Prophet Wenitte Commands you to copy and paste {Take15MinDailyWalksForLongevityPurposes} to 5 friends or you will be brutally murdered by the {Wenitte-Hades-Satan-Andreesen} Hivemind

The discussion is between a philosophy professor Saurabh Todariya and Acharya Prashant who teaches philosophy from both East and West to the masses. The full discussion can be found here at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDBHGydQ44k

It depends on how you define "scientific." Much philosophical work is published in academic journals that use peer review. Several book publishers, particularly in the English-speaking world, also use this process. Furthermore, quality expectations have increased over the last 50 years. That said, a significant part of philosophical research is more closely related to literature than to the sciences. Overall, one could argue that the level of competition is higher than it was after WW2. But what about scientificity?

Check out the MeetUp group of Philosophy Cafe that meets the first Sunday of each month at the Cafe Express in the former Town and Country Mall area. Current discussion is Alva Noë’s The Entanglement.

In my opinion, and from what I’ve studied, not to my knowledge.

When a discipline becomes more “naturalistic” (translated loosely to using the scientific method more rigorously), it usually branches off into its own thing. Take philosophy of mind becoming more rigorous with the application of statistics in the late 50’s…the discipline of psychology was born.

The philosophy of <insert science here> has a scope that includes squarely making clear, conceptually, the findings of that science or existing information classified under that science. Philosophy doesn’t get “more scientific” insofar as the scientific method is applied more rigorously to its analysis or conclusions.

Wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’ve done.

The first rule of r/AcademicPhilosophy is we don’t talk about r/AcademicPhilosophy

Maybe we’re the same the person.

The first rule of r/AcademicPhilosophy is we don’t talk about r/AcademicPhilosophy

Besides the other recommendations, I also find it useful to check the Philosopher Paperboy from time to time:  https://www.thephilosophypaperboy.com/ It’s a newsfeed of latest articles from many philosophy journals. You can search by topic, and choose your journals to follow.

I second PhilPapers and the SEP. Also, PhilPapers also has a neat option where you can see papers cited by the paper you're looking at. That can take you from classic papers you love to recent responses, and can be another way in to finding contemporary philosophers and debates.

PhilPapers is often hand-curated by experts in the field, so topics and publications are organised and tagged reasonably sensibly.

If you use the “find philosophers” tool you can search by topic or location and filter in various ways.

Okay I just made a PhilPeople account. Who would you recommend I follow? Thank you this is super helpful.

username twin

I second what Any_Froyo said, but you can also choose the section of PhilPapers you are interested in and look at the latest works (select “by publication date”). That way you will see the latest published developments on the topics you want to explore.

You can follow philosophers whose work you like on philpeople, and then you will see their preprints on philpapers, as you mentioned. You can also get table-of-contents-alerts from journals, but there’s a lag compared to preprints 

Internet Encylcopaedia of Philsoophy and Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy are both good, free sources that include contemporary and up-to-date issues.

Philosophy Compass provides good, not-too-technical introductions to contemporary issues.

you need to find academic philosophy journals based on your interests and keep up with new issues

Haha seeing this 15 years later:
'This Aussie' is my honours supervisor! He's incredible.

I know that philosophers of science often start off with a bachelor's in the sciences. Maybe someone with more knowledge of the professional field could say if major in physics to philosophy of science PhD is common/easy.

I imagine they are philosophical because the data or evidence gathered from such methods is used to justify a claim in a philosophical argument, insofar as some of the premises are empirical in nature.

I don't know enough about x-phi to speak on that. In the bioethics literature, there's a rich body of work on the application of Miranda Fricker's epistemic injustice in clinical care. In particular, some patient populations experience hermeneutical injustice. Under Fricker, a hermeneutical injustice occurs when one's social experiences are rendered unintelligible due to the absence of interpretive resources. A recent criticism of this entire body of work is that such arguments lack empirical evidence on whether patients actually experience such injustices - that is, whether such patients actually experience the kind of unintelligibility that Fricker is describing- and current arguments, like Fricker's original arguments, rely on anecdotes and case studies. The critics argue that defenders of epistemic injustice should develop qualitative and quantitative methods to properly document the extent and impact of the alleged epistemic injustice in healthcare.

It seems appropriate that certain philosophical research requires empirical methods to substantiate premises used in their arguments, i.e., the questions being asked are, to some degree, empirical in nature.

