Homeschooling Political Philosophy:Natural Rights – “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident…”

This blog is about homeschooling, not politics, but, of course, learning about political systems, political thought, etc. is a necessary and important part of a serious education.

For that reason, I want to mention a fellow homeschooler’s essays on the natural-rights principles that are the basis of the Declaration of Independence and that were central to the founding of the American republic (see her section titled “The Proper Role of Government, My commentary as I study his article”: the essays are written from an LDS perspective) and also to expand further on her comments.

There is a tendency nowadays to view “natural rights” as simply a fuzzy rhetorical flourish used by the Founders to justify their breaking away from Britain.

The Founders, specifically Jefferson, did not see it that way: they thought they were actually describing some important, central, objective facts about human life and the nature of government.

I think they were right.

I despise fuzzy thinking, and I certainly would not put it past even the Founders (who were, after all, politicians) to engage in political propaganda.

But, the principles of natural rights did not in fact simply advance the interests of the Founders: for example, as Jefferson himself recognized, slavery stands condemned as a horrendous crime from a natural-rights perspective. Jefferson and the other slaveholders among the Founders were faced with that uncomfortable fact when they advocated natural rights.

There is also a tendency nowadays to view “natural rights” as simply an old-fashioned religious concept, inappropriate to our modern secular age.

Again, the Founders disagreed.

Of course, anyone who believes in God will believe that everything from natural rights to quarks and neutron stars are, ultimately, due to God.

But, the Founders came from a wide variety of religious perspectives, ranging from evangelical Christians to deists or agnostics: they did not find that their religious differences impeded their common understanding of the concept of natural rights.

The idea of natural rights is not specific to any particular religious tradition.

The natural-rights perspective is in fact based on a careful, systematic analysis of the nature of human action that combines abstract logic with a keen awareness of the realities of human history.

Most of us homeschoolers are rightly reluctant to get into the typical Republican vs. Democrat, liberal vs. conservative “flame wars.”

But, in various conversations with other homeschoolers, I am seeing an increasing interest in the broader philosophical issue of natural rights. Aside from the essay I linked to above, a homeschooling friend recently recommended to me Bastiat's classic The Law, and I think there is also a growing interest among homeschoolers in understanding the underpinnings of the Founders' thinking.

That interest among homeschoolers is, I think, not only understandable, but vital. I’ll go into this in more detail in future posts, but I’ll mention here some basic sources from which one can learn about the concept of natural rights..

One of the best-known sites on the Web that consistently advocates natural rights is LewRockwell.com. The Mises Institute is the best site both for serious, scholarly work from a natural-rights perspective, as well as for popular introductions, commentary on current events, etc.

The novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand wrote two essays that succinctly summarized the classical natural-rights perspective: “The Nature of Government” and “Man’s Rights.” (I do not entirely agree with Rand’s political perspective, and I disagree strongly with some of her current followers, but these essays do very clearly present the classical limited-government version of the natural-rights perspective.)

My own views on natural rights come largely from an economics perspective (I considered majoring in economics, and actually had an offer to do a post-doc in econ after I got my Ph.D. in physics). The single greatest influence on me was the late economist Murray Rothbard – see, e.g., his books Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, The Ethics of Liberty, and For a New Liberty.

Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience is generally remembered for its anti-militarism and its emphasis on the importance of individual conscience, but it is in fact a passionate, humane, and readable defense of the natural-rights philosophy, which emphasizes the danger that any government poses to individual rights. Thoreau’s opening declaration could well serve as the motto for defenders of natural rights:

I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto, — "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government is the classical formulation of the idea of natural rights (although the basic concept of natural rights originated among the radical Protestants of the English Civil War such as Roger Williams, John Lilburne, and the heroic Anne Hutchinson, and the idea has roots in the Middle Ages and ultimately in Classical civilization).

Locke is difficult reading for those of us educated in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, but anyone seriously interested in natural rights or the founding of the United States ultimately has to read it.

Most of the sources I have linked to above are available online, though I would recommend getting hard copies of Locke's Second Treatise and Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty.

Isn't this an awful lot to read?

