'Rationality can be extremely powerful and valuable in some situations, for some purposes. In others, it is powerfully misleading and of negative value. Meta-rationality can often determine whether, and how, to rely on which reasoned arguments.'
Critiquing rationality and its limits has been a central topic of philosophy since the beginning, eg, first Greek skeptic philosopher, Pyrrho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrho . Since your meta-rationality project, like philosophical texts, contains a substantial number of "slabs of reasoning", I'm finding it difficult to distinguish your project of explaining* how to deal with the limits of rationality from philosophy.
I realize that this chapter and chapter 0 are the start of an attempt to explain* the difference, but every attempt to "explain* how "I'm not doing (or I'm going beyond) philosophy" that I've ever seen has ended up being considered yet more philosophy. And these two chapters give me the feeling that your attempt will meet a similar fate.
I understand that your 'bad brain' is inspiring you to make this attempt. I wish I could inspire you to abandon it and return to working on meta-rationality, meaningness, or whatever it has morphed into. I predict that when you complete your main work, if it is different from philosophy, the differences will shine forth as clear as day.
While your jeremiad against philosophy is entertaining, I find your main work so much more insightful and useful that I'm sad to see your bad brain distract you from it. Ultimately, who cares how your work is labelled by others? I think most of your readers could care less whether it counts as philosophy or not.
* Of course, "explaining" is applying rationality to generate slabs of reasoning. And explaining by comparing and contrasting conceptual frameworks is usually some form of philosophizing.
> Since your meta-rationality project, like philosophical texts, contains a substantial number of "slabs of reasoning", I'm finding it difficult to distinguish your project of explaining* how to deal with the limits of rationality from philosophy.
I don't understand. Academic journal articles in many non-philosophical fields include extensive reasoning. That doesn't make them philosophy.
The bit you refer to was from my saying that irrational philosophers were rationalists, because their writing mainly consisted of (bad) reasoning, which they seemed to think was adequate to derive important conclusions without making much reference to concrete specifics. That doesn't imply that anything that consists mainly of reasoning is philosophical.
> I wish I could inspire you to abandon it
I'm on the fence. Opinions here are extremely diverse. I appreciate them, but that makes them unhelpful as guidance :)
You might find this funny - one of the words for 'crackpot' in Hindi-Urdu is 'aflatoon'. The word 'aflatoon' is actually the Arabicised name of Plato. People perceived Plato's ideas as so crackpot-ish that his name became a synonym of crackpot in those languages. Most Hindi-Urdu speakers are unaware of the etymology so if you go to India/Pakistan and call someone 'aflatun' they will just hear 'crackpot'.
There is, of course, a Bollywood movie by that title, named so for featuring a supposedly eccentric, crackpot protagonist :D
Anti philosophy people always conviently ignore all the major successes of philosophy. Its just that once ideas are normalized in the culture people don't think of them as "philosophy." When something is at the cutting edge, it's entirely philosophy. Atomic theory was metaphysics until proven expiramentally. Almost all of the basic assumptions about our everyday lives: rights, democracy, even basic concepts like "an idea," "a citizen" etc etc were all Novel metaphysics within living memory.
Acedemic philosophy is a dumpster fire, but philosophic enquiry is wonderful.
Philosophy is just a catch all term for rational inquiry. Hence why until recently physics, math, psychology and virtually every other discipline was some version of philosophy like "natural philosophy" etc.
Now, in keeping with the split in disciplines and speaking roughly, I'd say we can roughly call non experimental rational inquiry as philosophy. This would exclude pure fact finding missions like surveys, experiments, and mystical methods of inquiry.
I just want to leave a note of encouragement for this project. These two posts 0 and 1 along with the writing about master and slave morality from a couple months ago have been significant boosters for me in understanding your meaningness writings. I’m realizing from the somewhat cursory reading of them that I did, I was reading them as philosophy. This project is hugely beneficial in pointing towards the mode that I was invisibly in in reading them and is very useful in exactly how you said at the end of the last post about how to read- it’s pointing me towards what I was assuming (unhelpfully) as I went into reading you. Thanks and my opinion is that this is a very useful project.
My sense was that treating my stuff as philosophy had caused some readers to misunderstand it, or miss the point: that it’s meant to be directly useful in one’s everyday life, rather than aesthetically interesting intellectual theorizing. It’s great to have confirmation that explaining this can be useful.
