111–120 of 192 posts
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The number 0?
Indian astronomers and mathematicians have a stronger claim to that invention than anyone recognizable as a classical European philosopher. I rate this claim as "false."
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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 ph…
I have a genuine question that seems to fit here. It's bugging me for a long time, so any feedback is very welcome. I can see that the scientific method works well in producing knowledge. Because we can do something with it. Like fly to the moon, cure diseases, build nuclear weapons. Philosophy however claims usually to also find knowledge. There are several methods, but none of them seems to have any evidence of wor…
Drawing on the recent article about Kant [1], if a concept is a mental categorisation of patterns within our sensory inputs, and reason is the mixing of such concepts according to some rules, and arriving at novel concepts that we have yet to experience as sensory inputs, then philosophy is a discipline that is in danger of a combinatorial explosion of concepts. While adhering to the general rules of reasoning, such…
To be fair, there are tons of bad actors. All the "stop polluting this is unethical" in the world isn't going to just stop the polluters unless real pressure is brought upon them. Aside from that, people just have different opinions, albeit often speaking out of ignorance or lack of reflection. Philosophy can't really help with that. If more people were open to discuss things in good faith, I imagine a lot of problems would be quickly solved.
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…
Virtually no philosophers historically had a "formal education in the discipline of called philosophy" and most went unread. He received the sort of classical education that was regarded at the time as a sufficient perquisite and went to the same school Fichte did. He was appointed at a very young age to a professorship of philology.
This reads as the sort of slanderous cope that the "scholarly oxen" Nietzsche refers to engage in as personal attacks against a man who proved most of them to be engaged in useless make-work. There is no philosopher in the 21st century who has contributed a hundredth of what Nietzsche did and many of them still continue to plough fields Nietzsche proved to be without foundation, like moral philosophy.
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…
> A bit weird to use Nietzsche as an example here, considering that he had zero formal education in the discipline called "philosophy" and spent most of his life as a hermit writer with nearly-zero readers. Virtually no philosophers historically had a "formal education in the discipline of called philosophy" and most went unread. He received the sort of classical education that was regarded at the time as a sufficien…
If I had to pick a favorite philosopher, it would be Nietzsche. No other thinker has influenced me more, and if you spent half a second searching Nietzsche and my username on HN, you’d see that. But if the man were alive today, he’d be writing a blog with 50 subscribers - because that’s about the level of readership he had during his life.
My point was that using Nietzsche as an example of what the philosophy field is like at the public, professional level is not a good example, as the man did most of his work in obscurity to begin with.
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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 t…
You seem to think that academics just sit in ivory towers and don’t factor in “the real world” to their arguments. That’s…not how it works, it’s just a poor anti-intellectual characterization. Your supposed “real world alternative” is pop-philosophy writers and loud, attention-seeking people on social media influencing what we ought to do about seriously complex issues like abortion.
Examples include economic theories, military strategies, business plans, and getting people to do anything differently at all. Making these work requires attention-getting, sales, and mass attention, frequently on social media.
Now if someone has a new theory about calculus or the atom, no ordinary person is going to care and no external factors are involved, and that idea stands alone from its implementation.
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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 ph…
I have a genuine question that seems to fit here. It's bugging me for a long time, so any feedback is very welcome. I can see that the scientific method works well in producing knowledge. Because we can do something with it. Like fly to the moon, cure diseases, build nuclear weapons. Philosophy however claims usually to also find knowledge. There are several methods, but none of them seems to have any evidence of wor…
In domains where it is suitable/adequate (be mindful of ambiguous, potentially misinformative language when engaged in study and communication, lest other humans pick up the bad habit and humanity becomes confused).
>Because we can do something with it. Like fly to the moon, cure diseases, build nuclear weapons.
Philosophy can be used to have interesting conversations, at least.
>Philosophy however claims usually to also find knowledge. There are several methods, but none of them seems to have any evidence of working in any other circumstances than everyday heuristics.