Well, yes. But spread out over the course of the middle-school and high-school years, it really is not that burdensome.

After all, learning math, from arithmetic through calculus, requires a lot of reading, too. And, any reasonable study of English and American literature requires thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of pages of reading.

Isn't it possible to read just one or two of the essays or books I have linked to above?

Well... yeah, just as it is possible to read one play by Shakespeare and one book by Dickens and declare that you have finished English literature.

But, you're fooling yourself.

Any serious education involves the study of history and of human nature. The idea of natural rights is central to the history of our own country, and, the Founders believed, central to understanding both history in the broader sense and the nature of human beings.

The Founders were, I think, correct.

If the idea of natural rights is central, as the Founders thought it was, to understanding human nature, history, economics, and politics, then it merits serious and sustained study. It is not a topic that one should try to briefly “slip in” to one's schooling, as one might “slip in” origami or basket-weaving if you and your child happen to have some spare time (nothing wrong with either origami or basket-weaving – but neither are essential parts of a serious education).

In all honesty, I think a firm understanding of natural rights does require reading, at the very least, all of the essays and books I have listed above.

Locke and Thoreau are, of course, the most demanding of these, but they are also key historical documents that any educated person must read: unfortunately, they are not likely to be required reading nowadays even at good universities, so it is important to include them in your homeschooling. Rand's essays are quite brief, and Rothbard's books are quite readable.

Am I then suggesting that kids should learn about the idea of natural rights only in middle school or high school?

No. The Founders expected ordinary people to grasp the references to natural rights in the Declaration of Independence. The basic concept is not difficult: natural rights are those rights human beings possess automatically by nature, granted neither by other human beings nor by any rulers or any government.

To give a concrete example, humans can, after birth, normally breathe on their own. Normally, breathing is therefore a natural right. On the other hand, humans are not automatically provided by nature with free health care: therefore, free health care is not a natural right.

The distinction is straightforward and obvious: even a child in early grade school can grasp it.

Why this distinction matters, what it implies about the nature of politics, economics, history, etc. – all of that cannot be fully grasped by a first-grader, of course. But we tell first-graders that the earth moves around the sun, even though they cannot yet grasp Kepler's laws of planetary motion. A similar point applies to teaching the idea of natural rights.

Further along, as a student learns history, economics, etc., the idea of natural rights should be deepened and used to illuminate those other subjects.

In short, reading Locke, Thoreau, etc. when the student is older should be not the first introduction to the idea of natural rights, but rather an opportunity to see how the idea was created and fully developed historically.

Of course, the concept of natural rights, and its centrality in the thought of the American Founders, has pretty much disappeared from American education, so that even highly educated adults in contemporary America do not generally understand natural rights as well as the average farmer in the era of the American founding.

So, as is so often the case for us homeschoolers, educating our kids necessarily starts with educating ourselves – i.e., if you have not read the sources I listed above, you have a bit of reading to do before you can help your child understand the principles that lie at the foundation of our country.

Is it worth the trouble? Yes – if you want your kids to have a solid grounding in history, economics, and the founding principles of our country.

Science vs. Religion: Teaching the Controversy

Scientific American has just published “a new column that examines the intersection between science and society,” an essay by my fellow physicist Lawrence Krauss that argues that science is fundamentally inconsistent with traditional religion. As Krauss’s conclusion states:

Until we are willing to accept the world the way it is, without miracles that all empirical evidence argues against, without myths that distort our comprehension of nature, we are unlikely to bridge the divide between science and culture and, more important, we are unlikely to be fully ready to address the urgent technical challenges facing humanity.

So, what does all this have to do with homeschooling? Like most scientists, I disagree with so-called "young earth creationists” as well as the more subtle creationism of “Intelligent Design.” But, on one point, I think the creationists are absolutely right: the “tolerant,” “moderate” position that holds that of course religion and mainstream, established science are compatible, and that, if they aren’t, at least we should be quiet about it, leads to an educational disaster.

Religion has been of crucial importance in human history; it is still extremely important to a large number of Americans.

