carrier, richard. is philosophy stupid

07/01/14 Is Philosophy Stupid?

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Is Philosophy Stupid?by

Richard Carrier, Ph.D.

Abstract: A lot of philosophical zombie blood has been

spilled over the uselessness, aimlessness, or

pointlessness of philosophy. What’s it for? Is it all just

bunk? Arbitrary opinions in fancy dress? A quibbling over

silly minutiae? Does it make progress? Can’t we just

replace it all with science? Is it too esoteric to be useful or

even meaningful in light of real world issues? Can

ordinary people do anything with it? Where did it come

from? What the hell is it? Even Stephen Hawking says

philosophy is dead. Is it? Or did he really just say that in a

book mostly filled with his own conclusions inphilosophy?

Find out! I’ll answer all these questions and more.

Table of Contents

• Summary of Slideshow [also see PDF and Video]

• Recommended Readings for Becoming a Capable Lay

Philosopher

• Readings Criticizing Philosophy or Responding to Them

Summary of Slideshow

Following is the annotated text of the animated presentation. A PDF

version if the slideshow (without animations) is available here. Not

everything said or every point made during the presentation is

included below, but the most salient elements are below. To instead

watch the actual talk as given, see here.

"Philosophy is the field that hasn't progressed in 2000

years, whereas science has philosophical

speculations about physics and the nature of science

are not particularly useful, and have had little or no

impact upon progress in [science]."

—Lawrence Krauss

"Most of us do not spend most of our time worrying

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http://www.richardcarrier.info/IsPhilosophyStupid-sansanimations.pdf

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about [the big] questions, but almost all of us worry

about them some of the time. Traditionally these are

questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

Philosophy has not kept up with modern

developments in science, particularly physics.

Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of

discovery in our quest for knowledge."

—Stephen Hawking

Ironically, Krauss and Hawking wrote their dismissals of philosophy

in books that in fact were philosophy. Neither actually proved their

conclusions scientifically in those books, but merely presented

possible models of reality given the limited scientific facts now

known, as premises, and speculating from there.

That’s philosophy.

So they said philosophy is dead and makes no progress, while

claiming to make important new progress in philosophy.

"Except for a patina of twenty-first century modernity,

in the form of logic and language, philosophy is

exactly the same now as it ever was; it has made no

progress whatsoever. We philosophers wrestle with

the exact same problems the Pre-Socratics wrestled

with [so we must concede] philosophy’s inability to

solve any philosophical problem, ever."

—Eric Dietrich

Is Philosophy Stupid? We often hear...

"Philosophy is useless"

"... divorced from reality"

"... too esoteric and obscure"

"... just pointless nitpicking over trivial minutiae"

"... gets nowhere, teaches and discovers nothing"

"... just opinion masquerading as knowledge"

But must distinguish...

Philosophy as practiced in the halls of academia

... vs. what philosophy was invented to be

... and what it should and could be

... and sometimes is.

The word's original meaning tells us something if what it originally



was and was meant to be.

Philo + Sophia

=

Love of Wisdom

=

Understanding Yourself and the World

You will often hear, even from philosophers:

"Philosophy is only concerned with the analysis of concepts, not

with facts"

False.

Most philosophy is conceptual, it's a study of conceptual space or

logical space or possibility space. But even that has factual

ramifications (as I'll show later), and that's still not all of philosophy.

Philosophy directly answers factual questions, too.

Atheism, for example, is a conclusion about what is factually true,

yet it is a philosophical conclusion (there has never been a paper in

a science journal proving atheism). Likewise naturalism,

physicalism, and all sorts of factual questions, from whether we

have free will, to what is morally true.

Philosophy Is...

What exists and what doesn't.

What its nature is or isn't.

How much we can trust what we claim to know.

How should we behave—and organize society.

What we should infer from the facts of science to answer all of the

above.

How we should integrate those facts with others, e.g. from history,

journalism, personal experience.

Philosophy answers questions like...

"Who am I?"

"What should I do with my life? How can I be happy?"

"Do I have the right friends? Are these bad friends?"

"Am I a bad person? Should I be living my life differently?"

"What's worth making sacrifices for? How much sacrifice?"

