If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is • Hacker News Board

Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is

#71

Post by Retric » Thu, May 12, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

krutulis wrote: post #45

CWuestefeld wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the author perhaps thinking of something more like "history of philosophy"? What you say about philosophy being more like mathematics is true, and as far as I can see, going forward philosophy is just philosophy, and it would be silly to label it with nations and cultures. But looking backwards, the path that brought different cultures to the table, that got them thinking about the nature of things, is quite diffe…

Yes, I agree. The history of philosophy is an important part of philosophy, not all of philosophy. I studied the subject nearly 30 years ago and can only recall the history courses as having a decisive Western bias (though not a monopoly). I believe all the courses were correctly labeled, and I can remember at least one embarrassed explanation that other traditions could not be included. I am curious how the bias mig…

There are many huge biases at the core of all western philosophy. 'Self' as a meaningful separate unit is one of them. To take a slightly different take on a famous quote. 'It is presumed that I exist and I think, therefore I exist.' Even logic stems from a way of thinking, A and !A could both be true if you step out of the mindset of Truth with a T.

The problem with looking at world philosophy is you find 'western' philosophy is an ecco chamber as far from math as literary criticism.

PS: Not to offend people, but a huge chunk of western philosophy was so closely tied to religious thinking it's actually painful to read. Though this stuff is often a footnote in most philosophy programs.

Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is

#72

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast » Thu, May 12, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

bnegreve wrote: post #8

I'm not sure this logic makes any sense. Science is also very euro-centric, yet most of us here would argue that science is among the most objective disciplines out there.

Is that the same science that advances one funeral at a time.

Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is

#73

Post by whatshisface » Thu, May 12, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

Scarblac wrote: post #61

whatshisface wrote: post #9

It feels like the author has missed the point of philosophy entirely. If some Chinese philosophical paper is very good, it should be evaluated on its merits and folded in to an appropriate course for that topic. Philosophers believe at least, that they are doing work more along the lines of mathematics than underwater dance (that is, searching for truth). Nobody would ever dream of arguing against eurocentrism in num…

I clicked around to see which topics were actually taught to undergraduates in the first philosophy program Google showed me (happened to be Yale): http://philosophy.yale.edu/undergraduate-program/undergradua... The first five: * An examination of major figures in the history of Western philosophy * An examination of attempts to reconcile the evils of this world with the existence of a perfectly good God, with specia…

Interesting. Yale seems like an outlier here - Stanford's program only has two history of philosophy courses[1].

It's possible that, for better or worse, the ivy league mindest is to focus on the foundation of our own legal system. (A huge number of lawyers start in philosophy.) Still, history isn't the same as philosophy. At my university, Aristotle is actually mostly studied by the classics department.

http://exploredegrees.stanford.edu/schoolofhumanitiesandscie...

Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is

#74

Post by Scarblac » Thu, May 12, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

sageikosa wrote: post #65

Coincoin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author clearly thinks philosophy is some kind of school of esoterism and after life.

What became Philosophy was first delineated by the Hellenic Greeks. It was a pursuit of the literate as an alternative to the waning gods of the masses. There are certainly other schools of thought on what things are, how they should be considered, how being should act, how societies should organize and what people should admire and strive for; but not all of those are philosophical.

Or they are actually philosophical, but organized into completely different topics than the ancient Greeks did, and therefore not considered "real philosophy" by all the departments that still just only study the same topics the Greeks did.

Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is

#75

Post by ececconi » Thu, May 12, 2016, 1:43 PM UTC

I very much disagree with this article. I was able to take some courses in Eastern thought, but I think the major problem of this article is how the authors define philosophy.

It seems like the authors are confusing the terms theology, culture, and philosophy. Yes, there are major problems with the way that philosophy is taught in the modern university. This attack, however, is unwarranted.

Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is

#76

Post by Scarblac » Thu, May 12, 2016, 1:45 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #73

Scarblac wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clicked around to see which topics were actually taught to undergraduates in the first philosophy program Google showed me (happened to be Yale): http://philosophy.yale.edu/undergraduate-program/undergradua... The first five: * An examination of major figures in the history of Western philosophy * An examination of attempts to reconcile the evils of this world with the existence of a perfectly good God, with specia…

Interesting. Yale seems like an outlier here - Stanford's program only has two history of philosophy courses[1]. It's possible that, for better or worse, the ivy league mindest is to focus on the foundation of our own legal system. (A huge number of lawyers start in philosophy.) Still, history isn't the same as philosophy. At my university, Aristotle is actually mostly studied by the classics department. http://explo…

Good point, of course if I only select a single data point it may be an outlier (and showing the first five was clear cherry picking on my part).

