How is it well argued? He concedes that pg is right about most philosophy in the conclusion section. He protests, protests, protests, then concedes. lol. His conceding does come with an assertion that philosophy came clean recently, but he doesn't bother giving some citations for that. Which philosophers admitted philosophy was mostly junk? Who came clean? What did they do to fix it?

Conceding that pg is right about most philosophy doesn't take away from his argument. If I conceded that most programs written in the last 5 years are garbage, would you conclude programming in general is also garbage?

The guy says:

"The simplest flaw in PG’s account is its scope: it implicates most philosophers up to the present"

That's what he's trying to argue with, and that is PG's claim (not that all philosophy is worthless). But then he simply concedes at the end, like he forgot his own thesis.

PG's "most" includes more than I'm comfortable with, which is why I wrote the essay -- to defend those parts of the subject that I thought were unfairly called a waste of time.

My "most," in other words, includes less than his.

Abel, 1824. Not Galois, 1829. Your favorite joke a bout proto-emo math geeks here.

Also, while I'm sympathetic to the intent of this essay -- easy criticism of the humanities goes back to Aristophanes -- it falls flat because it reads like a philosophy paper. A philosophy paper written in defense of academic philosophy is going to lose in the gut regardless of how correct it is to the reasoning mind (this is also why we still love Aristophanes).

Your "most" is, I would say, just an application of Sturgeon's Law, which, like a sort of Thermodynamics of Information, gives a sort of comfortable minimum to the amount of value you can extract from any field of inquiry.

Fair enough; but I would argue that the main thesis in the counter essay has nothing to do with the scope of pg's argument. In fact, I think the author would have been better off leaving the issue of scope out of his essay. The main body of the counter essay lies in the intermittent sections between the introduction and the end.

The biggest disagreement I see between the author and pg is the current state and value of philosophy. This is why I view the authors concession that most current philosophy might be garbage as largely irrelevant.