Almost twenty years ago, I abruptly dropped out of school in the middle of writing my doctoral dissertation in philosophy. Ironically, I had a paid dissertation fellowship at the time, awarded by the university on nomination from my department. I never explained why I left to my professors or fellow graduate students. In fact I never really explained why to anyone. I felt that I couldn’t explain, so I kept it bottled up inside all of these years. Periodically, I’ve started to write a blog post like this but always abandoned the effort. I finally decided that I had to finish now, if only for myself, because it became obvious that otherwise the urge to write would continue to niggle at me. In the interest of finishing, this post is much shorter than I would prefer—I may have foundered on prolixity in the past—though it may be longer than you would prefer. Let me clarify in advance that my reason for leaving was not interpersonal conflict. I generally liked the people and regret losing touch with them.
In short: I had been skeptical of academic philosophy practically from the beginning, even before I applied for grad school, but I naively believed that I could go against the grain, fight from the inside, maybe change some minds. This was a life-altering mistake that took me way too long to recognize. Perhaps I fell for the sunk cost fallacy, or perhaps I just didn’t know what else to do if not philosophy. I think what ultimately turned me around was the impending prospect that after I acquired a PhD, I would have to teach philosophy for the rest of my career, because of course that’s what professors are paid to do by universities.
I was always contemplative, from a very young age, so my attraction to philosophy was natural. Nonetheless, in my first year of studying philosophy at college I quickly became uneasy. Something felt off. My inner alarm started ringing. There was a bizarreness to some of the material I was reading, a kind of detachment from reality. It demanded a suspension of disbelief that I was reluctant to give. I actually began with logic, which you might assume would be uncontroversial. I assumed logic would be uncontroversial. The symbolic parts were easy for me, writing proofs. It was like a game, just puzzles to solve, no problem. When it came to the philosophical interpretation of the symbolism, though, I had a hard time taking things seriously. I couldn’t shake the impression that this was still largely a game, an artifice, rather than a source of knowledge. Truth-functional forms of argumentation such as modus ponens looked to me like caricatures. As far as I can tell, real people don’t formulate arguments like that, and real arguments have to be distorted, grossly oversimplified to force them into the pattern. I remember reading an article by V.H. Dudman, “Interpretations of ‘If’-sentences,” from the collection “Conditionals” edited by Frank Jackson, that offered empirical evidence of how logicians appeared to overlook facts about grammar. Unfortunately, Dudman was a relatively obscure figure in the field, not as widely discussed as I think he should have been.
Admittedly, my facility in symbolic logic helped me to emigrate from philosophy to my subsequent career, computer programming. I don’t think there’s anything philosophical about programming, though, except the historical inspiration by philosophers of some parts of computer science, with the consequence that the two fields share a lot of formalism. Programmers aren’t proving the truth of conclusions but rather providing instructions to a computer. When programmers write “if” statements in source code, the form is imperative, as can be seen by appending “else” clauses to the statements. The code tells the computer which path to follow, which instructions to execute, given the specified input to the program. The computer is not reasoning, just unthinkingly following our orders.
When I studied mathematical logic, I became quite troubled, for example by Cantor’s paradox, Russell’s paradox, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. These results are all very clever, the logicians responsible are certainly more clever than I am, and they provide interesting observations about the limits of formal systems. However, I was stunned by the almost mystical lessons that some logicians have drawn from the results, as if they’ve somehow discovered new universes parallel to the one we live in. In contrast, I don’t see anything profound that follows. When I create a set in my computer source code, I don’t believe I’ve thereby conjured something new into the world; it’s merely a convenient notation. My interpretation is that logicians are building models, which may be more or less useful but shouldn’t be taken literally. Of course I didn’t even find truth-functional logic to be particularly enlightening or significant.
As far as I’ve seen, the occupational hazard of professional philosophers is to take our language and our ideas too seriously. That way madness lies. In addition to the formal results mentioned above, you may have heard of informal problems such as the liar’s paradox, Theseus’s paradox, and the sorites paradox. Briefly, the liar’s paradox is a statement of the form, “This statement is false,” which is apparently false if it’s true and true if it’s false. Theseus’s paradox: if over time, as parts break or wear out, every plank and sail of the ship of Theseus (a mythical Greek king) is replaced until none of the original parts remain, is it still the same ship at the end? (The same question can be asked about a person and the cells of their body.) The sorites paradox: if you remove a single grain from a heap of sand, it’s still a heap, but if you continue to remove a single grain at a time, eventually only one grain will remain, which is not a heap, so at what point exactly does the heap disappear? (Similarly, giving one dollar to a poor person won’t make them rich, but if you continue giving them one dollar at a time, eventually the person will have a million dollars, or let’s say a billion dollars to account for inflation, at which point they’re indisputably rich, so when does the person become rich?) If you’re a professional philosopher, these are real problems, engendering thousands of real written pages of analysis and proposed solutions.
Philosophers never convinced me why I should be worried about vagueness, for example. It seems natural, indeed necessary. The extraordinary efficiency of human communication is also its limitation. Almost everything we say abstracts in countless ways from the fine details. Isn’t a conversation a kind of rough draft? Our concepts don’t need to be fully formed, complete with universal rules, to be useful. I’m not sure why we need answers to questions such as what is truth? what is knowledge? what is justice? Philosophers play a back and forth game, proposing a theory, say, that knowledge is justified true belief, and then entertain thought experiments, imagining elaborate hypothetical scenarios in order to “test” the theory. A counterexample, a Gettier case after Edmund Gettier, is said to refute the theory of knowledge as justified true belief, so the theory is adjusted to avoid the counterexample, or a novel theory of knowledge is proposed. My question is, why must there be a theory? Why do we assume that there exist clear principles that define knowledge?
