How to do philosophy
Heh.
This is a rangy response to @Bartricks's apparently misunderstood thread about evolution.
It's not over there, because it's not much about that, but it's what prompted me. Take it for what you will.
*
The fact-value distinction creates an apparently insuperable obstacle for philosophers, but not for ordinary people. Why?
It's not that ordinary people are unaware of the distinction. "That's just, like, your opinion, man." Plus it's drummed into them in English and critical thinking classes. Plus most people seem to figure it out on their own at some point. But the context for that is always the same: someone mistaking their value judgment for a statement of fact. We call people out on this. We teach them the nuance of recognizing when their claims on based on their values rather than the facts.
So we say, and most people seem to believe. When there's disagreement, it's usually not a failure to recognize the distinction but to accept that it applies to the case at hand; that is, people disagree about whether a given claim is factual or evaluative, not about whether there is a difference.
(All this talk of values, Nietzsche was here before.)
All that's preface.
To finish the preface: the philosopher believes that the ordinary person is either unfamiliar with the distinction or fails to apply it properly, and that if they did they too would be in the pickle philosophers are, unable to bridge the gap. Most people just don't notice, or don't understand what a big deal this is, that's the mantra of philosophy. (The other example that leaps to mind also comes from Hume: how do you know the sun will rise tomorrow?)
Is that right? I agree that philosophy is noticing things many overlook, of course, but you have to be careful.
People seem to walk across rooms; Zeno has an argument that shows there's something odd about that, looked at in a certain way. There are options now:
(1) The everyday, anti-intellectual response, which is not wrong, but not why we're here: don't look at it in that perverse way.
(2) If I can't find a solution, in the terms in which I've stated the problem, then I have shown that people do not in fact walk across rooms, but only seem to, that it is an illusion. I will recognize that this result is paradoxical, but if it's what my reasoning spits out, I'm stuck with it. Something north, perhaps well north, of half of philosophical enquiries that begin "How is it possible that " conclude that in fact it's not. We ask questions that are impossible to answer and conclude that the phenomenon we sought to understand, perhaps even explain, is illusory.
This is a better response:
The terms in which the question is raised are the problem. They don't properly represent the situation and make the perfectly ordinary seem impossible. The problem statement itself is a mistake. (This is not so far from (1) above as philosophers think.)
The problem with this answer is that we want to valorize our curiosity. That's where we started: it's good to see how odd the world happens to be, to make it new.
And so an even better answer is something like this:
I'm right to see there's a problem here, and I'm right to believe that this problem is regularly overcome; therefore, there is something more I'm not seeing, which is the everyday solution. How do people manage to walk across rooms anyway?
Which need not be to say that the problem apparently being overcome is real. It may very well turn out that the terms in which the problem was posed are mistaken. Either of these results are good:
1. The ant does face a genuine obstacle to doing such and such, and here's how he manages
2. It turns out this is not actually a problem at all for ants and here's why
Both of those answers represent greater understanding than we had before, and that's what we wanted. The problem statement provides a way in, even if it turns out the problem we thought was there is illusory. What's more, if it is illusory, we want to know why -- that is, what is it about this phenomenon that allows us, perhaps encourages us (or even requires us, as with optical illusions), to see it wrongly?
All of this sounds more like science than philosophy. The difference might be this: science has established methods of inquiry, and established means for creating new methods and evaluating them. Philosophy?
Of course, there's Reason, broadly construed, but look at its use here: reasoning establishes the apparent problem but cannot solve it. Without reason we wouldn't even be here -- lacking the spur of a problem to solve -- but it's only the very first step, or at most the first phrase of the melody. How do we go on, as science does?
You can construe those first notes somewhat like the start of an integer sequence, and imagine, formally, ways to go on. The more advanced the formalism the better -- we'll solve it all with probabilistic game theory or something, or with a newly axiomatized logic. Maybe it's all category theory. Like Frankenstein, we need only create the right monster to solve our problem.
Or you hear those notes as only the start of a melody leaving the rest to be improvised, or you take it as a cue to dance. (And you might even claim that composition is just ossified improvisation.) Insofar as there are rules to this, they are rules you, and perhaps your collaborators, make up as you go along, intuitively. (And, again, you have the option of claiming this is all we ever do.)
Both are tempting, but lose sight of the context of the problem. When we began, we had something real in view, the actual phenomenon of people walking across rooms, say. Now, we have shut that away behind a door marked, "We have gotten all we need from this; the rest is up to us."
And we know that's wrong. The right thing to do is to dig into the phenomenon itself, to observe more not less, to use our problem as a flashlight, likely the first of many, to illuminate the phenomenon. Insofar as formalisms or intuitive improvisations help craft better illuminating devices or help us use them better, we can profitably invest in them, but keeping our eye on the ball -- the original phenomenon, and our original experience of thinking we understand it and then recognizing that we don't.
This is a rangy response to @Bartricks's apparently misunderstood thread about evolution.
It's not over there, because it's not much about that, but it's what prompted me. Take it for what you will.
*
The fact-value distinction creates an apparently insuperable obstacle for philosophers, but not for ordinary people. Why?
It's not that ordinary people are unaware of the distinction. "That's just, like, your opinion, man." Plus it's drummed into them in English and critical thinking classes. Plus most people seem to figure it out on their own at some point. But the context for that is always the same: someone mistaking their value judgment for a statement of fact. We call people out on this. We teach them the nuance of recognizing when their claims on based on their values rather than the facts.
So we say, and most people seem to believe. When there's disagreement, it's usually not a failure to recognize the distinction but to accept that it applies to the case at hand; that is, people disagree about whether a given claim is factual or evaluative, not about whether there is a difference.
(All this talk of values, Nietzsche was here before.)
All that's preface.
To finish the preface: the philosopher believes that the ordinary person is either unfamiliar with the distinction or fails to apply it properly, and that if they did they too would be in the pickle philosophers are, unable to bridge the gap. Most people just don't notice, or don't understand what a big deal this is, that's the mantra of philosophy. (The other example that leaps to mind also comes from Hume: how do you know the sun will rise tomorrow?)
Is that right? I agree that philosophy is noticing things many overlook, of course, but you have to be careful.
People seem to walk across rooms; Zeno has an argument that shows there's something odd about that, looked at in a certain way. There are options now:
(1) The everyday, anti-intellectual response, which is not wrong, but not why we're here: don't look at it in that perverse way.
(2) If I can't find a solution, in the terms in which I've stated the problem, then I have shown that people do not in fact walk across rooms, but only seem to, that it is an illusion. I will recognize that this result is paradoxical, but if it's what my reasoning spits out, I'm stuck with it. Something north, perhaps well north, of half of philosophical enquiries that begin "How is it possible that " conclude that in fact it's not. We ask questions that are impossible to answer and conclude that the phenomenon we sought to understand, perhaps even explain, is illusory.
