
Progress in Philosophy - diodorus
http://angryrainbowmermaids.blogspot.com/2018/05/progress-in-philosophy.html
======
charlysl
For me, Russel put it best:

 _Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate
between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on
matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but
like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether
that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge—so I should
contend— belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge
belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man 's
Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy_

~~~
cerradokids
I prefer Ayn Rand's take on it:

 __Without abstract ideas you would not be able to deal with concrete,
particular, real-life problems. You would be in the position of a newborn
infant, to whom every object is a unique, unprecedented phenomenon. The
difference between his mental state and yours lies in the number of conceptual
integrations your mind has performed. You have no choice about the necessity
to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract
ideas, i.e., into principles.

Your only choice, is whether your principles are true or false, rational or
irrational, consistent or contradictory. The only way to know which they are
is to integrate your principles.

What integrates them? Philosophy. A philosophic system is an integrated view
of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you
need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a
conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical
deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted
conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested
slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but
integrated by- your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused
into a single, solid weight: selfdoubt, like a ball and chain in the place
where your mind’s wings should have grown. __

~~~
charlysl
Russel's approach is more epistemological and academic, whereas Rand's is more
psychological and individual. Both seem valid to me at their level.

------
hliyan
I have not read Tyler's original, but would like to dump some of my notes as I
read through this.

> I do deny the implication that philosophy should be judged by what gets
> exported from it—any more than physics or mathematics should be assessed in
> this mercenary and extrinsic way.

I find this strange. Shouldn't all knowledge be judged on the basis of whether
their application yields valid results? If not, how should they be judged?

> I believe the turn away from schools, teachings and doctrines is itself one
> of the great instances of philosophical progress.

I agree. The existence of "schools" of thought (e.g. the Geocentric vs.
Heliocentric schools of planetary motion) is a sign that the field of study is
still nascent. Opinions should give way to theories as a science matures.

> It is not the point of philosophy to end philosophy, to ‘solve’ the deep
> questions so that people can stop thinking about them. It is the point of
> people to think about these questions, and the job of philosophers to rub
> their faces in that fact.

What? Yes, it is not the point of philosophy to end philosophy. But it's
certainly not this either.

 _To me, the point of philosophy is to examine those aspects of existence that
cannot be examined by other sciences, especially because the measurement or
experimental methods or the resources to do so do not (yet) exist._

~~~
TelmoMenezes
> To me, the point of philosophy is to examine those aspects of existence that
> cannot be examined by other sciences, especially because the measurement or
> experimental methods or the resources to do so do not (yet) exist.

Not at all. Philosophy is about fundamental questions that fall outside the
scope of the set of questions that can be settled by empirical validation. For
example: "what is science?", "how can we know something?", "what does it mean
for something to exist?", "why is there something rather than nothing?", "what
is good and evil?", etc.

One important branch of philosophy is that of epistemology, concerned with the
nature and acquisition of knowledge itself. You expressed two rather extreme
epistemological views (extreme in relation to the positions of most non-naive
philosophers on these topics):

-> That one can only judge knowledge on the basis of its applications;

-> That given good enough instruments and enough resources, science could answer all questions worth being asked.

Maybe the example questions above can convince you to think deeper about these
positions.

~~~
Koshkin
> _" how can we know something?", "what does it mean for something to exist?",
> "why is there something rather than nothing?", "what is good and evil?"_

These all are perfectly valid questions, and they deserve answers which are
based on rigorous science. Philosophical discourse is just the first step in
trying to find these answers or to establish the scientific framework (a
model) that would allow to discover them in a completely rational way.

~~~
CM30
I strongly doubt we'll find scientific answers to moral questions anytime
soon. The answer to 'what's right' likely doesn't exist in nature outside of
human civilisation and social standards, and going from 'this is true' to
'this is right' is not an easy jump to make.

(It's also one that would theoretically obsolete the field of politics if it
was ever answered scientifically).

