Antiphilosophical Dictionary - Peter Naur

[Asolsutsesvyl]

Peter Naur (1928-2016) was a Danish computer science pioneer, most widely known for his work on the ALGOL 60 programming language, and the Backus-Naur Form (BNF) notation used to describe the syntax of formal languages.

Less known is that Naur took a big interest in psychology in his later years. Rejecting the schools of Freudianism, Behaviorism, and Cognitivism as all being based on bad definitions and otherwise flawed foundations, he drew heavily upon the classic work of William James. He demanded of psychological definitions that they would make sense in relation to experience, finding that James' descriptions did so while many more commonly used definitions did not.

Naur's Antiphilosophical Dictionary tersely dissects bad definitions commonly used by philosophers who build upon Aristotle's legacy - and psychologists whose thinking is largely underpinned by the work of such philosophers. Both Behaviorism and Cognitivism, as well as commonly accepted thinking about Artificial Intelligence, build upon this Aristotelian legacy.

But nothing is said about Plato and idealist or more purely metaphysical philosophy. Naur appears to simply be uninterested in such, as a simple agnostic in metaphysical stance, leaving such matters outside the scope of his work. But he does firmly object to Aristotle's brand of philosophy, because of its tradition of sloppy definitions and hampering of the quest for accurate empirical knowledge through flawed reasoning. In comparison, Naur probably found Plato mostly harmless.

The book can be downloaded as a PDF from Naur's website, along with some other of Naur's works.

I remain interested in the more purely metaphysical types of philosophy, but after a long time of immersion in some authors' work which mixes up philosophy, psychology, and other areas in and out of science in a way which obstructs accurate knowledge and understanding, it was refreshing when I had a first read of this book. It helps clean up some basic definitions and sloppy language, pointing towards directly experienced psychological reality in their place. It showed me what kinds of problems to look for in other areas, where I'd taken in the writing of presumptous authors engaged in a large-scale holier-than-thou crusade for the truth.

Here's part of the preface:

Preface

Judging from what is called philosophy, nonsense must be among the sturdiest plants there are.  The seed was sown by Aristotle 350 years B.C., and since then the philosophical nonsense has thrived.  A seedling of the plant, Aristotle's talk of motion, died around 1650, but the main stem flowers unscathed today.

In this sturdiness of nonsense there is nothing inexplicable, psychologically.  As noted by William James a hundred years ago (see the dictionary article reality, p.  67), we all tend to believe what we are told or read, as long as it does not flatly contradict something in which we are currently engaged.  In a debate which does not deal with matters of our special concern we all tend to agree with the latest honourable speaker.  This habitual trust in speech and print again is in line with our trust in the way we perceive our ordinary surroundings, our closest fellow beings and the things, the light, and the sounds we encounter.  Long periods may elapse between our experience of being astonished or frightened at something we are exposed to.  Most of the time we may perceive our impressions in our habitual way, without running into surprises.

Thus it is quite understandable that when we encounter statements concerning issues at the limit of our normal field of interest, that is questions we have had hardly any occasion to give any thought, then we will tend strongly to accept them in the manner children have to accept anything they meet, uncritically.  In this field we find, among other things, philosophy.


Another relevant circumstance is the general urge to know better.  This urge differs from one person to another, like any other characteristic, but it is evidently lively in many people.  Such people will be attracted to Aristotle's philosophical program of the highest knowledge.  Philosophy, in other words, is presumption incarnate.

To this is added in recent years the commercialization of science in the form of what is called research projects.  Such projects are financed on the basis of, not results, but plans.  Those who grant the money and those who receive it have a common interest in defending the projects, whether or not they build upon nonsense, and the more costly the project the greater the defence interest.  Disclosure of nonsense in this context thus becomes a subversive activity, in which only those can allow themselves to engage who have given up their chance of getting access to research money.  Thus in research contexts nonsense thrives practically unabated.

Scientists are mostly uninterested in what philosophers say.  Thus the scientists for hundreds of years, unconcerned with the philosophers' presumption, have been formulating ever more adequate and coherent descriptions of the ways of the world.  Most of those who have even glanced at what philosophers say have been puzzled to notice how the philosophers have talked for several thousand years, without being able to display a single specimen of what they say they seek: a truth.

A few scientists have joined the philosophers' club of presumption.  However, if one looks close into what they say one finds that they just confirm the basic impossibility of philosophy.

