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What, exactly, do philosophers do?

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Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#21

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

yters wrote: post #18
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…

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.

Because there is a good chance that whatever you want to say has already been said by at least a few other people and been refuted counter-argued or otherwise discussed.

If you are not aware of all that accompanying discussion, you are likely to think you have come up with something profound when you actually haven't. This is why r/im14andthisisdeep/ is a thing. A lot of teens think they have an insight despite the fact that what they thought is neither profound nor novel.

Also, a lot of philosophical reading helps set up frameworks or theoretical scaffolding that can serve as a layer of abstraction that you can build upon instead of everyone rediscovering the same ground principles.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#22

Post by room271 »

There are a few different areas of philosophy and it's useful to separate them out:

1) Logic (this is useful and also can be called maths) 2) Political Philosophy / Political Theory (crosses over with politics/history, again useful) 3) Ethics (useful and important but not necessarily worth academic study) 4) History of Philosophy (this is really the history of thought and useful and interesting. A lot of philosophy is really this) but unfortunately it blurs into attempting new thought 5) epistemology (useless, science is the better path)

Source: I studied philosophy.

It's important to remember that early philosophers tended to also be mathematicians and scientists.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#23

Post by amit_m »

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…

In the mathematical sciences, working on old problems using classical tools is typically considered career suicide.

I can only imagine how depressing it must be to do academic research on age-old philosophical questions - an endless literature survey, at the end of which there is no light, because even if you "solve" the problem, many others will not find your solution satisfactory.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#24

Post by mcguire »

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…

Could you provide a few examples of bad ideas that have been removed?

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#26

Post by dvt »

Always warms my heart to see philosophy on top of HN. Philosophy is hard -- much harder than one would think. And people that contribute are incredibly smart -- far smarter than software engineers, by comparison. On the other hand, it's very political, and a lot of it is mental masturbation. Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field. Philosophy of Mind, apart from a few great minds (Chalmers, Nagel) is also equivocal.

I went into undergrad with a primary focus on (meta-)logic[1] and I was taught by some of the world's premiere logicians (David Kaplan, Sam Cumming, a few others). But I fell in love with ethics -- a subject I'd never thought I'd enjoy as much as I did. I loved reading Moore, Foote, Anscombe, Geach.

My best memories were attending graduate seminars -- studying the philosophy of language and trying to figure out how logical connectives work in regular discourse, or studying abduction and trying to stitch together Horn clauses that seem to point to one conclusion rather than another.

Philosophers, in short, do all kinds of things: from pushing the boundaries of exotic logics, to solving ethical problems, to systematizing natural language or understanding the metaphysics of causality.

The article just touches on all of the above (in fact, it doesn't discuss modern philosophy at all). If you're interested in philosophy, the SEP[2] is a great resource.

[1] https://dvt.name/logic/

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#27

Post by anigbrowl »

euyyn wrote: post #10
ue_ wrote: 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…

It seems to me that the modern trend is not so much to answer specific questions like a mathematician proving a difficult theorem, but to identify and validate new analytical perspectives. A practical application of this is in the creation of new systems with which to evaluate our situations and make decisions.

Since philosophy often involves questioning basic assumptions that almost everyone takes for granted it retains the possibility to be disruptive or even dangerous.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#28

Post by ewjordan »

jff wrote: post #16
yarrel wrote: 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"

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 agree with him, because light cones yadda yadda, he cut me off because I was "getting into the weeds" (isn't that the point?!!?). The next topic was one vs many, where he cherry picked just enough offhand quantum mechanical commentary from Wheeler and Feynman to argue that maybe it was all just one electron going back and forth through time, and that was about when I lost all faith in the field.

That said, metaphysics is pretty much the worst of philosophy, because it has been so thoroughly rendered useless by all that we've actually learned about the physical world. Other subfields are substantially more interesting and less underinformed.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#29

Post by anigbrowl »

Diederich wrote: post #12
yarrel wrote: 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. (:

https://www.facebook.com/wouldprefernot/

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#30

Post by gerbilly »

I would say philosophy is a non experimental form of psychology.

Spend five minutes of introspection to see how your mind appears to work, then build huge tottering edifices of analytical thought on those narrow observations.

Profit?

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