I’m no expert on the history of philosophy by any means, but from my amateur readings it’s apparent that the theory of evolution had some degree or other of influence on subsequent philosophical thought (ie. creating less of a need for deism and thus freeing things up a bit for existentialism). Nonetheless, most books, websites, etc. that offer info a la “Philosophy 101” for beginners don’t tend to offer much post-Sartre. I’m interested in the possibility that the Computer Age may have a reductive influence on the course of philosophy in the next century, insofar that the “if-then” structure of PC programming and hence the way we interact with them may spill over into the way we think (a la the “osmosis” effect Darwinism seemed to have 100 years ago). If anyone has any cites or ideas along these lines I’d like to hear them.
SAaustinTx,
You might try looking at some of Daniel Dennett’s recent work; more specifically Freedom Evolves.
Here’s an interview with Dennett discussing his theory on how evolution generates free will.
In their book An Incomplete Education (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987), Judy Jones and William Wilson try to give a thumbnail sketch of all the knowledge you need to be a sophisticated New York intellectual. In the chapter on “Philosophy,” they give brief bios and content-summaries of every major philosopher from Plato to . . . John Dewey, who died in 1952. They don’t mention Bertrand Russell, or Jean-Paul Sartre, let alone any later thinker. (Not in that section, anyway, although there is, later in the chapter, a blurb on poststructuralism.) I always wondered why.
Aren’t their any philosophers alive and writing NOW who will someday be ranked with Plato, Aristotle, etc.?
I have read that Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) pronounced that henceforth there can be no more philosophy, only philosophizing, but I have not read his books and do not understand what he meant.
Wittgenstein’s comment as I recall correctly was a statement that all we can do now is look at the way language effects our perceptions. Was he right? I doubt that and I see that Eponymous has already mentioned Dennett.
He felt, very roughly, that philosophical problems arose from mistakes in understanding the way language actually operates, and that the job of the philosopher was not to solve a philosophical problem but to dissolve it by demonstrating why the problem didn’t really exist. A metaphor he used was that philosophizing should show the fly the way out of the bottle (rather than, say, through it).
I also recommend looking into Dennet’s work.
This is my thought on the subject …
What Darwinism and Computer Science share with regards to influence on philosophy is the primacy of an algorithmic process. Darwinism dissolves the question of the creation of organisms into a relatively simple series of steps. Similarly, books like Dennet’s “Consciousness Explained” attempt to dissolve the question of where consciousness comes from by showing how an algorithmic process could create such a thing.
Are you asking about the current state of philosophy, or do you only want to generate some general philosophical discussion about some ideas of your own?
There’s lots of philosophy going on at the moment, but it looks as if you are only interested in a rather specialized area, to wit philosophy of mind/language (which is not my specialization). Sartre, however, is not primarily seen as doing philosophy of mind/language.
With respect to influence of evolution: there are philosophers who are to some extent taking this into account. However, for most research interest evolution is only of mild importance. Ethically speaking, for example, the way moral rules may contribute to development of civilized society does not decide which rules we should live by at the moment. For philosophy of mind it could offer some insights, but even then the important part is how people think at present: this is the terrain of psychology.
I’m not sure what to make of your comment about the ‘if-then’ structure of programming. You are aware that logic theories that recognized such structures have been around for many centuries? I can’t remember anyone challenging the validity of such a reasoning structure (syllogism, if you will) in an interesting way. Furthermore I do not immediately see what interesting results you can derive from such a structure. But then, if it is a break-through thought it isn’t very likely it would be self-evident…
It would be interesting to examine contemporary popular discussion and education on philosophy in the time of Kant, Mill, Descartes et al. to see if they were regarded in their time as major players in philosophy. Perhaps it is simply the case that the great philosophers are not so recognized until after the fact. I don’t know that that is true (in fact I’m skeptical of it) but it’s one possible explanation.
Another is that philosophy might just be a cyclical thing. I may be betraying my ignorance here, but it seems to be the great thinkers of Western civilization have been bunched up in time, place and influence; you had your Greek thinkers, for instance, and you had your Industrial Revolution thinkers in another group, and you had a batch of Renaissance thinkers. I don’t remember a huge number of high-octane philosophical giants from the ninth century.
