Philisophy is (by definition, more or less) meta to everything else. By its nature, it has to question everything, including things that here seem to be unuqestionable, such as rationality and reductionism. The elevation of these into unquestionable dogma creates a somewhat cult-like environment.
Often people who dismiss philosophy end up going over the same ground philosophers trode hundreds or thousands of years ago. That’s one reason philosophers emphasize the history of ideas so much. It’s probably a mistake to think you are so smart you will avoid all the pitfalls they’ve already fallen into.
I agree with the linked post of Eliezer’s that much of analytic philosophy (and AI) is mostly just slapping formal terms over unexamined everyday ideas, which is why I find most of it bores me to tears.
Continental philosophy, on the other hand, if you can manage to make sense of it, actually can provide new perspectives on the world, and in that sense is worthwhile. Don’t assume that just because you can’t understand it, it doesn’t have anything to say. Complaining because they use what seems like an impenetrable language is about on the level of an American traveling to Europe and complaining that the people there don’t speak English. That said, Sturgeon’s law definitely applies, perhaps at the 99% level.
I’m recomending Bruno Latour to everyone these days. He’s a French sociologist of science and philosopher, and if you can get past the very French style of abstraction he uses, he can be mind-blowing in the manner described above.
Continental philosophy, on the other hand, if you can manage to make sense of it, actually >can provide new perspectives on the world, and in that sense is worthwhile. Don’t assume >that just because you can’t understand it, it doesn’t have anything to say.
It’s not that people coming from the outside don’t understand the language. I’m not just frustrated the Hegel uses esoteric terms and writes poorly. (Much the same could be said of Kant, and I love Kant.) It’s that, when I ask “hey, okay, if the language is just tough, but there is content to what Hegel/Heidegger/etc is saying, then why don’t you give a single example of some hypothetical piece of evidence in the world that would affirm/disprove the putative claim?” In other words, my accusation isn’t that continental philosophy is hard, it’s that it makes no claims about the objective hetero-phenomenological world.
Typically, I say this to a Hegelian (or whoever), and they respond that they’re not trying to talk about the objective world, perhaps because the objective world is a bankrupt concept. That’s fine, I guess—but are you really willing to go there? Or would you claim that continental philosophy can make meaningful claims about actual phenomena, which can actually be sorted through?
I guess I’m wholeheartedly agreeing with the author’s statement:
You will occasionally stumble upon an argument, but it falls prey to magical categories >and language confusions and non-natural hypotheses.
I think you are making a category error. If something makes claims about phenomena that can be proved/disproved with evidence in the world, it’s science, not philosophy.
So the question is whether philosophy’s position as meta to science and everything else can provide utility. I’ve found it useful, YMMV.
BTW here is the latest round of Heideggerian critique of AI (pdf) which, again, you may or may not find useful.
I think you are making a category error. If something makes claims about phenomena that can be proved/disproved with evidence in the world, it’s science, not philosophy.
Hmm.. I suspect the phrasing “evidence/phenomena in the world” might give my assertion an overly mechanistic sound to it. I don’t mean verifiable/disprovable physical/atomistic facts must be cited—that would be begging the question. I just mean any meaningful argument must make reference to evidence that can be pointed to in support of/ in criticism of the given argument. Note that “evidence” doesn’t exclude “mental phenomena.” If we don’t ask that philosophy cite evidence, what distinguishes it from meaningless nonsense, or fiction?
I’m trying to write a more thorough response to your statement, but I’m finding it really difficult without the use of an example. Can you cite some claim of Heidegger’s or Hegel’s that you would assert is meaningful, but does not spring out of an argument based on empirical evidence? Maybe then I can respond more cogently.
I’m not at all a fan of Hegel, and Heidegger I don’t really understand, but I linked to a paper that describes the interaction of Heideggerian philosophy and AI which might answer your question.
I still think you don’t have your categories straight. Philosophy does not make “claims” that are proved or disproved by evidence (although there is a relatively new subfield called “experimental philosophy”). Think of it as providing alternate points of view.
To illustrate: your idea that the only valid utterances are those that are supported by empirical evidence is a philosophy. That philosophy itself can’t be supported by empirical evidence; it rests on something else.
