What Do Philosophers Think - and What Do Philosophers Think Philosophers Think?

Pretty neat, but could’ve used a question about vampires.

“It’s interesting to ask why there is such a discrepancy.”

I wonder how many political philosophers reach their conclusions during/after obtaining a PhD or entered the program looking for better arguments to support their theory.

Because of an egalitarian bias in undergraduate humanities departments, I would guess that most enter with strong egalitarian beliefs searching for arguments in support of such political theory.

Eh, I’m not sure why they bother with offering a choice between deontological and virtue ethics, they only differ very slightly. That more philosophers ascribe to deontological and virtue ethics instead of teologicical/consequentialist ethics explains many of the other results.

Hume,

I’m pretty sure your view is correct. Post-graduate studies usually have a certain culture that the student is engrossed and, to an extent, ensnared in; the result is bias.

I also find it odd there would be so many atheists when the prime beliefs are in deontological and virtue ethics. Anyone else have some ideas? Where is that Justin Martyr poster when you need him?

Why criticize philosophy? Philosophy has helped us with uncountable problems in human history, and we all live by those solutions – not the least of which is the structure of scientific knowledge, the nature of justice, and certain mildly useful concepts like marginal utility or general equilibrium. Currently economics has taken over the place of social debate from philosophy, and philosophy is concerned overly with method – in an attempt to make a moral analysis into a science that it cannot be. A fact that is not dissimilar from the process that has been followed in economic theory.

The problem with most economists is that they lack sufficient philosophical rigor to understand the limitations of the statistical analysis that the employ, or the conclusions that they draw from their research.

The fact that reading through the philosophical literature every year leaves one with the impression that the vast majority of philosophical work is quite silly, and a complete waste of time, is no different from reading through the vast majority of economic literature, or any literature of the social sciences for that matter.

But the content of the peer reviewed journals appears to be specious in almost all fields – not just philosophy. One of the things we have learned of late is that the journal and paper process is less effective than the book process. Because the book process by necessity includes greater scope, and in doing so, eliminates assumptions, and opens the author to broader criticism. If you stick with the BOOKS on philosophy, it’s almost all very valuable, at least as a history of ideas. The same is true for most economics. Very little of value seems to come out of the journal process compared to the book process. Essays by Hayek to the contrary perhaps.

When you read (I do) a great deal of the literature, it generally appears that the process of introspection used by philosophers, (self testing of concepts) would be better supported by economic data and analysis, because that data extends perception and our ability to make comparisons and judgements. LIkewise, the number of papers (or lectures) I have been in where the economist makes profoundly childish errors in reasoning, especially with regard to causality versus correlation, is exhausting.

WHile most philosophers would be better served with a little knowledge of economics, most economists would be better served with much more knowledge of philosophy. we can forgive a philosopher, because they have little effect on policy these days. But it is very hard to forgive an economist, because we determine policy based on their judgements.

It is very hard right now to forgive economists for the stock that they have put in Macro. Very hard. 🙂

What matters is what the elite philosophers believe what. It doesn’t much matter what all the rest of them believe.

What matters is what philosophers at the top 10 grad schools believe.

What matters is what the philosophers who edit the philosophy journals believe.

What doesn’t matter is what the philosophers at the community colleges believe.

What doesn’t matter is what the traveling non-tenured philosophers believe.

What doesn’t matter is what the philosophers at the Catholic colleges believe.

Etc.

Disclosure: I am an adjunct professor in philosophy.

I don’t know if this means anything, but the results of the survey didn’t seem that surprising. Even when it came to politics. Nozick is still a fixture of political philosophy; it makes sense that libertarianism has many supporters among philosophers, even if they are still the minority.

I am surprised and a little confused by all the anti-philosophy rhetoric on this blog. Not that I don’t share some of the same frustrations with philosophy and philosophers. But surely there is some value to posing and answering philosophical questions? Most of the questions regarding the foundations of economics, for example, have a philosophical ring. At the very least, how we can answer policy questions without looking at ethical questions? (Assuming we don’t want to just beg the question and shout “utility!” or “Lockean rights!” or whatever.)

And Bryan and Robin spend a lot of time discussing the philosophy of mind for people who have no patience for philosophy. . .

Despite doing the Preview, I realise I mangled the fourth line above. I appear to be saying that communitarian are known as liberal egalitarians. I meant to say ‘egalitarians’ are usually known as ‘liberal egalitarians’ as I hope the comment as a whole makes clear. Anyway, it is true that liberal egalitarians and communitarians strongly overlap. Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor are clearly just as egalitarian as the ‘egalitarians’.

@ Curt Doolittle: I think macro sucks, big time. Does that make me a philosopher?

