Imagine getting into medical school and sitting down for your very first day of class. As a scholarly-looking professor approaches the lectern, you eagerly get out your pen and paper in anticipation for all the amazing knowledge coming your way.
“Welcome to Foundations of Medicine,” says the professor. “I hope you are all as excited as I am to explore the vast, wonderful world of healing."
At first, everything seems to progress normally, but it's not long before you notice an unsettling trend. Rather than just teach students about the modern understanding of the human body, the instructor seems to fixate on the strangest of topics. For weeks, you suffer through lecture after lecture on wholly discredited practices like bloodletting, trepanation, phrenology, and homeopathy. Eventually, about halfway into the semester, the professor seems to settle down with more sensible topics like cell biology and the germ theory of disease, but it doesn't last. Before you know it, you’re suddenly delving right back into the medicinal theories of Feng Shui, acupuncture, and demon possession.
Baffled by this outcome, you begin to wonder. Was this class some sort of outlier? Maybe the university just wants to give students some historical context before teaching the real, practical stuff. So you take a look at the undergraduate catalog and, strangely enough, the entire school of medicine is like this. In order to officially earn your medical credentials, you must endure such classes as
- Medicine in literature
- God, Faith, and Healing
- Women in Early Oncology
- Medieval Pharmacology
- Meta-medicine
- Eastern Ophthalmology
- Medical Justice
- Spirituality in Cardiology
- Survey of Early Modern Medicine
After investigating even further, you eventually come to learn that this isn't even a local phenomenon. It's a widespread practice among every accredited medical school across the western world.
Surely, given such a predicament, the only sensible response is to drop the entire ordeal and change majors, right?
Sensible, that is, for anyone but a philosophy major.
This may seem like a far-fetched scenario, but it really is how modern philosophy is taught at the college level. Generally speaking, philosophy courses do not really educate students in “philosophy” per se. Instead, most treatments on the subject are better described as a history of philosophy, or perhaps a survey. Sure, it might be interesting information to some, but it is not exactly the condensed summary of modern consensus that tends to define other fields.
To be fair, this is not necessarily a bad thing. If a history of philosophy is what really interests you, then by all means go ahead and study it. There may even be real, tangible value in this stuff, and so there is nothing intrinsically wrong with exploring it for its own sake. But can we please just take a moment to recognize what’s really going on, here? A formal education in philosophy will not actually qualify you as an authority in “correct” philosophical thought. At best, you will only emerge as a glorified historian and taxonomist.
Much of this is intentional, too. There is an outspoken tradition in Western education that says it is always more important to teach students how to think, rather than what to think [1]. College philosophy, it seems, is just taking this doctrine to a fanatical extreme. The questions themselves are often considered more interesting than the actual answers, and the very act of thinking through arguments is widely regarded as a valuable end unto itself. Professors and textbooks alike will therefore spend plenty of effort on the comparative analysis of ideas, but rarely on the establishment of which ones are official orthodoxy.
Take, for example, the classic writings of ancient Stoicism [2]---a popular outlook on life that emphasizes self-control and fortitude as a path to happiness. Every undergraduate student of philosophy will eventually read about this stuff at some point, as well as the views of their contemporary rivals. If, however, you were you ask your professor whether or not Stoicism actually works, then you will almost certainly get a non-committal answer. To illustrate:
- Should I adopt Stoicism for myself?
- Will Stoicism improve my life or make me more successful?
- Can Stoicism help me cope with trauma or overcome my bad habits?
- Are there any comparative studies evaluating this stuff empirically?
Who the hell knows? Academic philosophy doesn’t care about picking sides or quantifying efficacy. It only seeks to examine how other people have historically viewed the world. Success, in the modern philosophical context, often has very little to do with ideas being practical or insightful. Rather, success is generally measured by the degree of influence they possess. It is therefore not even a question of whether Stoicism happens to be right or wrong. We study it because it was a hugely popular force that influenced multiple centuries of development in ancient Western culture.
Again, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this sort of methodology, provided that we honestly acknowledge it for what it is. In principle, you be the world’s greatest thinker who decisively settles all the big questions for all time, and every philosophy undergraduate would still be required to slog through a gigantic mountain of inferior content before ever touching your ideas. Likewise, you could write a 4000-page ejaculation of incoherent word salad, and all you would have to do is impress the right people in order to have your ideas taught alongside more sensible content.
