Doing the Real Work of Philosophy

P.D. Magnus is a Professor of Philosophy at University of Albany SUNY. His research addresses the philosophy of science, the philosophy of art and music, the epistemology of technology, and pragmatism.

By P.D. Magnus

When I write philosophy, my task is not merely to generate the most persuasive argument for some target claim. Rather, my task is to figure out what I ought to say. I often have the experience of setting out to write a paper with a conclusion in view, only to find that spelling out the argument in detail leaves me not believing the conclusion anymore. The arguments instead lead elsewhere.

I expect this experience is familiar. It reveals that writing philosophy is (or at least can be) more a matter of figuring out what to think than it is of figuring out how to express pre-existing ideas. I start a paper with a conclusion in mind, but I end up making discoveries through the process of writing. Careful writing is a way of exploring the space of ideas and settling my own mind about them.

Dr. Magnus concludes that reliance on "the algorithmic average of philosophical discourse, would be a kind of bad faith—a refusal to genuinely do philosophy."

Read his excellent essay here: Offloading to AI Means Not Doing Philosophy: on the importance of exploring the space of ideas | Blog of the APA