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Whither philosophy?

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Re: Whither philosophy?

#81

Post by kromem »

ranprieur wrote: post #4

I 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.

I don't know how one could look at someone like Leucretius writing in 50 BCE about how traits are inherited from a doubled seed which can bring back features from a grandparent, how all life that we see originated from randomly scattered indivisible parts of matter, and that life proceeded by way of intermediate mutants that weren't as adaptable and thus died out because they couldn't reproduce and conclude that philosophers were wrong about almost everything.

Same guy in the same book described light as being made up of tiny indivisible parts moving very quickly - a reminder that proving the particle behavior of light was what Einstein won his Nobel for.

Or how about when they thought about the implications of indivisible parts of matter obeying physical laws as invalidating free will and thus concluded there must be a variable component to the behavior of such quantized parts of matter (which they termed The Swerve) - literally thousands of years before the experimental evidence for a probabilistic behavior to quanta and the relationship to the topic of superdeterminism.

I suspect part of the problem is that by continuing to prioritize the teaching of the philosophers that directly influenced later philosophers we extend the survivorship bias caused by the church in locking up Leucretius's naturalism 'heresy' and promoting Plato and Aristotle's intelligent design.

So most people at best learn that the Epicureans were talking about atoms and didn't believe in an afterlife and had some loose sense of hedonism, but never bother reading the off brand philosophy for themselves to realize "holy crap, these guys were objectively the most correct in antiquity on a number of major topics in astonishing detail and were broadly ignored in an age where impiety may no longer have been a death sentence like for Socrates but was certainly not winning popularity contests."

Re: Whither philosophy?

#82

Post by cynicauliflower »

dale_glass wrote: post #39
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The shoe certainly seems to fit most philosophical sub-disciplines, like metaphysics and ethics. But everyone asks questions from metaphysics. "Who am I?" "What is reality?" Everyone asks those questions, and everyone develops answers. (If you're claiming that the conclusions of philosophy on the topic are part of the junk drawer, I'm not necessarily going to argue. But the field itself is really relevant.) And (al…

> But everyone asks questions from metaphysics. "Who am I?" What do people even mean by this question? Because I don't think I was ever very concerned about that. > "What is reality?" Everyone asks those questions, and everyone develops answers. I guess I'm a bit of an oddity, because I was never that interested in the "big questions", and over time I developed the view that the answer to the questions most people se…

So special.

But really, however you supposedly feel about it, if you haven’t understood that very many people concern themselves with this question, what even have you been doing ?

Re: Whither philosophy?

#83

Post by kromem »

bccdee wrote: post #58
richardanaya wrote: post #8

[flagged]

> Everyone else is just a long drawn out claim that we live in a false reality compared to another dimension or that man is impotent to know reality Can you name one mainstream philosopher, besides Plato, whose primary focus was the idea that we live in a false reality? (Not that that was even Plato's primary focus.) That's such an odd complaint. Do you think Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Sartre were all just complaini…

Your focus on individual names does kind of gloss over the fact that for centuries the Neoplatonist and Advaita Vedanta schools of thought had an extensive foothold on philosophical thought.

Someone like Philio might not be widely read today, but the adoption of Plato's ideas into the dual creation of man in Genesis lives on today among Kabbalah much as Plotinus's contributions to Neoplatonism evolving alongside the Gnostics which in turn live on in everything from Scientology to The Matrix to Nick Bostrom.

That the commenter is mischaracterizing medieval and later mainstream philosophy doesn't mean their underlying claims about views of being in a world-copy being extensive among the broader set of philosophical thinking is incorrect. It was quite prominent in both East and West in various points in antiquity.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#84

Post by [deleted] »

pajuc wrote: post #77

The article asks a fair question. The comments here raise fair points. At the end though, all of this activity is nothing else than doing philosophy. Because what else would it be? The article is a critique of some aspects of contemporary philosophy. Like many others did before (greeks). It can't be a dismissal of doing philosophy itself. Because asking about the worth of philosophy is a philosophical question.

[deleted]

Re: Whither philosophy?

