1. This is an excellent point you make. There is, a priori, very little reason (as far as I know) to assume that an alternative universe would have the same physical properties as ours. If there is evidence in that direction I doubt it's merely "because our universe has this property."
But I agree with you in principle that this is a weak point. The essay's point was to respond to pg's attacks. jsomers never assumed that pg's single paper had somehow thrown philosophy into chaos and shambles.
2.I agree with you here that there is little distinction between these fields in Greece. But that's an interesting fact isn't it--it's essentially conceding that at least initially philosophy played an important role in the development of math and science (one certainly can't assume that the development of philosophy and math were going in two different tracts in the same man's head).
3.He's not saying that philosophy failed. He's arguing that pg is finding fault ex post facto. It's easy to fault Kant after you've read a response but perhaps without Kant the response (and the progress that supposedly came with it) never would have occurred.
For an analogous situation--Galois developed his theory which allowed for a proof that no polynomial of order 5 or greater was guaranteed a solution by radicals. Does this mean that Ruffini was a putz because he could only do most of the proof for order 5 polynomials? After all--he was clearly taking the wrong approach.
Or, do we think Pascal is an idiot because Newton developed the calculus that solved the problems he could not? No.
The point is that everything builds on everything. I think somers' Kant tree is a great example of this.
4. This is backwards. The point is that philosophical reasoning often led to the creation of entirely new fields of thought. Economics, politics, law and linguistics are great examples of this.
Would we have modern legal thought without the works of philosophers like Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Hobbes?
Would we have modern economics without the work of Smith, Pareto and Mill?
Would we have modern sociology without Marx and Gramsci?
That they called themselves "philosophers" is not irrelevant whatsoever. It demonstrates that philosophy often lays the groundwork for entirely new fields.
It's strange you say that their results did not require the existence of the rest of the field of philosophy. I suspect they would disagree as they seemed to rely on other philosophers in their own work.
Philosophy, at one point, was the catch-all phrase for any type of thought. Mathematics was philosophy. Science was philosophy. Law was philosophy. Economics was philosophy. Every form of thought (more or less) was philosophy. Over the course of history, these fields have spun off from philosophy, and achieved various degrees of relevance; their earliest works were done by "philosophers" because these fields did not yet exist, but in modern times they are studied independently. The question then becomes, in modern times, what is a person studying when they study philosophy? They are not studying any of the fields that spun off of philosophy, or else they would no longer be classified as philosophers. So, the question becomes (answering your point 5) what problems that other fields care about are still answered by philosophers? The critique in the OP correctly identifies that some philosophers still concern themselves with problems related to cognitive science, which still answer questions from psychology. But once cognitive science becomes its own independent field, there may be nothing left within the realm of philosophy.
We might not have had modern political science without Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Hobbes. But we would have had Hobbes even if he had not been classified as a philosopher, and thus we would have had the rest of them.
We might not have had modern economics without Smith, Pareto, and Mill. But we would have had Smith even if he had not been classified as a philosopher, and thus we would have had the rest.
We might not have had modern sociology without Marx and Gramsci. But we would have had Comte even if he hadn't been classified as a philosopher, and thus we would have had the rest.
I mention these three individuals' work because they (1) fundamentally began what came to eventually be their fields, and (2) did not really build these fields incrementally out of the rest of the philosophical body of knowledge at the time. This demonstrates that it isn't some kind of unifying thread within the study of philosophy that causes these fields to spin off from them; philosophy was just what you called it when you were studying problems that weren't in their own field yet. This no longer occurs in modern times, so we don't see philosophy spinning off new fields in the way that it used to; computer science (as a whole) sees its roots in modern mathematics, not philosophy. Psychoanalysis, as a modern field (unlike psychology as a whole, which also often refers to much older studies), clearly descends from biology. Electrical engineering. Nuclear physics even has it in the title.
The study of the works of "philosophers" can still be relevant within other fields, but to study philosophy is to spend one's time looking at what's left. It is this study, in modern times, that pg and I are attacking as vague, useless, and prone to wars of semantics.
I think you're creating a straw-man here and end up proving jsomers's point.
You jump on the delicacy of the language and that's the point. jsomers doesn't argue _about_ this particular law, he was only giving an example on how pushing and pulling language can have direct pragmatic purposes and real political ramifications.
The point is that since law is mired in language, exploring language becomes an incredibly relevant task and pg's criticism seems to ignore this important function.
You say jsomers is defending analytic philosophy in this section.
Later jsomers says philosophy was bad but has reformed.
So on the one hand he defends old philosophy. And on the other he claims philosophy was bad, but is OK now because it has reformed. These defenses are incompatible.
I think the reformation to which he refers would be the advent of modern, analytic philosophy at the turn of the century through the works of Russell, Moore, Frege, and Wittgenstein. If so, the two claims are equivalent.
1
The world is everything that is the case. *
1.1
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11
The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.
1.12
For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
1.13
The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2
The world divides into facts.
1.21
Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.
I'm saying that Wittgenstein /contributed/ to the advent of modern analytic or formal philosophy; an indisputable claim. While I have a spot in my heart for the Tractatus (if nothing else the method of truth tables in logic was co-invented within its pages, not to mention "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"), I'm not defending it and its solipsistic position/obfuscated style per se.
