My Honest Views
My Honest Views
I think David Lewis was off his rocker, I think Donald Davidson was far too impressed by elementary logic and decision theory, I think Willard Quine was a mediocre logician with some philosophical side-interests, I think Daniel Dennett never understood philosophy, I think Michael Dummett was a dimwit outside of his narrow specializations, I think P.F. Strawson struggled to understand much of philosophy, I think Gilbert Ryle was a classicist who wanted philosophy gone by any means necessary, I think Gareth Evans had no philosophical depth, I think John Searle was too wedded to common sense, I think Jerry Fodor had no idea about philosophy and didn’t care, I think Saul Kripke was a mathematician with a passing interest in certain limited areas of philosophy, I think Hilary Putnam was a scientist-linguist who found philosophy incomprehensible, I think Ludwig Wittgenstein was a philosophical ignoramus too arrogant to learn some history, I think Bertrand Russell was only interested in skepticism, I think Gottlob Frege was a middling mathematician with no other philosophical interests, I think the positivists were well-meaning idiots, I think Edmund Husserl had no interest in anything outside his own consciousness, I think Martin Heidegger and John-Paul Sartre were mainly psychological politicians, I think John Austin was a scientifically illiterate language student, I think Noam Chomsky was neither a professional linguist nor a philosopher nor a psychologist but some sort of uneasy combination, I think the vast majority of current philosophers have no idea what philosophy is about and struggle to come to terms with it, I think philosophy has been a shambles since Descartes, I think Plato and Aristotle were philosophical preschoolers, I think no one has ever really grasped the nature of philosophical problems, I think the human brain is a hotbed of bad philosophy (and that is its great glory).
Bernard Williams: a spiritually shallow, ethically unserious, smug sybarite.
P.S. Russell and Chomsky are my favorite people on this list.
My favorites too. I wonder what other people’s honest views might be.
I think Colin McGinn was a promising young psychologist who came to philosophy late and never got over it.
What about Kant? Schopenhauer? Hegel? Nietzsche? Whitehead? Nelson Goodman?
I don’t have such firm opinions about them.
I’m more interested in who you like
It shouldn’t be assumed that I don’t “like” the philosophers listed; on the contrary, I think they did some excellent work. It is just that they had pronounced limitations, stemming from a variety of causes, some inherent in philosophy itself. Indeed, it could be said that their merits derive from their limitations. See my new post “Favorites” for my personal favorites.
They say economics is common sense made hard- then what is philosophy? Is it the deepest, most intricate kind of intelligence or is it a specialty like any other?
I agree about economics–supply and demand, etc. Philosophy is both a specialty–it has its own list of problems–and a general mode of intelligence. I would describe it as meta-intelligence: intelligence applied to intelligence.
If you care, I’m curious of your take of Randall Collins; he’s been decribed as the “most intelligent man in the room.” That Homeric epithet would aptly fit you. He’s a sociologist yet empirically grounded and philosophically literate. You two would make a good audience for the other
I’ve never heard of him, but I notice the name overlap. A sociologist!
He’s made mutliple contributions: he wrote A Sociology of Philosophy, in the seventies he predicted credential inflation in education and is a micro sociologist and an authoriy on violencce of all things. Not that he is a philosopher, but he has intelligent things to say on a lot of things and it’s not just wild speculation. He has a blog called “The Sociological Eye” Very empirically minded.
I think this merits further explanation: “I think the vast majority of current philosophers have no idea what philosophy is about and struggle to come to terms with it, I think philosophy has been a shambles since Descartes, … I think no one has ever really grasped the nature of philosophical problems, ….”
Is Philosophy not “what it is”? If no one has ever grasped the nature of philosophical problems, everybody has been doing something but whatever they were doing, it wasn’t philosophy? Or there is a new discipline that is grasping the nature of philosophical problems, as opposed to grappling with those problems? And someone should start doing the former while everyone else continues piddling about with the latter?
This is an excellent question. It is best approached by asking what subject the young child is doing when it has its first philosophical thoughts–is it the same subject that sophisticated professional philosophers are doing? It is certainly at a very different intellectual level. Or consider the pre-Socratics: were they doing philosophy as we understand it now? Subjects grow and crystallize over time. It will depend on how the subject develops whether we will still want to call it philosophy. Was Thales doing physics?