The following notes are the results of irritation over the philosophical inanity accumulated over many years.  The first incentive to them came from my study of what is said in philosophical texts about science, induced by my work in astronomy around 1955.  Thus I came across Bertrand Russell's essay On the Notion of Cause (for more about this, see cause, p.  10).  His starting point is a detailed, critical analysis of what is said about causes in Baldwin's Dictionary of Psychology and Philosophy.  In his analysis Russell shows that what is said in the handbook is unclear and self-contradictory.  Russell then contrasts this philosophical confusion with the way the things are talked about in scientific astronomy, the field of my insight at first hand.

In later years my work in computing has given me the occasion to evaluate what is said in philosophical and psychological writings about people's mental activity and their perception of their surroundings and of linguistic expressions.  Here I have time and again found new examples of philosophical confusion of the kind Russell indicated.  However, I have never found other analyses like Russell's, and Russell himself appears in his later writings to have forgotten his antiphilosophical contribution.

[...]

While I have yet to study William James' classic work on psychology, this book adds to the motivation, showing why James' definitions are still better than ones in common use.

Naturally, Naur firmly dissects the philosophizing of Descartes.

[flofrog]

How did you find him, Asolsutsesvyl ?

[Black Dragon]

Interesting, and he makes some valid points, the best ones being to criticize and scrutinize things without just accepting them at face value because some famous philosopher said them, and to base psychological definitions on direct experience rather than metaphors and such. However, I think his reasoning is a mixed bag of actual wisdom and distortions/biases. While it's perfectly legit to criticize Aristotle's interpretations, criticizing philosophy as a whole and the desire to come at psychology from a purely scientific perspective seems, to me, more or less a materialist world view and by its very nature distorted(and in some ways even dangerous).

"Scientists are mostly uninterested in what philosophers say.  Thus the scientists for hundreds of years, unconcerned with the philosophers' presumption, have been formulating ever more adequate and coherent descriptions of the ways of the world.  Most of those who have even glanced at what philosophers say have been puzzled to notice how the philosophers have talked for several thousand years, without being able to display a single specimen of what they say they seek: a truth."

There's probably the best example. Although I'd wager Naur probably had the best of intentions(you know what they say...), this type of thinking is not only distorted, but detrimental to the progress of humanity, and especially insidiously damaging to fields such as psychology. Everything is concrete proof this, scientific method that...though I have not read his work, from the bits you posted, it seems he's proposing an explicitly rationalist, materialist point of view. That line of thinking has kept philosophy, spirituality, and science not only separate and compartmentalized, but at apparent odds, to the detriment of our progress as a species.

You can see this in how a good chunk(perhaps even the majority) of the mainstream scientific community has a virulent contempt for philosophy(including in a lot of cases morality and ethics), and a crazed need to ridicule and "debunk" anything pertaining to metaphysics. Only with the advent of quantum physics is that ever so slowly starting to change, and some of them are starting to discover and more or less even prove things philosophers have known all along. Through the 20th century, mainstream science really solidified the materialist premises to the point of dogma, and has become a mirror image of the corrupt witch-hunting, heretic-shaming religions its proponents so love to bash on.

Another example of the danger of that way of thinking is clear in how the mental health/psychiatric industries push useless and dangerous pills that don't actually work, and avoid addressing the real issues in a constructive way, because the way they see it, mental health issues are a purely scientific/non-philosophical matter of chemicals/physiology(and to some extent cognitive and environmental factors), because everything's just chemicals and the only reason you have thoughts and self-awareness is because of chemical reactions in your brain.

Simply put, they believe matter supersedes consciousness(because you can prove the existence of chemical reactions as a fact with materialist scientific methodology, while consciousness remains elusive and by their estimation therefore squarely in the realm of philosophical hogwash). Anyone on a site like this would probably agree that premise is ass-backwards, and a society operating from it is only screwing itself and benefitting STS agendas.

The quote about Bertrand Russel having "forgotten" his anti-philosophical stance in later works, is an indication that he evolved past that phase into a more balanced and holistic approach. That phase of scientific rationalism was good to get him thinking critically and questioning things, and to see things through a certain unique perspective or lens. In fact, I went through a phase much like that in high school and a couple years after, though I was never fully an atheist or materialist(identified as an agnostic but inquisitive/curious about metaphysical possibilities). He likely realized later the incompleteness and skewed bias of his view.