This is a better response:
The terms in which the question is raised are the problem. They don't properly represent the situation and make the perfectly ordinary seem impossible. The problem statement itself is a mistake. (This is not so far from (1) above as philosophers think.)
The problem with this answer is that we want to valorize our curiosity. That's where we started: it's good to see how odd the world happens to be, to make it new.
And so an even better answer is something like this:
I'm right to see there's a problem here, and I'm right to believe that this problem is regularly overcome; therefore, there is something more I'm not seeing, which is the everyday solution. How do people manage to walk across rooms anyway?
Which need not be to say that the problem apparently being overcome is real. It may very well turn out that the terms in which the problem was posed are mistaken. Either of these results are good:
1. The ant does face a genuine obstacle to doing such and such, and here's how he manages
2. It turns out this is not actually a problem at all for ants and here's why
Both of those answers represent greater understanding than we had before, and that's what we wanted. The problem statement provides a way in, even if it turns out the problem we thought was there is illusory. What's more, if it is illusory, we want to know why -- that is, what is it about this phenomenon that allows us, perhaps encourages us (or even requires us, as with optical illusions), to see it wrongly?
All of this sounds more like science than philosophy. The difference might be this: science has established methods of inquiry, and established means for creating new methods and evaluating them. Philosophy?
Of course, there's Reason, broadly construed, but look at its use here: reasoning establishes the apparent problem but cannot solve it. Without reason we wouldn't even be here -- lacking the spur of a problem to solve -- but it's only the very first step, or at most the first phrase of the melody. How do we go on, as science does?
You can construe those first notes somewhat like the start of an integer sequence, and imagine, formally, ways to go on. The more advanced the formalism the better -- we'll solve it all with probabilistic game theory or something, or with a newly axiomatized logic. Maybe it's all category theory. Like Frankenstein, we need only create the right monster to solve our problem.
Or you hear those notes as only the start of a melody leaving the rest to be improvised, or you take it as a cue to dance. (And you might even claim that composition is just ossified improvisation.) Insofar as there are rules to this, they are rules you, and perhaps your collaborators, make up as you go along, intuitively. (And, again, you have the option of claiming this is all we ever do.)
Both are tempting, but lose sight of the context of the problem. When we began, we had something real in view, the actual phenomenon of people walking across rooms, say. Now, we have shut that away behind a door marked, "We have gotten all we need from this; the rest is up to us."
And we know that's wrong. The right thing to do is to dig into the phenomenon itself, to observe more not less, to use our problem as a flashlight, likely the first of many, to illuminate the phenomenon. Insofar as formalisms or intuitive improvisations help craft better illuminating devices or help us use them better, we can profitably invest in them, but keeping our eye on the ball -- the original phenomenon, and our original experience of thinking we understand it and then recognizing that we don't.
Comments (88)
Thank you for this very thoughtful and sensible post. I would say that there is not a clear distinction between what 'ordinary people' and 'philosophers' think and there are traps that any of us (bearing the label or not) can fall into.
Take the question: who is US President? Maybe ten years ago this would have been a schoolroom exercise in speech act theory. An appropriate announcement at the end of an agreed process constitutes the fact of some person's being the holder of the office. The fact itself would not have been in question - the 'original phenomenon' could be referred to, while we discuss the nature of the fact. Lately, this is no longer possible. Perhaps the real president is the one who speaks for the common people, the one who stands up against the sneering intellectuals and federal state power merchants who deny him his rightful position. So it's all about values. Or is it? No, it's about facts. "Oh, but they are your facts and this is my truth." The expression "my truth" itself elides fact and value in a way that you say 'most people figure [ ] out'. Well, perhaps they do, but then they can get stuck on just the same problems as 'philosophers'.
Another curious question that seems to be exercising the minds of people who would not call themselves 'philosophers' - what is a woman? I think when commentators cannot agree on that question or on whether it's a matter of fact, opinion, value or a matter of the conferring or self-conferring of an honorary label, then we are seeing philosophy alive and working outside the philosophy schoolroom. So 'ordinary people' can find themselves bewildered and 'philosophers' may be equally so and for much the same reasons. The 'insuperable obstacle[s]' keep cropping up outside philosophy as well as inside.
This raises the question- so what's the point of philosophy, if it can't help with these apparently philosophical problems? Well, my post is long enough.
Joe Biden is President. Nothing controversial.
...killed the cat! :scream:
Socrates...the (alleged) father of Western philosophy, curious chap, was executed by hemlock. Philosophers need to watch their step.
[quote=Porky the pig][O lover of Sophia] be vewy, vewy careful.[/quote]
Good OP title but nowhere in it do I see the promised formula. Is that our homework OP?
Of note is the fact that it was first articulated by David Hume, the godfather of positivism and one of the leading lights of the Scottish enlightenment. So I would respond by situating the issue in the context of the history of ideas.
One of the many authors I've discovered only recently, but who might be well-known to others here, is Alexander Koyré, philosopher and historian of ideas, and an influence on later philosophers of science including Thomas Kuhn.
One of his books was adapted from a lecture series, and was a study of the momentous changes in worldview that characterised the scientific revolution and the advent of modernity. He says:
[quote= Alexander Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe]This scientific and philosophical revolution - it is indeed impossible to separate the philosophical from the purely scientific aspects of this process: they are interdependent and closely linked together - can be described roughly as bringing forth the destruction of the Cosmos, that is, the dissappearance from philosophically and scientifically valid concepts, the conception of the world as a finite, closed and hierarchically ordered whole (a whole in which the hierarchy of value determined the hierarchy and structure of being, rising from the dark, heavy and imperfect earth to the higher and higher perfection of the stars and heavenly spheres), and its replacement by an indefinite and even infinite universe which is bound toether by the identity of its fundamental components and laws, and in which all those components are placed on the same level of being. This, in turn, implies the discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based upon value-concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally the utter devalorisation of being, the divorce of the world of value from the world of facts.[/quote]
In effect, what occured was the abandonment of any idea of there being Capital T Truth, which is, of course, too contaminated by association with religious ideas to withstand the acid of Enlightenment materialism. What was lost, in fact, was the sense of there being a scale of values, the idea that there could be anything better or worse outside individual opinion or social consensus. The reason that is an insuperable obstacle is because to challenge the consensus view that the Universe is, in fact, devoid of intrinsic meaning, is to be stereotyped as religious, which more or less disqualifies one from participation in secular culture.