"Am I in love? What is love?"

"Is there a god / afterlife / cosmic plan?"



Philosophy = Worldview

Thus, as I said, analysis of concepts is only a part of philosophy.

Philosophy is the quest for understanding, of yourself and the world.

It is what you use to construct and test your philosophy of life, your

worldview. And as such it very much concerns itself with questions

of fact that science has not or cannot gain access to or conclusively

resolve.

So are you doing it well or poorly?

Skillfully or incompetently?

Informedly or ignorantly?

If you want to be on the right side of those three questions, you

have to learn philosophy and how to do it well, which means

skillfully and Informedly.

Scientists like Krauss and Hawking thus sound a lot like the

character Evil from the movie Time Bandits. He wanted a map to

the universe, which is basically what scientists claim they are

producing but philosophy is not.

"When I have the map, I will be free, and the world will

be different, because I have understanding...of digital

watches. And soon I shall have understanding of

video cassette recorders and car telephones. And

when I have understanding of them, I shall have

understanding of computers. And when I have

understanding of computers, I shall be the Supreme

Being!"

Evil was a terrible philosopher.

Scientists often exhibit not just the arrogance but similar bad

reasoning. In the character, as in this quote, these are only

exaggerated for comic effect.

Here is a much better criticism of philosophy...

"Philosophy is just not oriented to the outlook of

someone who needs to resolve the issue, implement

the corresponding solution, and then find out -



possibly fatally - whether they got it right or wrong.

Philosophy doesn't resolve things, it compiles

positions and arguments. It would be one matter if I

could just look up the standard answer and find that,

lo and behold, it is correct. But philosophy, which

hasn't come to conclusions and moved on from

cognitive reductions that I regard as relatively simple,

doesn't seem very likely to build complex correct

structures of conclusions."

—Eliezer Yudkowsky

Here he really means not philosophy the subject of study, but

philosophy as now conducted by the academic community.

The latter does fail to distinguish good from bad and settled from

unsettled in the domain of results.

And it fails to synthesize well-tested results and centralize them for

easy consultation.

Some philosophers share these criticisms and more. Most

importantly, Mario Bunge, Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for

Reconstruction.

Before I get to that, first a little history...

Aristotle (348 – 286 B.C.) invented modern philosophy, by taking

the disorganized practice of philosophy at the time and formalizing it

into a systematic field of study.

Aristotle effectively gave us the Six Parts of Philosophy:

•(1) Epistemology (or theory of knowledge = the study of how we

know what we know and what it means to say you know

something, and how we are to tell the difference between true

and false knowledge and reliable and unreliable ways of

knowing)

•(2) Physics (physika, which at the time actually meant “Science,”

i.e. all knowledge regarding the natural world, not just what we

mean by “physics” today)

•(3) Metaphysics (literally “after physics,” a term developed later for

what Aristotle called “first philosophy,” not because it was

studied first but because it dealt with the most fundamental

questions of existence; but the word “metaphysics” translated



into modern language means “after science,” meaning what we

are to infer about the nature of human beings and the world after

we’ve taken into account everything we’ve learned from science

—atheism is an example of a conclusion in metaphysics: it is not

itself a scientific result, but an inference we make from what we

have discovered scientifically, thus a conclusion we reach after

doing all the relevant science we can do)

•(4) Aesthetics (or theory of art and beauty = the study of what is

beautiful and ugly and why and what effects that has on us and

society and what all that entails about ourselves and the world)

•(5) Ethics (or moral theory = the study of what is right and wrong

and why and how to tell the difference and why we should care;

in short, the study of how we should behave, toward ourselves

and each other)

•(6) Politics (or political theory = the study of what sort of

government we should have and why and every other question

of how we should organize ourselves as a community;

ultimately, it’s the study of the use and regulation of power, and

what patterns are best to enforce or fight for, and which should

be opposed or torn down)

Science depends on conclusions (or else unexamined

assumptions) in epistemology.

Metaphysics depends on the findings of science.

Aesthetics depends on conclusions (or unexamined assumptions)

in metaphysics, science, and epistemology.

Ethics depends on conclusions (or unexamined assumptions) in

aesthetics, metaphysics, and all the rest.

