Metaphilosophy: Historic Phases
Arthur Holmes divides western philosophy into three phases marked by distinct conceptual equipment. He claims that during each phase, whether materialistic or idealistic, philosophers use the same conceptual framework. The phases are:
1. Essences -- Plato, Stoics
2. Mechanical -- Descartes, Newton
3. Relational - Einstein, Kantians
I think I get the first two, but it's not clear to me that we presently live in an age if relativism. How would you characterize our present conceptual framework?
1. Essences -- Plato, Stoics
2. Mechanical -- Descartes, Newton
3. Relational - Einstein, Kantians
I think I get the first two, but it's not clear to me that we presently live in an age if relativism. How would you characterize our present conceptual framework?
Comments (229)
I lack time to think of an answer right now, but maybe I will get to one later.
1. Essences -- Plato, Stoics
2. Mechanical -- Descartes, Newton
3. Relational - Einstein, Kantians[/quote]
I've speculated along these lines in an old post, though emphasizing (epochal?) experiences - shocks - which I think have made philosophizing possible, so to speak, instead of "conceptual equipment ... frameworks" throughout history:
a. Wonder (classical) - the question
b. Eternity (scholastic, romantic) - the answer
c. Despair (modern) - the nonsense
Is 'metaphilosophy' nothing more or less than (a) historical dialectics of philosophy or nonphilosophical (e.g. genealogical, or sociological, or anthropological, or ideological, etc) critique? Or something else ...
1. All three of Holmes' categories get scrambled when you add more detail. A few quick scramblings: Plato did have essences, but a lot of relational aspects too (participation, emanation for the neos). Something somewhere else relates to something here, and the essence is transmitted.Leibniz and Spinoza were extraordinarly relational, while being of the 'mechanical' age. Kant in many ways is platonism turned inside out where, instead of a higher place beaming down the forms, we beam them out from ourselves. And so, like Plato, both essence-focused and relational. & sort of mechanical as well.
2. But you can also see the dialectic crystal of Holmes' break-down, regardless of how well it maps the terrain. There's the thing as it is (essence). Then there's the thing as a momentary 'snapshot' that expresses not itself, but what a linear process of matter-undergoing-laws-of-transformation looks like at time x. (mechanical). Finally, there's the addition of a 'ground' (transcendental apperception and spacetime, I guess, here) which provides a depth and connectedness for phenomena which Holmes' 'mechanical' would be lacking.
So (1) the thing as it is, which is the thing it is (2) it's fragmentation into blind matter and (3) its reintegration into a whole.
This sounds like the hero's quest. Many metaphilosophical accounts seem to tend that way
3. But there's definitely some discernible progression. Is it that there's an innate tendency, in any time, to take the dialectic crystal Holme's has used, and cast it over any sort of material. So that two things are competing - an innate tendency to 'work out' that kind of framing with whatever material is handy (philosophical or not) + an attempt to adequately sketch what's happened in philosophy?
4. Quoting 180 Proof
If the Holmes thing is an instance of universal cognitive tool for re-arranging things according to a certain triadic structure of integration-disintegration-reintegration (a structure which works through the thinker, to realize itself) then an adequate 'meta-philosophical- perspective wouldn't seek to impose that structure over the whole history of philosophy (which seems like a response to the thinker's own personal shocks) but see the particular ways in which each epoch worked through that structure with regard to their specific shock, and the particular materials they had to make sense of it. @180 ProofI guess this would be what you called 'nonphilosophical critique.'
5. It's hard, when breaking down things into epochs, not to see them as suggesting a new source, a center of stability, that organizes everything else. Plato has a fixed elsewhere. Newton's laws involve a fixed progression of matter through fixed transformations. So on, and so on. There's always something you can return to, in thought, which will always be there, and explain the rest. Not explain, necessarily, but organize. This still goes for Deleuze and whoever else. It's a kind of hearth.
6. Maybe the question to ask of metaphilosophy, to figure out what it is, is what it is it looking for and why?
7. At a certain point, I get a feeling like this all Dumbo letting go of his feather, slowly, through a series of of progressively more abstract transitional objects? I guess ala Wittgenstein's 'fly in the bottle' but with a little more empathy. Instead of a meaningless creature, meaninglessly stuck in a small bottle, you have a confused and earnest person slowly trying on new ways of organizing things once and for all, until letting go and cultivating their own ability to organize with others, in their particular situation. (but then this too seems to be an overhasty wrap-up of it all?)
Sensate (Materialistic) Culture
The first pattern, which Sorokin called Sensate culture, has these features:
This describes the secular west.
Ideational (Spiritual) Culture
The second pattern, which Sorokin called Ideational culture, has these characteristics:
Integral (Idealistic) Culture
Most cultures correspond to one of the two basic patterns above. Sometimes, however, a mixed cultural pattern occurs. The most important mixed culture Sorokin termed an Integral culture (also sometimes called an idealistic culture – not to be confused with an Ideational culture.) An Integral culture harmoniously balances sensate and ideational tendencies. Characteristics of an Integral culture include the following:
Taken from this blog post.
Personally, I had never heard of Sorokin before reading the above blog post but he seems an admirable fellow.
I suppose the effect of characterizing philosophy as a folk-tradition only works if philosophy thinks of itself as something different, so characterizing it that way says something new, reframes things. If it is the same as any other folk tradition, that characterization should have the same effect for any folk tradition (one says 'this is a folk tradition' and sees what the effect is) That may be the case.
In general, only an outside view sees something as a 'folk tradition.' For the people in the tradition, it's just 'what's done,' or 'the tradition.' So if you ask a performer of the tradition, they'll say 'it's the most general form of inquiry' or 'it's the study of how things hang together in the broadest sense' or 'it's an inquiry into the deepest questions,' but these things aren't true. So what is it really...? Well that question hasn't been properly asked yet, because al the histories are written by natives, who give you the party line.
Philosophy is 'self-reflexive,' OK, but so is Islamic hadith, and so on. Westerners have a blind spot for philosophy because it's their folk tradition, but an outsider is able to see that it isn't what it claims to be from the inside.
It is a folk tradition, which while providing a necessary perspective, isn't sufficiently precise to demarcate it from any other folk tradition. That's the start of a story, not the end of one.
Quoting Snakes Alive
Something that maybe distinguishes philosophy from religion and other folk traditions (when describing it from this exterior viewpoint) is that you can almost arbitrarily change the content of a philosophical work, and its form, and still be doing philosophy. Philosophy can be about anything, use anything, be done in any way. If you label something as philosophy correctly and say no more on the matter, it says nothing about what it's about or how it's done. Contrast "Catholicism".
In this regard, it's actually very similar to broad terms like "folk tradition" or "art" which encompasses a plurality of styles and topics that can have mutually exclusive examples and overlapping examples at the same time. Contrast "Catholicism" and "religion". Philosophy's much more similar to the latter as an umbrella term.
Quoting Snakes Alive
Quoting csalisbury
That reflexivity, the ability to take anything about itself or "outside of itself" as a topic of investigation or inspiration, can be (and has been) used to read this plurality of styles and contents back into philosophy on a conceptual level; as in, as a concept understood in the interior sense to philosophy rather than from the outside.
Someone might take an imperialist view of that by itself'; it's a social practice that uses any other social practice and haughtily declares itself as more reasonable and rational than those bloody pagans and totemists. But it doesn't need to play that subjugating role, when it interfaces with politics it can be emancipatory, and it can attempt to highlight its own biases - like analysing philosophy in terms of ethnocentrism tries to do. (As Rick Roderick puts it "Rorty once called philosophy "the conversation of mankind", he didn't notice that some people aren't in it").
Another interesting way of looking at that arbitrarity of content/form within philosophy and its infinite capacity for reflexivity together is provided by Francois Laruelle. who attempts to characterise how philosophy works on an abstract, schematic level articulated in terms of these two properties. Philosophy consists in a mode of interpretation that takes the infinite capacity for interpretation and distinction as a given. but (allegedly) when one practices philosophy one cannot help but produce work that posits, without articulation, the very groundlessness of infinite interpretation (no starting/stopping points when conceived as a historical system of concept articulation) arising from the ability to take anything as grist for the mill, in any way, and draw distinctions of any character.
[hide="lengthy quote on Laruelle containing link to quoted essay"]
[url=https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/axiomatic-heresy]Axiomatic Heresy, Ray Brassier on Laruelle[/url
[/hide]
It might superficially seem so, but I deny this. Its core practices are unchanged since Plato, and so is its content.
It can be 'about anything' in the sense that the sophists could talk 'about anything' – that is, it has an emptiness to it that is mistaken for breadth.
Quoting fdrake
This is not quite right – as a blind spot, philosophy isn't capable of making its own operations 'grist for its mill.' Seriously questioning philosophy from the inside simply ends it rather than creating a new meta-field where new distinctions can be drawn. The latter one is the play-reflexiveness that philosophers themselves indulge in. Much of philosophy is like play – it plays at reasoning, or is an empty shadow of actual reasoning, taking on superficial aspects of its form and moving them around.
When you say core practices, what do you mean?
As an example, you can point to a few things that are core practices/doctrines of Catholicism.
(1) The Trinity
(2) The Eucharist
(3) Baptism
...
I'm asking what things you'd throw in the list for philosophy.
Some of these moves remain invariant, for example, saying 'Take case X. Is X an example of category Y?' or rephrased for the general case, 'what is Y?' This is perhaps the most important move of all, and is the Socratic move, but others consist in, for example, demanding that a premise taken for granted be rejected, and seeing what consequences follow from this according to the logic of the culture of language, so that you shuffle about the domain of several cultural concepts, with no 'cognitive' effect, but a reallocation of the way certain terms are applied in a small domain.
Agreed mostly all around. Still Hadith (or midrash, say) are the go-to analogies rather than, say, Sufi Dance or Quilting etc. Though those can just be as imperial as philosophy, too. If the philosopher tries a a Sufi Dance and can't sync up, the community of Sufi Dancers may (justifaibly) see philosophy as correlated with a particular impediment to dancing. Or a novelist may place the philosopher in a certain role etc. Maybe the philosopher can't pray because thought modeled on litigation doesn't allow the right kind of silence to emerge. The concerns of the philosopher are recontextualized; their significance changes.
Still, probably the people doing hadith would find more commonality, qua hadithers, with philosophers than they would with dancers.
I would like a real history of philosophy to be written. Not a summary of what philosophers have thought, but an actual historical account of what the heck it is and how it came to be in Greece. I'm particularly fascinated by the relation between philosophy, sophistry (something that I think may not really be distinct from philosophy, and was only thought to be so as part of a propaganda campaign that was pretty uncritically swallowed), rhetoric, and the Greek legal tradition. Looking back on it from 'outside the fly bottle,' what Socrates does is so weird, and it's an interesting historical question how such a practice comes about.
I'm particularly interested in how philosophy relates to the sophist's claim to be able to 'speak about anything,' an ability made possible by the emptiness and verbal nature of the sophist's claims and practices. Philosophers don't seem to understand that they make the same claim – to be able to 'speak about anything.' But isn't this a stupid claim!
I guess one difference with Laruelle (in this context) is that he's interested in neutering one specific dialectical move - or a class of them -, so that some interesting philosophy can be done without it. The "non" just means that Laruelle thinks this dialectical move (he calls it "decision") is part of the core practice of philosophy. In the way that "belief in the divine" is a core practice of religion; it doesn't refer to any specific god belief, but a general pattern he wants to suspend. There's no necessity in it, he just wants to see what happens by suspending it.
Another difference is that he describes how concepts do stuff rather than how people do stuff; decision operates as a structure of thought rather than a practice of people. Though clearly the two are linked.
@csalisbury was right I think, I'm not attacking viewing philosophy as a folk practice.
Quoting Snakes Alive
Maybe the PR statement of philosophy is the biggest questions, what is blah, the nature of truth and consciousness. It's kinda funny really, maybe you start out looking to make sense of the world in general, and then after 40 years of studying and teaching you write things like "the homeostatic cluster property theory of meta-ethical naturalism". Dan Dennett famously called philosophy a practice of "discovering higher order truths about chmess", chmess being a variant of chess that no one actually plays. Considering that people in the discipline seem to know that something is deeply weird about lots of its practice, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to leave out this instance of reflexivity from seeing it as a folk tradition.
Also, seeing it as a folk tradition sort of brackets it, like a phenomenologist doesn't care whether the "external world" really exists when analysing their experience. You don't have to care about the veracity of its claims or practices when you want to describe them like an anthropologist.
What I'm critical of, and I dunno if you're actually doing this, when someone says it's "just a folk practice", exactly the same shit is said about medicine from a similar perspective (seeing it as an organon of power over people's bodies). Confusing becoming indifferent for the purposes of an investigation for whether the content of a discourse reflects anything real or not and hypostatising this bracketing into a global refutation or annihilation of its internal sense.
As an example, "Allah exists" isn't false (or true) because of the folk status practice of the hadiths.
I dunno. It probably fits into the grand tradition of overblowing the significance of one's own insights. Non-philosophy's probably destined to become one of those intellectual cul-de-sacs that houses a university based cult.
Out of interest, how would you view something like a syllogism from this anthropological perspective?
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man,
Socrates is mortal.
Does it have anything to say about the widespread use of syllogism?
The idea isn't, of course, that folk traditions can't house real knowledge. But I don't think the way the discovery of the syllogism was interpreted (as involving a transcendental binding glue to the universe called 'logic') is at all correct.