(See Does Reason Know what it is Missing?, Stanley Fish, for a discussion of Habermas' analysis of this issue.)
Interesting you mention Stanley Fish, who is also famous for his observation (and essays) positing that Philosophy Doesn't Matter - the notion that philosophy makes no difference to anyone going about their business and making decisions in life away from academe or conferences (or presumably internet fora).
https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/does-philosophy-matter/
What do you mean by the fact value distinction? I think most philosophers - now and throughout history - would not draw it.
Here's another distinction - the fact concrete distinction.
There are facts. And there is concrete.
Facts are facts, not concrete. And concrete is concrete and not a fact. However, some facts are about concrete.
Now, the same is true of facts and values. There are facts, and facts are facts and not other things. And there are values and values are values not other things. But some facts are about values. (There are facts about what I value, for instance, and there are facts about moral values too).
The same applies to the 'is/ought' distinction. The 'is' denotes a fact. It 'is' the case that I am sat in a chair. 'Oughts' are directives (normative oughts are, anyway). But there can be facts about those, just as there can be facts about concrete even though concrete is not a fact.
It is fact that you ought to x, for instance.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This is very close to Mary Midgley's idea of philosophy as plumbing. We don't need it until things start to leak or smell.
Midgley's metaphor helps in reply to asking what the difference between ordinary people and philosophers might be. A philosopher has smelt something or noticed the leak, and is trying to deal with it. They se that there is a problem where others might not.
It needs to be said that doing philosophy is extraordinarily hard. Almost anyone can notice the smell, but fixing the leak requires some unusual skills and background.
Ordinary folk: Philosophers think too much.
We never hit the sweet spot betwixt deficiency & excess now do we? We're always swinging, pendulum-like, back and forth between extremes. The aurea mediocritas isn't easy to either attain or maintain.
:smirk:
That's awfully close to Dewey's conception, as I understand it. Problems. Problems that are live for us, that engage us, problems that maybe we think need to be solved, or think maybe we could solve.
I'm not sure I want to be quite that single-minded. I like peculiar questions, and I've asked a few on this forum. (Why do we want to avoid being wrong? Why don't we understand nature completely, why do we have to work at it?)
There are also questioning sorts of interests that are hard even to formulate as simple questions. For instance, language seems to work, but what it even works at is not clear, what it even does is confusing. And there are ways of conceiving of language that suggest it cannot possibly work at whatever it's doing, which we still don't know. I don't think I'm ever going to shake my fascination with that little knot.
So here the plumbing is, to all appearances, working fine, at something. But it's easy as pie to show how little we understand it. Why is it so easy? That's a new problem. I mean, it takes some pretty heavy physics to show that various things about the world are actually pretty odd -- but with language, it takes no more than a few questions to pull you up short, and those questions occur even to a six year old.
The germ for this thread is something I've tried to address before, the ongoing problem of causes and reasons. It looks to me now like one of those "antinomy of pure reason" sorts of things. But I also think we are foolish to dive right in making arguments as if we know perfectly well what it means for one event to cause another, or for a person to have a reason for what they believe or what they do. I don't think we do, and I don't think arguments that take such things as given get us anywhere.
Speak for yourself. :smirk:
Philosophers: folk that use language like its a game or art
Ordinary folk: folk that use language to communicate
Sure, there are some uses of language that appear to be habit more than a clear understanding of what it actually means to say such things, but I've seen philosophers fall prey to the habit just as much as ordinary people. Assumptions make up the the foundation from where we build our understanding of the world. Philosophers are the ones that don't seem to realize that as they attempt to re-ask the same questions we asked and solved in the 4th grade. That isn't to say that there aren't some higher level assumptions that we take for granted that can't be questioned - like does God exist - but then ordinary people can be just as concerned about whether god exists (like when they are suffering at the hand of an unfair world) as a philosopher can.
What are those questions?
:grin: This is why scientists have a dim view of philosophy - despite its claims to be a fact-finding mission, it's largely an exchange of opinions. Anekantavada (many-sidedness or no one-sidedness).
Interesting argument. I didn't ask or answer any such questions in 4th grade. I think most of us live unexamined lives, derive value systems unsystematically through experience and socialisation, holding onto views that are an amalgam of fallacies, prejudices and models of reality which can't be justified. I think the point is ignorance is bliss, truth seeking doesn't ususally make any real difference to survivability or prosperity and people have no idea how much of what they think is deficient.
Philosophers: their porridge is too hot.
Most people(certainly not ordinary, no such thing as an ordinary person imo): porridge gets cold very quickly as most are easily distracted.
Scientists: Porridge is just right Goldilocks! (do we have baby bears to thank for this or the hopes of all our children ?) (The hopes of children! A station where all antinatalists terminate)
Dan Dennett states that philosophers help because they work so hard at trying to identify the correct questions to ask and pursue. He further states that all science starts as philosophical musings and that the history of philosophy clearly shows all the failed questions. It is the responsibility of modern philosophers not to repeat the mistakes of classical philosophers. All very complicated stuff. So perhaps this porridge is too hot for most people. Most people do ponder the big why and how questions of human experience as they live it but they are easily distracted by day-to-day living. Paying their bills and socialising with others. Sports/tv/relationships/job(if not in science or philosophy) etc etc easily distract from philosophy and science. So perhaps their porridge often gets too cold too quickly.
Many scientists can balance their lives pretty well between living the human experience and progressing towards new knowledge.
They contribute the most in my opinion, (although there is also the massive impact of the political world) towards the hopes that I see in children. Hope that the generation responsible for bringing them into the human experience will provide them with more options and a better life than that experienced by them. The antinatalists would say to the children that it would be best for them if they never had been born and they would call their parents immoral for having them. This is why I suggested that the glorious hope for the future that I continually witnessed in the thousands of children I taught over my career dissolves antinatalism into the puddle of putrification that it is. I would also emphasize to you again that sensible population control has very little or perhaps even nothing to do with antinatalism. All I was trying to do was connect together some of the recent exchanges between us, nothing more exciting than that.
Everyone examines their lives at some point - usually in the late teens - early twenties. They question their existence and their purpose. The real question is how much of an examination does your life need before you can get on with just living it? Philosophy seems to have shown that you can never know anything, or that you have to start with some assumptions. So it would be pointless to keep asking questions for which you will never get an answer.
Quoting Jackson
What are propositions? What is a language? What is science? What are numbers? etc.
My recent dealings with Aritifically Intelligent Image Generators, kind of concur with what this inquiry gets at. They can abstract or generate images based on their total data-set. We are kind of like that ourselves, plus we have to knit together phenomena/images/symbols to come up with some new abstraction. Making the original unoriginal, perhaps. For more on this I would look to "Paradigm Shifts, Kuhn." I haven't read his book on the matter, too dry for me, but I get the point.
