Sometime ago I was quite surprised to know that Kevin T. Kelly’s work on Ockham’s Razor, very rigorous and mathematical in nature, falls under “philosophy”. Apparently modern philosophy can get quite awesome when it wants to.
(By the way, someone should really write an introductory LW post about this. I thought Johnicholas Hines would do it, but lately he seems to be missing.)
Typically, philosophers do whatever they want and label it ‘philosophy’, and will claim most positive historical figures as examples of ‘philosophers’.
Symetrically, those who are skeptical of the value of philosophy will note that anyone who does anything useful couldn’t possibly be doing philosophy, sometimes “by definition”.
Typically, philosophers do whatever they want and label it ‘philosophy’, and will claim most positive historical figures as examples of ‘philosophers’. Symetrically, those who are skeptical of the value of philosophy will note that anyone who does anything useful couldn’t possibly be doing philosophy, sometimes “by definition”.
Definitely true, and this suggests that the question of whether philosophy is good/bad/useful is fundamentally confused. One definition that I like is that philosophy is any academic study not otherwise classified. That explains why there are so many examples of fields starting out as philosophy, being given a classification and then not being philosophy any more. It also makes most attempts to say things about philosophy as a whole look rather silly. The only problem with this definition is that a few fields, like ethics, have classifications of their own but are too narrow to count as separate fields, so they’re classified as subfields. Still, I think that this definition does a good enough job of dissolving silly questions that we can ignore a few special cases.
Kelly’s observation: inductive processes by necessity change their minds multiple times before arriving at the truth.
Kelly’s proposal: inductive processes ought to minimize how often they change their minds before truth is reached. (There are some subtle issues here—this proposal does not contradict “statistical efficiency” considerations, although it’s hard to see why at first glance).
I didn’t have a clear-cut definition in mind then—I just thought that the Kelly link was far enough from being an edge case.
If I had to say, I would take a random selection of articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and that gives an idea of what typical philosphy is, as the term is normally used.
Sometime ago I was quite surprised to know that Kevin T. Kelly’s work on Ockham’s Razor, very rigorous and mathematical in nature, falls under “philosophy”. Apparently modern philosophy can get quite awesome when it wants to.
(By the way, someone should really write an introductory LW post about this. I thought Johnicholas Hines would do it, but lately he seems to be missing.)
Typically, philosophers do whatever they want and label it ‘philosophy’, and will claim most positive historical figures as examples of ‘philosophers’.
Symetrically, those who are skeptical of the value of philosophy will note that anyone who does anything useful couldn’t possibly be doing philosophy, sometimes “by definition”.
Definitely true, and this suggests that the question of whether philosophy is good/bad/useful is fundamentally confused. One definition that I like is that philosophy is any academic study not otherwise classified. That explains why there are so many examples of fields starting out as philosophy, being given a classification and then not being philosophy any more. It also makes most attempts to say things about philosophy as a whole look rather silly. The only problem with this definition is that a few fields, like ethics, have classifications of their own but are too narrow to count as separate fields, so they’re classified as subfields. Still, I think that this definition does a good enough job of dissolving silly questions that we can ignore a few special cases.
Kelly’s observation: inductive processes by necessity change their minds multiple times before arriving at the truth.
Kelly’s proposal: inductive processes ought to minimize how often they change their minds before truth is reached. (There are some subtle issues here—this proposal does not contradict “statistical efficiency” considerations, although it’s hard to see why at first glance).
I don’t think the work shown on that link would be regarded as typical philosophy—it’s more characteristic of computer science or statistics.
What falls under the category of “typical philosophy”, in your opinion?
I didn’t have a clear-cut definition in mind then—I just thought that the Kelly link was far enough from being an edge case.
If I had to say, I would take a random selection of articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and that gives an idea of what typical philosphy is, as the term is normally used.