
When Philosophy Lost Its Way - yk
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/11/when-philosophy-lost-its-way/?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0
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stephenhess
With the rise of scientific thinking, we're seeing a rapid increase in the
number of folks who identify as agnostic or athiest [1]. This is natural given
that the tenets of most major religions can't be tested or validated via
experimental methods.

The problem though is that absent these religious ideologies, we're left with
a number of core questions that secular philosophy has been unable to answer
convincingly. Namely:

\- Where does value stem from? What is good? What is bad? \- What is the
meaning or purpose of life? \- Why is there something instead of nothing? What
was the original cause? Was there one? \- What happens after we die?

This dovetails with a number of practical issues in today's world. (1) Lots of
suicide and depression. There are 30 million prescriptions of Zoloft written
in the United States. Many of these folks (I assume) aren't suffering some
sort of pathological illness but find themselves looking at a world that
appears to be devoid of meaning when these religious frameworks break down for
them (i.e. nihilism) (2) Religious extremism that manifests in sectarian
violence and war.

Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an
inferior product compared to religions. It doesn't provide out-of-the-box
answers to these really hard questions and as a result can be a very scary and
lonely ideology.

Relevant point: I'd love to see academic philosophy working to shore up these
areas and provide folks a better, clearer framework in which they can live
meaningful, enjoyable lives that doesn't require a religious framework.

[http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-
religio...](http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-
landscape/)

~~~
vezzy-fnord
You're ignoring the fact that religions haven't been able to convincingly
answer any of these questions, either. Else there wouldn't be so many of them
and they wouldn't be having highly intricate theological debates about the
half-dozen types of millennialism and interpretations of whether and to what
extent Mosaic law is still relevant, among many other things.

The idea that religion provides some sort of certainty is a complete falsehood
trivially debunked by a cursory glance of theological discourse. It provides
certainty only to those ignorant of it, just as those ignorant of secular
philosophy who never deliberate any of these questions have quite likely
settled on some ad-hoc worldview that works for them.

In practice, most of value theory is secular. The laws that underpin most
contemporary states are secular. The meaning of life is an unanswered
question, quite likely even an ironically meaningless question itself. The
afterlife if any is also an unanswered question. Christians disagree between
universalism, annihilationism, eternal torment and other dogmas on hell alone.

There are no out-of-the-box answers provided by anyone. Many religions
actually conveniently avoid pondering them in any detail.

~~~
fecklessyouth
>You're ignoring the fact that religions haven't been able to convincingly
answer any of these questions, either. Else there wouldn't be so many of them
and they wouldn't be having highly intricate theological debates about the
half-dozen types of millennialism and interpretations of whether and to what
extent Mosaic law is still relevant, among many other things.

The mere presence of debate does not preclude certainty about overarching
principles. Various denominations might disagree about what's moral in a
situation, but they can at least agree about why this specific kind of
morality is important, and what reasoning and evidence should be relevant in
the discussion, and how this morality plays into a larger conception of the
Christian life. Elements like the Gospel, the Apostle's Creed, and the
metaphysics of traditional deism can all be harnessed to conduct and resolve
debate. There are more certainties than there are the opposite. And perfect
certainty will never be achieved, even on a theological level. Since one of
the charges of theology is to adapt and present Christianity to a changing
world.

Unlike, say, secular moral discourse, especially manifest in political speech,
which makes no effort whatsoever to establish shared principles. There are
few, if any, first premises which can initiate debate. There are few agreed-
upon standards for what counts as relevant evidence, or how certain values
outweigh others.

Wading in secular moral philosophy, the situation becomes even more dire. No
one could ever hope to walk into a secular philosophy class with modern
material and achieve any guidance about how to conduct their life.

The ability to debate and resolve issues is the marker of a healthy tradition.
Not all issues can be resolved. But there should at least be a vehicle to
coming to the best available answer. Studying, say, the progression of
Catholic theological doctrine is a good example of this. But in our post-
Reformation era, in which every theological debate ends up spawning a new
Protestant denomination, your lack of confidence is understandable.

I do, of course, agree with you that our broader cultural approach to such
issues is entirely arbitrary and resistant to intellectual progress.