What is your understanding of philosophy that the others miss?
It’s like Tom Nagel’s–we don’t have the right concepts to formulate the problems clearly. Other philosophers seem to think we are conceptually well-equipped enough to have the problems clearly in our sights. I’m talking here about genuine mysteries.
Ex-academic philosopher, relatively new reader here (escaped in 2012). I’ve long wondered if there’d been anything really worthy or novel done in moral philosophy since Nietzsche, although MacIntyre’s After Virtue impressed me. Those only analyzing how we use moral *language* might as well have declared the subject dead. Peter Singer seems like more the intellectual equivalent of a celebrity than a philosopher. IMHO. A friend has suggested French philosopher Pierre Hadot. Opinion(s)?
There has been a good deal of excellent work in moral philosophy since Nietzsche (not that I think much of him). I like W.D.Ross and Nagel’s The Possibility of Altruism. Don’t dismiss work on moral language; it’s relevant to the question of the status of moral values. I don’t think Peter Singer is a philosopher at all–he’s a moralist (nothing wrong with that).
” I think David Lewis was off his rocker,”
Wouldn’t D. Lewis have said that In one concrete, existing, world, D. Lewis was off his rocker?
Since D Lewis being off his rocker is another way things could have been. Hence, a possible world.
Which for Lewis are all concrete existing worlds!
Just not in the world C. McGinn finds himself.
He would indeed say that. He might even agree that he is off his rocker in most worlds–perhaps all but one, viz. the actual world. I think in close worlds he is not off his rocker at all.
Let’s take Sam Harris as an example. Popular writer, incomplete argumentation, hardly a professional philosopher but knows a thing or two about it.
But he has contributed to the field by bringing philosophical debate into the public arena.
True, but what is your point?
Was a parallel follow on to the discussion of whether philosophers are accessible to lay readers, and whether Harris counts as a philosopher. The implied question is, should lay people delve into philosophy? (Obviously we do)
Philosophers write for different audiences, some advanced, some introductory. Sam Harris is not a professional philosopher, but he can write on it if he wants to. Lay people should delve into it if they feel so inclined, but they are advised to start with the easy stuff, or they could sign up for classes.
I’m hoping you do requests 😉
Karl Popper
What kind of requests?
I could be wrong, but I think he’s asking you to trash Popper.
Poor old Popper: I think he was too affected by skepticism, especially about induction.
I agree that no one has ever grasped the “nature” of philosophical problems. However, this isn’t because of the limits of “minds,” as we think of them in Western societies. It is because there is no good reason to think that things have natures or essences in the first place.
I also think Western psychologists are presently incapable of explaining why different people in different cultures have evolved to characterize “minds” differently. And until we can explain that, we cannot explain why we evolved in such a way that we now think what we think about how we think.
I’m not presupposing essence, just having characteristics–and clearly everything has those. I agree that the evolution of mind is a mystery.
I’m a philosophile linguist, and when you say, “… we don’t have the right concepts to formulate the problems clearly. Other philosophers seem to think we are conceptually well-equipped enough to have the problems clearly in our sights. I’m talking here about genuine mysteries”, I would agree that this is a big problem. (But isn’t that something Wittgenstein was concerned with?) I kind of agree with your assessment of Chomsky. He’s not concerned with descriptive linguistics at all, but he did focus on and appeal to Descartes. (But he seems to never have read Kant; rather he seems to have followed Carnap. His appreciation of what language in its full significance is seems seriously limited.) A genuine mystery worth pursuing, I would say, is the one as formulated by Putnam (other equivalent formulations have been made, and others are of course possible), “the problem of the way language and thought “hook on” to the world”. It seems that pursuing a grasp of this problem could be illuminating for understanding problems of metaphysics in the post- Kantian tradition. (Especially the strand going through H. Cohen and Cassirer.) (Putnam made his formulation in the context of debunking Tarski’s approach to the problem of “truth”, and I think he was suggesting that the problem was much bigger and nowhere near understood.) Among contemporary philosophers, I’ve found Cora Diamond to be quite interesting, and I think British philosopher David Bell deserves wider recognition.
I think you are alluding to the problem of reference or intentionality, which indeed has been much discussed.
Another request: Hume
I think Hume didn’t realize how big the missing shade of blue problem is for his empiricism.