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What, exactly, do philosophers do?

the-tls.co.uk

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Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#51

Post by stcredzero »

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,…

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

The part which is political is very relevant.

You might not like this one's politics, but his analysis of the politics of the Weimar Republic is cogent and very relevant to today's American and European politics. (It also applies to the Postmodernist Left.)

http://a.co/fP0iFwZ

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#52

Post by dvt »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #49
dvt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obviously I can't prove it, but we can look at a few metrics: academic performance, influential ideas, impact on society. I think Carmack would lose on all these fronts.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#53

Post by duncanawoods »

mcguire wrote: post #24
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?

If you read original sources you find a lot of weird nonsense that is quietly skipped over these days e.g. mystical numerology in Plato's republic, Aristotle's incendiary views on women and slaves etc.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#54

Post by sillysaurus3 »

dvt wrote: post #52
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obviously I can't prove it, but we can look at a few metrics: academic performance, influential ideas, impact on society. I think Carmack would lose on all these fronts.

How have modern philosophers impacted society? (Show your work.)

It seems obvious that Carmack's ideas have been far more influential than most philosophers' ideas, but admittedly this is difficult to measure. Impact on society isn't, though.

“Every mathematician believes that he is ahead of the others. The reason none state this belief in public is because they are intelligent people.”

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#55

Post by mcguire »

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…

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...

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#56

Post by erikbye »

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 the Internet.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#57

Post by dispo001 »

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 word history or historian behind or in front of it like computer science history, art history, the history of foobar.

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

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#58

Post by fnordsensei »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #49
dvt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To define "smart", you'd have to ask a philosopher. QED.

Jokes aside, my personal opinion is that we have a lot of hubris on the average, and a lot of us probably consider ourselves smarter than we are. Or at least could do with an attitude that generates an openness to learning, which being humble does.

For this reason alone, it might be interesting to consider that there might be a smarter lot out there. And a bunch of people who are sort of smart in the same way as developers are (deductive reasoning, parsing problems very finely, etc) to boot.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#59

Post by toufka »

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…

I do think you are being harsh here, or at least too particular to your own experience. My experience differs.

As a practicing scientist who also did a thesis on the concept of Causality, with projects on Time, I did in fact have to interact with and learn significant physics to make a dent in my projects. My professors were themselves extraordinarily capable with respect to (at least theoretical) science. My graduate-level philosophy of science classes were significantly harder than my theoretical physics classes, in some regards. The insight with respect to what is 'experimentable', and to be able to trace logical consequences of scientific assumptions through to experimental effects, and then to challenge those most basic of scientific assumptions by designing and using an experiment made powerful by its relation to an underlying philosophically-derived framework was extraordinarily empowering. And that's on the philosophy side.

I'd also argue that the framework instilled by my philosophy of science education has made my work as a scientist significantly more generalizable, and thus more influential to my fields.

Re: What, exactly, do philosophers do?

#60

Post by DonbunEf7 »

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…

The central question in philosophy of science is a meta-scientific question, as would be expected, and it's the Demarcation Problem. You know this, but I'm restating it for observers: What is the difference between science and pseudoscience, and how can it be realized as a repeatable procedure?

Science should be left to scientists, but the interpretation of science is still an individual responsibility.

I do like the joke that career philosophers know no maths aside from arithmetic and about half of Bayes' Theorem.

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