Politics depends on conclusions (or unexamined assumptions) in

ethics as well as all the rest.

And epistemology depends on conclusions in politics, since only

political philosophy can defend free speech, free thought, free

inquiry, or arrive at how these should be limited (e.g. outlawing

unethical scientific research).

So you can't actually make arguments or reach conclusions in one

of these domains without having settled all the others.



Science is just philosophy with better data. Which means

philosophy is just science with less data.

For what I'm about to say next, you'll find the evidence and

scholarship in my chapter on the history of science in the John

Loftus anthology The End of Christianity.

Contrary to popular conception, ancient science (which was one of

the six parts of philosophy) had mathematical laws, precise

observation, and controlled experiments.

The Scientific Revolution (which occurred during the 17th Century)

did not introduce any new methods for doing science. Instead it

recognized less reliable methods as less reliable (and attenuated

belief to reliability).

It remained philosophy.

In fact: science has always been philosophy.

What we now call science was still called philosophy all the way up

to the 20th century. It could be designated natural philosophy, or

physical or biological philosophy, or experimental philosophy, etc.

But still, philosophy. The word "scientist" didn't exist until the 1830s

(and wasn't popular until the 1890s).

Thus Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, even Maxwell and Darwin, were all

known as natural philosophers, never or rarely as scientists. They

all published some of their scientific findings in philosophy journals.

The first science journal, published by the Royal Society of Britain,

retains the same title it has always held since the age of Newton:

Philosophical Transactions. Even now scientists get doctorates in

"philosophy" (Ph.D.).

P.M. Harman, The Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell,

discusses how James Clerk Maxwell, often held up as the Einstein

of the 19th Century, discover of electromagnetic radiation and a

great deal else, considered everything he did "natural philosophy,"

from his speculative notions now largely forgotten to his revered

scientific findings. The only distinction he made was how well

proved each conclusion was. But it was all part of his overall natural

philosophy.

In my slides I show the title page of a common school science

textbook published in 1860, the same decade Darwin published his

theory of evolution. It's title: School Compendium of Natural and



Experimental Philosophy: Embracing the Elementary Principles of

Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Hydraulics, Pneumatics, Acoustics,

Pyronomics, Optics, Electricity, Galvanism, Magnetism, Electro-

Magnetism, Magneto-Electricity, and Astronomy — Contains Also a

Description of the Steam and Locomotive Engines, also of the

Electro-Magnetic Telegraph.

Darwin's theory of evolution was commonly referred to as a

discovery in physical philosophy or philosophy of biology, and as

the philosophy of evolution. So even in Darwin's day the

demarcation was not between science and philosophy, but

between two kinds of philosophy. In fact it was a spectrum of

reliability, based on certainty of results, which in turn was based on

access to data.

The shift in the 20th Century away from this conception was never

justified.

Science today is just the best philosophy we have, not because it's

free of error or fraud, but because it works on questions we have

the best data to answer. But that does not leave the rest of

philosophy with no data—just data insufficient to meet scientific

standards of certainty. But there are many degrees of certainty

below the scientific (e.g. historical, journalistic, personal, and

philosophical).

Hence atheism is a highly certain factual conclusion, but not a

scientific conclusion (there is no scientific paper proving it).

Scientific hypothesis formation is also, really, philosophy (it's just

advanced metaphysics). Superstring Theory is a prominent

example. That's actually philosophy, not science (yet). It's very good

philosophy, developed by very well-informed and competent

philosophers who also happen to be scientists, and like James

Clerk Maxwell they are working really hard to find a way to test it

and make it a scientific conclusion. Scientific hypothesis formation is

also, really, philosophy (it's just advanced metaphysics). Superstring

Theory is a prominent example. That's actually philosophy, not

science (yet). It's very good philosophy, developed by very well-

informed and competent philosophers who also happen to be

scientists, and like James Clerk Maxwell they are working really

hard to find a way to test it and make it a scientific conclusion. But

right now, it's still just philosophy, regardless of whether physicists

will admit this.

So that's the backstory. The demarcation between science and



philosophy is ultimately exaggerated. It is solely a difference of

object of study (concept-space vs. fact-space) and degree of

evidence (degrees of probability vs. scientific certainty).