On another point, I think asking and forming questions about certain subjects, fosters both philosophical and creative thought. You can ask questions about any subject, and than rigorously go about finding answers, it is imperative to operate such devices. I have yet to come across anything on scientifically based questioning, but I am sure one could find some data out there.
There are some common methodolgies used in philosophy, such as what you refered to as "axiomatic".What is true of Geometry (Eucilidan Axioms) should also spill over to the philosophies, as it does.
True, all philosophy, what's being sold as, feels like a giant gedanken experiment, too idealized and thus, to that extent impractical. Nonetheless, philosohy isn't completely useless as by providing us with vignettes of perfection, it calls to our attention what we could do to make our world better; this despite Nietzsche's amor fati.
As for antinatalism, I've decided that it isn't my place to tell what others who're fully capable of making their own decisions should/shouldn't do. I have a particular fondness for the idea for the simple reason that it, at the very least, sheds light on the problem of suffering. Suffering ain't a joke is the message I want antinatalists to get across to people. We need to take action ASAP. If not, natalists will eventually lose the battle - Algos can make life choose death and that's a shocker any way you slice this cake! It's as if a philosopher decided to become a sophist. That's how paradoxical it is.
Au revoir.
4th graders solved the problem of the nature of language? Is this your position?!
And the answer come back: "Just enough."
That looks like fear to me. If we're not careful, we'll all turn into Chidi Anagonye. Henry Miller called it "Hamlet", the excessive questioning and analyzing that gets in the way of living, that can cripple you as it cripples Chidi.
If I have a point, it begins with the opposite assumption: people do manage to walk across rooms, even though I have an analysis that suggests this is impossible or illusory, and in figuring out where my analysis fails -- as it evidently does -- I can come to understand more about how people do that than I did before. I don't wonder whether it's possible, and my puzzlement about how it's possible doesn't prevent me from walking across a room anymore than it does anyone else.
So why does the specter of Chidi/Hamlet in that ivory tower hang over philosophy?
You ask, "How much of an examination does your life need?" There are a couple ways to go here. (Analytical habits die hard.) Maybe a little reflection is good, but too much is Chidi. Chidi is just immoderate in his reflection. But (second way, now), at what point do we call this philosophy? Not that it matters, but there's a hint here that maybe philosophy could be defined as: excessive and unnecessary reflection. Maybe in some cases, just unnecessary, but in some unnecessary and positively harmful, disruptive, crippling, Chidi. [hide="For instance"](This can also veer into @JerseyFlight's complaint that we sit around here arguing about indexicals and shit, when there are blind children that need our help.)[/hide]
Anecdotal interlude. W. H. Auden named two sorts of poets: "Prospero" poets have something to say; "Ariel" poets like playing with language. The response to a bad Ariel poem is, "This needn't have been written"; the response to a bad Prospero poem is, "This shouldn't have been written."
Is poetry necessary? Painting? Music? Is philosophy? Once they're about in the world, the answer becomes "yes" to many people, who find their lives thus enriched. But for all that, it's still perfectly clear that there's little "survival value" in such undertakings. I'm perfectly happy to say that art and philosophy are unnecessary in exactly this sense. They are a bonus, above and beyond survival. And I'll say more: it seems to me that human beings need not, individually or in aggregate, engage in any one such enterprise, taken by itself -- not everyone needs to paint or play music or engage in philosophical reflection -- but it also seems to me that human beings, both individually and in aggregate, do have an actual need to do something unnecessary. The evidence for this view seems, strangely perhaps, overwhelming, because my god look at all the stuff people get up to, and have gotten up to down through the generations. First chance we got, we began doing all sorts of things we didn't have to just to survive and we've been doing more and more of that extra stuff ever since. No one needs to know how the universe began and gave rise to fundamental forces and matter and all that, but damned if we aren't bending heaven and earth to find out. Good for us. And so it is with philosophy, says I.
So what about that fear of the ivory tower? What is that? Why does it haunt philosophy? I think you can see it at work whenever someone claims, as they will around here, "Everyone has a metaphysics, just mostly unexamined," that sort of thing. People want to insist on the importance, on the relevance, of philosophy -- and claiming that everyone is actually doing philosophy all the time, though they may not realize it, is one way to do that. The great fear is that we'll all be taken for Ariels, just playing with words, or Prosperos, declaiming our ridiculous and embarrassing theories as if anyone wanted to hear them, as if they could possibly matter to anyone. (For the record, Auden thought only those who begin as Ariels have any chance of becoming great poets.)
My suggestion in the OP was that what we should really worry about is a methodological ivory tower, where we shut ourselves off from the phenomena we realize we don't understand and attempt to turn philosophy into either a branch of mathematics (which has its own ivory-tower, head-in-the-clouds PR issues) or a branch of literature, a sort of hyper-intellectualized belles lettres. I want us to remember that what we do as philosophers springs originally from a certain unusual sort of curiosity about the lives we are actually living, an unnecessary curiosity, to be sure, but valuable for that very reason, I say, rather than in spite of it.
If you want to go this far, then human life is not necessary. The universe can exist without us.
And did, practically forever.
Should that bother us?
It should bother people who believe the universe wanted to have humans in it and that is the sole purpose of the universe.
@apokrisis has a charming just-so story about this, which I'm sure he'd be willing to tell: what I call "unnecessary", he'll call "hastening the heat-death of the universe" -- that's why if there weren't people, the universe would need to invent them, and why people need to do (for the universe) things they don't need to do (for themselves).
Should I object that my use of "necessary" was pretty clearly circumscribed in what I wrote? It's just about the oldest move in philosophy, to climb up a rung or two toward greater abstraction -- "maybe we are ourselves unnecessary ..." What are we doing now? Are we trying to understand what it means for something to be "necessary", or, as we might say, "necessary in general"?
As it happens, the idea of "necessity" sits right in the middle of the issue that prompted this little thread: causes are supposed to be "necessarily" linked to their effects, somehow. But reasons are part of a constellation of concepts that seem to presume some sort of "freedom", since you are not forced into a particular course of action by your reasons. (But then it gets even squirrelier, because reason has its own version of necessity -- if x + 2 = 5, then x must be equal to 3. And we see this further as some sort of obligation on us, that we "must" so conclude, or that we "should" so conclude, and those feel oddly equivalent in this case.)
Questions of "necessity" play an outsize role in our cultural history, in a way that many people find particularly valuable. "Must it be so?" is a powerful question. Must we keep Black people as slaves? Must some have so much more than others? Must we kill one another in war?