There's been the suggestion that philosophers are sort of like people with anosognosia. I think that's right – they sometimes get the inkling something is deeply wrong, but there is a cognitive block stopping them from understanding. Though some philosophers have 'understood' – and what happens to these people (historically, empirically) is that they stop doing philosophy in the usual mode at all, not that they add another self-reflexive layer to it. Historical figures to whim this apparently happened include Wittgenstein possibly, but definitely Morris Lazerowitz and Richard Rorty.
Lazerowitz describes his transformation as something that 'clicked' and couldn't be undone when it happened – somehow the cognitive loop stopped working on him. There is something of a mystical quality to how breaking out is described (and Wittgenstein has the metaphor of the fly-bottle).
Seeing syllogisms as ways of deriving new behavioural commitments from old ones makes a lot of sense. The "binding glue" of a syllogism is ultimately normative/juridical from this perspective, you can be called to account for yourself through not adhering to the shared pattern.
Quoting Snakes Alive
Interpreting syllogisms as a means of logos itself unfolding is definitely an enduring myth. Though it has some ring of truth, as if you do make correct assumptions, you can derive correct conclusions through reasoning well. Correct in the sense that if you're an architect, say, you can tell if a given structure will be able to support its own weight through general principles.
Wilfred Sellars speaks about the "manifest image", which is roughly the landscape of conceptual and behavioural commitments that we have by virtue of being in (life situations like this one); it's perspectival and normative. He also spoke of the "scientific image", which is roughly the a-perspectival description of nature and ourselves, it uses patterns of reason in the manifest image, but updates and modifies them as well as being able to postulate new entities and see what these postulations do.
Philosophy navigates both of them; it (used to) posit entities regularly (like atoms, and logos, and Geist, and the transcendental subject, and the cogito...), now it seems (post Kant?) to posit explanatory categories more than new entities; to rethink and reconceptualise what is given rather than innovating new parts of nature (though the two aren't mutually exclusive). Having a "scientific image" of philosophy as a practice is an interesting project.
Quoting Snakes Alive
I think I disagree here? Maybe? People who've studied philosophy and find something deeply wrong with how it's done either stop, or try to effect a revolution in it; and in that manner define their own predecessors (as Zizek says about Borges). People who stop doing traditional philosophy can also start new stuff, like the origin of economics as a distinct discipline. They seem to emerge from a philosophical background and mutate it by fixing content somehow.
Though this is biased for famous philosophers and academics generally, the intractable cases like us (presumably) who are suspicious of the enterprise but keep on going for reasons unknown, like finding some meaning in it, or practicing it like knitting but with words to make concepts and dis/connect others, seemingly do it because we find value in it rather than trying to shake the ground in accordance with our ideas.
I don't think you can in the way philosophy traditionally has thought. The Skeptics actually already understood this, that all valid deductive arguments just beg the question. There is a sense in which they therefore don't produce 'new knowledge' (and why would they?). But what you can do with them is keep your behaviors in consistent order, or make sure commitments line up with each other, or realize that certain commitments, if followed through, require other commitments. And this can keep you straight if you're an architect or whatever. But pure deductive reasoning has, in my opinion, little to do with real intellectual life, and is an artifact of the folk circumstances surrounding the rise of philosophy. It preserves, again, a kind of shadow of reasoning in a limited case.
Quoting fdrake
I think the manifest / scientific distinction isn't real. I don't have much to say about it – it's made up and I don't know where the idea came from.
Quoting fdrake
I don't think the function of the discipline has changed at all. The 'posits' of the older and newer philosophers aren't real 'posits' in the way a physicist posits things, because they're not interested in asking about how things are, they're just ways of shuffling categories and verbal commitments about. There might be some value to doing that, but philosophers rarely do it valuably, because they lack the self-reflection to understand what they're doing, so their movements tend to be pretty much random and and the whim of intellectual fashion.
Quoting fdrake
I wouldn't say I'm 'suspicious' of the enterprise, any more than I'm 'suspicious' about Islamic hadith. That would imply I think Islamic hadith might really be a faithful account of the Prophet's actions, but I just have to reconsider how, or something. I'm more interested in discovering the origins of the practice anthropologically. I am not 'suspicious' that something is wrong with philosophy because that would imply I am also 'suspicious' that it is something like that it claims to be, and I know that it's not, in the same way I know the hadith don't actually have any historical basis.
Agrippa's trilemma is a classic philosophical move though, not something extra philosophical. It seems to me like you want to have your cake and eat it too; to see philosophy from the outside as a folk practice, but to be non-neutral about what its internal logic can demonstrate.
Quoting Snakes Alive
That's extremely oversimplified though. What makes, say, people like the Churchlands or Metzinger cease to be talking about the brain, and what we know about it, and what consequences this has for how we think about the brain and our consciousness?
In the same regard, "consciousness" is made up, as is the idea of a folk practice. We can gesture at them, or posit that we see things in those terms, but I don't see a way of allowing other disciplines to interface with how things are and to simultaneously deny that of philosophy. Probabalistically, or as a general tendency within philosophy, this disconnection from how things are is a valuable part of describing it as a folk practice. What about its internal logic makes it lose contact with how things are?
This isn't part of some defense of Skepticism – it really doesn't matter to me. Though I will say that mature Skepticism was geared precisely toward exploding philosophy from inside and leaving it – it was compared to a laxative, and made you shit philosophy out and the bug it carried with it. Of course, the Skeptics continued the investigation, but only as a ward against further infection.
Quoting fdrake
Because they just aren't. Eliminative materialism for example isn't a real hypothesis about the world or the brain or anything, it's just a suggestion to stop saying people have beliefs, etc., which is just shuffling about some words / categories.
Quoting fdrake
It's not made up any more than trees or rocks are. Words or practices referring to it, maybe.
As I see it the core impulse of philosophy is and always has been concern with the question of how to live. All else in philosophy is merely froth; it may be interesting (to some) or poetic froth, but remains froth nonetheless. The academicisation of philosophy has not done it any favours.
This reminded me (I'm biased it's true) of this:
(The seventies, when relativist often meant modernist and rationalist.)
I don't think that inquiring about concrete questions in life has much of anything to do with philosophy.
And philosophy is an academic discipline, and always has been. Philosophers founded the actual Academy. So that distinction is not viable / historically ignorant.
I don't know what you have in mind with the term "concrete questions', so I can't answer to that.
Philosophy has not always been, and is not now exclusively, or even predominately, an academic pursuit. All reflective people practice philosophy. It's not true that all or even most famous philosophers prior to the modern academic era were academics. Much of ancient philosophy consisted in what we now call science and consider to be a separate discipline.
This is just historically wrong. Philosophers invented Academia, literally, and philosophy was the original discipline housed therein.
That's your prerogative. I'll just say that anyone who doesn't see the immense differences between the ancient schools and modern universities may indeed be incapable of productive discussion on this topic.
Yes. I'd like that too. The real history, I mean. So, the conversation on the thread has since outstripped me, but I did want to respond to this.
I suppose it'd be hard to do because plato is the primary source for everything. On the other hand, I suppose that's true of the bible as well and people have done great work there.
One thought: Socrates is weird and that probably has something to do with his appeal. In Plato's account, he seems to be well-versed in the thought of the sophists (he seems well-versed in everything at the time, really) His driving force looks like a fondness for aporia. The sophists can talk about everything; Socrates can hiccup any talk about anything. You get the sense (or I get the sense) that the Platonic Canon erects itself (in later dialogues) in a space cleared by Socrates, while still using Socrates as a mouthpiece (and of course. The guy's a hit, early dialogues are at 95% on rotten tomatoes, why not keep using him?)
Socrates' daemon seemed mostly to tell him when something was bullshit. It didn't seem to do much besides that, from what I can recall of the dialogues. Of course, this is also a canny rhetorical move, but is it just that? I don't know.
If Socrates is the wound, maybe Plato is the pus and scab and scar?
Quoting The Codex Quaerentis: Metaphilosophy
The Platonic Socrates comes off to me as a disingenuous interlocutor with strong positive views. The aporia is ironic.
Quoting Janus
As detailed by Socrates in the platonic dialogue "Phaedo",
https://www.iep.utm.edu/phaedo/#SH3a
So, philosophical life, according to Socrates, consists in separating the body from the soul, the latter being close to, if not one, with truth. And hence, for a philosopher, academic pursuits and topics, are but a side quest, or rather a means to an end, the end and main quest being death.
So the reason I brought up the manifest image and philosophy's role in negotiating and modifying it is as follows. Say that you want to distinguish the folk practice of philosophy from how it's been professionalized over the years; seeing it as something people in general do rather than something that philosophers as a job description do. Then people outside of the academy predominantly do philosophy in response to events which happen and cultural shifts.
In a broad sense, people can respond to the open questions living raises, and other things we're confronted with, by reasoning philosophically; questions of supporting a law, a military intervention, equal rights; negotiating political terrain in the register of conception (what should we believe in response to event X?) and natural/metaphysical terrain in the register of their conception in relation to (at least) science and religion (should the laws for punishing drug addicts for their drug related conduct change given what we've learned about volition?) - these are both components of the manifest image that we play with in response to what happens.
Philosophy as a folk practice, including the conduct of philosophy outside of universities, is impossible to sever from a reactive effort to update our conceptions in response to the shifting situations we're exposed to. Though, clearly, not everyone engages in the folk tradition like literal members on a philosophy forum will.
If, and I agree that it does have, a tendency towards separation from how things are; it's a fine line to tread when the folk practice of philosophy in a large component just consists of discussions of how things are. And I find it hard to articulate the unique separation from how things are philosophical discourse has, from more general separations between concept and topic, words and what's talked about, and expression and what's expressed.
Ah there,
https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/genealogyofmorals/section8/
https://medium.com/@JoJoBonetto/what-is-the-meaning-of-ascetic-ideals-5110e4832cec
and others as well, and there is of course the original work from the man himself.
Quoting fdrake
I don't see all that much difference. What the professionals do today is not much different from what's in the Platonic dialogues. Philosophy has never been something 'people in general do.' It's a folk practice in the sense that it belongs to a parochial cultural tradition and is explicable in terms of that (and not explicable in terms of its efficacy, or something else), not in the sense that random people on the street do it.
Certainly, in religions, there are all kind of preachers. What I am saying is that in philosophy also, there are too, only that they are disguised as teachers. That, in essence, they preach, and not teach, as what they want people to believe. And that Nietzsche was among the first that unveiled their ruse.
"This isn't an argument. It's just contradiction. I came here for a good argument. An argument isn't just contradiction. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. That's not just saying 'No it isn't.'"
What are the historical invariants of philosophy as a folk practice then?
In the Socratic / Western tradition, the basic practice of philosophy is to do something like say 'Imagine scenario X. Is X a case of Y?' That's what most philosophy boils down to.
I don't think it's impossible, necessarily, but it does seem like you'd have to do some work to show that much later philosophy is essentially doing that. So, for instance, in Kant, there's a central thing of subsumption of particulars under a universal, but that's just one piece of the system - a major part, for sure, but a self-consciously deilmited part. I'm not defending Kant along any line, or anything here. But if you have to show that things that seem not to be 'is scenario x a case of y?' are actually that, then hasn't the tradition essentially changed because of that fact? (the fact that practioners can't see what they're doing as that, and need someone to cut through the fat? The other question lurking here is what it means to see something as a 'folk tradition'- it seems like folding that in on the tradition that underlies the idea of 'seeing something as a folk tradition' is just another way to keep it going, but with a ironic twist. Is philosophy (x) an case of y (folk tradition)? )
Isn't it more like, say, Kabbalah ?- there's a throughline, some continuity, but there are some genuine ruptures and changes that alter the core practice (like with all folk traditions?)
And what is the field that is about what philosophy claims to be about (the "big questions" etc), if philosophy isn't "really" about that? To illustrate with a personal anecdote: since I was very young I have had very broad academic interests. Through my adolescence those broad interests were increasingly reduced toward two fundamental poles of sorts: my natural science interests boiled down to physics, and my social science interests boiled down to something in the direction of economics or political science. Always searching for ever more and more fundamental cores of those fields, I eventually realized that my interests were essentially in what I now recognize as roughly metaphysics and ethics, though I didn't know to call them that yet. When I discovered formal academic philosophy early in college and realized that those two things were, broadly speaking, what the field was all about, that's when I "got into philosophy". But if what I was interested in all that time, the fundamentals about what is real and what is moral, wasn't actually philosophy, because philosophy is just one culture's folk tradition and isn't "really" about those topics, then what was I into back when I didn't have the name "philosophy" to describe it with?
I don't think so. Anyone familiar with the tradition isn't going to see anything new in Kant. Remember, the 'Copernican Revolution' line is his own propaganda. We tend to see differences because we're ignorant, and read 'great figures' in isolation. Reading more always dispels the illusion.
You were probably expressing an adolescent malaise of some sort, which may have had genuine impulses, but got routed through the appropriate channels for your culture. Philosophy advertises itself as being about 'big questions,' so you figured, that as someone interested in that, that was what you should think about or do. If you lived in another culture, you would have done something else, or had different malaises.
Don't look at what things say they are in their marketing; look at what they are.
