My experience taking philosophy classes at MIT was academic philosophers are trained very poorly at scrutinizing philosophical arguments. People adjacent to philosophy—logicians, mathematicians, linguists, (not physicists)—are generally better able to work through philosophical arguments. The first two because learning the language forces them to learn how to think argumentatively, the third because it deals with similar structure without the baggage introduced by academic philosophers.
For example, if I present the Grandfather Paradox to a professor in these four fields, I expect:
The logician would ask me for the axioms, and keep pushing until I admit one of them is, “your grandfather cannot die.”
The mathematician would say, “obviously you cannot kill your grandfather, otherwise you have a contradiction.”
The linguist would ask me what exactly I mean by grandfather—biological? has he frozen sperm? does he have children yet? a twin brother?—and conclude, “you can kill your grandfather, at least the person that word refers to in the mind of the time traveler.”
The philosopher would say, “oh that’s such an interesting thought experiment. I don’t know, can you? It doesn’t seem like you can’t, and yet that seems like it would create a contradiction.” Then they would try putting the paradox in premise-conclusion form, and two hours later conclude, “well many of these axioms and implications seem a little fishy, but I would have to say you can/cannot [equally likely] kill your grandfather”.
My experience taking philosophy classes at MIT was academic philosophers are trained very poorly at scrutinizing philosophical arguments. People adjacent to philosophy—logicians, mathematicians, linguists, (not physicists)—are generally better able to work through philosophical arguments. The first two because learning the language forces them to learn how to think argumentatively, the third because it deals with similar structure without the baggage introduced by academic philosophers.
For example, if I present the Grandfather Paradox to a professor in these four fields, I expect:
The logician would ask me for the axioms, and keep pushing until I admit one of them is, “your grandfather cannot die.”
The mathematician would say, “obviously you cannot kill your grandfather, otherwise you have a contradiction.”
The linguist would ask me what exactly I mean by grandfather—biological? has he frozen sperm? does he have children yet? a twin brother?—and conclude, “you can kill your grandfather, at least the person that word refers to in the mind of the time traveler.”
The philosopher would say, “oh that’s such an interesting thought experiment. I don’t know, can you? It doesn’t seem like you can’t, and yet that seems like it would create a contradiction.” Then they would try putting the paradox in premise-conclusion form, and two hours later conclude, “well many of these axioms and implications seem a little fishy, but I would have to say you can/cannot [equally likely] kill your grandfather”.