Wednesday, June 26, 2013

"What do most philosopher's believe?"

 Found this here, apparently philosophers David Chalmers and David Bourget have been conducting surveys on the views of other philosophers and what they think. Their website is philpapers and the method, data as well as the analysis are all included there. Looking at the views of other philosophers and other scholars seems to be a trend as well. Philosopher Joshua Knobe has been conducting similar studies. Knobe in a way launched the 'Experimental Philosophy' movement by which they dismiss many of the intuition-based theories philosophers have done and suggest that psychology and other social sciences, as well as the cognitive sciences can better inform philosophy.

These are a few of Chalmers and Bourget's findings.

Metaphysics:
The issues that fall under this heading broadly involve questions about what exists, and why and how it does. Here’s a breakdown of some of the biggies:
  • God: atheism 72.8%; theism 14.6%; other 12.6%
Granted, this is an oversimplification. Popular notions of these categories don’t necessarily correspond to more subtle distinctions among philosophers, who may be strong or weak atheists (or theists), or hold some version of deism, agnosticism, or none of the above.
  •  Free will: compatibilism 59.1%; libertarianism 13.7%; no free will 12.2%; other 14.9%
Compatibilism, the majority view here, is the theory that we can choose our actions to some degree, and to some degree they are determined by prior events. Libertarianism (related to, but not synonymous with, the political philosophy) claims that all of our actions are freely chosen.
  • Metaphilosophy: naturalism 49.8%; non-naturalism 25.9%; other 24.3%
Naturalism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the idea or belief that only natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces operate in the world,” or “the belief that nothing exists beyond the natural world.” Note that metaphysical naturalism needs to be distinguished from methodological naturalism, which nearly all scholars and scientists embrace.
  • Abstract objects: Platonism 39.3%; nominalism 37.7%; other 23.0%
This distinction gets at whether abstractions like geometry or the laws of logic exist in some immutable form “out there” in the universe (as Platonic ideas) or whether they are “nominal,” no more than convenient formulas we create and apply to our observations. It’s a debate at least as old as the ancient Greeks.
Personal Identity:
In this general category, we deal with questions about what it means to be a person and how we can exist as seemingly coherent individuals over time in a world in constant flux. Let’s take two fun examples that deal with these quandaries, shall we?
  • Teletransporter: survival 36.2%; death 31.1%; other 32.7%
Here, we’re dealing with a thought experiment proposed by Derek Parfit (one of the participants in the survey) that pretty much takes the Star Trek transporter technology (or the horror version in The Fly) and asks whether the transported individual—completely disintegrated and reconstituted somewhere else—is the same person as the original. In other words, can a “person” survive this process or does the individual die and a new one take its place? The question hinges on ideas about a “soul” or “spirit” that exists apart from the material body and asks whether or not we are nothing more than very specific arrangements of matter and energy.
  • Zombies: conceivable but not metaphysically possible 35.6%; metaphysically possible 23.3%; inconceivable 16.0%; other 25.1%
Zombies are everywhere. Try to escape them! You can’t. Their prevalence in popular culture is mirrored in the philosophy world, where zombies have long served as metaphors for the possibility of a pure (and ravenous) bodily existence, devoid of conscious self-awareness. The prospect may be as frightening as the zombies of the Walking Dead, but is it a real possibility? A significant number of philosophers seem to think so.

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