All true. But it’s like Freud to psychology: got the real questions started, had some good or even brilliant ideas, but is now almost completely obsolete, eclipsed by all the science since.

To defend Marx and Engels: I would say that, unlike Foucault who actually did have access to some formal tools of anthropology and other disciplines and just didn’t use them, Marx and Engels used the best economic of their era. Economics as always tended (to its detriment) to be a very armchair, non-empirical study with a priori principles, and a huge part of what Marx always did was to argue a fortiori: “Okay, I will grant you the labor basis of value, I’ll grant you many of your assumptions. That means capitalism is exploitative and will immiserate itself into oblivion”. It is really astonishing how much modern right-wing economics has memory-holed that, just like they’ve memory-holed that their theories depended on immobile capital and mobile labor and now we have the opposite.

Kapital is brilliant for its time, and what they did for sociology was to be among the first people doing rigorous institutional analysis. And while they definitely needed better data, that data just wasn’t actually available like it is now.

It depends on how one scores a debate, i.e. rhetorical performance (which is how most internet viewers decide it) or actual score-pointing (i.e. counting pickups and drops), and then whether you score false statements or not (for example, Plantinga falsely claims Dennett did not respond to his argument; technically that is a pickup, but since it is false, most professional debate scorers would not count it, and thus score it as a drop) and whether you count non sequiturs or not (Plantinga attempted pickups a few times with statements that were not logically rebuttals, but just verbiage non-responsive to Dennett’s actual points, and pro scoring usually does not count those).

Plantinga was more rhetorically effective (better organized, clearer, more emotionally forceful), because Dennett was a bit verbose and wandery and humble; but in technical scoring, Plantinga solidly lost that debate, especially if you don’t score falsehoods and non sequiturs.

On “most philosophy being rubbish” it is crucial to be aware of my full analysis of that (which is more nuanced, i.e. “most” leaves a lot of “some”) in Is Philosophy Stupid? and to peruse my empirical study, the three-case study I did (a series of three articles), showing philosophy is around 50% bullshit (with only a sample size of three and the selection criteria I used, though, that can’t be treated as a very precise result, only that it is alarmingly lower than other soft knowledge fields in the humanities, like history).

On Foucault and Deleuze, that is Contintental rather than Analytical Philosophy, and I reject almost all of it on methodological grounds. It lacks rigor (it is mostly florid editorializing with no great care to semantics, logic, or systematics) and is soft on contact with reality (it is mostly armchair and doesn’t interact with relevant sciences). Those two can be somewhat excused as the relevant sciences were not that advanced in their heyday, but the progress of the social sciences since blows them away, illustrating the vast difference between a rigorous, analytical, empirical approach, and theirs.

That doesn’t mean they didn’t have some good ideas. But they’ve been surpassed in every respect since. Any good idea they had has either been developed since, with more rigor and empiricism, and thus they are as obsolete to it as Freud to psychology (another who had “some good ideas” but whose entire project was far from what science went on to validate).

What one can say in their favor is the same thing one can praise Freud for: they were the first in many ways to start asking the right questions, and trying to answer them. But for Freud (or someone comparable) we would not have modern psychology. Likewise, but for, say, Foucault, we would not have modern sociology. Much the same can be said of Marx and Engels from a century before, who in many ways advanced sociology—not scientifically, but in terms of concepts and awareness of what it is we should be looking at and asking questions about. But in no way are they useful anymore. Their works are a hodgepodge of good and bad ideas, and well thought out and poorly thought out notions, and are hit-or-miss empirically. Even Darwin was more rigorous and spot-on, and even he is obsolete now.

That doesn’t mean no one should read them. Rather, it means one should read them like one reads Freud: with an understanding that every claim they make really needs checking now against subsequent scientific findings and philosophical advances, and so is more an artifact of history than a usable textbook.

One of the problems I have with academic philosophy generally, and Continental Philosophy specifically, is an unwarranted reverence for names and thinkers, whereby one organizes a textbook by, say, what this or that Great Thinker said, rather than organized as a knowledge discipline, where findings are categorized and discussed empirically. So, a chapter on “sociology of sex” and not a chapter on “Foucault.”

I believe history of philosophy, just like history of science, needs to be separated from the actual knowledgebase (of “philosophy” and “science”). “Where are we now on this” should not be answered with a history of ideas. It should be answered with an empirical-analytical status report that should not even need mentioning a single name. Though it can, my point is, if you can’t explain it without names, you’re doing it wrong (think of, for example, how we can explain modern evolutionary biology without ever mentioning Darwin; so even if we do name him, we didn’t have to, and his name is largely incidental to the results, even if he was not at all incidental to their history).