[Asolsutsesvyl]

How did you find him, Asolsutsesvyl ?

There's two parts to that. The first is, his name is one that hobby programmers who read about programming languages will almost certainly encounter. He's one of the famous old giants in computer science. The second is, getting curious and looking for more information about him after reading the news, a few years ago, that he had died.


@Black Dragon: It's a bit more complicated, in that materialist thought is a type of philosophical thought, in a tradition going back to Aristotle. Naur is, basically, in a position between the materialistic philosophers and the non-materialistic philosophers, as an anti-philosopher. He rejects Cartesian dualism, he rejects the behavioristic dogma that forbids consciousness as a scientifically valid area of study, and he also rejects the idea that a convincing simulation of a human is a valid criteria for a system having a mind like a human. But he does relate consciousness to the body and brain, because observation centers around embodied life, with an absence of what he would accept as any knowing of what conscious life is beyond that.

[Asolsutsesvyl]

As for Bertrand Russell, his development into a philosopher was not a development into spirituality. He analysed mind and other matters, and in the process provided and used flawed definitions of belief, intellectual life, and more. That kind of thing is traditionally bigger in academic philosophy, but boring to and ignored by most spiritual seekers.

Russell is also the logician whose hopes of rigorously and unambiguously providing a logical foundation for all mathematics came to nothing when Kurt Godel used logic to prove the limitations of what logic is able to prove, limitations making what Russell aspired to a logical impossibility.

In practice, there's a huge difference in most cases between the stuff which interests metaphysical explorers in communities like this and what academic philosophical argumentation has been about. The philosophical arguments in the mainstream are still stuck on whether or not all is matter, or all is mind, or both exist separately, and whether God exists, etc.


Anyway, here's two short examples of thought-worthy stuff from the book.

On how materialistic philosophy contorts the descriptions of things and then arbitrarily declares this or that illusory...

From time to time the philosophers succeed in dragging even significant scientists into their truth swamp. A prominent example is Eddington. He made great contributions to astrophysics and relativity theory, but also embarked on books having such titles as The Philosophy of Physical Science and The Nature of the Physical World. In the latter, from 1928, he discusses what he finds is `the philosophical outcome of the great changes of scientific thought which has recently come about'. In this book he is greatly concerned with truth.

[...] Eddington continues to tell how at another occasion he also thought of waves on water, but at that time took out another book, with a poem describing an impression of a frozen lake under the light of the night sky. He speaks of the deep impression the poem makes upon him, and says that `life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicist.' But then he continues:

`Of course it was an illusion. We can easily expose the rather clumsy trick that was played on us. Aethereal vibrations of various wave-lengths, reflected at different angles [...] photoelectric action [...] to a brain-centre. [...]'

There was one for you, all you naive laymen, who believe you know something about the things around you, come to the deep philosopher, he will reveal your illusions.

But it is nonsense, Eddington's presumptuous talk of illusions. It is no better than if a philosopher would say to me: You believe you are sitting there in a soft chair; but you are the victim of an illusion, you are in reality sitting in a wooden frame covered with cotton textiles and lacquer. And if philosopher number 2 came along and said: Wrong, in reality you are sitting in a model 92-133 covered with material 2217.

Eddington's talk of illusions stems from the Aristotelian dogma that the things merely `are' something Aristotle calls their essential properties (see essence, p.22) and that all other properties are illusions. Eddington himself gets lost in his hunt for the essence. He talks first about the solid substance of things, the material of the water moving. But then he says that the solid substance of things is another illusion. `We have chased the solid substance from the continuous liquid to the atom, from the atom to the electron, and there we have lost it.'

The dogma of essential properties serves no purpose other than the generation of idle nonsense. As we all know, things have lots of properties, of widely different kinds. Fixing our attention at some of them at a certain moment does not make us the victim of any illusion. Eddington's undulating water has such properties that are described by Lamb's equations, but it may just as fully have the properties the poet has expressed in words. There is here no contradiction or possibility of illusion. [...]

On how thinking and language are not quite the same thing, and how verbal formulation is merely something smaller and more limited arrived at...

Thinking-as-language-fallacy: Thus is denoted here the notion that our mental activity mainly consists of a processing of verbal expressions. The fallacy goes with the talk of `knowledge' in the form of verbal statements. The fallacy is expressed in detail by Bertrand Russell, see belief (p. 7). It is found in Quine's Word and Object, p. 3, where he says: `Actual memories mostly are traces not of past sensations but of past conceptualization or verbalization', and in Eddington's talk of `Symbolic Knowledge and Intimate Knowledge', see psychology (p. 66). The fallacy finds expression in Turing's Test, see Turing (p. 81).

