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What, exactly, do philosophers do?

the-tls.co.uk

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Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#11

I know I going to get downvoted but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgoB2JMEowc

Not by me - I read a lot of philosophy, and bullshit arguments are a problem. Not unlike programming, sometimes people get lost in trying to perfect their chosen framework or language without regard to its utility. Think of Brainfuck, which is technically very interesting because of its extreme simplicity while still being Turing-complete, but which would be a terrible choice for most practical problems.

Having said that... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#12
post #9

1. Spend an awful lot of time chasing tenure. 2. Spend an awful lot of time trolling each other on Facebook. 3. Occasionally rehash old ideas. 4. Even more occasionally come up with breathtaking insights into the nature of reality and what it means to be human. 5. Get annoyed if you point out any flaws in those insights. 6. Publish more than they used to.

> 2. Spend an awful lot of time trolling each other on Facebook.

I think I would very much enjoy seeing some citations of this. (:

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#14
post #7
post #5

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 clarifie…

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

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

"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-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."

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#16
post #9

1. Spend an awful lot of time chasing tenure. 2. Spend an awful lot of time trolling each other on Facebook. 3. Occasionally rehash old ideas. 4. Even more occasionally come up with breathtaking insights into the nature of reality and what it means to be human. 5. Get annoyed if you point out any flaws in those insights. 6. Publish more than they used to.

You forgot to include "Endlessly write justifications of how important philosophy is" and "Misunderstand the abstracts of scientific papers, then write essays based on those misunderstandings"

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#17
post #7
post #5

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 clarifie…

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

I have been enjoying Bernard Stiegler(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler). Some writing that would be HN centric here: https://iainmait.land/posts/20170418-algorithmic-governmenta...

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#18
post #5

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 clarifie…

If 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.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#19
post #10
post #3

The article starts with a question which asks about the present very clearly, but then answers a different question of what philosophers did (i.e the past) without any reference to modern philosophers. Modern philosophers analyse older philosophical work and reply to contemporaries; for example there is an ongoing debate about the difference between "letting die" and "killing", and if it is an ethical difference then…

I see the importance of exploring those questions, for they pertain to current movements and political issues, like veganism or euthanasia. So (from my position of now knowing the work of any modern philosopher) have such philosophical explorations, in the past decades or century, produced answers? In the sense that, have they made a change in the way these important issues developed? What are the biggest ways they h…

Not sure why you're being downvoted, I'd like to see an answer to this as well.

I'd suspect that they've provided quite a few important answers but I'm curious how much power/influence these ideas had in their times.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#20
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Kripke? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Kripke

Kripke is a good start. So is work by Jerry Fodor.

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-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/...

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).

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