Thanks, Frank.
Thank God SOMEBODY is getting them. Nick From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 10:44 PM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Grand Design, Philosophy is Dead, and Hubris Also, I keep writing messages in which I argue that the proper comparison for philosophy is with mathematics, not with physics. At least two of them I can find no trace of in my inbox, my out box, sent items, or anywhere. Gremlins. I got those. Frank From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 6:30 PM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Grand Design, Philosophy is Dead, and Hubris All, I have a creepy feeling some of my posts aren't getting through. For instance, did anybody ever tell me what OWEN things philosophers do? Including Owen? If so, could somebody resend the message, cause I never found out. Also, I keep writing messages in which I argue that the proper comparison for philosophy is with mathematics, not with physics. At least two of them I can find no trace of in my inbox, my out box, sent items, or anywhere. Gremlins. Nick From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 8:19 PM To: Owen Densmore Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Grand Design, Philosophy is Dead, and Hubris Owen, I think we're basically in agreement -- although see my comment below about what one can do from an armchair. Regarding what philosophers do, I think the issue is clouded by the fact that we want to think of philosophers as deep thinkers wrestling with our deepest problems whereas most philosophers are academics who do what academics do, namely they teach and write papers. From that perspective it's not nearly as grand and romantic as we would like to believe. If one accepts that as a starting point, the next questions are: what do they teach? and what do they write papers about? The answers are fairly easy to determine. To see what philosophers teach, look at any university catalog with a Philosophy department. To see what they write papers about, look at the references in the articles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Most of them are papers written by philosophizers. Neither of those answers, though, has anything necessarily to do with deep thinking and profound questions--except to the extent that they teach and write about those things. When teaching about the great human questions, most of the time philosophers talk about what other people have said. After all, not everyone can come up with significant new thoughts about issues that have been discussed for centuries. So it's mostly historical. That's what Sandel did in his course. He did it well, but he didn't make it up. He taught what other people have already said. When philosophers do their own work, they typically make incremental additions to the literature based on work others have already done. That's what almost all academics do. It's rare to find an academic paper that changes paradigms. (If it weren't rare, paradigm breaking wouldn't be as significant as it is!) So in that regard I disagree that philosophers don't build on the work of others. If they didn't they wouldn't get their stuff published. And if they didn't get their stuff published they wouldn't get tenure, and they would cease to be philosophers. -- Russ On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 4:53 PM, Owen Densmore <o...@backspaces.net> wrote: Nick, Owen, Did you guys get my post about what philosophers do? If not, here it is again. Yup, and I apologize for the overlap caused by my running errands while having half completed responses. -- Russ Although some philosophers would disagree with the detailed implications of the following characterization, in a broad sense philosophers spend their time analyzing and clarifying ideas. This is often referred to as conceptual analysis, and it is understood as what one can do "from an armchair," i.e., by thinking about something. Do you think this may contribute to what I see as the problem of not building upon prior art? Here's an example: I do not believe philosophers could have built a philosophic frameworkfor the concepts 20th century progress within the domain of what the limits of science, computation and math are. I'd include things like the Uncertainty Principle, Computationally Nondeterministic algorithms, Chaos and Non-linear dynamics, the speed of light limit, Godel's proof and many others. I think you'd need to leave the armchair and build upon prior art in each of these cases. I'd categorize mathematics and theoretical computer science as something you can do from an armchair. They don't involve empirical research. (There is even a branch of philosophy called experimental philosophy these days which requires that they get out of their armchairs. As I understand it, it mostly involves finding out what people think about philosophical questions.) If you look at what academic philosophers do these days it seems (to me) that an awful lot of it involves nit picking. This is what I meant by incessant arguing to no apparent end. I had to laugh when I heard one of these ending in "Oh, thats just a semantic argument." My God, isn't semantics the heart of philosophy? One paper would be a claim about some concept X, and a responding paper argues that the author of the first didn't consider this aspect of what we normally think of when we talk about X. The points may be valid, but the important larger issues often (in my view) get lost. This happens (it seems to me) because like all academics, philosophers are under pressure to publish. Hence many papers are published more because the author needs to add to his CV than because the paper is a significant advance in its area. (But that's true of much academic writing.) Totally agree. One way to get a sense of what philosophers do is to look at what they write, and a good place to get an overview of that is the <http://plato.stanford.edu/> Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), a resource that as I understand it, is respected by philosophizers -- and contributed to by many of the best known. Here's a link to the <http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html> Table of Contents. We stumbled across this during one of Nick's seminars and I found it really useful. The articles in it are intentionally written as review articles rather than as articles that propound a specific position--although many seem to include a good deal of the author's perspective. The following articles may be of interest to this list: <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/> species (what do we mean by the term and are there really any such things?), <http://scientific%20realism/> scientific realism (a description of how most scientists think about what they do), <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/> emergent properties(about, of course, emergence and what that term has been used to mean), and <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-process/> causal processes (by an Australian philosopher who I think gets it right but who seems to have been dismissed by many academic philosophers). Another place to look for information about what philosophers do is to do a Google search for " <http://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1&nord=1#s client=psy&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&qscrl=1&source=hp&q=%22how+to+write+a+ philosophy+paper%22&pbx=1&oq=%22how+to+write+a+philosophy+paper%22&aq=f&aqi= g-c1g4&aql=f&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=174002l175550l4l2l2l0l0l0l0l238l469l2-2l2&qscrl= 1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&f> How to write a philosphy paper." This will yield quite a few references written by academic philosophers for their students telling them how to write papers. For example, here's one from the Dartmouth writing program about " <http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/student/humanities/philosophy.s html> Writing the philosophy paper." Good references. And it does make a good point about exposition being key. Having written the preceding, I'm wondering whether it scratches the itch that prompted the question in the first place. It talks about what philosophers actually do, but it probably provides less ammunition to praise or criticize it. I liked Doug's question on what modern philosophers actually DO. It did prompt me to look for The Good Parts. I think Emmy Noether would have been considered a philosopher in her day and her symmetry/conservation laws discovery were quite a deal. And the impact of modern philosophy on politics, religion, ethics, economics certainly are non-trivial. They do appear to be the exception rather than the rule, however. -- Russ P.S. I write this as a computer scientist who has read quite a bit of philosophy in the past few years. But I can't claim to speak for philosophers. To find out what an academic philosopher would say that philosophers do one should really ask one. Do we have one on the list? They definitely should speak up to put us out of our misery! -- Owen
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