Mentioning Phil phD's

[SpencerH]

Agathon should do some proper research. What would you do in a 'philosophy PhD'? Sit around in coffee shops drinking absinthe and wearing togas?

I used that method before devising my last vaccine strategy.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Japher

A few things? I don't want to argue that conception is more important than application, but there was a lot more than just a few things added. Also, there was a lot more to Dalton coming to a conclusion that just happened to coincide with something a Greek had happened to mention. I see nothing about Dalton going "hey I wonder if that kook was right" and then going out with this theory in hand in attempt to prove/disprove it. His discoveries came through scientific advancement in measurements, and an analysis of such results. Need I point out that atomic theory is still just a theory? Yet, is one based on physical evidence, not on rational/irrational thought.

It is also underdetermined by the evidence which is why conceptual creation a la Democritus is important. Science (and philosophy) also made much use of the Atomist's distinction between primary and secondary qualities.

Platonic discovery? You mean theory, don't you?

How about invention? It doesn't make much of a difference. If you think that scientists just sit down and conduct a theory neutral investigation of "real facts" without any invention you are sorely mistaken. Theories are underdetermined by evidence.

Penrose is a putz, who is grasping at straws. Not until a credible measuring system is established for separating mind activity from brain activity will he be anything but.

The quality of Penrose's thought notwithstanding the point being made was about Plato. I notice you haven't said anything worthwile about that. One problem philosophers of mind are thinking about is that it may be the concepts that we are using that prevent us from establishing such a measuring system.

It is a great theory, but what does it help with? What does he plan to do with this idea? These are the question we have been asking, and all we get in response are theories, more ideas, more thoughts. All of which are swimming in a sea of ambiguity. Anyone can say there are diamonds in those hills, wait a few thousand years, and be right. Perhaps Penrose may be right, or maybe Hofstadter is, but debating over issues such as these is worthless.

Eh? Sometimes the problems we have are not ones that hard evidence can solve; sometimes they are the results of conceptual confusion. That is where many philosophers work.

I know nothing of this, but it seems if they are working with neuroscientist that they are looking for "hard" evidence and not just abstract views on the topic. I am sure this is interesting and will look into it.

No they aren't. They are trying to work out whether it is possible to perform a reduction of mental concepts to physical ones without losing anything worthwhile in the reduction. This is, in my view a conceptual problem since I tend to think that mental states are identical with physical states and that it might be worth just dumping our mental vocabulary. This is a conceptual problem and not an empirical one.

I think I have adequatly expressed my admiration for philosophers of the past, and perhaps I am ignorant of the role of todays philosophers. Yet, I hold firmly to my idealogy, being a "hard science" guy and all, that without proof a theory is worthless.

Godel?

Most modern day theories have hard evidence one way or the other of natural occurances.

The hard evidence doesn't count the way you think it does. An infinite number of theories can fit the facts. The choice between them is largely pragmatic. Philosophical problems are hard to solve, if not impossible but acknowledging this doesn't make them go away, nor does it mean that we should stop thinking about them.

Anyway, until someone comes up with a solution to the problem of induction, science will always be to some extent a matter of faith.

Philosophers are good at what could be called "conceptual inquiries" (although there is a lot more to be said on this). Science deals with empirical results not conceptual inquiries (this used to be called the a priori, although that description of it has somewhat fallen out of favour).

For example, last year I went to a talk by Elliot Sober who is a philosopher who works in the Philosophy of Science. It was well attended by philosophers, scientists and interested members of the university community. What he did was show us that the hypothesis of natural selection was not testable unless it assumed common ancestry. Now some people had assumed this but not proved it and some people had regarded it as false. Many of the science people there thought that he must be right, so did many of the philosophers. Sober didn't have to perform an experiment - this was more like a mathematical proof and most people would accept a mathematical proof. At a practical level, then, philosophers can help other thinkers with conceptual matters, using the tools and concepts that are germane to philosophy.

When we begin arguing abstract ideas, that is where I draw the line. Philosophy may have its place but should not exist as its own entity anymore.

