What I do claim is that many specific philosophical positions and methods are undermined by scientific knowledge about how brains and other systems work.
It would be useful to have a list of such positons which are still taken seriously by anglophone philosophy. FYI Hegel, Heidegger, Berkely and other easy targets generally aren’t.
For example, I’ve argued that a particular kind of philosophical analysis, which assumes concepts are defined by necessary and sufficient conditions, is undermined by psychological results showing that brains don’t store concepts that way.
But science gains benefits from using categories that are artficially tidy compared to folk concepts.Thus a tomato is not a scientific vegetable, nor a whale a scientific fish. Why shouldn’t philosophy do the same?
A lot of those probably aren’t advocating subjective idealism. Kantian views (‘transcendental idealism’), Platonistic views (‘platonic idealism’), Russellian views (‘phenomenalism’), and Hegelian views (‘objective idealism’) are frequently called ‘idealism’ too. In the early 20th century, ‘idealism’ sometimes degraded to such an extent that it seemed to mean little more than the declaration ‘I hate scientism and I think minds are interesting and weird’.
It’s also worth noting that Peter probably had analytic philosophy in mind when he said ‘Anglophone’. Most of the idealists in the survey are probably in the continental or historically Kantian tradition.
It would be useful to have a list of such positons which are still taken seriously by anglophone philosophy. FYI Hegel, Heidegger, Berkely and other easy targets generally aren’t.
But science gains benefits from using categories that are artficially tidy compared to folk concepts.Thus a tomato is not a scientific vegetable, nor a whale a scientific fish. Why shouldn’t philosophy do the same?
According to the PhilPapers survey results, 4.3% believe in idealism (i.e. Berkeley-style reality).
A lot of those probably aren’t advocating subjective idealism. Kantian views (‘transcendental idealism’), Platonistic views (‘platonic idealism’), Russellian views (‘phenomenalism’), and Hegelian views (‘objective idealism’) are frequently called ‘idealism’ too. In the early 20th century, ‘idealism’ sometimes degraded to such an extent that it seemed to mean little more than the declaration ‘I hate scientism and I think minds are interesting and weird’.
It’s also worth noting that Peter probably had analytic philosophy in mind when he said ‘Anglophone’. Most of the idealists in the survey are probably in the continental or historically Kantian tradition.