It’s in: most philosophers accept or lean towards compatibilism

Comments

1. Wes Alwan says

   December 14, 2009 at 7:32 pm

   And what — no one’s an anomalous monist? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_monism)

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2. Dan B says

   February 5, 2010 at 5:35 pm

   I went to the blog and read some of the comments. I think it is interesting that some people seem think that there is something wrong with the fact that there are wide disagreements amongst philosophers on many philosophical issues. I would be very concerned if suddenly all the Philosophers were agreeing on everything. If that were to happen then it would mean that those issues would be dead to philosophers, that something was wrong with the sample, or that we need a lot of new philosophers. It is good to see that most of those issues are still alive and kicking. After reading the comments to that blog I was also struck by the rather strange assertion that if a philosopher studies or teaches the philosophy of other philosophers, then he/she is not a philosopher. Of course that is dumb. It would probably be pretty difficult to become a good philosopher without studying the other philosophers; you would probably be completely ignorant of most of the ideas that have been raised and repeat a lot of mistakes. It does seem funny to me that those who make blanket assertions condemning philosophy, usually seem to be unaware that they are engaging in a philosophical argument, so in a way are being self contradictory. Usually it just shows their ignorance of our intellectual history and current intellectual debates. It is possible to engage in philosophical debate without any training. Most people do without even realizing it. All of the disciplines use logic and reasoning, which is a branch of philosophy. Just like we all might have naive ideas about psychology, cosmology, physics, geology, etc. without any training, we can all be amateur philosophers. That is probably why they make the distinction between professional philosophers and other philosophers. We wouldn’t say that a person with a major in psychology was a professional psychologist, just that they had studied psychology at the basic level. The same is true of philosophy. You can have professional philosophers who are experts in the various arguments and issues and have demonstrated their abilities in writing and thinking. I don’t see what is wrong with that. I don’t pretend to be a professional philosopher just because I am interested in it and have read about and debated some of the issues.

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