Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What, exactly, do philosophers do?

the-tls.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 170 posts

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#41

Post by sillysaurus3 »

nomel wrote: post #39
dvt wrote: post #26

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,…

> And people that contribute are incredibly smart -- far smarter than software engineers, by comparison Comparing a software engineer to someone contributing to the advancement of an entire field is not really a fair comparison. This is like comparing someone who has a job in "compliance and ethics" to someone making advancement in quantum computing.

It's also bogus. If there is one theme repeated over and over, from Aristotle to modern-day philosophers, it's that a philosopher is so much smarter than any other group, and that it's a humble sacrifice to go work in a field that won't pay very well.

The vast majority of philosophers don't advance the field in any meaningful way.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#42

Post by smnrchrds »

dvt wrote: post #37
smnrchrds wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field. Could you please elaborate on this?

I'm being kind of harsh, so let me restate: my experience with Philosophy of Science has been very sub-par. I took a class on the Philosophy of Time and a lot of it dealt with relativity. Now, I don't think you need to understand Einstein to understand the gist of relativity, but if you're studying it for 10-weeks in a formal environment then, yeah, you probably need to have a grasp not only on Minkowski spaces, but…

So you are OK with the works of Karl Popper? Because as an outside observer, that's what I consider the phenotype of the philosophy of science.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#43

Post by mcguire »

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?

That is, I think, the wrong question. Or rather, the wrong approach to take.[1]

Philosophy is not that kind of human endeavor. There is no "state of the art"; instead, Plato is as state-of-the-art as he ever was[2][3] and every publishing philosopher has novel ideas (or at least hopes they do, although they might also like to learn that some ancient sage has expressed support for their notions).

My personal way of viewing philosophy is as a conversation. A philosopher starts by finding other statements that they like or don't like. Then, they add their own thoughts, modifying previous ideas or attacking or supporting them, all with the best arguments they can muster. From all this, you, as an innocent bystander, can pick out the threads that best let you sleep well at night.

[1] And if I've ever written a more philosophical paragraph, I don't know what it is. I wish to submit it to the Faculty of the College of Liberal Arts, blah, blah, blah.

[2] I'm sure I'll be vigorously attacked by analytic philosophers at this point. There are very much schools who would like philosophy to be more akin to the sciences or (even better) mathematics (but without all the icky evidence and formal proofs and such). But then, the only particular sympathy I've had for analytic philosophy I've recently discovered due to an interest in Daoist philosophy.

[3] Except for Epicurus. He seems to have won on some topics---his physics; if you're a materialist, you're Epicurean even if you don't already know it---and everything else seems to have been misplaced. Which is the interesting part, dang it.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#44

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

duncanawoods wrote: post #34
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

All true but I feel as currently taught it is hamstrung as a "historical study of great men / literary study of original sources" instead of teaching the key ideas distilled into the the most efficient and practical form. High school physicists are not ploughing through Principia Mathematica, instead they learn the laws of motion and move on. Physicists pretty much leave behind the original sources until you are at t…

Classical mechanics is 'done and dusted'. Aristotle or Plato are not. They can still be discussed and actively debated about today.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#45

Post by sillysaurus3 »

dvt wrote: post #40
nomel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And people that contribute are incredibly smart -- far smarter than software engineers, by comparison Comparing a software engineer to someone contributing to the advancement of an entire field is not really a fair comparison. This is like comparing someone who has a job in "compliance and ethics" to someone making advancement in quantum computing.

I'm comparing people of equal experience in either field. A philosophy undergraduate is, in my experience, much more intelligent than their engineering counterpart. This probably has to do with the fact that in philosophy, writing clear arguments is of primary import. Whereas in engineering, most examinations are problem sets -- where the worst that can happen is a clever gotcha' (see whiteboard interviews).

Your argument is that the top philosophers are smarter than Carmack. That seems suspect.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#46

Post by dmreedy »

duncanawoods wrote: post #34
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

All true but I feel as currently taught it is hamstrung as a "historical study of great men / literary study of original sources" instead of teaching the key ideas distilled into the the most efficient and practical form. High school physicists are not ploughing through Principia Mathematica, instead they learn the laws of motion and move on. Physicists pretty much leave behind the original sources until you are at t…

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 refutation to achieve the kind of unity you're looking for, unfortunately.

Sometimes, however, they do borrow eachother's tools at least.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#47

Post by dvt »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #45
dvt wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm comparing people of equal experience in either field. A philosophy undergraduate is, in my experience, much more intelligent than their engineering counterpart. This probably has to do with the fact that in philosophy, writing clear arguments is of primary import. Whereas in engineering, most examinations are problem sets -- where the worst that can happen is a clever gotcha' (see whiteboard interviews).

Your argument is that the top philosophers are smarter than Carmack. That seems suspect.

Haha, there's no comparison. The top philosophers are smarter than our Supreme Court Justices. And those are certainly smarter than Carmack.

And I'm a huge Carmack fanboy.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#48

Post by planteen »

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…

Wow. The worst part is that Einstein's original paper is quite clearly written and works through though experiments itself.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#49

Post by sillysaurus3 »

dvt wrote: post #47
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is that the top philosophers are smarter than Carmack. That seems suspect.

Haha, there's no comparison. The top philosophers are smarter than our Supreme Court Justices. And those are certainly smarter than Carmack. And I'm a huge Carmack fanboy.

I mean, for the sake of argument I'd like to entertain that hypothesis. How do you propose to prove it? Or at least show some persuasive evidence.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#50

Post by dvt »

smnrchrds wrote: post #42
dvt wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm being kind of harsh, so let me restate: my experience with Philosophy of Science has been very sub-par. I took a class on the Philosophy of Time and a lot of it dealt with relativity. Now, I don't think you need to understand Einstein to understand the gist of relativity, but if you're studying it for 10-weeks in a formal environment then, yeah, you probably need to have a grasp not only on Minkowski spaces, but…

So you are OK with the works of Karl Popper? Because as an outside observer, that's what I consider the phenotype of the philosophy of science.

Yeah, Popper is obviously a genius. I know he's regarded as a philosopher of science, but I think that's a bit of a misnomer. I think he's probably somewhere between logic and metaphysics. Carnap, too, is also more of a logician. But, alas, they're both labeled philosophers of science.
Post reply on HN