I think there’s a fundamental criticism of modern economists missing here. One of the great contributions to political philosophy, as applied to economics, is the Arrow Impossibility Theorem, based on Condorcet’s work from the late 18th C. It proves that in a heterogeneous society — and all large societies can be expected to be very heterogeneous — there is no social welfare function that can be maximized. That kinda ripped the house of welfare economics completely apart.

But both macro and microeconomists still use the Pareto optimality characteristic of a notional general equilibrium solution to propose various welfare policies, in disregard of the Arrow proof.

Go figure. Some philosophy, that. By using the representative agent, they simply assumed away the heterogeneity problem that is the essence of political philosophy.

In fact, I think a survey of economists on this issue would be quite interesting. I believe they overwhelmingly would pay lip service to their acceptance of the absence of a social welfare function, and then merrily keep using welfare economics based on general equilibrium’s Pareto optimality implications for their policy advice. They would not even admit of any cognitive dissonance, I suspect.

How do you define “value” in this context?

Hmm there are more libertarians then there are libertarians. Only 15% of philosophers didn’t believe in free will.

Out of the subject.

Nature x nurture – very interesting

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/dobbs-orchid-gene/2

Troy,

I’m a philosopher. I’m not sure what you mean by “wisdom”. What I want as a philosopher are good answers to difficult, intriguing philosophical questions, such as what makes actions right, whether science should be interpreted as truth-tracking, what makes societies just, etc. This is what my colleagues and I work on, and while you might lament that we tend to be specialists rather than system-builders, we’re mostly working on deep, important questions. If you find that worthless, that’s fine.

Also, postmodern critique has almost no play whatsoever in philosophy. Postmodernism is exceedingly unpopular among philosophers.

Troy,

Based on your comments, I am quite certain that you have little to no familiarity with academic philosophy.

First of all, hardly anyone in academic philosophy is a postmodernist. Postmodernism and post-structuralism are considered by most of us to be b.s. pseudo-philosophies. They are popular philosophies in certain humanities departments, but not in philosophy.

Second of all, most philosophers who publish are doing original work, not the history of ideas. You can verify this easily by perusing the table of contents of philosophy journals.

Hi everyone,

I’m writing as professor of 18th century British literature, where as a matter of course we read figures like Locke, Hume, or Rousseau, in conjunction with other writers. I’m interested in your distinction between “popular philosophers” and “academic philosophy.”

If there is no interest, as you say, in the history of ideas, or for that matter, in the history of philosophy, then what place, if any, do figures like Rousseau have in contemporary academic philosophy? Does Rousseau, for example, represent another “popular philosophy” destined to fade in the wake of academic philosophy’s more lasting accomplishments?

So what is the relationship of “academic philosophy” to its very long history, which includes lots of things that don’t resemble academic peer-reviewed journal articles?

I have nothing but the utmost respect for Nehemas, but he was a scholar of philosophy, not a philosopher. And as much as I dislike RIchard Rorty, he was a philosopher. Dennett, to pick another I like, primarily analyzes others’ ideas. This isn’t to say that Nehemas and Dennett haven’t contributed some original ideas of their own — that’s just not what they primarily do.

Rorty was one of the better known postmodern philosophers, though David Donaldson could be classified as such as well. One can pretend to not be a postmodernist while being influenced by Heidegger, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Derrida, but that is all one would be doing is pretending. Let me go further and say that if one is primarily Rousseauean in philosophy, one is primarily postmodern in outlook. The roots are deeper than people realize or acknowledge. Any philosopher who believe in the social construction of reality and is epistemologically a radical skeptic is fundamentally a postmodernist. Anyone who can make a happy marriage of Heidegger and Marx/Rousseau is a postmodernist — as that is, in its essence, what postmodernism is.

Yes. pomo is sadly still the dominant paradigm in literary studies — but that doesn’t get the philosophers off the hook. I will agree that many of the scholars of philosophy are not and were never postmodernists — but there is a difference between being a philosopher and being a scholar of philosophy that those in philosophy do not want to acknowledge or admit to. More, there is far more postmodernist influence than you want to admit to as well.

What philosophy needs is a 12-step program. And the first step is of course first admitting that you have a problem.

Philosophy grad student here. I’m not inclined to wade into the debate, but I’ll second Brennan’s claim that Camplin is long on opinion and short on knowledge about what academic philosophers are up to.

Ok, I can’t resist taking a shot… Camplin wrote: “Any philosopher who believe in the social construction of reality and is epistemologically a radical skeptic is fundamentally a postmodernist.”

This strikes me as borderline incoherent. If you thought reality was a social construct you probably wouldn’t be a radical skeptic, since social constructs are ipso facto intersubjectively accessible. On the other hand, if you were a radical skeptic you would never claim to know something so contentious as the claim that reality is a social construct. So here’s one thing philosophers like to do: pick apart fluffed up nonsense peddled by self-avowed intellectual tourists like Camplin. Logic, as it happens, has always been good for that (even if it is now also applied in information theory).

