The Sooty Empiric

Recently Peter Wolfendale wrote up a very frank and honest discussion of his time in and out and on the edge of academia, and the relationship between this and his type II bipolar disorder. It's a long essay - insightful, but heavy stuff, so give it a read when you feel in a place to read about depression and its effects on a philosopher's life. (It will perhaps pair well with this  interview with Carrie Jenkins.) While it's not really the focus of the essay, I was really struck by PW's description of how he thinks about philosophical problems: Here’s how I think about a philosophical problem. It is a branching tree of paths, splitting off into alternative solutions, each with their own forking reasons, each caught in dialectical interaction with its opponents. You choose a path that seems right, and if you’re lucky you outlast the alternatives, chasing them into dead ends of bare assertion or loops that beg the question (either is a pyrrhic victory). However, the...

I object to the idea that we do and should decide what philosophical positions to adopt by amalgamating our opinions about the various theories' virtues like empirical adequacy, simplicity, explanatory power, fruitfulness, consistency, etc. Ever since Kuhn's work (at least) this has been a popular idea about how scientists do or should go about deciding what theory to adopt, and my impression is that many in our field propose we adopt a similar practice in philosophy. (This idea has appeared in print a few times, but I don't want to make this about disagreeing with particular people -- I hear the idea informally quite a lot, and so I am responding to something that I take to be in the air and which I object to quite generally, rather than in any particular spelling out.) I object to this on both the individual and social level -- I don't think each or any of us do or should do this, and nor do I think we should collectively do this when making joint choices. Likewise so...