That philosophy itself can’t be supported by empirical evidence; it rests on something else.
Right, and I’m asking you what you think that “something else” is.
I’d also re-assert my challenge to you: if philosophy’s arguments don’t rest on some evidence of some kind, what distinguishes it from nonsense/fiction?
Right, and I’m asking you what you think that “something else” is.
Hell, how would I know? Let’s say “thinking” for the sake of argument.
I’d also re-assert my challenge to you: if philosophy’s arguments don’t rest on some evidence of some kind, what distinguishes it from nonsense/fiction?
People think it makes sense.
“Definitions may be given in this way of any field where a body of definite knowledge exists. But philosophy cannot be so defined. Any definition is controversial and already embodies a philosophic attitude. The only way to find out what philosophy is, is to do philosophy.” -- Bertrand Russell
I don’t mean to make reductionism unquestionable, I’m just not making reductionism “my battle” so much anymore. Heck, for several years I spent my time arguing about theism. I’m just moving on to other subjects, and taking for granted the non-existence of magical beings, and so on. Like I say in my original post, I’m glad other people are working those out, and of course if I was presented with good reason to believe in magical beings or something, I hope I would have the honesty to update. Nobody’s suggesting discrimination or criminal charges for not “believing in” reductionism.
“Often people who dismiss philosophy end up going over the same ground philosophers trode hundreds or thousands of years ago.”
Really? When I look at Aquinas or Plato or Aristotle, I see people mostly asking questions that we no longer care about because we have found better ways of dealing with the issues that made those questions worth thinking about.
Scholastic discourse about the Bible or angels makes much less sense when you have a historical-critical context to explain how it emerged in the way that it did, and a canon of contemporaneous secular works to make sense of what was going on in their world at the time.
Philosophical atomism is irrelevant once you’ve studied modern physics and chemistry.
The notion that we have Platonic a priori knowledge looks pretty silly without a great deal of massaging as we learn more about the mechanism of brain development.
Also, not all new perspectives on the world have value. Continental philosophy and post-modernism are to philosophy what mid-20th century art music is to music composition. It is a rabbit hole that a whole generation of academics got sucked into and wasted their time on. It turned out that the future of worthwhile music was elsewhere, in people like Elvis and the Beatles and rappers and Nashville studios and Motown artists and ressurrections of the greats of the classical and romantic periods in new contexts, and the tone poems and dissonant musics and other academic experiements of that era were just garbage. They lost sight of what music was for, just as the continental philosophers and post-modernist philosophers lost sight of what philosophy was for.
The language in impenatrable because they have nothing to say. I know what it is like to read academic literature, for example, in the sciences or economics, that is impenetrable because it is necessarily so, but that isn’t it. People who use sophisticated jargon when it is really necessary are also capable of speaking much more clearly about the essence of what is going on—people like Richard Feynman. But, our modern day philosophical sophisticates are known to no one but each other and are not adding to large understanding. Instead, all of the other disciplines are busy purging themselves of all that dreck so that they can get back on solid ground.
mid-20th century art music [...] tone poems and dissonant musics [...] were just garbage
wat?
Here are a few pieces of mid-20th century art music. I’m taking “mid-20th-century” to mean 1930 to 1970. Some of them are quite dissonant. None of them is actually a tone poem, as it happens. They are all pieces that (1) I like, (2) are well regarded by the classical music “establishment”, (3) are pretty accessible even to (serious) listeners of fairly conservative taste, (4) are still being performed, recorded, etc., (5) are clearly part of the mainstream of mid-20th-century art music, and (6) seem to me to show no lack of awareness of what music is for.
1930: Stravinsky, Symphony of Psalms
1936: Barber, Adagio for strings
1941: Tippett, A child of our time
1942: Prokofiev, Piano sonata #7
1945: Britten, Peter Grimes
1948: Strauss, Four last songs
1960: Shostakovich: String quartets #7,8
1965: Bernstein, Chichester Psalms
(I make no claim that these are the best or most important works by their composers. I wanted things reasonably well spread out over the period in question, and subject to that picked fairly randomly.)
