“This may suggest that the layperson in question might have come up with the article themself*, given enough musing….If, so such a line of thought might go, philosophical achievement is not necessarily based on learning or even training, ”

No ways, this doesnt follow . If I say something like following without any footnotes, for example , it doesnt follow that fair amount of learning is not required to make the point I am making :
“…. We cannot assume a priori that naturalized philosophy cannot show that some sort of plausible identification of values and facts about evolution is not made in near future which would make some plausible derivation of value from facts possible. The point is, if philosophical ethics is continuous with science in the sense that philosophy is just a more abstract scientific inquiry—as the naturalists are arguing—then we cannot rule out such a possibility a priori because a priori method in this sort of inquiry is not viable….”

Or, it is possible to characterize say the debate in phil of biology regarding evolution of morality without any footnotes but again it does not follow that fair amount of learning is not required to get it right. So I cannot agree with the point you are making.

If, so such a line of thought might go, philosophical achievement is not necessarily based on learning or even training, then what is required to be good at philosophy? Two salient possibilities:
1 (expectably more common among philosophers?): some special qualities like lateral/clear/perspicuous/just damn clever thinking;
2 (for the hostile nonphilosophers?), basically bugger-all: anyone can do it but most have something better to do.

The situation may exacerbated by cross-attribution of these views: philosophers suspect non-philosophers of thinking 2, possibly because they themselves have nagging doubts about it, etc.

[*On this neologism: when is the use of the plural pronouns as unsexed personal singulars going to catch on in formal writing? It’s common enough in informal speech, and though by failing to specify multiplicity it may increase and will never reduce ambiguity , that’s not a unique or insurmountable problem, any more than the prsumably acceptable failure to specify sex is – or duality, triplicity…, or age-group or hair colour.]

Anyone will note that scientific discovery occurs by very different paths: such as by finding discrepancies, by abstracting a theory to a different situation, by looking for invariants through changes, by trying different equations to fit experimental results (a repeated technique in physics,) by pure philosophical musing, etc. etc. Any of these trails might suggest a repeatable experiment, and off we go.

But in the modern period, pure philosophical musing accounts for only a tiny number of discoveries. The premiere example is the theory of relativity, which originated in epistemological musing by Einstein, who explicitly identified it as such. It included I believe a thoroughgoing review of ideas from Aristotle to Kant—or at least, Einstein was quite familiar with them in his latter years, and continued both to employ, and to advocate for, an epistemological approach to unified theory.

There are of course older examples of a good deal of philosophical study in scientific discovery, I suppose we might conjecture at paradigm shifts. Descartes-Galileo-Newton come to mind as people well-versed in old arguments about the nature of reality—although perhaps that is because all they had to study were the ancient classics, plus the medieval experimenters.

We ought to distinguish “philosophy” as enormous endeavor, from the “philosophy of science,” a subdivision which has been about logical methods until its sociological turn. In most cases philosophy of science has little to teach scientists, much as philosophy of mathematics is of little use to working mathematicians.

But here again: the present mix in the philosophy of science, which is something like a philosophical psychology of science, is somewhat important for forming hypotheses in developmental child psychology.

Indeed I think it’s easy to predict a future circumstance wherein philosophy will again become crucial: when brain imaging becomes precise enough so that we can follow exactly what happens when the subject undergoes conceptual change, PLUS what happens when the subject thinks of the general idea of “concept.”

The connection between these two is philosophical in nature, and so philosophical discourse will provide most of the initial guideposts for drawing the detailed scientific map of how we perform classifications and meta-classifications.

There is still work being done on the philosophical implications of QM by contemporary physicists. I came across one person who lists this in his CV and I wrote him, curious about how his colleagues feel about this. He told me that some find it interesting, others handwaving and a waste of time, and most tolerate it because he does other work that has greater utility.

One can take a graduate-level class in QM without the words “Copenhagen interpretation” ever being mentioned. Frankly, while I find this a bit surprising, I don’t find it to be shocking or unacceptable because a working physicist really need not worry a bit about these things in order to do productive work in particle physics. As they say, the math really is everything; it is exceedingly tricky and arguably impossible to translate that math into language.

“(This should not be taken to imply that whatever philosophers have to say about such things these days is necessarily useful.)”

No, but personally I’d like to see serious interdisciplinary work between knowledgeable philosophers and physicists on these issues. I don’t think a philosopher without appropriate training in QM is equipped to do so, and I don’t think a physicist without appropriate training in similar philosophical issues and techniques is equipped to do so, either.

This is a completely different, but related, subject—but I think that the inability to understand that other disciplines can have useful ideas and methods with regard to one’s own research topic drives the far too common cross-disciplinary overreach and the corresponding lack of serious and ubiquitous interdisciplinary research and cooperation. But this is just one piece of that puzzle.

Did physicists really and unanimously “understand” the underlying ontological issues 75 years ago (do they now)? AIUI at least one influential subset of physicists decided not even to try to understand them, given that just doing the maths was so successful. (Feynman: “Shut up and calculate!”)

(This should not be taken to imply that whatever philosophers have to say about such things these days is necessarily useful.)

I would rewrite that as “philosophy is only useful in so far as it is useful to other disciplines”. My experience is that philosophy that fails to connect effectively with other disciplines – law, physics, history, anthropology, psychology, or indeed anything with an empirical or pragmatic grounding – is arid and sterile.

In contrast, it is possible to do good physics or history or biology without involving philosophy, at least in a good many areas.