Still another factor is that the notion of philosophy being a completely separate discipline is, I believe, a modern one. I could be wrong, but my understanding is that “philosophy” as a separate discipline is largely a 19th century invention and a 20th century industry, which naturally tends to academicize it and seaprate it from common popular discourse.
Descartes, to use that example, was a mathematician, like many other philosophers. To him, the examination of philosophy was just what a scientist does. Today, however, our scientists are too specialized to do both. Perhaps philosophy doesn’t do well for specialization - maybe it needs to be more closely connected to the sciences and the humanities than it commonly is today.
(Going by recollection, so details may be wrong)
J.S. Mill was very well known and respected in his day. His father was already famous and prepared him to be a child prodigy. After an adolescent crisis he managed to keep up his intellectual and political work.
Kant was an relatively little-known but well-liked provincial professor until he published the Critique of Pure Reason, which made him famous overnight.
Descartes I’m not too sure about, I’ve read an introduction that says he used to be considered to be a bit of an oddball in his day, and only became famous as kind of a strawman in the 19th century. On the other hand you see already lots of philosophers earlier than that reacting to him. And he was hired by that Swedish princess, so he must have had some kind of fame.
Currently there are famous philosophers, though most don’t capture the public imagination in the way that Sartre did. People like Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty, Habermas, Dworkin, Rawls, Kymlicka, Searle are (were) AFAIK generally considered great names in their respective fields.
The ‘problem’, if you think it is a problem, is not so much that philosophy has specialized as well that academia has broadened. There are so many people busy with science and humanities that it is completely impossible to be familiar with everyone. AFAIK at the time of Erasmus and Descartes all the European intellectuals knew each other and conversed with each other. So a proper comparison would be difficult.
FWIW there were also lots of philosphers in the centuries after Plato and Aristotle, some of whom were quite famous in their day but whose fame has not lived on. Part of the reason is that next to nothing of their writings has been kept. If you are interested you can read Long & Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosphers, a collection of text fragments of and about these philosophers.
What* Wittgenstein* would say today if he could rise from his cold grave and re-say what he said, was that…
All investigations into fundamental philosophies that use the traditional method of formulating logical relationships between strings of words, was, and is, a bull-shitting tip.
Words have no absolute referents, and so any manipulation of them will always be inexact and therefore any such study using them as an instrument of discovery will be inherently flawed.
Mathematical mumbo-jumbo manipulation is even more stupid. Then we have a symbol representing a symbol representing an indefinite referent. :smack:
But . . . what OTHER way is there to do philosophy? How can we philosophize without words or symbols? How can we even think, beyond the most primitive emotional-response level, without using words or symbols? To humans, thinking means symbol manipulation. Especially thinking about abstract concepts. Without language, we would all be as mindless as Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron. Wouldn’t we?
Please allow me to answer your question in this personal way, BrainGlutton…
When I was five or maybe six or maybe seven, I fell in love with a tree; a bare leafless black tree in winter. Something about the shape, the reach of the limbs, the strength, the muteness, the persitence through time, the realization of life through irrepressible yet effortless growth from acorn to giant.
I loved that tree back then but I didn’t know why. And although I wrote the words of explanation above, they are lies. I still don’t know why I so much loved that tree.
Now think of a computer that responds to words and combinations of words that are typed in by you. It has a large database of pertinent responces. The computer has a word combination bank of ten million reactive responces to whatever word combination that you might type in.
Try as you might you can’t tell the diference between the responces of the machine and a real live human being.
So, not knowing what else to do, you set up your computer with the very same program and database. Then the two machines have a most pleasant and coherent conversation that lasts fo forty years. Neither computer knows that they are not talkin to a man.
I would like to see some textual support for your interpretation of Wittgenstein, Milum. It goes against my reading of him, and those I’ve read that discussed him.
Sure thing, erislover, but first, two things. Let us discuss the ideas of Whittingstein and not his words. And “two”, remember that “my” Whittingstein had not been simply lying dead in his grave for the past fifty years, as he lay there, “my” Whittingstein had been thinking.