Whether religion and mainstream science are compatible is not just a sophomoric question that can and should be quietly ignored by mature people. It is a question that is central to our understanding of ourselves, our civilization, and our future.

Krauss points out, quite correctly, that science does not disprove the existence of “a God that does not directly intervene in the daily operations of the cosmos.”

However, science does have a perspective and orientation that differs quite radically from traditional, organized religion.

The central ethic of science is that scientists should actively work to undermine existing theories, to find little details that do not fit into accepted theories and that push us onwards to new and better theories.

I know of none of the major religions that similarly urges its practitioners to do their best to undermine the beliefs of that religion!

Furthermore, science as it now exists is based on a mechanistic perspective that is antithetical to both common sense and to religious sensibilities.

Common sense thinks of flowers as striving to grow upwards towards the air and sun. Modern science thinks of a flower as a strange, squishy little machine, “designed” only by the long process of evolution, in which the banging about of atoms, the pushing and pulling due to the quantum electronic interactions of molecules, is all that is happening. To modern science, there is no real purpose, no real goals, exhibited by a growing plant – just the large-scale result of all those atoms banging into each other.

Similarly, common sense thinks of the difference between a peach and a zucchini as consisting of all the properties that a peach has that a zucchini lacks and vice versa: a peach has the property of being reddish orange, sweet, and so on; zucchinis have contrasting properties.

To a scientist, peaches and zucchinis are simply slightly different ways of arranging carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms (with a smattering of other atoms): all the apparent differences between peaches and zucchinis are due to how these different arrangements of atoms reflect light, interact with various molecules in our taste buds, etc.

Just atoms (and photons) banging into each other – the peachiness and zucchininess have no separate existence.

I think it is hard for most non-scientists to grasp how certain scientists are of the correctness of this perspective: the shining of the sun, the eruption of a volcano, the growing of a rosebush, the internal operation of our own nervous system – nothing but tiny particles of matter (and force fields) pushing and pulling on each other.

I hope it is obvious how radically this view conflicts not only with common sense and traditional philosophy but also with traditional religion.

This conflict is central to contemporary human civilization. Science cannot simply be ignored – its stunning successes not only in creating material comforts and clever gadgets but also in explaining everything from the interior of a neutron star to the functioning of our own genes makes science an overwhelming intellectual and cultural force.

Any education that ignores this conflict between science and the traditional perspectives embodied in religion and philosophy (and “common sense”) is failing horribly either to teach about traditional religion, or about the full scope of the current scientific viewpoint, or both.

So, as a scientist, am I claiming that the scientific perspective is the final word, and everyone must meekly surrender to it?

Well… the perspective of science has been stunningly successful in understanding nature, and I think that needs to be acknowledged.

But, in the interests of full disclosure, let me present here the three little clouds on the horizon that suggest that maybe science as we know it has not grasped all aspects of reality.

First, in physics, we do not know how to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of gravity (general relativity). For a long time, it was thought that this was merely a technical, mathematical difficulty that we would soon overcome (superstring theory has promised to do this, for example). But, in recent decades, an increasing number of physicists have come to wonder if maybe this is a sign that we are missing something more fundamental than we realize.

The second cloud on the horizon is quantum mechanics itself. Anyone who has learned anything about quantum mechanics, even from really bad popular books (and there are lots of those!), knows that quantum mechanics is really weird. In a nutshell, quantum mechanics seems to say that everything that could have happened affects the future, not just those things that actually did happen.

There are various ways of trying to escape this ghostly effect of unrealized possibilities. None has yet convinced the majority of physicists.

The third cloud is the problem of consciousness. Physics has nothing to say about what it feels like to be an electron. But we all know that it does feel like something to be a human being. How can electrons, protons, and neutrons, whirling around inside our head become aware of themselves?

Lots of suggestions have been made: they all ignore the fact that electrons, protons, and neutrons are a part of physics, and that the idea of an “internal perspective” is utterly alien to physics.

Quite a few philosophers and physicists have mulled over this problem: an increasing number have the humility to admit that we cannot see what an answer could even look like (for one of my favorite discussions, see the philosopher Colin McGinn’s readable and informed book The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World).

