Making Philosophy Meaningful Again

I happen to think that most contemporary philosophy is bullshit. Not necessarily in the Harry Frankfurt sense, but rather in the more everyday sense in which it is a kind of nonsense, and maybe even some kind of unconscious fraud.

Most philosophy pretends to be about questions of fact but engages in methods which are incapable of determining whether something is a fact or not. In particular, contemporary philosophers generally depend on intuition - non-empirical, non-mathematical reasoning - as a basis for their claims. But intuitions about the kind of things that philosophy deals in tell us nothing at all about what the case is.

However, I don't think that the current state of affairs is necessary. In fact, I think that philosophy could be done meaningfully by basing its methodology much more directly on that of theoretical science and applied mathematics. The following is a talk I gave a few years ago at the University of Lund, Sweden, in which I tried to sketch such a view in somewhat more detail. 

Ironically, it is also the last talk I gave before (at least temporarily) leaving philosophy. Time will tell if I get to come back; I really miss working with philosophical questions, but the way the subject is now, it is hard to get to do so in a meaningful way.