Dr. Lillehammer also raises an interesting question at the end of his review:
"Is it a sign of maturity or decay when an area of philosophy reaches a stage where virtually every possible view, however implausible, is represented by a treatise-length study written in its defense? Do contemporary debates about modality, properties, causation, or the mind-body problem represent philosophy at its peak of maturity, or are these debates paradigm examples of a subject in decay?"
The question is not unrelated to the worry raised by Daniel Dennett in "The Higher Order Truths of Chmess" . Dennett asks us to imagine the game of "chmess," which "is just like chess except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one." Dennett notes that, "There are just as many a priori truths of chmess as there are of chess (an infinity), and they are just as hard to discover. And that means that if people actually did get involved in investigating the truths of chmess, they would make mistakes, which would need to be corrected, and this opens up a whole new field of a priori investigation, the higher order truths of chmess."
But says Dennett, noting Donald Hebb's dictum that, "If it isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing well,":
"Each of us can readily think of an ongoing controversy in philosophy whose participants would be out of work if Hebb's dictum were ruthlessly applied, but we no doubt disagree on just which cottage industries should be shut down. Probably there is no investigation in our capacious discipline that is not believed by some school of thought to be wasted effort, brilliance squandered on taking in each other's laundry. Voting would not yield results worth heeding, and dictatorship would be even worse, so let a thousand flowers bloom, I say....
"One good test to make sure you're not just exploring the higher order truths of chmess is to see if people aside from philosophers actually play the game. Can anybody outside of academic philosophy be made to care whether you're right about whether Jones's counterexample works against Smith's principle? Another such test is to try to teach the stuff to uninitiated undergraduates. If they don't 'get it,' you really should consider the hypothesis that you're following a self-supporting community of experts into an artifactual trap."
I've opened comments, and invite philosophers to react to the issues raised above; no anonymous postings, as always. And please bear in mind that I take neither Dr. Lillehammer nor Professor Dennett to be disputing Timothy Williamson's point in his contribution to The Future for Philosophy that, "Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth. Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention-spans.”
UPDATE: There is an exceptionally lucid and quite compelling explanation here by Daniel Nolan (Philosophy, St. Andrews) of why the "Twin Earth" thought experiments (which Chris Bertram [Philosophy, Bristol] had mentioned on the same site as a possible example of "chmess") are philosophically important, illuminating fundamental issues that philosophy ought to address.
