How do philosophy Tips (Paul Graham)
vo: How to do Philosophy
September 2007
In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy at university. I had several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the less honorable was to shock people. Where I grew up, the university was considered professional training, study philosophy seemed so frankly counterproductive. A bit like cutting holes in his clothes or put a pin in the ear, which were free of other forms of unproductive, which were just beginning to be fashionable.
But I also have other motives more honest. I thought that studying the philosophy would be a direct shortcut to wisdom. All people who were majoring in other things just end up with a package of specific knowledge. I'd learn what was really what.
I tried to read few books of philosophy. Not lately, we did not find those in our high school library. But I tried to read Plato and Aristotle. I doubt that I could understand, but they seemed to talk about something important. I assumed that I would learn what the university.
summer before the end, I followed a few courses in college. I learned a lot during the calculation, but I did not learn much in Philosophy 101. And yet my project to study philosophy remained intact. It was my fault that I had learned nothing. I did not read carefully enough the books in the program. I would give a second chance Principles of Human Knowledge Berkeley university. Something so admired and so difficult to read had to be something in it, all was what.
Twenty-six years later, I still do not understand Berkeley. I have a beautiful edition of his complete works. I just read them one day? Unlikely.
The difference between then and now is that now I understand why Berkeley is probably not worth trying to understand it. I think I see the problem now happened to the philosophy and how it could be repair.
words
I actually found mainly philosophy for most of my studies. It did not work out as I hoped. I did not learn truths of magic compared to which all else was the vulgar specific knowledge. But now I know at least why it did not happen like that. Philosophy does not really object of study, as were math, history or the most academic disciplines. There is no fundamental understanding that we should master. What comes closest is a knowledge that this or that philosopher has said on various topics over the years. There are so few philosophers in the true enough, that people have forgotten who discovered what.
Formal logic is an object of study. I took several courses in logic. I do not know if I learned anything [1] . That seems really important to be able to return to the ideas in his head: see when two ideas do not completely cover the space of possibilities, or when an idea is the same as another, two or three differences. But is that studying logic taught me the importance to think this way, or made better for it? I do not know.
There are things I know I've learned studying philosophy. The most spectacular, I immediately learned the first semester of first year in a course taught by Sydney Shoemaker. I learned that I did not exist. I am (and you) a collection of cells as they go, driven by various forces, which calls itself Me. But there is no central thing, indivisible, which accompanies your identity. We can theoretically lose half of his brain and live. This means that our brain could in theory be cut in half and each half transplanted into different bodies. If you imagine waking up after such an operation, one must imagine to be two people.
The real lesson here is that the concepts we use in everyday life are blurred, and break if pushed too far. Even a concept that is as expensive as I . Took me a while to grasp this, but when it did, it was quite sudden, as someone in the nineteenth century th striking evolution and realizing that the story of creation that child had heard was completely false. [2] Outside of math, there is a limit beyond which we can not push the words, in fact, this is not a bad definition of math to qualify for the study of terms that have precise meaning. The words every day are inherently imprecise. They work quite well in everyday life, we do not realize it. The words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics seems. But we can still break if pushed far enough.
I would say this has always been, unfortunately for philosophy, the central fact of philosophy. Most philosophical debates are not simply affected by confusions over words, but motivated by them. Do we have free will? It depends on what you mean by "free". Do abstract ideas exist? It depends on what you mean by "exist".
commonly been attributed to Wittgenstein the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusion about language. I do not really know how we can assign this idea. I suspect that many people have realized this, but have simply responded by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming teachers of philosophy.
How have things changed so? One thing that people have spent thousands of years studying it can really be a waste of time? Those are interesting questions. Similarly, among the most interesting questions one can ask about the philosophy. The most valid approach to the philosophical tradition this could be not to get lost in unnecessary speculations like Berkeley, but not close them like Wittgenstein, but explore it as an example of reason gone astray.
