41–50 of 85 posts
1. Philosophy is worth studying for many different reasons.
2. It is known that Philosophy majors have higher IQs and SAT/ACT scores than students in any other specialty.
3. Philosophy graduates make fantastic software engineers. It's a better screening degree than computer science (which is actually a pretty bad screening degree).
4. Pragmatism is an illusion.
Some random thoughts that come to mind. 1. Philosophy is worth studying for many different reasons. 2. It is known that Philosophy majors have higher IQs and SAT/ACT scores than students in any other specialty. 3. Philosophy graduates make fantastic software engineers. It's a better screening degree than computer science (which is actually a pretty bad screening degree). 4. Pragmatism is an illusion.
The snide commentary in this article undermines his arguments. Given how much of an expert he seems to consider himself, I would have expected him to know this. Looking down on others doesn't position you as their superior. Examples: "If anyone should realize that, an epistemologist should. If Professor Jones does not, perhaps he doesn't deserve to teach philosophy." "I shudder to think what a sensitive and intellige…
It seems like the superiority complex is fairly ingrained in their discourse. While my friends find it somewhat strange, they say eventually you start to tune it out and listen to the other arguments.
The author makes an unjustified claim: I don't know what the tariff for higher education at UNLV is nowadays, but you can be damn sure that every $50,000-a-year Philosophy major at Harvard is subsidizing a hell of a lot of electron microscopes for the glamorous—and much less profitable—Molecular Biology majors. This is nonsense. The materials scientist who bought a $1M electron microscope received a grant for roughly…
Ahh yes, classic argument technique: reply to nonsense with nonsense[1]! Fantastic move. Oh wait.. there is one thing tho, which I presume you're OK with: it's a total logical fallacy. The nonsense here is the perfectly reasonable part of overhead, like that it covers electricity for the microscope, legal, hr, accounting and so on offices that need to be done for any organization, buildings to house the stuff, people…
I'm not sure what fraction of a humanities professor comes from the University vs. outside funding agencies, but it's at least a commonly held opinion in the sciences that research money is subsidizing humanities instruction, rather than vice versa. Anyone have any detailed analysis to the contrary?
I laughed out loud at this. "Science" is not distinct from philosophy, it is a child of philosophy. It exists on the borrowed epistemological currency (and naively at that) first set forth by the likes of Bacon, Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, etc.
The author points out that philosophy has not provided definitive conclusions in any of its fields. True enough, but that means that science persists on a borrowed, naive philosophy of knowledge. That is, unless you think Popper and falsification solved the problem once and for all, and if you do, all I can say is .
It's a little like the philosophical equivalent of the debt ceiling. We've been borrowing for so long we no longer understand that there were ever consequences, or anything at stake to begin with. There's really no question that we live in an era of deeply, profoundly naive epistemology, as evidenced by this post's bracketing 'Science' as a sovereign discipline independent of and even superior to philosophy.
The question becomes, then: what will be the long-term consequences, if any, of our childlike faith in Sovereign, Benevolent Science? I don't know and I don't have any good speculations, but it worries me. The best and brightest of the Enlightenment put tremendous effort towards resolving the problem of skepticism and couldn't (Hume, Kant, Hegel and their Contentinental inheritors -- Hume, Compte, Russell, Ayer, Quine, Dennett and their Analytical inheritors), and yet now I can't count the number of times I've had conversations with otherwise bright, literate individuals who think that Science is a free and sovereign endeavor unencumbered by the high-falutin abstractions of philosophy -- pah!
Was it really that simple -- all we needed to do all along was pretend there was no epistemological question, even though positivism, phenomenology, and even Popper's falsification (please) are inadequate at a fundamental level to provide even a basic rational first principle in which to ground the entire enterprise?
If the naive reductionism of the current crop of Science-enthusiasts and dogmatic futurists like Brockman, Dennett, Pinker, et al, work for you, then more power to you. Go watch Star Trek and be happy. I just don't see how anyone with any sense at all of the history of ideas cannot be disturbed by the current state of our culture's philosophy, or lack thereof.
Some random thoughts that come to mind. 1. Philosophy is worth studying for many different reasons. 2. It is known that Philosophy majors have higher IQs and SAT/ACT scores than students in any other specialty. 3. Philosophy graduates make fantastic software engineers. It's a better screening degree than computer science (which is actually a pretty bad screening degree). 4. Pragmatism is an illusion.
Interesting that intelligent students choose philosophy. Is that choice justified, though, or just a relic of the old glory of philosophy?
From the article: This is a key point to understand: philosophy, as a discipline, does not provide answers. Well, notwithstanding the fact that it certainly provides some answers, philosophy is more oriented towards learning how to come up with answers, and more importantly, learning how to recognize if the answer you’ve come up with is right or wrong. I have forgotten much of what my first year philosophy professor…
When philosophy starts coming up with answers, we start calling it something else, e.g. what we call "psychology" grew out of philosophy over time as modern theories of the mind evolved from Kant to James who was trained as a physician and exposured to the empirically grounded Pragmaticism of Peirce (who was himself a working scientist).
But this is really quite naive, and when you look at the particulars, really one discipline has very little to do with the other. James certainly did lay the foundation for modern psychology, but to the extent that he did he was acting as a scientist, not a philosopher, and very little of James' actual philosophy survives self-consciously in the discipline today. How many psychologists do you know claim that the epistemological bedrock of their practice is rooted in a Jamesean (or Dewey-ian) pragmatism? How many psychological curriculums require a study of James' theory of belief? How much practical application do Kant's categories have in modern psychology, and if they did, would they hold up under serious philosophical scrutiny? The answers to these questions are: few if any, not many/none, not much, and no.
He's discussing the nature of philosophy which is itself philosophical in nature; therefore, he's using philosophy to argue against the usefulness of philosophy.
This begs the question: Is he therefore advocating we shoot him? This would be one of the most clever ways to commit suicide. His gravestone would have to read "Trollololol".
On a more serious note (so you don't down vote me. Gosh.), it's already been said but philosophy's value lies in the framework for understanding Truth. With the exception of Absolutists and Subjectivists (and there aren't many that extreme) everyone is searching for something better and philosophy teaches people how to reason and what questions are relevant and will further the understanding of an issue of -everyone- involved in the argument. Socrates managed to get himself killed for asking questions which says something about their value.
Philosophy grants people the ability to understand, well, everything.
Some random thoughts that come to mind. 1. Philosophy is worth studying for many different reasons. 2. It is known that Philosophy majors have higher IQs and SAT/ACT scores than students in any other specialty. 3. Philosophy graduates make fantastic software engineers. It's a better screening degree than computer science (which is actually a pretty bad screening degree). 4. Pragmatism is an illusion.
Source? I'm pretty biased so I mostly came here to ask "what about physicists?" but I'm also pretty curious about these relations in general.
Anyway, this might be relevant:
> Philosophers are the smartest humanists, physicists the smartest scientists, economists the smartest social scientists.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/verbal-vs-mat...