Hume: David Schmidtz and Gerald Gaus are libertarian, in a broad sense, and much more influential than Narveson or Long.

I was also surprised (and, to be honest, a little dismayed) that so many philosophers are moral realists. To me this suggests that many philosophers have not taken the resounding successes of physics and evolutionary biology seriously enough. The overwhelming weight of evidence suggests that (1) the universe is physical and rule-governed at a very low level, and (2) we humans — our minds and moral inclinations included — are physical systems, whose very complicated present states result from physical processes, parts of which we call “evolution,” parts of which we call “culture,” etc. And if you buy that — as just about all scientists do — then what is the motivation supposed to be for moral realism?

I’m not trying to gin up a debate here — what I’m wondering is whether moral realists have serious arguments against naturalist, physicalist anti-realism, or whether (as I have to admit I suspect) the support for moral realism is mostly a matter of philosophers’ failure to grapple with what physics & biology have taught us about the origins of complex systems in the real world?

Hume, Az

Current libertarian philosophers of some note.
I don’t care too much about who is more or less influential, these judgements change over time and vary strongly between different niches in the philosophical ecology. I have different opinions about how good the people are below, but they all have some presence in debates
Chandran Kukathas
Tibor Machan
‘Left Libertarians’ (minimum state with equalisation of property/collective ownership of land, not the EconLog view, or my view, but stuff that needs to be considered and is of value to to non ‘left’ libertarians)
Michael Otsuka
Hillel Steiner

I never said the postmodernists were coherent or consistent. They believe in the blank slate and are radical skeptics. That’s their position, not mine. If you’re not familiar with the postmodernists, that is not my problem — but not knowing about them will prevent you from understanding much of what is going on over here in the real world.

Until you have your Ph.D., Mr. Grad Student, don’t be accusing anyone of being an intellectual tourist. My experience of humanities grad students is that the vast majority are intellectual tourists — the ones who, like me, actually have what it takes to get that Ph.D. (not an easy thing to do) are the real deal. Your ignorance of the postmodernists doesn’t speak well of you right now, including your own tourist status.

Too many scholars of philosophy have their heads in the sand, paying attention only to their narrow interests, and pretending that nothing much is happening outside of that. It’s one of the things that differentiates them from actual philosophers, who their progeny will be studying in the future.

And don’t get me wrong — we need such scholars. But let’s stop calling them philosophers. Especially those who don’t know what wisdom is (philosophy means “love of wisdom,” meaning if you don’t know what wisdom is, then you can’t love it, and you aren’t a philosopher!).

Again, as an outsider who works in a historically-defined field, it seems strange to me that so much contemporary academic philosophy, as it is being discussed here, is conceived in this presentist fashion. Clearly, this is not news to those on the list, but I’d like to hear more about why this occurred.

The other observation that I’d offer is that all the interdisciplinary work mentioned by jrshipley is conceived as part of the sciences, not the humanities. These two things seem to hang together, as does the hostility to what many are calling “postmodernism,” which if we can use the term at all (I’d rather talk about individual writers than treating the pomos as representing a collectively held set of positions) derives from the literary- and humanities-based versions of philosophy derived from “philosophic” sources like Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and so forth. (I suppose Nietzsche, Marx, Freud cannot be cited here as “philosophic” in the same way as your chosen forebears)

I don’t consider this literary orientation heretical, because the greatest philosophers of the 18th century, say, Hume and Rousseau, wrote in a variety of genres, some of which were literary. Again, it seems to me that a considerable reorientation of philosophy has occurred between the 18th century and the 20th century, which redefined vast amounts of its history (as well as many contemporary variants) as “non-philosophical” or at best “pre-philosophical.”

So does a knowledge of philosophy as a discipline also demand knowledge of its very long disciplinary history?

I feel like Enlightenment philosophy has done a lot of good for the whole human world. Am I wrong? It’s not my only example, either, but I would start there.

I’d also submit that Socrates was right about the unexamined life being not worth living, and about the most pernicious form of ignorance being the false belief that you’re not ignorant. Though contemporary academic philosophers write about a lot of things, I think on the whole they’re accomplishing Socratic goals of examining “life, the universe, and everything”, and trying to expose false beliefs that could cause us to make serious errors.

It’s a mistake to suppose that “academic philosophy” has to produce some precisely contoured Contribution, for it to be a worthwhile enterprise. Rather, philosophy influences unknown thousands of individual persons to think more carefully about how to live and what to believe. What could be more important, really?

Interesting: If you go to the main page and restrict the survey to target faculty whose area of specialization is philosophy of religion, you get that

72% Accept or lean toward theism.

Quite a difference from the 16% of the target faculty in general.