All of this would be perfectly tolerable, or even admirable, if not for one thing. Philosophers, in both professional and amateur circles alike, seem to be endowed with an overly optimistic sense of self-importance. University departments from across the world brag openly about how philosophy teaches students such important skills as critical thinking, logical analysis, and complex problem solving [3,4,5]. They take pride in their supposedly dispassionate use of pure reason to create and evaluate arguments, all for the sake of developing a “clear and systematic view of who we are, where we stand, and where we should be going [6].” It all sounds wonderful in principle, but it's also a complete fiction.
To demonstrate, imagine a professional community of thousands of dedicated intellectuals who are all highly trained experts in the art of truth-finding. Now imagine these same intellectuals all share a common goal of exploring difficult questions, collecting evidence, evaluating the arguments, and deriving the most sensible conclusions possible. Naturally, we should expect such a group to eventually reach a unanimous consensus on every question posed, given that they all share the same methods, goals, evidence, and arguments. If anything, the very existence of any disagreement whatsoever would only prove that certain members of the community are either not following the correct guidelines, not sharing the same evidence, or not being sincere in their supposed quest for truth. The more disagreement there is, in fact, the more evident it would be that such a group is neglecting to enforce consistent standards of honest inquiry.
Now imagine that same group utterly failing to converge on a single point of agreeable fact, and you would finally have something that closely resembles modern philosophy. In a famous study by Bourget and Chalmers [7], hundreds of PhD-level philosophers from around the world were surveyed on a variety of foundational topics. You would think that if philosophers really are the great experts in reason that they claim to be, then we should expect an overwhelming consensus on the major questions of their field. The results, however, were the exact opposite. Not a single question could garner any consensus above 90%, and only one question was able to break above 80%. We’re not even talking about weird, esoteric issues, either, but fundamentally basic questions to all of philosophy itself. For example:
- What is truth? (correspondence: 50.8 %, deflationary: 24.8%, epistemic: 6.9%, other: 17.5%).
- What is knowledge? (empiricism: 35%, rationalism: 27.8%, other 27.2%)
- What is logic? (classical: 51.6 %, non-classical 15.4 %, other 33.1%)
- Do we have free will? (compatibilism: 59.1%, libertarian free will: 13.7%, no free will: 12.2%, other: 14.9%)
- Is there such a thing as good and evil? (moral realism: 56.4%, anti-realism: 27.7%, other: 15.9%)
It cannot be overstated that, in most any other professional field of study, this would be an absolute embarrassment. Yet, when it comes to academic philosophy, this is apparently just par for the course. For the last 100 years, the philosophical community has been researching, questioning, arguing, debating, evaluating, and educating, but they still cannot even fully commit to the existence of an objective reality beyond our sense perception (non-skeptical realism: 81.6%, skepticism: 4.8%, idealism: 4.3%, other: 9.2%).
Even more embarrassing for the philosophical community is how many of the traditionally “deep” philosophical questions have already been long-solved by professionals in other fields. Take, for example, the nature of morality and ethical behavior. Biologists and economists collectively solved this problem decades ago, in that they both arrived at the same, basic description via independent lines of investigation [8,9,10,11,12,13]. Self-interest, when coupled with social interdependence and scarcity, naturally gives rise to cooperative, pro-social behaviors. This is not a matter of any serious debate, either, but a well-established field, complete with its own mathematical formalism, laboratory experiments, and real-world applications. Yet to this very day, we can still find philosophers who obsess endlessly about whether or not “pulling the lever” is murder [Switch: 68.2%, don’t switch: 7.6%, other: 24.2%].
This is exactly why academic philosophy has a less-than-stellar reputation among professional scientists, engineers, and the public at large. One of the most famous examples of this frustration was even voiced by Professor Stephen Hawking himself when he publicly declared that “Philosophy is dead” [14]. Mind you, he wasn’t saying that philosophy is a completely pointless thing to study. Rather, he was complaining about the inability of philosophers to make progress and keep up with the times. Cosmologists are out there making amazing discoveries every day about the fundamental nature of space, time, and even causality itself, yet philosophers are still debating such banal questions as “what is the nature of being?” They’re not solving any new problems. They’re just rehashing the same meaningless rhetoric for decade after decade.