I have little idea what the ancient Greeks were thinking, and I tried to read Unger’s “I do not exist” but was unable to find a copy online - unfortunate, since it sounds like a fun read! But it seems like the same sort of thing as sharing paradoxes or things like Gettier problems? These are examples of how plausible reasoning goes wrong.
When teachers of introductory philosophy discuss Zeno’s paradoxes, they’re called paradoxes for a reason. We’re not expected to believe that motion is impossible, but to see that something must have gone wrong and to try to figure out what it is. It seems like a fun and perhaps useful exercise. Zen koans are similar.
Or at least, that’s how I read philosophy - not to discover the wisdom of the ancients (I am mostly not convinced), but to see how presumably smart people struggled with it. (I’m not sure how smart they were either, but people make a big deal over them for some reason, and some allowance needs to be made for vast cultural differences.)
So it seems like there’s a big difference between “a lot of famous philosophy is wrong, often absurdly, obviously so” and “philosophy is harmful.” To show the harm, I’d have to see that some people take it too seriously and this harms them. I suspect that most students exposed to it don’t suffer and get a bit of essay-writing practice, but perhaps sometimes there are more serious effects? Maybe it was harmful for you?
I’m reminded of your warning about the dangers of meditation, which didn’t attempt to prove that meditation is harmful for everyone, but to show that it *can* be harmful and explain why we should be cautious about it. Some of your best writing is along these lines.
Well, Chapter 2 is supposed to be about harmfulness. (Not sure whether or not I will finish the draft.)
As with the rest of “Undoing philosophy,” it doesn’t present an argument. It just gives three examples: political philosophy, “mission,” and how philosophy's wrong ideas about language and selves sabotage communication, coordination, and the social order. I hope that’s enough for some readers to get the point, and extrapolate to others.
Here’s a review of a biography of Parfit that seems like a pretty good example of how sometimes philosophy can be a harmful obsession even for famous philosophers. (Especially for famous philosophers? I assume results vary.)
I was thinking about why I resist this more than some of your other writing. When you wrote about why nihilism is mistaken and harmful I had no problem with that, nor with the early part of “In the Cells of the Eggplant” where you write about why specific philosophical ideas related to rationalism are mistaken.
I guess it seems too abstract and sweeping? I’m also skeptical of “big history” where someone tries to explain things happening centuries apart, on different continents in terms of a single theory. So I expect that I’ll like the examples better than the summary.
“To show the harm, I’d have to see that some people take it too seriously and this harms them.”
Though I do not hate philosophy like David does, I was nevertheless once the perfect example of such a person. I was determined to solve ethics. To find a rational system to optimally pick the correct action for any situation I’d encounter. I started optimistically, and made real progress, in the sense that my system became increasingly more nuanced & comprehensive. Then utilitarianism became my master, and I its inadequate servant. At first, because in principle it can applied to anything, and because in many cases it is basically correct, I was a happy slave. But my intellectual honesty would put an end to that, and introduce years of misery. At least twice a year I would have an existential crisis that would suffocate me with anti-human guilt, or reduce my thoughts to endless loops arguing with myself about nihilism, teetering over that abyss. In general, the intrusive thoughts would terminate joys as they arose, because the instinct was to think “util or bust, none of this would matter otherwise”, all while harboring anti-util doubts— so bust it was, then! It may have been agonizing over the suicidal trade off between my life and insect suffering that cracked my resolve, and opened a path away from there to be traveled over a few years time.
And yet for some reason, I don’t hate philosophy. I think going through this made me stronger & wiser. Plus, when I wasn’t ruined by it, some of its other topics interested me in more innocent senses. I have more perspective than I would have, and perhaps enough to not be as easily swept up by whatever bastardized half-breed of trickled-down philosophical ideas become cultural narratives. When you encounter the better version of the idea, and learn its limitations or at least that there are smart-seeming people that disagree with it, it creates needed distance. And perhaps it can allow you to appreciate what was good about your old dogmas, then use those ideas in whatever limited context you deem appropriate.
There's a big split in current philosophy between the analytic and continental factions. These might both be bad, but they seem bad in completely different ways. The continental school does not seem to suffer from excess rationalism, quite the contrary. And the methods and goals of someone like Deleuze seem wildly different from the boring English logicians. I don't understand that stuff well enough to have very strong opinions on it, but if you are going to take on philosophy as a whole you need to include him since he's very influential.
Curious what you make of this, in the post, which seems responsive to what you say here?
