Nowhere357

Hi Bob. Great post - clearly stated and very useful IMO.

First, your conclusion:
I agree, based on the way you defined the terms.

I think your intention is to limit 'things' to physical objects only. (In normal usage, a concept is a thing, for example, yet is not physical.)

So reality consists of physical objects (matter/energy in space/time), and relationships (patterns).

A principle IS a concept.
Also, a mental representation is not the same thing as an idea. I think a 'mental representation' is a 'perception'. We perceive physical objects directly with our senses, and we perceive the concept or idea of a thing, or event.

That's just sematics. My real objection is that you've brought in a new quality of reality, without acknowledgement.

For a fact, we do not perceive reality directly. We are aware of the world only after our senses and brain have filtered and altered it. IMO to say reality is only things and events is incorrect - we are aware of our perception of the world, and not the world itself. The fact that perception exists, MUST be included in any such fundamental description of reality. The map is not the territory, and the description must acknowledge that it is a description.

I think calling perception a pattern or relationship, assumes that
patterns or relationships can perceive themselves. Isn't this "begging the question"?

I'll stop here. Thanks!

Nowhere357

I think you just said that the map is not the territory. Seven pages for that?

Starboy

Its not what I said, but for you this is progress so I will leave it at that.

Starboy

Nowhere357

:notworthy

kennyminot

I agree with Starboy.

I am undergraduate student in the English department. (Almost have my degree! Yeaaah!) I am not an expert in philosophy (just a minor, so that doesn't qualify me to say much). But I have read a good chunk of some classic analytic texts. I have done serious research into the depths of the mind/body problem. Yet I never find any of these articles productive. People squabble. They argue back and forth. In ethics, for example, people are still arguing about the 'classical' positions: you have utilitarians, contractarians, and Kantians, all arguing about the same moldy conventions established by ancient thinkers. Some people have even revived the work of Aristotle. (Virtue ethics! My favorite!) But none of this ever seems to GET anywhere. Sure, you have progress: people revise theories, toss out ideas, resurrect them at a later date, bring them back, dust them off, drink some beer, write some more essays, and so on. But you don't have any of the CONCRETE PRACTICAL results that science can provide.

I'm a postmodernist. These problems revolve around the same individual-cherishing, eternal-loving dogma that has existed since the beginning of time. The idea that 'truth' is a convenient fiction might SEEM revolutionary. But it's nothing new. Postmodern arguments about language, for example, are simply an extension of the Hegelian critiques that existed in the late 19th/early 20th century. I was just reading an excerpt from Croce, and he sounds remarkably like a good 'ole fashion postmodernist. But the debate always freezes. Some people introduce the idea, and it seems like the light has finally dawned. It stirs up discussion. People solidify on either side of the issue. But eventually they stop talking.

So where does it go from here?

Personally: I'm bored with the debate. If I bring up that philosophy is 'tired' and 'uninteresting,' people assault with the latest and greatest work in the discipline. But if I don't find it interesting, why would I be reading it? Isn't this just shrugging off the issue? After all, to be quite honest, it doesn't sound like many people leveling these criticisms have seriously read the postmodernists. (Some things that Searle says about Rorty and Derrida, quite frankly, shows a weak understanding of their work). And they certainly can't argue that postmodernists are UNCLEAR. (Like, omigod, have you read anything by Putnam? Yuck!) So the debate ends up being this name-tossing spectacle. Have you read Popper? Maybe you did, but did you REALLY read him? . . . Have you read Rorty? Maybe you did, but did you REALLY read him?

Where does it go from here?

The debate has gotten FROZEN. People are talking about NAMES . . . not about issues. (Books have even started to include an index of names! Like, omigod!) The problem really has nothing to do with philosophy. It has to do with the ACADEMY. We have reached a point (quite frankly) where we are so wrapped up in masturbating over dead white men, that we have forgotten that real thinking doesn't need to involve paraphrasing someone's work. We have reached the point where a fixed (and obscure) vocabulary has been constructed that MUST BE learned for initiation. The language of the people has been forgotten. We have become self-obsessed intellectual egoists that sit on our ivory towers and fancy ourselves 'above' normal society.

Nietzsche never used direct quotes. He just painted in broad strokes: making generalizations, reading people in his own way . . . why can't the issue be stated in these terms? (Why can't philosophers write more books for 'all and none'?) Why can't people offer some BROAD STROKES that says EXACTLY WHAT philosophy has done in the past century? Why does it always need to make references to specific thinkers? Why must it always be stated in a professional vocabulary?