Still, even at Stanford, the history of philosophy courses seem to be about Western philosophy entirely.

Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is

#77

Post by vixen99 » Thu, May 12, 2016, 1:46 PM UTC

twoarray wrote: post #52

There are cultural, linguistic and historic reasons and limitations for being "Eurocentric".

Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World by Daniel Hannan

No comparable offer has emerged elsewhere.

Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is

#78

Post by bmj » Thu, May 12, 2016, 1:46 PM UTC

thomasahle wrote: post #6

aroman wrote: post #2

Coincidentally, I recently had lunch with the department chair of CMU's Philosophy department. Like many people, I assumed philosophy was all about (in his words) "the dead white men". What I was calling philosophy was really the "history of philosophy". I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that what CMU's philosophy department _actually_ teaches is logic, and philosophy of scientific research and math, and that…

At my university philosophy was only offered joint with another topic, such as Maths and Philosophy or Politics and Philosophy. The idea being, I think, to make sure the thinking had an object to study. What surprised me was, as it seems for you, that they basically only studied philosophy from the last fifty or hundred years. It's not really about Plato or Aristotle.

I went to a small liberal arts school. The philosophy department was tiny (only two professors, one of which also taught history and sociology), and only one other person in my graduating class earned a degree in philosophy. While the much of my advanced work (400-level classes) focused on dead white guys (Ayer, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche), I had several classes on various flavors of non-western philosophy, reading, among other things, Confucius, Laozi, the Koran, and various Hindi texts.

I wonder about the difference between the history of philosophy and philosophy. Few philosophers operate in a complete vacuum, so it isn't useful to have an overview of philosophical thought that had an impact on your particular area of study?

Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is

#79

Post by EthanHeilman » Thu, May 12, 2016, 1:47 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #9

It feels like the author has missed the point of philosophy entirely. If some Chinese philosophical paper is very good, it should be evaluated on its merits and folded in to an appropriate course for that topic. Philosophers believe at least, that they are doing work more along the lines of mathematics than underwater dance (that is, searching for truth). Nobody would ever dream of arguing against eurocentrism in num…

>Nobody would ever dream of arguing against eurocentrism in number theory.

There are strong cultural biases that show up in the history of mathematics. For instance the English mathematics community preferred Newton's notation over Leibniz due to a Anglocenteric bias in English mathematics community despite Newton's notation being clearly inferior. As wikipedia says:

>"The priority dispute had an effect of separating English-speaking mathematicians from those in the continental Europe for many years. Only in the 1820s, due to the efforts of the Analytical Society, did Leibnizian analytical calculus become accepted in England."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calculus#Leibniz

This change was brought about by the Analytical Society created by Babbage and others to defeat Anglocenteric notation in favor of the better Leibnizian Newton.

>If you think an idea is worth teaching just because it came from a certain culture, you must not care if it's right.

Consider two axiomatic systems with different starting axioms. They are both internally consistent but may differ widely. How do we choose which ones to teach? Is diversity and scope important to building an objective perspective?

Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is

#80

Post by skwirl » Thu, May 12, 2016, 1:48 PM UTC

relaxatorium wrote: post #11

physicalist wrote: post #4

Let's replace philosophy with medicine and the BS becomes apparent. So called Non-western philosophy is often a misnomer - it's actually religion.

So by this logic are we also removing Augustine, Aquinus, Decartes, Kant and the dozens of other canonical western philosophers whose arguments were substantially religious in nature? I suppose we could, but this leaves a pretty thin curriculum.

The big difference is the method. The people you cite made arguments based on premises and those arguments taken together (to their belief) were consistent. When people attacked the arguments and premises, they defended them. When the arguments or premises were eventually found to be indefensible, they were abandoned. Their premises, when based on religious texts, were bad - but the very method that they championed is what exposed that.

The scientific method itself is a product of Western Philosophy. The very fact that you know these philosophers were wrong about many things is thanks to the very tradition they were upholding.

My brief exposure to "Eastern Philosophy" in college was interesting as it did not really feel like philosophy. It seemed to be nuggets of so-called wisdom presented without argument. It very much reminded me of some books in the old testament and even some pre-Socratic philosophy. It came across basically as religious/mystic dogma.