So the only one of these that jumps out at me as being really unhelpful is
"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.
This fails at multiple levels. First it fails, because pretty much everything Kant wrote about geometry runs into the serious problem that his whole idea is deeply connected to Euclidean geometry being the one, true correct geometry. Second, this runs into the earlier discussed problem of trying to discuss what major philosophers meant, as if that had intrinsic interest. Third, a glance strongly suggests that they are ignoring the large body of actual developmental psych data about how children actually do and do not demonstrate intuitions for their surrounding geometry.
I don't know enough about the subjects to say much about the Skow, Uzquiano, and Button although I suspect that the third is confusing linguistic with metaphysical issues.
Since you're criticizing an article based on my own chosen excerpts of it, it would be irresponsible of me not to give fuller quotes so that Dunlop can respond:
...Subsequent advances in mathematics and physics appeared to discredit Kant's view of intuition. They showed that no geometry can be known a priori to apply to physical space. In their light, Kant's view appeared to rest on a confusion between pure geometry, which is known a priori but empty, and its applications. While conceding that Kant confuses pure and applied geometry, P. F. Strawson tries to
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.
Previous post: Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn't