The argument is absurd. Claiming that universities are "poisoning minds" by teaching Aristotle and Descartes
in 101 Intro to Philosophy courses is just silly. Those same universities teach modern philosophy courses that deal with the intersection of science and philosophy – judging by my one or two philosophy friends, philosophers are much more interested in the practical discoveries of psychology, math, and science than practitioners in those fields are interested in the most challenging branches of philosophy, which is a damn shame.
The reason Aristotle and Descartes are taught, the reason the roots of philosophical study are so important, is that philosophy at its highest is the process of directing inquiry at that which is not yet examined. Plato's Laws and Aristotle's Poetics mark some of the earliest attempts made by man to reason about the world simply through observation and lengthy reasoning. Descartes' work is even more breathtaking, in a sense, in that Descartes took the process of philosophers before him and developed a formalized explanation of how that process worked, then insisted that we could not fully understand the universe unless we applied this process to slowly revealing it. It was the birth of modern science, and it followed a profound philosophical insight.
Philosophy is a conversation that goes back thousands of years. Modern philosophy is so fascinating that of course there's a temptation to skip right to it – in my personal studies, I bounce back and forth between contemporary writers and writers from other centuries and millennia, letting the former refine my understanding of the latter and the latter provide context for the former. But the process of philosophy's development is important to teach, not to mention a somewhat exhilarating story when told properly.
Those contemporary articles the author scorns are proof that you can take two or three sentences from anything and make it sound much worse than it is. Yes, some of those subjects have been debated for years and years – that's a feature, not a bug. Philosophy's purpose is to search not for an answer to the surface questions (and when you're doing it right, everything becomes a surface question) but to dive deeper into questions of what lies beneath those questions, what assumptions we make when we use certain words or claim certain beliefs. We'll stop asking those questions when culture shifts enough that those questions cease making sense to ask – and if they do, it will be in large part because philosophy has helped reveal some unseen truths that led to a reorientation of society.
Look, Hacker News loves this stuff because people here are largely surface-oriented people. We love practical results, we love making things that directly affect a population's lives. LessWrong is best known for its connection to Eliezer Yudkowsky, a bright guy who's interested in putting an end to forms of death. This article's written by somebody who works for a Singularity institution. Those are what a lot of us think of when we think of philosophy – attempting to answer questions as old as mankind by devising a technical "solution" to them. Like plugging leaks and whatnot.
You have to understand that this isn't philosophy's sole purpose – in fact, this is a shallower purpose than philosophy's real one, which is to constantly search for deeper underlying truth. Philosophers should be aware of scientific developments, especially psychological ones, but only inasmuch as those developments completely invalidate a part of their studies, which isn't frequent. Philosophers aren't writing for the everyman; they're writing to continue a certain lofty ivory-tower discussion that slowly trickles down, through conceptual artists and writers and thinkers, to more practical-minded makers, down slowly towards people with more "mass-market" appeal, until what started as a very high-minded concept has shifted our way of thinking entirely.
Now, is that the only place philosophers should exist? No! The more philosophers, the more philosophy-oriented practitioners in whatever field, the better. But the solution is not for philosophy to become more scientific, it's for science to turn more philosophical. Insist that scientists and programmers and psychologists study philosophy. Teach philosophy to business majors. Remind students that inquiry lies at the heart of all understanding, all breakthroughs, and that therefore it's useful for nearly anything you'll undertake in your life. But don't critique philosophy for its approach. That sort of pure inquiry is still necessary, it's more difficult than ever – the geniuses of the 20th century are far more frustrating than the geniuses of ancient Greece and Europe – and it's under attack from many fronts, ranging from the blatantly anti-intellectual to the more subtly-so like this one.
The architect Christopher Alexander, who I greatly admire and whose work combines philosophical inquiry with practical reasoning with a fantastic mathematical rigor, makes the argument that what we typically think of as "practical" will never be enough to fully understand the nature of how the universe is organized. We can figure it out part by tiny part, but that's insufficient for thought or practice on any significant scale. He's a critic of our reliance on physics and constructing physical scientific models, not because they aren't the most cutting-edge way we know to study the universe – they are! no question about it! – but because they have their blind spots, just as every practice of inquiry throughout history has had its blind spots. For him, there is a practical intersection between math and philosophy, science and spirituality, that could be said to favor each side in a different way. But to emphasize one over any other simply because we value its "results" more would be just as disastrous as to favor the other instead. Each type of study is good at a very particular thing, and we should let it be good at that thing without insisting that it bow its head to the demands of the others.
The result of his thinking, incidentally, is that he comes out criticizing modern philosophy as well, but for much sounder and more incisive reasons than lukeprog does in this article.