Well read in the "tradition", I find this 'essentialist' position, at best, unwarranted (pace Whitehead). Reeks of p0m0 over-simplification and poseur faux-erudition. What could be more oxymoronic than an - (implied) essentalist relativism - "unchanged" "folk tradition" (which is both polyglot (i.e. not exclusively "European") and, at least, twenty-five centuries old)?
That was the whole point of my anecdote. In my broad interests across many topics, I wanted to investigate the most core or central topics, the ones that other topics reduced to or depended upon. I didn't know to begin with what those were, and I didn't see any of them being advertised as such. I just looked for connections to different things. I thought that physics on the one hand, and either economics or political science or some combination or super-field of the two on the other hand, were what I was looking for, and (in my youthful naivete) that I was pushing into new ground in asking about the foundational issues that underlaid those things: what, ultimately, is real, and what, ultimately, is moral?
Nothing ever said "philosophy is the field that answers those kinds of questions". I had had wildly inaccurate and inconsistent ideas of what philosophy was across my adolescence: at one time when asked what my philosophical views were I basically recounted string theory (to the best of my understanding at the time, at least), at another time within a few years I basically recounted utilitarianism (without knowing it was called that, thinking I had made it up).
Then as part of my general ed requirements in junior college I took a Philosophy 101 class, and just looking at the syllabus, I realized that this was a field full of people who had already been asking the same things about what I had previously thought were two separate topics. My fringe "physics" speculation had veered into metaphysics, and my pontification about rights and duties and such in the context of political science and economics was really getting into ethics... and hey, here's one already-existing field that covers both of those topics, philosophy.
If you're saying that philosophy is just one culture-specific take on that general field of inquiry, then what is the name of that general field of inquiry itself? If I had "known" back then what you're saying now, and so "should" have avoided getting "trapped and detoured" into philosophy instead of pursuing the true course toward the answering of those big questions, what field should I have gone into instead?
I don't recall a "question" of the ontology of quantum mechanics in Plato's Dialogues. Or "questions" of mind-body interaction, or demarcating science from pseudo-science, or free will, or the reality of time, or semantics (via e.g. language-games, speech-acts, or rigid designators), or turing computation (re: nature of information), or the role of 'the unconscious' in agency (e.g. cognitive biases), or either economic or existential 'alienation', or the inalienability & universality of 'human rights' ... and on and on.
The "questions" themselves have changed as the scientific, technological, political-economic, aesthetic and social circumstances to which they've been applied have changed. How could they not?
In isolated milieus no doubt they do. On the contrary, however, the "European tradition" (e.g. Western Philosophy) has been, for the most part, cosmopolitan, globalist-hegemonic and syncretic.
This is just non-philosophical things changing, and philosophy talking about them, because it has an empty form and so claims to 'talk about anything.' The questions are all the same.
Quoting 180 Proof
Western philosophy is isolated. No one cares about it except philosophers.
What about that @Snakes Alive?
Quoting Snakes Alive
This wins the prize for the stupidist, most unphilosophical, thing a primate has grunted so far today. Good job, Snake! :shade:
If the best defense you have of philosophy changing is the existence of string theory, who can convince you? My posts aren't for the true believers. There are others watching who doubt.
There is no general field of inquiry.
Yeah there is: philosophy. :monkey:
Are you saying that it is completely impossible to even attempt to do what philosophy purports to be about, or just that there is no concerted effort to do that which thus has a name?
Oof.
Let's grant that this is the core principle of philosophy. Is it connected to philosophy's manner of becoming disconnected from how things are?
I can see some argument for it.
(1) Philosophical arguments consist of addressing questions of the form "Is X a case of Y?".
(2) X and Y are explanatory categories philosophy has not created.
(3) In order to be connected to how things are, X and Y would need to be created by philosophical practice.
(4) No philosophical argument is connected to how things are.
Do you think this is close to your position?
The reason is that there is no deep logical reason that things happened this way. It's a cultural accident having to do with classical Greece's litigious culture. People happened, contingently, upon a few weird verbal tricks in trying to defend themselves in law courts, and this evolved into rhetoric and sophistry. Philosophy is just sort of the realization that you can apply these verbal techniques to 'anything,' and so give the appearance that you are inquiring into 'anything.'
But yeah, the larger problem is that philosophy asks about things besides conversation, and believes it can gain knowledge about them by conversing. This can happen sometimes, and of course conversation isn't totally useless, but the idea that you can get knowledge about the fundamental features of the world by talking about them as if you are in a courtroom is absurd, and, so I claim, culturally contingent. Like many culturally contingent things, from the outside it even looks absurd.
There is a guy named Avner Baz who came across something like 'the method from cases' which he takes to be philosophy's primary technique, and one that is useless because it only ever asks about cases for which the answer is indeterminate or relies on a subtle confusion of ordinary categories (otherwise, no one would bother asking). Therefore its methodology is fundamentally dysfunctional, by design.
I think something in this ballpark is right. Philosophy's defectiveness is sort of like a survival mechanism for it – its exploiting a cognitive blind spot gives its questions the illusion of depth even as it makes them literally unanswerable, and so able to be discussed in perpetuity. There is no interesting answer to questions like, 'when the hand is closed to form a fist, does a new object form? are there now two objects, the hand and the fist?' But this is basically what all such questions are like.
Note how the industry perpetuates itself – we can now have camps (the 'hand and fist are separate objects' camp, the 'hand and fist are one' camp, the 'fists don't exist, but hands do' camp), and then these can go on to form new syntheses ('both the hand and fist exist, in the form of the same material object'), etc. This process is obviously endless – you can meaninglessly shuffle about these categories, and form new questions of the same sort, until kingdom come. Of course, no inquiry into the nature of hands, fists, etc. is going on here.
The latter, I think. I'm not sure what an effort like that would look like, but I wouldn't rule it out as impossible a priori. The point is, whatever philosophy is doing, it's clearly not that.
I do think that philosophy is closer to Kabbalah (something evolving, ramifying and so on) than a fixed tradition whose core we can isolate. I agree that Philosophy's self-characterization seems flimsier the more you read, that it's a mistake to read Big Names in isolation and so forth. I can't weigh the extent of my germane reading against yours - I don't know how they compare - but I have read enough to have a broad sense of the lay of the land.
I agree with what you've said about snapping out of philosophy as something less like a philosophical epiphany than an extra-philosophical spiritual realization of having been confused in a certain way. Ideally, what that would lead to is finding what you were mistakenly using philosophy for outside of philosophy. Then, if you want, you can participate in philosophy as a detached hobbyist, or someone who enjoys it as a pastime.
There's something that you see in people like UG Krishnamurti where they sometimes play the game by its rules, but if challenged, switch to saying the game is bs. Back and forth, as they see fit, so long as they are seen as being the most authoritative source in the room. This is kind of like 'leaving a relationship' as a move in a relationship. We know that 'overcoming philosophy' is a big part of the folk tradition of philosophy. I looked up Avner Baz - he appears to be a professor of philosophy.
I know that this isn't universal across philosophers, either contemporary or historically, but the core subject that I view philosophy being about is not features of the world itself, but the process of inquiring into those features. My take on philosophy is entirely about "conversation" as you put it, because the process of inquiry is basically a conversation, both literally between people doing that inquiry, and more figuratively between the inquirers and the world they're inquiring into.
This is a very common theme in Analytic philosophy, which explicitly makes its focus all about language, and in doing so does actually dismiss a lot of previous philosophy, and contemporary philosophy that doesn't follow that route. I see a lot of it in Pragmatic philosophy too, where the content of an idea (about which we might talk) is grounded in the practical implications of that idea. I think it's the pragmatic grounding of talking about talking that really makes philosophy what it is. I said about as much earlier:
If you're doing ordinary work, that's not philosophy.
If you're administering the technology or businesses involved in doing that work, that's not philosophy.
If you're creating new technologies or businesses, that's not philosophy.
If you're investigating the "tools" and "jobs" out of which / toward which to create new technologies or businesses, that's not philosophy.
If you're asking how to go about doing that investigation, analyzing the ideas involved, and trying to persuade others that those are the ideas that are useful in conducting such an investigation, now you're doing philosophy.
If you're just analyzing the structure or presentation of those ideas, without regards to their practical applications anymore, then you're not doing philosophy anymore.
If you're just studying the language used to even discuss any of that, you're still not doing philosophy anymore.
:100: :clap: :fire:
Yep. The lack of self-reflection comes in part from the fact that only natives study the tradition. People outside of it either suspect it is what it says it is (because they are part of the same civilization), or simply hold inarticulate contempt for it. It would be nice if that could change. I like the idea of the culture that used to house philosophy becoming post-philosophical.
That's not true, though – substantive inquiry is certainly not just a conversation. Philosophy puts on some of the superficial trappings of inquiry, which involves discussion, but if you look closer, often no inquiry is happening.
I disagree. Empirically, anecdotally... i just mean reflecting on people I talk to day to day. A lot of people are interested in philosophy - that's why the guardian, the atlantic, the times etc puts out these pop-philosophy things. Guy on the street took DMT and is reading Plato now - it's not that unusual. Plato et al aren't usually seen with contempt - they're treated like the way people treat the Founding Fathers. Wisdom of the Ancients etc. Likely misguided, sure, but if you're actually trying to gauge how people outside the inner ring think of this stuff, that's closer to how it is.
Contempt is more commonly directed at present institutions. No one really hates plato on the 'outside.' They hate harvard, or something.
People on the street who have a broad interest in philosophy don't really have much notion what is actually contained in philosophical works, or what the discipline is involved in doing. Sure, I agree there are people with broad interests in 'questions of life,' and maybe they project that onto famous figures from their civilization. But very few people who claim an interest in Plato will have a notion of what he wrote or did.
The process of actually doing the inquiry involves a lot of stuff that is not just conversation, yes, but the process of setting up that process is very much like talking about talking. To get something like science underway, the people involved need to have broad agreement on some general things, like:
What do the questions we're asking even mean? What exactly are we asking, in this inquiry? An answer to this could be something like the verificationist theory of meaning. Analytic philosophy leans very heavily on this kind of question, and arguably even the Socratic dialogues are basically quests for adequate definitions of the terms used in other, more substantive inquiries.
What criteria do we judge answers to those questions by? What counts as evidence that a proposed answer to a question is true? An answer to this could be something like empiricism.
What method do we use to apply those criteria? An answer to this could be something like critical rationalism. This is the part most like the "litigation" you're emphasizing, having to do with burdens of proof and such. Is some account of the world to be presumed right by default until we find some reason to think otherwise, or are no accounts acceptable until one has been conclusively proven, or are all accounts equally possible until we find some reason to judge one over another...?
What should we take to be the relationship between the objects of our inquiry and we, the subjects doing the inquiring? Are we to think ourselves objective judges of something wholly independent of us? Or that the objects of our inquiry are dependent upon we subjects, created by us or by the very act of inquiry? Or that we subjects and the objects of our inquiry are interdependent parts of one system and what we're actually investigating is the relationship between ourselves and other things no different than us?
Who gets to do this inquiring? Is this to be a decentralized democratic process, or do some people have privileged or authoritative positions and their judgements carry more weight than those of others? Does it matter how many people make the same judgement? How, generally, should the social endeavor of inquiry be organized, for its findings to be reliably legitimate?
What are we asking for? Why are we inquiring into the things we're inquiring into? What is our objective or purpose? What use are answers?
These are the kinds of questions that philosophy purports (and I argue, genuinely endeavors) to answer.
I think for someone that doesn't have this interest, they should literally just ignore philosophy entirely (and most people do, because they don't care).
I guess you redefine philosophy as anything you like it's more true, but that's just a verbal thing.
I think the pre-thoretical ideas are attractive, sure, which is part of why philosophy 'happened' in the first place. But I don't think philosophy itself addresses the hunger people have in an interesting way. To the extent it promises to, that's a false promise, and instead funnels genuine curiosity into a kind of sterile cognitive loop, again based on lawyers' tricks from ancient Greece.
Yeah, I think it's fair to make a distinction between professional philosophy & spontaneous questioning. I also agree that most people don't know or care what happens in the discipline (except, again, in that 'wisdom of the ancients' when regarding ancient, canonical philosophers - this may have been what you meant when you said 'People outside of it either suspect it is what it says it is...")
Stil, it's not insignificant that people accidentally reinvent certain proto-philosophical discourse moves. Maybe the litigious genealogy of a lot of greek philosophy is one strand that got woven in with others, and assumed a perhaps bizarrely central role. I think you could also add in the 'wrestling' aspect of the gymnasium, an aestheticized grappling with one another. You mentioned, above, Socrates' fondness for aporia being disingenuous. I half agree there. I think, by the later dialogues, he's clearly carving room for his own positive philosophy. But, while he's for sure disingenuous throughout (Thrasyamachus lays how this works in The Republic perfectly, before nevertherless succumbing to it), I think there is a genuine magnetic draw to the aporia. You see this in the Parmenides dialogue, which never resolves, but grows more and more lost in the whirlwind.
If philosophy is a thoroughly contingent practice, it feels like it makes sense it would be this hybrid monster of things, that lurches its way forward. Just like Midrash or the short story or haikus or professional wrestling or painting or any other tradition.
I think it’s thus not a coincidence that philosophy emerged from a litigious climate. It’s not something that just happened and didn’t have to. Any critical enterprise of investigation has to end up with at least a broad family resemblance to philosophy as we know it.
