This is my viewpoint as a philosophical laymen. I’ve liked a lot of the philosophy I’ve read, but I’m thinking about what the counter-proposal to what your post might be, and I don’t know that it wouldn’t result in a better state of affairs. I don’t believe we’d have to stop reading writers from prior eras, or keep reinventing the wheel for “philosophical” questions. But why not just say, from here on out, the useful bits of philosophy can be categorized into other disciplines, and the general catch all term is no longer warranted? Philosophy covered just too wide a swath of topics: political science/economics, physics/cosmology, and psychology, just to name a few. I don’t really know how to categorize everything Leibnitz and Newton were interested in. Now that these topics have more empirical data, there’s less room for general speculation like there was in the old days. When you reclassify the useful stuff of philosophers’ work as science, math, or logic I think it’s very clarifying. All that remains afterwards (in my opinion) is more cultural commentaries and criticisms, and general speculations about life. I wouldn’t call them useless; I found Rawls and Nozick to be interesting. But there would be big picture thinkers, cross-disciplinary studiers, and other types of thinkers even without a formal academic discipline called philosophy.
The decision of what disciplines belong to “science” or “humanitees”, “art” or “engineering” is significantly a political decision. Indeed, it is a political question which disciplines exist in which organization and how they fit together.
Rationalist philosophers just need to call themselves “Psychologists of Quantitative Reasoning” in order to get funding. In the current political era, it is fashionable to claim ‘objectivity’ in one’s profession despite frequently inquiring into non-empirical matters. This claim of objectivity often serves to hide one’s personal biases which, if made explicit, might otherwise be useful in interpretation of research.
The drive to be unconcerned with the political implications of one’s work is the ideal paradigm for economic exploitation of a class of highly-educated scientists by institutions and people who control how funding is utilized to enables, disables, or actualize research and engineering.
This is my viewpoint as a philosophical laymen. I’ve liked a lot of the philosophy I’ve read, but I’m thinking about what the counter-proposal to what your post might be, and I don’t know that it wouldn’t result in a better state of affairs. I don’t believe we’d have to stop reading writers from prior eras, or keep reinventing the wheel for “philosophical” questions. But why not just say, from here on out, the useful bits of philosophy can be categorized into other disciplines, and the general catch all term is no longer warranted? Philosophy covered just too wide a swath of topics: political science/economics, physics/cosmology, and psychology, just to name a few. I don’t really know how to categorize everything Leibnitz and Newton were interested in. Now that these topics have more empirical data, there’s less room for general speculation like there was in the old days. When you reclassify the useful stuff of philosophers’ work as science, math, or logic I think it’s very clarifying. All that remains afterwards (in my opinion) is more cultural commentaries and criticisms, and general speculations about life. I wouldn’t call them useless; I found Rawls and Nozick to be interesting. But there would be big picture thinkers, cross-disciplinary studiers, and other types of thinkers even without a formal academic discipline called philosophy.
The decision of what disciplines belong to “science” or “humanitees”, “art” or “engineering” is significantly a political decision. Indeed, it is a political question which disciplines exist in which organization and how they fit together.
Rationalist philosophers just need to call themselves “Psychologists of Quantitative Reasoning” in order to get funding. In the current political era, it is fashionable to claim ‘objectivity’ in one’s profession despite frequently inquiring into non-empirical matters. This claim of objectivity often serves to hide one’s personal biases which, if made explicit, might otherwise be useful in interpretation of research.
The drive to be unconcerned with the political implications of one’s work is the ideal paradigm for economic exploitation of a class of highly-educated scientists by institutions and people who control how funding is utilized to enables, disables, or actualize research and engineering.
Fox News is a perfect example of brutally skewing scientific evidence towards political ends “How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-20110525
(For those of you who would: instead of voting me down because you dislike these ideas, how about trying to engage with them?)