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Peterdjones comments on Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn't - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure that more rationality in philosophy would help enough as far as FAI is concerned. I expect that if philosophers became more rational, they would mainly just become more uncertain about various philosophical positions, rather than reach many useful (for building FAI) consensuses.
If you look at the most interesting recent advances in philosophy, it seems that most of them were made by non-philosophers. For example, Turing, Church, and other's work on understanding the nature of computation, von Neumann and Morgenstern's decision theory, Tegmark's Ultimate Ensemble, and algorithmic information theory / Solomonoff Induction. (Can anyone think of a similarly impressive advance made by professional philosophers, in this same time frame?) Based on this, I think appropriate background knowledge and raw intellectual firepower (most of the smartest humans probably go into math/science instead of philosophy) are perhaps more important than rationality for making philosophical progress.
ETA:
I'm only familiar with about a third of these (not counting Tarski who I agreed with JoshuaZ is more of a mathematician than philosopher), but the ones that I am familiar with do not seem as interesting/impressive/fruitful/useful as the advances I mentioned in the grandparent comment. If you could pick one or two on your list for me to study in more detail, which would you suggest?
I know you aren't asking me, but my choices to answer this question would be Popper's Philosophy of Science; Rawls and Nozick's Political Philosophy and Quine.
Interesting to whom? Fruitful for what?
According to my own philosophical interests, which as it turned out (i.e., apparently by coincidence) also seems well aligned with what's useful for building FAI. I guess one thing that might be causing us to talk a bit past each other is that I read the opening post as talking about philosophy in the context of building FAI (since I know that's what the author is really interested in), but you may be seeing it as talking about philosophy in general (and looking at the post again I notice that it doesn't actually mention Friendly AI at all except by linking to a post about it).
Anyway, if you think any of the examples you gave might be especially interesting to someone like me, please let me know. Or, if you want, tell me which is most interesting to you and why.
Most of your examples seem valid but this one is strongly questionable:
This example doesn't work. Tarski was a professional mathematician. There was a lot of interplay at the time between math and philosophy, but it seems he was closer to the math end of things. He did at times apply for philosophy positions, but for the vast majority of his life he was doing work as a mathematician. He was a mathematician/logician when he was at the Institute for Advanced Study, and he spent most of his professional career as a professor at Berkley in the math department. Moreover, while he did publish some papers in philosophy proper, he was in general a very prolific writer, and the majority of his work (like his work with quantifier elimination in the real numbers, or the Banach-Tarski paradox) are unambiguously mathematical.
Similarly, the people who studied under him are all thought of as mathematicians(like Julia Robinson), or mathematician-philosophers(Feferman), with most in the first category.
Overall, Tarski was much closer to being a professional mathematician whose work sometimes touched on philosophy than a professional philosopher who sometimes did math.
Made me laugh for a second seeing those two on the same line because Popper (falsifiability) and Kuhn (Structures of Scientific Revolutions) are not particularly related.
Not at all. i should probably have put them on separate lines.