~~~
Koshkin
The answers to moral questions ("what is right") are found at the intersection
of sociology, psychology, and biology - which are all very well established
sciences.

~~~
wsy
They can't because they are empirical sciences. They only can find out facts
about the world.

Philosophy has already shown that moral is not derivable from facts:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem).

~~~
Koshkin
To be clear, I wasn't talking about _creating_ "optimal" moral imperatives
(which is impossible and even meaningless), only about _finding out_ why they
are the way they are in a particular social group, how they have evolved, etc.

~~~
CM30
That's all very well and good, but it's not really what moral
philosophy/ethics is trying to solve. It's about what is right and how society
should work, and whether the right thing is say, what brings the most
happiness/utility or what's someone's duty as a good person or what not.

No, those are not meaningless goals, since they kind of determine how society
works/should work, and are often the basis of fair political and legal
systems. Here's how it worked in the past doesn't justify it working the same
way now, and cultures throughout history have done all sorts of questionable
things on the assumption they were in the right. It's the job of moral
philosophers to figure out how to move forward from this, figure out what's
right for society and go beyond tribalism and instinct.

~~~
Koshkin
It is indeed meaningless and impossible, because, on the one hand, the
spectrum of choices is too large and fuzzy, and, on the other hand,
"happiness" cannot be universal, because the interest are naturally in
contradiction with one another, so the reason one is happy can make another
sad. Which is why we have _dura lex_ for morals. And which is why, for
example, a "just" war can be "immoral" or even "criminal" at the same time.
The popular saying "No good deed goes unpunished" is an expression of the deep
distrust towards any attempts to derive morals from some abstract "first
principles."

~~~
wsy
Your statement sounds quite philosophical. Is it open for discussion, or do
you consider it a dogmatic truth?

I'd recommend to check out John Rawls and Amartya Sen on how you can reason
about a fair society without assuming universal concepts of happiness, and
with taking into account everyone's selfishness.

~~~
Koshkin
Problem is, “fair”, “good”, and “right” are three different things, and what
adds to the confusion is that each has a different meaning depending on a
context (the size of the social group - down to the individual; relation to
other social groups; the point on the timeline - i.e. whether we are speaking
about now or the future, etc.) Statistical mechanics avoids complexity of
taking into account properties of the individual constituents by shifting
attention to the averages, and so, in a sense, must ethics, if it is to be
rational. But, again, the properties in question are not well-defined,
unfortunately, and so no amount of effort to rationalize them could yield a
positive result. Otherwise we’d have moral codes in place of arbitrary laws
long ago.

~~~
wsy
I agree that these are different things. I also agree that they are _hard_ to
define. I fail to see why that should be a reason not to attempt it. I
strongly disagree that our laws are arbitrary. They are very much inspired by,
sometimes even directly derived from what philosophers thought about fairness
and freedom.

I also want to point out that what both of us do here is having a
philosophical argument about moral code. It's not a new one, you can find
related stances to your own one with respect to morality in Nietzsche, and
with respect to meaning of terms and futility of discussion in Wittgenstein.
But this is not the whole picture, other philosophers have already reacted to
them and advanced the discussion. Like in other areas of knowledge, you better
do thorough research first, otherwise you just reinvent the wheel.

------
bitwize
I've realized this: Philosophy is the science of shit we really know nothing
about yet. Since we know nothing about it, we don't even know where to start.
Our body of knowledge is in a state of primordial chaos, so philosophers come
in and establish some ground rules that help us make sense of the chaos. THEN
we can begin to learn. The philosophers generally have to retreat once we
start building up a decent sized body of empirical knowledge and move onto the
next frontier.

That's why these days, philosophy is concerned mainly with a particular
frontier: the human mind, especially its subconscious processes. Neuroscience
is advancing at a steady clip, but it still doesn't have answers for things
like how we acquire knowledge, how we know something is knowledge, how we
process language, how we assign meaning to words and symbols, etc. Once the
neuroscientists crack those nuts, I wonder what philosophers will retreat to.
Morality and ethics, perhaps, about which gathering imperial data is difficult
to impossible.

------
nshepperd
> It is not the point of philosophy to end philosophy, to ‘solve’ the deep
> questions so that people can stop thinking about them.

And yet, many people who ask questions like "what is good?" or "how can we
know things?" or "is there free will, and if so, how does it work?" do so
because they _actually want to know the answers_. If the purpose of philosophy
isn't to find the answers, is philosophy the wrong place to be looking?

If you're claiming that there aren't any answers, well... that sounds like a
strong philosophical position!

