I’ve actually been recreationally looking at some undergraduate philosophy courses recently. And it still shocks me just how backwards-looking it all is. Basically nothing is taught as itself—it’s only taught as a history of itself.
There are two main skills that I think are necessary to practice philosophy (at least the sort that I have practical use for): the ability to suspect that your model of things is wrong even as you try your best, and the ability to sometimes notice mistakes after you make them and go back to try again.
Presumably this is what grad school is for, in one’s philosophy education, because I haven’t seen deliberate practice of either in the lectures and books I’ve skimmed. The presence of this sort of thing is one of the factors that makes LW stand out to me. If one were situating it not within philosophy but within philosophy education, it would be a pretty nuts outlier.
If you’d like to learn non-backwards-looking philosophy, which is indeed how most philosophy in mainstream American departments is done, then I highly recommend skipping undergraduate courses, which for some weird reason, kinda “talk down” to the students. Instead, I suggest three things:
(1) Just read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Pick a topic you like, such as causation or time or animal ethics, and just read the article or related articles.
(2) Read or skim academic papers or books. Most of them are surprisingly readable, especially the introductory parts. Notwithstanding criticisms of academic writing, I do think that analytic philosophy places unusual emphasis on writing clearly and plainly. (We can thank Russell and Moore for that in large part. Though, Plato wrote beautifully as well.) You can find good ideas for what to read from the Stanford Encyclopedia or track down philosophers whose work you find interesting.
(3) Listen to podcasts. Philosophy Bites’s archive is a treasure trove: it has so many important philosophers on and they all have interesting and clear explanations of some central idea. Also check out Matt Teichman’s elucidations. And there are a few more I’m forgetting. And then if you find something interesting, track the philosopher down, and read their books or papers. (Unfortunately, blogging by philosophers isn’t as active as one might wish; I think this tracks the general reduction in blogging on the Internet.)
You’ll learn a lot more this way than through undergraduate classes, which are usually slow and dull. I’m in philosophy grad school, but never took any philosophy undergraduate classes, but I picked up a significant background in philosophy using the 3 techniques above. I’m really happy for that. I love research-level philosophy, but undergraduate classes are too slow for me to sit through.
The ability to suspect that your model of things is wrong even as you try your best, and the ability to sometimes notice mistakes after you make them and go back to try again.
Wouldn’t knowledge of past mistakes be helpful in that? Wouldn’t recreating philosophy from a blank slate lead to reproducing a lot of errors?
Yeah, if there was a philosophy course somewhere that actually looked at past mistakes in philosophy, that would be really interesting.
But on the other hand, doing that gives up some sort of cosmopolitanism that I think university philosophy courses really try to hold on to. Even if you take a philosopher with a strong opinion on the subject, when it comes to teaching a course they’ll probably teach a section on Kant that faithfully explores the history of Kant’s arguments about analytic vs. synthetic, and then a month later they’ll get to Quine and faithfully explore the history of Quine’s arguments about analytic vs. synthetic.
Now, one might say “Those people really disagreed with each other, so clearly at least one of them has made a mistake. Why are you just repeating what their arguments were rather than helping the students actually learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past?”
I think partly it’s covering your ass against bias, real or merely accused. If experts disagree about something, then as a teacher you should probably teach both sides to some extent, even if you have an opinion.
But I think the real reason, which happens to be a worse reason, is that the knowledge of historical arguments is what people see as the core of a philosophy degree, and ability to avoid the mistakes of the past is not as central. If some department full of Quineans just totally skipped over the notion of analytic vs. synthetic in their courses because they didn’t think it’s a useful distinction, there would be this sense of “well, they haven’t really gotten a philosophy education” that stems from associating a philosophy education with trivia rather than skills.
In a sense it’s all about mistakes ,because the history of philosophy isn’t a bunch of random stuff, it’s one phlosopher reacting to another.
But you seem to want mistakes in a sense where they are not just criticisms from some perspective or set of assumptions, but absolute. That you are not going to get , because epistemology has not been solved. So what you have instead is everyone criticising everyone else in a Mexican stand off.
If it were possible to divide philosophy into right stuff and wrong stuff ,you would need an explanation, such as cosmopolitanism, for continuing to teach the wrong stuff. But that would be downstream of solving episyemology.