But those guys presented, almost entirely, slabs of reasoning. Much of it may be bad reasoning that results in wrong conclusions. In that case, it could accurately be described as “irrational”; but it is nevertheless philosophical reasoning. It is rationalist, in demonstrating unjustified faith in reason’s adequacy.
It’s certainly true that the Continental school applies different standards to what counts as philosophical reasoning. But I don’t think it’s accurate to insist that only the analytic school’s criteria count as “rationalism.” Hegel is standardly considered an arch-rationalist, although none of his stuff is acceptable by analytic criteria. Badiou is one of the most prominent Continental obscurantists, although he claims his stuff is all based in mainstream set theory, which makes him almost analytic, although as far as I can tell completely out to lunch.
(Uh, why am I saying “although”? Is Unger not completely out to lunch?)
Well the philosophers that I’ve been finding value in lately (Deleuze, Sloterdijk, Latour) I don’t think could be described as presenting “slabs of reasoning”. Slabs of verbiage perhaps. Certainly I don’t read them for their airtight arguments for the truth of some set of propositions. If they have value to me its because they present radical new frameworks for divving up reality – “refactorings” in vgr jargon. They are more like literature than they are a mathematical proof. Or drugs perhaps. And they are an acquired taste.
In my experience with philosophers, some of them are out there trying to do it, but most of them are actually… a nice way to put it is "historians of philosophy", but a practical one is "just sitting around saying names of older philosophers to show you know them". (This sounds like a jab at continentals but my father was a philosophy professor; I don't think I ever met a student or colleague who was "a philosopher" and he mainly wrote books about Plutarch.)
Analytics tried to escape this by writing everything like it's math, but it didn't really help.
I will now proceed to do this myself and point out that this is basically Wittgenstein's argument in Philosophical Investigations that philosophy isn't real and anyone who thinks they've found a philosophical question has just tricked themselves. You make it differently though.
Anyway, you can always get worse, so maybe they're better than nothing? EAs are generally bad too, on the principle that it's bad to be in a rationalist sex cult, but they're not actively trying to be evil. (Instead they do it by accident, because calling yourself an "effective altruist" invites too much fatal irony.)
Thanks for this! Yes, Wittgenstein is sometimes counted as an "anti-philosopher." And I'm significantly influenced by _Philosophical Investigations_. (More via ethnomethodology rather than its philosopher interpreters, though.)
My draft has a brief section on anti-philosophy, covering phenomenology, the Pragmatists, and Wittgenstein. Mostly just name-dropping them and linking elsewhere for anyone who wants to know more, though.
I've taken a few looks at this article and still some away confused. My basic questions are:
1. What is a proposition? Why is it a useless, metaphysical entity when something like an axiom or a theorem is not?
2. What is philosophy? What is the difference between it and other forms of reasoning about the world? Is every subdivision useless, or only certain subdivisions? What I've read of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze would seem to tug against many of these arguments.
“Philosophy doesn’t work” was the first “chapter” of a longer work, which will address “what is philosophy” at several points. I’m hoping to have the next chunk of it out early next week.
Philosopher sometimes do good work, despite being philosophers, mainly when they are not doing philosophy. Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze are sometimes counted as antiphilosophers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiphilosophy). I find antiphilosophy useful, in dispelling some of the errors of philosophy. Merleau-Ponty also counts as a phenomenologist, which, as philosophy goes, is relatively more in contact with reality, and therefore less erroneous. He also also counts as a psychologist; in fact, his job was as a psychologist, not philosopher, when he wrote Phenomenology of Perception. As it happens, my draft already takes that book as the central example for sorting out what does and doesn’t count as philosophy and why.
Early philosophers did psychedelics (Eleusinian Mysteries) and they though they were getting useful information about the nature of reality from them (because when you're in the psychedelic state it feels like that) and then tried to translate their experiences into philosophical works and metaphysics which other people took seriously.
I have some critiques (overall, I think I agree with you): First, philosophy ≠ ancient Greek philosophy (you’re probably aware that you’re doing this, he-he). Second, not all religious or philosophical thinking is metaphysically foundationalist. Notably—and you’re probably better informed about this than me—some interpretations of Madhyamaka seem to be antifoundational.