I think this survives in the way 'western civilization' in general seems to simply value talking, even to no end. There is some bizarre idea that no matter what is being discussed, and no matter to what end, discussion is a kind of good in of itself. We're always 'having conversations,' and 'democracy' is sacrosanct even beyond any material benefits it might provide or fail to provide.
Quoting csalisbury
It is a thoroughly contingent practice, because it only developed a few times worldwide. Nothing demands that it happen.
And sure, it's a hybrid, and has elements of mystery cults, ancient cosmological speculation, hucksterism, and primitive mathematics thrown in (these are all around today in some form under the umbrella of 'philosophy'). But there is a central thread, so I claim, which is what really drives it and causes it to survive. That thread runs through the rise of litigation, to the development of rhetoric, to sophistry, to the Socratic method (where it roughly stops developing).
I don't think relativism as applied to Physics relates to philosophy in a real way. Einstein to put it over simply applied reality to a geometrical shape that we aren't naturally inclined to be comfortable with. It isn't that reality is relative but that what we see with our eyes and the way we experience time is stretched or skewed by a universe that doesn't have a straight forward shape. Special relativity basically dictates that time can't be accurately measured (over vast distances) unless its in my bedroom or your bedroom. Time is not relative but it is just it can't be measured accurately, because it is the iteration of events and not the iteration of the clock. The clock ticks different or and the electrons change speed based on how fast the clock is flying (as a whole) through the universe. Have you read "A brief history of time" by Stephen Hawkings?
As for general relativity, the shape space/time (or reality) is a geometric shape that our minds don't really understand. Its not relative i would say, its just so wierd that our minds do not quickly (quickly) quantify or find intuitive enough to have some idea (some idea) of whats going to happen next. Just because something is hard to predict or judge does not make it relative, it just means it requires tremendous amount of time and scrutiny (and in this modern age, teamwork).
The picture given for general relativity you commonly see to explain gravity is obviously meant to be an over simplification and most people would agree. That ball going along the grid would also have a grid associated with atleast one other direction and then the ball would also create one or two more grids not shown. Basically to wrap our minds around all these grids in a shape that can be displayed in a 3d engine (like blender) would make it hard to show the concept of general relativity. My point is if that gravity grid commonly shown is essentially reality, then reality is not necessarily relative, but what i see with my eyes and what is going happen next (approximate prediction) are two different things. To say that space/time is curved (common general relativity phrase) is confusing because it doesn't do the theory justice in terms of explaining what general relativity really means. As you can tell, i'm not a physicist.
"It's a long time till the next galactic tick."
In the mechanistic perspective, the time between now and the next tick is assumed to be the same throughout the universe. Once we realize that time is relative, we have to identify the frame of reference for the statement. This alters the fundamental nature of things.
stray thoughts, slow sunday:
-It is very strange to try to capture the structure of the world in a game of claims and defenses. I think, by nature, this can't satisfy the thing it's trying to satisfy. But I do think@Pfhorrestis on to something with Athenian democracy. I don't think philosophy is necessary, necessarily, but it does seem like something the potential for which necessarily exists in certain social organizations. This is why, perhaps, you see those spontaneous rediscoveries of philosophical moves you described.
-I think 'intellectual intuition' in German Idealism is a placeholder for the kind of practices that actually provide the emotional satisfaction and spiritual understanding people often mistakenly look for in philosophy. 'intellecutal intuition' got a lot of scorn heaped on it, but I think, if anything, it's a useful talisman or touchstone reminding that this stuff only goes so far. Maybe they needed that placeholder more because of how systematic things were getting.
-You can imagine similarly structured societies spontaneously developing legal ideas, or just laws, that are similar - but they certainly won't necessarily develop the same bloated reef of stopgaps and implications and workarounds that constitute our particular legal system. Maybe it's the same for academic philosophy.
-Where would you place, say, Thales, in the litigation>rhetoric>sophistry>socrates development?Unrelated question, do you think the dialogue between Job and his interlocutors has any similarities to ethical philosophy?
The speed something travels at effects its radiation (above -~480 fareheit gives off radiation) and effects a clock telling time. Faster means clock slows down and slower mean clock speeds up.
Just because time is relative and hard to hammer down does not change the fact that the movement of objects has a set order in which they occured. If you jump up and down before i jump up and down we might have trouble deciding the seconds between the two events but i can assure you jumped up and down before me. Time still occurs as the iteration of events but the seconds between events is all that is relative.
Thales doesn't have much of anything to do with Socrates. The only connection seems to be that in the Phaedo Socrates fictionally reports purchasing a scroll written by Anaxagoras. And then Aristotle mentioned Thales. There is a retroactive tradition assimilating them, but I'm not really sure why, other than this tenuous link.
Job is wisdom literature, which is its own thing, a genre at least as richly developed as philosophy in the ancient Near East, and way older. There aren't really philosophical arguments in Job. There is just suffering, and some way of making peace with it in terms of societal wisdom (and poetry). Wisdom literature in the Abrahamic traditions tends to be pessimistic, but ultimately to require placing a (futile?) trust in God.
Quoting csalisbury
German idealism is a genuine nightmare, and I have seen people's brains actually get fried by it, much in the way people's brains get fried by neo-nazism, Marxism, flat earth conspiracies, or whatever. As in, once they get enough into it, they lose some of their cognitive abilities, and can't think / speak / reason like they used to. So I can't really cheer for it. Maybe there's some romantic yearning there. But I doubt it's real food for the soul.
I think that's right.
I've been meditating more and more regularly the past few months. I've noticed my chatter is very argumentative. It argues both sides of whatever topic it settles on (there are a lot of different voices and tones that crop up). Sometimes in a sustained back and forth. Sometimes its like catching fragments of a courtroom argument from a few blocks over, so you don't really see the whole thing. In any case, there's a lot of that. I don't know if that's a cause of me liking philosophy or an effect - it's been too long, so I can't remember what my chatter used to be like. Whatever the case, it's frustrating. It's really frustrating sometimes. I want it to stop, but I'm not in control of it. That might just be part of getting into meditating though? like you have to actually look at how out of control your inner conversation is before you can calm a bit.
I think that 'western civilization' has its roots on Aristotle, after all aristotelianism has dominated most of the world for some 2k years, and we are still under its influence. Talking, as well, as in "in the beginning was the word". Most probably because this is what discriminates us as a species from those poor hairy things, the animals, unable to speak their minds, to communicate, unlike us. Logos, having been exalted to .. dunno where, to the heavens, we take great pride in it. Maybe it's all that, pride. What do you think.
Quoting Snakes Alive
Pride or not, the Socratic method has been dead for quite a long time, when was the last time it was practised?
I appreciate the wordplay - Hammurabai - Nietzsche - meditation -a Nietzsche work whose title includes that word.
Yeah, I think the I covers a multiplicity. If you're used to identifying with a unitary I, that's weird and a big shift. If you're not, and have already accepted a fragmentary self, you're just at the beginning? It seems that way to me. Now you have a whole menagerie of voices and tones and personalities to attend to.
But what does this have to do with contempt for 'common people'?
sure, Schopenhauer it sounds like. What do you understand by 'will'?
By 'will', we normally think of what we want to do, but I think it is what we think is right, right to do, right in an absolute sense. When we are absolutely certain that a course of action, or thinking, was the correct one and could not be otherwise. But when we ponder on the same situation and think otherwise, then this conflict of wills becomes evident.
I think that's right. And I think, in that stroke, the whole idea of 'will' becomes void, like you said. Still. We live, and see what we do, and then reflect, and think we want to realign in a certain way, act in a better way. But if you self-tyrannize, and will yourself to will the right thing, that tends to backfire. So there's a new situation?
Yes, well Arthur was always upset, upset with something, a hard man to please, I wouldn't have invited him for supper, that's for sure. But do you think he suffered from an attention deficit disorder?
I'd been drinking the last time we talked. Looking back, I was surly and projecting. I'm an attention-seeker myself, so I'm probably more likely to diagnose others with the same. Still, even if I use philosophy as way of getting attention, I genuinely enjoy reading difficult texts alone, working them out., putting thoughts in order. So there's the attention-seeking aspect, and the material itself. The material can be used to get attention, but its almost like one subself using the work of another subself, the way a wheeler and dealer will leap on the work of a creative for his own gain. I guess that's the same with all things, and the relative weight of either part depends on the individual in question.
I would still say that the thing of doing philosophy is something different than the pursuit of wisdom, though they may both be tributaries of something upstream. As has been said on this thread, there's a strong litigious element to much of philosophy. I also think there's a strong public-wrestling aspect to it. You see that even today in the most dry and academic of philosophy. There's an strong agonistic aspect that I think might be more central than the widsom-seeking aspect. Still, I don't necessarily think most philosophers are disingenuous in the sense they claim to do one thing, while secretly knowing what they're really doing. Analagously : a lot of finance guys probably really do believe the hayek-derived approbation of the freemarket and that allows them to do one thing, in real life, while telling themselves a parallel story that explains themselves to themselves in agreeable terms.
Well, I am drinking most of the time, especially when engaging in conversation, so I'm really ok with that. :cheers:
Quoting csalisbury
Really, I wouldn't have noticed!
Quoting csalisbury
I think that the magnitude of the attention-seeking is important, normal people normally seek attention from their surroundings - the poeple they interact with -, whereas philoshophers seek attention from the whole, which is normal, if you think of it, since philosophy, traditionally speaking, has to do with the whole: philosophers do not speak to normal or common people, but to this notion of the whole. Whoever undestands this, is on the same page with them, whoever not, is considered inadequate or simply not ready yet.
Quoting csalisbury
Well maybe philosophers are so cunning that they managed to cun themseleves, being storytellers and all.
For sure. I feel like this is the source of the infamous arrogance of philosophers. I think it applies to a lot of types, but philosophers can be some of the worse offenders. At its simplest, its a devaluation of those around you combined with an over-valuation of the thing you're into. And then valuing or devaluing others depending on how well they can do the thing you're into. Again, I think this applies to all sorts of things, but I also think its true people into philosophy often do this more intensely (myself included, though I hope I'm getting better.)
I do think @Snakes Alive's characterization of philosophy as a folk tradition is helpful, in this respect, because it helps brings everything down to earth.
Yes, I think that philosophers have made an art out of devaluating others, especially ethical philosophers. But if they are so arrogant and offending, would that justify us to repay them with their own medicine?
Quoting csalisbury
Ah, it's been days since his last appearance, maybe he was eaten alive by snakes?? But I am still not sure what he means by "folk tradition", why doesn't he just say "tradition", what are these little folkers doing there?
It's a diminutive of course. Non-virtue signalling, if you will.
A folk tradition is highly particular to a certain civilizational circumstance, that's all. There is nothing derogatory about the term.
The reason it's important for phil. is because it often imagines itself to be something else (concerned with 'general inquiry,' and so on, which is untrue). So it's a substantive fact about what the discipline really is (something different from what it imagines itself to be).
If asked to give an answer as to what philosophy is, and what it studies, those in the folk tradition will give answers provided by that very tradition (the 'believer' can only argue from within). But those answers will not be the same as the answers given by those outside of it, who don't need to adhere to that tradition's idiosyncratic cultural boundaries.
Right, cause StreetlightX made me think it in terms of peasants and peasantry, in a diminishing way that is. And then we could say stuff like, philosophers are floggin a dead horse, or milking a dead cow even, so that to be, u know, to be in line with the rustic environment. But we cannot say these things now.
Quoting Snakes Alive
So if it's not that (the general inquiry), what is it then?
Quoting Snakes Alive
Ah, the power of tradition, folk or otherwise, is pretty strong, and overly underestimated, I think, the power it exerts, that takes hold of us, habits are hard to change, like they say.
That's off the mark – but then, it's not like there's anything wrong with peasants.
Quoting Pussycat
It's a kind of conversational play plus cognitive loop that was discovered due to the litigious nature of Greek society and the idea that one defended oneself by talking. This got transposed to the world, so that anything could be defended against, or questioned, by talking about it. It comes from the sophistical notion that one can 'talk about anything.' Roughly, the idea is that the techniques of the courtroom get transferred to the world, so that it is 'questioned' or 'put on trial.' This results in the quasi-magical belief that anything can be learned about by interrogating it in a conversation.
Something like that.
Rhetoric, you mean, or even sophistry, but both in a neutral way? Is this an epistemological position you are putting forward here, as in the limits of knowledge, or, I don't know, the limits of talking with regards to learning, I do not understand. Or are you just criticising philosophical methods?
Quoting Pussycat
No, it's a social / historical claim about what philosophy actually is, how it developed, & what it does.
This shows that (i) there was some debate, or public perception, that philosophers were using lawyers' methods, such that the philosophers themselves needed to address this perception, or likely were even confused themselves about what the difference is; and (ii) the answer was precisely that philosophy was lawyering freed of material constraints (which also, though, defeats its purpose and possibly its effectiveness). Lawyering can work on a witness – it's not clear that reality is a 'witness' that can be cross-examined in this way, but that's basically what the Socratic method tries to do (in early Socratic dialogues, the witness is confused – is it reality, or is it the interlocutor?).
I also suspect that the very idea of a syllogism, or any kind of deductive argument set out in premises that implies a conclusion, has its roots in courtroom procedure. People noticed in getting people to make statements, that multiple statements, due to their natural semantics, had commitment relations to each other, and noticed that if you said one thing, you then had to say another, on pain of contradiction. This then became a model of reasoning.