#85

Post by keiferski »

FredPret wrote: post #72
keiferski wrote: post #40

There are many reasons for philosophy’s stagnation, though the dual influences of specialisation and commercialisation, in particular, have turned philosophy into something that scarcely resembles the discipline as it was practised by the likes of Aristotle, Spinoza or Nietzsche. A bit weird to use Nietzsche as an example here, considering that he had zero formal education in the discipline called "philosophy" and sp…

If someone is uninterested in publicly discussing a problem that involves public participation & cooperation, they are also unqualified to answer any questions about the problem. Man in the arena and all that.

Sure, on an individual level. But that sounds like a failure at the societal level to me. We shouldn’t want the only people sharing their expertise to be the most comfortable with publicity.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#86

Post by FredPret »

keiferski wrote: post #85
FredPret wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone is uninterested in publicly discussing a problem that involves public participation & cooperation, they are also unqualified to answer any questions about the problem. Man in the arena and all that.

Sure, on an individual level. But that sounds like a failure at the societal level to me. We shouldn’t want the only people sharing their expertise to be the most comfortable with publicity.

I disagree - it's only when you try to take ideas out of the textbook and put them in the real world where it is relevant to people that you run into the messy details that make or break ideas.

If the ideas are about purely intellectual things, that's fine.

But if the ideas are about people's lives or actions, or any complex system in the real world, then the idea isn't really fully fleshed out until someone starts to implement it.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#87

Post by vivekd »

b450 wrote: post #7

The 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…

I hold the minority position that philosophy is a useful means of getting information about the world around us and it's only cultural factors that happened in the 1700s (movement against rationalism) that makes us blind to it.

That's hard to see when we talk about more recently popular philosophical topics like ethics or existentialism.

But hacker News also had an interesting discussion recently on Popper and the philosophy of science ( what counts as science). There was another discussion a while back in the philosophy of math - what is math, what if anything separates mathematical knowledge from other types of knowledge.

Viewed from this framework, I think most people would agree that philosophy is useful and an important means of ascertaining valuable knowledge.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#88

Post by Nasrudith »

cubefox wrote: post #79
b450 wrote: post #7

The 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…

Ethics is far from useless. It has important connections to open issues in society and e.g. birthed the effective altruism movement. Metaphysics is useless similar to any foundational research. Theoretical (as opposed to applied) mathematics is also largely useless. Nobody expects to use transfinite set theory in practice. Or the cosmology of the early universe, for that matter. Or an interpretation of quantum mechan…

The problem with Ethics is largely the same as the problem with the church that cost it all moral authority: despite being held up as the source of morality/ethical behavior it fails at actually promoting it. With that failure the open secret is that they are a side-show or distraction from actual power where the decisions, dodgy or otherwise get made.

Ethics professor scandals in particular are a case which highlights the problem. While there may be sincere examples the scandal ridden ones are like cynical constitutional law professors: they clearly studied it to try to find loopholes around it instead of to uphold it.

Despite that the field of Ethics has vast theoretical potential in one subarea: understanding of incentives, including perverse ones and how to properly craft systems of them. "Alignment" is the buzzword for the latest moral panic about AI. One of the many problems with it aside is that humans sure as hell aren't aligned. See corruption for an example of what bad systems get you.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#89

Post by Nasrudith »

b450 wrote: post #7

The 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…

> 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.

I think it is a matter even worse than being a junk drawer. It seems to be actively opposed to practicality and regards referencing the real world with scorn. That is frankly an ancient form of stupidity that goes back a very long time, to Ancient Greece at the very least. And it continues to today: any time that something becomes practical it gets banned from philosophy and philosophers stop writing on it.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#90

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Nietzsche made same point. Even in his time, there was difference between Academic Philosophers, that kind of studies and regurgitator others, and "True Philosophers" that struck out into unbroken land, broke new trails. Often a characteristic of the "True Philosophers" was they were despised, un-respected, and cast out in their own time. He would point to people like Spinoza as truth seakers.

On other hand. Like others have said, the ancient Greeks did treat it like self help. Stoics, were all about just dealing with life.

The problem is language. We have a single word "philosophy" and try to make it into like 4 different subjects. It is dealing with life, getting through the day, but it is also about things that turn into a science like Math/Physics, and it is also ethics and language, etc...

We are just trying to fit too much into one word.

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