Whither philosophy?
aeon.co
Whither philosophy?
1–10 of 192 posts
Re: Whither philosophy?
#2What are the notable unanswered questions about knowledge and the structure of knowledge?
Are any of them potentially answerable in a definitive fashion?
One question I keep asking is:
>What does an algorithm look like?
in the context of whether visual programming systems make sense and are workable.
Re: Whither philosophy?
#3Whence and wherefore, for that matter.
Re: Whither philosophy?
#4I have a BA in philosophy. Rather than learning the truth, I discovered that almost all philosophers were wrong about almost everything.
But in tracing the history of wrongness, wrestling with all the fashions of thinking, you learn to think with precision. That skill continues to help me.
Re: Whither philosophy?
#5What are the notable unanswered questions about knowledge and the structure of knowledge? Are any of them potentially answerable in a definitive fashion? One question I keep asking is: >What does an algorithm look like? in the context of whether visual programming systems make sense and are workable.
Many questions that aren’t definitively answerable are nonetheless worth repeating to ask each generation, since the alternative is an ossified answer treated as if it were definitive (ie a particularly stagnant religious dogma) or that we fall back on simplistic answers that further thought would trouble.
Questions of value and purpose and the use of power are chief among these.
Re: Whither philosophy?
#6I have a BA in philosophy. Rather than learning the truth, I discovered that almost all philosophers were wrong about almost everything. But in tracing the history of wrongness, wrestling with all the fashions of thinking, you learn to think with precision. That skill continues to help me.
You have to know what precision means to claim you think with precision. Most philosophy believes the false idea that one can't know reality, thus generally ends up a waste of time.
Re: Whither philosophy?
#7The argument is sometimes made that philosophy is the mother of all other academic traditions - once a philosophical idea reaches a sufficient level of promise or maturity, it spins off into its own discipline, as in the speciation of "natural philosophy" into specialized hard sciences. One might even point to psychology (or even more contentiously and partially, computer science) as a 20th century offshoots of philosophy.
That story seems excessively tidy and flattering, and in any case, its pessimistic corrolary is that most of today's philosophy is a junk drawer of dead-end intellectual projects that never yielded anything useful. The shoe certainly seems to fit most philosophical sub-disciplines, like metaphysics and ethics.
Anyway, the article is a fairly (though maybe inevitably) partisan read on the crisis of philosophy. The author pretty casually dismisses some views which are pretty popular among philosophers - examples include the idea that philosophical theories are rival, and can be disproven; and the view that philosophy is supposed to be therapeutic (the rejection of this view is especially surprising given that it was pretty much universal among the archetype philosophers, the Ancient Greeks). The author appears to favor the view that the point of philosophy is to "articulate cultural self-understanding" (or, "[promoting] cultural self-consciousness"). Seems reasonable enough I guess, but I'm not sure what it means.
Re: Whither philosophy?
#8[flagged]
Re: Whither philosophy?
#9I have a BA in philosophy. Rather than learning the truth, I discovered that almost all philosophers were wrong about almost everything. But in tracing the history of wrongness, wrestling with all the fashions of thinking, you learn to think with precision. That skill continues to help me.
You have to know what precision means to claim you think with precision. Most philosophy believes the false idea that one can't know reality, thus generally ends up a waste of time.
You can use the definition of knowledge from "Meno". If belive something, and have at least some justification for that belief, amd lastly, it happens to be true, then you know it. You may never find out that you knew it vs just believed it, but it is an attractive definition.
Re: Whither philosophy?
#10The argument is sometimes made that philosophy is the mother of all other academic traditions - once a philosophical idea reaches a sufficient level of promise or maturity, it spins off into its own discipline, as in the speciation of "natural philosophy" into specialized hard sciences. One might even point to psychology (or even more contentiously and partially, computer science) as a 20th century offshoots of philo…
> today's philosophy is a junk drawer of dead-end intellectual projects that never yielded anything useful
I hold multiple degrees in philosophy and this is a correct description (for >95% of what happens in academic philosophy).