Things are not always what they seem, because seems itself is a heuristic.
>On the contrary, the lack of convergence in opinion seems to indicate that they do not work well.
It could also suggest that the entirety of reality isn't deterministic like the physical realm (which is mostly only what science studies, and most people have the impression that science studies everything (they even have a Theory of "Everything"!)).
>I agree that philosophy is nice to have, a playground for ideas, a collection of possibilities of systems of concepts. But I fail to see what points to it being a source of knowledge.
I would say that via philosophy, one could develop a proposition that science uses the planet as its playground. For example: without science, could we have achieved this level of global warming?
>It's one thing to state "These systems are possible", and another to state "this system is the real one", specifically in ethics.
I've encountered many thousands of people who claim with extreme certainty that science is essentially or even literally the only game in town when it comes to the acquisition of knowledge.
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Just as you must distinguish between philosophers and philosophy professors, you must distinguish between philosophy and academic ersatz. We all know what guides and drives academia. It's not always the love of wisdom (philo + sophis). Why should metaphysics be a dead end? Given the facts of observation, what must be true of reality so that such facts can obtain? Metaphysics is tacit within the facts, and a metaphysi…
I hope we can all agree that science works reasonably well in gathering knowledge. Because we can use it to do things. You are saying metaphysics is about the "why" of this. I agree. I disagree that there has been a way or method of producing metaphysics that seems to work well. The evidence is that we have so many incompatible systems that all claim to be true.
Imagine the mess science would be if it brought this level of accuracy and epistemology to the table when thinking.
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> 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 seem to ask isn't really important or useful, but the useful part can be found in a physics textbook. Have you any concerns about things like war, climate change, etc? Because physics has been quite useful for bringing these things into our reali…
> Have you any concerns about things like war, climate change, etc? Because physics has been quite useful for bringing these things into our reality, but seems less so for making them go away. Sure. But I highly doubt that philosophy holds the answer. Like take the current conflict in Gaza. Can you imagine solving it by having both sides read books about I don't know, stoicism? I can't. Now I'm not one of the people…
Do you have any interest in the truth of the matter though? Can you have any, and how much? Might you have some unrealized limitations imposed upon not just your beliefs, but your forms of thinking?
Perhaps considering what's at stake could offer additional motivation.
>Like take the current conflict in Gaza. Can you imagine solving it by having both sides read books about I don't know, stoicism? I can't.
Can science solve it, limited to Grade 10 scientific curriculum, or at all? They've certainly helped with the weaponry part.
And yes, I certainly can.
>Now I'm not one of the people that thinks that technology is going to magic up a solution to that either by inventing some sort of wonder tool, or way to usher nirvana.
Good to hear, but I know for a fact many people think very differently. Faith in science is strong.
>I think if we have a social solution to make things quiet down it's going to be more in the realm of psychology, neuroscience and behavioral studies. Meaning, using propaganda and social manipulation to convince people to stop fighting. And I think at this point we've got the track record to say that works to start a war, so maybe it can also be used in reverse.
Agreed! At its best, mysticism is extremely powerful.
>But I don't think that's quite in the field of philosophy.
Some possible explanations:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
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> A bit weird to use Nietzsche as an example here, considering that he had zero formal education in the discipline called "philosophy" and spent most of his life as a hermit writer with nearly-zero readers. Virtually no philosophers historically had a "formal education in the discipline of called philosophy" and most went unread. He received the sort of classical education that was regarded at the time as a sufficien…
Why do people insist on reading the absolute worst interpretation of every comment on the internet? Honestly. It is so tiresome. If I had to pick a favorite philosopher, it would be Nietzsche. No other thinker has influenced me more, and if you spent half a second searching Nietzsche and my username on HN, you’d see that. But if the man were alive today, he’d be writing a blog with 50 subscribers - because that’s abo…
Do you feel similarly about the rigor of the scientific method?