a more general remark

The following also seems very true, and gives further evidence of why the “critical thinking” paradigm in philosophy needs to be abandoned:

“I think that philosophy tends to attract more assholes than many other disciplines, because people who are naturally critical of others get a perfect environment to be, well, critical of ideas and they get to be negative to their hearts content, all the time being rewarded for having the perfect critical stance that philosophy says it requires. So you get to be a negative nelly and be good at your job (at least in the short term). Interesting that the other sphere of knowledge where it really pays to be critical or at least highly skeptical is science, although there don’t seem to be so many assholes in that field.”

On the latter point, I suspect that it’s because there is a more obvious reality principle at work in science. It’s a bit easier there than in philosophy to know the difference between good and bad work. There may be assholes in the sciences, but one can forget that and work with them as long as they’re delivering the goods.

What’s unique in philosophy is that people can feel superior precisely because they’re not delivering the goods. They can tell themselves and others that there is something capitalistically vulgar about actually delivering a finished work to press. They can smugly sit at home, sure that their never-to-be-finished masterwork trumps all of the actually extant work in philosophy. No one’s going to take that seriously in the sciences.