I think we’d agree that some philosophical progress has happened over the last couple thousand years, though (though I’d probably claim there’s been a lot more progress in epistemology since 1950 than you’d agree with). Our hypothetical “Mistakes of the past” philosophy course couldn’t just be a regular survey course but with the professor taking sides on every issue, but it could be cherry-picked to take advantage of places where the issue appears clear-cut in hindsight.
Since you can find someone to disagree with anything, of course for each mistake you could find someone who disagrees, so the amount of editorial control isn’t zero, but in general I think that this kind of material would actually be appropriate for a liberal-arts setting. u/Jonathan_Livengood you should get on developing this course :P
It’s a very interesting suggestion. I haven’t really taught history of philosophy—a big exception being a graduate course on the history of work on the problem of induction from Hume to Quine, which I taught in the spring. Basically all of the courses I’ve taught are current topics, arguments, and controversies that are live today. Course titles like “Logic and Reasoning,” “Biomedical Ethics,” “Contemporary Philosophy of Science,” “Metaphysics,” and “Philosophy of Psychology.”
Maybe the way to teach something like this would be under the heading “Progress in Philosophy,” where you could sort of split time between [1] the contemporary debate about what counts as progress and whether there is or could be progress in philosophy and [2] some historical examples. (This was also a major theme of the grad course I taught in the spring, so it’s still very much on my mind.)
Out of curiosity I looked up what you were teaching in the spring—the problem of induction, right? (I’ll be surprised and impressed if you managed to foist a reading from Li and Vitanyi on your students :P ) I’m definitely curious about what you think of the progress in probability, and what morals one could draw from it.
I’d actually checked because I thought it would be the philosophy of psychology. That seems like one of those areas where there were, in hindsight, obvious past mistakes, and it’s not clear how much of the progress has been emprirical versus things that could have been figured out using the empirical knowledge of the time.
No Kolmogorov complexity—the course was really a history from Hume to about 1970. The next time I teach a seminar, I’m hoping to cover 1970 to the present. Still, this time around, a lot of the readings were technical: Ramsey, Jeffreys, Fisher, Neyman, De Finetti, Savage, Carnap, and others. You can see the full reading list here.
I agree that a nice course on progress could be done with a philosophy of psychology focus. I expect that progress-skeptics would object that the progress is in psychology itself, not in the philosophy of psychology. (I wouldn’t share that skepticism for a couple of reasons.) Maybe if the course were framed more in terms of philosophy of mind and computation? Have you read Glymour’s “introduction” to philosophy, Thinking Things Through? It has that feel to me, though it’s pitched more like, “Here are things that philosophy has contributed to human knowledge,” and it ranges over more than mind and computation.
I’m actually not sure what argument you’re implying by your past examples. 1500 years ago the denial of Euclid’s parallel postulate wouldn’t have been taught—does this have implications for modern mathematics education?
It has implications for physics. If you re run the history of thought with even more emphasis on what’s currently believed to be true,and even more rejection of alternatives, then you just slow down the acceptance of revolutionary ideas like non Euclidean geometry.
But past mathematicians already just taught what they thought was true then. I’m not asking why they didn’t do that even harder, I’m asking what relevance you think it has for current math education. (And by extension, what relevance you think the education system of the Scholastics has for modern philosophy education.)
As it is said, keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out. Teaching a specific thing impedes progress when that thing is wrong or useless, but it aids progress when that thing is a foundation for later good things. This framework largely excuses past mathematicians, and also lets us convert between the “cautiousness” of philosophy education and a parameter of optimism about the possibility of progress.
But past mathematicians already just taught what they thought was true then.
But we don’t know that we are living in the optimal timeline. Maybe relativity would have arrived sooner with fewer people in the past insisting that space is necessarily Euclidean.
I’m asking what relevance you think it has for current math education.
The topic is philosophy education. Science can test its theories empirically. Philosophy can’t. Mathematics can take its axioms for granted. Philosophy can’t.
As it is said, keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out. Teaching a specific thing impedes progress when that thing is wrong or useless, but it aids progress when that thing is a foundation for later good things.
The difficulty is that we don’t have certain knowledge of what is in fact right or wrong: we have to use something like popularity or consensus as a substitute for “right”.
It may well be the case that one can go too far in teaching unpopular ideas, but it doesn’t follow that the optimal approach is to teach only “right” ideas, because that means teaching only the current consensus, and the consensus sometimes needs to be overthrown.
The optimal point is usually not an extreme, or otherwise easy to find.
