Reddit mentions of Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection

Oh yeah, there's a ton of stuff out there about natural selection (and evolutionary theory more broadly). You might want to start with the SEP entry on natural selection, which will give you a feel for some of the issues. Beyond that, here are a few things I'd recommend reading:

• Eliot Sober's The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus
  
  
• Peter Godfrey-Smith's Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection
  
  
• Dawkins' The Extended Phenotype (this is from back when he was still doing good science, and before he went sort of nuts)
  
  
• Samir Okasha's Evolution and the Levels of Selection
  
  
• Matthen & Ariew's "Two Ways of Thinking About Natural Selection"
  
  That should give you some pretty solid places to start reading. I've read all of those things, and I'm pretty comfortable recommending each of them as worth your time.

I was speaking about the relationship between philosophy and science in general, and I didn't intend to say anything directly about the status of philosophy of science. It's worth noting, though, that philosophy of science as such (as distinct from epistemology) is really a new subdiscipline born of the work of Popper, Hempel, Kuhn, Quine, Sellars and other mid-20th century thinkers. And as a subdiscipline, I think it's doing great, although (like other areas in philosophy) it's becoming more specialized. For an example of a recent brilliant (and highly praised) philosophy of science book, see Peter Godfrey-Smith's book Darwinian populations and natural selection.


Your point that science and philosophy were once continuous disciplines is certainly true for the ancients and somewhat true as recently as Descartes (whose contributions to physiology were significant), but had ceased to be true by the 19th century. Additionally, I don't think it has much to do with philosophy and science per se, just the specialized branching of human knowledge, as you mention. For example, scientists who worked in areas like human anatomy or early chemistry in the 17th century were also still able to do good work in pure mathematics (like Descartes). But again, by the 19th century, pure mathematics was almost entirely being done by specialist mathematicians, rather than generally well-rounded thinkers who dabbled in a bunch of areas (though of course, the deep connection between physics and mathematics was still in place).

The Less Wrong piece you linked to makes some interesting points, but it also paints a misleading picture of contemporary philosophy. For example, Luke Muehlhauser (the writer) says "if you're looking to solve cutting-edge problems, mainstream philosophy is one of the last places you should look. Try to find the answer in the cognitive science or AI literature first." Well, if you take a look at a journal like Trends in Cognitive Science, you'll see that many of the contributors are philosophers. Or look at some of the most exciting models of cognition and thought, you'll see that they're pioneered by philosophers working in cognitive science - the predictive coding models of Andy Clark and Jacob Hohwy for example. It also mentions people like Dennett, but doesn't dwell on the huge contributions of philosophers Chalmers, Block, Searle, Fodor, and so on, all of whom have played a major role in the development of contemporary cognitive science. Of course, it can't mention EVERYBODY, but by singling out Dennett, it makes it sound like he's radically different from all his peers, when in fact his methods are pretty representative of the way all philosophy of mind works these days.


There are, of course, philosophers who do more traditional work, like analytic metaphysics or the history of philosophy. For what it's worth, I think those are things worth studying, although I can see why sites like LessWrong would be more skeptical of their utility. But in any case, in my experience as a professional philosopher working in the United States, that kind of pursuit isn't front and center of philosophical enquiry any more - empirically informed epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language are the dominant interests of the majority of my peers.