11–20 of 149 posts
I'm reminded of a story from "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" where he asks a bunch of philosophy graduate students on what the definition of a certain phrase was, and everyone actually had a different idea. This ambiguity of language is why in my opinion philosophy is most certainly an art and not a science.
Working on some inforgraphics tackling gender bias a while back, I was'accused' of producing data visualization art. I defended the intellectual rigor of my work, yet lost the argument - my 'accuser' turned out to be the curator of data visualization art at the Tate Modern. He won the argument by pointing out that the work, though based on hard data, was designed to evoke an emotional rather than an intellectual resp…
There's something to be said for the notion that, in the modern world, anyone who is a "professional philosopher" is just incapable of doing the kind of "here's how you should live" work that dominates early Western and Asian philosophy. Among modern professions, the only ones that can bear the legal liability of such a line of inquiry are in the health sciences. In this sense, philosophy professors cannot be doing w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's something to be said for the notion that, in the modern world, anyone who is a "professional philosopher" is just incapable of doing the kind of "here's how you should live" work that dominates early Western and Asian philosophy. Among modern professions, the only ones that can bear the legal liability of such a line of inquiry are in the health sciences. In this sense, philosophy professors cannot be doing w…
I don't understand where you got the idea that people who tell others how to live have legal liability: if that were the case your local preacher would be in serious trouble.
Deciding what to philosophize about is the real art.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand where you got the idea that people who tell others how to live have legal liability: if that were the case your local preacher would be in serious trouble.
There's a thin line between cult and religion, and a lot of it has to do with institutional age. Although, yeah, there are a lot of christian, and buddhist for that matter, cults. Often these do end up breaching legal boundaries, as I've described, but more often they merely offend common morality or decency, which also reveals the problem of trying to tell people how to live, outside of accepted avenues (i.e. health…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a thin line between cult and religion, and a lot of it has to do with institutional age. Although, yeah, there are a lot of christian, and buddhist for that matter, cults. Often these do end up breaching legal boundaries, as I've described, but more often they merely offend common morality or decency, which also reveals the problem of trying to tell people how to live, outside of accepted avenues (i.e. health…
I highly doubt that they are breaching legal boundries. Doctors only have a monopoly on formal medical advise- they do not have a monopoly on "telling people how to live". Nobody thinks their local preacher or philosopher is giving formal medical advise- so there is unlikely to be any liability at all outside of gratuitously bad behavior like telling people to drink bleach.
I think of philosophy of the art of words and ideas, just like literature is generally the art of words and stories. But, for historical reasons, many people and most philosophers claim philosophy is much more than this. Spinoza was convinced he was "engaged in the pursuit of truth", as the article writes, and he probably thought he had built a logical proof of the existence of god. But his concepts are fuzzy, so his…
Stating "there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy" while then going on to do the same seems incongruent.
When disciplines acquire their own method and formal language, they tend to splinter off philosophy. Think about mathematics, physics, biology, economics...
Reading him, it's interesting how often "new ideas" are actually old ideas that have been forgotten and are now being recycled.