History
Western philosophy really begins with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. What we know comes from their predecessors fragments and citations from subsequent work, the doctrines of the latter could be described as a speculative cosmology, occasionally venturing into the analysis. Presumably, they were motivated by anything that leads people in any other company to invent cosmologies. [3]
With Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in particular, this tradition has turned a corner. He began to be a lot more analysis. I suspect that Plato and Aristotle were encouraged by the progress in math. Mathematicians have shown that you can come to understand things in a much more conclusive than inventing stories about them pretty. [4]
People talk so much now abstractions that we do not realize that the jump had to be when they started. He probably passed many millennia from the time people started for the first time to describe things as hot or cold, and when someone asked: "What is heat?" Without Clearly this was a very gradual process. We do not know if Plato and Aristotle were the first to ask any of the questions they put it. But their works are the oldest we have to do this at scale, and there's a cool (not to say naive) about them that suggests that they placed some of the issues were new to them at least.
Aristotle in particular reminds me of the phenomenon that occurs when people discover something new, and are so excited, they crossed at a run a huge percentage of the newly discovered territory in one lifetime. If so cases, proof of the newness of this way of thinking. [5]
All this to explain how Plato and Aristotle can be very impressive, yet naive and mistaken. It was very impressive even to ask the questions they asked. This does not mean they were always good answers. It is not considered insulting to say that the ancient Greek mathematicians were naive in some respects, or at least, they lacked some concepts that would have made life easier. So I hope people will not be too offended if I claim that ancient philosophers were similarly naive. In particular, they do not seem to have fully grasped what I called above the central fact of philosophy: that the words break if pushed too far.
"Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers," wrote Rod Brooks, "programs written for them does not work most of the time." [6] Something similar happened when people began to try to talk about abstractions. To their surprise, they were unable to answer on which they were all agree. In fact, it seemed they rarely managed to short responses.
They were actually debating artifacts induced by sampling at too low a resolution.
The proof of worthlessness which turned some of their questions, is how little effect they have. No one, after reading Metaphysics of Aristotle, acts differently accordingly. [7]
Certainly I am not trying to pretend that the ideas should have practical application to be interesting? No, she may not be. Hardy claims that that number theory is not useful, do not disqualify it. But we realized he was wrong. In fact, it is curiously difficult to find an area of math that really has no practical use. And Aristotle's explanation of the ultimate goal of philosophy in Book A of the Metaphysics implies that philosophy should also be useful. Theoretical Knowledge
Aristotle's goal was to find the most general of general principles. The examples he gives are convincing: a worker Ordinary things produces a sense of habit, a master craftsman can do more because it captures the underlying principles. The trend is clear: knowledge is more general, the more admirable. But then he makes a mistake - perhaps the largest error in the history of philosophy. He noted that theoretical knowledge is often acquired for herself, out of curiosity rather than any practical need. Then he argues that there are two types of theoretical knowledge: a part which is useful in practice, and some that do not. Since people who are interested in this last topic for itself, it must be more noble. Then he gives a goal in the Metaphysics , exploration of knowledge that has no practical utility. That means no alarm is triggered when tackling issues grandiose but vaguely understood, and eventually lost in a sea of words.
His mistake was to confuse the motive and result. Certainly, people who want a deep understanding of something are often driven by curiosity rather than any practical need. But this does not mean that they eventually learn is useless. It is very valuable practical to have a deep understanding of what we are doing, even if one is ever asked to solve advanced problems, you can see the shortcuts in the solution of simpler problems, and it has knowledge which will not be undermined in borderline cases, what would happen if we depended on formulas that do not understand. Knowledge is power. That's what makes theoretical knowledge prestigious. This also makes intelligent people curious about some things and not others, our DNA is not as disinterested we might think.
Thus, although the ideas need not have immediate practical applications to be interesting, the kinds of things we find interesting will prove surprisingly often have practical applications. If Aristotle did
came to nothing in the Metaphysics, in part because he was left with conflicting objectives: to explore the most abstract ideas, guided by the assumption that they were unnecessary. It was like an explorer looking for a territory to the north, starting with the assumption that it is located to the south.
And since his work became the map used by subsequent generations of explorers, he also sent them all in the wrong direction. [8] And perhaps the worst is that he has protected the one hand, criticism of others, and secondly, invitations to their internal compass, in establishing the principle that the highest form of theoretical knowledge was necessarily useless. The
Metaphysics is essentially a failed experiment. There are some ideas that deserve to be kept; all had absolutely no effect. The Metaphysics is among the least read of all the famous books. It is not difficult to understand as are Principia of Newton, but the message is garbled.
