Maybe "emergent philosophy" was used by the existentialists, but a
[Google search] brings up a grand total of 43 hits. By contrast, "rationalism" gets 73,000 and "empiricism" gets 51,000. I confess I had never heard the term "emergent philosophy" before.
Anyway, I also had a comment about putting transhumanism on the philosophy page. Sure, one could say it's a philosophy; but it's not, as far as I know, what is studied by professional philosophers, i.e., people with Ph.D.'s in philosophy who teach and "do" philosophy. So I think it might be better to have a different section of the philosophy page, or better yet an entirely different page, where popular philosophies of all sorts can be listed and discussed. I think it's a bit odd to see it rubbing elbows with the rest of the contents of the page.
To give an analogy from history, this would be a little like putting conspiracy theories of history on the history page as if they were just another variety of historical theory. They are interesting to many people, and we can concede that they're a kind of history, but golly, hardly any reputable historians have any truck with them. Similarly pseudoscience of all sorts. Maybe the most apt comparison is the "metaphysics" section you will see in many American bookstores. You won't find Plato, Aristotle, *René Descartes, and Gottfried Leibniz there; you find stuff about transcendental meditation, ghosts, and all sorts of stuff that real metaphysicians know and care nothing about. Wikipedia should have long, detailed, fair articles about all such stuff; but that doesn't mean that it needs to be presented right alongside more clearly reputable scholarship.
Transhumanism is, granted, different in that it does have a large number of very well-educated, smart adherents. They are not philosophers, most of them, however, but scientists; and insofar as they're doing philosophy, their philosophy is about as good as you would expect from scientists who are not philosophers. Maybe it would be better to list it under technology, actually.
--Larry Sanger
Max More is a Ph.D. who teaches and "does" philosophy, and who highlights transhumanism. Robin Hanson might qualify as another (his Ph.D. is in Economics, though), as might a few Europeans like Nick Bostrom. It is precisely because such people are so few that one must call the philosphy "emergent" or "minority" or some other adjective to highlight the fact that it is in its infancy as a philosphical discipline, but to compare it to conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific nonsense is entirely off the mark. "Reputable" scholarly philosphers do take it seriously, and the fact that you don't says more about your own ignorance of the field than about the philosophy itself. --
LDC
Lee, you have a good point (although I will thank you for not presuming to know what I am or am not ignorant of). As I implied in my last paragraph, the analogies were not the best. Indeed, I know that there are
some academic philosophers (two?) who study transhumanism. There are many other people in other fields who no doubt do excellent work, even excellent philosophical work, related to transhumanism. I would not begrudge any of them any of their achievements. But none of this implies that transhumanism is something that very many philosophy professors even know or care about, much less take seriously. I would be very interested to know if there were a newly-emerging field that a lot of philosophy professors were suddenly interested in. It would be news to me--it's not impossible, I can be taught. In my experience, philosophers tend to be rather ignorant about popular philosophies and popular intellectual fads of all sorts. --
LMS
Maybe a page like "popular philosophies" listing some less-academic things like Rand's Objectivism and More's Extropy would be a better place for transhumanism. "Intellectual fad" is probably a fair characterization, but that's not a clear category to me. You're also right that most of its fans are scientists and technologists rather than "academic philosophers". But isn't that because most of what used to be called "philosophy" has been split off into various sciences? Wouldn't Marvin Minsky be considered a philosopher if cognitive science and neuroscience were less advanced than they are now? I think it is dangerous to treat philosophy as a specialized field like other academic specialties. Just because the philosophers studying it aren't the ones in the "philosophy" department doesn't mean it's not philosphy in its most rigorous sense. --LDC
Again, Lee, you've got an excellent point. --LMS
I take your point about transhumanism but I don't really think it belongs in technology per se, though, because much of it is speculative, and, er, thus largely philosophical. The trouble here is that it doesn't really have a home if you take it away from philosophy. Let me think for a bit about how we can get this to hang coherently in a way which satisfies us both?
sjc
PS I have squared it away into Technology by creating a new theme: Concepts in Technology. You can sleep easy now, Larry.
sjc
That sounds like a good solution. It occurred to me that, perhaps necessarily, any "emergent philosophy" is going to end up looking less than academically respectable, precisely
because it's emergent. Perhaps in the not too distant future it will be obvious to all philosophers that we should have a
transhumanism or a [philosophy of superintelligence]
? link on the philosophy page, rubbing elbows with all the other "philosophies of." Who knows...maybe it will be an automated intelligence that updates the page. ;-) BTW, have you seen
The Singularity? Jimbo started that several months back.
You know, I think an idea at least as interesting to consider as AI is easy, cheap genetic engineering, that makes all new human beings smarter than Einstein. What humanitarian-minded person would be opposed to such a scheme? And think how the world would change then... --LMS
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