Philosophical training should begin with the latest and greatest formal methods ("Pearl" for the probabilistic graphical models made famous in Pearl 1988), and the latest and greatest science ("Kahneman" for the science of human reasoning reviewed in Kahneman 2011).
More Pearl and Kahneman, less Plato and Kant Scientific methods have improved over time, and so can philosophical methods. Why, come up with better philosophical methods, of course! But the field of philosophy doesn't seem to be very good at answering them. (I say more about the reasons for philosophy's degenerate state here.)Īs the CEO of a philosophy/math/compsci research institute, I think many philosophical problems are important. philosophy departments - NYU, Rutgers, Princeton, Michigan Ann Arbor, and Harvard - and you'll find that they spend a lot of time with (1) old dead guys who were wrong about almost everything because they knew nothing of modern logic, probability theory, or science, and with (2) 20th century philosophers who were way too enamored with cogsci-ignorant armchair philosophy. Check the syllabi of the undergraduate "intro to philosophy" classes at the world's top 5 U.S. How did philosophy get this way? Russell's hypothesis is not too shabby. You bet. There's some good philosophy out there, but much of it is bad enough to make CMU philosopher Clark Glymour suggest that on tight university budgets, philosophy departments could be defunded unless their work is useful to (cited by) scientists and engineers - just as his own work on causal Bayes nets is now widely used in artificial intelligence and other fields. I've complained before that philosophy is a diseased discipline which spends far too much of its time debating definitions, ignoring relevant scientific results, and endlessly re-interpreting old dead guys who didn't know the slightest bit of 20th century science. Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject. Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy
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