In a sense it’s all about mistakes ,because the history of philosophy isn’t a bunch of random stuff, it’s one phlosopher reacting to another.
But you seem to want mistakes in a sense where they are not just criticisms from some perspective or set of assumptions, but absolute. That you are not going to get , because epistemology has not been solved. So what you have instead is everyone criticising everyone else in a Mexican stand off.
If it were possible to divide philosophy into right stuff and wrong stuff ,you would need an explanation, such as cosmopolitanism, for continuing to teach the wrong stuff. But that would be downstream of solving episyemology.
I think we’d agree that some philosophical progress has happened over the last couple thousand years, though (though I’d probably claim there’s been a lot more progress in epistemology since 1950 than you’d agree with). Our hypothetical “Mistakes of the past” philosophy course couldn’t just be a regular survey course but with the professor taking sides on every issue, but it could be cherry-picked to take advantage of places where the issue appears clear-cut in hindsight.
Since you can find someone to disagree with anything, of course for each mistake you could find someone who disagrees, so the amount of editorial control isn’t zero, but in general I think that this kind of material would actually be appropriate for a liberal-arts setting. u/Jonathan_Livengood you should get on developing this course :P
It’s a very interesting suggestion. I haven’t really taught history of philosophy—a big exception being a graduate course on the history of work on the problem of induction from Hume to Quine, which I taught in the spring. Basically all of the courses I’ve taught are current topics, arguments, and controversies that are live today. Course titles like “Logic and Reasoning,” “Biomedical Ethics,” “Contemporary Philosophy of Science,” “Metaphysics,” and “Philosophy of Psychology.”
Maybe the way to teach something like this would be under the heading “Progress in Philosophy,” where you could sort of split time between [1] the contemporary debate about what counts as progress and whether there is or could be progress in philosophy and [2] some historical examples. (This was also a major theme of the grad course I taught in the spring, so it’s still very much on my mind.)
Out of curiosity I looked up what you were teaching in the spring—the problem of induction, right? (I’ll be surprised and impressed if you managed to foist a reading from Li and Vitanyi on your students :P ) I’m definitely curious about what you think of the progress in probability, and what morals one could draw from it.
I’d actually checked because I thought it would be the philosophy of psychology. That seems like one of those areas where there were, in hindsight, obvious past mistakes, and it’s not clear how much of the progress has been emprirical versus things that could have been figured out using the empirical knowledge of the time.
No Kolmogorov complexity—the course was really a history from Hume to about 1970. The next time I teach a seminar, I’m hoping to cover 1970 to the present. Still, this time around, a lot of the readings were technical: Ramsey, Jeffreys, Fisher, Neyman, De Finetti, Savage, Carnap, and others. You can see the full reading list here.
I agree that a nice course on progress could be done with a philosophy of psychology focus. I expect that progress-skeptics would object that the progress is in psychology itself, not in the philosophy of psychology. (I wouldn’t share that skepticism for a couple of reasons.) Maybe if the course were framed more in terms of philosophy of mind and computation? Have you read Glymour’s “introduction” to philosophy, Thinking Things Through? It has that feel to me, though it’s pitched more like, “Here are things that philosophy has contributed to human knowledge,” and it ranges over more than mind and computation.
I’m actually not sure what argument you’re implying by your past examples. 1500 years ago the denial of Euclid’s parallel postulate wouldn’t have been taught—does this have implications for modern mathematics education?
It has implications for physics. If you re run the history of thought with even more emphasis on what’s currently believed to be true,and even more rejection of alternatives, then you just slow down the acceptance of revolutionary ideas like non Euclidean geometry.
But past mathematicians already just taught what they thought was true then. I’m not asking why they didn’t do that even harder, I’m asking what relevance you think it has for current math education. (And by extension, what relevance you think the education system of the Scholastics has for modern philosophy education.)
As it is said, keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out. Teaching a specific thing impedes progress when that thing is wrong or useless, but it aids progress when that thing is a foundation for later good things. This framework largely excuses past mathematicians, and also lets us convert between the “cautiousness” of philosophy education and a parameter of optimism about the possibility of progress.
But past mathematicians already just taught what they thought was true then.
But we don’t know that we are living in the optimal timeline. Maybe relativity would have arrived sooner with fewer people in the past insisting that space is necessarily Euclidean.
I’m asking what relevance you think it has for current math education.
The topic is philosophy education. Science can test its theories empirically. Philosophy can’t. Mathematics can take its axioms for granted. Philosophy can’t.
As it is said, keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out. Teaching a specific thing impedes progress when that thing is wrong or useless, but it aids progress when that thing is a foundation for later good things.
The difficulty is that we don’t have certain knowledge of what is in fact right or wrong: we have to use something like popularity or consensus as a substitute for “right”.
It may well be the case that one can go too far in teaching unpopular ideas, but it doesn’t follow that the optimal approach is to teach only “right” ideas, because that means teaching only the current consensus, and the consensus sometimes needs to be overthrown.
The optimal point is usually not an extreme, or otherwise easy to find.