Arguably it is a failed experiment interesting. But unfortunately this is not the conclusion that the successors of Aristotle's works have drawn as Metaphysics. [9] Shortly thereafter, the western world fell into a difficult period intellectually. Instead versions 1 were supplanted the works of Plato and Aristotle became revered texts need to learn and discuss. And so it went for a long period of shocking. It was not until 1600 (in Europe, where the center of gravity was so moved) we found people confident enough to treat the works of Aristotle as a catalog of errors. And even then it was rare that says simply. If
seems surprising that the interval was so long, it is considered that little progress there was in mathematics from the Hellenistic period and the Renaissance.
In the intervening years, an unfortunate idea stood firm: he was not only acceptable to produce works such as Metaphysics , but it was a particularly prestigious kind of work produced by a class of people called philosophers. No one thought to go back and debug the argument that motivated Aristotle. And so, instead of correcting the problem that Aristotle had discovered by falling into it - you can easily get lost if you speak too freely to very abstract ideas - they continued to fall into it.
The Singularity
Curiously, however, the work they produced continued to attract new readers. In this regard, the traditional philosophy occupies a kind of singularity. If one writes so confused about big ideas, you produce something that seems irresistibly attractive to students inexperienced but intellectually ambitious. At first glance, it is difficult to distinguish something that is difficult to understand because the author was confused in his own mind, something like a mathematical proof, which is difficult to understand because ideas it represents are difficult to understand. For someone who has not learned the difference, traditional philosophy seems extremely attractive: as hard (and therefore impressive) as math, however, a broader scope. That's what attracted me when I was a schoolboy.
This singularity is even more remarkable in that it has its own integrated defense. In general, when things are hard to understand, people who suspect that this is nonsense silent. There is no way to prove that a text has no sense. What comes closest is to show that the official judges of a certain class of texts can not be distinguished from placebo. [10]
And so, instead of denouncing philosophy, most people suspected it was a waste of time have just studied other things. That alone is pretty damning evidence, considering the claims of philosophy. This is supposed to take care of ultimate truths. Surely, all intelligent people would be interested, if it obtained results in this regard.
Because defects philosophy have extended the types of people who could correct them, they tended to recur. Bertrand Russell wrote this in a letter in 1912:
far, the people attracted to philosophy have been those who loved the sweeping generalizations, which were all wrong, which made that few gifted minds are accurate attacked the discipline. [11]
His reaction was to drop Wittgenstein top, with spectacular results.
I think Wittgenstein deserves to be famous, not for the discovery that most of philosophy which preceded it was a waste of time (finding that, judging from circumstantial evidence, must be made by any intelligent person who had studied a little philosophy and declined to pursue further), but for how he reacts . [12] Instead of going quietly to another area, he put the mess from the inside. It was Gorbachev.
The field of philosophy is still shaken from the fright Wittgenstein gave him. [13] Later in his life he spent much time talking about how the words worked. Since seems that this is allowed, that is what many philosophers now. Meanwhile, sensing a void in the department of metaphysical speculation, people who were formerly of literary criticism quietly moved closer to a Kantian direction, with new names as "literary theory", "critical theory" and, when they're feeling ambitious, "theory" for short. Writing is the word salad of which we are familiar:
Gender is not like some other grammatical forms which express precisely a mode of conception without reality that corresponds to the conceptual mode, and therefore do not express precisely something in reality by which the intellect could be encouraged to design a thing as he does, even where this ground is not something in the thing as such. [14] The singularity
I have described do not go away. There is a market for writing that seems impressive and can not be refuted. There will always both supply and demand. Thus, if one group abandons this territory, there will always be others willing to occupy. A Proposal
We may be able to do better. Here is an intriguing possibility. Maybe we should do what Aristotle meant to do, instead of doing what he did. The goal he announced in Metaphysics seems those who are worth being pursued: to discover the most general truths. That sounds good. But instead of trying to discover because they are useless, try to discover because they are useful.
I propose that we try again, but we used this criterion to now despised, the applicability as a guide to keep us from going astray into a swamp of abstractions in us asking questions. Instead of trying to answer the question: What are
the most general truths?
try to answer the question:
Of all the useful things we can say that they are the most general?