So, how will these disturbing clouds be resolved? What will the angry dance among science, religion, and philosophy look like a hundred years from now?

I don’t know. But I am confident that it is one of the great questions of the twenty-first century.

An education that tries to sweep such questions under the rug, that ignores how radically the modern scientific view of reality differs both from common sense and from traditional religion, is really no education at all.

Should Homeschooled Kids Study Philosophy?

Should homeschooled kids study philosophy and, more specifically, should homeschooled kids of grade-school age study philosophy?

The answer to both questions is “Yes, but…”

Educated people know something about the history of philosophy, just as they know something about the history of literature, music, architecture, etc. Ideas created or elaborated by philosophers hundreds of years ago are still floating around today, and kids need to learn about those ideas because they affect us all today. Kids need especially to learn about those ideas that happen to be utter nonsense, so that they are not sucked into believing in the nonsense themselves.

Furthermore, philosophy is, in fact, less complicated than most people imagine, and even grade-school kids can seriously learn some things about the history of philosophy.

When my kids were in third-grade, we read together, out loud, Jeremy Weate’s A Young Person’s Guide to Philosophy: like all DK books, it is engaging and nicely illustrated. It is of course necessarily superficial, but it does give kids a thumbnail sketch of some of the major figures in the history of philosophy, and it offers a good basis for further discussion.

When our kids were fourth-graders we read together Lloyd Spencer’s Introducing the Enlightenment, which, in the format of a graphic novel, does a nice job of introducing the leading characters and ideas of the Enlightenment. I found especially interesting his emphasis on the importance of Locke as a key figure behind the Enlightenment, and also his contrasting of Rousseau vs. Voltaire.

So, yes, even grade-school kids should learn something about the history of philosophy, if nothing else to be immunized against philosophical nonsense.

But… many introductory books on philosophy take the tack that “philosophy is not so much a set of answers as a way of asking questions: the important thing about philosophy is not specific answers, but rather the philosophical way of thinking”

Yeah – that is because the answers that philosophers have come up with over the centuries have been almost uniformly bad!

I have in mind, for example, Kant’s claim that the structure of the human mind forces us to think in terms of Euclidean geometry, just a few years before non-Euclidean geometry was discovered, or Comte’s “positivistic” claim that we would never know the composition of the stars, just a few years before scientists discovered how to analyze stellar composition using spectral lines.

The problem is not simply that these guys goofed up. The problem is that, for centuries, philosophers have supposed that they could gain insight into the inner nature of reality by thinking about how we use words, by studying carefully how we think about the world, and by utilizing the basic common-sense knowledge that we all already possess – without doing complex experiments, without learning advanced math, without making painfully detailed observations of nature, etc.

The “method” of philosophy, in short, is that of a literate, articulate gentleman, someone who is very skilled at using words but who does not want to soil his hands with actually doing detailed observations or experiments, or bother his mind with doing high-level math or learning about the detailed observations and experiments carried out by others.

(A few philosophers today are actually going to the trouble to learn real, advanced math, science, etc., but they are very few in number. People who can really handle tough math and science, naturally, tend to become mathematicians, scientists, engineers, etc., rather than philosophers.)

This philosophical method is the exact opposite of the scientific method: science has progressed by assuming that nature hides its secrets in the hard, difficult to come by, details.

Kepler discovered that planets move in ellipses by trying to understand why Tycho Brahe’s actual observations differed in tiny details from what any existing model predicted. Darwin proved the fact of natural selection through his bizarre obsession with Galapagos finches, and many other varieties of animals. The second law of thermodynamics was developed by thinking in great detail about how heat engines worked, and trying to figure out what the performance of the most ideal possible heat engine would be.

Science is the result of an obsessive-compulsive disorder directed to making unnaturally detailed observations of nature in the paranoid belief that nature is hiding deep secrets in those absurd, tiny little details.

And it has worked.

The method of philosophy has been to assume that the inner nature of reality is inherently accessible and transparent and can be understood by thinking calmly and carefully in the comfort of one's armchair, as if reality were simply another well-spoken gentleman who can be understood if one courteously and attentively listens to his words.

That has failed.