~~~
wsy
Philosophers have given their answers to some of these questions. But - as
absurdly as it sounds - the answers are not the main point of philosophy.

I would say, the main point is learning to ask these questions better. That
includes: \- getting a deeper understanding what the question means \-
learning how to assess candidate answers \- learning which answers are wrong,
and for which reasons \- finding out what difference it makes to know the
answer (sometimes it doesn't make any difference)

------
vinceguidry
This makes me think of this xkcd:
[https://xkcd.com/435/](https://xkcd.com/435/)

And also of the strange and wonderful epiphany I got when I started
considering the ancient Greeks again. On the purity scale given by the xkcd,
math is just applied philosophy.

The Greeks invented philosophy. _Nobody thought philosophically before the
Greeks invented it._ People thought rigorously before the Greeks, but the
rigor took a different form. That form is so different from philosophy that we
have a different name for it. That word is _theology_.

When the people of the world tried to think rigorously before the Greeks
invented a way to take the theology out of it, they could not stop themselves
from invoking deities or moral importunings and all of that alongside their
attempts at rigor. Theological rigor is different than philosophical rigor. In
a very real way, philosophy is just applied theology.

Patterns for the sake of patterns is a hallmark of ancient theology. The
ancient Hebrews believed they needed to sacrifice dozens to hundreds of
animals daily at their great temple in order to stay in God's good graces. The
Aztecs did one further and sacrificed _humans._ The patterns, the rituals,
calmed the mind and served as a bulwark against the chaos and insanity that
would surely reign and did reign whenever war or famine tore them away from
them.

Philosophy, the love of wisdom, saved people from that. Without those amazing
men who dared to think differently, often at the cost of their lives, Socrates
was made to drink poison for his heresy, we wouldn't have the modern world.
Ancient Greece wasn't a philosophical wonder island of reason and logic.
Philosophy had to coexist with their existing mystery pantheistic sacrifice-
demanding religion. Those thought processes _that they invented_ had to catch
fire and spread the same way any idea needs to.

It seems so strange, so weird, so crazy to consider, kind of like the idea
that all current humans descended from a common ancestor. But before the
Greeks, people didn't really consider the true nature of things. They just
accepted whatever ideas sounded good and soothing.

~~~
Koshkin
> _before the Greeks, people didn 't really consider the true nature of
> things_

This is a very bold statement, and it's most likely incorrect - given that the
Greeks were relative newcomers to the world of civilizations to begin with,
and also the fact that the modern humans have been in existence for many
dozens of millennia.

~~~
vinceguidry
I don't think it's all that bold. If earlier people had invented philosophy,
then those are the people we'd be celebrating. The Greeks would have
celebrated them.

Before the Greeks, there was this giant wall at which you had to stop, we call
them 'mystery religions' because that's what they all had at the heart of
them, this immense wonder about 'what it's all for', that they couldn't help
but attribute to whatever god they had concocted up.

After the Greeks, humanity had tools to investigate that mystery rationally.
Today we call those tools philosophy.

If you go look at the culture of the ancient Egyptians, long in the tooth by
the time the Greeks came around, you don't see anything like Greek
rationalism. Their thoughts are circular, their reasoning hung up around their
mystery religion, never to escape it. The Egyptians had 5000 years to invent
philosophy but they never did.