Why? Can't we argue about the intelligibility of concepts? This is a matter with practical implications. We aren't talking about strange metaphysical theories here, which are largely the province of the history of philosophy.

Rather, it should lie within fields such as theoretical physics, classical chemistry, and other various social sciences. For being able to come up with believable ideas lends nothing towards its application.

This would be silly. There is good reason to put the historians of philosophy together with the philosophers of science, epistemologists, ethicists and the rest as they have a lot in common. It is not as if they don't have anything in common with the others, but they have more in common with each other. Likewise there are some people in other disciplines who have a lot in common with philosophy (pure mathematicians are a good example) but it is just convenient to put them somewhere else.

Thus, a PhD in such a field should lend way towards applications of a thought, and not just the creation of one.

It does - a friend I spoke to today is doing a thesis on mental representation. This is of interest to all sorts of people - particularly those who study AI and the brain. It is not as if this topic is radically cut off from other disciplines.

What about historians of philosophy like me? You can't put us in the history department because the methods of the history of philosophy and plain old history are rather different. It would be like lumping in Classics with history, which would be a nightmare where I am. Similarly one could make a case for me to be relegated to the Classics department. But I lean more towards the interests of philosophers. Departmental boundaries are for the most part pragmatic and historical. You try telling the people in religious studies that they should be merged with philosophy and vice versa. Most won't like the idea.

Of course I am speaking without any understanding of what is taught at that level of instruction, merely speaking from that which have read and experienced.

Undergraduate courses in philosophy and introductory books are not representative of the work that professional philosophers do. We all teach people about God and Free will in first year, but people that do graduate work often do it in the topics of logic, reductionism, philosophy of language, philosophy of science and other such boring and technical areas. Some of us even work in AI or Cognitive Science or Linguistics. In all these topics there is a dialogue between philosophy and science - science provides experimental results and philosophy attempts to clear up conceptual confusions (which can lead to new and exciting ways of thinking about scientific discoveries).

This is why many scientists turn up at philosophy talks and vice versa.

Here's what I am going to do. I am going to write a thesis on Plato's conception of mental representation. No one has done this before and it might be of use to all sorts of people. Hopefully, it will be of use to historians of philosophy who want to understand Plato's thought, it will be of use to those in the history of ideas, it may also be of use in sparking a revision of our view of Plato (here's hoping). People who want to write about mental representation will find in it an account of what the first person to really think about it thought. An analysis of Plato's account might even provide new ways of thinking about it which might help solve some problems that current work is dealing with. That's a big ask and I'd be overjoyed if it acheived even one of these goals.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Provost Harrison
Agathon should do some proper research. What would you do in a 'philosophy PhD'? Sit around in coffee shops drinking absinthe and wearing togas?

No, you search through editions of Greek texts, translate them. Then look at what everyone else has said on the subject. Then you attempt to say what you think. Much like many other disciplines really.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Frogger
None of the philosophers I know were any good at physics or math. They seemed to be good at constructing fraudulent proofs with the aid of faulty logic and convenient axioms.

Which isn't surprising, given their forebears.

You mean like Newton?

[Asher]

Some of us even work in AI or Cognitive Science or Linguistics.

Just what on earth does a philosopher do in AI?

You mention a whole wide spectrum of things, from atomic theory to AI, that philosophers participate in in your view. The problem with that, of course, is philosophers don't know a damn thing about AI other than perhaps what they feel is ethical to do. Which again, is nothing but an annoyance...

In my head I'm picturing a snobby philosopher in a beret continually interrupting psychologists and computer scientists discussing AI, with stupid questions like "but do we want to have an AI on the same level of a human? Hmm. Let's sit around and discuss this for a century before we research any more..."

[Imran Siddiqui]

Asher, can you tell me why democracy is better than dictatorship WITHOUT using philosophy?

[Asher]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Asher, can you tell me why democracy is better than dictatorship WITHOUT using philosophy?

What the hell kind of question is this?
I can certainly tell you why a democracy is better than a dictatorship without taking a public university's philosophy courses!

Again, I urge all people who feel the urge to peck out replies to me to read the argument.

