CARRIER, Richard. is Philosophy Stupid
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Transcript of CARRIER, Richard. is Philosophy Stupid
07/01/14 Is Philosophy Stupid?
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Is Philosophy Stupid?by
Richard Carrier, Ph.D.
Abstract: A lot of philosophical zombie blood has been
spilled over the uselessness, aimlessness, or
pointlessness of philosophy. What’s it for? Is it all just
bunk? Arbitrary opinions in fancy dress? A quibbling over
silly minutiae? Does it make progress? Can’t we just
replace it all with science? Is it too esoteric to be useful or
even meaningful in light of real world issues? Can
ordinary people do anything with it? Where did it come
from? What the hell is it? Even Stephen Hawking says
philosophy is dead. Is it? Or did he really just say that in a
book mostly filled with his own conclusions inphilosophy?
Find out! I’ll answer all these questions and more.
Table of Contents
• Summary of Slideshow [also see PDF and Video]
• Recommended Readings for Becoming a Capable Lay
Philosopher
• Readings Criticizing Philosophy or Responding to Them
Summary of Slideshow
Following is the annotated text of the animated presentation. A PDF
version if the slideshow (without animations) is available here. Not
everything said or every point made during the presentation is
included below, but the most salient elements are below. To instead
watch the actual talk as given, see here.
"Philosophy is the field that hasn't progressed in 2000
years, whereas science has philosophical
speculations about physics and the nature of science
are not particularly useful, and have had little or no
impact upon progress in [science]."
—Lawrence Krauss
"Most of us do not spend most of our time worrying
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about [the big] questions, but almost all of us worry
about them some of the time. Traditionally these are
questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.
Philosophy has not kept up with modern
developments in science, particularly physics.
Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of
discovery in our quest for knowledge."
—Stephen Hawking
Ironically, Krauss and Hawking wrote their dismissals of philosophy
in books that in fact were philosophy. Neither actually proved their
conclusions scientifically in those books, but merely presented
possible models of reality given the limited scientific facts now
known, as premises, and speculating from there.
That’s philosophy.
So they said philosophy is dead and makes no progress, while
claiming to make important new progress in philosophy.
"Except for a patina of twenty-first century modernity,
in the form of logic and language, philosophy is
exactly the same now as it ever was; it has made no
progress whatsoever. We philosophers wrestle with
the exact same problems the Pre-Socratics wrestled
with [so we must concede] philosophy’s inability to
solve any philosophical problem, ever."
—Eric Dietrich
Is Philosophy Stupid? We often hear...
"Philosophy is useless"
"... divorced from reality"
"... too esoteric and obscure"
"... just pointless nitpicking over trivial minutiae"
"... gets nowhere, teaches and discovers nothing"
"... just opinion masquerading as knowledge"
But must distinguish...
Philosophy as practiced in the halls of academia
... vs. what philosophy was invented to be
... and what it should and could be
... and sometimes is.
The word's original meaning tells us something if what it originally
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was and was meant to be.
Philo + Sophia
=
Love of Wisdom
=
Understanding Yourself and the World
You will often hear, even from philosophers:
"Philosophy is only concerned with the analysis of concepts, not
with facts"
False.
Most philosophy is conceptual, it's a study of conceptual space or
logical space or possibility space. But even that has factual
ramifications (as I'll show later), and that's still not all of philosophy.
Philosophy directly answers factual questions, too.
Atheism, for example, is a conclusion about what is factually true,
yet it is a philosophical conclusion (there has never been a paper in
a science journal proving atheism). Likewise naturalism,
physicalism, and all sorts of factual questions, from whether we
have free will, to what is morally true.
Philosophy Is...
What exists and what doesn't.
What its nature is or isn't.
How much we can trust what we claim to know.
How should we behave—and organize society.
What we should infer from the facts of science to answer all of the
above.
How we should integrate those facts with others, e.g. from history,
journalism, personal experience.
Philosophy answers questions like...
"Who am I?"
"What should I do with my life? How can I be happy?"
"Do I have the right friends? Are these bad friends?"