Edit: Alasdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice, Which Rationality is a stellar
treatment of this problem you're noticing:

[http://www.amazon.com/Whose-Justice-Rationality-Alasdair-
Mac...](http://www.amazon.com/Whose-Justice-Rationality-Alasdair-
Macintyre/dp/0268019444)

~~~
acqq
Morality from religion? Please. Who practices what Jesus personally told his
believers to do?

"anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the
victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery."
Matthew 5:32

Combine that with God's official "Thou shalt not commit adultery"

And especially for the protestants, directly by Jesus again:

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin
destroy, and where thieves break in and steal." Matthew 6:19 "But store up for
yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and
where thieves do not break in and steal."

And of course, who does this, as Jesus says:

"And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is
better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes
to be cast into hell fire." Matthew 18:9

Now explain why you don't do what Jesus and God personally, according to the
holy books, tell you to do if you get the morality from the religion.

Even if you are a believer you have to see that it's a human consensus that
decides what's moral at any particular point in time. That consensus was
historically at some times at some places more influenced by some holy books,
therefore the witch hunt ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.") and
luckily it's not that much anymore, at least in Europe.

Have even more fun trying to accept the morality from Islam holy books. Note
the whole Quran is claimed to be the actual "words of God.": "Whoso fighteth
in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a
vast reward." Quran (4:74)

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jseliger
Paul Graham's essay "How to do philosophy" complements this piece well:
[http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html](http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html).

This:

 _The second event was the placing of philosophy as one more discipline
alongside these sciences within the modern research university. A result was
that philosophy, previously the queen of the disciplines, was displaced, as
the natural and social sciences divided the world between them._

may also be a problem because the healthier parts of philosophy, concerning
"Why?" or "How?", got turned into science. The less healthy parts got turned
into philosophy.

~~~
jandrese
This is a big factor IMHO. Philosophy is trying to live somewhere between
science and theology and there just isn't much room there anymore. Worse, a
lot of that space is filled with dubious areas of study or rat holes (example:
Bertrand Russel's Principia Mathematica) so philosophers find themselves
hemmed in at both sides.

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nihils
The author's conception of philosophy seems to be heavily biased towards
Western analytic philosophy whose pretension towards logically underpinning
sciences and reliance on formal methods means that is more of a theoretical
computer science or physics. Plenty of Continental philosophy: post-
structuralism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, and non-Western philosophy
(such as decolonial thought) speaks to and about daily life.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I don't see post-structuralism or deconstruction
as having all that much to say about daily life. (Almost) nobody actually
_lives_ that way. That is, when you go out for a beer with your friends, you
talk to them as if humans can actually communicate, and as if the message sent
will be (approximately) the message received.

~~~
steveklabnik
I go out for a beer with my friends and talk to them about post-structuralism.
;)

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Sure. But you probably don't deconstruct what they say during the conversation
(except for example or for entertainment).

~~~
steveklabnik
That's true. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have an
_impact_ on daily life. In other words, descontruction, specifically, is an
analysis technique. The outcome of doing said analysis is separate from doing
the analysis.

------
tyre
As a philosophy major turned engineer turned CEO, I agree with the article
about the fall of philosophy in academia. As my concentration advisor half-
joked in one of our first courses, "you are majoring in mental ma __ __bation.
" However, I do not agree that philosophy has been entirely relegated to
universities. Thought many of those who self-identify as philosophers reside
in academia, not everyone who _behaves_ as a philosopher resides there.
Philosophy literally translates from the Greek to lover of wisdom. Those who
pursue knowledge and understanding, regardless of title, are philosophers. In
fact, many of the non-technical articles on HN are philosophical. Asking how
to build a company culture or what it means to be successful in the context of
a startup are both philosophical inquiries. Balancing the tradeoff between
competing interests (e.g. financial vs. mission-driven, personal gain versus
organizational gain) come down to questions your values, questioning "what is
good". There are few questions as emblematic of philosophy.

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anateus
So rather than working at the edges of social and natural sciences, looking at
the unknown and feeding back (perhaps not as much as it could), as western
analytic philosophy does now, they seek a return to a time when a philosopher
was prized for obscurantism and bon mots rather than an increase in clarity?

So... they haven't heard of people like Slavoj Žižek? Is that what they want
all of philosophy to be like?

~~~
gaius
Zizek is to Nietzsche as Dan Brown is to Shakespeare.

~~~
steveklabnik
Zizek has published a large amount of works that are taken very seriously. I
don't like a lot of the things he says either, but calling him Dan Brown would
only be true if Dan Brown was accepted as a serious scholar.

------
zenogais
There's a broad strand of discourse within philosophy on exactly the topic of
its incorporation into the academy. Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, et al come
immediately to mind.

Quite a lack of research on the author's part to come to such a conclusion.

------
habitue
> Before its migration to the university, philosophy had never had a central
> home. Philosophers could be found anywhere — serving as diplomats, living
> off pensions, grinding lenses, as well as within a university.

I think we've come back to this. While philosophy in the academy might be
navel-gazing and disconnected, blogs and regular people talk about philosophy
all the time. Philosophy is something we engage in before we've fully wrapped
our heads around a problem, or know how to test it or formalize it. It's all
the gaps between formal logical reasoning and science, and there are a lot of
those gaps.