So now to Mario Bunge's Ten Criticisms of contemporary academic

philosophy, which has largely deviated from what philosophy was

invented to be and could and should be.

• Tenure-Chasing Supplants Substantive Contributions

• Confusion between Philosophizing & Chronicling

• Insular Obscurity / Inaccessibility (to outsiders)

• Obsession with Language too much over Solving Real-World

Problems

• Idealism vs. Realism and Reductionism

• Too Many Miniproblems & Fashionable Academic Games

• Poor Enforcement of Validity / Methodology

• Unsystematic (vs. System Building & Ensuring Findings are

Worldview Coherent)

• Detachment from Intellectual Engines of Modern Civilization

(science, technology, and real-world ideologies that affect mass

human thought and action)

• Ivory Tower Syndrome (not talking to experts in other

departments and getting knowledge and questions to explore

from them or helping them)

How do you tell good philosophy from bad? How do you find the

philosophy that avoids all ten of Bunge's defect criteria? Philosophy

as an academic field simply isn't making any effort to. Philosophy

needs to be rigorously demarcated from pseudo-philosophy, and

philosophical error needs to be more consistently ferreted out? Just

as science is from pseudo-science, and just as science tries to find

and fix its mistakes. Not all philosophy is pseudo-philosophy, or in

error, but there is no easy way to tell (it's all published in the same

journals and academic presses, and presented at the same

conferences, and wins the same professorships).

Error is just error: like in science, identifying and eliminating it is a

form of progress.

What is pseudo-philosophy?

Philosophy that relies on fallacious arguments to a conclusion,

and/or relies on factually false or undemonstrated premises. And

isn't corrected when discovered.

All supernaturalist religion is pseudo-philosophy. Religious



philosophy is to philosophy what "creation science" is to science.

And some philosophers are willing to admit this, including one of the

most renowned atheist philosophers of religion this decade. He

gave up on it, and called it out...

"I found the [philosophical] arguments [in aid of

religion] so execrably awful and pointless that they

bored and disgusted me I now regard “the case for

theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously

enough to present it to a class as a respectable

philosophical position—no more than I could present

intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. I do

not mean to charge that the people making that case

are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to

be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are

almost painfully earnest and honest. I just cannot take

their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot

take something seriously, you should not try to devote

serious academic attention to it. I’ve turned the

philosophy of religion courses over to a colleague."

—Keith Parsons

"Goodbye to All That"

Secular Outpost Online

The same is often true of secular philosophy.

It's only when you demarcate philosophy from pseudo-Philosophy

that progress in philosophy becomes apparent.

Like science, the vast majority of “progress” in philosophy consists

of tiny incremental advances that look small or pointless, but

together amount to a significant body of knowledge. (Just skim

through science journals to see how true this is of any science.)

Like, for example, the discovery of a measure of potato chip

crispness:

Julian Vincent, “The Quantification of Crispness,” Journal of the

Science of Food and Agriculture 78 (1998): 162-68.

Or empirically testing how random flipping a coin is:

Joseph Ford, “How random is a coin toss?” Physics Today 36.4

(1983): 40–47.

Or conducting a massive, expensive, years-long study to verify what



everyone of sense already considers obvious, that prayer doesn't

work:

H. Benson et al., “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory

Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: a multicenter randomized

trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer,”

American Heart Journal 151.4 (April 2006): 934–42.

Proving something that's obvious just to answer delusional people

sounds like a lot of what philosophy does, too.

There are also tons of science papers documenting really minor

facts or once again duplicating a mundane result about a drug or

astrophysical measurement, or proving some really tiny and

obscure thing. So philosophy should be judged with the same

charity.

Philosopher Toni Vogel Carey summarized some ways philosophy

actually makes progress as a field, contrary to the claims of

scientists like Hawking or Krauss, in “Is Philosophy Progressive” for

Philosophy Now Online. His two most important categories of

philosophical progress were:

1 — Progress as Destruction

Philosophy every year eliminates options from logical space (by

demonstrating incoherence internally or with well-established

evidence). As a result, options in philosophy are enormously more

constrained now than they were a hundred or even fifty years ago.

