>Also, you seem to be unaware of the diversity of thought in contemporary moral realism, if you think that all moral realism is equivalent to Platonism.
I'm well aware of moral naturalism, and ascribe to it myself. However, defenses of "philosophy qua philosophy" and that sort of ilk are almost never about any form of naturalism. If you are a fan of seriously naturalistic philosophy, done well and in accordance with the best scientific evidence, than you probably belong on the Science side of the insipid "science versus philosophy" flame-wars, and your favorite philosophers actually spend portions of their books arguing exactly that. Because they have to, over and over again, ad nauseum.
Because otherwise, the Platonism-of-the-gaps people will rush in and declare Platonism About Everything, which is what they really want.
So for instance, I think that Derek Parfit really needs to see a therapist, because if you actually assert that "if naturalism were true, ... I would have wasted much of [my life]"[1], then you've got a problem. You should not need Platonism about X, for any value of X; you should be disinterestedly considering whether Platonism is true (I damn well think it's not).
>I'm well aware of moral naturalism, and ascribe to it myself.
Huh. Well, I'm an error theorist. ;)
>If you are a fan of seriously naturalistic philosophy, done well and in accordance with the best scientific evidence, than you probably belong on the Science side of the insipid "science versus philosophy" flame-wars
I don't see why I have to pick one side or the other...
I consider my outlook to be thoroughly naturalistic, yet I still find myself frequently defending philosophy to people who misunderstand it. That doesn't mean I support all types of philosophical work that are being done, or that I think all philosophical questions are equally valuable.
>Because otherwise, the Platonism-of-the-gaps people will rush in and declare Platonism About Everything, which is what they really want.
Who are these Platonism-of-the-gaps people? I sort of see where you're going with this, and I agree with you that a lot of what is done in analytic philosophy is misguided, but I also want to be careful to avoid using the word "Platonism" as a pejorative for everything I disagree with.
Thanks for that Parfit quote, by the way. I think that's pretty hilarious.
I would go ahead and label them as the entire "robust realist" school of thought in meta-ethics, and we can then throw in large portions of the people doing philosophy of mathematics (the original Platonism in modern philosophy), many people's positions on semantics in philosophy-of-language (ie: they think of semantics in a way that requires Platonic propositions to exist in order to give semantic content, as opposed to merely pragmatic content, to sentences), and of course the endless droning claims of dualism in philosophy of mind.
I would grant these people a lot more charity if they could all get together and agree on what exactly the Immaterial or Platonic Stuff is supposed to actually be, and how it comes into contact with the physical world, not only through supervenience but through some form of actual causation. Instead, since they don't have a unified account of the Immaterial, it looks (admittedly, from the outside) as if they're just working in separate fields and positing various forms of Immaterial Stuff as disparate "solutions" for all the problems they refuse to allow to be solved naturalistically.
Naturalism can at least shunt off the hard work of explanation to actual sciences, and when that work gets done, naturalism ends up with philosophical accounts that don't require new and different forms of spooky stuff for each and every thing we want to explain.
I pretty much entirely agree with you. I reject all of the non-naturalistic positions you've outlined.
I find it disappointing that non-naturalism is seeing a resurgence in metaethics, especially since I'm not even a moral realist to begin with. It's clearly just a lot of people grasping at straws.
For modern lines of development regarding Platonism (or something like it) in the philosophy of math, you might want to check out Ladyman and Ross's "Every Thing Must Go". They attempt to argue from insights from quantum mechanics that relations are real, but objects are not. I haven't read the whole book, but I believe they're explicit in stating that their position is not Platonism as it's classically understood, even though their position sounds suspiciously similar to it.
Even though I'm not a dualist of any kind, philosophy of mind is still the area where I'm the most sympathetic and forgiving towards spooky explanations. Consciousness is pretty weird, after all. So when someone wants to defend property or even substance dualism, I think they're wrong, but not crazy; and yet physicalism completely dominates in philosophy of mind, while moral non-naturalists get a free pass on their weak "well, it SEEMS like there are morals, therefore morals" arguments. It just feels completely backwards to me.
Anyway, I'm not quite sure what prompted you to take the discussion down this path. There is much in contemporary analytic philosophy that I find problematic and even indefensible, but when I'm trying to impress upon people the importance and relevance of philosophy, I don't mention the shortcomings until the person has a deep enough understanding to take a nuanced view of these issues. This is just like how, if you're trying to convince the global warming skeptic that the scientific consensus is to be trusted, you don't start off by talking about the replication issues in psychology. When I talk about philosophy with people, my main goal is to convey the point that there are important philosophical questions that are worth thinking seriously about.
I'm well aware of moral naturalism, and ascribe to it myself. However, defenses of "philosophy qua philosophy" and that sort of ilk are almost never about any form of naturalism. If you are a fan of seriously naturalistic philosophy, done well and in accordance with the best scientific evidence, than you probably belong on the Science side of the insipid "science versus philosophy" flame-wars, and your favorite philosophers actually spend portions of their books arguing exactly that. Because they have to, over and over again, ad nauseum.
Because otherwise, the Platonism-of-the-gaps people will rush in and declare Platonism About Everything, which is what they really want.
So for instance, I think that Derek Parfit really needs to see a therapist, because if you actually assert that "if naturalism were true, ... I would have wasted much of [my life]"[1], then you've got a problem. You should not need Platonism about X, for any value of X; you should be disinterestedly considering whether Platonism is true (I damn well think it's not).
[1] -- http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/08/on-wasted-philosophic-liv...