"Am I a bad person? Should I be living my life differently?"
"What's worth making sacrifices for? How much sacrifice?"
"Am I in love? What is love?"
"Is there a god / afterlife / cosmic plan?"
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Philosophy = Worldview
Thus, as I said, analysis of concepts is only a part of philosophy.
Philosophy is the quest for understanding, of yourself and the world.
It is what you use to construct and test your philosophy of life, your
worldview. And as such it very much concerns itself with questions
of fact that science has not or cannot gain access to or conclusively
resolve.
So are you doing it well or poorly?
Skillfully or incompetently?
Informedly or ignorantly?
If you want to be on the right side of those three questions, you
have to learn philosophy and how to do it well, which means
skillfully and Informedly.
Scientists like Krauss and Hawking thus sound a lot like the
character Evil from the movie Time Bandits. He wanted a map to
the universe, which is basically what scientists claim they are
producing but philosophy is not.
"When I have the map, I will be free, and the world will
be different, because I have understanding...of digital
watches. And soon I shall have understanding of
video cassette recorders and car telephones. And
when I have understanding of them, I shall have
understanding of computers. And when I have
understanding of computers, I shall be the Supreme
Being!"
Evil was a terrible philosopher.
Scientists often exhibit not just the arrogance but similar bad
reasoning. In the character, as in this quote, these are only
exaggerated for comic effect.
Here is a much better criticism of philosophy...
"Philosophy is just not oriented to the outlook of
someone who needs to resolve the issue, implement
the corresponding solution, and then find out -
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possibly fatally - whether they got it right or wrong.
Philosophy doesn't resolve things, it compiles
positions and arguments. It would be one matter if I
could just look up the standard answer and find that,
lo and behold, it is correct. But philosophy, which
hasn't come to conclusions and moved on from
cognitive reductions that I regard as relatively simple,
doesn't seem very likely to build complex correct
structures of conclusions."
—Eliezer Yudkowsky
Here he really means not philosophy the subject of study, but
philosophy as now conducted by the academic community.
The latter does fail to distinguish good from bad and settled from
unsettled in the domain of results.
And it fails to synthesize well-tested results and centralize them for
easy consultation.
Some philosophers share these criticisms and more. Most
importantly, Mario Bunge, Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for
Reconstruction.
Before I get to that, first a little history...
Aristotle (348 – 286 B.C.) invented modern philosophy, by taking
the disorganized practice of philosophy at the time and formalizing it
into a systematic field of study.
Aristotle effectively gave us the Six Parts of Philosophy:
•(1) Epistemology (or theory of knowledge = the study of how we
know what we know and what it means to say you know
something, and how we are to tell the difference between true
and false knowledge and reliable and unreliable ways of
knowing)
•(2) Physics (physika, which at the time actually meant “Science,”
i.e. all knowledge regarding the natural world, not just what we
mean by “physics” today)
•(3) Metaphysics (literally “after physics,” a term developed later for
what Aristotle called “first philosophy,” not because it was
studied first but because it dealt with the most fundamental
questions of existence; but the word “metaphysics” translated
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into modern language means “after science,” meaning what we
are to infer about the nature of human beings and the world after
we’ve taken into account everything we’ve learned from science
—atheism is an example of a conclusion in metaphysics: it is not
itself a scientific result, but an inference we make from what we
have discovered scientifically, thus a conclusion we reach after
doing all the relevant science we can do)
•(4) Aesthetics (or theory of art and beauty = the study of what is
beautiful and ugly and why and what effects that has on us and
society and what all that entails about ourselves and the world)
•(5) Ethics (or moral theory = the study of what is right and wrong
and why and how to tell the difference and why we should care;
in short, the study of how we should behave, toward ourselves
and each other)
•(6) Politics (or political theory = the study of what sort of
government we should have and why and every other question
of how we should organize ourselves as a community;
ultimately, it’s the study of the use and regulation of power, and
what patterns are best to enforce or fight for, and which should
be opposed or torn down)
Science depends on conclusions (or else unexamined
assumptions) in epistemology.
