- "Can philosophers change their minds?
A friend of mine in graduate school used to say that almost all philosophers, after they’ve completed their PhD dissertations, never read anything new, never work on anything new, and never change their minds about anything, for the rest of their lives .
And in fact, my 25 years of first-hand experience inside professional academic philosophy fully confirmed my friend’s cynical claim, provided that we introduce the following seven clarifications and qualifications.
First , “almost all” means “as many as 99%—but not absolutely all.” There are a few exceptions, let’s say 1%.
Second , “never” means “ almost never, i.e., 99% of the time, not.” As before, there a few exceptions, again let’s say 1%.
Third , “philosophers” means “contemporary professional academic philosophers.”
Fourth , “read anything new” means “read any philosophy outside their declared areas of research specialization (AOS) and teaching expertise.”
Fifth , “work on anything new” means “work intensively and seriously, and then also publish, on any philosophical issues, problems, or topics outside their AOS.“ Many or even most professional academic philosophers work intensively and seriously, and then also publish on problems or topics inside their AOS, that they haven’t previously worked or published on.
Sixth , “change their minds about anything” means “change their minds about their fundamental philosophical beliefs and commitments.”
To be sure, many or even most professional academic philosophers will occasionally change their minds about some first-order philosophical claims or theories, without changing their fundamental philosophical beliefs, especially including their worldviews or their metaphilosophy.
Seventh and finally, “the rest of their lives” means “the rest of their philosophical lives.” This includes the period beyond retirement, when many or even most professional academic philosophers remain more-or-less intellectually active for several decades."
- "There are at least five very strong social-institutional pressures on newly-minted PhDs not to read anything outside their AOS [Areas of Research], not to work on anything outside their AOS, and not to change their minds about their fundamental philosophical beliefs and commitments, for the rest of their philosophical lives.
First, without self-declaring an AOS by the time they’ve completed their dissertations, newly-minted PhDs will never get any sort of job, much less a tenure track job, remembering of course that for the purposes of this essay, “never” means “ almost never—i.e., 99% of the time, not.”
Second, without publishing a few articles in their self-declared AOS, young philosophers will never get a tenure track job.
Third, without publishing a substantial number of articles or a book in that self-declared AOS, young philosophers in the tenure track will never achieve tenure andpromotion to associate professor.
Fourth, without publishing another substantial number of new articles or another book in the very same self-declared AOS, not-so-young associate philosophers will never be promoted to full professor.
And fifth and finally, right from the very start of one’s career, obviously one has to do some highly-focused reading on topics X, Y, and Z in order to teach courses on X,Y, and Z; and since each and every employed philosopher has been hired by a philosophy department specifically in order to teach courses on X, Y, and Z, then there’s very little departmental incentive or interest in encouraging these philosophers, once hired, to change their areas of teaching expertise during the course of their careers, or indeed even to permit them to do so."
- What about great philosophers of the past —by which I mean, all great philosophers now dead, from the pre-Socratics forward to 2023—many or even most of whom weren’t professional academic philosophers: did any of them ever change their minds about their fundamental beliefs and commitments?
Four leading examples come immediately to mind:
Saint Augustine’s radical turn from worldly Manicheanism to ascetic Christianity, as recorded in the Confessions (Augustine, 401);
Immanuel Kant’s Hume-inspired awakening from his “dogmatic slumbers,” as later recorded in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics , and his corresponding radical turn from classical Leibnizian-Wolfran rationalism to transcendental idealism in the Critique of Pure Reason , aka “Kant’s Copernican Revolution” (Kant, 1781/1887/1997, 1783/2004);
A.N. Whitehead’s radical turn from logicism—i.e., the explanatory and ontological reduction of mathematics to pure logic—in Principia Mathematica to “the philosophy of organism,” aka process philosophy , in Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality (Whitehead and Russell,1910/1962; Whitehead, 1927/1967, 1929/1978); and
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s radical turn from solipsistic ideal language philosophy in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to communitarian ordinary language philosophy of the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1921/1981, 1953).
- Now generalizing over these four great philosophers’ changes-of-mind, we can see three basic elements.
First, each philosopher’s change-of-mind was internally-initiated or self-motivated, not externally-initiated or other-motivated . Worldviews cannot be changed solely or even primarily by engaging with other philosophers’ contrary views, and especially not by means of professional academic philosophical debate (Hanna, 2023a). Second, each change-of-mind involved the radical turn from a reductive or bottom-up worldview, to a non-reductive or top-down worldview.
And third, each change-of-mind involved the radical turn from a deterministic and passive-minded or uncreative-minded worldview, to a non-deterministic and active-minded or creative-minded worldview. In the cases of Augustine and Whitehead, this active-mindedness or creative-mindedness included not only rational human mindedness, but also divine mindedness.
If we expand the formulation of my initial question from “can philosophers change their minds?” to “can philosophers or scientists change their minds?,” then we discover at least one famous case of a physicist, namely Stephen Hawking, who during the last twenty years of his life made a radical turn from the reductive or bottom-up and deterministic and passive-minded cosmology of A Brief History of Time to what his collaborator Thomas Hertog calls “Hawking’s final theory” (Hawking, 1988; Hertog,2023). Moreover, and most importantly for our purposes, Hawking’s intellectual transition to his final theory clearly manifests the same three basic elements manifested by the four great philosophers’ changes of mind:
(i) internal initiation or self-motivation,
(ii) the radical turn to a non-reductive or top-down worldview, and (iii) the radical turn to a non-deterministic and active-minded or creative-minded worldview (Hanna, 2023b).
My Views:
Because philosophical_realism is an evolutionary default and a very primal instinct, it is unlikely that the majority will ever change their philosophical views from philosophical realism [secured] to ANTI-philosophical_realism which could trigger an unpleasant Cold-Turkey.
Anyone know of any notable philosophers who had changed from mind from philosophical realism to ANTI-philosophical_realism or vice-versa?