I have no idea what the public thoughts of philosophers in ancient Athens were, but most likely there was a mixed opinion, if any at all, I bet some were even clueless of their existence. Like a material in abscence of a magnetic field.
I still say this both misrepresents what philosophers actually do and misconstrues it as an arbitrary, contingent thing.
First, in the absence of deference to any authoritative font of supposed truth, any people collaboratively investigating anything together will need to converse about the investigation and convince each other with arguments in order to build a consensus on the truth between themselves. (It's either that, force some authoritative decree, or go without any consensus at all). This will have to involve establishing what counts as evidence, who has the burden of proof, and so on. Athenian-style legislation is a specific case of that general process; philosophy isn't an over-generalization of legislative process.
Secondly, once that kind of stuff is established, the conversation turns to the actual presentation of evidence; both in actual legislation, and in ancient philosophy. Nowadays, we consider that stage to be something separate from philosophy, "science", but back in the day that was considered a branch of philosophy, "natural philosophy". And scientists to this day continue writing arguments to each other about what evidence they have to offer and what the implications of that evidence is: that's what a science journal is, a publication of such writings. Philosophy today is limited more to the equivalent of "legislating about the legislative process", though as that self-limitation was not immediate it also is not universally agreed-upon, and some philosophers continue to dispute the process used by scientists, try to apply different processes to their more substantive (vs procedural) investigations, or try to apply the scientific process to philosophy itself. But the trend over time is clear that the actual presentation of evidence is becoming a separate thing, science, and the quibbling over the argumentative process itself (standards of evidence, burdens of proof, etc) is the remaining domain of philosophy.
In one platonic dialogue, with Socrates as mouthpiece, rhetoric is praised, and in another it is diminished, what are we to make of this? And in another, Socrates seems to be well informed of lawyers methods, as he enlists them, one by one, to his interlocutor, but then goes his own way. So it seems more likely that Socrates/Plato were into "knowing thy enemy", into espionage, or as collectors of thoughts, so that to be more effective into deflecting attacks, for their own ends of course. So maybe philosophy was born out of necessity, in a reaction against the action and need for "lawyering" everything, which is why it resembles it so much, as in "to defeat your enemy you have to fight him in his own battlefield". And the invocation of this fictitious witness you mention, on behalf of Socrates/Plato, was to show the illusion of the lawyer. But then philosophy witnessed its own defeat, as the lawyers won, and philosophy was, with the death of them, assimilated into lawyering.
Ah yes, forgot about this one. Socrates (in)famously never reaches a conclusion, but all his argumentation results in the so-called "aporia", which in greek means "not-knowing", for which he was strongly critisized by later philosophers, they said that he was mocking them, that he somehow knew but wouldn't tell them, or that his method was fallible. But courtrooms always reach to a conclusion, as later philosophers do, which I think shows the aforementioned assimilation of philosophy into so-called lawyering.
That would make a lot of sense.
Another thought: I think you can marry the agonistic and litigious aspects of philosophy in the general idea of laying claim to something. People compete to lay claim to truth. First, in the sense of legally establishing a claim to this or that.But also in the sense that one jousts, as as a show of strength or skill, to lay claim to the king's favor. (or the adulation of a teacher, or the public etc) think those two aspects ave been joined in philosophy for most of its history.
It's possible that aporia was used as a clever literary and intellectual device by Socrates, and to some extent maybe by Plato as well (though as I said above, I think Plato is largely disingenuous in using it, and any decent reader will see he clearly favors a side, or has an agenda distinct from the options presented, and which he intimates quite heavily).
But it's important to realize that there is a foundational reason why philosophical debates end in aporia, regardless of the literary use to which that result is put: it is because philosophical reasoning does not work. In other words, aporia is the only option for a philosophical dispute, and while one might think this is because of the grandeur or mystery of the subject matter, it is more likely because the technique simply doesn't inquire into things in an effective way or yield any results. In other words, you have to use aporia like this, because you have no other choice, since you cannot get anything but an aporia using the method, by design.
I should also note that in practices, especially religious practices, where an initial bold claim is made, and then falsified, its practitioners often retreat to some other claim rather than abandon the belief. They will often say the claim really did come true, just in some non-obvious way, or insist they never really meant the original, but that the original was proxy for some more esoteric thing. This tends to happen with philosophy: it purports to answer substantive questions about which people are curious, and failing this retreats, claiming that the aporia reached has its own value, was the point all along, or the real point is for philosophy to act as a 'multiplier of thought,' or whatever. Compare the Jehova's witnesses saying the world did end in 1914, but what we meant by that was... This is a classic pattern of these practices that don't have any efficacy.
What are you imagining as an effective inquiry? The kind of thinking that ended up in the steam engine?
Quoting Snakes Alive
And this comparison holds because doctrines in philosophy and religion don't tend to be involved in the production of steam engines?
Philosophy as a tradition, much like religion, doesn't have its character determined by being inefficacious in the above sense. Though, this may be a reason why philosophy and theology receive less funding and focus in education than science and technology. More importantly though, this lack of efficacy doesn't help describe philosophy as a tradition, speaking to its conceptual/behavioural structure, the appropriate question seems to me why philosophy lacks efficacy in that sense.
Part of the answer seems to me to be that efficacious reasoning in the above sense usually gets described, and is involved institutionally, with science, engineering and technology. Natural philosophy turned into the sciences as a theoretical study, mix it with the tradition of tinkering and you get engineering. It seems at some point, people who practiced philosophy were indeed doing such efficacious reasoning, and it's a retrojection of contemporary categories to describe it otherwise. Given the premise that the nature of philosophy is a historical invariant, it seems strange that it lost its capacity to be efficacious at some point.
I think that means you would need to paint with a less broad brush; what is it about philosophy as it is currently practiced that ensures it lacks efficacy? Rather than appeal to a historical invariant of aporia and courtroom style reasoning (which are rooted in the previously discussed idea of using language to transfer behavioural commitments (blocking derivation of behavioural commitments from posits and deriving them respectively for aporias and otherwise)).
Not at all. I think, for example, that many historians ask questions of no technological value, and with no obvious utility. But nonetheless, those questions are real ones that can receive interesting answers.
Quoting fdrake
It attempts to inquire about 'anything' by a conversational method, and there's no reason at all that just talking about basic features of the world should yield any insight into them.
You can think of philosophy as a kind of ritual miming of serious inquiry. Doing what it does no more gets at the basic features of the world than playing house supports a family, or doing a rain dance makes rain fall.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that the Socratic method invariably involves itself in linguistic confusions, too, but I guess that's a separate hypothesis. You'd need a more sophisticated metasemantics to understand why philosophy in particular is so ripe for linguistic confusion, but I think it is (and I think this fact is not only part of why it survives, but also why it arose in the first place – out of sophistry, which was a way of exploiting linguistic confusions for profit in court, to impress people, etc.).
Quoting Snakes Alive
Now I'm at a loss. So philosophy doesn't get at how things are. This failure doesn't derive from insufficient similarity to the natural sciences or engineering/technology. Nor does it derive from linguistic confusion. What does it derive from then?
Quoting Snakes Alive
You're right, there's no necessary reason why any inquiry in any style should yield substantive/efficacious insights. That is quite a different claim from there being no examples of reasoning yielding substantive/efficacious insights. In fact, there are examples in the history of philosophy of precisely this sort; see my previous point about natural philosophy for an example.
The same transcendental game regarding the lack of sufficient reason philosophy exhibits for producing efficacious/substantive results can be played with the fact that it has produced those results on some occasions; reading the capacity for substantive insights back into the essence of the tradition as a possibility.
I'm not some kind of chauvinist for the natural sciences, no. I think plenty of areas of inquiry ask and answer interesting questions. Philosophy does not, and it's not unique in this regard (neither does New Age, for example), but it is also its own historically contingent thing, defective for its own historically contingent reasons.
It does involve itself in semantic confusions, but I think this has more to do with its origin and survival. I doubt it would be efficacious even if it did not (what would it do, exactly, even if it dispelled these confusions? There is nothing for it to do).
Quoting fdrake
The point is that philosophy doesn't really inquire – it mimes inquiry through a kind of conversational ritual that mimics the courtroom, but without witnesses, evidence, or point.
Actual inquiry involves observation, participation in a skill, past experience, showing by example, feedback from successes and failures, and so on. Philosophy doesn't have any of these, and so lacks the hallmarks of ordinary effective inquiry.
1) "I was just pretending to be retarded" – Philosophy doesn't actually seek interesting substantive answers to question, but does something else more esoteric / rarefied / unfalsifiable, or actually serves some ill-defined function in "the questioning itself."
2) "Everything is philosophy, actually" – Philosophy is necessary because even questioning or trying to be critical of it is a philosophical move.
3) "Everything else came from philosophy" – Historically, the natural sciences / engineering / having sex / hair trimming / etc. came from philosophy.
I think all these are awful attempts at a defense, and you employed #3. It's a historical hypothesis, and in my opinion, not true. I guess we could argue about specific cases if you really wanted to.
#1 is a coping mechanism used by religious beliefs, as I noted above; #2 is a vacuous 'transcendental' move that is symptomatic of a discipline just not being able to see anything outside itself, and merely reiterates, rather than shows, that everything must conform to its own flawed techniques.
I have seen all three of these responses so often that I'm used to all the ways they occur and how people bring them up and defend them. Surely there's something better than that!
Defective as compared to what?
Quoting Snakes Alive
Besides the lack of historical justification you're using to make a historical claim, I think you're missing something obvious; to the extent that styles of reasoning are commonplace and shared, the courtroom is those shared norms of reasoning; expectations of behavioural conduct and belief propagation given a starting point. In that regard, the only difference philosophy has from reasoning simpliciter when understood as a historical tradition (we do have to learn how to reason after all) is a mild constraint on topics of interest (just enough so that philosophy doesn't become something which is not philosophy) and a historical particularity.
This doesn't mean there are no distinctly philosophical moves though, I mean something like a transcendental argument, or understanding something as a folk tradition for philosophical purposes, won't make sense outside of a philosophical context.
Quoting Snakes Alive
My use of natural philosophy wasn't intended to be that. It was a counter argument.
(1) What I understand as a claim of yours: philosophy hasn't changed meaningfully since its inception. It has always been defective (not efficacious in some unspecified sense).
(2) Something which is a historical fact: natural philosophy did produce efficacious results (in the specified sense of providing a predictive and instrumental understanding of nature).
(3) Natural philosophy was part of philosophy at its time.
Surely you can see the contradiction. Combined, throughout its history philosophy could never have produced a predictive understanding of nature if it was always not productive of efficacious insights, therefore either the character of philosophy has changed over time (and you can't construe it in just one way that entails it does nothing and is useless forever) or it always has the potential to produce efficacious results (if its character actually hasn't changed).
History, chemistry, linguistics, asking where the bus stop is, learning to play chess, beauty school, football coaching...
Quoting fdrake
Do you want to go into the history, then?
Quoting fdrake
This is not true, though; philosophy is removed from ordinary reasoning by that fact that it has no subject matter, nor any method other than conversation, and that conversation does not run up against anything, because it has no empirical content, and does not track anything outside of itself.
Quoting fdrake
It's not for philosophical purposes (you just did #2).
Quoting fdrake
So your argument is that natural philosophy = science = philosophy? That's not how words work, I'm afraid!
This is a complex historical question, but you can't address it like that. The claim that natural science somehow 'came from' philosophy is probably not right, though I don't think we can address the issue adequately here.
Quoting fdrake
Your line of attack, you see, was to catch me in a contradiction, without historical evidence – but how, one might think, can this be possible? How can I be shown to be in error on a historical matter, with no appeal to history? If we look back through the conversation, we find the answer – your 'argument' turns on an equivocation, and you slipped from 'philosophy' to 'natural philosophy,' which is an old-timey word for science.
And so the illusion that you've discovered something continues. Do you see how it works?
Sure! I'd like to see what you've written on it.
Quoting Snakes Alive
No, not at all. I hoped that you would read me with more charity.
Quoting Snakes Alive
OK, let me rephrase.
(1) Natural philosophy was philosophy.
(2) Natural philosophy was efficacious.
(3) Then some philosophy was efficacious. (1,2) (you mistook existential generalisation for equivocation)
(Same argument form as:
(1) Apples are a fruit.
(2) Apples are tasty.
(3) Some fruit are tasty.)
(4) Philosophy has not changed in any relevant respect since Ancient Greece (what I understand as one of your claims).
(5) Philosophy was not efficacious in Ancient Greece (what I understand as part of your characterisation of philosophy)
(6) Philosophy is never efficacious (4,5, if something does not change over time and it has a property at some time, then it has that property for all times)
(6) and (3) contradict each other.
So it seems you want to deny (1):
Quoting Snakes Alive
And claim that somehow natural philosophy was not philosophy. Why wasn't natural philosophy philosophy? If you say "because philosophy is not efficacious whereas natural philosophy (by equating it with natural science!) was", this is a textbook example of begging the question.
Which, no doubt, you will frame as an observation of conduct rather than an error in reasoning. Which I can agree with, so long as you also accept that you've been painting with too broad a brush, and you're not talking about philosophy simpliciter, or about an unchanging historical essence, but about a much more particular practice of it that you've not articulated.