Read something like [1], written by someone who's a doctor by trade, and you
can see the hands-dirty philosopher is still out there.

[1] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

------
peterashford
The article is rubbish. Philosophy has answered many questions. Natural
Philosophy (science) has now taken over the position of prime means of
inquisition into the truth. There is still space left for Philosophy just less
of it than there used to be, and don't forget than many people in Physics,
Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience are effectively doing Philosophy inside
their disciplines.

This isn't "the death of philosophy", this is philosophy having succeeded
brilliantly. The sciences are offspring that any parent should be eminently
proud of.

------
paulpauper
I actually thing we're in a philosophy boom, with recent developments in
quantum mechanics and the synthesis between the two subjects. There is a lot
of research in this area, about quantum mechanics, thought experiments
(Chinese room), turing tests, complexity/computational theory of mind (Bostrom
simulation argument, singularity) and connection to free will and other
philosophical concepts. Philosophy becoming more STEM-like.

~~~
empath75
A lot of cutting-edge computer science and math is intimately connected with
the more abstract reaches of philosophy (category theory, etc).

~~~
AnimalMuppet
You classify category theory as philosophy rather than math? Can you explain
why?

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Outdoorsman
The best available evidence we (humans) have suggests that we're finite
beings...and we don't much like the idea of that...

The angst that accompanies knowing that what you were conscious of before your
birth likely approximates what you will be conscious of following your death
has driven thinkers to posit myriad explanations...none are completely
testable, but the scientific postulates are at least open to the rigors of the
scientific method, most notably peer review...

If either science or philosophy must be subsumed, I'd rather it be
philosophy...

Personally, I prefer a life containing both...

------
ThomPete
The purpose of philosophy is to ask questions not provide answers. And so as
long as there are phenomena to observe there are questions to ask and thus
philosophy apply.

I think a lot of the confusion about the need for philosophy stems from
academia thinking about philosophy the way it does. Here you usually will
critique some existing philosophers to provide a more concise thesis. However
life does not happen in academia and so a lot gets lost when it's confined to
the university world

There is a world of difference between studying philosophy and then
philosophizing. Just because you know the ins and outs of Kant, Nietzsche doe
not mean you are a good philosophical thinker.

The best thing that can happen for philosophy is to remove it from academia
and put it back into it's rightful context. To question, ponder, explore
phenomena and provide perspective no matter the subject.

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VLM
WRT becoming smart as per the article rather than good, one point missed in
the article is living in the university system means devotion and belief in
the class pyramid at the predefined authoritarian apex angle and all that. You
can be whatever you want when you're an individual, but when your identity as
a philosopher is as a cog in the hierarchical machine, you and your ideas must
be strictly limited to fit a cog shaped hole at a precise level, not too high
so as to threaten those in positions above you, not too low as to be
inadequate.

------
VeilEm
Philosophy is simply irrelevant.

Discoveries in physical sciences lead to new technology or just to a better
understanding of how the world works and how we fit in it.

Research in social sciences, when the political courage exists to pursue it,
can lead to better policy, and better lives for everyone.

Philosophy just seems to be a bunch of circle jerking around esoteric terms
and concepts with no trickle down benefits. If Philosophy departments around
the world simply shutdown over night, would anyone notice? Would anyone be the
worse of? Even in the long term? Probably not. Well maybe would be philosophy
students would pursue more employable fields for their undergraduate study,
increasing the labor pool and competition for jobs.

~~~
yarou
Philosophy is irrelevant? That's really quite a bizarre statement to make.

Philosophy is quite useful in defining AI (philosophy of mind) and quantum
physics (philosophy of physics) to name a few. Your comment is beyond narrow
minded and ignorant; I should seriously hope you don't hold such views.

~~~
VeilEm
I most certainly do hold this as my view, and it's had zero negative impact.
In fact only positive impact as I'm not spending time wasting on thinking for
the sake of thinking. Philosophy is a mental trap that produces no value.

One of my favorite books is Candide. The book ends with Candide tending to his
garden. This is how I live my life. It works pretty well.

How many modern philosophers use their knowledge to live good lives and
improve the lives of others?

~~~
peterashford
"Philosophy is a mental trap that produces no value." Then you find no value
in the past 1000 years of Western thought?

Philosophy helps me live a good life - I have a pretty good bullshit detector.
Your post set it off quite well.

~~~
VeilEm
It think it was instrumental in helping us get to where we are. My comment is
more around modern philosophy. Now we understand the importance of empirical
observation and the benefits of liberty and fair laws we've probably maximized
the value we get out of talking about how to think. Like I asked before, do
you think that there would be a negative impact if philosophy departments
disappeared overnight? What would they be?

