Let's add some data. Noûs is the second-highest rated general philosophy journal. Here are its 2012 articles, with abstracts/introductions:
Dorsey. "Weak Anti-Rationalism and the Demands of Morality." The demandingness of act consequentialism (AC) is well-known and has received much sophisticated treatment. Few have been content to defend AC's demands. Much of the response has been to jettison AC in favor of a similar, though significantly less demanding view. [...] Given that AC requires agents to promote goodneess, and given that "goodness" here is most often construed as impartial and aggregative between persons, were I in a position to save others from death by sacrificing myself or my most important interests, I am morally required, on AC, to do so. More rare, however, is the suggestion that we should reconsider whether excessive demandingness is a true objection to any moral theory. [...] I argue here that the demandingness objection requires an unstated premise: the overriding rational authority of moral demands. I shall further argue that there is good reason to reject this premise.
Portmore. "Imperfect Reasons and Rational Options." Agents often face a choice of what to do. And it seems that, in most of these choice situations, the relevant reasons do not require performing some particular act, but instead permit performing any of numerous act alternatives. This is known as the basic belief. Below, I argue that the best explanation for the basic belief is not that the relevant reasons are incommensurable (Raz) or that their justifying strength exceeds the requiring strength of opposing reasons (Gert), but that they are imperfect reasons—reasons that do not support performing any particular act, but instead support choosing any of the numerous alternatives that would each achieve the same worthy end. In the process, I develop and defend a novel theory of objective rationality, arguing that it is superior to its two most notable rivals.
Gauker. "What Tipper is Ready for: A Semantics for Incomplete Predicates." This paper presents a precise semantics for incomplete predicates such as “ready”. Incomplete predicates have distinctive logical properties that a semantic theory needs to accommodate. [...] The account offered here defines contexts as structures containing an element called a proposition set, which contains atomic propositions and negations of atomic propositions. The condition under which “Tipper is ready” is true in a context is defined in terms of the contents of the proposition set for the context. On this account, the content of the context pertinent to a conversation must be determined not by what speakers have in mind but by relations of objective relevance.
Dunlop. "Kant and Strawson on the Content of Geometrical Concepts." This paper considers Kant's understanding of conceptual representation in light of his view of geometry. [...] While conceding that Kant confuses pure and applied geometry, P. F. Strawson tries to preserve the interest of his view. Strawson seeks to explain how the application of geometry can be independent of experience. [...] I sketch a way of reconciling Strawson's interpretation of "pure intuition” (on which it represents objects as we imagine, or are prepared to picture, them) with Kant's view that it proves the applicability of concepts independently of experience. Pure intuition can be taken, in the spirit of Strawson's interpretation, to represent procedures for constructing objects that fall under the concepts. I argue that on Kant's view, the representation of such procedures indeed yields a priori knowledge of the applicability of concepts.
Ichikawa & Jarvis. "Rational Imagination and Modal Knowledge." How do we know what's (metaphysically) possible and impossible? Arguments from Kripke and Putnam suggest that possibility is not merely a matter of (coherent) conceivability/imaginability. For example, we can coherently imagine that Hesperus and Phosphorus are distinct objects even though they are not possibly distinct. Despite this apparent problem, we suggest, nevertheless, that imagination plays an important role in an adequate modal epistemology. When we discover what is possible or what is impossible, we generally exploit important connections between what is possible and what we can coherently imagine. We can often come to knowledge of metaphysical modality a priori.
Glüer & Pagin. "General Terms and Relational Modality." [N]atural language natural kind terms are associated with two properties: a manifest, stereotypical property, and an underlying physical property realizing, instantiating, and (in many cases) explaining the manifest qualities of its instances. Natural kind terms are peculiar in that their modal profile is governed by the underlying property. To implement this idea formally, we shall extend the ‘evaluation switcher semantics’ we have earlier suggested for proper names and modal operators.
Siegel. "Cognitive Penetrability and Perceptual Justification." It is sometimes said that in depression, everything looks grey. If this is true, then mood can influence the character of perceptual experience: depending only on whether a viewer is depressed or not, how a scene looks to that viewer can differ even if all other conditions stay the same. This would be an example of cognitive penetration of visual experience by another mental state. [...] This paper [concentrates] on a simple and popular theory of perceptual justification known as dogmatism. I will argue that there are cases in which dogmatism predicts that a cognitively penetrated visual experience can elevate the subject from an epistemically bad situation to an epistemically better one, yet in which it is implausible to suppose that such epistemic elevation takes place.
Skow. "Why Does Time Pass?" According to the moving spotlight theory of time, the property of being present moves from earlier times to later times, like a spotlight shone on spacetime by God. [...] My main goal in this paper is to present a new version of the moving spotlight theory (though in some respects the theory I present also resembles the growing block universe theory of time). This version makes a connection between the passage of time (the motion of the NOW) and change. In fact, it uses facts about change to explain facts about the passage of time. [...] It explains both why the NOW moves, and why it moves at a constant rate.