I don't write on it, since I'm just a layman that thinks about this as a hobby (I 'believed in' philosophy when I was younger, got a degree in it, and later slowly came to my present views on it), but I wouldn't mind discussing it. I'm interested in the history of how philosophy arose, and think the Greek rhetorical tradition (as traced through the quasi-legendary Corax of Syracuse, in his bid to school landowners to defend their claims from Syracusan tyrants) is an interesting place to start. I also think people ought to know more about the sophists and their contribution, and I think a historical survey comparing the Greek legal tradition to the earliest philosophical dialogues could prove fruitful (to see how the actual rhetorical techniques are employed similarly or dissimilarly in each case).
A really ambitious person would, I think, then compare the Greek socio-historical situation to analogous ones in India, and so on, to see whether there are certain social conditions that precipitate the rise of something like 'philosophy.'
I don't think you can get very far explaining what philosophy is without this historical angle on it, but 'histories of philosophy' simply take for granted its own internal mythology about what it is, so we don't have that (as far as I know – I would be delighted if anyone could point me in a promising direction as to a 'real' history).
I'm not responding to the rest of the post – can't I just leave it as an exercise for you as to why it doesn't work? [Again, deductive arguments that don't involve historical facts can't make historical claims.]
The following are historical claims:
Quoting fdrake
Natural philosophy was understood at its time as philosophy. At that point the systematic study of nature wasn't its own thing. Sure, there are changes in understanding on the long road from Thales through the Islamic Golden Age to the Enlightenment, but it was still understood as philosophy at the time. And as a description of a historical practice, natural philosophy was philosophy.
Natural philosophy also included the study of planet motion, the study of time in the abstract...
Quoting fdrake
This is your historical claim.
Quoting fdrake
This is also your historical claim.
Quoting Snakes Alive
This is just mime history. AKA: a philosophical historiography of philosophy that gives itself the ability to pronounce its interpretations of things as facts. You're still doing philosophy! You don't get to play the :I'm not playing that game: game!
How are things like "Philosophy has not changed in any relevant respect since Ancient Greece" and "Natural philosophy was efficacious" not claims of historical fact?
What would be a hypothetical example of "involving historical facts" in an argument here?
This relates to a point I made earlier that you never replied to. Scientists, who are appealing to empirical facts, still write arguments to each other. They report on observations and then derive conclusions from those observations. That's "just conversation", except for the part where the conversation is about something in the real world. But the things you're saying are most characteristic of philosophy, the "litigious" format of it, is still present. Even in an actual courtroom, parties present evidence, and then talk about that evidence, draw conclusions from it... or dispute the relevance or reliability or admissibility of it, and so on. Philosophy in its ancient conceptions, which included natural philosophy, which we now call "science", included all of that. Nowadays, we call the discovery and presentation of evidence and drawing conclusions from it something separate from philosophy ("science"), and only call the discussion of its relevance and reliability and admissibility (what counts as evidence, who has the burden of proof, etc) "philosophy". But it's all part of that same "litigious" "conversation".
And it's not philosophy, it's the history of how a certain social practice arose.
If so, what can we possibly do here to resolve the disagreement over that claim of historical fact, besides talk about it, or point to other people talking about it, pointing to sources we agree are reliable reporters of historical facts?
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-sophists-9780715636954/
There is also an article in there that discusses the historical origin of the idea that the sophists and philosophers were distinct, which is said to be introduced by Plato, and to have little grounding. Interesting for how the notion that philosophy was a domain of inquiry grew out of the tradition of teaching rhetoric (which included courtroom defense for educated young men in Athens).
OK. Natural philosophy should be considered part of the history of philosophy (and as philosophy in that context). Why?
(1) Historical argument of its classification; it was understood at the time as being part of philosophy. Universities teaching it as such should carry about the same weight as the Pope declaring someone a Catholic.
(2) Commonalities in methods at the time; conceptual argument, employment of mathematics and syllogisms, generalisations from experience, thought experiments, interweaving of all of them. Newton's Principia was a work of natural philosophy, it uses all of these at once without the rigour of mathematics expected from the later mathematical sciences, though it was an important precursor to them. Can you tell where Descartes study of the soul stops and where his study of sensation begins? Probably not. Boundaries between natural philosophy and philosophy were blurry as hell, though crystallised more and more as natural philosophy became natural science.
Why should natural philosophy be considered distinct from modern day science?
(3) Conceptually: testability and predictability of theories (how does the theory of humours predict rather than post-hoc explain? Still counts as natural philosophy.) and the necessity of theoretical generalisations and conservative extensions of theory was not as emphasised.
Love philosophy, hate philosoph-ism, the assumption that we should care whether this instance or kind of thinking should be considered part of that.
Love critiques of essentialism...
(1) Newton's work is not considered a work of philosophy generally, so if popular classification matters, this should tell us something;
(2) The methods of that work have nothing to with philosophy as traditionally practiced;
(3) In philosophy programs, the work is not typically assigned or read by philosophy students, whose training would not equip them with the skills to read and understand it anyway (since philosophers do not learn the principles of mathematics or mechanical motion that would make them conversant in 17th c. physics, or any era of physics).
Note the same for Descartes – his philosophy, what is read by philosophers and taught in philosophy programs, actually is fairly well cordoned off from his scientific work, which is not read in philosophy departments (nor is his geometry), and which philosophy students would not be able to understand, since their disciplinary training doesn't teach them any mathematics either.
So if you're serious about this line of thought, you should ask yourself – why, if there really is a progression between the two, is this progression not, against your insinuation, institutionally reflected, in what anybody thinks philosophy is, or in the way anyone practices it?
Edit: clarifying note, please treat this post as attempting to provide a historical justification for
Quoting fdrake
(link to post here)
Quoting Snakes Alive
This is a contemporary classification, a retrojection. It was published as a work of natural philosophy. It's literally in the title. It's also not just about the word, it's not like I'm saying "it has an adjective in front of
"philosophy", therefore it's rightly considered a work of philosophy". Its methods and concepts now are obviously part of... Newtonian mechanics. Which is in maths, physics and engineering. Does this mean that it was not philosophy in relevant senses at the time of publication? No.
What evidence was there that it was philosophy at the time of publication? Well, here are Newton's principles of reasoning in his own words (doubtless inspired by others of his ilk):
He's not working in an established discipline of science, he's working on the very edge of a nascent concept of science, in which he still has to care about borderline metaphysical and properly epistemological issues, and not appeal to established tradition of the discipline you're retroactively claiming him to be a part of. It's like calling The Taming of the Shew a rip off of the movie adaptation, or calling Aesop another of those bed time story writers.
It's surely appropriate to see the work as part of the sciences when considering scientific history. But at the time? Nah. This was philosophy turning into something else. It wasn't the Scientific Revolution because there was science close to as we understand it today before then... At the time Newton was expounding his theories of mechanics, his chief academic competitor was Aristotle's physics for crying out loud. There's a whole development going through Aristotle (who was still relevant for his physics at the time of Newton), Galileo, Avicenna; Alhazen and others from the Islamic Golden Age, Descartes, Newton, and there are points of continuity, points of disagreement, and different framings of what it means to study the natural world.
"Is X a case of Y"? It's fuzzy in this case. Development of ideas is. I think you're treating the distinction between natural philosophy and philosophy as much stricter than it actually was in this historical context.
Quoting Snakes Alive
See the rules he stipulated. What kind of principles do they look like to you? Even if you understand his work as science, there is still a substantial component devoted to the development of scientific methodology in the abstract; what we'd categorize now as philosophy of science.
I'm not saying that Newton was doing exactly the same thing as contemporary philosophers do(you're actually committed to that claim on pain of consistency if philosophy has a historically invariant character involving not being efficacious and natural philosophy rightly counts as philosophy ...), I'm saying that understood historically and conceptually, it's appropriate to consider natural philosophy as a type of philosophy due to continuity of reasoning styles and institutional practices (teaching, common study topics, having Aristotle's physics as an academic competitor within the same field) going back through the tradition.
Quoting Snakes Alive
Perhaps philosophy as it is currently practiced has little continuity with things that budded off it much before - even within the Newton example, it looks like optics was much more developed as a separate field than mechanics was at the time... But yeah, you're the person claiming that it always has and always will be out of touch with how things are as a historical invariant, despite the continuity with something we agree with as efficacious reasoning I've highlighted above.
Quoting Snakes Alive
Is Descartes' conception of the soul cordoned off from his mechanics because undergrads don't get readings about the interplay between the two?
That's really not enough of a historical justification for drawing a hard line between Descartes' mechanics, in which he considers the human body as an example (it's extended and follows its own laws of motion), and the soul (it isn't extended, it can't be a body in his sense), almost like the distinction between souls and bodies was something he spent a lot of time writing about.
There may be a reading where you consider a radical methodological break - when he starts treating extended bodies using his algebra to study their motion vs his maybe less grounded use of mechanism to distinguish mind from body. But I'm not buying it. Could probably make the same move with Newton.
You need to stop that.
Take it you didn't read the rest of the post then.
Oh, goodie. I look forward to it then. I did try to meet your want for historical justification for the claim head on. Hopefully something interesting comes out of it.
In the interest of the historical method I decided to look up whatever happened to be published in Nous. I'm not sure where to get a copy of the article, but they at least post abstracts. Two abstracts popped out for me.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nous.12259
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nous.12272
In the first we have some of the tools you identify as philosophy. And we also have useage of other concepts. A lot of philosophy of science, and related, is like this in my experience. So, for instance, we have the author asking after an analysis of biological function -- which is a conceptual request on a discipline. What is wanted is the form you posit -- "What is X?" -- however we can arrive at some concept and have it be productive. We can, of course, say what is productive is definitionally not philosophy. But then I'd say we're not staying true to our historical roots -- we have an artifact of philosophy, a philosophy journal, and what we see are the use of classical tools being put to use.
The second link is an example of what I'd say is something of the normative dimension of philosophy that your account misses. Even Plato had normative concerns. One can even fairly read his ouevre in that vain -- that the death of his teacher at the hands of sophists was the monumental injustice that spurred on his philosophy, and that all other concerns are tertiary to his desire for justice in the world. I thought of bringing up late antiquity to highlight this too, as they emphasize this element much more strongly, but the concern is right there in Plato. Which isn't to say your account his wrong, here, since this is actually a through-line back to Plato -- but that drive for knowledge of what is good is a major part of a lot of philosophy, and is missing from your account. It is, in part, a kind of literature dedicated to wisdom.
Second, and others have noted this too, I'd say that as interesting as your account is it might be more local than you're putting out, and that philosophy -- while it may not follow the usual lines put forward -- may also have a more general impulse. I'd say that I'm inclined to think in this direction, simply because philosophy as arisen in other parts of the world other than Greece. So, like money, religion, art, and politics philosophy comes about seemingly spontaneously, and this is even confirmed in everyday sorts of conversations on philosophical topics -- such as "how do you know?", "Do we have freewill?", or "Does God exist and what is he like?". There's one particular story and pseudo-lineage we call Western Philosophy that draws from Greece, and it likely picked up, along with that influence, the blind-spots from which that tradition draws -- in your thesis, the litigious aspect of ancient Athens. And it would be a very interesting historical exercise to see in what sorts of conditions philosophy finds itself -- does it find itself in similar circumstances, where argument in court is given such importance, and then these same language-games then get applied more generally to other subjects? Or does it arise in times of despair, such as when Plato despaired humanity? Or is it merely the mark of powerful and great civilizations, employing artisans and priests and philosophers to demonstrate their superior civilization, thereby giving them empirical proof of their right to conquest?
Third -- I'd hesitate a little in putting too much stock into historical methods. Not because I don't prefer them. I do. But because they also end in aporia! :D The same with art. The same with religion. The answers are ambiguous and always will be, in these disciplines. Yet, somehow, they mutate and become something different along the way, they add on new creations while assimilating the old.
We've admitted this because you haven't objected to the claim that contemporarily, Descartes' geometry or mechanics, and any of Newton's work, are not considered philosophy. They do not employ primarily philosophical methods; philosophers, in general, lack the competence to read and understand them (unless specially schooled in a particular historical period, or in a particular branch of the philosophy of science); they are not the subjects of textual introductions to philosophy; they are not taught to philosophy undergraduates; contemporary philosophers do not engage with them argumentatively, or attempt to refute or augment them. There is no reasonable criterion on which, then, these works are philosophical in any contemporary sense. Notice that none of the above is true of Descartes' Discourse on Method, or Meditations: philosophers can understand those, they do argue with them, they do write about them in textbooks and teach them to undergrads, and so on.
The reason for this is clear – the methods employed in the Discourse and Meditations are different from those employed in the geometry. And what's more, these methods match the methods of prior works of philosophy, all the way back to the Platonic dialogues, and later works, all the way to articles in the journals today. So it is clear at present that there is a continuity between these works, precisely the ones you are not willing to defend as interesting natural science, and philosophy, but it is not clear that there is any interesting continuity between those works you are willing to defend as interesting natural science and philosophy.
So you must be making some weaker claim – they are not philosophy as contemporarily understood, but maybe at one time they were thought to be? Or maybe even though they're not philosophy in any sense, at least they resemble philosophy in some interesting way? Or what I think you are likely saying, and which is really what #3 is getting at: historically, they developed out of philosophy in some interesting way, though they're distinct.
Unfortunately, this is a much harder historical claim to prove. It is obvious that works of philosophy develop out of each other, because they cite each other, and their sole reason for existing is the fact that the author read some other works of philosophy. This is not at all obvious for Newton's work, because, as you admit, most of it has little to do with what philosophers were doing at the time, or even had done in the past. Are a couple principles appealing to notions like 'cause' enough to establish a historical connection? I would hope not – or else philosophy 'wins' by default, since it talks about everything, so everything is philosophy (#2).
