DISQUS

Jason Kuznicki · 5 years ago

You aren't by any chance thinking of Isaiah Berlin's essays on the role of philosophy, perhaps? He seemed to suggest that philosophy might eventually run its course, once all man's questions were recognized as susceptible to either deductive or empirical methods. As I recall, he dismissed this possibility--but you would seem to be bringing it up once more.

Let me give you a parallel from history, where our knowledge has never been greater, but where the discipline does not seem in danger of dying out. While it is true that very few new facts are discovered about, say Louis XIV, still, every new generation will have some interest in the past, and it will approach the past informed by a different set of interior questions: While the source matter of history is always the same, the audience changes all the time. New histories are necessary, using new language, new ways of thinking, new ways of relating the information and presenting it.

Even if western philosophy were ever reduced to a set of (admittedly complex) unchanging truths, wouldn't this kind of work still be necessary? And would that not be as fully an intellectual pursuit as discovering the ideas the first time around?

Bernard · 5 years ago

Firstly, I think Jason is right. Even if we had a complete framework there would still be the small matter of understanding it and applying it to the real world.

Secondly, isn't philosophy the study of knowledge? It seems to me that that is always going to be situational and so new questions will be thrown up whenever our culture or our situation changes (for which, see the greek obsession with mathematical philosophy, the middle ages' obsession with theological philosophy and the contemporary obsession with philosophy of science).

Thirdly, the 'it's just a matter of tying up loose ends from here' belief comes up quite a lot, and occasionally just before things change dramatically (classical physics was just reaching a point of stagnation when Einstein challenged newtonian mechanics). It's not a given that there's always more to discover, but it's been a good bet before now. It's also more likely that professors in a subject will see the existing knowledge as accurate and complete, because the more you teach something the more familiar it becomes.

slarrow · 5 years ago

Darned if I can remember the name of the movement, but I remember an epistemology course back in my college days in which the professor mentioned the New Excitement in Philosophy: approaching philosophy materially in the way Will described. I always thought of it as the "philosophers in the laboratory" school of thought.

That seems to be what Will thinks philosophers may be good for. I think it's something far more pragmatic: getting people to think. That's actually always been what philosophers are good for; Socrates gained notoriety (and condemnation) for getting the young to fight their way to their conclusions instead of just accepting them.

I think the difficulty right now is that due to the extreme specialization of philosophy and its subsidized life in the Academy, professional philosophy is done for other professional philosophers. Just looking throughout history, how often has that been the case? Consequently, does it not suggest the present ennui may be a result more of the structure of philosophical society rather than the water level in the philosophical well?

One final "besides": isn't it the height of hubris to essentially say, "We've got everything pretty much figured out now?" We laugh at those kinds of statements from past figures (no more patents needed in early 1900s, who needs more than 640K ram?). Why exactly are we making them now? I have no problem providing comic fodder for my great-grandchildren, but I'd like to do it deliberately, not ironically.

Neel Krishnaswami · 5 years ago

Philosophy is of critical importance to theoretical computer science (and vice-versa). In particular, nonstandard foundations of mathematics (like intuitionistic or category-theoretic formalizations) are of radical importance to computer science, basically because constructive proofs are algorithms. All that weird stuff like modal logic and possible worlds have direct applications to computer science. A friend of mine wrote a paper using modal logic to make writing distributed programs easier, as follows. Imagine your possible worlds to be computers on a network. If a program has a box type -- ie, is true at all possible worlds -- then you can safely run the code on any machine. If some part of it has a diamond type -- can only run at some particular world -- then you know that there has to be a communication link to that world And so on. This is all brutally practical stuff, and it is informed by some of the most bizarre logical machinery around.

Matt · 5 years ago

I see philosophy as something both circumscribed by the extent of our empirical knowledge, which was expanding, last time I checked. In other words , the more we know, the more questions we have for our philosophical counsellors.

Perhaps the idea that philosophy has run its course is a form of nostalgia for a golden past -- one in which philosophers filled in the gaps in everyone's empirical awareness of the natural world, and the discipline's explanatory power seemed limitless. Now that the biochemists and physicists can explain in baffling detail the workings of the natural world, maybe some philosophers feel crowded out of the "explain-the-universe" business, and they're stuck instead in the "explain-your-specialty" ghetto of academia.

Kenny Easwaran · 5 years ago

It seems to me that philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of probability still have relevance to those fields and related fields, and have a chance to shed more light on theoretical (not just practical) capacities for knowledge. Though perhaps that's just my bias from working in those areas.

billyjoerobidoux@yahoo.com · 5 years ago

You seem to assume that philosophy makes progress or can make progress, but maybe philosophy is just trying to figure out which questions we can't answer. Second, you seem to imagine philosophy is solving problems for the benefit of human welfare, such as creating societies more in line with human nature. (But maybe the society most in line with human nature isn't full of rational actors who ignore sunk costs but full of sports fans who revel in Iraqi deaths). But turning philosophical questions into scientific problems is a short step from turning them into technological solutions. Philosophy is the will to power, which in my opinion is an impoverished vision of philosophy.

Robert Campbell · 5 years ago

Will,

I tend to agree with you here. Neither analytic nor Continental philosophy have solved any big problems, and although the feedback loops are badly stretched, the poor track records have contributed over time to the acute shortage of jobs in academic philosophy.

But is it enough for academic philosophers to announce that solutions are going to come from physics and biology and psychology and economics--perhaps after those disciplines have come to be more appreciative of theretical arguments? While the philosophers are still residing in philosophy departments, training students to operate in philosophy departments (if they can ever find jobs there)?

After all, those philosophers who claim to defer to psychology are usually far removed from actual research efforts in the field, and tend to have rather strong opinions about which empirical results in psychology are worth paying attention to at all. I am not sure that they have fully overcome the bad example set by Quine, when on the one hand he said he was naturalizing epistemology, and on the other he insisted that the only psychology he had any plans to listen to was behaviorist.

Robert

Skeptikos · 5 years ago

n 1: a belief (or system of beliefs) accepted as authoritative by some group or school [syn: doctrine, philosophical system, school of thought, ism] 2: the rational investigation of questions about existence and knowledge and ethics 3: any personal belief about how to live or how to deal with a situation; "self-indulgence was his only philosophy"; "my father's philosophy of child-rearing was to let mother do it"

From WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University.

You guys are so cute. Get over yourselves, philosophy is up and running for the first time since Socrates. Almost everything in between was little more than sophism and semantics. (mind you I have deep respect for great sophists)

As we are finally able to ascertain that we finally "know" things (few as those things may be) we can get to work. The question you ask is merely the symptom of a dying philosophy.

Thank goodness. Maybe now, Homo Intellego (or Homo Skeptikos) will finally begin to replace the hariless ape, Homo Assumptive (which refers to itself as Homo sapient, a clearly incorrect appelation).

When you can tell me why the universe exists, whether or not other universes exist, etc...than you can declare Philosophy dead, till then...look up me laddies, look up.

Hits 60 · 5 years ago

An interesting read! I'll consider what you said over my christmas holidays. I want Grand good Theft Auto: San Andreas for Christmas!

Will Wilkinson · 5 years ago

Skeptikos... Why does the universe exist? Ill-formed question. Grammatical, but nonsensical. Do other universes exist? No. The universe is the totality of everything that exists. Whether other spatio-temporal regions exist is a question for astronomy, not philosophy. So, there. Philosophy is dead?

Bernard · 5 years ago

Hits 60 is the most erudite commentator I've seen in a while.