Button. "Spotty Scope and Our Relation to Fictions." Whatever the attractions of Tolkein's world, irrealists about fictions do not believe literally that Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit. Instead, irrealists believe that, according to The Lord of the Rings {Bilbo is a hobbit}. But when irrealists want to say something like “I am taller than Bilbo”, there is nowhere good for them to insert the operator “according to The Lord of the Rings”. This is an instance of the operator problem. In this paper, I outline and criticise Sainsbury's (2006) spotty scope approach to the operator problem. Sainsbury treats the problem as syntactic, but the problem is ultimately metaphysical.
Uzquiano. "Before-Effect without Zeno Causality." José Bernardete presented a family of puzzles in which an open-ended series of events, whose limit is a point earlier than each event in the series, necessitates a before-effect. The more radical cases involve an open-ended series of hypothetical events[....] The purpose of this note is, first, to argue that not every “before-effect” is caused by the events in the open-ended series that follows, and, second, to raise the question of when, if ever, is a “before-effect” causally influenced by the open ended sequence of actual or hypothetical events that follow.
Smithies. "The Normative Role of Knowledge." I argue that knowledge plays an important normative role in assertion and action, which is explained and unified by its more fundamental normative role in belief. Moreover, I propose a distinctive account of what this normative role consists in. I argue that knowledge is the aim of belief, which sets a normative standard of correctness and a corresponding normative standard of justification. According to my proposal, it is correct to believe, assert and act on a proposition if and only if one is in a position to know it. By contrast, one has justification to believe, assert and act on a proposition if and only if one has justification to believe that one is in a position to know it.
Choi. "Intrinsic Finks and Dispositional/Categorical Distinction." I will first develop from my semantic account of dispositions what I think the correct formulation of the dispositional/categorical distinction in terms of counterfactual conditionals. It will be argued that my formulation does not have the shortcomings that have plagued previously proposed ones. Then I will turn my attention to one of its consequences, the thesis that dispositional properties are not susceptible to intrinsic finks. [...] I will remedy my defense of the impossibility of intrinsically finkable dispositions and then refute some of apparently powerful criticisms of it.
Let's add some data.
Okay, so we've more or less determined that the stuff going on at Nous is very different than what the post presented. However, looking at The Philosophical Review and Mind's recent issues have set off some alarming bells in my mind. Unfortunately, I don't have time to investigate further, but we may need to consider the possibility that the texts were representative and Nous is just a superior journal (in LW terms) than the others...
Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
I've complained before that philosophy is a diseased discipline which spends far too much of its time debating definitions, ignoring relevant scientific results, and endlessly re-interpreting old dead guys who didn't know the slightest bit of 20th century science. Is that still the case?
You bet. There's some good philosophy out there, but much of it is bad enough to make CMU philosopher Clark Glymour suggest that on tight university budgets, philosophy departments could be defunded unless their work is useful to (cited by) scientists and engineers — just as his own work on causal Bayes nets is now widely used in artificial intelligence and other fields.
How did philosophy get this way? Russell's hypothesis is not too shabby. Check the syllabi of the undergraduate "intro to philosophy" classes at the world's top 5 U.S. philosophy departments — NYU, Rutgers, Princeton, Michigan Ann Arbor, and Harvard — and you'll find that they spend a lot of time with (1) old dead guys who were wrong about almost everything because they knew nothing of modern logic, probability theory, or science, and with (2) 20th century philosophers who were way too enamored with cogsci-ignorant armchair philosophy. (I say more about the reasons for philosophy's degenerate state here.)
As the CEO of a philosophy/math/compsci research institute, I think many philosophical problems are important. But the field of philosophy doesn't seem to be very good at answering them. What can we do?
Why, come up with better philosophical methods, of course!
Scientific methods have improved over time, and so can philosophical methods. Here is the first of my recommendations...
More Pearl and Kahneman, less Plato and Kant
Philosophical training should begin with the latest and greatest formal methods ("Pearl" for the probabilistic graphical models made famous in Pearl 1988), and the latest and greatest science ("Kahneman" for the science of human reasoning reviewed in Kahneman 2011). Beginning with Plato and Kant (and company), as most universities do today, both (1) filters for inexact thinkers, as Russell suggested, and (2) teaches people to have too much respect for failed philosophical methods that are out of touch with 20th century breakthroughs in math and science.
So, I recommend we teach young philosophy students:
(In other words: train philosophy students like they do at CMU, but even "more so.")
So, my own "intro to philosophy" mega-course might be guided by the following core readings:
(There are many prerequisites to these, of course. I think philosophy should be a Highly Advanced subject of study that requires lots of prior training in maths and the sciences, like string theory but hopefully more productive.)
Once students are equipped with some of the latest math and science, then let them tackle The Big Questions. I bet they'd get farther than those raised on Plato and Kant instead.
You might also let them read 20th century analytic philosophy at that point — hopefully their training will have inoculated them from picking up bad thinking habits.
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