We forget how pious, even traditional, Socrates was and remember that he asked a lot of questions it turned out no one could answer. When that looks like social activism, we applaud; when it looks like playing with words, we boo. But underneath is the same questioning impulse.
Someone (I forget who) described the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy as a neat little man, wearing a bowler hat, carrying an umbrella, and standing at a slight angle to the universe. Philosophy should aspire to stand at such an angle, and then to look.
"Are we necessary?" is an excellent question, and that's so even if it turns out to be unanswerable, even if it turns out not quite to make sense. My real concern was to counter the assumption that it, and all such questions, are to be settled simply by argument, by arraying the case for "yes" against the case for "no", rather than spending a little time in the moment of questioning, and then seeing where the question itself might take us.
Necessity is just a statement about history. For example, Schrodinger said we need to transform the concept of necessity in science to observations of behavior.
A lot of counter-intuitive facts disturb such anthropomorphic naïveté (e.g. inhabiting the surface of a spinning round planet moving around a sun that's eight light-minutes away, etc). Knowing trumps believing (C. Sagan).
Hopefully just à bientôt.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Can you perceive of any purpose for the universe during this time apart from its happenstance progress towards a lifeform capable of asking questions? What do you think it means if we cant? Does it matter to YOU? It's perfectly fine if your answer is something like I don't know as that would currently, probably be my answer but I am still 'excited,' by the question.
What, indeed, is the point of it all?
Some time back, there was a thread that amounted to attempting to answer this question:
Okay, there are some problems there, and it's not hard to see that there are problems there. And yet we ask. Why? Why are we so inclined to ask questions that don't quite make sense?
One common answer is that we are misled by the surface similarity of this question to a question like "Where is Belarus?" As it happens, Ryle's original example of a "category mistake" was a visitor being shown libraries, dining halls, classroom buildings, and so on, and then asking, "Yes, but where is the university?" We know that we can engage some little sentence generator within us to produce "Where is X?" for any token X, but why would we? What did that young student want to know that he was not getting from his tour guide? Why do we think of the universe as being somewhere? Why do we think it might or might not have a purpose?
There are two sorts of responses to questions like these that I want to head off:
(1) Your question is just a mistake; don't do that.
(2) It's a question, so let's start arguing for one answer or another.
Answer (1) often involves an argument that some canon of logical, or, more often, semantic, purity has been violated. Answer (2) generally presumes that a sufficiently pure (logically and semantically) analysis is available, and once discovered will yield an answer. (Thus if you've never beaten your children, you should cheerfully answer "no" when asked if you've stopped -- because logic.)
If your suspicion is that something like answer (1) is appropriate -- that, say, it makes no sense to ask where the universe is -- how will you proceed? Well, that's a curious point, because the natural thing to do in many cases is look for situations where answer (2) is appropriate -- that is, where we believe we are already in possession of the correct analysis, like "Where is Belarus?" -- and then point out that our situation is not enough like these. Hence the violation. But that's a pretty weird place for philosophy to end up -- are we only to ask questions we already know the answers to, or at least know how to get the those answers? "No one's ever asked that before," should be about the highest praise we can give, but that's not the vibe here at all.
If answer (1) shows, in some sense, too much humility, is too deferential to received wisdom, answer (2) shows too little: we presume we can or already do understand what's at stake, what the question means, where it comes from, why it's asked, how to go about answering it, what the answer will look like. It's impatient, which ought to be a sin in philosophy. (It was Kafka who said that all sins spring from impatience.)
I started this thread with the idea that we should stop turning away from the phenomena that puzzle us in our rush to have some explanation or some answer to the questions we begin with, but more and more I seem to have been defending the moment of questioning itself, that engagement with the world in wonder and curiosity; I also want us not to be in such a hurry to get un-puzzled.
I'm genuinely sorry this is all so meta, but actual philosophy is hard.
Does the universe have a purpose? If it makes sense, that's a yes or no question, so three options are immediately available. Must we choose among those? Must we simply choose among those?
I'd counsel not thinking much about the answer yet at all. It's a question people can and do ask. Even philosophers. What's going on there? Why do we ask the question? Is it a matter of psychology? Before even getting to the why, maybe we should spend some time just thinking about the situation the question implies -- here we are, considering our home, the universe in which we evolved, and on the one hand this is unquestionably where we belong, and yet we have this doubt, or uncertainty, about what that belonging really means, a doubt so strong we wonder if this is our true home or whether we have come from elsewhere. ("I ain't nothing but a stranger in this world. I've got a home on high.") Which word in "Why am I here?" gets the emphasis?
There's a lot of territory covered in your post, much of it of high quality. But I'm unclear on the main question being asked.
These answers obviously will vary depending on which school of philosophy you believe is on the right track, phenomenology will differ from analytic philosophy which will differ from strands of continental philosophy and so on.
An even bigger problem is that we have to assume the apparatus that allows us to have knowledge (modes of understanding, realized in the brain, stimulated by the environment) is itself not explainable. We have to assume that our mode of understanding must be right in different circumstances, without giving it a foundation which we are able to account for.
Many of these questions seem to me to be well argued for by Hume, who says, that despite our ability to cast very serious doubts on the most evident things, we have no choice but to postulate them. What nature causes us distress through reason, nature too relaxes our doubts.
Well, that was an interesting trip through your personal musings regarding the universe.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
In my opinion, the answer is absolutely yes! The totality of all conscious life within it gives the universe purpose and the main purpose for me is to ask and try to answer questions. When all the answers (if ever) are known. The universe may then 'become.' I have no idea what it will 'become.' The limits of my imagination fail at that point. I will not use the soiled label 'god' but if all questions are answered then omniscience is achieved in a collective, totality sense. If omniscience is achieved then omnipotence is probably consequential.
I assume omnipresence would be plausible at that point and I don't think omnibenevolence will be relevant. Just thought I would offer you back some of my own playful musings.
Interesting approach. I think perhaps a lot of the time the philosopher is in the job of classifying the habits of thinking which accompany our particular forms of life and mistakes happen when he mistakes his classification for a discovery. The librarian noting that "How to make Curries" is a book about cookery is not discovering something about the book, they are classifying it, it's not a necessary part of the process, the book didn't need classifying to be understood, and used.
Likewise one could say (of Hume's problem of induction, for example) that his contribution was to classify the assumption that the sun will rise tomorrow as that kind of thinking habit and not this kind. It is not of the kind where we can write it down in logical notation, or convert it to maths. It's of the other kind, the kind where we simply find ourselves thinking that way and it works.
The mistake is to then go on to think that Hume has discovered something wrong, something which needs fixing (@Banno's 'plumbing'). That a habit of thinking is of this kind and not that kind is not a problem that needs fixing, it's a classification exercise.
