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What, exactly, do philosophers do?

the-tls.co.uk

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Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#121

Post by smegel »

rwnspace wrote: post #120

Disgruntled philosophy grad: not very much, in my estimation. Most of the good ones born in the last five decades have been swallowed by CS, at least in the West. There's lots I'd like to say on the topic, originating from 'psychoanalysing' the field with a little too much vigor, supporting it with social-structuralist bollocks, and throwing in criticisms of the academic publishing hamster-wheel. But a simple nod is…

Out of genuine interest, did your Phil degree lead to many career opportunities?

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#122

Post by rwnspace »

dispo001 wrote: post #57

The term has been repurposed into philo-historianism. IOW A modern philosopher is someone who studies real philosophers. Look how the field is void of any original idea and at its endless citation of dead people. Far to much value is attributed to "what they said" rather than the mind set that made them say it. This could happen to any field and to some benevolent and productive extend it does. We normally put the wo…

>I have to ask: how does one write the "hello world" of philosophy? And please don't cite me a manual.

Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum. I'm sure you could write that out in a faintly amusing way using 'import' or something.

Your second sentence is right a lot of the time, but certainly not always. It's just that certain, foundation-shaking ideas are treated exceptionally and independently, or as not relevant to the very practice of thinking. As if the contents of the mind and the stomach (etc) vary independently.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#123

Post by rwnspace »

smegel wrote: post #121
rwnspace wrote: post #120

Disgruntled philosophy grad: not very much, in my estimation. Most of the good ones born in the last five decades have been swallowed by CS, at least in the West. There's lots I'd like to say on the topic, originating from 'psychoanalysing' the field with a little too much vigor, supporting it with social-structuralist bollocks, and throwing in criticisms of the academic publishing hamster-wheel. But a simple nod is…

Out of genuine interest, did your Phil degree lead to many career opportunities?

No: but learning Python and doing compTIA A+ has. I was thinking about doing a Masters focusing on analogy, or shifting over to cognitive studies where I could jump ship to STEMland. But being a poor student makes it too difficult for me to think and have a functioning life.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#124

Post by yters »

otakucode wrote: post #97
yters wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're already pre-supposing SO much. You're pre-supposing a shared objective universe which we are both capable of observing, perceiving, explaining, and predicting. You are presuming a very specific order of causation and effect. All of these things are not 'given' in philosophy and can be manipulated to various effect (like hyperbolic geometries in mathematics). The argument that the universe exists apart from our…

Are you presupposing any of those things in your response to me?

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#125

Post by yters »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #99
yters wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Math relies just as much, if not even moreso, on proofs and logic that came beforehand. It is not like every math paper starts out with the axioms of Peano arithmetic.

Math can be built on, etc. but it is never rejected or controversial. It is just true or false.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#126

Post by otakucode »

yters wrote: post #124
otakucode wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're already pre-supposing SO much. You're pre-supposing a shared objective universe which we are both capable of observing, perceiving, explaining, and predicting. You are presuming a very specific order of causation and effect. All of these things are not 'given' in philosophy and can be manipulated to various effect (like hyperbolic geometries in mathematics). The argument that the universe exists apart from our…

Are you presupposing any of those things in your response to me?

Of course! I have to presuppose that we share the same language, that the laws of physics won't shift and turn the atmosphere into spiders suddenly, that typing won't suddenly introduce poison into my bloodstream and thereby be a lethal mistake, all KINDS of things. Dealing with other people brings ethics and such into things, and that's the highest level of philosophy.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#127

Post by mattmanser »

pishpash wrote: post #7
tw1010 wrote: 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've fallen out of touch, but if you want fairly recent, Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfitt is good and is more modern stuff dealing with things that are soon to be very important (what is a person).

He died recently which prompted me to get his On What Matters which has good reviews, but hasn't reached the top of my pile yet.

My view is that philosophy is rather slow moving and gestates with societal changes rather than big thinking leaps. And I tend to agree with pg that philosophy went wrong a long time ago and descended into a war of definitions:

http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#128

Post by msla »

unhammer wrote: post #69
dmreedy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because fundamentally, every single premise established in Philosophy is rejectable, and in practice, every premise is routinely rejected. Unlike physics, where there is one tower and it is built high by many hands, in Philosophy, there are many towers and many builders, all having made very little progress on what are incredibly hard problems. There are too many different schools and too few means of empirical refut…

> every single premise established in Philosophy is rejectable until it's not, at which point it moves out of the domain of Philosophy and into physics, math, psychology, what have you.

Right. What we now call science was once subsumed under "Natural Philosophy", and, as an example, "atomism", or the idea that matter is made of atoms acting under the influence of natural laws, was once a philosophical position, such that different philosophers disagreed on its validity.

(No, the "philosophical atoms" of Democritus weren't atoms as we now know them. For one thing, the word "atom" means "uncuttable", as Democritus imagined atoms to be the indivisible units of matter, and, more importantly, he had no larger experimental and explanatory framework to slot his ideas into, so he couldn't come up with ideas like molecules and chemistry that, to us, follow quite naturally from the notion matter is made of atoms.)

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#129

Post by msla »

ewjordan wrote: post #28
jff wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

The scientific misunderstandings are extremely offensive at times, too: a philosophy professor teaching metaphysics at Yale a long while back once offered a completely serious argument against relativity of simultaneity by snapping his right fingers, then snapping his left, and saying "whatever the physicists want to say, one of those snaps obviously happened before the other". When I objected that physicists would a…

Special Relativity isn't even hard. It's literally geometry and trigonometry. True, it's done on a hyperbolic space, as opposed to a Euclidean, but that's the only difference. Everything follows from that simple foundation.

https://www.av8n.com/physics/spacetime-welcome.htm

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#130

Post by fmap »

pishpash wrote: post #7
tw1010 wrote: 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?

Martin Löf's lectures on type theory are pretty much the clearest explanation of modern mathematical logic that you'll find anywhere. Some of the technical results turned out to be false, or at least needed more work, but the analysis of inductive definitions and equality is and was groundbreaking.

Since this is more mathematics than philosophy, the latest truly novel idea is also a few months old instead of a few decades. You really just have to start somewhere and work your way forward. :)

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