Tyler Durden

Actually i'm an undergraduate at the local state college. Not a philosopher!

If you loosen the definition of a philosopher, then i can direct you to new age section where the books by frauds like Deepak Chopra sell because they're written in a "clear and simple manner" for the masses, no scary "tangled web of previous philosophers" is anywhere to be found.

Seriously, I think you're just terribly lazy, Starboy, and unwilling to put in a honest day's work of studying and learning, with all these purile demands of reducing abstrat thought to the vulgar limits of common language.

I think it's possible, but that would be a very redundant exercise and a time waster. Why repeat the mistakes of those other guys, if a specific thinker already made inroads in a similar framework of beliefs with his works? Why not proceed from where they left off? Improve a broken system or create a new one by opening new questions in unsettled fields of discourse? It is possible to do original work, but highly unlikely. This also goes for science - nobody does any original work without learning the tools and methods and the history of his practice.

This will be my last post to you, since you are too much of a coward to really improve your knowledge by reading the relevant books.

I am not in the habit of giving advice, because i think the best is not to listen to any, but in your case i will make an exception:

THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS IN PHILOSOPHY.

Starboy

Tyler, I have a confession to make. I have been doing some reading on philosophy and frankly I am none the wiser for it. I was hoping that a devotee such as yourself might be able to shed some light on the subject, but alas, you confirm what I have suspected. Philosophy is nothing more than an aggregate of conflicting thought and presupposition with no mechanism other than intuition to favor one philosophy over another.

I disagree with you in regards to being able to express complex thought in simple language. I happen to agree with Fermi, if you can’t explain it in simple language then you don’t know what you are talking about. In any case it is possible to explain some of the most complicated ideas of physics in simple language. It’s done in kiddy physics all the time. Yet I haven’t been able to find one philosopher that has been able to explain any philosophical idea without referring to a tangled web of philosophers. When you do this what it looks like to me is that what you actually know about is not some set of ideas but some philosophically correct history of an idea. But Tyler if you like it then have at it.

Starboy

Pyrrho

If you want a standard definition of "philosophy" from a dictionary, see:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=philosophy

But here is my take on what philosophy is. It will help if we start by thinking about the etymology of the term, and note that "philosophy" is literally the "love of wisdom". If we look at the early Greek philosophers, we may observe that they were interested in all aspects of knowledge. Many of the things they discuss are now handled by science (an older expression for what we typically call "science" is "natural science", and an even older expression is "natural philosophy"). For example, people like Thales and Anaximander and Anaximenes were interested in what everything is made of, which is now mostly dealt with by "scientists" (metaphysicians, of course, never give up on talking about anything, or nothing, as the case may be, but that is a matter we can forget for the moment). Philosophers, originally, were interested in all knowledge. This is reflected in Plato's remark:

Certain areas of thought have, over the years, developed to the point that they become independent areas of study. One of the more recent things to 'break away' from philosophy is psychology, which was previously dealt with by philosophers.

So, to tell you what philosophy is today, it is whatever has not developed to the point that it has broken away as a distinct subject from the totality of all knowledge.

Now, if you imagine that philosophy is useless, because it is the remaining stuff that hasn't been sufficiently developed to 'break away', I will remind you that thinking about stuff in a primitive way is what brought about the later developments.

Naturally, what I say above is not something to which everyone agrees, but that makes it no different from anything else. Just do a search for the "flat earth society" to get an example of something that you may have thought was universally agreed upon, but is not. I do not mean to suggest that disagreeing with my ideas about philosophy involves the same silliness as disagreeing with some other ideas; I am merely pointing out the fact that there is probably absolutely nothing about which there is complete and universal agreement.