Countless philosophers have shrieked at the idea that their beloved profession might be dead, but the sheer childishness of their rebuttals only proves the point further. They’ll say such vapid things as, “Science is philosophical [15]," or that Hawking himself holds to questionable philosophical views [16], or that the claim itself is just “ill-informed, incoherent, and irresponsible [17]." It’s like a giant stream of insults, straw men, and red herrings that make no effort to understand, let alone address, the underlying problem. Philosophy, as a professional academic institution, does not make progress. It solves no problems and it makes no discoveries.
Even the very word itself—philosophy—is a terribly ill-defined concept. To demonstrate, just ask yourself right now: what is philosophy? That is to say, when I go out and take a bunch of philosophy courses from the philosophy department to earn my philosophy degree, what exactly am I studying? What knowledge or skills must I acquire in order to officially qualify as an expert in the field? What separates the study of philosophy from, say, the study of physics or art? How do we differentiate between a philosophical problem and a scientific one? How do we measure the difference between good philosophy and bad philosophy?
You would think that academic philosophers might be able to agree on this stuff at least, but even this is a hotly debated issue (Metaphilosophy: naturalism 49.8 %, non-naturalism 25.9%, other 24.3%). For instance, consider the classic platitude that philosophy is simply “the love of wisdom." By that definition, who isn’t a philosopher? Who among us honestly hates wisdom and has no interest in understanding the world?
At least one university department attempts to clarify this doctrine by telling us that “philosophy is an activity people undertake when they seek to understand fundamental truths about themselves, the world in which they live, and their relationships to the world and to each other [18]." Okay, so if I go out and get a PhD in philosophy, does that really make me an expert in the “fundamental truths” about myself, the world, and our relationships? If so, then why exactly does the community have such a hard time agreeing on what those truths are? Why are they so terrible at rooting out the many falsehoods within their literature and just telling us the facts?
In practice, a far more appropriate definition for a philosopher is someone who merely “studies philosophy.” Philosophy, then, is defined by the agreed-upon curriculum that all students are required to learn for their philosophy majors. It’s a perfectly valid definition, and at least some university departments do seem to implicitly assume as much on their own websites [19]. But let’s just be honest with ourselves about what this entails. Philosophy, for all practical purposes, is nothing more than a collection of arbitrarily assigned coursework defined by the undergraduate committee of your particular institution. In practice, that usually amounts to a massive survey of thought from culturally influential figures throughout history. So the next time I need help contrasting the epistemological views of Emmanuel Kant versus David Hume, I’ll be sure to consult a philosopher. But when it comes to determining which views are more valid, functional, or practical, then I’m afraid even the “professional” philosophers are just as unqualified as the rest of us.
Again, this would all be perfectly fine and dandy, if not for the arrogant pretense that modern academic philosophers are the great lords of all human wisdom. They would like you to think that they’re all out there probing the deepest mysterious of life, the universe, and everything, but that image is nothing but a pretentious fiction. Every month, this community publishes huge volumes of literature in prestigious academic journals, despite having no official consensus as to what a “correct” answer would actually look like, even if they ever found one.
This is not a good thing. Hucksters, snake-oil salesmen, and the outright incompetent are the only people who can possibly benefit from this kind of ambiguity. When a professional field lacks any clear criteria over what constitutes sensible work, then the inevitable result is going to be a lot of worthless nonsense. So even if philosophy were to occasionally offer some worthwhile nuggets of truth, it is almost impossible to find any of that truth without first digging through a giant mountain of useless rhetorical bullshit.
Case in point: Consider the famous philosopher Alvin Plantinga, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest living philosophers of religion today. Yet, if you actually bother to read any of his writings, they're practically overflowing with some of the most asinine gibberish you’ll ever encounter. The guy honestly wrote a 90-page essay in defense of the proposition that “it is entirely right, rational, reasonable, and proper to believe in God without any evidence or argument at all [20].” Not just any God, mind you, but specifically the Christian God of the Holy Bible. He even goes on to claim in his other writings that, if you don’t share his assessment about God’s obviousness, then sin must be corrupting your brain and literally making you stupid [21]---as if all those Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists, Pagans, and Jews across the entire world could only believe what they do out of idolatry, pride, and masturbation. These are not just some idle scribblings, either, but widely considered to be Plantinga’s magnum opus. You would think that this sort of grossly bigoted incompetence would earn someone the disdain of an entire community of expert critical thinkers, but no. Instead, the guy has practically been showered with awards, fellowships, and honors [22].
