Just as I thought I would be done with metaphilosophy, the election of Donald Trump made me realize how much intellectual hygiene and epistemic responsibility actually matter.
Philosophy should be about rational persuasion. But it isn't. In philosophy it is impossible to rationally persuade anybody because no genuinely philosophical proposition can be rationally justified. Therefore, whenever someone becomes convinced of a philosophical position, irrational thought processes must have played a key role.
Philosophy is the art of intellectually dishonest persuasion. It is to academia what post-truth is to politics. Donald Trump is what happens when voters and pundits start thinking about politics philosophically. The bubble of analytic philosophy is just as detached from reality and just as full of bad reasoning as the bubble of Breitbart-reading Trump voters.
Teaching scientific illiteracy (in the form of non-naturalistic or pseudo-naturalistic philosophy) and arbitrary and intellectually dishonest thinking (arguments based on untrustworthy intuitions, etc) to our brightest young minds is a great disservice to democracy. As the election of Trump shows, bad reasoning has real consequences.
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