The utility test that I propose is whether we are pushing the people who read what we wrote to do something differently then. That we must give specific advice (even implicit), we keep wandering beyond the resolution of the words we use.
The objective is the same as that of Aristotle, we are approaching just a different direction.
As an example of useful and general idea, consider that of the controlled experiment. There is an idea that has proved widely applicable. Some may say that this is part science, but it is not part of any science specific, which is literally the meta-physical (in our sense of "meta"). The idea of evolution is another. It turns out to have fairly broad applications - for example, genetic algorithms and even product design. Frankfurt's distinction between lying and bullshitting a recent example seems promising. [15]
It seems to me what philosophy should look like: general observations rather push someone who understood them to do something differently.
Such observations will necessarily be about things that are defined imprecisely. Once they begin to use words with precise meaning, it does math. So, from the utility does not completely solve the problem I described above - it does not purge the metaphysical singularity. But it should help. It gives people with good intentions a new roadmap towards abstraction. And they may well produce things that, by comparison, tarnish the writings of people with bad intentions.
A disadvantage of this approach is that it will not produce the kind of writing that you are worth a post holder. And not only because it is not fashionable at the moment. To get tenure in any what areas we should not reach conclusions with which members of tenure committees may disagree. In practice, there are two kinds of solutions to this problem. In math and science, we must prove what they say, or, in one way or another, adjusting its claims so that nothing false claim ("6 of 8 patients had lower blood pressure after treatment). In the letters, we may either refrain from drawing any definite conclusion (eg, conclude that the issue is complex), or draw conclusions so narrow that nobody is concerned enough to be disagree with you.
The kind of philosophy that I advocate will be able to take any of these paths. At best, we will be able to reach the model show the essayist, not the mathematician or the experimenter. And yet, we will not be able to pass the test of utility without underlie specific conclusions and fairly widely applicable. Worse yet, the test utility will tend to produce results that hinder people: it is useless to tell people things they already believe, and people are often frustrated to be told things that they do not believe.
Here's something exciting though. Anyone can do that. Achieving general and useful in addition, beginning with the useful and by starting the generality do is perhaps not the young teachers who seek to become owners, but it's better for everyone else, including teachers already hold. This side of the mountain slope is gentle and pleasant. We can start by writing things that are useful but very specific, and then gradually make them more general. At Joe's, there are good burritos. What makes a good burrito? What makes good food? What makes something good? We can continue as we want. We did not go all the way to the top of the mountain. We did not have to tell everyone that because of the philosophy. If
doing philosophy seems daunting, here's a thought encouraging. The field is much younger than it looks. Although the first philosophers in the Western tradition lived about 2500 years ago, it would be misleading to say that the area 2,500 years ago, because for most of this period, the major practitioners did little more than writing Plato and Aristotle comments on any checking over their shoulder if there was not a new invasion army. And at times when they did not, the philosophy was hopelessly intertwined with religion. She struggled not to its links there about two centuries, and even then, was struck structural problems that I described above. If I say this, some say that is a generalization ridiculously disproportionate and uncharitable, and others will say there is nothing new, but here goes: to judge by their work, most philosophers so far have wasted their time. So in a sense, the field is still in its infancy. [16]
This seems a preposterous claim. It will not seem so preposterous in 10,000 years. Civilization always seems old because it is always the oldest ever. The only way to tell if something is really old or not is to look at the structural evidence, and structurally, the philosophy is young and is still unfolding in the unexpected collapse of the words.
philosophy is as young now as were mathematics in 1500. There is much to discover.
Notes
[1] In practice, formal logic is not very useful because, despite some progress over the last 150 years, we are always able to formalize a small proportion of statements . It is possible that we can never do better in this area, for the same reason that the "knowledge representation" typical of the 1980s could never have worked, it is possible that quantities of statements have no representation more concise and a huge brain state analog.
[2] It was difficult for contemporaries of Darwin enter it more than we can imagine easily. The story of creation in the Bible is not only a Judeo-Christian concept, that's pretty much what everyone should believe that since man is man. What was difficult to understand evolution, was to realize that species were not as they seemed to be immutable, but had in fact evolved from different agencies and easier during periods whose duration exceeded the imagination.