Metaphysics depends on the findings of science.
Aesthetics depends on conclusions (or unexamined assumptions)
in metaphysics, science, and epistemology.
Ethics depends on conclusions (or unexamined assumptions) in
aesthetics, metaphysics, and all the rest.
Politics depends on conclusions (or unexamined assumptions) in
ethics as well as all the rest.
And epistemology depends on conclusions in politics, since only
political philosophy can defend free speech, free thought, free
inquiry, or arrive at how these should be limited (e.g. outlawing
unethical scientific research).
So you can't actually make arguments or reach conclusions in one
of these domains without having settled all the others.
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Science is just philosophy with better data. Which means
philosophy is just science with less data.
For what I'm about to say next, you'll find the evidence and
scholarship in my chapter on the history of science in the John
Loftus anthology The End of Christianity.
Contrary to popular conception, ancient science (which was one of
the six parts of philosophy) had mathematical laws, precise
observation, and controlled experiments.
The Scientific Revolution (which occurred during the 17th Century)
did not introduce any new methods for doing science. Instead it
recognized less reliable methods as less reliable (and attenuated
belief to reliability).
It remained philosophy.
In fact: science has always been philosophy.
What we now call science was still called philosophy all the way up
to the 20th century. It could be designated natural philosophy, or
physical or biological philosophy, or experimental philosophy, etc.
But still, philosophy. The word "scientist" didn't exist until the 1830s
(and wasn't popular until the 1890s).
Thus Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, even Maxwell and Darwin, were all
known as natural philosophers, never or rarely as scientists. They
all published some of their scientific findings in philosophy journals.
The first science journal, published by the Royal Society of Britain,
retains the same title it has always held since the age of Newton:
Philosophical Transactions. Even now scientists get doctorates in
"philosophy" (Ph.D.).
P.M. Harman, The Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell,
discusses how James Clerk Maxwell, often held up as the Einstein
of the 19th Century, discover of electromagnetic radiation and a
great deal else, considered everything he did "natural philosophy,"
from his speculative notions now largely forgotten to his revered
scientific findings. The only distinction he made was how well
proved each conclusion was. But it was all part of his overall natural
philosophy.
In my slides I show the title page of a common school science
textbook published in 1860, the same decade Darwin published his
theory of evolution. It's title: School Compendium of Natural and
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Experimental Philosophy: Embracing the Elementary Principles of
Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Hydraulics, Pneumatics, Acoustics,
Pyronomics, Optics, Electricity, Galvanism, Magnetism, Electro-
Magnetism, Magneto-Electricity, and Astronomy — Contains Also a
Description of the Steam and Locomotive Engines, also of the
Electro-Magnetic Telegraph.
Darwin's theory of evolution was commonly referred to as a
discovery in physical philosophy or philosophy of biology, and as
the philosophy of evolution. So even in Darwin's day the
demarcation was not between science and philosophy, but
between two kinds of philosophy. In fact it was a spectrum of
reliability, based on certainty of results, which in turn was based on
access to data.
The shift in the 20th Century away from this conception was never
justified.
Science today is just the best philosophy we have, not because it's
free of error or fraud, but because it works on questions we have
the best data to answer. But that does not leave the rest of
philosophy with no data—just data insufficient to meet scientific
standards of certainty. But there are many degrees of certainty
below the scientific (e.g. historical, journalistic, personal, and
philosophical).
Hence atheism is a highly certain factual conclusion, but not a
scientific conclusion (there is no scientific paper proving it).
Scientific hypothesis formation is also, really, philosophy (it's just
advanced metaphysics). Superstring Theory is a prominent
example. That's actually philosophy, not science (yet). It's very good
philosophy, developed by very well-informed and competent
philosophers who also happen to be scientists, and like James
Clerk Maxwell they are working really hard to find a way to test it
and make it a scientific conclusion. Scientific hypothesis formation is
also, really, philosophy (it's just advanced metaphysics). Superstring
Theory is a prominent example. That's actually philosophy, not
science (yet). It's very good philosophy, developed by very well-
informed and competent philosophers who also happen to be
scientists, and like James Clerk Maxwell they are working really
hard to find a way to test it and make it a scientific conclusion. But
right now, it's still just philosophy, regardless of whether physicists
will admit this.