With respect to the major world religions, one could slice them many different ways. We could say Theravada Buddhism is “antiphilosophical soteriological pragmatism” (ugh). Over in the Muslim world, there’s _still_ controversy over the relationship of “rational thinking” with the religion. And not all Christians are fans of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. In terms of late modern philosophy, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, for example, were two anti- or unrational thinkers. (I’m not very familiar with Nietzsche, but Kierkegaard’s thinking was very unique.)
A last point I want to make is that we could probably extend your critique to include religion, too, not just “philosophy.”
Thanks! I agree with pretty much everything you say here. If/when I continue this project/series/whatever, it will become clearer that we don’t disagree. I think!
Why don't you cite Peter Unger's work Empty Ideas here? You may find it congenial if you haven't read it. It does a good job making its case while avoiding the charge of self-refutation.
I kind of think the Tao was on to a lot of these points thousands of years ago— as an ignorant westerner, when I read Philosophical Investigations I thought “hey, it’s a lot like the Tao.”
Ursula Le Guin’s translation of the first lines of the Tao goes “The way you can follow isn’t the real way. The name you can say isn’t the real name.” I thought “well, that’s true.” And then felt depressed about communicating anything
If asked, “Can conceptual analysis be a useful tool?”
I would answer, “Sometimes, yes.”
How would you answer?
———————————————————————
There is a sense in which I just agree with you— as someone that once studied a lot of philosophy, most of its inquiries strike me as pointless now. For me now, it is often this:
“Let us list the logical possibilities. How interesting, there’s some I had not considered. And how might we find which of these is actually the case? Apparently, we just can’t. Let us take our expanded sense of possibility and keep it in our back pockets, but end our inquiry here.”
At this point, I get off the train, but the philosophy department stays, and pesters the conductor with endless questioning & argument. Some of them even convince themselves that they know that their preferred fraction of infinity is the Truth, and become quite opinionated about it.
For you, is the first part of the journey philosophy? Or does it only become philosophy when you stay to bother the conductor?
I do not understand your perspective well enough to know what you would say. I would like to, though!
Sure! It’s absolutely necessary in (for example) software development. That is not philosophy. (As a completely random example, a couple hours ago I read this closely-reasoned conceptual analysis: https://thunderseethe.dev/posts/traits-are-a-local-maxima/)
Conceptual analysis is not, in general, philosophy. So this is not a distinguishing feature of philosophy
Philosophy often (maybe always) also does conceptual analysis. The problem is that it analyzes concepts about metaphysical things that don’t relate to concrete reality. (Like essences, utility, propositions, natural kinds, or necessary and sufficient conditions.) No amount of analysis will help with those, other than to conclude “this is a bad concept, it doesn’t real, drop it!”
And if you drop all the doesn’t-real concepts, there’s little (if anything) left of philosophy.
i actually would love to see you think through moral philosophy given that most of the candidates for metaphysical entities are ones you yourself often use (ie good, right). moral philosophy does feel different than other areas since it’s subject matter is something real (the psychological facts about our judgements about whether some action or outcome is good) and ultimately useful (curve fitting out intuitions to principles that allow us to save compute time later on and avoid the unreliability of in the moment intuitions). consistency of decision producers strikes me as worth striving for in general, so long as we allow ourselves to do periodic check ins to see if our action guiding principles are working for our aims every now and then (meta rational)
But, I would not think through moral philosophy, because I believe philosophy is the wrong tool for the job. It’s not the only discipline that takes ethics as its subject matter. There’s moral psychology, for example, which has its own problems, but I find it much more grounded in reality than moral philosophy. And ethnomethodology, which frustrating skirts around the point, but was originally invented as a way of understanding people’s relationships with black/white racism in the American South, and has extensive moral content and implications.
'Rationality can be extremely powerful and valuable in some situations, for some purposes. In others, it is powerfully misleading and of negative value. Meta-rationality can often determine whether, and how, to rely on which reasoned arguments.'
Critiquing rationality and its limits has been a central topic of philosophy since the beginning, eg, first Greek skeptic philosopher, Pyrrho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrho . Since your meta-rationality project, like philosophical texts, contains a substantial number of "slabs of reasoning", I'm finding it difficult to distinguish your project of explaining* how to deal with the limits of rationality from philosophy.
I realize that this chapter and chapter 0 are the start of an attempt to explain* the difference, but every attempt to "explain* how "I'm not doing (or I'm going beyond) philosophy" that I've ever seen has ended up being considered yet more philosophy. And these two chapters give me the feeling that your attempt will meet a similar fate.