No respectable philosophy journal (that isn't basically specializing in

pseudo-philosophy) will publish on the philosophy of magic,

numerology, mysticism, astral planes, angels, demons, gods, souls,

or miracles—all except as counterfactual thought experiments—or

serious arguments for, or assuming, Platonism, Idealism, etc.

Remember what Dietrich said about the Pre-Socratics? So it is no

more a valid criticism to say philosophy has made no progress

because we are still asking some of the same questions in

philosophy they were, than it is to say that science has made no

progress because we are still asking some of the same questions in

science they were (and we are: plenty of scientific questions they

attempted answers for remain unanswered today).

2 — Progress as Clarification

New advances in conceptual understanding are accumulated in



philosophy every year, new knowledge regarding Distinctions /

Possibilities / Meaning & Implications, and Exposing Assumptions.

And these advances have had real-world impact, for example on

legal decisions that affect the whole of America and the course of

human political and legal history, like Roe v. Wade and Kitzmiller v.

Dover.

Less obvious examples of progress in philosophy include all the

philosophy that gets cleverly labeled something else to hide what it

really is, like scientific speculation and theorizing (Quantum Theory,

Cosmological Theory [e.g. Ekpyriotic Big Bang Theory], Superstring

Theory, Quantum Loop Gravity Theory) and mathematical theorems

& discoveries (discoveries in concept-space).

...and on top of all that, are all the advances in philosophy regarding

"Facts Most Probable" (remember atheism? And the frontiers of

probabilistic discovery now are naturalism and physicalism, which is

an advance on the mere conclusion of atheism).

So ... not all that different from science. Most scientific progress

consists of destruction: eliminating or narrowing hypotheses. Much

of it consists of clarifying the available options given the known

facts. The rest consists of building an edifice of highly certain

conclusions to use in understanding and improving the world.

Philosophy differs in the last case in only two ways: its edifice of

conclusions consists of highly certain conclusions about what exists

(and does not exist) in concept-space, and conclusions about the

empirical facts of the world that differ from the findings of science

only in being less certain.

Major general advances made by modern philosophy include.

Naturalism (in the domain of metaphysics)

vs. Supernaturalism

Evidentialism (in the domain of epistemology)

vs. mysticism, authoritarianism, dogmatism, a priori facts, faith

Consequentialism (in the domain of ethics)

vs. authoritarianism / absolutism

Democracy / Human Rights (in the domain of politics)

vs. fascism, aristocracy, autocracy, Athenian democracy

Aesthetic Relativism (In the domain of aesthetics)

vs. cosmic aesthetics / aesthetics as morality



Major Specific advances made by modern philosophy include...

From the Late 19th Century...

• Set Theory

• Symbolic Logic

• Reduction of Mathematics to Axioms & Logic (Russell)

• Transfinite Mathematics (Cantor)

From the 20th Century...

• Game Theory

• Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems / Dan Willard's Solutions

• Modal Logic

• Bayesian Epistemology

Just google them to learn more.

Small but important discoveries made by modern philosophy

include...

• Connecting meaning of a statement with its truth conditions (and

corresponding advances in defining "truth")

• Distinction between sentences and propositions (and its

significance for cognitive science and AI research)

• Demarcation of qualia as fundamental attribute of consciousness

• Compatibilism (proving that desirable versions of responsibility,

self-determination and personal freedom are compatible with

total causal determinism)

• More rigorous defenses of atheism

As just one of the best examples, consider the recent treatise by

Judea Pearl, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference

(Cambridge University Press, 2000). (This is, incidentally, the father

of the journalist Daniel Pearl murdered in Pakistan.)

Here is that book's quite accurate description:

"a comprehensive exposition of modern analysis of

causation. It shows how causality has grown from a

nebulous concept into a mathematical theory with

significant applications in the fields of statistics, artificial

intelligence, philosophy, cognitive science, and the

health and social sciences [including business,

epidemiology and economics]. Pearl presents a



unified account of the probabilistic, manipulative,

counterfactual and structural approaches to

causation, and devises simple mathematical tools for

analyzing the relationships between causal

connections, statistical associations, actions and

observations. This book will be of interest to

professionals and students in a wide variety of fields.