------
man-and-laptop
Epistemology is an interesting area of philosophy. It asks "How do I know
whether something is true or not?"

It interests me because while there's consensus on what's true in the hard
sciences, there isn't any outside of it. People have passionate and utterly
divergent opinions on politics, which they don't have about mathematics or
physics. There has to be a way to live in a world where people disagree
massively about politics, or idealistically, where we can resolve the
disagreements. I find this more interesting than most specific issues in
politics.

I recommend Less Wrong or Nassim Taleb.

~~~
skybrian
Before even getting into politics, we need to agree about what's going on in
the world. I would consider it a great improvement if political discussions
could move beyond naive realism: assuming we understand what's happening just
because of what we read in the news. (Or worse, on Twitter.)

Journalism is only the "first draft of history" and often gets it wrong. We
should therefore be more uncertain about most things we read, particularly
breaking news.

------
kristianc
Honestly the original post on MR is much better than this, and has the benefit
of Cowen’s customary concision and knack for getting to the heart of the
issue.

------
protonfish
I have mixed feelings while reading philosophers trying to desperately justify
their relevance. It's sad at first, then you start being battered with the
verbose fallacies they believe to be good quality thinkin', and you wish they
had died out a long time ago.

I do not have the time to address every bit of nonsense in this gish gallop so
I'll stick to 2:

1\. What is the measure of philosophic truth? It is implied strongly that
"success" is determined by acceptance of ideas by others. Usefulness,
accuracy, precision, ethics, are not important: what is important is that your
ideas spread like a virus. If true, then philosophy is really, like the
Sophists of old, just about rhetoric. And if manipulating people through words
is your thing, then studying advertising and marketing would be a much more
effective investment.

2\. A key argument was "philosophy is so much better now than it used to be."
I find the fact philosophy is not nearly as bad as it used to be, though
arguably true, not very compelling. A better question would be "Is it good
enough?" I have not yet found convincing evidence that is the case.

~~~
jasonhansel
All good points, but it is worth noting that the idea of a logical fallacy
itself comes from philosophy. The study of fallacies proper began with
Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations.

~~~
ColanR
I guess that just means philosophy hasn't improved beyond the standard erected
by Aristotle.

More complicated, and more to it, but certainly not of higher quality.

~~~
jasonhansel
The study of fallacies in the West began with Aristotle, but it certainly
hasn't ended there; Aristotle only lists a fraction of the things we consider
fallacies today.

That said, I do think that more philosophical research is needed in the area.
Unfortunately, most philosophers have focused on formal logic, even though
informal fallacies are much more common.

------
trukterious
_> philosophical exports are the kinds of thing that, once you internalize
them, just seem like the way things are_

Yes; if you like a philosophical idea that's usually sufficient for you to
have 'adopted' or 'accepted' it. Yet, in addition, philosophical problems
_have_ been solved. It's just that _ipso facto_ they then become part of
science or some other discipline, so we don't notice so easily. For example,
the theory of evolution was an example of philosophical progress (a new way of
thinking about something, in this case life). But it's now part of biology.
Another example is that Karl Popper solved the problem of induction. It's
controversial that he did so. But if it shelves off into some other field,
e.g. AGI, then perhaps his achievement will be more widely accepted as such.

~~~
szemet
Is there any theoretical AGI modell based on Popper theories? I've heard only
about ones based on Solomonoff induction & bayesian inference, like:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI) and
its various derivatives...

~~~
abecedarius
There was an old paper "The scientific community metaphor" which I thought was
pretty interesting and Popper-flavored, though it was more of a sketch of a
GOFAI architecture than anything like AIXI.

------
ThomPete
Philosophy in my mind and experience really is the art of thinking both
critically and constructively about a subject.

Good philosophy opens up more new questions than it answers.