So, while kids should learn about the history of philosophy, they most emphatically should not be encouraged to think “philosophically,” i.e., in the way that professional philosophers have thought for the last couple centuries. That method of thinking is a proven loser.

Of course, some areas that are usually considered part of “philosophy” are subjects that humans simply must deal with. The obvious example is ethics: you do have ethical views, whether you admit it or not, and it would be best if you consciously investigated and understood those views.

But… the fact that “ethics” is classified by libraries and by universities under the subject of philosophy should not compel us to think that professional “philosophers” are actually experts on ethics or that the “philosophical way of thinking” is necessarily the right way to think about ethics.

Ethics is too important to be left to the philosophers.

Ethics has to do with the practical issue of how we should live our daily lives: on the face of it, numerous different subjects have something interesting to say about that question – history, anthropology, economics, biology, religion, etc.

And, surely, the accumulated common-sense wisdom of human beings through the generations has some relevance, too.

Yes, kids certainly need to learn about the difference between right and wrong, and from a very early age. But it is an error simply to assume that philosophers are better able to think about ethics in a careful, systematic way than experts in other intellectual disciplines.

In thinking about ethics, the quality of someone’s thoughts must be judged on its own merits, not by whether or not he is officially a “philosopher.” And, based on the failures of philosophy in so many other areas, one should not be optimistic about philosophers’ contributions to thinking about morality, either.

So, yes, homeschooled kids should be taught about Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, about Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel – indeed, they need to be intellectually immunized against Kant and Hegel.

But children should also be taught not to think “philosophically,” in the manner of current and recent academic and professional philosophers. On the contrary, they should be explicitly told that, for at least the last two centuries, the philosophical enterprise as carried out by professional philosophers has been an obvious failure and that the vast increase in our knowledge of reality during the last several centuries has been due not to philosophy but to natural science.

Physicists Dissing Philosophy

The feisty Czech physicist Luboš Motl recently weighed in on the “what’s gone wrong with philosophy” issue. I think it is fair to say that Luboš specializes in controversy, but I also think his views on the issue of philosophy are very widespread among practicing scientists.

Luboš also links to an interesting essay by an old professor of mine, the Nobel laureate Steve Weinberg, in which Steve addresses the “unreasonable ineffectiveness of philosophy”: why has all the effort of philosophers during the last couple centuries borne so little fruit?

Steve’s basic conclusion is that the best that good philosophy can do is simply to serves as an antidote to bad philosophy: as he states at one point, “But here again the service of philosophy was a negative one; it helped only to free science from the constraints of philosophy itself.”

I do think that Steve is a bit too harsh towards the philosophy of “mechanism,” i.e., the idea that all of reality consists fundamentally of simple entities that do nothing but push and pull on each other. He is of course correct that the rise of the concepts of fields (e.g., the magnetic field) in the nineteenth century disproved the most naïve versions of mechanism – the world is indeed more than just billiard balls bouncing off each other, which is the underlying picture behind the most primitive version of mechanism.

However, as much as we physicists may admire ourselves for our new, more sophisticated picture of reality, which Steve discusses – quantum fields, superstrings, etc. – still, to an ordinary layperson the scientific world-view remains pretty mechanistic. Quantum fields, superstrings, etc. are still simple, mindless little things that push and pull on each other in simple, mindless ways.

If the modern physicist’s view of reality is not quite the simple “clockwork universe” of the nineteenth-century physicist, it is still, as Steve himself has noted elsewhere, basically a view of the universe bereft of meaning, purpose, or feelings.

In short, a pretty mechanistic universe, from the perspective of most human beings (and traditional philosophy).

I think the underlying issue here is the essential three-way conflict among science, philosophy, and religion.

Science, philosophy, and religion all make claims to have a broad, integrated view of reality. But, the views of reality they arrive at differ dramatically.

The scientific view of reality is based on actively trying to disprove one’s hypotheses (believe me – I, and any good scientist, would dearly love to show that we have a wonderful new theory that overturns all the existing theories in our field!) and on only retaining those theories that survive the most vigorous attempts at disproof. Science also embodies the rather paranoid concept that nature is hiding its secrets from us and that we can uncover those secrets only through obsessively detailed observation and experiment. And, science rests on a broadly mechanistic picture of reality, a universe lacking in objective purpose, meaning, or feelings.

