The end of philosophy in 800 words or less

David Brooks gets under a lot of liberals' skin, but one thing I've always appreciated is that he seems to have a pretty deep interest in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, and is willing to write about it in his op-ed columns. Even if a lot of what he says is not exactly cutting edge stuff, I think he's still performing an important function: introducing key concepts from the brain sciences to a mainstream audience. So when he writes an article called "The End of Philosophy" trying to get across the notion that the Enlightenment-era conception of the mind as the "seat of reason" has been shown by science to be completely inaccurate, I'm sympathetic.

However, plenty of people aren't so sympathetic, and in fact they have a pretty good reason not to be: Brooks' column is terrible. From John Cole's Balloon Juice:

David Brooks has another of his patented “science explains social things but I won’t tell you how or cite any actual articles” pieces today. This one is about the “science of morality.”

And, indeed, Brooks does not cite any articles, and many of the claims he makes are as vapid as they are pithy (e.g., "The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality... challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people." Huh?). While a person who is already familiar with philosophy and cognitive science (ahem) can charitably fill in the blanks, everyone else is left scratching their heads.

The problem, I think, is that Brooks is working in an incredibly constricted format--the newspaper op-ed. Consider all the advantages of a blog: there is no length limit, you can post as often and as much as you want, you can include links, you can include as many images as you want, you can go back and edit posts to make them clearer, you can dialog with commenters or other bloggers, you can vary the difficulty of your posts (as for example Krugman does with his "wonkish" versus non-wonkish posts), etc. Maybe if he were blogging Brooks would do a good job conveying all these difficult ideas to a mainstream audience--but as it is, he is trying to cram everything into 800 words of newspaper print, which I'm pretty sure would be impossible even for Socrates.

Oh, and in case you don't know who Socrates is or what he is famous for, let me give you the Brooks capsule summary:

Socrates talked.

Got that?