What's Wrong with Contemporary Philosophy?
Here's an interesting article that attempts a diagnosis of contemporary philosophy and why it seems not to progress or hold much external sway.
http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/What'sWrong.pdf (Hat tip Stephen Hicks)
I am sympathetic to the points made in the article, in particular regarding analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy has, in its current academic form, largely become irrelevant, esoteric, and insular. What used to be -- and still is billed as such -- the quest for asking and answering "The Big Questions" has become overly concerned with technical terminology and peculiar puzzles.
Can you really imagine Aristotle at the Lyceum worrying about whether it is a logical possibility for a cat to give birth to an elephant? I recall several times thinking in a seminar: "if we resolved this _fill in the blank_ puzzle, definitely and once for all, what difference does it make?"
What do others think?
2 comments:
I'd be willing to bet that the greatest thing philosophy needs these days is just a good writer of popularized philosophy. We need someone who can bring into sharp relief how the philosophic puzzles we all spend so much time working on relate to those Big Questions we all know we should be working on.
There really is a point to the crazy little puzzles that get discussed so much. They're puzzles because something in our conceptual frameworks make them puzzles. We discuss them because it is an easy, effective way to get right to the heart of an issue.
The problem is, there isn't a whole lot of effort done to show, after getting right to the heart of an issue, how to get back to a wide view of what that issue is. We need someone to do this. It sure would be useful.
For example, I spend a lot of my time worrying about tiny little issues relating to the nature of fiction. And, when I try to discuss my work with my engineer of a step-father, he stares at me blankly and then cries in exasperation, "But it's just a movie! That's all! Get over it!" The tiny little issues I spend my time dealing with don't matter to him because, no matter what my conclusions about the nature of film might be, he is still perfectly capable of enjoying The Lord of the Rings. No matter what any of our conclusions are about these little erudite puzzles might be, people will still go on living just as they would. The little puzzles just don't matter.
But, dag nabbit, those little puzzles all relate to the Big Questions, and we all know that people care about the Big Questions. And I swear that the funny little quirks about fiction I study relate to the big questions about how our minds work, how we interpret the things around us, and so forth. So, if only I could adequately explain to my step-father that connection between fiction and the whole of thought, and if only we, as a group, could adequately explain to the general public the connections between all of those crazy puzzles and the Big Questions, there'd be a lot less talk about the uselessness of philosophy. And I don't mean to make it sound like this is an us-v-them sort of situation; we lose sight of the big picture all the time. We need someone to remind us, as well, how the little puzzles fit in the big picture.
So... yeah. Someone go do that.
I second Michelle's proposal...someone should go do that.
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