Anyone who wishes to elucidate meaningful

relationships from data, predict effects of actions and

policies, assess explanations of reported events, or

form theories of causal understanding and causal

speech will find this book stimulating and invaluable."

Remember Hawking saying philosophy is dead and makes no

progress? This book alone refutes him, before we even get to the

loads of other examples.

Indeed, remember Krauss saying philosophy of science contributed

nothing to science? I am fairly certain even his field employs Pearl's

results. Philosophy has changed the way Krauss's colleagues do

physics and he doesn't even know it.

One might still ask why philosophy appears to make so much less

progress than science, relatively speaking. But this is not an

inherent feature of philosophy. It's the result of three rather obvious

factors..

• Vastly fewer personnel are devoted to philosophy than to science.

• Vastly fewer resources are as well.

• And a pervasive lack of focus (as the Bunge criteria indicate, most

philosophers are wasting their time, so most philosophy is not

progressive or minimally so).

That it makes progress and adds to human knowledge is not the

only thing establishing philosophy as a major and important field of

inquiry. It also trains its experts in skills that might not be unique to

philosophy, but are peculiarly emphasized in it far more than in any

other field, and philosophers who are properly trained are far more

expert in these skills (far, far more) than most scientists are, or

almost anyone else.

What skills are particular to philosophy?

• Logics (building accurate logical models & fallacy-detection)

• Conceptology (the study of ideas and the meaning and



implications of words and concepts)

• Conciliation (completing inferences from the results of science &

other fields, determining the most probable)

• Axiology (completing inferences from moral, aesthetic, and

political values).

But what about philosophy for the common man and woman?

We don't need to be scientists or do science to broadly understand

the results of science and apply it in our daily lives and personal

philosophy. In exactly the same way, we don't need to be

philosophers or do philosophy at an expert or professional level to

broadly understand the results of philosophy and apply it in our daily

lives and personal philosophy. We just have to figure out how to tell

good philosophy from bad. The academy should be helping

everyone do that.

They aren't. But in the meantime you can do your best to work

around that.

See below for a fuller bibliography and recommended reading lists

for understanding philosophy.

But step one is to get up to speed on the basic skills and concepts

of philosophy, and the best thing for that is The Philosopher's

Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods.

Most textbooks in philosophy are really just history of philosophy. It's

very rare to find a textbook that actually aims to teach you to

philosophize well instead. This is the best one on a the market.

But that's just the skeleton. You need the flesh to go around it. And

the only book on the market doing that by attempting to satisfy the

Bunge criteria, is my book Sense and Goodness without God. That

I think you will find essential not because it's necessarily right about

everything (there is surely some philosophical error in there, and I

would very much like it corrected if there is), but because it

exemplifies what philosophy should be doing, and gets you

introduced to a complete, coherent, evidence-based worldview,

which you can use as a model for building your own, or use until

you do.

Books and Links on Becoming a Good Philosopher



Julian Baggini & Peter S. Fosl, The Philosopher's Toolkit: A

Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods

(Wiley 2010)

[A textbook by two philosophers on the basic skills to dophilosophy, and think like a philosopher; representative of what

philosophy is and could be, and what skills it hones and requires.]

Ken Manktelow, Thinking and Reasoning: An Introduction to

the Psychology of Reason, Judgment and Decision

Making (Psychology 2012)

[Psychologist specializing in reason summarizes everything youneed to know about how to reason well and avoid reasoning

poorly; exemplifies part of a modern science-informedepistemology in philosophy.]

“Resources for Critical Thinking in the 21st Century”

[Dr. Carrier’s helpful guide to what you need to know to be a

skilled critical thinker, and thus a good philosopher, completewith lists of even more recommended readings, slideshow, and

short video.]

“How to Be a Philosopher”

[Dr. Carrier’s four essential tips on becoming a practicalphilosopher in your daily life.]

“Essentials in Philosophy”

[Dr. Carrier’s recommended readings for starting up as aninformed philosopher.]