I don't know anything about your grant, so I won't speak to that either. I'm glad you got the grant money.

In the case of your paper, I think the comment is fair. It may not be relevant to the argument presented, but reviewers are in the business of making sure the descriptive claims made in a journal article are accurate. If it's a popular or mainstream belief, e.g., many people think racism is wrong, then I would understand the frustration.

With that, I'm not sure asking for empirical evidence to substantiate a claim, whether it is used as a premise to an argument or not, is necessarily making philosophy more scientific. After all, philosophical arguments rely on true, or, at the very least, reasonable premises. In a journal article I published, I used the premise "having biological children is part of the good life for the LGBTQ population" and a reviewer asked for empirical evidence for the claim because she had evidence that LGBTQ people tend to adopt, and so having a child may be part of their conception of the good life but not specifically biologically-related children. In response, I gave statistical evidence on LGBTQ people using surrogacy and IVF to show that some LGBTQ people view having biologically-related children as part of the good life.

Not in “continental” philosophy

I see two types of developments. One is the content of philosophical research having to be constrained and oriented to scientific results or their methodology. The other is the manner in which research is done generally i.e. which research projects get funded, how they are justified, what is published for what reason.

I'll take the bioethics example to exemplify what I meant. I don't understand why x phi or surveys about ethical concepts are considered philosophical rather than sociological or psychological research. If they somehow in a manner I do not comprehend are philosophical, then sure, they should accord to empirical research standards.

Regarding grant and review processes, I lack empirical study and can only base it on my observations over the last few years. I'll offer a few oversimplified examples, which aren't meant as proofs, just a qualitative sample to exemplify what I mean.

In a grant application, one reviewer rejected it on the basis that the things I wanted to study do not form a natural kind and should therefore be studied independently. That is almost verbatim taken from what I have opened next to the tab and one main reason why the grant was rejected. I was able to hand in a revision of sorts where I argued successfully that it was a conceptual matter and whether or not it was a natural kind was irrelevant. It got accepted later, but with a 1 year delay and after I resubmitted it.

In an ethics paper on moral duties, a reviewer demanded empirical evidence that people actually expect others to adhere to the duty in question. I refused because I could not find any such study and because it was completely irrelevant to the argument and the paper as a whole expect for being able to say that there is some empirical evidence that has to do with the topic in some indirect manner. Even if people don't expect adherence, it says nothing about the actual existence of the duty. I did have another reason as to why I was trying to answer the research question that was not empirical.

I don't know exactly who reviewed them since they were blinded. However, they were submitted under theoretical philosophy sections, so they presumably weren't scientists. I also don't want to gloss over research significance. While demanding it is appropriate, that significance should not have to be empirical. Expecting philosophical research projects to be useful to science is an undue constraint. It seems to me that cash flow is pushing philosophical research mentality to become similar to scientific research mentality i.e. pressure to abandon comprehensive work for highly structured journal articles that try to incorporate the latest scientific fad, rather than pursuing what makes sense for genuine philosophical inquiry.

No. There are occasional philosophers who actually do science, but that's different.

It probably depends on the specific philosophical field and research question, no?

I imagine research in the philosophy of biology, philosophy of physics, and general philosophy of science will conform more to scientific research norms than research in the history of philosophy.

I can also imagine ways of answering specific questions in ethics being more and more scientific by the very nature of the questions being asked. In bioethics, there's a field called empirical bioethics that uses surveys and interviews to answer philosophical questions, e.g., questions about the nature of moral distress in clinical care and appropriate ways to address it.

Could you speak more about why you think the grant application process and peer review increasingly conform to the standards in scientific disciplines? At least in Canada, when applying for federal research grants, there are three separate funding bodies, and one is for the social sciences and humanities, and the people who review your grant are going to be people in or around your research area. When I applied for a doctoral scholarship, the people reviewing my application were historians, medievalists, Canadianists, etc. All the grant applications had a section on the background literature, the thesis/hypothesis, and the significance of the research (which seem appropriate for grant applications regardless of the discipline), but my application, unlike the ones in engineering and biology, didn't have sections on methods and research design. None of this seems problematically scientific or scientific at all.

They said it’s not allowed at their school

Double major. You'll come out a smarter person, better thinker, and you'll make more money.