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How to Do Philosophy

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Do Philosophy

#31

Post by neilc »

byrneseyeview wrote: post #7
JeffL wrote: post #3

Although unpopular with many people, Ayn Rand approached philosophy in some ways as you are proposing. She strove to discover general principles that, once grasped, change the way one acts. Personally, reading and understanding her philosophy has changed my life and the decisions I make a great deal. For anyone interested, I have a site http://www.ImportanceOfPhilosophy.com that explains why I think philosophy is so…

One of the ways I (and others) knock Ayn is that she didn't have an effect on later developments in philosophy. But she did have an effect on people's lives. By pg's definition, is she more relevant -- or is she reheated Nietzsche with some Stirner stirred in?

IMHO Rand is vastly different from Nietzsche. There is obviously some degree of influence, but Nietzsche is subjective, anti-systematic and anti-rational, while Rand is almost the canonical example of a philosophy that attempts to be objective, systematic and rational.

As for Rand's limited influence on subsequent development in philosophy, that's an interesting point. Why is this the case? Even if you disagree with Rand's philosophy, I think it's pretty outrageous that her work isn't even mentioned in more university philosophy programs. There are only a few other philosophers whose work provides as complete a system for understanding reality, the nature of knowledge, and the nature of ethics (I'd include Aristotle, Plato, and Hegel as others that are similarly complete, but there aren't too many after that).

So why is Rand's work not taught more often? I'd say that is mostly the result of the biases and predilections of the typical university philosophy department.

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#32

Post by neilc »

pg wrote: post #26
dpapathanasiou wrote: post #19

Disappointing that this essay (like so many others) talks about Plato without mentioning Diogenes. Plato is the stuffed shirt know-it-all, and Diogenes is the smart-alecky devil's advocate ready to poke holes in Plato's ideas, thereby cutting him down a few notches: http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/diogenes.ht... and http://members.optushome.com.au/davidquinn000/Diogenes%20Fol... Ultimately, Diogenes…

Ultimately, Diogenes is more important. I don't see how you can say that. He left no work. All we have to judge him by is a few probably apocryphal stories.

IMHO it's hard to argue that any philosopher is more influential than Plato, especially when you consider the clear neo-Platonic influences on Christian theology, and the subsequent influence that that tradition has had on Western civilization.

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#33

Post by geebee »

uuilly wrote: post #15
JeffL wrote: post #3

Although unpopular with many people, Ayn Rand approached philosophy in some ways as you are proposing. She strove to discover general principles that, once grasped, change the way one acts. Personally, reading and understanding her philosophy has changed my life and the decisions I make a great deal. For anyone interested, I have a site http://www.ImportanceOfPhilosophy.com that explains why I think philosophy is so…

I agree with you. Ayn Rand basically says: -People are self interested. -This is not a bad thing. I think those are pretty good axioms to build upon. I don't think Rand came up with a grand unified theory of human behavior but she started from the right place... As opposed to our Greek ancestors...

yes, but what is "self?" what is "interested?" How does the meaning change when you put "self interested" together as a phrase?

As Paul mentioned in his essay, you're already bumping into what words mean.

I can tell you what an integer is, what a square root is, and what a ratio is, and as a result, I can (by looking it up in a book and typing in the text, heh heh) prove that the square root of 2 can't be expressed as the ratio of two integers. But can we do the same thing with the phrase "self interested"? Without pushing the meaning of words out to their breaking point?

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#34

Post by Goladus »

bdr wrote: post #25

"in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings." What meanings? I think that math is made of structure, not meaning. The latter is a human phenomenon. For example, a proof using geometry and one using algebra might be mathematically identical, but have different meanings (created when they are perceived).

I think the question is whether you can say the terms used in either proof have precise semantics. Any of the terms in a correct geometry proof can be traced back precisely to the initial axioms, which are terms with meanings defined as precisely as possible.

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#35

Post by DanielBMarkham »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #9

Sorry to post twice, but this is a pet topic. Software is applied philosophy. Where else can you deal with everything that western philosophy offers, from classification to epistemology to the philosophy of language and science -- and at the end of the day produce something that has immediate value for someone? All of this working, real-world stuff we're doing, from heuristics to machine learning and meta-programming…

I'll elaborate: in systems design you start with nothing. With words, ideas, feelings. Heck -- most of the time people can't even express what they want the system to do! When you start like that, you are in a completely impracticable spot.

Not only that, but when you do get the words out, they're all just abstractions of other things. "We'd like the user to see the most relevant article" Well gee, what do you mean by "relevant"? What do you mean by "see"? It's the same exact problem you face when you're talking about stuff most people consider BS, like are we real or not.

So you start in this totally meaningless set of concepts, you refine, you abstract, you categorize -- in short, you take a trip through each of the major branches of philosophy. When they say "user", do they mean something that is part of an abstract type of "person"? Or is that over-designing? When we look at scaling past ten million users, what's the impact of applying various principles of set theory, such as normalization? When we say we want the machine to learn what the user wants, do we really mean just what his next actions will be?