Now we did not make that leap. There is no one in an industrialized country would be confronted for the first time the idea of evolution into adulthood. Everyone hears about children or as truth or as heresy.
[3] The Greek philosophers before Plato wrote in verse. It must have affected what they said. If one tries to write about the nature of the world in verse, it inevitably turns to cast. The prose can be more precise, and less definitive.
[4] The philosophy is a little brother lazy math. She was born when Plato and Aristotle looked at the works of their predecessors and said in response: "Why can not you be more like your brother?" Russell said the same thing 2300 years later.
Math is precisely half the most abstract ideas, and philosophy, half vague. It is probably inevitable that the philosophy will suffer from the comparison, because there is no lower limit to its accuracy. Bad math is boring, while bad philosophy is absurd. And yet there few good ideas imprecise in half.
[5] The best work was done by Aristotle in logic and zoology, two sciences that can be said that he has invented. But the most dramatic break from his predecessors was a new way of thinking, much more analytical. Arguably he was the first scientist.
[6] Brooks, Rodney, Programming in Common Lisp , Wiley, 1985 94.
[7] Some would say that we owe more to Aristotle than we believe, because his ideas were one of the ingredients of our culture common. Without doubt, the quantities of words we use are connected with Aristotle, but it seems a bit much to suggest that we would not have the concept of the essence of a thing, or the distinction between matter and form, if Aristotle had not written on them.
There is a way to see how much we really depend on Aristotle, which would be to compare the differences between European culture and Chinese culture: what ideas were present in European culture in 1800 that were not in the culture China, under the contribution of Aristotle?
[8] The meaning of the word "philosophy" has changed over time. In antiquity, it covered a wide range of subjects, comparable in size to our "scholarly" (but without the methodological implications). So even the time of Newton, she understood what we now call "science." But today, the core of the discipline is still what seemed the core of Aristotle's attempt to discover the most general truths.
Aristotle did not call this the "metaphysics". This name was assigned to it because the book we now call Metaphysics came after (meta = after) Physics in publishing classic works of Aristotle, collected by Andronicus of Rhodes three centuries later. What we call "metaphysics", Aristotle called "first philosophy".
[9] It is possible that Aristotle's immediate successors are aware of this but it's hard to say because most of their work is lost.
[10] Sokal, Alan, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Transformative Hermeneutics of Toward a Quantum Gravity ", Social Text 46/47, pp. 217-252.
seems abstract nonsense that sound very attractive when they are stuck with a hand that the audience is already looking to take. If so, we should observe that they are more popular with groups who are (or feel) weak. The powerful do not need their comfort.
[11] Letter to Ottoline Morrell, December 1912. Cited in:
Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius , Penguin, 1991, p. 75.
[12] A preliminary result shows that any metaphysics between Aristotle and 1783 had been a waste of time, is due to E. Kant.
[13] Wittgenstein showed a mastery in which the inhabitants of Cambridge seemed particularly vulnerable in the early twentieth th century - perhaps in part because many were raised religiously Then stop thinking, and so have a free space in the head for someone to tell them what to do (Marx and others chose Cardinal Newman), and partly because a quiet and serious as Cambridge at that time had no natural immunity against the messianic figures, as European policy had then no natural immunity against dictators.
[14] This actually comes from Ordinatio of John Duns Scotus (c. 1300), replacing "number" with "gender". More things change, the more they stay the same.
[15] Frankfurt, Harry and Senecal, Didier (trans.), The art of bullshitting (On Bullshit) , 10/18, 2006.
[16] Some introductions to philosophy argue that philosophy is now being studied as the process rather than a truth that would learn. Philosophers whose works are treated would roll over in their graves upon hearing this. They hoped to do more than serve as examples to learn how to argue: they hoped they were getting results. Most were wrong, but that does not seem an impossible hope.
This argument is similar to my eyes to someone, in 1500, noting the lack of results obtained by alchemy and saying that it was worth the process. No, he did it badly. Finally, it was possible to transmute lead into gold (not economically, however, at current energy prices), but it was turned back and try another approach to achieve this result.
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