Philosophy is radically different: it supposes that the secrets of reality can be uncovered by concentrated thought alone, that reality is naturally open to human understanding. The “testing” of philosophical theories consists basically of verbal assaults by other philosophers. And, historically, most philosophers seem somehow to have uncovered a reality in which human feelings and concerns have a natural home.

Religion differs dramatically from both philosophy and science, most notably in the fact that very few religions welcome attempts to prove that they are wrong: indeed, in practice, the primary warrant for religious belief is that those who deny or seriously question the core beliefs are encouraged or compelled to leave the religious community. And, of course, religions commonly claim that the driving Spirit behind reality has made an active effort to explain Himself to us. Needless to say, religion generally offers a universe full of purpose, meaning, and feelings.

It would be quite surprising if three such radically different approaches to confronting reality were to give compatible pictures of reality.

Of course, they do not.

This is a deeper cultural conflict than often acknowledged: these three views of reality cannot all be right.

It is easy for us scientists to deride creationists who claim that their religious beliefs disprove modern biology and paleontology. It is also easy for us to dismiss “postmodernists” who claim that their verbal musings trump the findings of modern science.

But, in some ways, both the creationists and the postmodernists deserve credit for seeing something that more sensible, moderate folks try to evade: in the long-term, science, philosophy, and religion cannot co-exist.

Choices have to be made.

Why We Are Homeschooling

Anyone familiar with the homeschooling universe knows of the wide diversity of “homeschooling philosophies” – e.g., the classical trivium, unschooling, Charlotte Mason, and, most of all, “eclectic.”

Rather than choosing from that smorgasbord of homeschooling philosophies, we have based our homeschooling approach on the idea that one’s homeschooling methods tend to be a reflection of one’s broader view of human life – including philosophy, politics, religion, etc.

We are homeschooling largely for academic reasons and also because we dissent from much of the prevailing values and attitudes that are typical of contemporary American life.

American society does not value intellectual achievement. We have “select” sports teams even for grade-school children who show unusual athletic talent. It does not surprise us that some kids can advance at twice the pace athletically of most other kids their age.

But, with very few exceptions, we do not have “select” schools for academically talented and motivated children. Very few Americans grasp that bright kids can advance intellectually at twice the speed of average kids.

Indeed, bright kids, as we all know, are disparaged as “nerds.”

Our own kids have been consistently testing at twice their grade level or higher (in tests administered by a local school district, not by me). I’d like to think that this shows that our kids are simply born geniuses, but I am pretty certain that this is not the case: I know lots of other kids who, at an early age, seemed to me as bright or brighter than our kids.

No, I think that our kids are excelling academically simply because our homeschooling approach is centered on the idea that learning is a very good thing, and that children are capable of learning much more, much faster, than most adults realize.

Aristotle said that man is the rational animal. Our mind is our primary tool for survival. To deny children the opportunity to develop that tool to its fullest is to cripple them.

Aristotle also said that long-term happiness is the result of developing our potential as rational beings to the fullest, in the pursuit of excellence.

As a modern scientist, I of course can find numerous points on which I differ with Aristotle’s philosophy. But on those two points, I agree with Aristotle.

Modern American society, especially the pop culture that so pervades most Americans’ lives, does not.

And, that is the central reason we are homeschooling: to enable our kids to develop their potential as rational beings to the fullest in an environment that values their intellectual efforts and achievements.

Is Philosophy Futile?

The historian Richard Carrier offers some on-target criticisms of present-day philosophy in this interview with Ben Dench.