I understand that your 'bad brain' is inspiring you to make this attempt. I wish I could inspire you to abandon it and return to working on meta-rationality, meaningness, or whatever it has morphed into. I predict that when you complete your main work, if it is different from philosophy, the differences will shine forth as clear as day.
While your jeremiad against philosophy is entertaining, I find your main work so much more insightful and useful that I'm sad to see your bad brain distract you from it. Ultimately, who cares how your work is labelled by others? I think most of your readers could care less whether it counts as philosophy or not.
* Of course, "explaining" is applying rationality to generate slabs of reasoning. And explaining by comparing and contrasting conceptual frameworks is usually some form of philosophizing.
> Since your meta-rationality project, like philosophical texts, contains a substantial number of "slabs of reasoning", I'm finding it difficult to distinguish your project of explaining* how to deal with the limits of rationality from philosophy.
I don't understand. Academic journal articles in many non-philosophical fields include extensive reasoning. That doesn't make them philosophy.
The bit you refer to was from my saying that irrational philosophers were rationalists, because their writing mainly consisted of (bad) reasoning, which they seemed to think was adequate to derive important conclusions without making much reference to concrete specifics. That doesn't imply that anything that consists mainly of reasoning is philosophical.
> I wish I could inspire you to abandon it
I'm on the fence. Opinions here are extremely diverse. I appreciate them, but that makes them unhelpful as guidance :)
You might find this funny - one of the words for 'crackpot' in Hindi-Urdu is 'aflatoon'. The word 'aflatoon' is actually the Arabicised name of Plato. People perceived Plato's ideas as so crackpot-ish that his name became a synonym of crackpot in those languages. Most Hindi-Urdu speakers are unaware of the etymology so if you go to India/Pakistan and call someone 'aflatun' they will just hear 'crackpot'.
There is, of course, a Bollywood movie by that title, named so for featuring a supposedly eccentric, crackpot protagonist :D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aflatoon_%281997_film%29
That is very funny, thank you!
“All philosophies are mental fabrications. There has never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things.”
— Nagarjuna
Anti philosophy people always conviently ignore all the major successes of philosophy. Its just that once ideas are normalized in the culture people don't think of them as "philosophy." When something is at the cutting edge, it's entirely philosophy. Atomic theory was metaphysics until proven expiramentally. Almost all of the basic assumptions about our everyday lives: rights, democracy, even basic concepts like "an idea," "a citizen" etc etc were all Novel metaphysics within living memory.
Acedemic philosophy is a dumpster fire, but philosophic enquiry is wonderful.
I’m curious, what makes an enquiry count as philosophic?
Philosophy is just a catch all term for rational inquiry. Hence why until recently physics, math, psychology and virtually every other discipline was some version of philosophy like "natural philosophy" etc.
Now, in keeping with the split in disciplines and speaking roughly, I'd say we can roughly call non experimental rational inquiry as philosophy. This would exclude pure fact finding missions like surveys, experiments, and mystical methods of inquiry.
I just want to leave a note of encouragement for this project. These two posts 0 and 1 along with the writing about master and slave morality from a couple months ago have been significant boosters for me in understanding your meaningness writings. I’m realizing from the somewhat cursory reading of them that I did, I was reading them as philosophy. This project is hugely beneficial in pointing towards the mode that I was invisibly in in reading them and is very useful in exactly how you said at the end of the last post about how to read- it’s pointing me towards what I was assuming (unhelpfully) as I went into reading you. Thanks and my opinion is that this is a very useful project.
Thank you! That is very helpful to hear.
My sense was that treating my stuff as philosophy had caused some readers to misunderstand it, or miss the point: that it’s meant to be directly useful in one’s everyday life, rather than aesthetically interesting intellectual theorizing. It’s great to have confirmation that explaining this can be useful.
I have little idea what the ancient Greeks were thinking, and I tried to read Unger’s “I do not exist” but was unable to find a copy online - unfortunate, since it sounds like a fun read! But it seems like the same sort of thing as sharing paradoxes or things like Gettier problems? These are examples of how plausible reasoning goes wrong.
When teachers of introductory philosophy discuss Zeno’s paradoxes, they’re called paradoxes for a reason. We’re not expected to believe that motion is impossible, but to see that something must have gone wrong and to try to figure out what it is. It seems like a fun and perhaps useful exercise. Zen koans are similar.
