I received a journal alert today for the latest issue of Phil Studies, and saw that one of the articles in the issue is titled “Does empirical moral psychology rest on a mistake?” The author thinks so, and I don’t really work on the topic. So, being a collegial philosopher working diligently on his plot of philosophical space, and recognizing the need for specialized division of labor in philosophy if any decent work is to get done on a given question, I figured the most reasonable thing to do on this matter was to trust that the author is probably right.

After thinking about this for a bit, I realized that there might be scores of topics that I care about to some degree, which have also been shown to rest on a mistake – in which case, I’m wasting needless emotional energy on these matters, which probably makes me a less efficient philosopher overall. So to rid myself of this anxiety, I did a Philosophers’ Index search on “rests on a mistake?” to find out where this energy was being expended, and have, since this morning, purged myself of any interest in these topics. Here, then, for your benefit, is a list of fields and topics we can all safely stop working on.

• Metaethics
• Kelsen’s notion of legal normativity
• The defense of free speech
• Naturalism
• Higher-order music ontologies
• Theories of consciousness
• Origins of life research
• Non-cognitivism
• Modern moral philosophy
• Twin earth[1]
• The Husserl/Heidegger feud
• Philosophy of action
• Epistemology
• Moral subjectivism
• Business ethics
• The idea of niskama karma
• The traditional treatment of enthymemes
• Ontology (twice!)
• The free will debate
• An inferential role semantics (which one?)
• Environmental ethics
• The Grisez-Finnis-Boyle moral philosophy
• Moral education
• Analytic aesthetics
• Action theory
• Foundationalism (did you catch the irony in this one?)
• American philosophy (should we stop, then? Or just expatriate?)
• Liberalism
• The Gettier problem
• Applied ethics
• The philosophy of induction
• Cognitive psychology
• The logic of preference
• Moral philosophy (also twice! Guess the second article ought not to have been written)
• Recent moral philosophy
• The principle of substitutivity
• The analysis of religious language
• James’ ethics of belief
• Negation
• Modal logic
• Traditional aesthetics
• The neo-intuitionist theory of obligation
• Christology

Man, I feel like a Turing machine.

[1] Note: not ‘the twin earth thought experiment’, but twin earth. So either XYZ was a really bad idea, or we’re in some trouble.