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.
Jacob Archambault 