Are these all garbage? Perhaps you had in mind only music “weirder” than those: Second Viennese School twelve-tone music (though I’d call that early rather than mid 20th century), Cage-style experimentalism, and so forth. I’m not at all convinced that that stuff had no value or influence, but in any case it’s far from all that was happening in western art music in the middle of the 20th century.
Great list of 20th century compositions! 20th century art music gets an undeservedly bad rap, IMO.
I would add a few more composers:
1930: Kurt Weill: Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
1935: George Gershwin: Porgy and Bess
1940-1941: Olivier Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps
1944: Aaron Copeland: Appalachian Spring
Kurt Weill’s work might be considered theater music rather than art music, but I would argue that it is both of those things. Messiaen is admittedly avant garde and a bit outside of the mainstream, but is approachable by a wide range of audiences, including many who would not care for the composers of the Second Viennese School. Many of Messiaen’s compositions could have been added to the list, so I picked one of the best known.
For what it’s worth, I omitted Weill and Gershwin because I thought ohwilleke might not consider them arty enough, Messiaen becase I wasn’t confident enough ohwilleke would concede that his music sounds good, and Copeland because Appalachian Spring was the obvious work to use and I already had enough from around that time :-). Of course I agree that otherwise those works are all worthy of inclusion in any list like mine.
“Often people who dismiss philosophy end up going over the same ground philosophers trode hundreds or thousands of years ago.”
See the paper on the Heideggerian critique of AI I posted earlier.
The notion that we have Platonic a priori knowledge looks pretty silly without a great deal of massaging as we learn more about the mechanism of brain development.
Oh? I would think that one of the lessons of neuroscience is that we are in fact hardwired for a great many things.
The language in impenatrable because they have nothing to say.
How do you know? That is, what evidence other than your lack of understanding do you have for this?
Often people who dismiss philosophy end up going over the same ground philosophers trode hundreds or thousands of years ago. That’s one reason philosophers emphasize the history of ideas so much. It’s probably a mistake to think you are so smart you will avoid all the pitfalls they’ve already fallen into.
While I agree that it’s important to avoid succumbing to these ideas, philosophy curricula tend to emphasize not just the history of ideas but the history of philosophers, which makes the process of getting up to speed for where contemporary philosophy is take entirely too long. It is not so important that we know what Augustine or Hume thought so much as why their ideas can’t be right now.
Also, “the history of ideas” is really broad, because there are a lot of ideas that by today’s standards are just absurd. Including the likes of Anaximander and Heraclitus in “the history of ideas” is probably a waste of time and cognitive energy.
A few points:
Philisophy is (by definition, more or less) meta to everything else. By its nature, it has to question everything, including things that here seem to be unuqestionable, such as rationality and reductionism. The elevation of these into unquestionable dogma creates a somewhat cult-like environment.
Often people who dismiss philosophy end up going over the same ground philosophers trode hundreds or thousands of years ago. That’s one reason philosophers emphasize the history of ideas so much. It’s probably a mistake to think you are so smart you will avoid all the pitfalls they’ve already fallen into.
I agree with the linked post of Eliezer’s that much of analytic philosophy (and AI) is mostly just slapping formal terms over unexamined everyday ideas, which is why I find most of it bores me to tears.
Continental philosophy, on the other hand, if you can manage to make sense of it, actually can provide new perspectives on the world, and in that sense is worthwhile. Don’t assume that just because you can’t understand it, it doesn’t have anything to say. Complaining because they use what seems like an impenetrable language is about on the level of an American traveling to Europe and complaining that the people there don’t speak English. That said, Sturgeon’s law definitely applies, perhaps at the 99% level.
I’m recomending Bruno Latour to everyone these days. He’s a French sociologist of science and philosopher, and if you can get past the very French style of abstraction he uses, he can be mind-blowing in the manner described above.
