With what we currently know about the human brain, behavior, etc and the progress being made, I think philosophy (and thus philosophers) will become less and less important with doctors, scientists and lawyers becoming much more prominent. With that in mind, I’m going to mention Dawkins and Dershowitz.
I agree that Searle is wrong with his Chinese Room argument. He compares a process technically possible today with processes we don’t yet understand and comes to some unimaginative conclusions. He’ll say on the one hand that the brain is device like a computer. But on the other hand he refuses to assume we’ll be able to make a similar one. I suspect he ends up there 1) because he is not an actual computer scientist and 2) is hesitant to make significant leaps from well established science. So if you’d like to discount him for lack of imagination on that point, I wouldn’t argue with you.
I nominated Searle because I like the way he gets right up to the point of refusing to make the leap. He displays little reverence for the grand names of philosophy. He has no problem discarding their philosophies where they rely on things mystical or unscientific. He approaches philosophy from the firmest foundations he can find. I see such an approach as the future of philosophy so I included Searle with Dawkins and later, Sagan. But perhaps Searle is too reliant on firm foundations.
I just reviewed one of Professor Searle’s lectures and I see that I made an important mistake in my word choice here. He would not say that the brain is a device like a computer. He would say that brains are biological structures with physical processes that cause minds and minds are features of brains.* In doing so he removes the question of consciousness from philosophy and delivers it to science.
*To me, it isn’t a very big jump from here to the brain being a processor - a biological computing device - but Searle wouldn’t make that jump. I still admire him for being realistic and materialistic enough to say consciousness and everything that comes from it is something science can deal with.
Diogenes the Cynic writes:
> The Demon-Haunted World is a masterfully written guide to critical thinking. It
> should be required reading in high school.
The Demon-Haunted World isn’t a very good book. It’s not even the best book that Sagan could have written. Towards the end of the book it’s sloppily put together because he was dying of cancer and desperate to finish the book. It’s kind of a miscellaneous grabbag of writings. There’s a lot of biographical material and a lot of what some people would call “philosophizing.” That is, it’s just a bunch of essays full of exhortations about how we should all think more rationally with some examples of how people don’t think rationally, but there isn’t that much useful philosophical advice or analysis. The history of science in the book isn’t very accurate. The closest that Sagan gets to doing a guide to critical thinking is the chapter “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” but this is no more than a sketchy version of what you can find in various standard textbooks on critical thinking. Try the book Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric by Howard Kahane and Nancy Cavender, for instance.
I see such an approach as the past of philosophy. For too long philosophers have
been forced to submit themselves to the hard sciences, and anything they said which
did not derive from the results found in the hard sciences would be hooted at. But
lately a number of philosophers have been calling that mindset into question,
critical of the view that science will be able to solve all problems and answer all
questions. That’s why I mentioned Wilber and Chalmers upthread: they aren’t off
the deep end like Chopra et al. are, but they do have a place for subjective exper-
ience in their philosophies.
I am confident that the hard materialists will be consigned to the dustheap of history
300 years from now, thanked for their limited contributions but hardly consulted
in future discussions and dissertations. If they aren’t it will be because history
will have ended (when civilization ended). Hard materialism as a foundation for
civilization is untenable in the long run, tho any sound future philosophy will
incorporate it into the milieu while simultaneously transcending it.
I’d recommend Wilber’s Quantum Questions, which discusses the views of
many of the quantum/relativisitic theorists from the first part of the century, and
how almost without exception they saw the limits of materialism in what they
were attempting to study.