So that's the backstory. The demarcation between science and
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philosophy is ultimately exaggerated. It is solely a difference of
object of study (concept-space vs. fact-space) and degree of
evidence (degrees of probability vs. scientific certainty).
So now to Mario Bunge's Ten Criticisms of contemporary academic
philosophy, which has largely deviated from what philosophy was
invented to be and could and should be.
• Tenure-Chasing Supplants Substantive Contributions
• Confusion between Philosophizing & Chronicling
• Insular Obscurity / Inaccessibility (to outsiders)
• Obsession with Language too much over Solving Real-World
Problems
• Idealism vs. Realism and Reductionism
• Too Many Miniproblems & Fashionable Academic Games
• Poor Enforcement of Validity / Methodology
• Unsystematic (vs. System Building & Ensuring Findings are
Worldview Coherent)
• Detachment from Intellectual Engines of Modern Civilization
(science, technology, and real-world ideologies that affect mass
human thought and action)
• Ivory Tower Syndrome (not talking to experts in other
departments and getting knowledge and questions to explore
from them or helping them)
How do you tell good philosophy from bad? How do you find the
philosophy that avoids all ten of Bunge's defect criteria? Philosophy
as an academic field simply isn't making any effort to. Philosophy
needs to be rigorously demarcated from pseudo-philosophy, and
philosophical error needs to be more consistently ferreted out? Just
as science is from pseudo-science, and just as science tries to find
and fix its mistakes. Not all philosophy is pseudo-philosophy, or in
error, but there is no easy way to tell (it's all published in the same
journals and academic presses, and presented at the same
conferences, and wins the same professorships).
Error is just error: like in science, identifying and eliminating it is a
form of progress.
What is pseudo-philosophy?
Philosophy that relies on fallacious arguments to a conclusion,
and/or relies on factually false or undemonstrated premises. And
isn't corrected when discovered.
All supernaturalist religion is pseudo-philosophy. Religious
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philosophy is to philosophy what "creation science" is to science.
And some philosophers are willing to admit this, including one of the
most renowned atheist philosophers of religion this decade. He
gave up on it, and called it out...
"I found the [philosophical] arguments [in aid of
religion] so execrably awful and pointless that they
bored and disgusted me I now regard “the case for
theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously
enough to present it to a class as a respectable
philosophical position—no more than I could present
intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. I do
not mean to charge that the people making that case
are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to
be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are
almost painfully earnest and honest. I just cannot take
their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot
take something seriously, you should not try to devote
serious academic attention to it. I’ve turned the
philosophy of religion courses over to a colleague."
—Keith Parsons
"Goodbye to All That"
Secular Outpost Online
The same is often true of secular philosophy.
It's only when you demarcate philosophy from pseudo-Philosophy
that progress in philosophy becomes apparent.
Like science, the vast majority of “progress” in philosophy consists
of tiny incremental advances that look small or pointless, but
together amount to a significant body of knowledge. (Just skim
through science journals to see how true this is of any science.)
Like, for example, the discovery of a measure of potato chip
crispness:
Julian Vincent, “The Quantification of Crispness,” Journal of the
Science of Food and Agriculture 78 (1998): 162-68.
Or empirically testing how random flipping a coin is:
Joseph Ford, “How random is a coin toss?” Physics Today 36.4
(1983): 40–47.
Or conducting a massive, expensive, years-long study to verify what
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everyone of sense already considers obvious, that prayer doesn't
work:
H. Benson et al., “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory
Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: a multicenter randomized
trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer,”
American Heart Journal 151.4 (April 2006): 934–42.
Proving something that's obvious just to answer delusional people
sounds like a lot of what philosophy does, too.
There are also tons of science papers documenting really minor
facts or once again duplicating a mundane result about a drug or
astrophysical measurement, or proving some really tiny and
obscure thing. So philosophy should be judged with the same
charity.
