4 Brand Spanking new fields for Philosophy

Here are some cutting edges in philosophy these days:


1) Philosophy of Language and Analytic Philosophy - I have described this to death on this blog, and I have actually done very little of it.

The Gist: These guys build very intricate systems for representing knowledge and answering the basic questions of life.

What it looks like: They use discreet math and symbolic logic, which looks like atomic sentences and predicates (capital and lower case letters, like Pa, where Adam is a, 'eats a popsicle' is P ) and four or five symbols; interspersed with very dry sometimes fun sometimes boring essays.


People they use :
They dip in to Frege, Russell, and Kant, very often; with an emphasis on the newer guys including Chomsky, Kripke, Quine, among others.

Minor details: Sometimes this stuff is heartbreakingly boring. Sorry.

Concrete usages: This language-writing stuff turns out to be great for writing systems for machines, computers and so on.


2) Political Philosophy and Ethics:

Political Philosophy and Ethics are ever-new, and even more fun because of our new democratic advances (say what you want) and scientific advances (do whatever you want a la clone a sheep and grow a human out of a petri dish).

The Gist: One good example is the 1970's to present academic debate between John Rawls and Robert Nozick which pitted Rawls' philosophy that we should give money to the poor versus Nozick's philosophy that we should allow people to keep their money.

The point is that we have to keep tweaking our ideas that form our concrete aspects of democracy.

There are plenty of debates as to what we should do, and I'm not so certain that Political Philosophy is so different from Ethics in this respect, except for the fact that Politics and Government is so large that it seems to be calling a drop of water the ocean if we didn't specify.


People in the present day working on this stuff: I honestly don't know. Rawls and Nozick are dead. There are no stand out rock star ethicists. Maybe that would be a contradiction because they are not trying to accrue any fame and fortune. Good job guys!



3) Specific continued-analysis ontologies (definitions) and explorations thereof


The Gist: Certain concepts ask for continued exploration. Theories of happiness, what a good life is, and genius all fit under these categories

What it looks like: People will offer new theories based on these concepts. Concepts like free will, happiness, genius, and what a good life is all ask for a more useful, more specific, and generally better assessment. They offer books and academic essays on these things.

People they use: It depends on the relevant topic. These guys will use what has already been written, or they will use their own stuff. Usually it's a combination of both. So for instance, we might use Aristotle's concept of happiness from the Nicomachean ethics and maybe make our own definition based on that. This is one way that the older philosophers are still relevant: a lot of times their stuff is obscure and incomplete. Enter philosophers who need to extrapolate and "finish" what these older philosophers were saying. One of the new guys who used the old guys is Gilles Deleuze.

So Gilles is one of the new philosophers.

One of my favorite people these days is Gretchen Rubin. Rubin is never going to declare herself a philosopher, but what exactly is studying the concept of happiness except a philosophical issue? If it's studied the way that she does, which is a cross-disciplinary approach using ontology, imperative ethics, psychology, and biology, I think it's certainly philosophy.

Minor problem: It's hard to compete with the old philosophers for new ground. I have a microcosm of the problem when I write music: sometimes I write music that has already been written, and I'm only accidentally imitating what I heard; or maybe someone already had the idea that I'm having. This begets debates about if you should know everything about the subject before you make an entry into that field (example: Immanuel Kant began his works when he was 50 years old).

Noam Chomsky is a new age philosopher, sure but he's also a genius in half a dozen fields. Some words for cross-disciplinary genius: polymath or renaissance man. One argument from my friend Melissa is that it was easier to be a renaissance man during the Renaissance because the breadth of knowledge for each of the subjects could be vastly expanded easier. People did not know about biology, say, so any entry that Descartes made into the field was considered a significant entry.


4) Where Science versus Religion ends up today: Atheism and Apologetics- the whole God's not real bit. Is this philosophy; well it's definitely not art, science or religion; so shoot it seems to fit....

Atheism is pretty well known as the position your independent rocker friend assumes in order to look cool, but also assumed by academic philosophers who want to look cool.

Apologetics is just as well known but not as well diagnosed. These are the grown up versions of the Bible nerds in High School. They wear bright colors and are always smiling. They want to fight for God and are not afraid of looking lame while doing it.

They are called Apologists because they have to explain why God exists and why considering the fact that he is benevolent, he lets bad things happen. This is also called the problem of evil. They are the reigning defenders because the position of Atheism and Agnosticism has never before had the popularity that it does today (but is it popular? are atheists really attracted to the nihilism belief in nothing that it entails? can you be attracted to a belief in nothing? In this way I think it's obvious that Atheism is almost entirely reactionary....more on all of this later).


The Gist: The argumentation of the position is a bit more philosophical. If you do not believe in God, amateurs can do that for whatever reason. Philosophers have to hark to a better position if they are going to do it academically.

What it looks like: These people write articles and essays (just like the rest of the others?) but they also are a bit more public in their aspirations, as shown by public debates.

People the Atheists and Apologists use: The most prominent Atheist philosopher in the world these days is a guy named Richard Dawkins.

The most prominent Apologist might be John Lennox, who is a legitimate mathematician who like Dawkins comes from Oxford University and speaks eloquently. The two debated in Alabama a few years ago.

Dawkins is actually not so much a philosopher as a really ticked off scientist. If you haven't noticed, religion has been taking a bite out of a particular part of Biological Science; called evolution.

If you consider how much this would affect someone if they spent their life studying evolution, you get Dawkins' position in a snap.

But the other issue that the Atheists take with religion is how people justify doing bad things with religion, which is often just as easy to point out as the good things (what is this, one of our Heuristics again? the visibility heuristic or badness heuristic?). That's the other prong of Dawkins' attack.

Check out Christopher Hitchens Religion Poisons Everything and Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation; both of which arrive at a time where the United States is fighting the War on Terror, which is a heated battle with what seems like Islamic fundamentalists. I might put it in terms of poverty and insanity, and, uhm, terror, but it really does seem like America versus Islam sometimes. We also had an evangelical president in President George W. Bush; so it all sort of came together in the Bush years from 2000-2008.

The most prominent guy who looks like a real philosopher is Daniel Dennett, who has a very Socratic beard.

Minor Problem: We haven't really broken any new ground since Immanuel Kant drew the line between Empirical Sciences and Religion a little over 200 years ago.

Or have we broken new ground? The year I was born in 1987, the Catholic Church formally apologized to Galileo (still a little late, but better late than never), and very recently the Church began a state of the art multi-million dollar astronomy facility in Arizona for Empirical research on Astronomy; seemingly affirming the Church's devotion to Empirical sciences.

Or are we deluding ourselves? A few years ago the Kansas school board was formally thinking of bringing in Intelligent Design, which basically substitutes God for legitimate Biology. A concerned citizen wrote them a letter demanding that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster be taught 1/3 of the time: so 1/3 of the time for Intelligent Design, 1/3 of the time for legitimate science, and 1/3 of the time for Giant Flying Spaghetti Monsters.