In a sense it’s all about mistakes ,because the history of philosophy isn’t a bunch of random stuff, it’s one phlosopher reacting to another.
But you seem to want mistakes in a sense where they are not just criticisms from some perspective or set of assumptions, but absolute. That you are not going to get , because epistemology has not been solved. So what you have instead is everyone criticising everyone else in a Mexican stand off.
If it were possible to divide philosophy into right stuff and wrong stuff ,you would need an explanation, such as cosmopolitanism, for continuing to teach the wrong stuff. But that would be downstream of solving episyemology.
I broadly agree.
I think we’d agree that some philosophical progress has happened over the last couple thousand years, though (though I’d probably claim there’s been a lot more progress in epistemology since 1950 than you’d agree with). Our hypothetical “Mistakes of the past” philosophy course couldn’t just be a regular survey course but with the professor taking sides on every issue, but it could be cherry-picked to take advantage of places where the issue appears clear-cut in hindsight.
Since you can find someone to disagree with anything, of course for each mistake you could find someone who disagrees, so the amount of editorial control isn’t zero, but in general I think that this kind of material would actually be appropriate for a liberal-arts setting. u/Jonathan_Livengood you should get on developing this course :P
It’s a very interesting suggestion. I haven’t really taught history of philosophy—a big exception being a graduate course on the history of work on the problem of induction from Hume to Quine, which I taught in the spring. Basically all of the courses I’ve taught are current topics, arguments, and controversies that are live today. Course titles like “Logic and Reasoning,” “Biomedical Ethics,” “Contemporary Philosophy of Science,” “Metaphysics,” and “Philosophy of Psychology.”
Maybe the way to teach something like this would be under the heading “Progress in Philosophy,” where you could sort of split time between [1] the contemporary debate about what counts as progress and whether there is or could be progress in philosophy and [2] some historical examples. (This was also a major theme of the grad course I taught in the spring, so it’s still very much on my mind.)
Out of curiosity I looked up what you were teaching in the spring—the problem of induction, right? (I’ll be surprised and impressed if you managed to foist a reading from Li and Vitanyi on your students :P ) I’m definitely curious about what you think of the progress in probability, and what morals one could draw from it.
I’d actually checked because I thought it would be the philosophy of psychology. That seems like one of those areas where there were, in hindsight, obvious past mistakes, and it’s not clear how much of the progress has been emprirical versus things that could have been figured out using the empirical knowledge of the time.
No Kolmogorov complexity—the course was really a history from Hume to about 1970. The next time I teach a seminar, I’m hoping to cover 1970 to the present. Still, this time around, a lot of the readings were technical: Ramsey, Jeffreys, Fisher, Neyman, De Finetti, Savage, Carnap, and others. You can see the full reading list here.
I agree that a nice course on progress could be done with a philosophy of psychology focus. I expect that progress-skeptics would object that the progress is in psychology itself, not in the philosophy of psychology. (I wouldn’t share that skepticism for a couple of reasons.) Maybe if the course were framed more in terms of philosophy of mind and computation? Have you read Glymour’s “introduction” to philosophy, Thinking Things Through? It has that feel to me, though it’s pitched more like, “Here are things that philosophy has contributed to human knowledge,” and it ranges over more than mind and computation.
If you did that 1500 years ago, then theism would appear clear cut in hindsight.
If you did that 150 years ago, then reductionism would appear obviously false.
As opposed to what? Would you be doing anyone any favours by rounding off “seems true to us, here now” as the last word on the subject?
Yes. Favors would be done.
I’m actually not sure what argument you’re implying by your past examples. 1500 years ago the denial of Euclid’s parallel postulate wouldn’t have been taught—does this have implications for modern mathematics education?
It has implications for physics. If you re run the history of thought with even more emphasis on what’s currently believed to be true,and even more rejection of alternatives, then you just slow down the acceptance of revolutionary ideas like non Euclidean geometry.
Would they? Can you explain how and why?
But past mathematicians already just taught what they thought was true then. I’m not asking why they didn’t do that even harder, I’m asking what relevance you think it has for current math education. (And by extension, what relevance you think the education system of the Scholastics has for modern philosophy education.)
As it is said, keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out. Teaching a specific thing impedes progress when that thing is wrong or useless, but it aids progress when that thing is a foundation for later good things. This framework largely excuses past mathematicians, and also lets us convert between the “cautiousness” of philosophy education and a parameter of optimism about the possibility of progress.
But we don’t know that we are living in the optimal timeline. Maybe relativity would have arrived sooner with fewer people in the past insisting that space is necessarily Euclidean.
The topic is philosophy education. Science can test its theories empirically. Philosophy can’t. Mathematics can take its axioms for granted. Philosophy can’t.
The difficulty is that we don’t have certain knowledge of what is in fact right or wrong: we have to use something like popularity or consensus as a substitute for “right”.
It may well be the case that one can go too far in teaching unpopular ideas, but it doesn’t follow that the optimal approach is to teach only “right” ideas, because that means teaching only the current consensus, and the consensus sometimes needs to be overthrown.
The optimal point is usually not an extreme, or otherwise easy to find.