This curiously unselfconscious "manifesto" by Clark Glymour (Carnegie-Mellon)--apparently prompted by my passing comment at New Apps that CMU's department is idioscynratic qua philosophy department, but very good at what it does--has generated a good deal of comment, both at the place where posted, but also here and here. While clearly written and certainly offering a distinctive view of the field (though one that doesn't leave much room for most of what philosophers do, which, he dismisses as "cramped and parochial, a subject on the verge of swallowing itself"), Glymour's piece does invite the quip Charlie Huenemann (Utah State) posted on Facebook (which he gave me permission to quote): "He certainly hears his own drummer. It's a wonder that CHE hasn't hired him to cover philosophy." Probably his ill-considered shots at Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (not to mention English Departments) wouldn't make him viable at CHE, though he seems to share the Carlin Romano view of Heidegger! It does seem to me that the idea that the measure of value for philosophy departments is whether they are taken seriously by computer scientists is so manifestly silly that one suspects at least some of the "manifesto" is really meant as Swiftian satire of the parochialism of some formal philosophers.
UPDATE: Hannes Leitgeb (Munich) writes:
I noticed the reference to the "parochialism of some formal philosophers" (embedded in a couple of intensional clauses) in your recent post on your blog. Of course, the existential sentence "some formal philosophers are parochial" is true (as is "some non-formal philosophers are parochial"), but since in some readers' minds this might lead to the wrong implicature that "formal philosophy is parochial" more generally, I thought a good antidote to this might be the following link to the videos of some of the talks at our Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.
It's an inventory of 80 presentations covering anything from rational belief, belief revision, context change, knowledge, supposition, truth, appearance, chance, causality, ontology, modality, counterfactuals, transmission of justification, computation, Kantian ethics, formalism, history of philosophy, norms, descriptions, coherence, logical truth, self-reference, structural realism, confirmation, theory choice, explanation, reference, vagueness, foundations of probability, to voting and democracy.
This is the outcome of but a couple of months of activity at our center. I hope that in the very near future it will become even clearer that there is nothing "parochial" in general about doing philosophy by logical and mathematical means (which I regard as just one way of doing philosophy).
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