How to Do Philosophy, by Paul Graham
Paul Graham takes it upon himself to show us all how to do philosophy. In a way, it’s refreshingly honest and ambitious; in another, it’s old news, sometimes even plain wrong.
What strikes me is the justification those who proclaim philosophy dead or useless use. They invariably arrive at this conclusion by philosophizing. So, Paul Graham’s philosophizing has made him realize that philosophy is useless. It’s made him realize that most philosophy doesn’t cause people to do anything different after they’ve read and digested it. Is that supposed to make me do things differently? No, I think a lot of the time, people don’t change how they think because they’re lazy. But that’s another topic entirely.
There’s a lot to agree with there. If you think I’m needlessly critical, it’s because I can’t be bothered to shout “me too!” in all the places I agree.
Instead, let’s see some disagreement. PG writes:
Instead of version 1s to be superseded, the works of Plato and Aristotle became revered texts to be mastered and discussed. And so things remained for a shockingly long time. It was not till around 1600 (in Europe, where the center of gravity had shifted by then) that one found people confident enough to treat Aristotle’s work as a catalog of mistakes. And even then they rarely said so outright.
If it seems surprising that the gap was so long, consider how little progress there was in math between Hellenistic times and the Renaissance.
Here, Paul completely glosses over the huge contributions of Islamic mathematics, which flourished between the founding of Islam and up until the renaissance. The fact that the word “algorithm” derives from the name of Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī is not simply trivia, it’s an indication of some of the roots of algebra (pun not intended).
Some of what Graham writes is old news. People on reddit pointed out that his essay is similar to the pragmatist tradition.
One more thing stuck out. In a footnote, Graham writes:
In practice formal logic is not much use, because despite some progress in the last 150 years we’re still only able to formalize a small percentage of statements. We may never do that much better, for the same reason 1980s-style “knowledge representation” could never have worked; many statements may have no representation more concise than a huge, analog brain state
I disagree strongly. Not that formal logic isn’t much in use, but that it couldn’t or shouldn’t be. In fact, I think a cursory introduction to formal logic and common fallacies would be a great contribution to obligatory education. We are surrounded by arguments (in the formal sense) every day. People who have influence on our daily lives are promoting conclusions by unsound and often also invalid arguments all the time. We ought to be able to recognize them.
I think knowing how to, roughly, view an argument in the abstract and see if its conclusion follows from its premises, and to be able to recognize explicit and implicit premises, is a very important skill that, unfortunately, has waned, if it was ever present in the general population.
I’m not saying this to put myself on a pedestal; I’m sure I’m pretty lousy myself. I wish it were not so.