So let's ask a more productive question – what led Newton to write the Principia? What methods did he employ in framing the principles he did? Was reading philosophers the primary motive behind this? Would the work have been writable in the absence of those philosophers? Are his goals or results philosophical in any interesting sense, by either contemporary standards or 17th c. standards? And no, it's not enough to say 'ah, but Newton had so many philosophical implications!' etc. This is because since philosophers can talk about anything, this move can be used to trivially claim that anything is philosophically relevant and therefore philosophy (#2).
We also need to ask why, even if somehow we thought this was 'philosophy turning into something else,' philosophy's historical core always defaults to what's present in the Platonic dialogues, and nothing else.
At the same time, It feels like the line of thought you're pursuing will culminate eventually in (or at least require) a method of canonization where certain philosophers and works are considered part of the tradition, while others, who may seem to be philosophers, are actually doing something else. Newton & Natural Philosophy is one example of this, but I'm sure we could quickly multiply examples. But what is this? It's asking a 'what is x' question and then determining which things are and aren't x on the basis of whatever the answer is (if you're not doing that, and are simply looking at what's taught in philosophy classes today without establishing an essence, then all you can say is that only those things that are taught as philosophy today are taught as philosophy today.) You mentioned a religious analogy where philosophers will backpedal or re-cast their claims so they can never be shown wrong. There's also a robust religious tradition of editing received tradition (almost always baggy, multiform, all over the place) in order to draw out a single thread of continuity that links it all together with reference to the present state of affairs.This could look like Josiah justifiying his reign, but it could also look like showing a throughline from Jereboam to his descendants to trace an inherited corruption.
there's a thin line between leaving philosophy 'standing up because you're tired of sitting' and a sons-eating-the-father thing which is a matter of wresting control through laying claim to a higher-order narrative. Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, UG Krishnamurti, Richard Rorty, Heidegger, Derrida and Laruelle all come to mind as people who it's unclear to what degree they're doing one vs the other.
Another way to say this: It's possible that most of what's going on in this thread is well within the folk tradition. It increasingly seems that way to me.
Yeah, I think that what we're doing here is unambiguously metaphilosophy (I mean, it's in the title! ;)), which on my account at least is the philosophy of philosophy, a subfield of philosophy, and not something outside of it. (I'm aware that there is historical disagreement about whether metaphilosophy is within or outside philosophy, or even if there is such a thing).
I thought Rorty was pretty radical. Reading him and the pragmatists he led me to especially informed my anti-philosophical leanings. I ended up not majoring in philosophy. Reading him suggested to me that the game of armchair 'science' was dead. You mention Wittgenstein. He strikes me as anti-philosophical and is yet considered one of the 20th century greats.
Paul Graham makes some interesting points about W.
Have you seen this critique of philosophy?
http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
I think Rorty is in the analytic mainstream, but that the analytic mainstream had an anti-philosophical wing, for about 30 years or so. I like Rorty too, 'spiritually,' I guess, but he's a sloppy thinker, which I think hurts the cause, because the 'anti-philosophy' view gets associated with that sloppiness. It would also be nice to eventually have people do this who were never in the philosophical tradition to begin with.
But I like the idea that the inclination to philosophy doesn't match its aims – if it really were about the most general truths, or about how the world as a whole hung together, and it delivered on learning about those things, how exciting it would be! Who wouldn't be motivated to learn things like that! But no one in their right mind actually gets excited about philosophy in that way because it's apparent it doesn't actually do any of those things – I think even to people who practice it.
I agree that there's a sloppiness in Rorty. I don't know the analytic tradition well. I have looked into the empiricists, and even they strike me as anti-philosophical in some sense. Perhaps that was the decisive era.
But I read people like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer before all that. I see it as a literature of basic stances that one can take on existence. It's not essentially different than a different type of young man choosing a favorite rapper.
[just saw latest post, will now reply to that]
I agree, and that's one of the tricky things about criticizing philosophy. To do it well, one has to read oneself into the tradition. But this costs time. Philosophy loves to hate itself articulately. I didn't major in philosophy, but I've spent way too much time reading philosophy in terms of time that could have been spent on marketable skills.
Quoting Snakes Alive
I agree. There's a theoretical leaning that I have to fight in myself. O the fantasy of the magic words! James is pretty great on that theme. We'd like to climb out of time on a ladder made of spit.
Quoting Snakes Alive
To me it seems that some of the classics are actually successful as literature on grand themes. Pascal, Nietzsche, Hobbes. But this is technology that only works if one believes in it. It's personality on the market for consumption/adoption. And it's also in literature proper and pop culture in general. And there's no great chasm for me between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. There's plenty of 'life philosophy' in The Possessed, embedded in the context of action and high stakes.
So theories of how the whole world hangs together are IMO to be found in certain 'philosophical' works, but those philosophical works aren't science. (I'm agreeing with how exciting it would be.)
For me science is something like technology that works whether one believes in it or not. It's not falsifiability that matters so much as the undeniability of its 'miracles', in war or peace, given our fragile and needy embodiment. Philosophy is 'just opinions.' Perhaps it can all be boiled down to the status of the average professor of philosophy these days. It's not terrible, but few look to them as sages.
Just curious: do you like Lee Braver? I've really enjoyed a couple of his books.
Quoting Pfhorrest
haha, this is what I wanted to write, well actually something similar like, "where are we? in the philosophy forum, so we are doing philosophy!".
But I think that snakes is doing what he's accusing others of doing, these #2's I mean, for some reason thinking that his thinking is somehow exempt from the philosophical tradition, where in fact he never left it.
Why aren't there any novel or interesting ways of defending something that is clearly so defective? Why are its practitioners so complacent and boring? Aren't they supposed to be good at 'thinking?'
There's also the odd thing that it's not even true – it's like a robot shorting out and running a default message, even if it has nothing to do with what the interlocutor is actually saying. I mean, come on – 'a historical examination of the relation between rhetoric in the Athenian legal tradition as it relates to sophistry? That's just more philosophy!' It's not even a coherent objection!
But do think it's interesting and para-philosophical - I mean, I was the one who introduced the relationship between litigation and philosophy early on in this thread! I think we're on the same page on a lot of this. What I object to is something that seems like a motte-and-bailey shuttling between bona-fide meta-philosophy & historical examination.
I want to read your post more times and make notes on it before responding so that we can have a productive discussion without (1) me writing in a way where it suggests I'm doing this:
Quoting Snakes Alive
and (2) trying to stop you misinterpreting me as doing that, so we both don't get frustrated, snarkshout at each other, and lose what I imagine will be an interesting discussion out of it.
Who me?
Do you object then? Alright then, objection sustained!
Tell you what snakes, I'm with you, with you all the way, I also believe that there is something wrong with philosophy, I said so myself, so maybe we can forge an alliance, albeit a temporary, an unholy one!
But, for argument's sake, and so that I can promote my own, I would like to play the devil's advocate, like they say. Should you have any objections, please take them to the judge and jury.
I mean, I don't want to show contempt of court, but you've been #2ing and traditionally folking around all over the place! We cats you know, we like our place clean!
Braver wrote a great historical exposition of anti-realism. He also did a book on the intersection of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Groundless Grounds.
[quote=review]
His general thesis is that, despite their differences, Wittgenstein and Heidegger both insist upon our radical finitude as human beings, and that there is an unsurpassable limit to the reasons we give as to why things are the way they are. In other words, reason as a ground-giving activity cannot ground itself, but arises out of our situation in a world that is always already "there" before the question of grounds or reasons can arise in the first place.
[/quote]
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/groundless-grounds-a-study-of-wittgenstein-and-heidegger/
I mention him because I think his work plugs in to the theme here. A Thing of This World is one of my favorite texts.
Is it literature or science or history? To me it's the story of grand personalities embedded in histories doing a kind of pre-science or framework-deep hypothesizing/myth-making.IMV philosophy is connected with seeing dominant norms from the outside. That makes it dangerous and/or useless at times.
I can't remember how much Durant goes into it, but he does end the book with American pragmatism. To me it seems that the professionalization of philosophy is the key issue. Personally I think scholars like Lee Braver are great.
I suppose I view strong philosophy as a kind of pre-science with indirect effects. At the very least it's a part of the conversation that we use when building our public-facing identities. As I see it, all of us here in this thread are comfortably within philosophy. And I count Paul Graham's essay as philosophy. At the same time, I understand the criticism of this or that philosopher as irrelevant or uninteresting. And then lots of forum philosophy strikes me as inferior to common sense. So I understand the frustration with language games that hardly pretend to be relevant. But that is as old as William James and surely much older.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism
[quote=link]
The early text "Paradigms for a Metaphorology" explicates the idea of 'absolute metaphors', by way of examples from the history of ideas and philosophy. According to Blumenberg, metaphors of this kind, such as "the naked truth", are to be considered a fundamental aspect of philosophical discourse that cannot be replaced by concepts and reappropriated into the logicity of the 'actual'. The distinctness and meaning of these metaphors constitute the perception of reality as a whole, a necessary prerequisite for human orientation, thought and action.
...
Reflecting his studies of Husserl, Blumenberg's work concludes that in the last resort our potential scientific enlightenment finds its own subjective and anthropological limit in the fact that we are constantly falling back upon the imagery of our contemplations.
[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Blumenberg
Perhaps much of philosophy involves dominant orienting metaphors whose effect is indirect. One does not quantify the effect of metaphors very easily, though one can compare forms of life in a loose way.
To some degree, yes, but with Rorty, for instance, that's not so clear. A certain grand role for philosophy is abandoned. I'm pro-philosophy, by the way, and I've suggested that anti-philosophy has simply been assimilated by philosophy. It's a big tent.
[quote=James]
Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.
[/quote]
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5116/5116-h/5116-h.htm
That's a pretty radical move. It's a speech from the exit on the way out.
You might like this (and maybe already know about it).
[quote=link]
On Rorty's account, modern epistemology is not only an attempt to legitimate our claim to knowledge of what is real, but also an attempt to legitimate philosophical reflection itself—a pressing task, on many accounts, once the advent of the so-called new science of the sixteenth and seventeenth century gradually gave content to a notion of knowledge obtained by the methodological interrogation of nature herself. Because the result of this kind of interrogation, theoretical empirical knowledge, is so obviously fruitful, and also carries with it seemingly uncontentious norms of progress, its mere presence poses a legitimation challenge to a form of thought, and claim to knowledge, that is distinct from it. Cartesian epistemology, in Rorty's picture, is designed to meet this challenge. It is sceptical in a fundamental way; sceptical doubts of a Cartesian sort, that is, doubts that can be raised about any set of empirical claims whatever, and so cannot be alleviated by experience, are tailor-made to preserve at once a domain and a job for philosophical reflection. Rorty's aim in PMN is to undermine the assumptions in light of which this double legitimation project makes sense.
[/quote]
And then from Rorty:
[quote=Rorty]
In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try.
[/quote]
Cultural politics.
I reckon myself more a Peircian pragmatist, so much so that I keep using the word in its original sense instead of capitulating to the supposed necessity of renaming that sense to distinguish it from its false usurpers.
Ah yes, I'm well aware. But what's that got to do with issue at hand?
I realize that we are antipodes on some vague attitude level. I find the theme of usurpation way too earnest. It's a brand name. Who cares? 'False usurpers'? Seriously? But our issue involves the 'usurpers' of philosophy itself and not just pragmatism.
Let's compare 'no unanswerable questions and no unquestionable answers' (an excellent phrase) to what I quoted from a review of Groundless Grounds.
In 'my' view, 'language is received like the law.' It's just one part of a world or form of life that we inherit that I might call a set of unquestionable answers --- which make a limited questioning possible in the first place. As to 'no unquestionable answers,' I'd be surprised if you didn't support the censorship or banning of various 'thought criminals' (you know, racists or homophobes or ..) But then any sane or decent person almost by definition refuses to question or even tolerate the questioning of certain norms. Unquestionable answers. And I don't see how one manages unanswerable questions without some systematic filter that calls most questions nonsense (like some positivist). Why is there a here here? I'd argue that that is unanswerable in principle.
I'm being an uncharitable reader of a fine phrase. I realize that. I guess I'm making the background of our little disagreement more explicit. But I'll agree that we are both in the same big tent known as philosophy. But I'll drag in Beckett and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. And politics and theology...Where we draw line is a matter of context and particular purpose.
I think what you're doing is this:
(A) Look at how philosophy is practiced now.
(B) Look back into history to see how it came about.
Methodologically, this makes sense when philosophy's stipulated to have one character. Or alternatively, if you care only about the historical currents that lead to how philosophy is practiced now. When you fix philosophy as an object of study in this way, you can read off its content from what is studied in it.
Fixing it in this way, it's very plausible that Newton's Principia and Descartes' analysis of motion are not part of the tradition as it is currently practiced. Whereas Plato's Dialogues are.
One of your central claims on this basis is that:
(C) That philosophy is unchanged since Plato, and never does any work.
What I've been trying to do with the historical stuff is this:
(D) Look back into history to see what was philosophy then.
(E) Try to establish that natural philosophy was philosophy at the time.
(F) Conclude that philosophy has done work at some point.