The thinking-as-language-fallacy is flatly contradicted by the experience of every author, that the generation of the text in progress is a troublesome process, not merely a copying of something already there. Every word, every sentence, requires a tiring exertion (see the description under introspection, p. 30). This typical author's experience may be understood as a consequence of the fact that the generation of each verbal expression involves a choice that has to be made at the moment of generation. This choice again depends on a merely vague feeling about which property of the matter of concern is to be expressed. Each aspect of the world has an infinity of properties (see essence, p. 22). Giving expression of some of them requires a selection, both of which properties and of which verbal expression.

Thus any verbal formulation involves a situation dependent choice between an indefinite mass of possibilities. Correspondingly any verbal formulation will be incomplete compared with the properties of the matter of concern.

The thinking-as-language-fallacy is closely related to fallacies and lack of understanding about conception and denotation, see concept (p. 11).

For a more tenable understanding than thinking-as-language, see stream of thought (p.  75).

See also word-as-code-of-meaning-fallacy (p. 84). Further references are given in the Literature Appendix (p. 89).

[Black Dragon]

How did you find him, Asolsutsesvyl ?

There's two parts to that. The first is, his name is one that hobby programmers who read about programming languages will almost certainly encounter. He's one of the famous old giants in computer science. The second is, getting curious and looking for more information about him after reading the news, a few years ago, that he had died.


@Black Dragon: It's a bit more complicated, in that materialist thought is a type of philosophical thought, in a tradition going back to Aristotle. Naur is, basically, in a position between the materialistic philosophers and the non-materialistic philosophers, as an anti-philosopher. He rejects Cartesian dualism, he rejects the behavioristic dogma that forbids consciousness as a scientifically valid area of study, and he also rejects the idea that a convincing simulation of a human is a valid criteria for a system having a mind like a human. But he does relate consciousness to the body and brain, because observation centers around embodied life, with an absence of what he would accept as any knowing of what conscious life is beyond that.

Thanks, this clarifies things a bit for me. So some of these materialistic dogmas now in main stream science were contributed to in part by philosophers, specifically Aristotle...I suppose I can see that. Not a fan of behaviorism, especially the B.F. Skinner kind as espoused in the book "Beyond Freedom and Dignity", where he espouses basically drugging and behaviorally modifying everyone in society to some baseline norm.

[Asolsutsesvyl]

There is science and there is philosophy. Philosophy is filled with position-taking and argumentation about things without evidence. Philosophy tends to fill the areas which science doesn't currently deal with, a little like religion often does. For example, there's been a fierce battle between materialism and monotheism, but it was only in part a battle between science and religion. The bigger part was a battle between philosophy opposing religion and religion.

Each age has its philosophical dogmas, and the materialism of mainstream science is an example. Though, if you look at mathematics, a significant portion of mathematicians are quietly Platonist, persuaded intuitively that what they explore exists independently of them and humanity, in and of itself, and independently of matter as well. (In the Soviet Union, by contrast, such positions were politically incorrect, and mathematics textbooks sometimes included statements affirming the official state materialist philosophy, by asserting the material nature of mathematical reality.)

More generally, Plato's influence lives on in philosophies which hold that there's a greater, abstract reality which transcends time and space, and is more real and significant than the transient stuff of the material world. Agnostic people say they simply don't know anything about that, just like they don't know whether God exists or not. As for religions, their philosophies may or may not collide with that of Platonists.

The materialism of today reaches back to Aristotle, but has developed in many stages. It's an example of Aristotle being among the most influential handful of persons in the history of Western civilization. On account of other things objected to, Bertrand Russell claimed that "almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine".

[flofrog]

How interesting. When I was getting into what is 12th grade here and called in france, terminale (!) like it's your last year of education , if you were in the literature section you would study philosophy in some sort of attempted depth. At the time, ( I was a nerd) I was discovering buddhism and was really attracted to physics because it seemed in my mind to be linked somehow to buddhism, and I remember having sometimes discussion with our philosophy teacher why physics were more interesting than philosophy, being less of an airbag. Pretty arrogant of me lol That wouldn't go too well. On most of the weekly philosophical essays we were supposed to give back , I would get back an annotation of 'Interesting, but no' and a grade like 9 out of 20, which is probably a C. lol, I still remember her voice and she didn't wash herself much, nobody wanted to sit on the first row, next to her desk.

