Thanks Maccy. I didn't intend to offend you or any legit arts/philosophy people, and I accept that philosophy goes hand in hand with critical thinking and has many useful applications. I really just wanted to express my frustration with Mr. High and Mighty philosopher, Non_Believer. I also read somewhere that Jim Fetzer has not only written books on critical thinking, but taught it at his university while at the same time writing books on nonsensical conspiracies and bringing them up in his (philosophy and critical thinking)classes whenever he got the chance - so it appears that an entire university sort of fell through the cracks has zero credibility as far as I'm concerened. He shouldve been yanked long ago....But I suppose every discipline has its eejits who can give the profession a black eye and of course, they tend to speak the loudest.
No worries. I wasn't offended personally and I'll quite happily admit that I worked nowhere near as hard as I should have done at my degree (I was rather distracted by extracurricular theatre activities and too young to balance my time well) and so I'd be delighted for my thinking to be taken apart by somebody with full-on analytical skillz (that's the technical term). It was just that I do know from what I've studied that philosophy takes a lot of work if you do it properly. So I was defending the many very clever and erudite people I've know who've come through the arts. I definitely understand the rant, though.
Non-believer has thus far shown no sign of thoughtfulness or even the ability to put together a cogent argument. There's an awful lot of hand-waving and rhetoric going on as well and a strange inability to admit his own ignorance. At present, I am ashamed on behalf of philosophy and of those who really study it.
I don't know if its the same in the US, but my experience of UK Philosophy departments is that lecturers get a lot of leeway and are pretty much left to their own devices. I wouldn't be surprised if Fetzer's work was pretty good in his specialism - he seems to have published a lot and been awarded fellowships and the like. If this is the case, it may well have been that the faculty tolerated what they would see as his eccentricities for the sake of his legitimate research.
A massive generalisation follows: philosophers tend to be very good at arguing in fine detail, but the nature of the discipline means that you could just analyse the starting point of your argument without being able to progress further. Usually, you'll have to make some basic assumptions in order to progress at all - often these will be derived from the work of other philosophers who have already worked over the issues in detail. Most Philosophy Professors will be working around the edges of great works anyway, they won't produce anything truly new themselves, although they may shed light on some aspects of an issue or aid with its understanding. Nevertheless, this means that philosophical discourse will often proceed very narrowly and methodically from a set of assumptions. Where those assumptions have a basis in sound scholarship, there's a good chance that all will be well (or at least that the argument will be usefully incorrect).
However, if the argument proceeds from assumptions that are just wrong (a stars wars beam weapon as a possibility, for example) the narrow focus can lead to tightly argued piece of nonsense - and it is this very focus that can stop the author from seeing this. In short, Fetzer lacks the understanding of basic science which would lead him to question someone like Judy Wood. Because he is used to philosophising about science he assumes both that he doesn't need to know more and that the likes of Wood are at least to be considered - that there is no hypothesis that should be rejected out of hand. Because he lacks the real-world knack of spotting the impossible, he demands that a multitude of impossibilities should be considered. He fails to realise that he doesn't have the rigor to test and reject them and so finds himself in a swamp of rhetoric and confusion.
I think this is probably exacerbated by a classic need to believe - possibly, as always, the mark of a delusional mind.
In other words it's still possible to be a good philosopher and an idiot at the same time. All you have to do is arrogantly step out of your area of expertise with an emotional investment in the conclusion of you argument that blinds you to your own ignorance.
Edited to add: just looked at NB's profile to see when he was last on (2 days ago, and today's his birthday - so he may not have run away) and I saw that he's 47 years old. Being as he doesn't claim to be a philosopher but rather to hold a graduate degree in Philosophy (which must be a Masters, otherwise he would have said Doctorate) my guess is that he was at most 27 years old when he last formally studied Philosophy. In other words it's been at least 20 years since he was last seriously engaged in this stuff he likes to spout off about. Architect's academic expertise is somewhat different as he uses it every day in his profession, NB is trying to impress with a dying memory of intellectual grandeur.
). Noone is impressed, non_believer, quite the opposite.
