(Disclaimer: My knowledge of philosophy is at the 101 level.)

I do think a lot of what passes for philosophy is bogus. But the bogus philosophers still have "Department of Philosophy" on their university letterhead. Meanwhile: To a first approximation, all biologists believe in evolution.

I wasn't one of the silent downvoters, but I went ahead and downvoted without being silent because your comment just misunderstands Larks's. He did not even implicitly claim that there is a creationism tradition in biology, but rather an ongoing, publicized debate between evolution and creationism, which is analogous to analytic vs. continental philosophy, if one is laughably wrong but still famous for whatever reason.

Hi, shminux. I recently downvoted this comment of yours. I did recognize you, but that's from seeing you in the lesswrong IRC channel, where you make a significant portion of the interesting discussion, not from lesswrong.com, where I don't generally look at the authors of comments or posts unless I'm having trouble following a discussion or I feel that it would be prudent to associate the author with their comment or post (for instance, I learned the name of user Nisan after they posted Formulas of Arithmetic That Behave Like Decision Agents, which contained a splendidly unusual amount of math for lw). I was particularly surprised by the low quality of your arguments in that thread, given my past experience with you. Still, I disliked one of your comments first, and saw your name second.

I also responded to one of your comments in that thread, here. I didn't further downvote your comments, because I make a point of not downvoting people whom I've engaged in discussion, just as a point of argumentative hygiene. Absent that, I might have downvoted every comment of yours that I read, without reply. I don't have any problem downvoting silently. It might be a polite norm to give feedback to any post or comment of low quality, but it is not a good use of my time in general, certainly not for that thread, in which many people were responding to you with comments to the effect that your conclusions were sloppy or informal. If other people behave as I do, then I would guess it was not one person who downvoted you, but a few people who did, and that the downvotes were given on the basis of your comments, rather than on who you are.

Yeah, there does seem to be some amount of karmassination going on here.

Well, I don't have a low opinion of my chosen profession: I'm very happy with what I do. But I do have a low opinion of some philosophers and some philosophical work, along with a high opinion of some others.

My original reply was just intended to point out that a) the analytic/continental divide is no longer a significant part of the academic philosophical world, and b) that you don't have good reasons to compare philosophy to an academic science (or to a form of art).

As to how we should think of philosophy, I think we have an easy way to approach the question: how do you think about what you're doing right now? Do you take yourself to be producing a work of art? Do you take yourself to be engaging in scientific theorizing or experiment of some kind? What methods are you applying? What standards are you holding yourself to?

I'm asking these questions in seriousness, not as a rhetorical move. I want to know your answers. I don't think I'm presently engaged in either science or art. I consider myself held to standards of honesty and sincerity, and to producing good and convincing arguments. I think that if what I'm doing right now has no relation to the truth, then what I'm doing is in vain. I also don't think I have an answer to the question 'what is philosophy and how should it be treated?'