[Asolsutsesvyl]

How interesting. When I was getting into what is 12th grade here and called in france, terminale (!) like it's your last year of education , if you were in the literature section you would study philosophy in some sort of attempted depth. At the time, ( I was a nerd) I was discovering buddhism and was really attracted to physics because it seemed in my mind to be linked somehow to buddhism, and I remember having sometimes discussion with our philosophy teacher why physics were more interesting than philosophy, being less of an airbag. Pretty arrogant of me lol That wouldn't go too well. On most of the weekly philosophical essays we were supposed to give back , I would get back an annotation of 'Interesting, but no' and a grade like 9 out of 20, which is probably a C. lol, I still remember her voice and she didn't wash herself much, nobody wanted to sit on the first row, next to her desk.

I haven't really been into physics like that, myself, and mainly have a curiosity about big picture stuff and some smaller tidbits. Basically like others interested in "popular science". But I understand philosophy seeming boring to problem-solvers who don't care much about the culture of philosophical arguments which fail to actually bring understanding.

Peter Naur points out that science is basically about creating useful descriptions of stuff. That's about it, and it has very little to do with ultimate truth or falsehood. For example, neither Newton's physics nor Einstein's is true or false. Both approximate aspects of reality imperfectly, Einstein's giving a smaller difference between measured values and theoretically calculated values. Either way, a difference is there, as always when measured carefully enough.

Separately from physics itself, there's been endless philosophizing about the truth and falsehood of theories in physics. Those are the wrong categories and approaches for the theories, since the theories were never true or false, making all the philosophizing about them nonsense from the start.

Different from all that is if you find mystical inspiration in physics without declaring the physics to be this or that in itself.

The part about Buddhism sounds like it resonated with some deeper basic way you looked at the world, and the combination of that and physics seems to "fit", roughly, with your later spiritual interests.

[flofrog]

I have a small question for you both... Would you say that most of what was discussed in this thread relates to occidental philosophy, and if yes , then would you say that relating to space/time, most eastern philosophy would correspond to the Tao, Confucius, and possible Zen Buddhism, or would you keep those to spirituality and then what of for that time of Plato would be corresponding in Asia ?

[Azarnac]

This has been on my to-read list for some time now, and I finally read it.

On the whole, Peter Naur's work could be useful for those who are dissatisfied with blurry definitions used by mainly modern European philosophers(especially of the Continental variety). Naur's search for precise definitions perhaps reflects his own occupation as a computer scientist. Naur does not conceal his own bias for William James, whom he quotes at length. This isn't surprising: James was, just like Naur, a fan of the descriptive thought, which they both view as more scientific.

From an academic perspective, the work is shoddy and cannot be taken seriously. Naur makes no secret for his contempt for a specific type of philosophy and what he imagines "philosophers" to be like, and ironically commits the same mistakes that he blames on philosophers: that they are divorcing concepts from their contexts or that they don't define their terms very well. This is shown in how he treats philosophy and philosophers as a monolith entity, does not define philosophy at all(perhaps he should have asked himself how the idea that philosophy is mere intellectual position taking without evidence is compatible with the root meaning of philo-sophia, the love of wisdom!)

Embarassingly, even amateur philosophers can glean from his work that he has not engaged with either primary sources(what did Aristotle actually write?) or scholarship on them(Late Antique philosophy has been shown to be spiritual schools engaged in philosophy as a way of life with concrete spiritual exercises, refer to the works of Pierre Hadot, Algis Uzdavinys or Peter Kingsley, for starters).
Naur sets off with the assumption that philosophy goes back to Aristotle(patently wrong), contents himself with quoting a few passages from modern "philosophers" such as Bertrand Russell or Karl Popper and usually compares them to what William James said in his Principles of Psychology, 2 volumes which he recommends every philosopher ought to put below their pillows at night if they want to return to sanity. He either consciously or unconsciously falls in line with a modern trend: the replacement of philosophy and religion with modern psychology, which is either implicitly or explicitly seen as superior. Naur seeks to create a kind of caricature of Greek philosophers; they are depicted as blabbering idiots that are dependent on slaves for practical tasks. He fails to mention that even among Athenian philosophers, this was rarely the case and he also seems to be unaware of the the importance of "leisure time", first created among Egyptian priests for the pursuit of wisdom.