Philosopher Toni Vogel Carey summarized some ways philosophy
actually makes progress as a field, contrary to the claims of
scientists like Hawking or Krauss, in “Is Philosophy Progressive” for
Philosophy Now Online. His two most important categories of
philosophical progress were:
1 — Progress as Destruction
Philosophy every year eliminates options from logical space (by
demonstrating incoherence internally or with well-established
evidence). As a result, options in philosophy are enormously more
constrained now than they were a hundred or even fifty years ago.
No respectable philosophy journal (that isn't basically specializing in
pseudo-philosophy) will publish on the philosophy of magic,
numerology, mysticism, astral planes, angels, demons, gods, souls,
or miracles—all except as counterfactual thought experiments—or
serious arguments for, or assuming, Platonism, Idealism, etc.
Remember what Dietrich said about the Pre-Socratics? So it is no
more a valid criticism to say philosophy has made no progress
because we are still asking some of the same questions in
philosophy they were, than it is to say that science has made no
progress because we are still asking some of the same questions in
science they were (and we are: plenty of scientific questions they
attempted answers for remain unanswered today).
2 — Progress as Clarification
New advances in conceptual understanding are accumulated in
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philosophy every year, new knowledge regarding Distinctions /
Possibilities / Meaning & Implications, and Exposing Assumptions.
And these advances have had real-world impact, for example on
legal decisions that affect the whole of America and the course of
human political and legal history, like Roe v. Wade and Kitzmiller v.
Dover.
Less obvious examples of progress in philosophy include all the
philosophy that gets cleverly labeled something else to hide what it
really is, like scientific speculation and theorizing (Quantum Theory,
Cosmological Theory [e.g. Ekpyriotic Big Bang Theory], Superstring
Theory, Quantum Loop Gravity Theory) and mathematical theorems
& discoveries (discoveries in concept-space).
...and on top of all that, are all the advances in philosophy regarding
"Facts Most Probable" (remember atheism? And the frontiers of
probabilistic discovery now are naturalism and physicalism, which is
an advance on the mere conclusion of atheism).
So ... not all that different from science. Most scientific progress
consists of destruction: eliminating or narrowing hypotheses. Much
of it consists of clarifying the available options given the known
facts. The rest consists of building an edifice of highly certain
conclusions to use in understanding and improving the world.
Philosophy differs in the last case in only two ways: its edifice of
conclusions consists of highly certain conclusions about what exists
(and does not exist) in concept-space, and conclusions about the
empirical facts of the world that differ from the findings of science
only in being less certain.
Major general advances made by modern philosophy include.
Naturalism (in the domain of metaphysics)
vs. Supernaturalism
Evidentialism (in the domain of epistemology)
vs. mysticism, authoritarianism, dogmatism, a priori facts, faith
Consequentialism (in the domain of ethics)
vs. authoritarianism / absolutism
Democracy / Human Rights (in the domain of politics)
vs. fascism, aristocracy, autocracy, Athenian democracy
Aesthetic Relativism (In the domain of aesthetics)
vs. cosmic aesthetics / aesthetics as morality
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Major Specific advances made by modern philosophy include...
From the Late 19th Century...
• Set Theory
• Symbolic Logic
• Reduction of Mathematics to Axioms & Logic (Russell)
• Transfinite Mathematics (Cantor)
From the 20th Century...
• Game Theory
• Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems / Dan Willard's Solutions
• Modal Logic
• Bayesian Epistemology
Just google them to learn more.
Small but important discoveries made by modern philosophy
include...
• Connecting meaning of a statement with its truth conditions (and
corresponding advances in defining "truth")
• Distinction between sentences and propositions (and its
significance for cognitive science and AI research)
• Demarcation of qualia as fundamental attribute of consciousness
• Compatibilism (proving that desirable versions of responsibility,
self-determination and personal freedom are compatible with
total causal determinism)
• More rigorous defenses of atheism
As just one of the best examples, consider the recent treatise by
Judea Pearl, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference
(Cambridge University Press, 2000). (This is, incidentally, the father
of the journalist Daniel Pearl murdered in Pakistan.)