When applied properly to problem-solving or system analysis or conceptual
ideation it can be amazingly powerful and provide you with a perspective that
is wider than those who don't.

I have studied philosophy since I was very little but I always had one goal
and that was to make it applicable to my life not just serve as an
intellectual discipline devoid from any reality.

------
vinayms
I think its fruitful to view philosophy as something that evolves rather than
progresses.

At its core, philosophy is nothing more than a disciplined approach to acquire
knowledge about anything that the human mind is curious. The approach is
usually through systematic questioning and applying logic* to the received
answers, and iterating till satisfied.

What happened was things changed. When "philosophy" first burst onto the
scene, everything that man was curious about was ripe for exploration - life,
universe, creation, numbers, sexuality, morals, shapes, thoughts, politics -
everything. A cursory look at the kinds of topics that were discussed by
ancient philosophers (not just the Greeks) should show the same. In time, all
these pieces of knowledge got specialized and got separated into their own
fields. Now, physics deals with the universe, maths deals with numbers and so
on. Knowledge is not a Pangea anymore.

All the low hanging fruits have been picked, eaten, digested and turned into
manure. That is how the specialization happened. The deep and meaningful
questions in each of these fields can only be asked if one is well versed in
them. Human knowledge has outgrown the human capacity to be Renaissance men.
Thus, we can't expect an outsider like Berkeley take down calculus anymore
(but I guess they still do), and such tasks must be left to the experts with a
philosophical bent.

This leaves "philosophy" with very little to tackle. To me it seems only the
question of existence and the meta question about nature of knowledge are left
untouched by other fields, but I suppose theology often trespasses. I think
this is why most people feel philosophy is boring and useless - the questions
are either too abstract or they produce nothing but never ending debates and
flamewars with no results that improve the knowledge.

Philosophy has evolved. Philosophers must evolve too. I honestly have no idea
what philosophers do (probably graduate and teach, and the cycle continues?)
but they are left with two things to do to make themselves relevant again (not
sure if they feel irrelevant) - pick a field of interest, learn it deeply and
ponder over it, or infuse philosophical outlook to the students of various
fields who would be better equipped to do the pondering.

\---

* For sake on convenience, I consider logic as a tool that already exists. To me logic is philosophy in its own right, and it bootstraps philosophy.

------
adjkant
I'm amazed there has been little talk of modern ethics where there has
actually been good progress by people like Rawls and Sandel, for example. The
problem is that these ideas have not been truly applied in any way, only
considered on the surface level. I think the problem with modern philosophy is
not one of progress but one of translation and application.

------
PinkMilkshake
I don't think we can have a reasonable conversation about the progress of
philosophy without separating it's two major traditions, Continental and
Analytic. Once you do, it becomes clearer where the progress has been made.
The modern world stands on the foundations of the Analytic tradition and while
I don't necessarily agree, some argue that it reached it's apex when it
discovered Empiricism.

Progress in Continental Philosophy probably ended at the same time, when it
came up against our new found ability to test what is true. Now the remnants
of it (that I know of), Neo-Marxism and Postmodernism spend all their time
trying to attack the foundations of Empiricism. Because until that is done,
they can't really move forward.

I feel that all the worst parts of human history and many lingering
pseudosciences came out of the Continental tradition. Communism, Fascism,
Anti-enlightenment, Psychoanalysis, and many schools of Sociology. And while
Sociology has potential, Marxism is to modern Sociology what Alchemy is to
Chemistry.

------
tkyjonathan
I dunno.. I'm studying on my own philosophy of systems (general systems
theory) and I find it incredibly useful for my line of work. Perhaps
philosophy can progress when applied to other fields, like biology, computer
science, quantum physics...

~~~
adjkant
You realize all those fields were birthed out of philosophy right? Once
something becomes more known, it graduates from philosophy. Some questions
look to be staying longer than others but generally I think you'll keep seeing
fields be birthed, though over the timeline of centuries.