Or at least, that’s how I read philosophy - not to discover the wisdom of the ancients (I am mostly not convinced), but to see how presumably smart people struggled with it. (I’m not sure how smart they were either, but people make a big deal over them for some reason, and some allowance needs to be made for vast cultural differences.)
So it seems like there’s a big difference between “a lot of famous philosophy is wrong, often absurdly, obviously so” and “philosophy is harmful.” To show the harm, I’d have to see that some people take it too seriously and this harms them. I suspect that most students exposed to it don’t suffer and get a bit of essay-writing practice, but perhaps sometimes there are more serious effects? Maybe it was harmful for you?
I’m reminded of your warning about the dangers of meditation, which didn’t attempt to prove that meditation is harmful for everyone, but to show that it *can* be harmful and explain why we should be cautious about it. Some of your best writing is along these lines.
Well, Chapter 2 is supposed to be about harmfulness. (Not sure whether or not I will finish the draft.)
As with the rest of “Undoing philosophy,” it doesn’t present an argument. It just gives three examples: political philosophy, “mission,” and how philosophy's wrong ideas about language and selves sabotage communication, coordination, and the social order. I hope that’s enough for some readers to get the point, and extrapolate to others.
Here’s a review of a biography of Parfit that seems like a pretty good example of how sometimes philosophy can be a harmful obsession even for famous philosophers. (Especially for famous philosophers? I assume results vary.)
https://philosophersmag.com/imperfect-parfit/
Thanks; I skimmed. Yikes!
Yes, fair enough!
I was thinking about why I resist this more than some of your other writing. When you wrote about why nihilism is mistaken and harmful I had no problem with that, nor with the early part of “In the Cells of the Eggplant” where you write about why specific philosophical ideas related to rationalism are mistaken.
I guess it seems too abstract and sweeping? I’m also skeptical of “big history” where someone tries to explain things happening centuries apart, on different continents in terms of a single theory. So I expect that I’ll like the examples better than the summary.
“To show the harm, I’d have to see that some people take it too seriously and this harms them.”
Though I do not hate philosophy like David does, I was nevertheless once the perfect example of such a person. I was determined to solve ethics. To find a rational system to optimally pick the correct action for any situation I’d encounter. I started optimistically, and made real progress, in the sense that my system became increasingly more nuanced & comprehensive. Then utilitarianism became my master, and I its inadequate servant. At first, because in principle it can applied to anything, and because in many cases it is basically correct, I was a happy slave. But my intellectual honesty would put an end to that, and introduce years of misery. At least twice a year I would have an existential crisis that would suffocate me with anti-human guilt, or reduce my thoughts to endless loops arguing with myself about nihilism, teetering over that abyss. In general, the intrusive thoughts would terminate joys as they arose, because the instinct was to think “util or bust, none of this would matter otherwise”, all while harboring anti-util doubts— so bust it was, then! It may have been agonizing over the suicidal trade off between my life and insect suffering that cracked my resolve, and opened a path away from there to be traveled over a few years time.
And yet for some reason, I don’t hate philosophy. I think going through this made me stronger & wiser. Plus, when I wasn’t ruined by it, some of its other topics interested me in more innocent senses. I have more perspective than I would have, and perhaps enough to not be as easily swept up by whatever bastardized half-breed of trickled-down philosophical ideas become cultural narratives. When you encounter the better version of the idea, and learn its limitations or at least that there are smart-seeming people that disagree with it, it creates needed distance. And perhaps it can allow you to appreciate what was good about your old dogmas, then use those ideas in whatever limited context you deem appropriate.
Thank you—this was a wonderful personal account!
There's a big split in current philosophy between the analytic and continental factions. These might both be bad, but they seem bad in completely different ways. The continental school does not seem to suffer from excess rationalism, quite the contrary. And the methods and goals of someone like Deleuze seem wildly different from the boring English logicians. I don't understand that stuff well enough to have very strong opinions on it, but if you are going to take on philosophy as a whole you need to include him since he's very influential.
Can't believe you have me defending philosophy.
Some Deleuze inspired music to compensate for my arguing https://archive.org/details/john-zorn-2022-multiplicities-a-repository-of-non-existent-object
Listening now… that’s quite a thing!
Listened all the way through this evening, and loved it! Thank you!
Curious what you make of this, in the post, which seems responsive to what you say here?