Here is that book's quite accurate description:
"a comprehensive exposition of modern analysis of
causation. It shows how causality has grown from a
nebulous concept into a mathematical theory with
significant applications in the fields of statistics, artificial
intelligence, philosophy, cognitive science, and the
health and social sciences [including business,
epidemiology and economics]. Pearl presents a
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unified account of the probabilistic, manipulative,
counterfactual and structural approaches to
causation, and devises simple mathematical tools for
analyzing the relationships between causal
connections, statistical associations, actions and
observations. This book will be of interest to
professionals and students in a wide variety of fields.
Anyone who wishes to elucidate meaningful
relationships from data, predict effects of actions and
policies, assess explanations of reported events, or
form theories of causal understanding and causal
speech will find this book stimulating and invaluable."
Remember Hawking saying philosophy is dead and makes no
progress? This book alone refutes him, before we even get to the
loads of other examples.
Indeed, remember Krauss saying philosophy of science contributed
nothing to science? I am fairly certain even his field employs Pearl's
results. Philosophy has changed the way Krauss's colleagues do
physics and he doesn't even know it.
One might still ask why philosophy appears to make so much less
progress than science, relatively speaking. But this is not an
inherent feature of philosophy. It's the result of three rather obvious
factors..
• Vastly fewer personnel are devoted to philosophy than to science.
• Vastly fewer resources are as well.
• And a pervasive lack of focus (as the Bunge criteria indicate, most
philosophers are wasting their time, so most philosophy is not
progressive or minimally so).
That it makes progress and adds to human knowledge is not the
only thing establishing philosophy as a major and important field of
inquiry. It also trains its experts in skills that might not be unique to
philosophy, but are peculiarly emphasized in it far more than in any
other field, and philosophers who are properly trained are far more
expert in these skills (far, far more) than most scientists are, or
almost anyone else.
What skills are particular to philosophy?
• Logics (building accurate logical models & fallacy-detection)
• Conceptology (the study of ideas and the meaning and
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implications of words and concepts)
• Conciliation (completing inferences from the results of science &
other fields, determining the most probable)
• Axiology (completing inferences from moral, aesthetic, and
political values).
But what about philosophy for the common man and woman?
We don't need to be scientists or do science to broadly understand
the results of science and apply it in our daily lives and personal
philosophy. In exactly the same way, we don't need to be
philosophers or do philosophy at an expert or professional level to
broadly understand the results of philosophy and apply it in our daily
lives and personal philosophy. We just have to figure out how to tell
good philosophy from bad. The academy should be helping
everyone do that.
They aren't. But in the meantime you can do your best to work
around that.
See below for a fuller bibliography and recommended reading lists
for understanding philosophy.
But step one is to get up to speed on the basic skills and concepts
of philosophy, and the best thing for that is The Philosopher's
Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods.
Most textbooks in philosophy are really just history of philosophy. It's
very rare to find a textbook that actually aims to teach you to
philosophize well instead. This is the best one on a the market.
But that's just the skeleton. You need the flesh to go around it. And
the only book on the market doing that by attempting to satisfy the
Bunge criteria, is my book Sense and Goodness without God. That
I think you will find essential not because it's necessarily right about
everything (there is surely some philosophical error in there, and I
would very much like it corrected if there is), but because it
exemplifies what philosophy should be doing, and gets you
introduced to a complete, coherent, evidence-based worldview,
which you can use as a model for building your own, or use until
you do.
Books and Links on Becoming a Good Philosopher
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Julian Baggini & Peter S. Fosl, The Philosopher's Toolkit: A
Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods
(Wiley 2010)
[A textbook by two philosophers on the basic skills to dophilosophy, and think like a philosopher; representative of what
philosophy is and could be, and what skills it hones and requires.]