It’s not that people coming from the outside don’t understand the language. I’m not just frustrated the Hegel uses esoteric terms and writes poorly. (Much the same could be said of Kant, and I love Kant.) It’s that, when I ask “hey, okay, if the language is just tough, but there is content to what Hegel/Heidegger/etc is saying, then why don’t you give a single example of some hypothetical piece of evidence in the world that would affirm/disprove the putative claim?” In other words, my accusation isn’t that continental philosophy is hard, it’s that it makes no claims about the objective hetero-phenomenological world.
Typically, I say this to a Hegelian (or whoever), and they respond that they’re not trying to talk about the objective world, perhaps because the objective world is a bankrupt concept. That’s fine, I guess—but are you really willing to go there? Or would you claim that continental philosophy can make meaningful claims about actual phenomena, which can actually be sorted through?
I guess I’m wholeheartedly agreeing with the author’s statement:
I think you are making a category error. If something makes claims about phenomena that can be proved/disproved with evidence in the world, it’s science, not philosophy.
So the question is whether philosophy’s position as meta to science and everything else can provide utility. I’ve found it useful, YMMV.
BTW here is the latest round of Heideggerian critique of AI (pdf) which, again, you may or may not find useful.
Hmm.. I suspect the phrasing “evidence/phenomena in the world” might give my assertion an overly mechanistic sound to it. I don’t mean verifiable/disprovable physical/atomistic facts must be cited—that would be begging the question. I just mean any meaningful argument must make reference to evidence that can be pointed to in support of/ in criticism of the given argument. Note that “evidence” doesn’t exclude “mental phenomena.” If we don’t ask that philosophy cite evidence, what distinguishes it from meaningless nonsense, or fiction?
I’m trying to write a more thorough response to your statement, but I’m finding it really difficult without the use of an example. Can you cite some claim of Heidegger’s or Hegel’s that you would assert is meaningful, but does not spring out of an argument based on empirical evidence? Maybe then I can respond more cogently.
Unless you think the “Heideggerian critique of AI” is a good example. In which case I can engage that.
I’m not at all a fan of Hegel, and Heidegger I don’t really understand, but I linked to a paper that describes the interaction of Heideggerian philosophy and AI which might answer your question.
I still think you don’t have your categories straight. Philosophy does not make “claims” that are proved or disproved by evidence (although there is a relatively new subfield called “experimental philosophy”). Think of it as providing alternate points of view.
To illustrate: your idea that the only valid utterances are those that are supported by empirical evidence is a philosophy. That philosophy itself can’t be supported by empirical evidence; it rests on something else.
Right, and I’m asking you what you think that “something else” is.
I’d also re-assert my challenge to you: if philosophy’s arguments don’t rest on some evidence of some kind, what distinguishes it from nonsense/fiction?
Hell, how would I know? Let’s say “thinking” for the sake of argument.
People think it makes sense.
“Definitions may be given in this way of any field where a body of definite knowledge exists. But philosophy cannot be so defined. Any definition is controversial and already embodies a philosophic attitude. The only way to find out what philosophy is, is to do philosophy.” -- Bertrand Russell
A reply on just one point:
I don’t mean to make reductionism unquestionable, I’m just not making reductionism “my battle” so much anymore. Heck, for several years I spent my time arguing about theism. I’m just moving on to other subjects, and taking for granted the non-existence of magical beings, and so on. Like I say in my original post, I’m glad other people are working those out, and of course if I was presented with good reason to believe in magical beings or something, I hope I would have the honesty to update. Nobody’s suggesting discrimination or criminal charges for not “believing in” reductionism.
“Often people who dismiss philosophy end up going over the same ground philosophers trode hundreds or thousands of years ago.”
Really? When I look at Aquinas or Plato or Aristotle, I see people mostly asking questions that we no longer care about because we have found better ways of dealing with the issues that made those questions worth thinking about.
Scholastic discourse about the Bible or angels makes much less sense when you have a historical-critical context to explain how it emerged in the way that it did, and a canon of contemporaneous secular works to make sense of what was going on in their world at the time.
Philosophical atomism is irrelevant once you’ve studied modern physics and chemistry.
The notion that we have Platonic a priori knowledge looks pretty silly without a great deal of massaging as we learn more about the mechanism of brain development.