My education is in many ways strongest in science, many of my friends are scientists, and my worldview is predominantly scientific. My first impulse when I want to understand something is to take an empirical approach. I added “materialist” to my self-description because “empiricist” does not necessarily exclude it (in terms of worldviews and modes of thought, empiricism and non-materialism could be complementary) and I chose “scientism” because it encapsulates a conjunction of attitudes which cluster around these concepts.

Certainly, some use that word as a sort of insult; probably to imply a way of thinking that is supposedly too narrow and rigid. Indeed, in some people it is. But that accusation, or the possibility of it, doesn’t inspire defensiveness in me and I’m a little surprised that it does in you. The contemporary scientific view of the universe—or, more precisely, the view of the universe that those who most strongly affiliate with the social institution of “science”—is a worldview, a mode of awareness with its own particular strengths and weaknesses.

That it has some weaknesses as well as strengths is clearly apparent to me; just as any other mode of awareness does. The various forms of art are, in my opinion, also modes of awareness with their own strengths and weaknesses. So, too, is historicism.

To put my argument in perspective, I should mention that my educational experience with philosophy, science, literature, and history is atypical by contemporary academic standards and it is my opinion that this unusual experience (which exists alongside prior conventional education in science) provides me with a better-than-average understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of how they’re otherwise conventionally taught. To be sure, many of my classmates arrive at a chauvinistic conclusion which is at odds with my own: they believe our experience is the high road to what they imagine as “truth”. I disagree but believe that our experience has its own particular virtues which compensate for its weaknesses.

A type of ahistoricism is an essential quality of this education and, for the most part, this is almost aggressively the case with regard to philosophy. My tutors were very much the sorts of people who would insist that “the text itself was the only thing of importance”. I disagree—but I also would disagree that an historically informed reading, such as StevenAttewell advocates, is necessary. There is a particular kind of value and insight available in taking a text as its own exclusive authority—historical context can obscure as much as it illuminates, especially in unskilled hands. Indeed, it seems clear to me that there are a number of useful ways in which to approach a text; none of them are exclusively sufficient for the most ambitious of readers; none of them so far superior to all the others that a serious reader can safely habitually utilize one to the exclusion of all the rest.

It seems to me that philosophy is a “mode” in the same sense that art is a mode and science is a mode. People have become so specialized these days that it’s well-nigh impossible for them to appreciate that useful and important things about the world can be developed outside of their disciplines. That is to say, only when they can be safely convinced that a subject of inquiry is entirely outside their discipline will they admit that there’s another way of approaching it. Otherwise, they tend to be certain that another discipline’s approach to a subject is inferior and incomplete, at best, and misleading or confusing, at worst.

By its nature, philosophy gets the worst treatment by other disciplines these days because the subjects of philosophical inquiry are enormously varied and almost without exception they are the subjects of inquiry of other disciplines. To everyone (but particularly scientists), philosophers are badly imitating its betters and producing little or anything of value. These people seem to be incapable of grasping that philosophy has an inquisitive character all its own; a utility all its own.

The flip side of this is that equally chauvinistic philosophers can wield the other edge of this sword and assert or insinuate that philosophy is privileged above all other modes of thought because it can consider almost any topic. So, too, both artists and critical theorists are prone to making such claims.

I took issue with StevenAttewell’s argument because, honestly, his intellectual point-of-view is closest to my own, as a matter of temperment. If I hadn’t learned better, I’d have argued the same historicist argument he makes, I would have looked down upon those who stupidly and ignorantly thought that it made any sense at all to read Republic outside its historical context. Luckily for me, however, I did learn better. There is nothing in this world that cannot be more greatly and usefully comprehended by expanding upon and integrating the perspectives from which it is viewed. I could devote my entire life to the study of Republic without exhausting all possible ways in which it could productively be approached. There’s a reason why critical modalities so quickly come and go: it’s not simply fashion and the thirst for the novel, it’s that there are always additional new and useful perspectives.

Students of the nature of animal intelligence have a typical response they make when someone attempts to compare the intelligence of a human with, say, a dog. They’ll say, “a dog is very smart at being a dog, not so smart at being a human”. To some extent (and being careful to avoid pushing this line of argument too far), asking whether it’s better to understand ethics through philosophy than through, say, political science or theology or even cognitive science is a category error. Ethics as understood via philosophy is the best way in which to understand ethics via philosophy. It’s a very poor way of understanding ethics via theology or political science.

People who tend to denigrate the utility of philosophy—or, for that matter, critical theory—are the sorts of people who have difficulty not feeling certain that there is a single, privileged way of understanding pretty much everything. In this sense, yes, I think the criticisms of those who use the word scientism are often apt—and I say that as someone whose intellectualism could be most accurately described as “scientific”, even though I’m not a scientist. I’m not making the common romantic claim that many subjects are, by nature, completely unsuitable for science; rather, I am making the claim that even when a subject is, by nature, quite well suited to science, it can be and usually is also well suited to disciplines other than science.

9. Philosophers (philosophy professors—whatever) may be unable to say what philosophy is and also avoid (a) excluding things that are obviously understood by everyone in philosophy to be philosophy, since Plato and (b) including things that can be done badly by people in many other fields.

And (9) probably doesn’t matter. Philosophers can, in the individual instances where bad philosophy is done, explain why it is bad philosophy. Personally, I think that is often a waste of time, unless something is at stake politically or the answer to the question has some noticeable effect on people’s lives. Life is short. Billions of people live under an almost countless number of harmless misconceptions. There are usually better things to be doing than trying to show them where they’ve gone wrong.