I’ve actually been recreationally looking at some undergraduate philosophy courses recently. And it still shocks me just how backwards-looking it all is. Basically nothing is taught as itself—it’s only taught as a history of itself.
There are two main skills that I think are necessary to practice philosophy (at least the sort that I have practical use for): the ability to suspect that your model of things is wrong even as you try your best, and the ability to sometimes notice mistakes after you make them and go back to try again.
Presumably this is what grad school is for, in one’s philosophy education, because I haven’t seen deliberate practice of either in the lectures and books I’ve skimmed. The presence of this sort of thing is one of the factors that makes LW stand out to me. If one were situating it not within philosophy but within philosophy education, it would be a pretty nuts outlier.
If you’d like to learn non-backwards-looking philosophy, which is indeed how most philosophy in mainstream American departments is done, then I highly recommend skipping undergraduate courses, which for some weird reason, kinda “talk down” to the students. Instead, I suggest three things:
(1) Just read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Pick a topic you like, such as causation or time or animal ethics, and just read the article or related articles.
(2) Read or skim academic papers or books. Most of them are surprisingly readable, especially the introductory parts. Notwithstanding criticisms of academic writing, I do think that analytic philosophy places unusual emphasis on writing clearly and plainly. (We can thank Russell and Moore for that in large part. Though, Plato wrote beautifully as well.) You can find good ideas for what to read from the Stanford Encyclopedia or track down philosophers whose work you find interesting.
(3) Listen to podcasts. Philosophy Bites’s archive is a treasure trove: it has so many important philosophers on and they all have interesting and clear explanations of some central idea. Also check out Matt Teichman’s elucidations. And there are a few more I’m forgetting. And then if you find something interesting, track the philosopher down, and read their books or papers. (Unfortunately, blogging by philosophers isn’t as active as one might wish; I think this tracks the general reduction in blogging on the Internet.)
You’ll learn a lot more this way than through undergraduate classes, which are usually slow and dull. I’m in philosophy grad school, but never took any philosophy undergraduate classes, but I picked up a significant background in philosophy using the 3 techniques above. I’m really happy for that. I love research-level philosophy, but undergraduate classes are too slow for me to sit through.
Wouldn’t knowledge of past mistakes be helpful in that? Wouldn’t recreating philosophy from a blank slate lead to reproducing a lot of errors?
Yeah, if there was a philosophy course somewhere that actually looked at past mistakes in philosophy, that would be really interesting.
But on the other hand, doing that gives up some sort of cosmopolitanism that I think university philosophy courses really try to hold on to. Even if you take a philosopher with a strong opinion on the subject, when it comes to teaching a course they’ll probably teach a section on Kant that faithfully explores the history of Kant’s arguments about analytic vs. synthetic, and then a month later they’ll get to Quine and faithfully explore the history of Quine’s arguments about analytic vs. synthetic.
Now, one might say “Those people really disagreed with each other, so clearly at least one of them has made a mistake. Why are you just repeating what their arguments were rather than helping the students actually learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past?”
I think partly it’s covering your ass against bias, real or merely accused. If experts disagree about something, then as a teacher you should probably teach both sides to some extent, even if you have an opinion.
But I think the real reason, which happens to be a worse reason, is that the knowledge of historical arguments is what people see as the core of a philosophy degree, and ability to avoid the mistakes of the past is not as central. If some department full of Quineans just totally skipped over the notion of analytic vs. synthetic in their courses because they didn’t think it’s a useful distinction, there would be this sense of “well, they haven’t really gotten a philosophy education” that stems from associating a philosophy education with trivia rather than skills.
In a sense it’s all about mistakes ,because the history of philosophy isn’t a bunch of random stuff, it’s one phlosopher reacting to another.
But you seem to want mistakes in a sense where they are not just criticisms from some perspective or set of assumptions, but absolute. That you are not going to get , because epistemology has not been solved. So what you have instead is everyone criticising everyone else in a Mexican stand off.
If it were possible to divide philosophy into right stuff and wrong stuff ,you would need an explanation, such as cosmopolitanism, for continuing to teach the wrong stuff. But that would be downstream of solving episyemology.
I broadly agree.
I think we’d agree that some philosophical progress has happened over the last couple thousand years, though (though I’d probably claim there’s been a lot more progress in epistemology since 1950 than you’d agree with). Our hypothetical “Mistakes of the past” philosophy course couldn’t just be a regular survey course but with the professor taking sides on every issue, but it could be cherry-picked to take advantage of places where the issue appears clear-cut in hindsight.