Also, not all new perspectives on the world have value. Continental philosophy and post-modernism are to philosophy what mid-20th century art music is to music composition. It is a rabbit hole that a whole generation of academics got sucked into and wasted their time on. It turned out that the future of worthwhile music was elsewhere, in people like Elvis and the Beatles and rappers and Nashville studios and Motown artists and ressurrections of the greats of the classical and romantic periods in new contexts, and the tone poems and dissonant musics and other academic experiements of that era were just garbage. They lost sight of what music was for, just as the continental philosophers and post-modernist philosophers lost sight of what philosophy was for.
The language in impenatrable because they have nothing to say. I know what it is like to read academic literature, for example, in the sciences or economics, that is impenetrable because it is necessarily so, but that isn’t it. People who use sophisticated jargon when it is really necessary are also capable of speaking much more clearly about the essence of what is going on—people like Richard Feynman. But, our modern day philosophical sophisticates are known to no one but each other and are not adding to large understanding. Instead, all of the other disciplines are busy purging themselves of all that dreck so that they can get back on solid ground.
wat?
Here are a few pieces of mid-20th century art music. I’m taking “mid-20th-century” to mean 1930 to 1970. Some of them are quite dissonant. None of them is actually a tone poem, as it happens. They are all pieces that (1) I like, (2) are well regarded by the classical music “establishment”, (3) are pretty accessible even to (serious) listeners of fairly conservative taste, (4) are still being performed, recorded, etc., (5) are clearly part of the mainstream of mid-20th-century art music, and (6) seem to me to show no lack of awareness of what music is for.
1930: Stravinsky, Symphony of Psalms
1936: Barber, Adagio for strings
1941: Tippett, A child of our time
1942: Prokofiev, Piano sonata #7
1945: Britten, Peter Grimes
1948: Strauss, Four last songs
1960: Shostakovich: String quartets #7,8
1965: Bernstein, Chichester Psalms
(I make no claim that these are the best or most important works by their composers. I wanted things reasonably well spread out over the period in question, and subject to that picked fairly randomly.)
Are these all garbage? Perhaps you had in mind only music “weirder” than those: Second Viennese School twelve-tone music (though I’d call that early rather than mid 20th century), Cage-style experimentalism, and so forth. I’m not at all convinced that that stuff had no value or influence, but in any case it’s far from all that was happening in western art music in the middle of the 20th century.
Great list of 20th century compositions! 20th century art music gets an undeservedly bad rap, IMO. I would add a few more composers:
1930: Kurt Weill: Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
1935: George Gershwin: Porgy and Bess
1940-1941: Olivier Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps
1944: Aaron Copeland: Appalachian Spring
Kurt Weill’s work might be considered theater music rather than art music, but I would argue that it is both of those things. Messiaen is admittedly avant garde and a bit outside of the mainstream, but is approachable by a wide range of audiences, including many who would not care for the composers of the Second Viennese School. Many of Messiaen’s compositions could have been added to the list, so I picked one of the best known.
For what it’s worth, I omitted Weill and Gershwin because I thought ohwilleke might not consider them arty enough, Messiaen becase I wasn’t confident enough ohwilleke would concede that his music sounds good, and Copeland because Appalachian Spring was the obvious work to use and I already had enough from around that time :-). Of course I agree that otherwise those works are all worthy of inclusion in any list like mine.
Eg reinventing logical positivism!
Logical positivism isn’t even one hundred years old yet.
See the paper on the Heideggerian critique of AI I posted earlier.
Oh? I would think that one of the lessons of neuroscience is that we are in fact hardwired for a great many things.
How do you know? That is, what evidence other than your lack of understanding do you have for this?
While I agree that it’s important to avoid succumbing to these ideas, philosophy curricula tend to emphasize not just the history of ideas but the history of philosophers, which makes the process of getting up to speed for where contemporary philosophy is take entirely too long. It is not so important that we know what Augustine or Hume thought so much as why their ideas can’t be right now.
Also, “the history of ideas” is really broad, because there are a lot of ideas that by today’s standards are just absurd. Including the likes of Anaximander and Heraclitus in “the history of ideas” is probably a waste of time and cognitive energy.