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What, exactly, do philosophers do?

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Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#151

Post by dwaltrip »

erikbye wrote: post #56
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…

Except for the reading part that's exactly like software engineering. Since when does a software engineer ever start from scratch? We all build on top of what was before. As for "the field does progress and removes bad ideas or clarifies good ideas", that's best practices. That's new and better programming languages and libraries. Better operating systems. And "that mountain of work" has gotten us from punch cards to…

One very large difference is the fact that software engineers can hit "run" at the end of the day, and will quickly find out whether or not their thing works.

It's much harder to assess the quality of ideas in philosophy.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#152

Post by DanielBMarkham »

Programming is applied philosophy. That is, through inquiry we explore a previously unknown field (to us) and reduce common concerns to a formally-testable set of axioms (our tests) When programmers walk into a new field, it might as well be magic and noise -- things happen for reasons we can't understand and conversations occur in which we don't understand the context. When we leave a field, at least for the part we've coded, we're able to describe both the "fuzziness" of the area and the parts that work in a more predictable format. We turn mystery into science.

Looking at it this way, and as a layperson outsider, modern philosophy went off-the-rails sometime after formal logic theory. We've forgotten the skill and benefits of general inquiry and instead tried to formalize philosophy itself as if it were already a science. (or as if there were some underlying science waiting for us to discover it)

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#153

Post by Ngunyan »

voidhorse wrote: post #20
keeler wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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' tw…

>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).

I would drop Sartre and add Heidegger instead in that list. And I favor Suarez over Aquinas.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#154

Post by ue_ »

grzm wrote: post #148
ue_ wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it does make boring reading at all. In fact, it makes very important reading - the strange drive-by downvoting culture on HN deserves to be called out. And as I have noted elsewhere, those are merely guidelines; if they are to be rules then they ought to be called as such.

I understand where you're coming from and sympathize with any effort to make HN a better place. I don't think you're necessarily going about it in a way that will accomplish that, or have taken to heart that there are some aspects of HN that are the way they are because that's how the mods want it to be after considered experience, thought, and reflection. I hesitated writing this response because it's not clear to m…

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#155

Post by jhanschoo »

vacri wrote: post #140
keeler wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep your audience in mind. This is Hacker News. If this were a website for lawyers, political scientists, and historians I would have given a different answer to the question of "What, exactly, do philosophers do?" For them, the language of thought and issues at the foundations of mathematics qualify as "heads in the clouds" type stuff. I would have also given a different answer if the primary group here were, say,…

HN isn't particularly philosophy-friendly. I've talked about how philosophy was crucial in laying down the philosophy of science and working out the scientific method, only to be drowned in a sea of "wasn't necessary, it's self-evident" sorts of comments.

It's funny because it took philosophy centuries to see that—and even now, the scientific method is showing limitations; its too difficult to perform in the social sciences and the less rigorous method of extracting trends off big data also often has great value.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#156

Post by sametmax »

Retric wrote: post #137
sametmax wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is. When you see a mistake in a reasoning, it's not called a proof anymore. It's kinda the definition.

The problem is it was called a proof beforehand. So, their is cases of demonstrated lag between publishing and problems showing up. Therefore in the strictest possible terms, every published result is in some way suspects as they simply have yet to be disproved. I am in no way suggesting this is some kind of reasonable standard. Just that math is slightly more subjective than often portrayed. PS: This line of reasoni…

Fair enough :)

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#157

Post by voidhorse »

Ngunyan wrote: post #153
voidhorse wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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' tw…

>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). I would drop Sartre and add Heidegger instead in that list. And I favor Suarez over Aquinas.

That's a fair substitution. I like to give a nod to Sartre and existentialism mostly because it's one of the few philosophical positions that's both accessible to those less familiar with philosophy as a whole, and as such it's had significant impact other cultural domains as well--though you are right, if our concern here is providing a list of those thinkers who made the most significant impacts to the field internally Heidegger is a much more important figure than Sartre (Nazism aside) and his thinking has spawned far more work and extensions than existentialism (as far as I know about anyway).

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#158

Post by voidhorse »

mcguire wrote: post #55
voidhorse wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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' tw…

Sartre? And how could any such list leave out von Hartmann? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Robert_Eduard_von_Hartman... http://www.iep.utm.edu/hartmann/ https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/selections/eduard-von-h...

I thank you for bringing Hartmann up, as I hadn't looked into his work and this is a reminder to do so.

But anyway, I wouldn't include him for the same reason I wouldn't include Pierce, James, and some other american pragmatists, or more enigmatic figures such as Cioran and Bataille--namely because while my personal perspective on their thought is that it's excellent and deserves serious consideration, and they are some of my favorite philosophers to read, their work hasn't had as great a historical impact on the world stage as these other major figures.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#159

Post by essive »

Philosophy Degrees: Reid Hoffman - LinkedIn, Stewart Butterfield - Flickr, Peter Thiel - PayPal, Patrick Byrne - Overstock, Carly Fiorina - you all know her, Carl Icahn - Icahn Enterprises, Sheila Bair - FDIC, George Soros - Soros Funds, Herbert Allison Jr. - Fannie Mae, Gerald Levin - Time Warner, Ethan Cohen - you all know him, Rupert Murdoch, Rashida Jones, Philip Glass, etc... ...of course - just statistical - there's always some list for other degrees too....

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#160

Post by eli_gottlieb »

keeler wrote: post #114

People forget that Alan Turing's essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published in Mind, a major philosophy journal. People forget that Boolean algebra comes from a work called "The Laws of Thought," where Boole tries to describe the algebraic operations underlying thought. If you think that isn't something "philosophers do," this is an ancient goal stretching back to Aristotle's logic, up through Descart…

>Of course, I don't mean to say that philosophy and inquiry are purely synonymous. There's something vague about what the discipline of philosophy exactly is. But I don't think that's too terribly important.

I think it's pretty important, actually, because the more strictly we nail down the rules of what counts as Good Philosophy, the more it may actually diverge from really proper Inquiry into our original, pre-philosophical concerns. I'm probably unorthodox in thinking this, but I really do think the job of philosophy ought to be to answer or dissolve our pre-philosophical questions, in ways that address what we actually meant by those questions, rather than merely playing Philosophy as a disciplinary language-game.

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