Since you can find someone to disagree with anything, of course for each mistake you could find someone who disagrees, so the amount of editorial control isn’t zero, but in general I think that this kind of material would actually be appropriate for a liberal-arts setting. u/Jonathan_Livengood you should get on developing this course :P
It’s a very interesting suggestion. I haven’t really taught history of philosophy—a big exception being a graduate course on the history of work on the problem of induction from Hume to Quine, which I taught in the spring. Basically all of the courses I’ve taught are current topics, arguments, and controversies that are live today. Course titles like “Logic and Reasoning,” “Biomedical Ethics,” “Contemporary Philosophy of Science,” “Metaphysics,” and “Philosophy of Psychology.”
Maybe the way to teach something like this would be under the heading “Progress in Philosophy,” where you could sort of split time between [1] the contemporary debate about what counts as progress and whether there is or could be progress in philosophy and [2] some historical examples. (This was also a major theme of the grad course I taught in the spring, so it’s still very much on my mind.)
Out of curiosity I looked up what you were teaching in the spring—the problem of induction, right? (I’ll be surprised and impressed if you managed to foist a reading from Li and Vitanyi on your students :P ) I’m definitely curious about what you think of the progress in probability, and what morals one could draw from it.
I’d actually checked because I thought it would be the philosophy of psychology. That seems like one of those areas where there were, in hindsight, obvious past mistakes, and it’s not clear how much of the progress has been emprirical versus things that could have been figured out using the empirical knowledge of the time.
No Kolmogorov complexity—the course was really a history from Hume to about 1970. The next time I teach a seminar, I’m hoping to cover 1970 to the present. Still, this time around, a lot of the readings were technical: Ramsey, Jeffreys, Fisher, Neyman, De Finetti, Savage, Carnap, and others. You can see the full reading list here.
I agree that a nice course on progress could be done with a philosophy of psychology focus. I expect that progress-skeptics would object that the progress is in psychology itself, not in the philosophy of psychology. (I wouldn’t share that skepticism for a couple of reasons.) Maybe if the course were framed more in terms of philosophy of mind and computation? Have you read Glymour’s “introduction” to philosophy, Thinking Things Through? It has that feel to me, though it’s pitched more like, “Here are things that philosophy has contributed to human knowledge,” and it ranges over more than mind and computation.
If you did that 1500 years ago, then theism would appear clear cut in hindsight.
If you did that 150 years ago, then reductionism would appear obviously false.
As opposed to what? Would you be doing anyone any favours by rounding off “seems true to us, here now” as the last word on the subject?
Yes. Favors would be done.
I’m actually not sure what argument you’re implying by your past examples. 1500 years ago the denial of Euclid’s parallel postulate wouldn’t have been taught—does this have implications for modern mathematics education?
It has implications for physics. If you re run the history of thought with even more emphasis on what’s currently believed to be true,and even more rejection of alternatives, then you just slow down the acceptance of revolutionary ideas like non Euclidean geometry.
Would they? Can you explain how and why?
But past mathematicians already just taught what they thought was true then. I’m not asking why they didn’t do that even harder, I’m asking what relevance you think it has for current math education. (And by extension, what relevance you think the education system of the Scholastics has for modern philosophy education.)
As it is said, keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out. Teaching a specific thing impedes progress when that thing is wrong or useless, but it aids progress when that thing is a foundation for later good things. This framework largely excuses past mathematicians, and also lets us convert between the “cautiousness” of philosophy education and a parameter of optimism about the possibility of progress.
But we don’t know that we are living in the optimal timeline. Maybe relativity would have arrived sooner with fewer people in the past insisting that space is necessarily Euclidean.
The topic is philosophy education. Science can test its theories empirically. Philosophy can’t. Mathematics can take its axioms for granted. Philosophy can’t.
The difficulty is that we don’t have certain knowledge of what is in fact right or wrong: we have to use something like popularity or consensus as a substitute for “right”.
It may well be the case that one can go too far in teaching unpopular ideas, but it doesn’t follow that the optimal approach is to teach only “right” ideas, because that means teaching only the current consensus, and the consensus sometimes needs to be overthrown.
The optimal point is usually not an extreme, or otherwise easy to find.