By Paul Thagard, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Waterloo

Philosophy is indispensable for assessing the significance and dangers of current problems, including artificial intelligence, challenges to democracy, climate change, consciousness, and misinformation. Unfortunately, philosophy has sometimes deserved the reputation of being incomprehensible and useless. Valuable philosophical investigations should avoid these seven interrelated sins: dogmatism, arrogance, obscurity, isolation, irrelevance, narrowness, and nihilism.

Dogmatism

Dogmatism is being certain of beliefs without adequate evidence or justification. Some philosophical dogmatism derives from religion, where faith proclaims that evidence is irrelevant compared to divine revelation. Secular dogmatism can have other sources such as complete confidence in one’s own intuitions or pure reasoning ability. Dogmatism prevents appreciation of alternative views that might lead to changes of mind, and tends to block discussions that might lead to consensus. The antidotes to dogmatism include questioning the basis of the beliefs of oneself and others, critical thinking about the sources and evidential basis of beliefs, and accepting fallibility through admission that all knowledge is ultimately subject to revision.

Arrogance

Dogmatism is often associated with intellectual arrogance, an attitude of superiority and over-confidence about one’s own beliefs and abilities. Such arrogance encourages condescending dismissal of opposing views and resistance to criticism. The antidotes to arrogance include the cultivation of humility through recognition that everyone gets things wrong sometimes, through acknowledgement of uncertainty about complex issues, and through willingness to engage with opposing views and learn from them.

Obscurity

Another philosophical sin is obscurity, where words are used to entrance rather than to illuminate. Some philosophers over its long history have been writers who excelled in style, clarity, and insight, such as Plato, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and Daniel Dennett. Other great philosophers have had duller styles that enabled them to get their ideas across, such as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Charles Peirce, Edmund Husserl, and John Rawls. Their writings are sufficiently comprehensible to allow careful reflection on the what they got right and where they went wrong.

Unfortunately, some other philosophers have reveled in obscurity, using complex language, twisted reasoning, and abstract, unexplained concepts in ways that put great demands on the reader. Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida are examples of philosophers who have attracted devotees determined to extract the hidden meanings in their difficult writings. Such thinkers may well make valuable contributions, such as Hegel’s ideas about coherence and Heidegger’s emphasis on embodiment, but the obscurity of their writing makes appreciation and evaluation of their claims difficult.

Obscurity can also result from writing that appears clear in individual sentences l but cryptic in its general meaning, for example in the aphorisms of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. The antidote to obscurity is writing that is sufficiently clear and developed that readers can determine what is being claimed and what evidence and reasoning supports it. Otherwise, obscure writing should be discarded as not even wrong.

Narrowness

The fourth philosophical sin is narrowness, the concentration on smaller and smaller issues derived from the philosophical literature. This scholarly strategy can be productive if all one cares about is publications, but it cuts philosophy off from the great issues about knowledge, reality, morality, art, and politics that have made it crucial to intellectual discourse for more than two thousand years. The antidote to narrowness is awareness of the profound problems that have motivated philosophy and situated it as crucial to general thought.

Isolation

Another kind of narrowness is isolation, which is the severing of philosophy from relevant ideas in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Identifying philosophy as a stand-alone subject may help to justify the existence of philosophy departments in universities, but it cuts the field off from a vast body of information relevant to the most crucial issues about knowledge, reality, and morality. Some great philosophers have been polymaths, thoroughly versed in the science of their day and sometimes even contributing to it, as evident in the great works of Aristotle, Leibniz, Hume, Mill, Russell, and W. V. O. Quine. For philosophy, isolation is death rather than self-preservation. My new book, Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness illustrates the power of combining philosophy with psychology, neuroscience, biology, and artificial intelligence.

Irrelevance

When I was a philosophy student at Cambridge University, I heard the story of an Irish village that was so poor that people could only survive by taking in each other’s laundry. The story reminded me of some of my classes in analytic philosophy, which seemed concerned only with technical puzzles about the work of other philosophers rather than with profound questions that drew me to philosophy. A glance through recent issues of philosophy journals should convince you that much of it suffers from irrelevance, which is lack of concern with the pressing philosophical issues of our age. The antidote to irrelevance is ensuring that philosophical effort is directed at problems that connect with people’s lives.

Nihilism

The most grievous sin of philosophy is nihilism, which rejects all accounts of knowledge, reality, value, meaning, and purpose. Local skepticism that challenges dogmas is an excellent technique for philosophy, but global skepticism about everything is a sophomoric strategy that leads to despair and irresponsibility, rather than the wisdom that philosophy is supposed to love. Nihilism would conclude that we are all doomed anyway, and it does not even matter that we are doomed. In alliance with science, philosophy can develop strong accounts of how we can know reality, act morally, and have meaning in our lives, even in a world threatened by dangerous leaders and intelligent computers. My 2019 book Natural Philosophy and related works outline a general approach to philosophy that avoids the seven sins.

Paul Thagard is a philosopher, cognitive scientist, and author of many interdisciplinary books. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for Psychological Science.

©Paul Thagard