I will quote a few passages to illustrate these points:

A more description-oriented psychology was developed by the English psychologists of
the nineteenth century. This development reached its highest point in William James’s
Principles of Psychology from 1890, which rejects Aristotle and philosophy completely. (66)

→This is why Naur is sympathetic towards William James. I still remember my professor who was walking around with William James' "The Variety of Religious Experiences" as if it was some kind of bible. He was also the same professor who taught us that a professional scholar can never engage in the spiritual practices he investigates, for fear of becoming "subjective". This was built on the erroneous colonial assumption that European intellectual theories are inherently superior to whatever the "natives" produced over thousands of years. It also stemmed from the fear of dealing with consciousness directly, instead of through the safety of a familiar intellectual framework.

It would
have become Eddington better if instead of all the previous nonsense he had followed this
lead. If so he might have realized that sensible talk about reality must build upon what we
experience in connection with our talking about reality. The description of this belongs to
psychology. (69)

→This is the taking over of philosophy and religion by psychology! Psychology cannot describe reality, because the ultimate states of reality described in ancient philosophy and religion are to be accessed through experience, not through description. A basic understanding of Schopenhauer's "Will and Representation" will show you that too. Schopenhauer understood that the intellect only gets you so far, but won't open up the vista of universal "will" or consciousness.

Philosophy goes back to Aristotle. He described the historical development of
civilization in terms of five main stages. The fourth stage is concerned with the study of the
material causes of existing things. The fifth stage reaches divine philosophy, when the mind
grasps the formal and final causes of things. The fifth stage is of course the highest, and
whoever deals with that will be superior to all others in insight. Thus philosophers are
presumption incarnate. Hence the clinging to Aristotle’s ideas that thrives among
philosophers until today. (61)

→oh my! He fails to mention that far from being a mere rationalist, Aristotle belonged to a group of Greek philosophers that were well aware of noetic realities, and discussed how far a philosopher could get in his search for truth(which is inevitably bound up with the perception of these divine realities). A distinction was made between the sage and the philosopher, according to Hadot, and while the former was said to possess wisdom and perception of divine realities, the latter was caught up in a kind of tragic quest for wisdom, which he never reaches.
This is true for the time of Plato and Aristotle, but the philosopher and the sage are far closer to each other in the time before(Pre-Socratics such as Empedocles and Parmenides) and after them(Neoplatonists such as Iamblichus). These groups would be seen as "mystics" instead of philosophers today, but in the true sense of the word, they were engaged in philo-sophia par excellence.
Rational discourse, in their schools, was a preparatory exercise for spiritual exercises that were designed to lead to the direct perception of Platonic forms, and also the practice of theurgy. These traditions pre-date Greek philosophy by possibly thousands of years, and were mostly transmitted from Egypt and Mesopotamia to Greece, as shown by Algis Uzdavinys and Peter Kingsley.
Contrary to Naur's uninformed claim, philosophy was not position taking without evidence, as spiritual powers and unusual knowledge was part and parcel of these traditions and Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists were regularly recruited by cities engaged in warfare to help out through both mechanical(i.e. the construction of siege weapons) and supernatural means. Clearly, they were not seen as mere intellectuals.
Naur's description of philosophers is much closer to the way the Sophists were described by their contemporaries. The Sophists were impostors in the sense that they were merely selling rhetoric(how to win any argument through talking, refer to the famous story of Achilles and the Tortoise engaged in a race) and became the object of ridicule by philosophers and mystics, as the latter sought to distinguish themselves from Sophists by living what they preached. The Sophist was just a regular man when he went home, just like the modern philosophy professor does not undergo any spiritual transformation, but just engaged in intellectual discourse.
Beyond mere description, many ancient philosophers, both in the East and the West, were aware of the confinement of earthly life, what people would call "matrix" nowadays. Hence, they were looking for methods of liberation and sought Truth(as in, the Truth about the place of humans in our world and what may be beyond it) above all. This is why philosophers are concerned with Truth and the essence of the things, as descriptions will not liberate the soul. Scientists makes discoveries, but do not attain enlightenment or dematerialise their bodies into rainbow bodies(as in Dzogchen), which is what philosophers and followers of religions pursue(Neoplatonism mostly got absorbed by Sufism and the more practical sects of Christianity and secret societies)

Descartes’s discussion was rejected in 1890 by William
James in his Principles of Psychology. James is not concerned with truth, but with
description.

description may reasonably be
claimed to be the core of science. More specifically, the scientific-scholarly activity is a
matter of coherent description.  (20)

Thus you can see that Naur misses the mark when it comes to philosophy.

Nothing is more foolish than the philosophers’ lack of understanding of feelings.
This is closely related to their adoration of logic. As ordinarily presented in a philosophical
context, feelings are an unreliable, wild element of immature persons, an element the truth-
seeking philosopher has ascended above (25)

→Naur does not understand the context in which the philosopher’s stance towards feelings has arisen. See the Sufi’s battles with the lower tendencies of human beings, which they call nafs(refer to Annemarie Schimmel's works on the Mystical Dimensions of Islam, which heavily depend on earlier Neoplatonism). Anyone acquainted with Fourth Way schools will also see that the philosopher's stance towards lower emotions and desires is anything but foolish.
Ironically, these things will not matter to pure intellectuals, which is what Naur seems to be, even though he seeks to depict "philosophers" as babbling intellectuals divorced from reality.

To this passage I can say for my part that I do not see the sense of asking “What is ‘being’?”,
and so I feel alien to the rest of the talk.  (32)

Can't help Naur, can we?

Present-day philosophical discussions consist for a large part in tagging labels, –isms,
on people, understood as a summary of their views. In a discussion with a philosopher one
tries perhaps to express a view of some controversial question. As the reaction one then gets:
‘Aha, you are an x-ist’, where x has to replaced by some designation. And so the philosopher
is satisfied; he (yes, he, I have never encountered or heard of a woman philosopher, women
have too much good sense to engage in such)—he has put you into a box with a label on it,
and so the matter to him has been settled. Philosophers also put such labels upon themselves.
For example Høffding in Dictionary of Philosophy is classified as a cautious idealistic
monist, while he called himself a critical monist. (32)

To this, I quote:

It is remarkable that in modern times Sufi teaching is, to a large ex-
tent, carried on by women again. Not only does the interest in the mysti-
cal path—modernized as it may be—apparently appeal more to women,
who hope to find a more "romantic" or poetic expression of religious
feeling than that offered by traditional religious forms, but some of the
most genuine representatives of mystical tradition, directors of souls, in
Istanbul and Delhi (and probably in other places as well) are women,
who exert a remarkable influence upon smaller or larger groups of seek-
ers who find consolation and spiritual help in their presence.
The verse about Raabi’a quoted by Jaamii (N 615)—who was, in general,
not too favorably inclined to women—is still valid in this respect:

If all women were like as the one we have mentioned,
then women would be preferred to men.
For the feminine gender is no shame for the sun,
nor is the masculine gender an honor for the crescent moon. (From Annemarie Schimmel's Mystical Dimensions of Islam(1975), p. 435)

Philosophy arose out of the earliests strands of religion and the practical part of philosophy(i.e. not dead academic philosophy) has again been absorbed by religions. If you take them in, most of Naur's points are rendered untenable.

All the investigations and descriptions of ever more phenomena is of no philosophical
interest. Take for example fields like chemistry, astronomy, or geology. They have neither
foundations nor crises of their foundations. Evidently they are philosophically poor fields at
a low scientific level. The investigations in chemistry of new substances and their properties,
and the development of new substances for numerous applications, e.g. medicines, all what
is collected in what Heidegger calls ‘handbooks’, is just insignificant. These kinds of things
are of no interest to the philosopher, who has slaves to attend to all that is practical.
For Heidegger there is only interest in ‘foundations’ and their ‘crises’.  (27)

→But the foundational assumptions are important and do constitute scientific revolutions. All current sciences are based on physicalism as a philosophy, and what constitutes proof is derived from these assumptions. A change will only come about if the assumption that all things are material is questioned enough and that would constitute a crisis. The idea of the philosopher being uninterested in practical utility and that he is dependent on slaves does not constitute a valid argument, for most philosophers throughout the ages were not aristocratic members of a Greek polis.

But to the philosopher, in his Aristotelian fixation, all this mathematical analysis has no
interest, because it does not talk about anything that is true or false. The mathematical
analytic descriptions are difficult to establish, they demand mastery of a large arsenal of
techniques of mathematics and computing. Part of the difficulty is that a mathematical
analytic description only in very few special cases may be worked out exactly. In by far the
most cases the mathematician has to simplify his problem by introducing approximations in
the mathematical description. Thus all such descriptions aim merely at finding
approximations to what may be measured about how the world behaves. And again the
descriptions never fit perfectly. Whether they would fit if they might be worked out exactly,
no one can say. (51)

→The philosopher comes from a different worldview, in which there is ultimate truth to be found and falsity reigns in the society in which he finds himself. The mathematician works for society, the philosopher seeks to escape or transcend from society. That would be a Diogenes in ancient society, or the alchemist Fulcanelli in modern times.

Let for example the goal be to find out whether or not the
Moon is above the horizon at this moment. Then a skilled reasoner from the state of the
world in its multiplicity will be able to select that quite special property which is called the
times of the rising and the setting of the Moon at this location on this day. These times may
be found in an almanac. What the reasoner finds in the almanac thus shares a similarity with
the rising and the setting of the Moon. In virtue of this similarity the data in the almanac
enable the reasoner to find the desired answer about the Moon.
James’s account of reasoning shows why descriptions, and thereby scholarship and
science, are useful to humanity. Through a description of an aspect of the world a reasoner
gets access to properties of the aspect that otherwise would remain unnoticed. (72)

→Useful to humanity, but not to the mystic individual in pursuit of liberation. Descriptions are bound in language, and language cannot transcend duality or frame mystical experiences that show a view that transcends human societies.

Naur made the mistake of not thoroughly researching where "philosophy" came from, its corruption in the times of Plato, and even more so when philosophy was made subservient to theology in the middle ages and became scholasticism(which mainly draws on how medieval theologians perceived Aristotle). There is plenty of scholarship on the different philosophical schools available, and how modern University philosophy professors(the main target of Naur) have little to do with the origins of philosophy.

"Ancient Hellenic and modern European ’philosophy’ have nothing in common but the name. Ch. C. Evangeliou therefore contents the uncritical assumption that ancient Hellenic philosophy is the origin of Western or European ‘philosophy’, arguing instead that the Socratic tradition, to which Plato and Aristotle belong, has more affinity with the Egyptian wisdom and the ‘remote philosophies of India and China’." -Algis Uzdavinys

[Asolsutsesvyl]

That's a nice overview of how Naur's work fits into everything, and a more careful look than my own. I read Naur in a more narrowly filtered way than your own, and extracted what I found valuable things from it while separating it in my mind from philosophy which aims to transcend the world (i.e. the Platonic side of the Plato-Aristotle divide, which Naur is entirely silent about, and by extension, all other purely spiritual/non-materialistic philosophy too).

Naur seems completely uninterested in playing the role of a materialistic skeptic and criticizing spiritual strivings to transcend the world. Indeed, he maintains a simple silence on all such things. I think the striving for "Truth" which he criticizes can be understood from his examples and emphasis. It's the variety which looks for the essence of everything within the material world. And so, he mocks Bertrand Russell who simultaneously claims that truth is great and that philosophers haven't found any (after millennia of arguing about it).

When materialistic philosophers search for the great "Truth", they do so in domains overlapping with scientific activity, and Naur views them as creating useless hindrances for scientific progress, while their claims of valuing and advancing "Truth" amounts to no more than sophistry.

I think Naur has a point, but:

1. He uses words differently than most trying to argue seriously about these matters. I think that's a main reason this work of his is not academically acceptable. But what he means isn't tricky to understand if you think about it.

2. His entire for vs. against philosophy thing can be cleanly, categorically separated from the more Platonic striving to, well, try to escape Plato's cave. That is, if you keep in mind #1, all concerns about #2 are basically untouched by Naur's argumentation.

Naur glosses over many things. That relates to his own sloppy use of language, where I think he implicitly narrows the scope of consideration, and argumentation. When he claims that philosophy began with Aristotle, for example, he is making clear what kind of philosophy he will be arguing against, but philosophers may be thrown off by the way he used the word "philosophy" and miss the point that he reduced it to a subcategory of philosophy. On top of that, "Aristotelian" becomes extended through his generalizations into the category of stuff he's arguing against. His sloppiness with the main categories of philosophy perhaps reflects his contempt for it all.

The way I find the book most useful is in pointing towards cases where philosophy is simply bad psychology and limiting assumptions about reality in disguise. I found it helpful for improving my personal BS-detector.