> 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. > 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 Stanford > Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/> (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 Table > of Contents <http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html>. > 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: species<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/> > (what > do we mean by the term and are there really any such things?),scientific > realism <http://scientific%20realism/> (a description of how most > scientists think about what they do), emergent > properties<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/>(about, > of course, emergence and what that term has been used to mean), and causal > processes <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-process/> (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 "How to write a philosphy > paper<http://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1&nord=1#sclient=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.&fp=c306e119a7d85f91&ion=1&biw=1171&bih=769>." > 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 "Writing the philosophy > paper<http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/student/humanities/philosophy.shtml>." > > 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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