But those guys presented, almost entirely, slabs of reasoning. Much of it may be bad reasoning that results in wrong conclusions. In that case, it could accurately be described as “irrational”; but it is nevertheless philosophical reasoning. It is rationalist, in demonstrating unjustified faith in reason’s adequacy.
It’s certainly true that the Continental school applies different standards to what counts as philosophical reasoning. But I don’t think it’s accurate to insist that only the analytic school’s criteria count as “rationalism.” Hegel is standardly considered an arch-rationalist, although none of his stuff is acceptable by analytic criteria. Badiou is one of the most prominent Continental obscurantists, although he claims his stuff is all based in mainstream set theory, which makes him almost analytic, although as far as I can tell completely out to lunch.
(Uh, why am I saying “although”? Is Unger not completely out to lunch?)
Well the philosophers that I’ve been finding value in lately (Deleuze, Sloterdijk, Latour) I don’t think could be described as presenting “slabs of reasoning”. Slabs of verbiage perhaps. Certainly I don’t read them for their airtight arguments for the truth of some set of propositions. If they have value to me its because they present radical new frameworks for divving up reality – “refactorings” in vgr jargon. They are more like literature than they are a mathematical proof. Or drugs perhaps. And they are an acquired taste.
In my experience with philosophers, some of them are out there trying to do it, but most of them are actually… a nice way to put it is "historians of philosophy", but a practical one is "just sitting around saying names of older philosophers to show you know them". (This sounds like a jab at continentals but my father was a philosophy professor; I don't think I ever met a student or colleague who was "a philosopher" and he mainly wrote books about Plutarch.)
Analytics tried to escape this by writing everything like it's math, but it didn't really help.
I will now proceed to do this myself and point out that this is basically Wittgenstein's argument in Philosophical Investigations that philosophy isn't real and anyone who thinks they've found a philosophical question has just tricked themselves. You make it differently though.
Anyway, you can always get worse, so maybe they're better than nothing? EAs are generally bad too, on the principle that it's bad to be in a rationalist sex cult, but they're not actively trying to be evil. (Instead they do it by accident, because calling yourself an "effective altruist" invites too much fatal irony.)
Thanks for this! Yes, Wittgenstein is sometimes counted as an "anti-philosopher." And I'm significantly influenced by _Philosophical Investigations_. (More via ethnomethodology rather than its philosopher interpreters, though.)
My draft has a brief section on anti-philosophy, covering phenomenology, the Pragmatists, and Wittgenstein. Mostly just name-dropping them and linking elsewhere for anyone who wants to know more, though.
I've taken a few looks at this article and still some away confused. My basic questions are:
1. What is a proposition? Why is it a useless, metaphysical entity when something like an axiom or a theorem is not?
2. What is philosophy? What is the difference between it and other forms of reasoning about the world? Is every subdivision useless, or only certain subdivisions? What I've read of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze would seem to tug against many of these arguments.
Hi, thanks for the questions!
I wrote about this at https://metarationality.com/propositions . For a more formal and official take, you can read https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions/ .
“Philosophy doesn’t work” was the first “chapter” of a longer work, which will address “what is philosophy” at several points. I’m hoping to have the next chunk of it out early next week.
Philosopher sometimes do good work, despite being philosophers, mainly when they are not doing philosophy. Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze are sometimes counted as antiphilosophers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiphilosophy). I find antiphilosophy useful, in dispelling some of the errors of philosophy. Merleau-Ponty also counts as a phenomenologist, which, as philosophy goes, is relatively more in contact with reality, and therefore less erroneous. He also also counts as a psychologist; in fact, his job was as a psychologist, not philosopher, when he wrote Phenomenology of Perception. As it happens, my draft already takes that book as the central example for sorting out what does and doesn’t count as philosophy and why.
Hey, check this theory!
Early philosophers did psychedelics (Eleusinian Mysteries) and they though they were getting useful information about the nature of reality from them (because when you're in the psychedelic state it feels like that) and then tried to translate their experiences into philosophical works and metaphysics which other people took seriously.
...! :D
This seems plausible, based on what little I know!
I have some critiques (overall, I think I agree with you): First, philosophy ≠ ancient Greek philosophy (you’re probably aware that you’re doing this, he-he). Second, not all religious or philosophical thinking is metaphysically foundationalist. Notably—and you’re probably better informed about this than me—some interpretations of Madhyamaka seem to be antifoundational.