I'm not slamming philosophy in general, just that it's a totally useless field in post-secondary study, and public institutions shouldn't be spending taxpayer's money in a useless field...

[Imran Siddiqui]

I can certainly tell you why a democracy is better than a dictatorship without taking a public university's philosophy courses!

Can you adequately make the claim without relying on arguments that have been made political philosophers and entrenched in society?

The ideas of libertarianism come straight from JS Mill and Locke, conservatism from Burke, communism from Marx.

Without people studying philosophy (and that includes high level philosophy) you don't have those people engaging in new formulations of society (Locke read Hobbes and countered him... Burke read everyone... Marx comes very much from Hegel).

[Asher]

Imran... I don't get what you don't understand.

I don't care what philosophers did a hundred plus years ago.

Today's philosophers are doing nothing but regurgitate the same **** over and over again...

NO ONE here has adequately demonstrated the use modern day philosophy students at a public university serves.

As to your previous question about democracy: Let's say I invent another magical field of study called Vowelology: the study of vowels. To prove how useful this field is, I'm going to ask you to answer your own question coherently without using vowels...

Further, I'm going to go ahead and claim credit for all papers from now on that use vowels in them.

[Asher]

Sidenote: You've got me *this* close to a rant about the misnomer of "political science".

[Imran Siddiqui]

And Asher, you did say:

Philosophy is completely useless. Completely. You've not given any real "uses" for it in this thread, just lame attempts to make it sound useful...

So, If I've gotten you wrong, it is because you've exclaimed that Philosophy is useless.

[Asher]

Oh, give me a break.
I meant university level philosophy, okay?

Of course "philosophy" is useful if we dig down deep enough and determine that without modern philosophical scolars, we wouldn't be able to say why democracy is better than dictatorship!

You're being ridiculous, Imran.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I don't care what philosophers did a hundred plus years ago.

Why should I care what scientists did a hundred plus years ago? Why should I give a damn about Newton? Because they matter to present day society, just like philosophers who wrote a hundred years back do.

Let's say I invent another magical field of study called Vowelology: the study of vowels. To prove how useful this field is, I'm going to ask you to answer your own question coherently without using vowels...

The only problem (and the logical fallacy) is that the original question asked you to compare a subjective (metaphysical) idea with a subjective idea using a subjective basis. You are asking to talk about something objective (vowels - physical) using a subjective basis.

Though I'll agree with you, vowels are important .

I meant university level philosophy, okay?

You assume that Locke, Burke, Hegel, Marx did not have a 'university level' philosophy?

Are we to be mired in the same political philosophical muck? Perhaps someone else with this derided 'university level' philosophy will come up with a new political system of ideas which may change things.

[SpencerH]

Originally posted by Asher
Sidenote: You've got me *this* close to a rant about the misnomer of "political science".

Yeah, its kinda like computer science eh? Any discipline that has to call itself 'science' isnt!

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Asher

Just what on earth does a philosopher do in AI?

You just keep coming out with howlers don't you? Have a look in the Literature. Jack Copeland wrote an introductory text to it some years back. I could look for plenty of other books, but I know about his one because I met him at a grad conference he organised some years back. I assume you have heard of the Turing Test and other such things. Philosophers are interested in these.

You mention a whole wide spectrum of things, from atomic theory to AI, that philosophers participate in in your view. The problem with that, of course, is philosophers don't know a damn thing about AI other than perhaps what they feel is ethical to do. Which again, is nothing but an annoyance...

Again, I suggest that you look before you leap. You might try reading some of the work that's been done before coming out with whoppers like this. You seem to imagine a war between computer scientists and philosophers when one does not exist.

In my head I'm picturing a snobby philosopher in a beret continually interrupting psychologists and computer scientists discussing AI, with stupid questions like "but do we want to have an AI on the same level of a human? Hmm. Let's sit around and discuss this for a century before we research any more..."

No - it isn't like that at all. In fact the AI people I know don't do ethics. You seem to have a very weird view of philosophers. I only know one that wears a beret.

How about looking about on the net for a bit before you come out with your next absolute howler. (That must be half a dozen by now).