Now. At long last. My first two replies were cut off. Ok,** erislover**, will you now say in simple english what Wittgenstein said so clumsily in the tagline remark that you thought (admittly out of context) so prophetic?
( If you like I’ll tell you what he meant.) 
But, Milum, what you are describing is what I called a reaction at the “emotional-response level.” You fell in love with that tree for purely esthetic reasons; words are neither necessary nor adequate to express your feelings. It is conceivable that an ape could fall in love with a tree in exactly the same way. But that kind of emotional response is not a form of thinking and certainly will never give rise to any structured system of thought which might deserve to be characterized as “philosophy.” I repeat: I do not see how philosophy is at all possible, without words or other symbol-referents.
Perfectly plausible, but what does it have to do with the question I raised? These computers are using symbols to communicate and, arguably, to think. But how could computers, or humans, communicate or think without symbols?
I really don’t think that’s completely necessary.
Certainly his work is itself a kind of philosophy in that he offers (in his later works) a method for attempting to deal with common problems in philosophy, and through this method, he showed (if you believed him) that the problems weren’t really problems. No one can claim this method is complete. One of his students, Anscombe (unfortunately now deceased), carried his methodology into the study of intention.
The focus of LW’s work has always been getting at meaning. In his early work, the Tractutus Logico-Philosophicus, he was working on constructing a language that could only let one say things that could be said in order to avoid the problems of philosophy. His mistake in this work was twofold, in my estimation. First, that the problems of philosophy can be handled syntactically. Second, that should he even succeed, the language he’d produce wouldn’t be what we think of as language.
As he returned to these themes later in life, he came to tackle the problem differently. Instead of viewing language as a formal construct, he tried to approach words, sentences, and language-games as parts of human life. There was almost an isomorphism between the situation and its language-game. It was in this that words obtained their meaning. But it went farther than that, in that the situations that spawned language-games were situations of living.
For example, a favorite passage of mine is from his later work, On Certainty, and I paraphrase: " ‘A is a physical object’ is a piece of instruction we use when someone doesn’t know what A is, or what a physical object is." He used this in a long train of thought about idealism and realism, to show how the statements “There are no physical objects” or “There are physical objects” don’t make sense because philosophy is co-opting the words. That is, philosophers are trying to take the words out of their language-games and away from the situations they have importance in, and yet retain the weight of their meaning.
For this reason, Wittgenstein was critical of philosophy in the sense most people understand it. Early Wittgenstein felt that people had not properly assigned meaning to various signs in their propositions; later Wittgenstein felt that people were misusing words when they philosophized, and if they only took the time to discover the situations in which it is used (in order to live as a human being in a world) they would see that its use does not apply in this cirucumstance.
I do not believe he felt philosophy was bullshit. He found philosophical questions interesting and sought to resolve them. His analysis of metaphysics, epistemology, phenomenology, and logic were not done just to show people what idiots they are.
PS – my sig wasn’t meant to be used again. I almost never use it because it is long and I don’t want to get in trouble for it, but the new board seems to have sigs on by default.
But BrainGlutton ! That is exactly the point. A ape, a whale, a seven year old Milum, can extract information from the external world and establish neuron connections that gestalt. Beyond words, beyond communication, without any symbol-referent transfer of information to any other biological form. This is the soul, the essence, of being alive.
My example of the two comunicating computers was to point out just that fact. Structured systems of comunication such as language have a great function, indeed they can contribute greatly with innovations beneficial to us all, indeed they might guide us towards philosophical thoughts that approximate Truth and Reality, but ultimately only our biology can ever know the truth and be “set free”, “united with the Universe”, or whatever may be our fate as sapient matter.
The problem with words is that they must be inexact because they,by their very nature,group unlike objects, things, and thoughts. This might be close enough for horseshoes or chatting about the weather but not suitable for philosphical systems beyond the complexity of Tarot cards.
Very true. Words are sufficient for mere idle chatter, but true philosophic inquiry requires the use of a more exacting medium, like telepathy.