I think this kind of error is what's behind a lot of the "if p then q - p therefore q" kinds of arguments where q is some surprising conclusion. The OP of @Bartricks from which you derived this thread is just such a case. The problem appears to be that q derives from p plus a habit of thinking we want to hold as being flawless (logic), therefore we must accept q no matter how odd. But we don't accept q (perhaps as a result of that other kind of thinking habit). It's a mistake to assume something's gone wrong there. Obviously, there's two solutions to the surprising q. Just as it's valid that "if p then q - p therefore q" it's also valid that "if p then q - ~q therefore ~p"....and choosing which is not something done with that kind of thinking habit, but with another. The philosopher's error is in think that, by rendering one (or other) side of the choice in a clear rational manner he's somehow influenced that choice itself, where what he's done is merely classify it as being that kind of choice.
All of which is just a rehash of Quine - nothing new under the sun and all that... But I think it applies to philosophical propositions no less than it does to empiricism.
Part of the problem is the error bars get wider if you base your musing on an inaccurate base such as the one stated above. The Sun DOES NOT IN FACT RISE OR SET, it is the Earth that turns.
Quantum physics shows that there is some 'missing physics' between classical physics and quantum physics so it is likely that classical mathematics and classical propositional logic such as If p then q conditionals do not apply to phenomena such as quantum tunnelling.
Nonsense! Quantum is real god is not.
This is an interesting and valuable enterprise but I would call it "cognitive psychology" rather than "philosophy". A whole lot of what I post, including almost* everything in this thread, also isn't philosophy, but "psychology of philosophy" -- at least as I'm inclined to use the terms, which is no doubt idiosyncratic.
You seem to have "bracketed", as they say, the issue of whether a classification, or a classificatory scheme, is "correct", in any sense. You might do that (1) for scientific reasons -- that is, that you don't care, since what you're investigating is the landscape of human classificatory habits. You might do that (2) for another reason, one we might call "logical" or "philosophical" or even "mathematical", that given any set of phenomena (or objects, whatever), there is no single way to classify them. (Which sounds like a theorem.)
Either is sufficient, but it's still slightly odd, since philosophers generally worry quite a bit about their classificatory choices and would never consider them all equivalent, as you implicitly do. You also imply that a classification is, shall we say, "external", "imposed" on the set:
Quoting Isaac
The librarian has discovered that the book contains instructions for cooking; the predicate "... is a cookbook" is true of it, while many other predicates are not. It doesn't completely determine your final decision on how to classify the book (because there are many predicates you can use to partition your set, and many combinations of them), but it's now available. (As a bookseller, I can tell you I wouldn't trust the title alone: it could absolutely be a novel, and not unlikely a memoir.)
All this does relate to the sorts of things I've said earlier in this thread, like this: the usual way of classifying classificatory schemes is by their purpose. You pick the overlapping axes of your partitions based on suitability and usefulness for your purpose in so classifying items. (There is one section of the bookstore where I work that I have arranged, believe it or not, by the color of the book.) It might matter a great deal that "purpose" takes a possessive there -- any classificatory scheme might be treated sort of functionally, as itself the definition of "a" purpose, some purpose, but the issue in choosing it is whether that purpose is the same as yours.
And I've been suggesting that philosophy has no purpose, not in itself, so to speak, even though pointless activities, as a group, including, you know, art and all that, may have some purpose. Whether that's so, I've bracketed. I just take it as a fact that people do lots of pointless stuff, which kinda suggests there's a reason to do something pointless so I'm walking a bit of a tightrope here -- we need to do something we don't need to do, but that doesn't mean that something has to be philosophy, and philosophy only fits the bill if you don't need to do it.
And my reason for going through all that rigmarole is to bring us back to the moment of wonder, the moment of questioning, of curiosity. What is my purpose in watching a spider build its web? If there's survival value in that, it's a long, long way away. I don't think it's there at all. I can do that, because of how natural selection built me, but that doesn't mean I am constrained to act in ways that enhance my ability to survive and reproduce. And I am free not only of that purpose but of purpose as such. I don't have to have a reason to watch the spider build its web. That activity need have no purpose at all.
Which is not to say that there aren't psychological explanations for my spider-watching available. Of course there are. But they don't count as reasons for me. (We are still very close to the prompting thread after all.)
--- Anyway, this is all beside the point, because reasons and causes play no part in the moment of wonder itself. I can and do experience the world without there being any particular reason for my doing so. If philosophy ends up being striving to understand, it requires a beginning where understanding is absent, even if that must be relative rather than absolute. Which means I should backtrack a little: curiosity is a clue, a retroactive experience of recognizing that you have already not understood something. It is a valorization of that failure as the proper starting point.
* There is a single word in what I've posted here that, as I wrote it, I felt like I was verging on actual philosophy. There are a couple other points where I was at least in the neighborhood. The rest is chit-chat.
Mainly because I've no idea what 'correct' might constitute. I can see 'useless' (in book terms, a classification system based on paper thickness, for example, would be next to useless compared to one based on subject matter). But actually correct? There doesn't seem to be any clear criteria by which to judge.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Oddly concurrent with my discussion on realism... I don't mean to imply that it's entirely imposed, but partly so. Like the image of a man with a bow is partly imposed on the constellation Orion. It is definitely in the shape of a man with a bow. It's just that its also in the shape of lots of other things too. We've chosen to ignore those other possibilities and focus on the man with the bow, so in that sense it's imposed. But it's definitely not in the shape of next week's winning lottery numbers, so our choice to ignore that arrangement was intrinsic to the actual pattern of the stars, not imposed.
I'd see philosophical classification like that. Imposed, but from a constrained set of choices. Which I think might be what you're getting at with...
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
...? Only I'd say that the classification isn't the discovery. the librarian discovered the book was about cookery by reading it. The decision to then classify as a cookery book is not a discovery but a declaration (maybe it was also 'about' travel but the librarian decided it was more cookery than travel).
I think you're right to say much of this is then cognitive psychology, but that's the equivalent of reading the book. The aspect I was trying to get at was the declarative act of classification, which is slightly different to the investigative act of discovering the properties on which one might base a classification decision.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think this is key to (my understanding of) what you're saying. What counts as a reason and what is sufficient cause are not the same, but what counts as a reason is personal, subjective, and yet seems to want to elbow its way into discussions which have the flavour of technical discussions, right/wrong. We can't have a technical discussion about the rightness or wrongness of what feels to me to be a reason... because (getting into the psychology of it), what you feel constitutes a reason is a post hoc construction which serves purposes usually quite apart from the matter at hand.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, I can agree on that, but I think where I might diverge is that there can be a fetishisation of such curiosity. One can over do it. Adding "...yeah but what is it really?" to the end of every answer is a commoditisation of curiosity, not curiosity proper, and I really get the feeling that some substantial portion of philosophy is of that latter sort.
