discussion is because of them.

Only recently did Chemistry claim it's independence.

You state this as if it were some kind of political movement, just in its ways, and noble in its endeavors. In fact, most chemists of yesteryear thought that chemistry (which evolved from alchemy, remember, and had nothing to do with physics at all) was not related to physics. But as time progressed, there was an ever-increasing unification between physics and chemistry. Today, a chemist will more often than not agree that it's a narrow subset of what we call physics.

It's very highly specialized, but it is still physics. When I was most recently going through college, that was the first thing that the instructor mentioned. Chemistry is so thoroughly influenced by quantum mechanics that to deny it is itself pseudo-science. Nearly all of the early atomic research was performed by chemists (who, at the time, did NOT think of chemistry as a branch of physics). It was only when chemists wanted to peer into the behavior of their chemical reactions (from ionic bonds to fission, and all points in between) that the seeds for what we now call Quantum Physics were planted.

No, the realization that (quantum) physics and chemistry are essentially concerned with the same things is itself a very recent phenomina -- late 20th century at the earliest.

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#123
post #121

Having studied philosophy (and maths and CS) myself, I mostly agree with your essay. However, here are a few things in defense of studying philosophy: 1. Just as it can be useful to be able to consider what makes a _good_ burrito, it can be useful to consider what makes a _tortilla_ (as opposed to pita or lavash or other flat breads). A large part of metaphysics is about carving up and categorising concepts and analy…

I think thats what we got with the Paul Graham article; Philosophy of Computer Science ;)

The article says its not good enough for those of us otherwise interested in philosophy but dissappointed by its exactness, to back off from it. Rather we need to demand accuracy, precision, and practicality. And that for the sake of progress its important to recognize the field is in poor condition and not silently pass it off, in its current state, as having higher merit.

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#124
In addition to Sokal's hack on "Social Text", I believe that Rob Pike did a test in which random texts produced by running a Markov chain over Derrida were found to be indistinguishable by informed readers from actual Derrida. (I'm probably misremembering at least some details of the actual incident but the gist is, I'm pretty sure, true.)

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#125
I'm surprised that your essay doesn't deal directly with the branch of philosophy known as ethics, as practiced by such canonical philosophers as Kant, Hume, Bentham and Mill, and by contemporary philosophers like Peter Singer, Michael Walzer, Jonathan Glover, and John Rawls. Their work addresses some of the most general questions (what is a just action or a just society?), and it seems to meet your utility criterion: if you find it convincing, you have to do things differently.

Is this not an example, from within the mainstream of philosophy, of the thing you're calling for?

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#126
It is true that many works on philosophy are complicated because they fail to accurately define the meaning of the terms they are discussing. However, the solution proposed by this essay would result in the reduction of philosophy to self-improvement books like the 7 Habits of this and that.

In his book, Wittgenstein said that one must be silent on those things about which one cannot speak. The idea as advanced in his lecture on ethics is that some things simply cannot be expressed in human language and one should not try to speak about them. But is there really any harm in trying?

Anything useful that came out of philosophy is called something else: mathematics, science, etc. It has not failed. We should keep on trying.

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#127

In addition to Sokal's hack on "Social Text", I believe that Rob Pike did a test in which random texts produced by running a Markov chain over Derrida were found to be indistinguishable by informed readers from actual Derrida. (I'm probably misremembering at least some details of the actual incident but the gist is, I'm pretty sure, true.)

I've done a bit of research -- the Pike incident involved Baudrillard, not Derrida.

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#129
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he meant something along the lines of "Few were sufficiently correct that they were remembered for their discovery."

No, I meant that when you learn about e.g. the chemical elements, you don't also learn who discovered each of them. It's accepted knowledge; you're taught it as facts. In philosophy, most of the exam questions have someone's name in them. E.g. "explain x's concept of y."

Einsteinium? (yes, I'm away Einstein didn't discover that =P)

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#130

In addition to Sokal's hack on "Social Text", I believe that Rob Pike did a test in which random texts produced by running a Markov chain over Derrida were found to be indistinguishable by informed readers from actual Derrida. (I'm probably misremembering at least some details of the actual incident but the gist is, I'm pretty sure, true.)

I've done a bit of research -- the Pike incident involved Baudrillard, not Derrida.

All that proves is that Baudrillard's message is invariant under Markov chains. I'd like see a mathematician produce an argument of such fine structure.
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