With respect to the major world religions, one could slice them many different ways. We could say Theravada Buddhism is “antiphilosophical soteriological pragmatism” (ugh). Over in the Muslim world, there’s _still_ controversy over the relationship of “rational thinking” with the religion. And not all Christians are fans of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. In terms of late modern philosophy, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, for example, were two anti- or unrational thinkers. (I’m not very familiar with Nietzsche, but Kierkegaard’s thinking was very unique.)
A last point I want to make is that we could probably extend your critique to include religion, too, not just “philosophy.”
Thanks! I agree with pretty much everything you say here. If/when I continue this project/series/whatever, it will become clearer that we don’t disagree. I think!
He-he
There's an ouroboros aspect to philosophy, in which philosophy subsumes all critiques, as yet more philosophy.
Capitalism also manages to subsume all critique. There's business profit to be made in running a Banksy museum, or selling anti-capitalist t-shirts.
And there's readable philosophy to be made in criticizing the myth-denying overly-rational aspects of philosophy.
Why don't you cite Peter Unger's work Empty Ideas here? You may find it congenial if you haven't read it. It does a good job making its case while avoiding the charge of self-refutation.
Thanks! I haven’t read it, but I’ll mention in the section on anti-philosophy in Chapter 3.
I kind of think the Tao was on to a lot of these points thousands of years ago— as an ignorant westerner, when I read Philosophical Investigations I thought “hey, it’s a lot like the Tao.”
Ursula Le Guin’s translation of the first lines of the Tao goes “The way you can follow isn’t the real way. The name you can say isn’t the real name.” I thought “well, that’s true.” And then felt depressed about communicating anything
Please help me understand.
If asked, “Can conceptual analysis be a useful tool?”
I would answer, “Sometimes, yes.”
How would you answer?
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There is a sense in which I just agree with you— as someone that once studied a lot of philosophy, most of its inquiries strike me as pointless now. For me now, it is often this:
“Let us list the logical possibilities. How interesting, there’s some I had not considered. And how might we find which of these is actually the case? Apparently, we just can’t. Let us take our expanded sense of possibility and keep it in our back pockets, but end our inquiry here.”
At this point, I get off the train, but the philosophy department stays, and pesters the conductor with endless questioning & argument. Some of them even convince themselves that they know that their preferred fraction of infinity is the Truth, and become quite opinionated about it.
For you, is the first part of the journey philosophy? Or does it only become philosophy when you stay to bother the conductor?
I do not understand your perspective well enough to know what you would say. I would like to, though!
Can conceptual analysis be a useful tool?
Sure! It’s absolutely necessary in (for example) software development. That is not philosophy. (As a completely random example, a couple hours ago I read this closely-reasoned conceptual analysis: https://thunderseethe.dev/posts/traits-are-a-local-maxima/)
Conceptual analysis is not, in general, philosophy. So this is not a distinguishing feature of philosophy
Philosophy often (maybe always) also does conceptual analysis. The problem is that it analyzes concepts about metaphysical things that don’t relate to concrete reality. (Like essences, utility, propositions, natural kinds, or necessary and sufficient conditions.) No amount of analysis will help with those, other than to conclude “this is a bad concept, it doesn’t real, drop it!”
And if you drop all the doesn’t-real concepts, there’s little (if anything) left of philosophy.
i actually would love to see you think through moral philosophy given that most of the candidates for metaphysical entities are ones you yourself often use (ie good, right). moral philosophy does feel different than other areas since it’s subject matter is something real (the psychological facts about our judgements about whether some action or outcome is good) and ultimately useful (curve fitting out intuitions to principles that allow us to save compute time later on and avoid the unreliability of in the moment intuitions). consistency of decision producers strikes me as worth striving for in general, so long as we allow ourselves to do periodic check ins to see if our action guiding principles are working for our aims every now and then (meta rational)
i actually would love to see you think through moral philosophy
I’m glad to hear of your interest!
I do hope to write more about ethics at some point. (You know that I have some stuff about that on Vividness? Closest match to what you want would be https://vividness.live/emptiness-form-and-dzogchen-ethics probably.)
But, I would not think through moral philosophy, because I believe philosophy is the wrong tool for the job. It’s not the only discipline that takes ethics as its subject matter. There’s moral psychology, for example, which has its own problems, but I find it much more grounded in reality than moral philosophy. And ethnomethodology, which frustrating skirts around the point, but was originally invented as a way of understanding people’s relationships with black/white racism in the American South, and has extensive moral content and implications.