Another aspect of this is that one can read modern discussions of, for example, Foucault’s quite important contributions to science and philosophy, that are actually better than what Foucault said himself, owing to a tendency to just “forget” everything he said that didn’t hold up or wasn’t clear or accurate, and boil his ideas down to just their best, the ones that made an impact, or gained empirical confirmation. That makes him sound more impressive than he was.

Which (no black and white fallacies here) does not mean he was a mediocre thinker. He’s quite impressive, and historically important. But one should not exaggerate that impressiveness. Just like Aristotle, IMO. The same is true of Freud and Marx, for example; there is a tendency to round everything up to 1 or 0, such that they were either totally geniuses or totally buffoons, when really they were geniuses for their day, and made important contributions, but were not using the best methodology and were far from right about everything.

The actual writings of Foucault are actually not very rigorous, nor as analytically or empirically careful as they should have been. Compare him with Wittgenstein or Quine, for example, philosophers I disagree a lot with but their methods were far more sound; or, now, Nussbaum and Haack, or, then, Ayer or Polanyi, who were far more right about things than all of the above. Though of course not right about “everything,” but my point is to methodology. So my general response to all Continental Philosophy is: for any given idea it fielded, “Did that test out or not?” And often I can’t even answer that, because they lacked sufficient precision to even be able to be sure what it is they really meant.

Good job, Dr. Carrier! I haven’t read the debate between Plantinga and Dennett. Many people told me that Plantinga did much better, but I’ll check it out for myself. You said most Philosophy is rubbish. I’m curious to know your opinion about Michael Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

Who is Bill?

My article is about Robert, and what he said.

Do you mean William Lane Craig? If so, where do you find him saying God is “a concrete substance”? I only know him advocating for God as a disembodied mind and as arguing beginningless substances are impossible.

Theists like Bill reject the idea that God is an abstract object. Bill asserts that God is a concrete substance.

He has the same issue with just trusting Craig in particular. I’m a little less soft on him on that front: When it’s come up multiple times, he actually has a duty to do a little homework. That wouldn’t mean reading all of Dennett’s work, but a good (neutral and fair) intro, some selective posts or articles, etc. would have helped him tremendously.

I feel really indebted to your work and generous articles and responses to my comments. I really think that without your work I could have fallen for Christian apologetics after leaving Islam.
Thanks a lot!

To be fair to your last point, Bertuzzi confesses early on that he didn’t study Dennett’s work much and didn’t know it well. I don’t expect him to know better here, and he did try at least a few times to get the discussion on track and just lost control of the narrative on the force of his guest’s personality. So he was relying on Stewart here, who failed him—but in the same way Christian apologists usually fail their audience.

The challenge in the communication is that, if you start by identifying the underlying ontology and centering it, you don’t shock people enough. Terms like “illusion” or ideas like the stream of consciousness as the monkey in the age (especially interestring in the context of modern neuropsychology showing that many people don’t have an internal monologue-type stream of consciousness) actually help people see the magnitude of what is being proposed. However, they also do miscommunicate the idea.

This also has led to things like Buddhists being dismissed as unempirical when I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. The distinction being made, of absolute truth versus conventional truth, is actually quite useful because it maps quite neatly (while emphasizing different features) to noumenal versus phenomenological distinctions. The point is just that all we can do is model the universe, and this has emotional implicaitons for our well-being as well as practical scientiifc implications.

What people like Dennett are saying really becomes profound when you actually either address the full weight of the cognitive evidence, the way that our sense of self distorts and alters even our original phenomenological experiences, or actually do some meditation or introspection and think about one’s behavior. The great irony, of course, is that doing this also grants much greater control. When we know what our biases, our reasons for unconscious action, etc. are, we can plan around and deal with them.

I also have to say that I find this degree of misrepresentation to be a bit ghoulish. Bertuzzi is not too bad as a commentator, he is capable of acknowledging nuance (I think he’s too beholden to trusting apologists in his in-group without checking but I don’t get the read from him that that fault is a totally culpable one), but I still think that, in particular, when someone has passed, it’s especially morally pressing to do what Dennett himself counseled and to steelman the person. I don’t expect Bertuzzi or his guest to express the ideas as if they believed or without any pushback or Christian retort, but definitely there should be a strong emphasis on a neutral presentation, on pushback against weak objections to the ideas, and on what Christians can learn and emphasize from Dennett’s work. I’m glad that they framed the discussion as wrong in creative ways, but it would be better to say wrong but useful.