It hangs there insofar a philosophy doesn't propose to have the final answers.
The other thing that comes to mind regarding the OP I can't quite articulate clearly yet, but I can so far summarize it as follows: one either lives by the 48 laws of power, or one thinks there should be more to life than that, and then uses philosophy to find out.
To be "ordinary", one needs to live in a very small world, have a small mind, have a dog-eat-dog heart. Many people live this way, and they seem to do just fine.
A problem philosophers sometimes face is that they cannot come up with a viable alternative to the ordinary, or at least cannot show that their alternative is better than the ordinary.
Not sure what you mean. It seems you're referring to what artists/novelists do.
Could be. 'The unexamined life is not worth living' resonates with some and doesn't with others. If you don't share that impulse and you are not exposed to examples of philosophy that pique your interest, why should you care? Is there evidence that philosophy is of benefit to individuals and how would that be demonstrated?
Quoting baker
From my experience, there are many variations of an 'ordinary life' that do not necessarily involve a dog-eat-dog value system.
Do you have a view on where the boundary between reflection and 'proper' philosophy might lie? What I mean is, there are many people who reflect on their lives and purpose and values, without ever reading or learning philosophy - when does a partially examined life become actual philosophy?
It's not implausible to think that watching a spider build its web might relax you and enrich your understanding of the world, and thus enrich your life, and that these effects could contribute towards enhancement of your ability to survive and reproduce.
To illustrate with an example:
I live in a once rural area that is undergoing rapid suburbanization and gentrification. Many new people are moving in, and the town is developing an anonymous, hostile, tense atmosphere that is typical for cities. The new settlers tend to look down on the old ones, they don't speak the local dialect. For the most part, they don't greet when one meets them in the street, not even neighbors. Material wealth is what matters the most. The preferred form of dealing with any problem in the neighborhood is to call the police, to sue. Twenty years ago, this was unthinkable, and instead, people tried to talk things over, or, more frequently, acted with consideration first, so that many problems didn't come up at all.
I think the quality of our lives has dramatically diminished, despite all the new fancy houses, all the new asphalt, concrete, infrastructure. The sensibility and consideration in relationships with other people that were once the norm are now becoming alien. One now has to walk on eggshells at all times, and live in constant fear of the nasty things the new neighbors will do.
Philosophically, it's hard to make a convincing case for why the old way of relating to people is better than the new one.
Ordinary people are in the position of power, so why do they play the victim?
If all you've ever eaten is cold pizza and you're closed off to the possibility of eating hot pizza, then the benefits of eating hot pizza cannot be demonstrated to you.
Describe three.
When one stops whining and being silly.
Sally, Matthew, Mark, Rowena, Tony - there's five people I know well who live outside of a dog-eat-dog worldview. I know a few people who live in the nastier world you describe, but most do not. Unless you take any interaction with the contemporary world as an example of your point.
Quoting baker
Philosophy starts when people stop whining and being silly? This begs the questions, what is whining and being silly? Isn't that what Nietzsche does and he's a philosopher?
Quoting baker
So my question isn't about evoking a variation of Plato's cave. My question is can you (or anyone) demonstrate that philosophy is of benefit? What would it even look like for philosophy to be of use - would we see equality/world peace/environmental healing?
Quoting baker
I think this example is a good one and this happened to us in our once rural area too twenty years ago. The quality and experience of life changes for the worse, but it's largely an aesthetic experience.
It's perhaps telling that there's no Nobel Prize for philosophy.
Descartes, Locke, Leibniz and Kant surely deserved on too, as do Plato and Aristotle.
The problem, then, is finding a suitable candidate after the middle of the 19th century. Russell did win one, as merited, but not for his intellectual contributions.
So, it's not that simple.
I don't think J suggested it was simple. I took it as an acerbic and amusing observation.
Is this a serious question? I will answer. But, why do you come to a forum on philosophy if you are not interested in philosophy?
Ok.
It wasn't meant as a jab at Janus at all. It's was an comment that immediately came to mind.
And he is correct that we lack this award in "philosophy" as we now understand the field. Probably a good thing too. How can the judges possibly know which theory is correct on matters of metaphysics?
Epistemology may be a bit different, but it would be a hard award to justify.
Influence. I don't agree with much by Quine but I know he was very influential.
Who said it was a jab at Janus ? Although that does have a nice alliterative ring to it.
I agree those philosophers were pivotal to the development of modern philosophy. But then what about Spinoza, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Peirce, James, Dewey and others I haven't mentioned.
Quoting Tom Storm
It has other associations if you combine it with Bartrick's cute nickname for me: "Hugh Janus".
Derrida was also influential and Lacan. Not a good metric.
Oops. I misunderstood, my bad.
Derrida was a good philosopher. Again, I don't agree with some of his arguments, but his influence is valid.
These awards should be given relative to the time some of these figures lived in. Spinoza's arguments are somewhat difficult to re-articulate now, though it can be done.
Hegel.... I think won several awards in his time. But, let me avoid talking about him.
As for the others, sure. There are good arguments for the pragmatists, I think. The others are more difficult to pin down for an award. Most of these are debatable, or will find partisans.
Quoting Janus
Hah. Well, with someone like him, one does not debate. One merely bows in astonishment...
Quoting Jackson
Influence is difficult to argue with, but the effects of influence can be good or bad. I don't think he's good at all, but others here swear by him.
Feel free not to respond if you so choose, but what idea of Derrida do you think exerts bad influence?
It's not one specific idea, although one could mention differance or hauntology or whatever else he argued, it's several factors.
I won't go into details here, for one thing, people do find him useful and two, I have not read too much of him, though a bit from his followers. The thing is, if I'm not liking or finding persuasive what I'm reading, why bother going on?
There are plenty of others to read.
In short, willfully obscure writing, no regard for proper arguments, constantly saying people misunderstand him, then proceed to make fun of others, etc.
This has not been good for philosophy, in my opinion. For literature, paradoxically, the results are not too bad.
Thanks for the reply. I have read a lot of Derrida and think his first three books or so were good, after that he was pretty redundant. He reminded me of Scholastic writing, going on and on about stuff no one cares about.
But his essay, "Differance," is very good and worthwhile.
I've had several tries at it, but it doesn't work.
By using our brains (truth) & hearts (good) [Xin (heart-mind)]. Wisdom (sophia) is knowing what is true (verum) and what is good (bonum).
