I am often under the impression that many philosophers take linguistic constructions such as "meaning" and "morality" to be entities that can exist on their own, outside functioning brains, while on the other hand they claim to be materialists. They strive to find a way to make logic (syntax) produce meaning, forgetting that semantic meaning is all about context, emotion and behavior shaped by millions of years of evolution. Philosophers do care about complexity (they care about everything, it's their job), but their metaphors are always about metaphysics or notions of some kind of "x-liness" that, like an "elan vital" will give meaning to the soulless constructions of mathematics and physics (chinese room, waterfalls, qualia).<p>The paper gives numerous examples where a philosopher could use complexity theory, but doesnt go so far as to make any conclusions, thus showing that comp. complexity is actually useful for these problems.