Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Whither philosophy?

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 192 posts

Re: Whither philosophy?

#101

Post by kbrkbr »

vivekd wrote: post #87
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 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 working in any other circumstances than everyday heuristics. On the contrary, the lack of convergence in opinion seems to indicate that they do not work well.

There are plenty of takes what math "is" philosophically, and there are so many opponents and overcomers of Popper.

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.

It's one thing to state "These systems are possible", and another to state "this system is the real one", specifically in ethics.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#102

Post by kbrkbr »

_yb2s wrote: post #59
bccdee wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Ancient Greece most of the philosophers were strong people, that had personally done great things, or endured incredible hardships with the aid of their philosophy, and these real world tests stood as evidence of its value. Are you just describing Stoicism here? The only "strong man" ancient philosopher I can think of is Marcus Aurelius (not Greek, incidentally). Plato's Republic didn't come from his experience…

Yes, I am mostly talking about Stoicism, but the older philosophers that the Stoics revered like Socrates were often discussed or admired by Stoics more in the context of their personal lives, rather than their philosophy. Socrates, Xenophon, and Plato were all soldiers or military leaders. Epictetus was a slave that was crippled from abuse. Viktor Frankl and James Stockdale are both fairly modern people that survive…

That seems to be an argument also for religion. Plenty of people also survived extreme hardship using their beliefs.

Not saying there is anything wrong with this thesis, but I want to point out that this is not what philosophy usually thinks of itself, and it may not transfer. The philosophy the helped X may not help Y under similar circumstances.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#103

Post by kbrkbr »

paul_funyun wrote: post #92
lmm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put it to you that most of us did not need a paragraph of ten-dollar words to dismiss skepticism and relativism, and that serious academic study of philosophy puts one at higher, not lower, risk of embracing such nonsense. Metaphysics may not be inherently bullshit, but empirically the study of it seems to be so in practice.

Relativism is much more common among non-philosophers than philosophers.

Do you have a reference for this claim?

Re: Whither philosophy?

#104

Post by dale_glass »

cynicauliflower wrote: post #82
dale_glass wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ?

That's why I'm posting! I've argued quite a lot on such subject matters and not yet reached the needed understanding.

The way I see it, most big questions fall prey to the is-ought problem. Even if God came from the heavens and delivered my purpose to me, to me that'd mean nothing. That merely is an "is".

Re: Whither philosophy?

#105

Post by kbrkbr »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #46
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…

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.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#106

Post by dale_glass »

mistermann wrote: post #71
dale_glass wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 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.

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.

But I don't think that's quite in the field of philosophy.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#107

Post by kbrkbr »

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.

> Because what else would it be?

Usually if you make a point like this, you state the definition of philosophy and show that the very thing falls under the definition.

It could be reasoning, application of common sense, rhetorical play, use of large language models ftw, finding of a common opinion. And that is just a minute of brainstorming.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#108

Post by ngcc_hk »

Just re-think philosophy as thinking in a philosophical way such as why, what is the foundation, what is the logic of this, what is the value … just like democracy we do not always have a king or a totalitarian one ring to rule them all. But the philosophical way survived.

And if one use sophist approach, it is the training then even debate, … not to mention how many leaders are PPE graduate

Re: Whither philosophy?

#109

Post by tekla »

djoldman wrote: post #64
jfengel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's OK. It's not expensive, and it's useful to have a place for off-the-wall notions that probably won't pay off. It's always going to be contentious, because even that small pot of money will attract many different grasping hands. But it seems a worthwhile tradeoff, Just In Case. At least as much as, say, the more abstruse areas of theoretical physics and mathematics.

What's an example of a philosophical notion that did pay off?

The entire enlightenment?

Re: Whither philosophy?

#110

Post by VikingCoder »

eikenberry wrote: post #37
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.

Wrong how? Philosophy is about tools for thought. Tools can have different use cases, pros/cons, and can be used wrong, but they are never really just wrong in a general sense. I might not agree with Kant's categorical imperative but it is still useful sometimes when thinking about ethics. Also "learning the truth" in philosophy is more learning what "the truth" means and how it is applied. Personally I'm a fan of Wi…

Yeah, picture concluding that epistemology is "wrong."
Post reply on HN