Abstinence :blush:
Avoid beauty (pulchrum), you hairy beast! Alack, it's too late for me! I've already tasted flesh!
[math]\uparrow[/math] My attempted at a joke!
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
Made me laugh
You're too kind, monsieur, too kind! :up:
How does one do Gnosis and can you provide an example of it in action?
Good question. I was wondering exactly the same.
Quoting Bret Bernhoft
I guess the big issue here is to specify where this "common thread" comes from and why it is the origin of the doctrines
Writing in everyday, imprecise English, I advance one proposed answer to what language works at and does. Entertainment.
Lots of folks have experienced pleasure when imbibing a narrative that arouses & holds their interest with personal truths, dazzles their imagination with vibrant revelations, expels their breath with uncanny yet logical surprises and elevates their understanding with useful information.
I don't know if language has its own intentions apart from its impacts via application, but I trust many will grant the above as true description of their experience of good storytelling.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The juxtaposition of the above two words is an example of my experience of a bit of language as entertainment.
Firstly, how do you pronounce the participle? Secondly, is it a neo-logism of the writer? Thirdly, is the two-word phrase paradoxical?
As to the thirdly, how do you arbitrarily make inferential statements?
I have an example that comes from literature. It's a short story that places you into the ballpark of gnosis.
I have one distillation of the technique of gnosis that might be enlightening. Literature that conveys gnosis to the reader oftentimes makes use of metaphor in a very specific way. Via metaphor, it elaborates a link between the everyday world & the uncanny dimension of creation. The result is a narrative ambiguity that imparts awareness of duality of being of existing things.
The effect is environmental as the reader is partially transported out of the everyday world into a complex position with one foot on solid ground & the other foot landed within a dreamscape. Once inside the realm of duality, created things assume a high vibrational energy that perplexes the whereness of reality.
One genre label for this type of dual narrative is magical realism.
Our recently concluded Short Story Competition 3 includes such a story.
Dream of the Flood, by Tobias. Use the link below.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13187/dream-of-the-flood-by-tobias
A fortnight later - my apologies, I have intended to get back to this post, but I kept rethinking my response. Even now I'm still puzzling.
It's easy to slip from Wittgenstein's demonstration that metaphysical statements are senseless to Ayer's contention that they are nonsense. Yes, philosophy is hard.
But if the plumbing is working then we would understand it.
SUBTOPIC: Fundamentals
?? Banno, et al,
I am wondering if the original question is flawed in some way? Let us suppose we examine a set of alternatives:
Philosophy is only as hard as the question under examination.
https://www.usmessageboard.com/attachments/1611604183365-png.448413/
Most Respectfully,
R
Saturday, July 22, 2022
Listing names isn't a description.
That's like asking whether breathing is of benefit to individuals and how would that be demonstrated.
It seems your obsession with your status as non-philosopher is getting in the way of thinking clearly.
"Largely an aesthetic experience".
I don't feel like looking up images of concentration camp prisoners and such. "Largely an aesthetic experience".
No it's not. Breathing is completely unavoidable. Philosophy is avoidable. Odd comparison.
Quoting baker
I would have thought that this is my point - such a description is not possible. You can't readily describe people who have chosen not to behave in the manner you have suggested without going into lengthy biography.
Quoting baker
'Obsession' no - 'status' yes. Am I not thinking clearly? I never said I thought clearly.
Quoting baker
Is this a non sequitur? Why mention concentration camps?
So it sounds like you won't engage with my question, but opt to dismiss it instead as poor thinking. Ok.
Just noticed this, Rocco. Someone who does not do philosophy... sure, there are plenty of them. My suspicion is that they live parasitically off the philosophical considerations of others...
For my part, once I've had my morning coffee, and am confident in the advent of breakfast, a bit of philosophical musing comes next - often at the expense of time spent on what I ought be doing.
I will agree with you if your contention is that doing philosophy well consists in developing and using certain tools for sorting out conceptual difficulties.
(There's a "reply" button a the bottom of each post that will let folk know when you answer a post. There is also a "picture" button in the toolbar for adding graphics rather than linking to them.)
Not at all. What is completely avoidable is formal study of philosophy. One can perfectly well avoid enrolling in a college program the topic of which is philosophy. One can also perfectly well avoid reading any books by or about people that are popularily known as "philosophers".
But what one cannot avoid is reflecting on the nature of things, on what constitutes truth, goodness, how it is that one knows something, etc. -- all of which are standard topics in philosophy.
The difference between philosophers and people who aren't that (or who make a point of claiming not to be philosophers) is in how systematically and how in accordance with the philosophical tradition they reflect on those topics.
One of the assumptions in critical thinking is that it is possible to rationally, with arguments, summarize a person's stance on any given topic.
Oh, come on.
We were talking about the decrease of life quality in areas that are undergoing or have undergone suburbanization or gentrification. To classify this decrease merely as "largely an aesthetic experience" takes away the relevance of this decrease.
I've been trying to show you why your question is wrong, and why your persistent declarations of "not being a philosopher" are misguided.
Which in my view is a difference so big you could park a planet on it. :smile: I think making a distinction between understanding philosophy and having an unexamined opinion is of critical importance. Isn't a role of philosophy to provide better alternatives to the fallacies and inadequacies of common sense and enculturation?
Quoting baker
Who said merely? Aesthetic experiences are serious matters. It's the first thing that strikes me when I see land taken over by lots of identical, ugly houses, not to mention all the garish signage. But we also need more housing (here), so the trade off between habitat and housing for humans is a complex matter.
Quoting baker
To denigrate a question by saying it isn't legitimate may be a way of avoiding its answer. I think the question -
Quoting Tom Storm
- is a salient one. Obviously its a large and unwieldly subject and it would benefit from some clarifications.
Quoting baker
This is not an opportunity for a lecture on critical thinking. You made an assertion which of itself did not present an argument or conspicuously engage with rationality -
Quoting baker
I made the point that I know many ordinary people who do not have a small mind and a dog-eat-dog heart. The view presented here of ordinary people seems eccentric, pejorative. That was my response.
In other words, many of the ordinary people I have known treat others with respect, do not chase money or power, read books, explore ideas, donate their time and money to charitable causes and generally do good when they can.
This is a philosophy forum, not the watercooler.
Quoting Banno
Yes, but isn't there a third option? Isn't it possible that someone's nose gets to be a bit too acute and they start noticing smells that are perfectly normal, and then drawing the false conclusion that the plumbing system needs to be overhauled? This is how most people view philosophers, and it isn't always implausible.
Quoting Banno
I'm not so sure. I think was saying that most of the things that work are things we don't understand, and that seems right. Epistemology looms large in modern philosophy, but perhaps this is an aberration.
:100: :smirk: