How to Do Philosophy

Philosophy is not about proving scientific theory as this article suggests. It is about understanding how to think (thereby understanding why there is scientific theory). Basing an initial premise or blame against Aristotle whose works are not complete and not understood in historical terms is like accusing a toddler of not understanding how to order a pizza.

It amazes me every now and then how smart people can get lost. I have and I'm not that smart. But I am smart enough to know that many of the attempted arguments in this essay are off.

Consolidating the history of a field of thought to a few authors and blaming one of the "fathers" as making a mistake is a false argument. It doesn't address the core framework of the field or address applied thinking. Philosophy is about logic and understanding how to get to a point where one human can explain to another in clear terms what that means.

I enjoy Mr. Graham's articles and read all of them, in this case I would avoid reading this and instead read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance instead.

I did the same thing with Paradise Lost to produce the "poem" at the start of ANSI Common Lisp. When read aloud it passed as poetry to a sample of 1 English Lit grad student.

In other words, contains 0 bits of information?

Paul Graham wrote: "Greek philosophers before Plato wrote in verse. This must have affected what they said. If you try to write about the nature of the world in verse, it inevitably turns into incantation. Prose lets you be more precise, and more tentative."

I've written some poetry in my time, and I've read enough of it too, to know that verse can be even more precise than prose -- but it is generally less tentative, mainly because it takes more effort and thought _per_word_ to write poetry. Verse is crafted; prose tumbles out of discussion.

One can imagine Plato or Aristotle stumbling back home after a long night of drinking and talking philosophy, and then quickly jotting down a particularly juicy discussion in prose. However, good poetry (especially when it's highly philosophical) tends to require a lot of thought, and it tends to come from individual reflection. Wordsworth's "Daffodils" talks about this:

For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.

Poetry comes out of individual reflection, and usually not directly from a discussion. However, the classical Greek philosophers produced philosophy by discussion -- hence the "Socratic method."

Verse is no more or less suited to philosophy than prose, but the classical Greeks preferred prose, because it reflected their approach to philosophy.

Ironically, especially nowadays, prose cloaks philosophy in a garb of officialness. Prose claims precision through official-sounding vocabulary and structure; poetry _exhibits_ precision through careful choice of sound, word, image, and structure.

mfh http://hilbertastronaut.blogspot.com/

I didn't start taking classes in philosophy until several quarters ago and had merely read out of interest for some years. It has always been a matter of some discomfort that people hold even THIS sort of knowledge at arm's length, fail to truly enter into it, mistake a kind of aimless and wandering detachment from the essential questions for objectivity, and fail to develop any understanding whatever of philosophy as a project.

I have no stake in this matter except an intellectual one. It's quite saddening for me to see yet another formal student of philosophy produce such a boring, typical, and downright naive treatise on the subject, a writer who has chosen to convert into assertions of half-truths a thinly veiled myopia.

If this is the sort of intellectual cynicism that the modern institution produces, then I am quite happy that I've had no part in it.

And why on earth is there no mention of the Americans? Is that once burdgeoning and scientifically literate pragmatist tradition completely lost to us? Why are we still dwelling on the befuddled analytic solution to continental problems when such great American minds as Charles Sanders Pierce have made such sharpening new developments without precociously discarding the old? And their writing is as far as anything out there from being mealy-mouthed or inexact.

I'm sorry, but we can do a hell of a lot better than this. And we ought to; our current level of science demands it.