We do all of this automatically, without realizing that some pretty smart other people have walked many of these roads before. Because those guys have been there, done that, all of these sciences have been created: sciences like hardware and software design, debugging, complexity theory. For the most part, we don't need to learn about all of these smart people and the full stories of their ideas. After all, only about 1 or 2 percent of what they did lived on after them. But by understanding a more complete version of what they thought, sometimes it can save you going down a dead end. And heck, it can just make discovering the answer more fun. And at the end, when all of that BS comes toghether for a real, live, working system? It's a thing of beauty. Did you even build a system for a large organizatino and every department had a different idea of what reality was? Did you look for wrong and right people, or think of the word "paradigm" (Kuhn -- sort of)

You can't take philosophy like you would a hard science. It doesn't progress or evolve from one phase to another, and half of it doesn't even make sense with the other half. That's okay, though. It doesn't mean that it is not useful, just different.

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#36

Post by dpapathanasiou »

pg wrote: post #26
dpapathanasiou wrote: post #19

Disappointing that this essay (like so many others) talks about Plato without mentioning Diogenes. Plato is the stuffed shirt know-it-all, and Diogenes is the smart-alecky devil's advocate ready to poke holes in Plato's ideas, thereby cutting him down a few notches: http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/diogenes.ht... and http://members.optushome.com.au/davidquinn000/Diogenes%20Fol... Ultimately, Diogenes…

Ultimately, Diogenes is more important. I don't see how you can say that. He left no work. All we have to judge him by is a few probably apocryphal stories.

Plato, despite his intellect (or perhaps because of it), turned out to be, as you say yourself, "naive and mistaken".

Yet Diogenes was able to see that about Plato then, as a contemporary.

And while it's true that he never sat down to write anything himself, his work has endured via written accounts of others (Diogenes was a real person, not a mythical figure).

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#37

Post by dpapathanasiou »

yters wrote: post #30
dpapathanasiou wrote: post #19

Disappointing that this essay (like so many others) talks about Plato without mentioning Diogenes. Plato is the stuffed shirt know-it-all, and Diogenes is the smart-alecky devil's advocate ready to poke holes in Plato's ideas, thereby cutting him down a few notches: http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/diogenes.ht... and http://members.optushome.com.au/davidquinn000/Diogenes%20Fol... Ultimately, Diogenes…

Uh, have you read Plato's dialogues? The defining characteristic is that they aren't philosophical treatises, i.e. not pedantic monologues claiming all knowledge. Their whole point is to stimulate the reader to think for themselves on very interesting questions.

Never ask a person of Greek descent if he's read Plato.

The very idea! ;)

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#38

Post by axiom »

neilc wrote: post #31
byrneseyeview wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the ways I (and others) knock Ayn is that she didn't have an effect on later developments in philosophy. But she did have an effect on people's lives. By pg's definition, is she more relevant -- or is she reheated Nietzsche with some Stirner stirred in?

IMHO Rand is vastly different from Nietzsche. There is obviously some degree of influence, but Nietzsche is subjective, anti-systematic and anti-rational, while Rand is almost the canonical example of a philosophy that attempts to be objective, systematic and rational. As for Rand's limited influence on subsequent development in philosophy, that's an interesting point. Why is this the case? Even if you disagree with…

This is changing very quickly these days. Rand is mentioned in most courses on contemporary philosophy. Her ethics is usually called "enlightened self-interest" or "rational egoism."

There are now quite a number of Ayn Rand philosophy chairs at various high profile universites in the country.

It's funny, but one of the reasons Rand is coming into universities these days is the attitude that no theory is any better than any other i.e, subjectivism. The very thing that Rand spent so much time attacking! (I got this from talking to the guys who run the Ayn Rand Institute, which is largley responsible for these developments.)

Edit: Regarding Nietzsche, you are 100% corrent. For what it's worth Rand was adamant that her ethics was nothing like Nietzsche. Here's the most positive thing she had to say about him: "as a poet, he projects at times (not consistently)a magnificent feeling for man's greatness, expressed in emotional, not intellectual terms."

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#39

Post by dpapathanasiou »

neilc wrote: post #32
pg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, Diogenes is more important. I don't see how you can say that. He left no work. All we have to judge him by is a few probably apocryphal stories.

IMHO it's hard to argue that any philosopher is more influential than Plato, especially when you consider the clear neo-Platonic influences on Christian theology, and the subsequent influence that that tradition has had on Western civilization.

Influential, yes.

Plato was an elitist to the extreme, and his notions of a rigid class hierarchy did shape early feudal civilization in Europe.

But most important? Would you want to live in his Republic?

Re: How to Do Philosophy

#40

Post by create_account »

yters wrote: post #30
dpapathanasiou wrote: post #19

Disappointing that this essay (like so many others) talks about Plato without mentioning Diogenes. Plato is the stuffed shirt know-it-all, and Diogenes is the smart-alecky devil's advocate ready to poke holes in Plato's ideas, thereby cutting him down a few notches: http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/diogenes.ht... and http://members.optushome.com.au/davidquinn000/Diogenes%20Fol... Ultimately, Diogenes…

Uh, have you read Plato's dialogues? The defining characteristic is that they aren't philosophical treatises, i.e. not pedantic monologues claiming all knowledge. Their whole point is to stimulate the reader to think for themselves on very interesting questions.

Irony: the "Intelligent Design" guy is talking about thinking for himself!
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