Books and Links Critical of Philosophy (or

Responding to Them)

Mario Bunge, Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for

Reconstruction (Prometheus 2001)

[A philosopher explains ten things wrong with academic

http://astore.amazon.com/supportcarrier-20/detail/1405190183


http://www.richardcarrier.info/CriticalThinking.html

http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-to-be-philosopher.html

http://astore.amazon.com/supportcarrier-20?_encoding=UTF8&node=7




philosophy today and how to fix them.]

“Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline”

[Luke Muehlhauser’s summary of what’s wrong with academic

philosophy—and in part how to fix it.]

“Rationality and Philosophy”

[The remainder of that same series of articles by Luke

Muehlhauser examining the implications of rationality andcognitive science for philosophical method, the main thrust of

which is how to do philosophy far better than academics aredoing it.]

Eric Dietrich, “There Is No Progress in Philosophy,” Essays in

Philosophy 12.2: Philosophy's Future: Science or Something Else?

Article 9 (7-11-2011)

[A philosopher argues philosophy has made no progress and

never will. It’s wrong on almost every major point, but thecritique is typical, and figuring out why those points are incorrect

is key to sorting good from bad philosophy.]

Toni Vogel Carey, “Is Philosophy Progressive?” Philosophy

Now Online (2007)

[Essentially a response to arguments like Dietrich’s, by anotherphilosopher.]

“Jerry Coyne’s Scientistic Dismissiveness Of Philosophy”

and

“Defending Philosophy 1: A Reply To Dr. Coyne”

[Philosopher Dan Fincke responds to the criticisms directed at

academic philosophy by biologist Jerry Coyne. Commentssection is additionally illuminating, especially in the second listed,

which was the first posted.]

“On The Supposed Irrelevance of Philosophy to Most

People (Defending Philosophy)”

http://lesswrong.com/lw/4zs/philosophy_a_diseased_discipline/

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationality_and_Philosophy

http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1396&context=eip

http://philosophynow.org/issues/59/Is_Philosophy_Progressive

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2011/10/jerry-coynes-scientistic-dismissiveness-of-philosophy/

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2011/10/defending-philosophy-1-a-reply-to-dr-coyne/

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2011/11/defending-philosophy-2-on-the-supposed-irrelevance-of-philosophy-to-most-people/



[Philosopher Dan Fincke responds to the claim that all academic

philosophy is a waste of time because it does not add anythinguseful to human knowledge. Comments section is again

illuminating.]

“Take Philosophy Seriously (Tip 7 of 10 For Reaching Out

To Religious Believers)”

[Philosopher Dan Fincke explains why understanding and having

competence in philosophy is crucial for any atheist who intends toreduce religiosity in the world, in the process mentioning and

responding to common dismissals of that point.]

“The Future of Practical Philosophy”

[Philosopher James Stacey Taylor defends the value of appliedphilosophy in the real world against common criticisms, which are

often valid criticisms that philosophers should take seriously, toreform the way they do what they do.]

“OEN Interview”

[In a podcast linked in this post Dr. Carrier summarizes some ofhis criticisms of academic philosophy. Then in the very long

comments section to the article here linked are scatteredthroughout my further criticisms.]

“Lawrence Krauss: Another Physicist with an Anti-

Philosophy Complex”

[Philosopher and biologist Massimo Pigliucci addresses thecriticisms of philosophy infamously leveled (and later largely

retracted) by physicist Lawrence Krauss.]

“Progress in Philosophy Not an Oxymoron”

[That philosophy doesn’t make progress is a common criticism.

Here philosopher and biologist Massimo Pigliucci responds tothat claim. He also has a book in progress arguing thatphilosophy really does make progress, so keep your eye out for

that, as hopefully it will have many more examples.]

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2011/10/take-philosophy-seriously-tip-7-of-10-for-reaching-out-to-religious-believers/

http://npcassoc.org/docs/ijpp/TaylorFuture.pdf

http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2009/08/oen-interview.html

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/04/lawrence-krauss-another-physicist-with.html

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/03/progress-in-philosophy-not-oxymoron.html



Christopher Norris, “Hawking contra Philosophy,” Philosophy

Now Online (2011)

[A philosopher responds to the criticisms of philosophy leveledby theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.]

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