I may also add that interdisciplinary studies can be useful, as the fragmenting of knowledge into different categories can lead to problems, both because a particular issue may involve more than one branch of knowledge (or may lie 'in between' two branches), and because people have a tendency, these days, to focus on one thing, and not learn about other subjects that may be relevant to their interests. I believe you said something about philosophers needing to learn about science (in another thread), and, unfortunately, many do. But, of course, the same kind of criticism applies to many scientists, who learn only about one branch of science, and don't bother with the other branches, and may end up saying things that contradict well-established theories in those other branches. At this point, I advise you to reread the quote from Plato above, about what a "lover of wisdom" will study.

Starboy

Thanks Pyrrho for the background. I was aware of it. I understand that philosophy as a knowledge tradition has seen better days. I do suspect that philosophy is useless, but not because all the good bits have broken away but because philosophy as it exists today is having a hard time explaining why it is important. As I see it philosophy is one of the three big “truth” traditions, religion, philosophy and mathematics. I leave science off the list because it is not a “truth” tradition. What scientists intuitively know is that “truth” is not reality. Philosophers and religionists confuse “truth” with reality. Mathematicians use "truth" as a marker and could care less about reality. A scientist can’t make “truth” claims because to make such claims would be to make assumptions about reality that may not be warranted. This is why all scientific knowledge is tentative as opposed to “true”. The second big difference between science and philosophy is that science assumes an objective reality, but philosophy could go either way and usually does. Because of this science has an authority that it can use to discriminate between conflicting scientific knowledge. Philosophy has no such authority. Now as long as it stayed there this would be fine, but philosophers insist that philosophy has important things to say about reality when in fact they have no interest in actual explorations of reality. Because of this why would anyone think that philosophers comments on ethics, science or anything else for that matter were important? As I see it this is the big problem of philosophy. Based on my discussions with philosophers it would appear that philosophy has become the study of philosophy. This is confirmed by the arguments of philosophers. They don’t present and support ideas so much as attack other philosophers and weave a tapestry of past philosophies.

Starboy

Pyrrho

I agree with you that the inability to express oneself clearly is generally a sign that one does not know what one is talking about. Wittgenstein (a philosopher), put it this way:

As for your claim:

May I enquire which you have been reading? I suspect you are reading the wrong ones.

As for your comment that there is "no mechanism other than intuition to favor one philosophy over another", have you heard of the principles of logic? Or the idea that one's beliefs should not conflict with reality? The fact that many people, some of whom have been called "philosophers", do not properly apply such mechanisms as are available is no sign that there are none to apply.

Hugo Holbling

Once again you utterly fail to answer any points raised against your simplistic understanding of philosophy and science, make blunderbuss comments about the demarcation problem being solved when it is anything but, and persist in poisoning the well by casting me as a defender of philosophy. Here is the newflash for you: even if philosophy is hopelessly outdated and useless, your noddy version of science is still full of holes and - the important point in this context - not supportive of your hostility towards religion.

Starboy

I assure you Hugo, these may be problems in the world of philosophy but science can blunder along very nicely knowing nothing of it.

Starboy

Starboy

Pyrrho, condescension is not a convincing form or argument. Making unsubstantiated assumptions about what I know and do not know is equally unconvincing. If this is the best preparation that philosophy can provide in critical thinking then it is in big trouble.

Over the years I have read Russell, Popper, Descartes, Kuhn, Lakatos, Ruse, Thagard and good deal more I cannot recall. I have studied symbolic logic and graduate level mathematics as well as several kinds of engineering. As a trained physicist to the PhD level I have studied the work of Bohr, Mach, Einstein and so forth. Mine is an informed opinion. What bothers me about this is that by attacking my background instead of my ideas you lend further credence to my comments regarding the rotten state of philosophy.

Starboy

fallowcypher

Starboy - stop staring at your feet or you will miss all that stellar glory.

Tyler - the stairway to the stars is halfway on the ground.

Hugo - stop being such a ninja and walk out of the shadows once in a while.

Pyrrho - enough of the burnt offerings; the fumes are smothering your neighbors.

fallowcypher - shut the smuck up.

Starboy

Fallowcypher, I am not sure what your point is but welcome to IID all the same.

Starboy