Ken Manktelow, Thinking and Reasoning: An Introduction to
the Psychology of Reason, Judgment and Decision
Making (Psychology 2012)
[Psychologist specializing in reason summarizes everything youneed to know about how to reason well and avoid reasoning
poorly; exemplifies part of a modern science-informedepistemology in philosophy.]
“Resources for Critical Thinking in the 21st Century”
[Dr. Carrier’s helpful guide to what you need to know to be a
skilled critical thinker, and thus a good philosopher, completewith lists of even more recommended readings, slideshow, and
short video.]
“How to Be a Philosopher”
[Dr. Carrier’s four essential tips on becoming a practicalphilosopher in your daily life.]
“Essentials in Philosophy”
[Dr. Carrier’s recommended readings for starting up as aninformed philosopher.]
Books and Links Critical of Philosophy (or
Responding to Them)
Mario Bunge, Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for
Reconstruction (Prometheus 2001)
[A philosopher explains ten things wrong with academic
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philosophy today and how to fix them.]
“Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline”
[Luke Muehlhauser’s summary of what’s wrong with academic
philosophy—and in part how to fix it.]
“Rationality and Philosophy”
[The remainder of that same series of articles by Luke
Muehlhauser examining the implications of rationality andcognitive science for philosophical method, the main thrust of
which is how to do philosophy far better than academics aredoing it.]
Eric Dietrich, “There Is No Progress in Philosophy,” Essays in
Philosophy 12.2: Philosophy's Future: Science or Something Else?
Article 9 (7-11-2011)
[A philosopher argues philosophy has made no progress and
never will. It’s wrong on almost every major point, but thecritique is typical, and figuring out why those points are incorrect
is key to sorting good from bad philosophy.]
Toni Vogel Carey, “Is Philosophy Progressive?” Philosophy
Now Online (2007)
[Essentially a response to arguments like Dietrich’s, by anotherphilosopher.]
“Jerry Coyne’s Scientistic Dismissiveness Of Philosophy”
and
“Defending Philosophy 1: A Reply To Dr. Coyne”
[Philosopher Dan Fincke responds to the criticisms directed at
academic philosophy by biologist Jerry Coyne. Commentssection is additionally illuminating, especially in the second listed,
which was the first posted.]
“On The Supposed Irrelevance of Philosophy to Most
People (Defending Philosophy)”
07/01/14 Is Philosophy Stupid?
richardcarrier.info/philosophy.html 18/19
[Philosopher Dan Fincke responds to the claim that all academic
philosophy is a waste of time because it does not add anythinguseful to human knowledge. Comments section is again
illuminating.]
“Take Philosophy Seriously (Tip 7 of 10 For Reaching Out
To Religious Believers)”
[Philosopher Dan Fincke explains why understanding and having
competence in philosophy is crucial for any atheist who intends toreduce religiosity in the world, in the process mentioning and
responding to common dismissals of that point.]
“The Future of Practical Philosophy”
[Philosopher James Stacey Taylor defends the value of appliedphilosophy in the real world against common criticisms, which are
often valid criticisms that philosophers should take seriously, toreform the way they do what they do.]
“OEN Interview”
[In a podcast linked in this post Dr. Carrier summarizes some ofhis criticisms of academic philosophy. Then in the very long
comments section to the article here linked are scatteredthroughout my further criticisms.]
“Lawrence Krauss: Another Physicist with an Anti-
Philosophy Complex”
[Philosopher and biologist Massimo Pigliucci addresses thecriticisms of philosophy infamously leveled (and later largely
retracted) by physicist Lawrence Krauss.]
“Progress in Philosophy Not an Oxymoron”
[That philosophy doesn’t make progress is a common criticism.
Here philosopher and biologist Massimo Pigliucci responds tothat claim. He also has a book in progress arguing thatphilosophy really does make progress, so keep your eye out for
that, as hopefully it will have many more examples.]
07/01/14 Is Philosophy Stupid?
richardcarrier.info/philosophy.html 19/19
Christopher Norris, “Hawking contra Philosophy,” Philosophy
Now Online (2011)
[A philosopher responds to the criticisms of philosophy leveledby theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.]
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