Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Clutch · 01-13-2003, 02:00 PM

Quote:

i don't see why philosophy shouldn't have an element of humour included, along with a healthy refusal to take ourselves too seriously.

Damn straight. And the best modern stuff really is like that. Russell, Kripke, Fodor, Dennett, just to name a few... heck, even old Davie Hume was pretty sly. (Though I don't think Kant was ever known as "Chuckles".) I laugh whenever I re-read Quine's desire for "relief from slooplessness"!

Gurdur · 01-14-2003, 03:55 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Clutch

Gurdur, this is not a flamewar. Not from my end. You said some things about recent and contemporary philosophy that were plain wrong, and I pointed out just how they were wrong. Nothing is left undone in that respect.

If you are sincerely interested in learning more about these matters, I would be happy to oblige you. But your apparent obsession with finding insult in any demonstration of your error, and your tendency to respond with invective, certainly makes it undesirable for me to pursue this as things stand.

If you want a flame-war, you're on your own. If you want to discuss philosophy with someone who actually does it, you need only reconsider your attitude and approach.

Clutch, how about I re-quote your completely unprovoked silly little insults ?

You started a flame-war with me completely unnnecessarily, and made only very minor quibbles while evading my point made in reply to thirdin77.

Your self-serving rhetoric is rather transparent.
I humbly suggest you should reconsider your attitude.

Clutch · 01-14-2003, 07:08 AM

Gurdur, of course you are free to quote away as many times over as you wish -- and let readers decide for themselves whether my testiness rises to the level of some dire insult warranting this display on your part.

As for evading your point. First, I was under the impression that I was discussing my point. Which was that your characterization of current and recent philosophy was incorrect in various ways. This having been demonstrated, I also engaged your more general points, which you kindly summarized in point form for me. In fact you seemed not to notice that I treated the very same themes in my post to thirdin77, to which I directed your attention. But to mollify you, I also replied point by point to your summary -- even-handedly and politely. This was not a short section of my post, so it is odd that you again did not notice it:

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While I'm guilty of being unfair (to a degree only) to modern philosophy, my main contentions, to wit:

1. Philosophy can no longer be regarded as "above" the natural sciences (or even linguistics -), it is now a companion discipline,
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Agreed. I�ll go one further, in fact: It was always a mistake to have regarded philosophy as �above�. (Excepting centuries ago, when the term was more or less intended to exhaustive apply to all intellectual inquiry.

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2. It is often mired in its own ignorance of other disciplines, notably biology
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True of many disciplines, including philosophy. And including biology, for that matter. I don�t see biology as a special case of philosophical ignorance, though. Lots of philosophers work in Phil. of Biology, and many others explicitly apply biological notions. There�s always more to learn, but then, philosophers need to pay more attention also to computer science, to psychology, to cognitive ethology, to cosmology...

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3. The most exciting initiatives have come from people entering philosophy from other fields in practice (Habermas, ethics, form sociology; Singer, ethics, philosophy, with knowledge from more or less med ethics)
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Some new ideas have come from outside, and it�s important that this continue. I can�t see any reason to think that most have, though, nor even that the most interesting have. Habermas and Singer are more �exciting� than Nozick and Rawls? I dunno. Again, this is pretty clearly a matter of what you (or I) find �exciting�, however it is that you intend the term to apply here.

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4. Philosophy as a discipline is still very much struggling to intergrate the new knowledge, where it actually attempts to do so.
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Agreed, with an exclamation point! Again, the same is true of virtually every discipline -- psychology continues to work at integrating insights from computation theory into models of cognition; linguistics the insights of neurology (and philosophy); cosmology the insights of biology! (Thinking of Lee Smolin, here.) It�s a general struggle in no way particular to philosophy.

In short, many of your specific claims in this section strike me as reasonable. Does agreeing with you count as evasion? But they certainly do not add up to the conclusion that philosophy is uniquely, or even unusually, insular -- as I pointed out systematically. I also pointed out very widespread and familiar institutional trends of interdisciplinary study and research in which philosophy plays a role, as concrete evidence that any such insularity claim is quite dubious. You have chosen to focus on vitriol instead of addressing these facts.

In any case, your remarks about me reconsidering my own attitude are well-taken. I am trying, imperfectly, to post at II with greater generosity and less impatience.

Bill Snedden · 01-14-2003, 07:12 AM

This "flamewar" is indeed pointless and it ends now.

No more accusations, no more recriminations, no need to apologize.

It's over and done with. All parties will retire to their neutral corners and return to resume discussion if and when they choose. Acceptable topics for conversation include philosophy generally and the OP specifically in this thread.

Unacceptable topics include who said what to whom and related deliberations on why and when.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Bill

01-14-2003, 07:12 AM	#34
Bill Snedden Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2000 Location: Greensboro, NC, U.S.A. Posts: 2,597	Timeout... This "flamewar" is indeed pointless and it ends now. No more accusations, no more recriminations, no need to apologize. It's over and done with. All parties will retire to their neutral corners and return to resume discussion if and when they choose. Acceptable topics for conversation include philosophy generally and the OP specifically in this thread. Unacceptable topics include who said what to whom and related deliberations on why and when. Thank you for your cooperation. Bill

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