Undoing philosophy, Chapter 0

It's bad. We can do better without it. In fact, we usually already do.

Philosophy: not even once. Just say no to Plato

Overview, motivations, and how to read this

“Undoing Philosophy” has five chapters:

1. Philosophy’s methods yield mainly wrong or nonsensical conclusions.

Arguing about metaphysical abstractions is not useful. We can and should do better.

2. Popular conceptions of philosophy are often incoherent misunderstandings.

They not wrong because they disagree with a professional definition. Rather, they are too broad, including things everyone would agree aren't philosophy.

3. Philosophical ideas do great harm after escaping into the general culture.

Our taken-for-granted everyday ways of talking, feeling, and acting embody wrong philosophical ideas, causing unnecessary misery.

4. I don’t do philosophy.

Although some topics philosophy claims to address are important, many are inherently nonsensical. Replacing the poorly-functioning methods, and dropping the nonsense topics, yields something sufficiently different that calling it “philosophy” would be misleading.

5. We can, and do, relate to meaningness better without philosophy.

Non-professionals engage with philosophy mainly to better understand questions of meaningness: “problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.”

Reflection-in-action—awareness of what we are doing as we do it—yields more accurate insights. Non-conceptual noticing and conceptual reflection unconceal dysfunctional patterns. Often those stem from unthought, inaccurate assumptions, often originally from obsolete philosophy, that we can amend or drop.

Motivations

It’s common to misunderstand the stuff I write as philosophy. It’s not. Its purposes, methods, and topics are non-philosophical.

This is a natural confusion, because there are superficial similarities. However, the misimpression matters. It is not just fussing about the definition of the word “philosophy,” nitpicking about what that does and does not include.

If you read Meaningness or Meta-rationality as philosophy, you are liable to miss most of what they offer. You might think they’re conceptual analyses and intellectual arguments concerning standard topics: epistemology, axiology, ethics, logic, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. They aren’t.

Some phenomena the books discuss do fall under the broad categories treated by those fields. However, the particular phenomena the books address are mainly passed over by philosophy, as trivial: breakfast, for example; and similarly all the other concrete, meaningful details of real life. My work passes over the main topics of the philosophical subfields, as metaphysical delusions: propositional attitudes, for example; and similarly “the mind,” “utility,” “relativism,” and all its other standard conceptual apparatus.

And, the ways I treat the phenomena that I do find significant, and the types of conclusions I draw from them, are quite different.

Overview, and how to read this

This work is in two parts. The first points out that philosophy is bad. Topics philosophy pretends to explain, such as caring and knowing, are tremendously important. However, its explanations are all wrong, and acting on them usually makes things go badly.

Many ways non-philosophers misunderstand caring and knowing originated in philosophy, and then spread throughout common culture, origins obscured. Philosophical ideas—about what it is to be human, how meaning works, how communication works—dominate our ways of talking and thinking and feeling and acting. We think and feel and act badly because philosophy is bad. Indirectly, it causes much misery. As a dramatic example, political philosophy, justified by metaphysical delusions, killed a hundred million people in the mid-twentieth century.

Less dramatic harms are insidious, pervasive, ongoing, and perhaps even worse. “Philosophy is bad” is not an intellectual pose, trying to score points by arguing about abstractions. Philosophy is bad because it is messing up your life.

Philosophy has been a disaster; but it’s one we can recover from. The second part sketches better, non-philosophical ways to approach understanding caring and knowing; thinking, feeling, and acting. These are the methods applied in Meaningness and Meta-rationality. Their motivation is pragmatic: not intellectual clarification, but to help you care and know better in your everyday life, and in your larger life-projects.

I hope that reading those books with this sketch of their motivations and methods in mind will better enable you to apply them in practice.

The same considerations apply to reading this work. If you misunderstand this as an attempt at a philosophical refutation of philosophy, using the methods of philosophy (argument and conceptual analysis), you will miss the point.

You may be tempted to counter it with philosophical arguments in favor of philosophy. That would waste your time and mine (and annoy both of us).

Read it instead as a guide to how to read my other stuff—if you want to do that.