# Philosophy's Future  ## Metadata - Author: [[Russell Blackford,Damien Broderick]] - Full Title: Philosophy's Future - Category: #books - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: All rights reserved. ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Massimo Pigliucci ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kk7ew9w3nwyf0tw1f5aff76y)) > By “rigid properties” here Smolin means that the objects in question, once we become aware of them, present us with “highly constrained” choices about their properties. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt662w35zws84596fx06j7sb)) > I have referred twice already to the idea that philosophy is closer to mathematics and logic (and a bit further from science) via a qualification. The qualification is that philosophy is, in fact, inherently concerned with the state of the world (unlike mathematics and logic, which while useful to scientists, could be, and largely are, pursued without any reference whatsoever to how the world actually is). If you are doing ethics, or political philosophy, for instance, you are very much concerned with those aspects of the world that deal with interactions among humans within the context of their societies. If you are doing philosophy of mind you are ultimately concerned with how actual human (and perhaps artificial) brains work and generate consciousness and intelligence. Even if you are a metaphysician – engaging in what is arguably the most abstract field of philosophical inquiry – you are still trying to provide an account of how things hang together, so to speak, in the real cosmos. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kk937te3xbsehzkm8r505jw4)) > This means that the basic parameters that philosophers use as their inputs, the starting points of their philosophizing, their equivalent of axioms in mathematics and assumptions in logic (or rules in chess) are *empirical* data about the world. This data comes from both everyday experience (since the time of the pre‐Socratics) and of course increasingly from the world of science itself. Philosophy, I maintain, is in the business of exploring the sort of conceptually evoked spaces that Smolin is talking about, where the evocation is the result of whatever starting assumptions are made by individual philosophers working within a particular field and, crucially, of the constraints that are imposed by our best understanding of how the world actually is. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kk93bf5q6rbn4rqqjbrsychn)) > Moody concludes that philosophy does not make progress1 or progress3, because its history has not yielded a trail of solved problems. What about progress2? He takes up the possibility that perhaps philosophy is not a type of inquiry after all, and analyzes in some detail two alternative conceptions: Wittgenstein’s (1965) idea of philosophy as “therapy” and Richard Rorty’s (1980) so‐called “conversational model” of philosophy. As Moody (1986, 38) summarizes it: “Wittgenstein believed that philosophical problems are somehow spurious and that the activity of philosophy … should terminate with the withdrawal, or deconstruction, of philosophical questions.” On this view, then, there is progress, of sorts, in philosophy, but it is the sort of “terminus” brought about by committing *seppuku*. As Moody rather drily comments, while nobody can argue that Wittgenstein’s ideas have not been taken seriously, it is equally undeniable that philosophy has gone forward largely as if the therapeutic approach had never been articulated. If a proposed account of the nature of philosophy has so blatantly been ignored by the relevant epistemic community, we can safely file it away. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kpqmzdnb6aqt16nad0g4m9b0)) > Rorty’s starting point is what he took to be the (disputable, in my opinion) observation that philosophy has failed at its self‐appointed task of analysis and criticism. Moody quotes him as saying (1986, 39): “The attempts of both analytic philosophers and phenomenologists to ‘ground’ this and ‘criticize’ that were shrugged off by those whose activities were purportedly being grounded and criticized.” Rorty arrived at this because of his rejection of what he sees as philosophy’s “hangover” from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when philosophers were attempting to set their inquiry within a framework that allowed a priori truths to be discovered (think Descartes and Kant), even though David Hume dealt that framework a fatal blow during the eighteenth century. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kpqmzqzng99chtt2t1y84t66))