Tyler Durden

Do you mean we never learn anything, but only remember something forgotten? No knowledge is ever gained, but always uncovered? Is knowledge truly ahistorical, eternal and independent of our superfluous existence of contingency that we only 'remember' it?

DoubleDutchy

'Good' is dismissed. Can't be verified by experiment on nature. Mind centric biased humbug, I wonder if you're even aware of it.

phaedrus

Thee has inferred a lot from those two lines. Please share the line of thinking which has resulted in the inference?

Tyler Durden

Well, that’s a very conservative take of what explanation should be, since I don’t think the standard of knowledge ought to be limited to the superficial understanding of the layperson.

Yes. Don’t get me started. My sole conviction is that I can philosophize better than most people can argue their convictions. While you may be out of your depth here, you are doing philosophy. It is never a painless experience.

Sure, in the historical sense we study the writings of the past philosophers to understand how one does philosophy. However, that training doesn’t make a person a philosopher, but a historian. One may so declare Plato a great man, without having to agree with him. To philosophize is to think originally.

A patently false assertion. The body of philosophy reflects how the great men of the time interpreted knowledge in the most original means possible. Thus, the philosopher spoke as the scientist, the mathematician, the logician, the theologian… all at the same time.

This fringe is your own representation.

In the undergraduate level you are taught the history of philosophy and are expected to be able to explain them. At the graduate level you are expected to apply what you’ve learned in uncharted territory.

It’s a riposte of Nietzsche and Foucault, though they might have rejected my choice of wording.

I will leave you to answer why you think there is a connection between the lack of a cohesive and coherent ‘subject matter’ of philosophy and your cute strawman, but I think the question of what the subject matter of philosophy is philosophy in itself. Most fields of discourse have a coherent subject of study, i.e. biology is the study of natural organisms. Ask Joe blow on the street and he’ll tell you it’s the study of living creatures. Ask him about philosophy and you’ll get a funny look, a smart ass remark or a busted nose.

Fair enough. I wasn’t being technical or precise. What we call philosophy usually dates back to Zoroaster, Confucius, Lao Tze, the ancient Greeks (Homer), the Upanishads, the Buddha, because their text survives. Obviously there are evidence of art and religion stretching further back than those guys, earlier than 800 B.C. We may have difficulty in deciphering their meaning to themselves, since we are wearing the horse blinders of our era. However, since then, what emerged as philosophy was a bold, new type of discipline, a unified discourse of knowledge that made attempts at explaining nature beyond the limits of symbolic religion and representational art.

Well they are taught today as a display of historical movement, how ideas emerged and transformed history. As a historical function philosophy is relevant to be cognizant of how we grew, developed, evolved as a human species, and how we expressed ourselves as human beings.

This conflict is what keeps me philosophizing, or experimenting with my thoughts. Were I utterly content I would be satisfied with the immediate pleasures of day to day life and give up philosophy, trade it in for Sunday mass.

A lot of critical thinking is basically the beginner’s guide to philosophical tools.

Descartes has been buried in the 20th century when philosophers finally overcame the idol of Cartesianism. But it took 300 years of thinkers to stop worshiping at the altar of Descartes by avoid privileging epistemology, demolish the Cartesian self, and scrutinize his methodology in greater detail. But that doesn’t mean Descartes’ thought is worthless. It shows how our knowledge moved from the authoritarian voice of the scholastics, when they wrote about revelation, to the self, and gave birth to the age of Enlightenment, the belief that human beings can acquire objective knowledge beyond the self. This movement from the external authority of God to subjective thought also reveals how recent our self-consciousness emerged from a system of collective behavior. If you are interested, Julian Jaynes’ Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is very provocative.

You could, and I would encourage you to get better arguments. They are out there, and you have not used them. The goal is respectable, many a fine thinker have gone down that road, but your means is not.

Tyler Durden

Sure, I'm complaining about Socrates/Plato's theory of anamnesis, how it posits knowledge as transcendental.

Your zen koans are too priceless to spoil philosophizing over, so i wanted to hear what you may have to say about remembering as opposed to learning.

Christopher13

Tyler, just want to let you know that I enjoyed your last lengthy post. But at the end, your comments suggest that you may underappreciate the contribution of Aquinas and the "perennial wisdom." But I only offer this tentatively until I read more. I don't mean to interrupt. Please continue.

Chris

Starboy

DoubleDutchy, you and the rest of the philosophers on this thread can attack me personally all you like, but leave my daughter out of this. If I had direct access to Frotiw I would have decked him.

Starboy

DoubleDutchy

I honestly have no idea what you are talking about.

Tyler Durden

I apologize if i have demeaned Aquinas' contributions - he was probably the best aristotelian, par excellence - but i wanted to emphasize the importance of Descartes' revolutionary transition from the scholastics' style to a very subjective, self-centered approach to philosophy. Aquinas remained very much within the tradition of medieval philosophy, even though he rejuvenated the enterprise with Aristotle's lost teachings.

Frotiw

Starboy

Im sorry if you got offended. I ended my remark with Just kidding. I know you have troubles understanding and accepting anything said by philosophers but I can only repeat that I really was just kidding. -On a side note the target of my joke was not you daughter but you, this should not be difficult to understand if read it again. Anyway humor is always difficult to communicate(without misunderstandings) between countries(supposely this is the last to learn when learning forreign languages). Understand that I do not wish to offend you and have not done so in any post. I have written that I find you ignorant(and still do) for varius reason(that many have pointed out) it is up to you if you get offended or not. The reason was merely to point out an honest opinion and relevant aspect of the possibility of actually agreeing on anything in this thread. The participants in a discussion happens to be relevant of the outcome of a discourse.