After all, when you demand science for the positive results of its discipline, it simply points to a television.

Peace out,
Kennie Smith

Starboy

And a television (as technology of course) is just the tip of the iceberg! There are so many exciting developments going on right now it boggles the imagination.

THANK YOU KENNIE!

I don't care if philosophy continues or dies a silent death and fades into history. But I am sick and tired of philosophers claiming philosophy is important when they have nothing to back it up. From where I sit philosophy has causes more confusion than anything else. It is an impediment to clear critical thinking.

Starboy

Aethari

A few thoughts...

Most importantly, I don't think we could ever reach a concensus on the "point" of philosophy. Most of the people lamenting on this thread about philosophy seem to be judging philosophy from a totally pragmatic viewpoint. (Would Hume have been more worthwhile if he had written crap that spawned thousands of jobs and a new industry instead of writing well and giving lots of academics a headache?) I get the lurking feeling that people like Starboy must have had scarring experiences with philosophy in college, or something equally traumatic.

What kind of nonsense is this?

Was Machiavelli's political philosophy not important?

Are Locke's theories equally beside-the-point? (Who ever uses 'checks and balances'?)

Did the institutions of the Scholastics like Aquinas not play a direct role in Europe's emergence from the Middle Ages?

Were the philosophies of Nietzsche uninfluential on the rise of fascism in the early 20th century?

Has Hume's problem of induction and further investigators like Popper not played a critical role in the judgments regarding verification and falsifiability in modern science?

That's just off the top of my head in 30 seconds. I have this lurking feeling that if you picked up a good history of philosophy book, you could find a lot more.

If you don't think philosophy has been important, perhaps you need to go read some history books. Not only is philosophy important simply as a quest for knowledge, but philosophy is inexorably intertwined with the politics and "pragmatic" happenings of our history.

I disagree. We talk about names and paraphrase other's work because as much as it might seem "not to happen" in philosophy, the point really is to make progress. Later you bring up science as a comparison. Scientists cite names, papers, and talk about things "dead white men" first came up with. Hell, scientists are even more thoroughly embedded in a system than philosophers are. I'm not going to pick your response apart sentence-by-sentence (I've learned better, by now), but come on. Philosophy doesn't work in broad strokes, and expecting philosophy to step up to the same pragmatic and utilitarian plate as science is ranting at the orange for not tasting like steak.

The point of philosophy is an accurate and precise investigation of the ideas behind what we do and experience. Once you take away the great thinkers, the precise vocabulary, and the detailed argument, philosophy has been crippled into a worthless, watered-down discipline. Again, I don't see you blasting science for referencing specific experiments, thinkers, and using a professional vocabulary.

Take a moment and think about what philosophy would be like if we removed all these things that make you so sore. Personally, I think the concept of a philosophy course or debate without technical terminology and references to past thinkers is quite amusing. Perhaps we could all huddle around and try to get our funky inner selves in line with the Great Non-Technical Earth Vibe. Who knows.

~Aethari

Tyler Durden

Amid all the hullabaloo and the cacophony of ignorance, nobody has bothered to credit philosophy for the birth of science. What? How can that be? It's pretty simple. The methodology of science is derived from the rationality of continental rationalism and the experimental method of classical empiricism.

I hate to dredge up a classic quote again, but its metaphorical power may settle the painful confusion for once and all:
"Philosophy as the Amazon of knowledge"
Once we stop this assumption that Science emerged ex nihilo, like Athena broke out from the head of Zeus a full grown goddess, only then we are capable of admiring philosophy.

Will there be revisionist history forthcoming from people who dogmatically believe in the divine, ahistorical status of modern science? my wallet argues as much.

After reading Feyerabend i no longer entertain such silly notions like a clear demarcation between the advances of science and the self-immolation of philosophy.

Aethari

TD-

That too.

~Aethari

Tyler Durden

Aethari, were i so bold i would also credit Platonism for the inherent belief that truth is divine, which runs throughout the Enlightenment philosophy of western civilization, and one of its proud candidates is Newton's natural philosophy, or mechanistic science.

Furthermore, there is an inherent belief of teleology in both the laws of science and moral ends of religion, but it wouldn't do to muddy the waters and confuse our non-philosophers?