Neilium

And those darn painters can't come to any sort of consensus on how to paint a flower ... and if all of Argentina could just agree on one tango ...

Philosophy is a way to speak of the unspeakable. If you have no use for such conversations, that's fine. Consider yourself one of the lucky few.

-neil

King's Indian

Hello,

I'm sorry not to have made myself more clear. The activity of plumbing is philosophy, the mental confusions we are prey to are the blocked pipes.
...by the way, did you realise that your position (that philosophy is just a way of getting all confused and tangled up) reminds one of the Oxford School (JL Austin, John Wisdom)? That confusions and disputes of this sort are mental cramps we may learn to massage by exclusively applying common-sense and science? Heaven forbid if your argument echoes too closely a mid-twentieth-century philosophical fashion...
Take care,
KI

flatland

From whence do you gain your faith in the power and truth of inductive reasoning itself? Have you performed some empirical experiment to prove the validity of inductive reasoning without using inductive reasoning itself? Of course you have not. You have noticed that situations that resemble prior situations often have similar results. Thus, you base prediction on past experience. I would personally agree with you that empirical science is a wonderful way to learn practical information about the world we perceive ourselves to exist in. However, this is not the concern of philosophy.

Philosophy is concerned with answering those things that cannot be answered through observation, to the satisfaction of the questioner. As such, it does away with any need for any oversight from any other point of view. If you wish to be a phenomenalist and live your life accordingly, you are free to do so. NOBDOY CAN REFUTE YOUR POSITION, unless you yourself admit to some logical inconsistency. And if you become skeptical enough, you must admit that even logical inconsistency should be allowed. Since knowledge outside our own minds is inaccessible, we must decide what we will believe. This is what you do when you practice philosophy. You are simply trying to decide what to believe about things that you cannot learn with true certainty, namely everything.

You have decided on a physicalistic viewpoint, and you are welcome to it, just as I am welcome to my own determinism, and just as anybody is welcome to their desitic, phenomenalistic, or dualistic viewpoint.

Amos

I always thought that philosophy was the love of wisdom and is different from learning in that it is a gift from God regardless if we believe in God or not. It seems to me that the philosophic mind is equal to what we call the mind of God.

nermal

I've always thought of philosophy as brain candy. It tastes good, appeases the pallete, but has no substantive content--empty calories. This is particularly true of metaphysics. It boasts the lofty goal of understanding reality, but makes no predictions and has no bearing on reality per se--reality is or is not what it is or is not, regardless of which cerebral sounding language you use to describe your relationship to it. Whether or not you are an existentialist, this doesn't substantively change how you must live in reality. Food may be a figment of your imagination, but you must still imagine yourself eating it just like everybody else.
Oh, philosophy is also a way for long-haired guys in turtleneck sweaters to score with young gullible girls.

Ed

nermal

Damn! Everytime I mean to say Transcendentalist, it comes out existentialist. Don't know why that is.

Ed

Starboy

As I have said before science is something that philosophy doesn’t get. It doesn’t get it because science has something that philosophy doesn’t have. It is the authority of experiment on nature. Because philosophy lacks such a thing it has no idea how to treat the rest of science. Inductive reasoning is just a fancy way of saying come up with any kind of explanation you can by any means possible. The method of arriving at the explanation is not any where near as important as the means that science has for testing that explanation. There is no comparable method in philosophy for sorting out conflicting or competing philosophical positions. It is hilarious how many philosophers I have come across that claim to understand the “philosophy of science” but completely ignore the basis authority of science. They overlook it because it is a concept so foreign to them it just doesn’t register. Testing an idea is something philosophers can’t do!

Flatland, you point out another deficiency of philosophy. Everybody talks about philosophy but few can agree on what it is. To me it is the BS of the gaps. If we lack knowledge in an area the philosophers are more than willing to fill it with philosophical BS. This may seem harmless but there is a danger that people will accept the BS of the reality challenged as actual knowledge instead of admitting ignorance and then systematically and carefully doing something about it.

How philosophical of you. An excellent example of what I have been talking about!

Starboy

Keith Russell

Starboy, there are other views of philosophy.

Why allow someone else to define philosophy for you?

I prefer a Randian or Popperian view of philosophy, one in which philosophy is an active--and vital--force in one's life, not an esoteric parlour game for bored, ineffectual cynics.

Keith.

Starboy

Keith, you make my point. If philosophy is anything isn’t it what philosophers do? The historical philosophical record is an accretion of what philosophy is. It isn’t pretty or worthy or useful for much of anything. It pollutes our minds with worthless concepts like Ockham's razor. And as practiced on this forum is "an exoteric parlor game for bored, ineffectual cynics." You all need to get out more, and explore and experience reality.

Starboy

King's Indian

Hello, Keith.

I rather anticipate Starboy's answer will be along the lines of: "Ha! See? You guys can't agree on anything". As though science proceeded in lock-step, with no back-chat in the ranks.
Are you going to mention science's historical development from "natural philosophy", or shall I?
Cheers,
KI.
[edited to add: Damn! Too slow. This must be the OS turbo-charged model. Wow. Not even Occam's razor? Won't the theists be pleased.