I think a variety of (exclusively) philosophical topics (decision theory, philosophy of mind, ethics, etc.) are important to discuss. Unfortunately, I think academic philosophy’s approach to philosophical problems is suboptimal for a variety of reasons. This post is meant to be a summary of these reasons. The main implications are that one should think about how to do philosophy differently and not defer to philosophers as much as one should do to other experts. That is, when I make a claim about some issue in philosophy and a philosopher comes up to me and tells me I’m wrong, I won’t change my mind nearly as much as when I say something about physics and a physicist tells me I’m wrong (other things equal).

Disclaimers

Many people from the sciences have very negative views towards philosophy in a much more general way. For example, some might say that philosophy is useless because it doesn’t make any testable predictions. Or because it has no unified methodology. I on the other hand, don’t think that philosophy is fundamentally useless or anything like that. In contrast I think it is very important to discuss many philosophical topics in an academic way.

I also don’t think that all of academic philosophy is useless or that all academic philosophers have no idea what they are talking about. There are many professional philosophers in academia who do good, interesting and useful work.

I am mainly going to focus on analytic philosophy. Many say that continental philosophy is much worse than analytic philosophy, but I haven’t read much about it, so I cannot really judge. (Luke Muehlhauser writes: “This is philosophy of the ‘Uncle Joe’s musings on the meaning of life’ sort, except that it’s dressed up in big words and long footnotes.”)

List of reasons

• There is very little progress and consensus in philosophy. Even obvious things such as atheism and the rejection of dualism still have significant opposition. Also note that philosophy had a lot of progress in areas which are now not considered philosophy anymore. (Overall, there is a lot of work that could be called philosophy but is done by mathematicians, logicians, computer science, etc.) On many contested issues, people on all sides are very confident in their own position. This kind of lack of consensus makes it impossible not to disagree with philosophers: If you put yourself on one side, you disagree with the other side. If you say that it is unclear which side is right, you disagree with all the philosophers who do think that it is obvious that they are correct.
• Knowing about Dunning-Kruger, overconfidence and other biases and being otherwise careful about disagreeing with experts, I disagree with many philosophers on topics that I have thought about quite a bit. In general there are also philosophers who agree with me on these issues, but I find it odd that they don’t form an overwhelming majority. Here are two examples:
  • Most philosophers (and especially experts on decision theory) would two-box in Newcomb’s problem. I am quite sure that one should one-box (even after reading some of the defences of two-boxing).
  • Most philosophers are moral realists. Some meanings of the term “moral realism” refer to sensible positions, but what I perceive to be the most common meaning of the term is, I think (even after studying books like Shafer-Landau’s), not.
  • While atheism is mainstream among philosophers in general, most philosophers of religion are theists.
• If you ask an average philosopher about two moral problems, the answers you get depend on the order in which you ask her about the moral problems even though most would agree that the order in which you are presented with the problems is morally irrelevant. This indicates that philosophers don’t think about moral problems very systematically, but based on momentary whims. In fact, these order effects are not significantly reduced by philosophical training, indicating that philosophers don’t think about moral problems in a more systematic way than non-philosophers.
• There is a complex of issues that I have with philosophy’s obsession with its own history:
  • There is no proper differentiation between philosophy and history of philosophy. Both in academic papers and courses at the university, the two are mixed together.
  • In most disciplines the most important ideas are collected into textbooks. This is good for various obvious reasons: Whereas original papers are not really optimized for being very accessible, many textbooks compete in how easy to read they are. They also consolidate knowledge, sorting the wheat from the chaff, unify terminology, translate ideas into modern language, etc. Philosophy has textbooks including some good ones (like Baggini and Fosl’s The Philosopher’s Toolkit), but people read the original texts nonetheless. (Some philosophy programs even require students to know Latin or Ancient Greek, as if they were studying the ancient history of philosophy!) When philosophers say, “there’s nothing like reading Kant’s original Kritik der reinen Vernunft”, this sounds suspicious to me. Are they unable to write up Kant’s ideas in modern simple language (like that used in all the other sciences)? Or do they think the exact phrasing is somehow vital to the content? Or maybe even that Kant’s text is already the best representation of his own ideas? I would guess that the answer to these questions is no (for most philosophers), but then they force people to read Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft anyway.
• Philosophy is full of language confusions and terminology chaos. My guess would be that many philosophical discussions would disappear if everyone could settle on proper terminology. For example, it seems likely that much of the discussion around free will is of that kind.
  • Sometimes a philosophical term can have multiple meanings. Many terms’ meanings are extremely fuzzy.
  • Often there are different terms for the same position. For instance, (confidence-adjusted) (intrinsic) attitudinal hedonism, the experience requirement in preference (or desire) theory and subjective desire satisfactionism all seem to refer to the same axiological position.
• On a related note: While (analytic) philosophers pride themselves in being very rigorous, they are usually not. For example, you will often find something like “by happiness we mean pleasure” as a “definition” of the term happiness. I would guess that most people can’t define “pleasure” in a more precise way than happiness. I used to take this argument against philosophy much too far, though. I think that it is often totally fine to not be overly precise: you can meaningfully talk about happiness without being able to write down a mathematical equation with which the happiness of a given brain can be calculated. But it’s important to be conscious of how rigorous one is.
• It’s okay for academic fields to be difficult to understand. In order to communicate efficiently, most fields develop a considerable body of terminology, consisting largely of terms for which there is (sometimes unfortunately) no widely known term. Some sciences also use mathematical notation. All of this seems necessary or at least efficient. Furthermore, scientists often increase accessibility wherever possible by using short sentences, a clear structure, etc. in scientific papers. Some (but by no means all) articles in philosophy on the other hand seem to be hard to read because they use complex syntax and unnecessary terminology.
• Some work in philosophy is done on topics that are also researched in other disciplines. For example, some parts of philosophy are basically about psychology. The philosophical literature often ignores these other disciplines and their findings. This is unfortunate when, for example, philosophical speculations contradict reality. Or when the non-philosophical literature provides more interesting ideas than the philosophical literature.

Further reading

• Richard Carrier: Is Philosophy Stupid?
• Luke Muehlhauser: Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to David Althaus for comments.

Appendix: My personal history with philosophy

I had my first philosophy class in 8th grade, but I was mostly absent because at the time I also studied mathematics at the university and the classes I took there coincided with the philosophy class at school. I also took philosophy in 11th and 12th grade. (The alternative was to take religion.) I remember that I was very excited after the first philosophy lesson in 11th grade but then increasingly disliked it. Some of my reasons (like lack of rigor, etc.) for disliking it were similar to the ones given above, but some were also stupid and probably emanated from a teenager’s contrarian bias or mathematical elitism. I always found the topics of philosophy interesting, though. In all of 11th and 12th grade, the two worst grades I received were in philosophy and ancient greek.

In 2013 I found LessWrong, a community of people who are interested in philosophy but critical of academic philosophy for similar reasons as I am.

In 2015 I wrote and published a paper in a mainstream philosophy journal in which I try to define a certain moral view formally. The first sentence of its abstract is probably my most famous sentence ever: “Most ethical work is done at a low level of formality.” It even made it into a “monstrous metaphysics meme” (ht Matīss Apinis).

I have given academic philosophy many more chances. I attended classes at the philosophy department at the university, I went to talks at conferences and summer schools. Quite a few friends of mine study or have studied philosophy. Because some of my work is philosophical in nature, I often read academic papers in philosophy.