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Notes -
‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’
I quite enjoyed this interview with Alex Byrne, a professor of philosophy at MIT. As an epistemologist his career was built on arguments about the nature of color (or colour, if you prefer) but in the past six years or so he has taken up questions about gender, eventually having a book dropped by Oxford over it. I was not previously aware that he is married to academic biologist Carole Hooven, an apparent victim of "cancel culture" over her writing on the biology of sex.
No one who has followed trans advocacy lately will find much of surprise in the interview, I suspect, but from a professional standpoint I really appreciated him laying this out:
Most of the professional philosophers I've met over the years pride themselves on "challenging" their students' beliefs. This has most often come up in the context of challenging religious dogmas, including faith in God. They (we, I guess I have to say) boast of teaching "critical thinking" through the practice of Socratic inquiry, and assuredly not through any crass indoctrination! And yet in my life I have been to dozens of philosophical conferences, and I cannot remember a single one where I did not at some point encounter the uncritical peddling of doctrinaire political leftism. And perhaps worse: when I have raised even mild pushback to that peddling, usually by raising questions that expose obvious contradictions in a relatively innocuous way, it has never inspired a serious response. Just... uncomfortable laughter, usually. Philosophers--professional argument-makers!--shy away from such argumentation. And yet they do not hesitate to skulk about in the background, wrecking people's careers where possible rather than meeting them in open debate.
I do have some wonderful colleagues and I think there are still many good philosophy professors out there; Byrne appears to be numbered among them. But I have to say that my own experiences conform to his descriptions here. I suspect a lot of it is down to the administration-driven replacement of good philosophers with agenda-driven partisans, which appears to be happening across most departments of higher education, these days. But that is only my best guess.
This state of affairs is undeniable, in my experience. As academia has become less of a walled garden, and more of a finishing school for half the populace, it has lost the functional ability to question seriously the deep truths of our society.
On the one hand because so many more people go to university, the benefit of capturing professors has increased greatly. It also means that it's become harder for professors to hold views the public at large would disagree with, as we have seen with the increasing mobs of students harassing professors with even slightly heterodox views.
As you point out, I also think the fact that modern philosophy disdains any sort of religious or wisdom-focused value structure leads to a lot of idiocy.
At this point it's clear that the majority who are interested in practicing actual philosophy, focused on questions deep assumptions, are doing it outside of the university structure.
I think the divorce of philosophy from any sort of empirical shit-testing has been its downfall. Nobody in ethics seems to ever be concerned that humans actually live by whatever they determine to be ethical. Peter Singer puts out a book that demands equality for animals at least in the moral sense, and nobody seems to ask whether a life lived in this manner is feasible or not. I& we gave full rights to animals, what does that look like, what do we do for food or the like. What do we do when an animal kills a human? The Stoics and other Greek schools practiced philosophy, but they did it with the end of humans actually taking what they say seriously and living in that manner. If they suggest living by reason and not emotionally, that’s what they mean, and they try to do so. If they say “momento mori”, or “Armor Fati,” or whatever, they mean exactly that such teachings should be followed by the student. In the East, Confucius, Buddha, and Lao Tze created (what I view as) philosophy, and they teach with the view of humans doing those things.
Once divorced from the idea that philosophy should influence human life, it becomes a sort of parlor game of playing with the rules of logic and the meanings of words to create “insights” that nobody will ever care about.
I think you're broadly correct, but that you come down too hard on the hardcore analytical philosophy, especially philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. While all of these are some of my longest standing side pursuits, I do admit that they have little to say about how humans out to conduct their lives. But they are not merely parlor games. I subscribe to the idea of quietism.
I've been fascinated with finding ways to improve my own thinking not in terms of knowing more about a subject, but in improving the lowest level functions of thought. The rough analogy is I want my engine to run more efficiently, not to be bigger or use higher octane fuel. I think the Big 3 lines of philosophy I listed above help me do that. Do they directly make my life better? Probably not, but maybe discovering Popper's theory of falsifiability has made me better at spotting bullshit "analysis" and "data science" in journalism, business, and the utter non-field of "popular science."
Beyond that, I think that some of the really esoteric pathways are just fun. I've been reading recently about the eliminative materialism. It's wild. "Turns out, if you're really smart, you'll realize you don't even exist!"
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