Hugo Holbling

One more time: i challenge you to the multiple formal debates you continue to dodge, as well as to justify this content-free rhetoric about the disutility of philosophy. You have been hammered on these issues on so many occasions that i've lost count, but if you have anything new to offer then bring it to a formal debate. Avoiding me and the others who have offered likewise is a spectacle all its own.

Perhaps a moderator could split this continuing anti-philosophy ranting and send it upstairs for the appropriate (if familiar) treatment?

trendkill

Not to paint myself as at all knowledgeable about theology (or academia, for that matter), but it occurs to me that, hypothetically speaking, if a particular field of study was in fact nonsense, it might well turn out to be incredibly difficult for even an intelligent, rational person to succeed in.

Tyler Durden

How would you know? I don't pay much attention to generalizations of the ignorant, because that is based on their prejudices and nothing else.

I find actual experience to be a far better foundation than the ignorant's prejudices anytime, anywhere, and six times sunday.

Isnt it true that the higher mathematics and sciences are more difficult than they are in their high school counterparts, aye? These field of disciplines do not get "easier" the farther you go.

Tyler Durden

Since factually speaking there are intelligent, and rational people i know personally who has succeeded in theology, you just flat out do not know what you're talking about.

Actually were it essentially nonsense all the way down, there wouldn't be any success whatsoever. Just how many works of theology have you read, by the way?

Personally, I do not find theology to be anything but the study of the history of the philosophy of religion(s). That in itself is a respectable discipline... But I know better than anyone else how ridicule is terribly easy. And that in itself is no argument against anything, but a demonstration of one's prejudices.

nermal

Well, since it is taught in Philosophy 101, it is required reading, at least for formal students of philosphy.
And, I think at least one branch of philosophy, metaphysics, deals exclusively with the reality truth issue, so I would say most philosophers "get" the distinction.

I do believe you are tilting at windmills, here.

Ed

Biff the unclean

Those are odd windmills because in all my many years I've never come across a single Philosopher who espoused "metaphysics" that didn't spend their time denying reality

Tyler Durden

Well this begs the further question: just how many Philosophers have you met?

nermal

Are they denying the existence of reality, or the perception of it? I know of no philosopher who denies that there is some reality somehow--they questioned our idea of what, exactly, it is.

In any event,

even denial of reality is not a failure to question the relationship of truth and reality.

Ed

trendkill

Since I never said it would be impossible for them to succeed, as your response implies, but only difficult, it appears that in fact you are the one who does not know, or pay attention to, what he is talking about.

I do not remember stipulating to the field in question being nonsense "all the way down". I had more in mind a field of study which had nonsensical premises that would make logical inquiry difficult.

Indeed, and you have demonstrated yours quite ably.

Tyler Durden

Ha! Poisoning the well, evasion. I know a person who has gone through both mathematics physics in the applied sciences and theology on the graduate level, and if i'm going with an argument by authority, i'm more inclined to take the experienced person's word over the ignorant's. Care to address this point?

Well, reports of my telephatic powers have been greatly exaggerated. You had originally written "..a particular field of study was in fact nonsense" I derived you to be saying that it was "in fact nonsense." In fact, nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship.

What would they be?