Richard’s central point is that the original idea of philosophy as providing a grand integrated view of life and reality has been replaced by a concept of philosophy that involves dealing with isolated puzzles and riddles :

In academia, philosophy is almost dead. What passes for philosophy now is little more than a fancy system of games and puzzles. Even the few exceptions (Singer, Nussbaum, Haack) are mostly divorced from the original goal of philosophy, which was to bring a coherent worldview to the common man, based on facts and reason, that would tell us how to better live our lives and cope with the world as-it-is. But that requires building and defending systems of thought, not arguing isolated specialized problems in isolated specialized fields; it requires figuring out what actually counts as progress and then rolling up their collective sleeves and working on that progress, not just pontificating willy nilly and turning philosophy books and journals into what the rest of us call history of philosophy; and so on. There are no Humes or Ayers or Aristotles or even Ciceros or Senecas anymore….

The idea of a coherent worldview, every part as well thought out as the rest, has become an alien concept. Philosophy as it was, is no more. And as far as most people are concerned, what philosophy is now, is all but useless to anyone, and even what's useful, is so dense and jargonized as to be unintelligible. That's why decreasing numbers even bother studying it….

Richard also points out that philosophers are focused on the obsolete, discredited views of long-dead philosophers in a way that never occurs in the natural sciences:

History of philosophy can save people time, but only if you actually use it that way. Yes, by learning the blind alleys, you can avoid them yourself. But this has a pernicious tendency in two unfortunate directions. On the one hand, many philosophers dismiss new ideas by immediately labeling them as something that was already refuted even when in fact the new ideas are relevantly different. I have a hell of a time trying to get philosophers to understand that I am both a mathematical realist and a mathematical nominalist, and not a mathematical Platonist in any sense of the term--they can't fathom the synthesis, because all they hear are the past-and-dead categories "mathematical realist," "mathematical nominalist," "mathematical Platonist" and they can't get their minds out of the ruts of the way these things were characterized and debated in the past. History of philosophy has made them worse philosophers, not better ones. On the other hand, many philosophers keep trying to think in the same ruts as past debates--we're still dividing ethical theories into Utilitarian, Kantian, and Virtue Ethics, even though that very division is antiquated and confining….

History of philosophy also seems to be starting to replace actual philosophy outright… Pick up any philosophy journal today and see the amount of citing and referencing and discussing of "other" philosophers that occupies their pages, in ratio to anything that actually gets done as far as making progress in human understanding, and you might become as alarmed as I am.

Philosophers shouldn't be acting like historians. They should let historians do that, just as scientists do. You don't see articles in science journals laden with elaborate discussions of the history of science before attempting to establish a finding. They just present their findings. If there are other current findings and theories on the books (not past refuted findings and theories, but still unrefuted ones), they will survey them and respond to them, even if that involves them in historical reporting. But they don't waste time on inessentials. They build on established and agreed findings and results. No botanist would say you have to read up on the history of all the mistakes and dead ends in 19th century botanical science to make progress in botany today. Philosophy should operate the same way. It just doesn't…

Finally, he suggests that contemporary philosophy is woefully lacking even in basic intellectual standards:

Once at a dinner I stopped an editor of a philosophy journal and showed him that he had published an article with a glaringly obvious logical flaw, so obvious in fact it should have been embarrassing to his entire publication and certainly should never have passed any credible peer review. He actually responded by saying, "You actually expect philosophy journals to prevent the publication of fallacious arguments?" I was flabbergasted. Several of us at the same table answered in unison, "Uh, yes, we do." What the hell else is peer review for?

The interview goes into much more detail, and covers numerous other topics ranging from technology to religious fundamentalism (I don’t agree with all of Richard’s other points in the interview: I think he is way too optimistic about technologically induced “telepathy,” for example).

If anything, I think Richard may have understated the problems with current academic philosophy and the radical difference between modern academic “philosophy” and philosophy as practiced by Locke or Aristotle.

In later posts, I'll discuss in more detail how and why modern philosophy is in the doldrums and what I think this means for us homeschoolers.

The root problem, I think, lies in philosophers' failure fully to confront the fact that modern philosophy arose as an attempt to deal with the collision between modern science and traditional religion in seventeenth-century Europe. The philosopher/anthropologist Ernest Gellner wrote on this at great detail (e.g., in his The Legitimation of Belief , The Devil in Modern Philosophy, and Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion), and I agree with Gellner that you cannot grasp modern philosophy without addressing broader issues involving science and religion.