Blog post: 4 Great Philosophers (who are still alive)

I have seen a worrying number of people assert that there is no good or practical philosophy going on today. I politely disagree with this assessment, and so here are 4 philosophers who I think are readable, accessible, and insightful. And, more importantly, they all still draw breath.

Massimo Pigliucci

Massimo Pigliucci is both a philosopher of science, and has made more recent forays into ancient philosophy. I was introduced to him via his work of pseudoscience (he co-edited this fantastic volume), but he has also written on Stoicism, and has co-authored this book on alternative ancient philosophies to Stoicism.

Pigliucci is a proper hard-nosed analytic philosopher, who is broadly known (at least among undergrads and grad students) for being very “anti-bullshit”. This broadly appeals to me as someone who spent a large part of their undergrad trying desperately to redesign logical positivism (and failing, many such cases).

Pigliucci is the kind of philosopher I aspire to be. He is not scientistic, but his philosophy is run through with references to empirical inquiry, and he reconstructs ways to approach questions like “what is the good life?” Or “how do we construct meaning?” Without veering into woo-ey philosophy. As someone who also thinks these questions are supremely important, but is also suspicious of the ways in which they are often answered, this strikes me as a very good thing.

Byung-Chul Han

There are no surprises here. Byung-Chul Han has become something of a philosophical rockstar of late, with books like The Burnout Society becoming surprise bestsellers.

Han’s focus is modern life, and he spends much of his work outlining the various ways in which he thinks it goes wrong, or increases human suffering. He interrogates concepts like work, love, information, and more, in order to better articulate some of the sinking feelings that some people have about “the modern world” (in appropriate scare-quotes).

Han is not to everyone’s tastes. He has been accused of being exactly the kind of “woo-ey” philosopher that Pigliucci would take to task. However, I would gently disagree with this sentiment. While Han’s writing style sometimes leads to him making pretty broad, sweeping claims that I am not convinced are fully evidenced, I tend to think he is very accurate at diagnosing particular feelings about modern life that have become widespread. His observation that our value systems have shifted to encourage a kind of auto-exploitative state where we view work as one of the only valuable activities chimes with a lot of people’s experience of the world, and has better allowed them to understand themselves. I think that Han’s work is best read as part-philosophy-part-poetry. And the relevance of his discussions to us, who are currently living in the modern world, is pretty evident.

Eric Schwitzgebel

Eric Schwitzgebel has written on a number of different topics. So much so that I could not possibly cover them all here. However, there are two I want to draw attention to.

The first is Schwitzgebel’s dispositionalism about mental states, and about belief in particular. For Schwitzgebel, to believe something just is to have a certain disposition to act in certain ways. To believe that a bridge is secure just is to use it in all the ways that make sense under the assumption that it is secure. He has a number of arguments in favour of this position. But for our purposes, I wanted to talk about this because it is an example of philosophical theory fixing itself firmly to the earth, and thinking how our concepts make a difference in practice. A pragmatic instinct I am, personally, pretty fond of.

The second is that Schwitzgebel has written on the subject of AI rights. Almost everyone is in agreement that Large Language models like ChatGPT do not have mental states. But presumably we do not want to rule out by fiat that we might one day produce something approximating artificial consciousness. Schwitzgebel points out that this has the potential to become an extremely worrying future civil rights disaster. He raises the question: at what point will we consider that an artificial being is sentient, and moreover worthy of legal protection?

Schwitzgebel has also done work on borderline states in philosophy of mind, which is an immensely interesting and underexplored topic. We all know someone can be conscious and that things are not conscious, but what about the middle area where we are not entirely sure?

Schwitzgebel also has a Substack, which you should definitely check out. https://substack.com/@eschwitz?r=2ohjsz&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile

Hasok Chang

Okay, I am biased with this one, because Hasok supervised part of my masters degree. But I stand by my judgement that he is one of the most interesting philosophers of science working today. Chang is, broadly speaking, a pragmatist thinker. He is heavily influenced by the philosopher Huw Price, who coined the term subject naturalism. Subject naturalism describes an approach to philosophy by which we ensure at all times we view the human being themselves as a naturalistic object. That is, we try to include the measurer (us) in our theory of measured (the world).

To that extent, pragmatist philosophers like Chang are just as interested in how humans come to use words like “truth” as they are direct, first-order theories of truth. Chang turns this approach to studies of science, to much acclaim

I recommend Chang in particular for two reasons. The first is that he is an incredibly clear writer, and his arguments are always outlined in great detail. And the second is that he is a way by which broadly analytically-minded philosophers like myself can begin to appreciate some of the insights that are more common among continental philosophers, while still keeping that precise, analytic edge. His arguments about pragmatist, anti-realist science is not too dissimilar from something some continental philosophers have argued, but it is put much more clearly, and much more modestly, than many presentations in continental philosophy. This doesn’t go for all continental philosophers (#notallcontinentalphilosophers), but it does for at least some. I would recommend Chang’s Realism for Realistic People as a good place to start.

I know that it can seem like all the great philosophy has already been written, and that there is nothing else to say on the subject. But, as has often been the case throughout history, the death of philosophy is highly exaggerated. And I hope this has given people a few thinkers they might wish to pick up,