Bear in mind now that Professor Hawking and myself are far from the only people to notice these problems with philosophy, and many prominent figures have written extensively about it in recent years [23,24,25,26]. So it’s not really a question of “if” philosophy has a problem, but how best to explore that problem and bring the field back to some semblance of respectability. It’s ironic, too, because the philosophers themselves are apparently the last people on Earth we can count on for that kind of resolution. “Philosophy,” after all, is just a word, which means there is no objectively correct way to define it and protect it. Any answer we give is necessarily going to be arbitrary, and there are dozens of competing schools of thought over how best to define the subject. Let’s not forget that countless members of the community also have a vested interest in maintaining this lack of standards, as it allows them to essentially get paid for doing nothing. Nevertheless, if philosophers ever want to be taken seriously as academic grown-ups, then sooner or later they’re going to have to impose a few boundaries. Philosophy, it seems, is in dire need of its own philosophy.
It’s interesting when you utter this phrase out loud, because it actually provides a subtle clue as to what the word “philosophy” tends to indicate in practice. Namely, the rigorous articulation of what stuff means. It almost sounds trivial to put it in those terms, but if you know anything at all about modern philosophy, then you know that this is a ubiquitous feature of the profession. Not just mere dictionary definitions, mind you, but a relentless drive towards conceptual clarity.
To demonstrate, consider the so-called “philosophy” of science. In order to officially call yourself a scientist, then presumably you accept the fundamental goals of science, and you agree to practice its methods. Science is not just a body of knowledge per se, nor is it a system of doctrines to be affirmed. Science is a process to be followed. A philosophy of science may thus be defined as any description of what science is, why science matters, how science operates, and how to identify those who fail to do science correctly. The philosophy doesn’t even have to be set in stone, either, in that anyone and everyone is more than welcome to offer their own particular spin on the basic principles.
It is tempting to complain that all of this may only be a mere “philosophy” unto itself, but at least it’s a consistent philosophy that reasonably captures what people usually mean whenever they use the word---for example, the philosophy of education, philosophy of religion, philosophy of law, moral philosophy, art, language, sports, politics… Heck, even corporations have their own philosophies! [27]. It therefore stands to reason that the philosophy of philosophy (or simply metaphilosophy) should likewise explain what it is that philosophers do, why they do it, what value it brings, and how to tell the difference between competent or incompetent practitioners.
So how exactly do you think the community of professional, PhD-level philosophers officially define their field? Simple: They don't [28]. They honestly and truly do not know what it means to be a philosopher, despite decades of personal commitment to that very profession. It's weird, too, because it's not exactly difficult to just observe a group of professionals at work and then enumerate the various tasks they collectively tend to engage in.
The way I see it, most “professional” philosophers in the academic world are essentially just a bunch of cultural curators. Human beings have been debating the same foundational questions throughout history, and there is real value in cataloging the variety of answers which develop over time. In this context, it simply doesn’t matter if the community is unable to pick and choose which views are correct, because the very idea of a “correct” philosophical stance is utterly meaningless. At best, we can only explore the perspectives of influential figures, articulate their claims more succinctly, summarize the various critiques, and then enable students to figure out which answers work best for themselves.
We may further identify an “applied” category of philosophy, which is defined by the act of doing philosophy, or merely philosophizing. Anyone can do it, and it is simply a matter of doing exactly what we just established---a formal articulation of definitions, goals, values, presumptions, beliefs, etc., followed by a thorough exploration of supporting arguments, logical implications, and practical consequences. “Successful” practitioners are thus measured by their overall degree of cultural influence, but I believe we can also reasonably evaluate their merits by examining certain objective criteria. For instance, I personally think that good philosophers must clearly define their terms, rigorously formulate their arguments in accordance with established rules of inference, and then show how such conclusions are relevant to real-world problems. In other words,
- What do you mean by that?
- How do you know that?
- Why should anyone care?