A dictionary contains definitions of most popular words, including “truth,” “knowledge,” “justice,” and unpopular words too. However, a dictionary is a writing aid, not a philosophical treatise. Dictionaries briefly summarize common or accepted usage, as surveyed by the dictionary editors. The definitions are typically circular and devoid of surprises (at least to the erudite). Should a theory of knowledge be surprising? I would be surprised if our concept of knowledge could be formulated with universal principles, as if it were a law of nature. This feels like philosophers imposing a faux order on what is disordered. Is there a good reason to think that our concepts are not inherently messy, haphazard? I think the paradoxes suggest that our concepts are messy. What is a heap? What is a rich person? I know one when I see one, but I doubt there’s a principle behind it, an answer to the question of when a heap begins, when affluence begins. In my opinion, that’s not a problem in need of a solution. Our age-old concepts were never intended to withstand the assault of arbitrary philosophical thought experiments. Often a concept starts with some interesting individual examples, paradigms, and we extend the concept by similarity or analogy, without foreknowledge of where we’re headed. It’s not preordained that the story will end nicely, wrapping up all of the loose threads.
Essentially, I was an anti-philosopher intruding on philosophy. Sometimes I felt like an atheist in the priesthood. You can easily imagine how that would end badly, but I thought that philosophers would be more amenable to criticism. After all, philosophy advertises itself as a home to critical thinking. Some of my professors said that I was too critical, which may seem prima facie absurd. It turned out that they were right, in a way. I was too critical of and for my profession. But I’m not an anti-intellectual! I’m pro-intellectual, which makes my philosophical apostasy feel to me like disloyalty.
In one sense, philosophy is the most prolific intellectual enterprise ever. In another sense, though, today’s philosophy is not the same as the original, thousands of years ago. The ship of Theseus has sailed. The term “philosophy” ultimately derives from a Greek word meaning simply love of wisdom. At the time of the ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the sciences were still nascent or nonexistent. Aristotle himself is said to have founded several of them. The widespread specialization and professionalization of science came much later. I fear that philosophy may be stuck in the past. The lines of philosophical inquiry that were productive, allowing rapid progress, branched off into their own separate endeavors. Is it possible that what remains is mostly detritus, the intellectual dead ends? To a greater extent than many other academic fields, philosophy brings its own history to the present. Philosophy departments still study those ancient Greek thinkers extensively, while biology departments, for example, do not. The Enlightenment is also well represented in current coursework: René Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant. As brilliant as Isaac Newton was, his Principia is not read by contemporary physics undergraduate students, though they do of course study Newtonian mechanics. What is fruitful in science is distilled into textbooks, duplicated, and disseminated. Isn’t it a bit odd that philosophy professors feel the need to steer students backward in time? Does that indicate a failure of philosophical progress? Or is academic philosophy primarily a history of ideas?
One might claim that philosophy now consists of the hardest problems, and that’s why progress is glacial. On the other hand, doesn’t every academic discipline include unsolved problems? It’s not as if the sciences have finished the job, declared victory, and closed up shop. In fairness to philosophy, there are age-old questions of great import that we may never escape, and don’t seem to belong in another field: for example, is there a God? Introductory philosophy classes invariably debate this question (for perhaps several weeks), and even if they didn’t, every person in our society must confront the question at some point, if only to dismiss it. What you may not realize, if your exposure to academic philosophy is only to such an introductory class, is that professional philosophers spend very little of their time debating the existence of God among themselves. Many of them are atheists, some are explicitly Christian philosophers, and those two groups tend to avoid direct conflict, at least on matters of religion. You won’t find pro and con papers in academic philosophy journals.
I don’t blame philosophers for this attitude, because frankly, the arguments are threadbare. There’s nothing new under the sun. The social prominence of religion has inspired unlimited resources to be deployed in the debate, on every side, over the course of millennia. What may appear novel to the undergraduate student who has never thought hard about the subject is merely trite to the philosophers. We’ve heard it all before. I personally doubt whether many minds are changed by introductory philosophy classes—perhaps too little, too late—but it's undeniable that a large number of people care deeply about the question. That doesn’t help with my predicament, however, which was that the questions interesting to academic philosophers in particular, as opposed to the public, seemed to be based on implicit assumptions that I did not share.
My goal and expectation is not to convince anyone with this blog post. I didn’t convince anyone decades ago. It’s more of a confessional. I sinned against academic philosophy. But I’m not begging forgiveness. I’m still unrepentant. I think I just needed closure. Academic philosophy was at the forefront of my life for many years, then suddenly it wasn’t. A feeling of loss lingered. I couldn’t discuss my loss with the very group that I rejected. I didn’t think that I could discuss it with a therapist either; was I supposed to explain in therapy everything I’ve just written above? Maybe now I could simply forward my blog post to a therapist, but I don’t feel the need anymore.
I’ve avoided delving deeper into technical matters here. Although I spent an enormous amount of time at school in the library pouring over books and journal articles, as philosophers do, I feel that attempting to reengage with the material would be futile and distracting to readers, if any readers remain. Moreover, whatever was “the state of the art” in philosophy during my time is likely no longer the state of the art. Academia is publish or perish! Every time I’ve postponed writing about it, I’ve fallen further behind the current discourse. Glancing occasionally at some recent work, I get the impression that the situation in academic philosophy has not fundamentally changed, but I lack the motivation to respond to the latest generation, who might consider my arguments anachronistic. I brought this situation on myself by quitting, and I’m ok with that.
Addendum: I ended up writing a follow-up post, A critique of philosophical objectivity.