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Whither philosophy?

aeon.co

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Re: Whither philosophy?

#71

Post by mistermann »

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…

> 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 reality, but seems less so for making them go away.

Granted, it is extremely easy to dismiss such things with one of the many handy memes our culture has been trained to think in, but dismissing things doesn't make them go way, though it does tend to make it seem like it (which in our culture tends to mean it "has" gone away).

Re: Whither philosophy?

#72

Post by FredPret »

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.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#73

Post by mistermann »

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 have a BA in philosophy. Rather than learning the truth, I discovered that almost all philosophers were wrong about almost everything.

Have you studied any set theory? How about epistemology, or non-binary logic?

> 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.

Precision: the state or quality of being precise; exactness.

Something seems off here.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#74

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #35
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…

> 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 is reality?"

Everyone also wipes their butts. But that doesn’t mean we need Departments of Butt Wiping and tenured professors who have spent their whole life time studying techniques of butt wiping.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#75

Post by dventimi »

5040 wrote: post #68
djoldman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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."

Re: Whither philosophy?

#77

Post by pajuc »

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.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#78

Post by gmane »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #74
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 is reality?" Everyone also wipes their butts. But that doesn’t mean we need Departments of Butt Wiping and tenured professors who have spent their whole life time studying techniques of butt wiping.

On the contrary: I think you actually make a good argument for why we SHOULD have a Department of Butt Wiping with tenured professors who have spent their whole life time studying techniques of butt wiping.

If everyone does it (and often multiple times a day to boot) then there's actual material improvements to the human condition that could be identified and implemented. That improvement requires study, rigor, and people who stand to materially benefit for conducting that study. You'd generally end up in a university-like framework for that study (even private research is structured similar to university research, with some key differences).

Re: Whither philosophy?

#79

Post by cubefox »

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 mechanics. A lot of non-foundational research is also useless. Research on the evolutionary origins of the ichthyosaurs. Or the surface properties of Pluto.

Re: Whither philosophy?

#80

Post by hliyan »

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 higher order concepts are far removed from the real world because they are built up on multiple layers of abstractions. And it never need to stop because one can keep building abstractions on top of each other, and one has people to talk with who speak the same abstractions. I suspect this is is what has happened to philosophy.

I think past philosophers drew more from history and their own experiences (closer to the "metal" as it were) than the writings of other philosophers.

On that note, it is interesting that we've not seen any contribution from modern philosophy to alleviating some of the greatest existential crises the world is facing today: e.g. "How much inequality is acceptable, if so, why? What are the ethics of damaging public goods such as the atmosphere? To what extent should citizens be held accountable for the war actions of their representatives? How far back can a historical claim to land go? Should the law view natural persons (who possess a conscience) and artificial persons such as corporations (who do not) in the same way?"

[1] https://ralphammer.com/immanuel-kant-what-can-we-know/

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