Again, this may only be my personal philosophy, but at least it’s a qualified philosophy from an experienced professional within science and engineering. Just because goals and definitions are arbitrary, that does not mean anyone is free to concoct whatever self-serving nonsense they like. If you expect your ideas to be clear, informative, and compelling, then there are just certain rules you’re going to have to learn to follow. If, however, you don’t care about any of those things, then by all means, go ahead and mash your keyboard with whatever vapid gibberish comes to mind. Just don’t act surprised when the rest of the world tends to have a hard time adopting your conclusions.
But who knows? Maybe I’m being overly simplistic. Maybe you have an entirely different perspective on how philosophy ought to be defined. That's great, and I would absolutely love to hear all about the many different nuances within competing schools of thought. But whatever views you have, can we please stop deluding ourselves under the pretentious fantasy that the so-called “philosophers” possess some kind of magical insight into the fundamental truths of anything? Academic philosophy is not about being right or wrong, but about exploring the questions themselves within some cultural or historical context. If that is how you view philosophy, then it is perfectly safe to say that the field is very much alive and well. If, however, you want hard, definitive answers, then sooner or later you’re going to have to start imposing some basic standards. In that sense, I’m afraid to say that philosophy is most definitely dead, because it was technically never alive in the first place. Science is the ultimate authority in that realm, because science actually has standards for what correct answers are supposed to look like. Science therefore doesn’t need philosophy in any direct sense, because science is a philosophy. So until mainstream academic philosophers learn to impose a philosophy of their own, they shall forever remain on the sidelines as other institutions carry on the real work of research and discovery.
References:
- "Where can philosophy take me?" University of Kentucky [link]
- Stoicism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) [link]
- Undergraduate Program in Philosophy, Stanford University [link]
- "Why Study Philosophy?" University of Washington [link]
- "Why Study Philosophy?" James Madison University [link]
- "Why Study Philosophy?" University of Maryland [link]
- Bourget and Chalmers, "What do philosophers believe?" Philosophical Studies, Vol. 170, pp. 465--200 (2014)
- Axelrod, Robert, The Evolution of Cooperation, Basic Books, 1981
- Straffin, Philip D., Game Theory and Strategy, Mathematical Association of America, 1993
- Von Neumann, John, and Morgenstern, Oskar, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Princeton University Press, 1944
- Weibull, JorgenW., Evolutionary Game Theory, MIT Press, 1997
- Ridley, Matt, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, Penguin Books, 1996
- Futuyma, Douglas J., and Kirkpatrick, Mark, Evolution,
Sinauer Associates (4th Ed) 2017
- Hawking, Stephen, The Grand Design, Bantam Books, 2010 [link]
- Norris, Christopher, "Hawking contra philosophy," Philosophy Now, No. 82, 2011 [link]
- Thagard, Paul, "Is Philosophy Dead? Why Stephen Hawking is Wrong," Psychology Today, [link]
- Rebecca Goldstein-Newberger, "Is Philosophy Dead?" 2015 [link]
- "What is Philosophy?" Florida State University Department of Philosophy [link]
- A better way of getting at the nature of philosophy is to ask about
what it deals with (subject matter) and what it is that philosophers (or
anybody else) do when they are doing philosophy (method). Plymouth State University [link]
- Plantinga, Alvin, "Reason and Belief in God"
- Original sin involves both intellect and will; it is both cognitive and affective. On the one hand, it carries with it a sort of blindness, a sort of imperceptiveness, dullness, stupidity. This is a cognitive limitation that first of all prevents its victim from proper knowledge of God and his beauty, glory, and love; it also prevents him from seeing what is worth loving and what worth hating, what should be sought and what eschewed. It therefore compromises both knowledge of fact and knowledge of value.---Plantinga, Alvin, "Warranted Christian Belief," pp. 178
- Alvin Plantinga Awards and Honors [link]
- Chalmers, David J., "Why isn't there more progress in philosophy?" Philosophy, Vol. 90, No. 1, pp. 3--31 (2015)
- Brennon, Jason, "Skepticism about philosophy," Ratio, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2010) [link]
- Daly, Christopher, "Persistent Philosophical Disagreement," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 117, No. 1, 2017 [link]
- Cappelen, Herman, "Disagreement in Philosophy, an Optimistic Perspective," The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology, Cambridge University Press, 2017
- Toyota Corporate Philosophy
- Overgaard, Gilbert, and Burwood, An Introduction to Metaphilosophy, Cambridge University Press (2013) [link]