DRMacIver's Notebook
Is philosophy bad?
Is philosophy bad?
This is a draft bankruptcy piece. It contains a few interesting things, but I abandoned it because it fundamentally didn’t work.
I threatened to write “Contra David Chapman on Philosophy” as a response to David’s repeated insistence that philosophy is bad. This piece isn’t exactly that, but it’s not exactly not that.
Chavid Dapman on Philosophy
Allow me to introduce my correspondent for this piece, Chavid Dapman. Chavid is a fictional character created by Claude to approximate David Chapman’s opinions on the subject. Given real world David Chapman’s opinions on AI, this is probably a very irritating thing of me to do. Sorry, David.
I’ve tried to inform Claude when I think Chavid says something that David wouldn’t, but this is an imperfect process. As Claude would put it, “Chavid Dapman is a fictional character created for narrative purposes. His critical opinions on philosophy should not be taken as precisely representative of thinker David Chapman’s more nuanced perspectives.”
Anyway, here is Chavid’s opinion on philosophy:
Philosophy is an intellectual tradition that aims to find absolute answers to questions about life, knowledge, ethics, and existence through logic, thought experiments and reasoning. However, after thousands of years, philosophy has failed to deliver definitive answers, especially compared to the progress of science. Logic and thought experiments have clear limits. And philosophy tends to neglect empirical research and interactive empiricism.
Yet the deeper issue is that philosophy pursues misguided questions based on false assumptions, such as: What constitutes a good life? What is the meaning of existence? What is human consciousness? The search for abstract absolute answers presumes these are coherent topics, when they are not.
Philosophy goes astray in seeking universal essences, rather than understanding experience as an ongoing, embodied process. Contemplating pseudoproblems based on flawed metaphysics cannot elucidate anything. We should reject the search for absolute abstract answers and eternal philosophical truths. Philosophy needs to engage the physical world pragmatically and empirically.
Editor’s note: I ran this by actual David Chapman and he doesn’t think it reflects his views at all and is instead a generic and not terribly well thought out critique. I agree.
I like philosophy
Let’s just get this out of the way: I like philosophy, and I get a lot out of it. Reading philosophy has been significantly life improving for me, and informed a lot of my thinking. This makes it hard for me to accept a blanket “philosophy is bad” claim when a lot of philosophy is clearly good for me, and I’m writing from that perspective.
There’s also plenty of philosophy I dislike. Frankly, it’s almost impossible to like a thing without this being true, because almost everything has good and bad examples, and also examples that are and aren’t to your tastes.
I think one of the differences between Chavids opinions of philosophy and mine are quite straightforwardly that I tend to think of the examples of philosophy that I like as sufficient evidence that philosophy is good, and Chavid tends to think of the examples of philosophy that he doesn’t like as sufficient evidence that philosophy is bad.
This disagreement is partly what Adam Mastroianni calls a strong vs weak link problem. Some things are as strong as their weakest link, some as their strongest. With science (in Mastroianni’s example), progress doesn’t really depend on the worst science we’re doing but the best. I think the same is true of philosophy: Although there are many bad (both by my standards and theirs) examples of philosophy, there are also many good examples, and you can get value out of the good examples and mostly ignore the bad ones.
I think Chavid is basically right in saying that “a good life” is a bad abstraction (although I’m sympathetic to what happens to the question when you verb it, which is “How can you live well?” rather than “What is a good life?” - I think this is hard to answer, but worthwhile engaging with), but also this is almost never the sort of philosophy I read.
In contrast, here are two examples of philosophy I’ve got a lot out of:
“Games: Agency as Art” by C Thi Nguyen is a book about games, and what the fact that we play games tells us about humanity, and defending them as a distinctive form of art whose medium is constructing structures of agency. This book isn’t “empirical” in the sense that it gathers a lot of data, but is deeply engaged in the world by basically centring its philosophy on many games Nguyen has played.
“Epistemic Injustice” by Miranda Fricker is a book about ethics that consists of looking at a bunch of examples of things that are bad and saying “these seem to have some sort of shared distinctive character. What is it?”. Many of these examples are fictional, but even those feel like they connect to plausible shared experiences.
These are examples for me of the sort of thing philosophy really shines at: Pointing at something specific and going “There’s something interesting here. What is it?”. They don’t go astray into big abstract questions, but they use the same sort of methods that philosophers tend to engage with big abstract questions on and focus them on something specific and try to clarify our engagement with them.
Where was this going?
That was the point at which I abandoned this. I would still like to write a pro philosophy piece, but I think arguing against David Chapman’s views on it is the wrong way to do it.
I like Joe Carlsmith’s Seeing More Whole viewpoint, which is (in very brief summary) that philosophy is about using logical reasoning to discover what sorts of person it is possible to be. This seems an important viewpoint to me.
I’ve previously ha-ha-only-serious joked that the fundamental philosophical question is “That’s weird, right? You get that that’s weird?”. I think the big thing that I get out of good philosophy is that it forces you to actually look at the details of life and how it works, rather than implicitly skipping over the bits that don’t make sense.
This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to write that piece. How to use philosophy is another similarly brief draft bankruptcy piece trying to do much the same thing.
Reading Philosophy for the Examples and How to use thought experiments maybe capture this better. Perhaps part of the problem is that I’ve tried to do too much with this topic and it needs something larger if I’m to write the whole thing. Or maybe just many smaller things.