I have great respect for Wittgenstein, certainly far more than for the myriad of analytical philosophers I read a long time ago who all "wrote sense" (comparatively speaking) and all of whom I've forgotten.
That's wonderful. Perhaps you, as a Wittgenstein buff, would be so kind as to explain how the Wittgenstein quote I gave above, which at first glance appears to be nonsense, is in fact respectable and worthwhile thinking? I don't get it; enlighten me.
"My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright."
I think that's kinda the whole point of the Tractatus: much of philosophy (metaphysics and ethics, particularly) has no sense. Strictly speaking, they mean nothing.
Wittgenstein's early work inspired the development of modern analytic philosophy both in its use of formal methods and its claim that much of what was then considered philosophy was meaningless. The decades immediately following Wittgenstein were concerned with linguistic analysis (what the authors of these papers take fault with), while more contemporary philosophy has conceded to a kind of naturalism, appealing to the sciences.
If you place any value on modern analytic philosopher (even as a Popperian), you have to at least give Wittgenstein some historical credit even if the philosophical travesties of the logical positivists can be attributed to misinterpretations of the Tractatus.
With regards to decent philosophers with direct influence from Wittgenstein, what's your take on Kripke and Anscombe?
OK looking them up. Kripke's wikipedia entry is full of stuff about logic. I don't really have a problem with logicians. I don't think they are in the primary philosophy tradition pg was criticizing (and which I don't like). If he learned something about logic from wittgenstein, then great i guess.
Anscombe wiki has:
For years, I would spend time, in cafés, for example, staring at objects saying to myself: "I see a packet. But what do I really see? How can I say that I see here anything more than a yellow expanse?"
I think that stuff is a dead end. We should solve problems we have, not question all traditions simultaneously for no particular reason.
By the way, I do think there are good philosophers, who made useful progress, but they are largely neglected. e.g. xenophanes, godwin, burke, feynman. (neglected as philosophers)
Above you say that this is an honest request to know more so I will treat it as such.
In philosophy a method proposed by Descartes to find the foundations of knowledge was to doubt everything that possibly could be doubted which includes the external world. Wittgenstein in his Tractatus similarly starts from a blank slate and tries to define and describe the world without crossing his own boundaries and definitions of what can be considered sensible to say (and fails. To objectively describe the world is an attempt to step outside it and his bounds of sense).
I would also like to note that this early is work very different from his later work where he completely rejected the Tractatus, writing with a different style and focus. His later work (especially Philosophical Investigations) has some extremely interesting ideas regarding language, its use and development which I believe would interest those working in the areas of semantic web and NLP.
Your post had no content. It made a bald assertion that ignored what had been said before. I would genuinely like it if you posted some actual content, and I hoped to indirectly encourage you in that direction. The tone is from a book I've been reading today (The Diamond Age).
Your post had no content. [...] I would genuinely like it if you posted some actual content, and I hoped to indirectly encourage you
Heh. Something about this comment seemed very familiar to me, and after a while I figured out what it was: the distinctive sound of xlnt aka curi. Yay web history!
While I have an enduring if inexplicable affection for you, and get that you weren't being sarcastic, the last thing I want to do is have an argument about Wittgenstein together :)
Well, to cheer you up let's talk about Godwin. I read Caleb Williams years ago. It was great - like an 18th century anarchist version of Enemy of the State!
But he writes nonsense. What did he ever get right? Besides the obvious point that "we learn language by copying sentences" can't explain where new sentences come from.
Ignore his politics, though I personally have a great deal of respect for people with extreme politics.
The Chomsky hierarchy -- a method of classifying formal grammars. Seems computer science-y enough that you'll consider it as something real. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy
But I agree with you in principle that this is a weak point. The essay's point was to respond to pg's attacks. jsomers never assumed that pg's single paper had somehow thrown philosophy into chaos and shambles.
2.I agree with you here that there is little distinction between these fields in Greece. But that's an interesting fact isn't it--it's essentially conceding that at least initially philosophy played an important role in the development of math and science (one certainly can't assume that the development of philosophy and math were going in two different tracts in the same man's head).
3.He's not saying that philosophy failed. He's arguing that pg is finding fault ex post facto. It's easy to fault Kant after you've read a response but perhaps without Kant the response (and the progress that supposedly came with it) never would have occurred.
For an analogous situation--Galois developed his theory which allowed for a proof that no polynomial of order 5 or greater was guaranteed a solution by radicals. Does this mean that Ruffini was a putz because he could only do most of the proof for order 5 polynomials? After all--he was clearly taking the wrong approach.
Or, do we think Pascal is an idiot because Newton developed the calculus that solved the problems he could not? No.
The point is that everything builds on everything. I think somers' Kant tree is a great example of this.
4. This is backwards. The point is that philosophical reasoning often led to the creation of entirely new fields of thought. Economics, politics, law and linguistics are great examples of this.
Would we have modern legal thought without the works of philosophers like Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Hobbes?
Would we have modern economics without the work of Smith, Pareto and Mill?
Would we have modern sociology without Marx and Gramsci?
That they called themselves "philosophers" is not irrelevant whatsoever. It demonstrates that philosophy often lays the groundwork for entirely new fields.
It's strange you say that their results did not require the existence of the rest of the field of philosophy. I suspect they would disagree as they seemed to rely on other philosophers in their own work.
5. What is your metric for "useful"?