Let's look at how (C) interfaces with the process of (D->E->F). If we find something that was philosophy in part (D), and assume (C), what is found in part (D) must be part of philosophy now. Therefore, assuming (C), if natural philosophy was part of philosophy, then contemporary philosophy must be able to do work. Alternatively, a weaker claim than (C) is required; you're focusing on a specific part of the tradition at a specific time, and want to understand what lead to this, bracketing any universal claims about philosophy as a tradition, or rendering them more speculative on the same basis.
Now you deny this claim on the basis that natural philosophy - the examples from Newton and Descartes - are not part of philosophy as it is currently practiced. Then you use (C) to read this back into the historical tradition; since it's not part of the tradition now, and the historical essence of it is unchanging, it must not been part of the tradition then.
.Quoting Snakes Alive
This commits you to a methodological break between Newton's Principia and Descartes' geometry from philosophy's canon; they are not part of the historical tradition now since their methods were so obviously different from that of philosophy. I will grant that the kind of reasoning employed by the mathematics in the Principia and in Descartes' analysis of motion are not part of the tradition now. Nevertheless, they were linked to Descartes' metaphysics and Newton's methodological insights at the time.
But I think that, in doing (A), you're filtering the history of philosophy for what is continuous, or conceptually/methodologically similar with, its current practice. As a perspective, it commits you to draw distinctions between the fields of study (philosophy, natural philosophy) from a contemporary understanding of the concepts and how they are classified, rather than how they were classified at the time and historically arose, how they were taught together, how they were integrated into the same field of study.
This, ultimately, is a conceptual retrojection rather than a historical interpretation; what is sufficiently similar to what we have now, what is continuous with it? As opposed to a perspective where we follow the history of philosophy forward in time, bracketing the contemporary classifications.
What led Newton to write the Principia? Well, I presume you're looking for the answer "mathematics, and in the tradition of the mechanical/mathematical analysis of motion that goes from Galileo to Descartes to Newton". And the interplay between Descartes' philosophy of mechanical bodies and the bodies as he analysed them mathematically is bracketed as non-necessary for the development of his analysis of bodies; because it has a methodological break, it relies principally on mathematical arguments, definitions linked with syllogisms with constant appeal to intuition (at the time). The same story holds for the mechanical perspective on the world Newton had inherited from his predecessors, because the sciency bit relied upon mathematics and experiments, it had different character historically.
But I think that you've done a lot of work to distinguish natural philosophy conceptually from philosophy as it is practiced now (@Moliere's good points aside), but I don't think you've distinguished it sufficiently historically when you are also positing (C).
Quoting Snakes Alive
If we assume (C), like you do, or if you conclude it, anything which was part of the practice of philosophy in the past must be part of it now!
I think that it is much more plausible to reject (C), or substantially weaken it, given the discussion that we've had. Studying philosophy (even studying in general) can lead to a methodological break with it (or previously established methods in general).
I don't support that, at least not in public spaces. I support individuals' rights to not engage with such people, and private venues' rights to exclude them. On pseudo-public but technically private places like internet forums, I prefer technological solutions that empower individuals to not engage with them, rather than outright exclusion of them.
Quoting jjAmEs
Yeah? I straight up do that in my philosophy, grounding the meaning of questions in what an answer to them would look like (which for descriptive questions basically is positivism, not quite, though descriptive questions are not the only questions). Questions that can't have answers are thereby meaningless.
Quoting jjAmEs
All of those authors and fields can say philosophical things, and philosophy can say things relevant to them, but that doesn't make everything they do philosophical, or philosophy so broad as to encompass all that they do. It sounds like you've read something of my Codex since you know the catchphrase, but in case I just posted it somewhere around here, I go into more detail on where and why I would draw the lines at the start of my essay on metaphilosophy, explicitly distinguishing it from (among other things) religion/theology and art/literature.
I like that, but I should have been clearer. I'm suggesting that being civilized or sane means that lots of issues are and must be 'dead' for us. They are 'irrationally' foreclosed. We inherit certain norms of decency and intelligibility that make discussing norms possible in the first place. In simpler terms I'm suggesting that open-minded-ness has its limits. To be sane is to be deaf and blind in a good way.
Quoting Pfhorrest
OK, fair enough. But surely you see how convenient that is. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is all of this...here? What I have in mind is (for instance) presented in Sartre's Nausea. If the big questions are excluded as meaningless, isn't that a little fishy?
That's the big objection. But the little objection would be questions that seem answerable in principle for which we don't have answers. How can humans achieve immortality? What social order maximizes happiness? I relate to pragmatism. I think we trust technology that works reliably, and all the romance of science depends on this: if it's gear, it's here. But calling the rest meaningless seems problematic. The rest (like philosophy) is gear that may or may not work. The user dies before he's quite sure.
Quoting Pfhorrest
To be clear, I never said that everything they do is philosophical. I'm just saying that I don't think there's a sharp boundary. You can draw one as others have, of course, but I'm in a different camp. There was a time when I wanted to write my own work of philosophy, but I realized that (to me) it was more natural to gossip on the margins. All of 'my' better ideas are already out there. I guess it would still be nice to have the discipline to type up a system, but it's hard enough to find people who care about the famous books that already do that, let alone my necessarily repetitive contribution. I now think the way to go is a screenplay. I say embed philosophy within a narrative. Steppenwolf, Nausea, Immortality. For me it's somewhat about avoiding the pseudo-scientific pose and embracing what I see as the truth: that our philosophies are idealized / crystallized versions of our own glorious selves. It takes guts to market your thoughts non-anonymously. What keeps me from doing it is a more general feeling about shaping one message for an abstract public. Don't you feel forced to compromise or self-censor?Isn't one constrained to keep it all a little dry and vague in that situation? (I say that, and yet I know that people have fiery political debates on Facebook, under their own names, which I'd hate for the same reason I don't have tattoos.)
Philosophy, since its infancy, attempts to meddle in everything and in everyone's affairs. It does this by a method of appropriation/assimilation: on one hand, it appropriates and assimilates everything that it likes, that it finds worthy, and on the other, it outrightly rejects and discards as aphilosophical/unworthy everything that it doesn't like. An example of this, is so-called "natural philosophy" and the sciences, which philosophy made it appear to be its child. And so in this way, everything of value is philosophical, and vice-versa, everything philosophical is of value, a win-win situation for philosophy in any case. Any attempts to criticize or chastise philosophy for its wrong-doings, if any, sooner or later are appropriated and assimilated into philosophical thinking. This is what happened to analytic anti-philosophy, some time after the tractarian Wittgenstein posited to have solved all philosophical problems by saying that they were mere nonsense, a product of bad understanding and usage of language: it became part of the philosophical tradition, changing to analytic philosophy instead.
or even a snake eating its own tail.
I disagree. I do think that to make productive headway in conversation, some topics need to be closed off, but those topics that need to be closed off should be closed off for good reasons, not irrationally; the reasons to close off those topics should be readily apparent the more "indecent" or "insane" such topics of conversation are; and the "insanity" or "indecency" of people who insist on trying to force the conversation there anyway lies in their inability to understand the obvious good reasons not to go there as readily as other people do.
Really, much of my whole philosophical project consists of giving the reasons to foreclose certain large swaths of clearly unworkable ways to investigate things, showing how a bunch of different ways of trying to investigate things boil down to those two clearly unworkable ways and so should be foreclosed along with them, showing how a bunch of proposed answers to various philosophical questions are tantamount those those ways of trying to investigate things, showing what's still left after all of that has been foreclosed, and then letting the sciences take it from there, using those not-insane-or-indecent approaches still left to do the actual hard work of figuring things out.
Quoting jjAmEs
I think some of those kinds of questions have answers, though the answers are usually as trivial as the questions themselves. It reminds me of a joke I modified decades ago. "What is the answer to this question?" someone asked me, and supposedly their 'correct' answer was that "What" is the answer to that question; but I say instead, "This is the answer to that question." The moral of the story is: Ask an empty question, get an empty answer.
Quoting jjAmEs
I say that the role of philosophy in those kinds of questions is to show the means to answering them, not to answer them itself. Those are contingent questions that must be answered with a posteriori investigation. Philosophy's only job there is to clarify how to conduct such an investigation.
Quoting jjAmEs
I know that feeling. I'm still not completely sure why I bothered writing a philosophy book. Mostly, it seems, because there wasn't already such a book out there. I studied philosophy and jumped from one school of thought to another trying to figure out what to call myself, but none of them fit completely; like pants that are either long enough but not wide enough, or wide enough but too short, or where somehow one leg fits right but not the other or vice versa.
So I guess I thought, "I'm going to make some philoso-pants that fit people like me". Sure, it's just pants that are the same length in both legs as this pair are in one leg, and the same width in both legs as that other pair are in the opposite leg, so I'm just stitching together aspects of pairs of pants that already exist, but on the whole I've not found any pair that fits right in every way, so I thought I should make some.
But now that I have, it seems, most people like their skinny jeans or their high-waters or their weird lopsided pants that are too tight on one side and too short on the other or vice-versa, and nobody wants my pants... or I don't know how to let the people who would want them know that they exist now.
Quoting jjAmEs
I liked that idea so much it was the original plan for my philosophy book. You can still read the old, incomplete work-in-progress version of that if you want. It had five characters, two representing the skinny jeans and high-waters, two representing the lop-sided pants, and each of them a kind of contemporary social archetype (the religious preppy, the gothpunk nihilist, the hippie "social justice warrior", the nerdy "silicon valley libertarian"), except the fifth who was to be my author-avatar. It's a story about us going to see a fictional movie-within-the-story that prompts a philosophical dialogue as we dine and walk around the neighborhood surrounding the theater nearest my old university.
But I realized after a decade of writer's block and then a year of trying to write fiction (that turned into just a 60,000-word outline) that I absolutely suck at writing dialogue, and would make more progress if I just described my views and those I'm against in my own natural voice.
I have vague dreams of maybe meeting someone, or several someones, who agree with the overall aim of my project, who might like to collaboratively work on turning it into a narrative again, someday. But I have no idea how to go about that.
Quoting jjAmEs
Not at all, really. I was having passionate arguments on the internet in the days before pseudonymity was a widespread norm, so it was all under my real name, and back when I was a teenage no less. UseNet archives and what remains of old mid-90s early web forums are full of records of my views from the time, and it's never hurt me. I think that some of it is because the controversial views are so nuanced and buried so deep among other nuanced views that they're not smacking anybody in the face; I'm an anarcho-socialist for example, and argue for that in my book, but nobody who stumbled across my website is going to come away with that as their first impression, and probably nobody is going to read over 60 thousand words deep into the work to get the the chapter where I talk about that.
I guess I'm saying that those 'obvious good reasons' are not explicit reasons. You seem to suggest that arguments have been made, and they need only be remembered. I'm suggesting that we are trained into a culture like animals, and that conscious deliberation is the tip of an iceberg. This is the old idea that we are creatures of our time, and that our most dominant ideas are assumptions we don't even notice. They are the water the fish swim in, invisible to the well-adjusted fish.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I mostly relate to this. I'm guessing that I'm a little more cynical about metaphysical systems and maybe irrationally attached to a more informal/literary style. I see us as myth-making myth-structured engineers. That's why the 'wheel of life' and other religious notions are philosophical to me. The idea of some purified separate discipline (pure philosophy) looks like one more myth to me. This is examined in 'The White Mythology' (Derrida).
Quoting Pfhorrest
I like that. But 'why is there a here here' is not empty in some simple way. What does it all mean? That's a vague request IMV for something like an orienting myth or metaphor. For some, the world is created as a test. Many secular thinkers rely on a notion of progress. There is a here here so that we have a world to improve for our grandchildren. Or perhaps the world is a stage on which we learn to let it all go. We learn how to die on a road to transcendence.
But I do see the nullity of the question (as in W's TLP). It's as if we are just clever animals who really just want to push the right button. And religious and metaphysical phrases can go in the ear and transform pain into pleasure, confusion into a calm sense of being oriented (we have an arrow to follow toward the horizon, a clear image of the hero to emulate.)
So you exclude the quasi-religious function from philosophy? I take a more holist view. To me a person's philosophy is tied up with their self-image and self-esteem. The philosopher is religious in a new self-critical way. 'Reason' or rationality becomes a sort of holy ghost. That myths must subject themselves to criticism becomes a dominant myth. If philosophy is only practical meta-engineering, that's a cool idea but leaves out all the juicy stuff that people die for.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I like this description. I relate. I agree with Schopenhauer that philosophers are especially irritable. No one out there gets it just right. But I have this sense of the pugnaciousness of strong minds. We take pleasure in locating the error, aesthetic or logical, in all other claims to the throne --which are just fashion choices to the worldly cynic who looks at bank accounts, fame, armies.
I think I prefer the improvised clash of personalities to writing a book because it shows the philosopher in an embattled social context. We see their manners, who they find to insane to talk to, how they respond to unforeseen objections. So I appreciate you meeting my initially challenging tone with sincere and eloquent responses.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I relate to this too. I'd like to write fiction. I believe that I should write fiction. But spouting conversational (post-)philosophy is what comes natural. Yet with my wife I improvise voices and characters all the time. But it's all un-self-conscious play. If only I'd somehow be offered money ahead of time, then I'd have the motivation. Or if I were young and single. I was a musician once, and I loved the music but it was also tied up with some kind of sexual display. Seduction/intimidation.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I relate to this, in terms of both art and philosophy. But I find myself becoming more isolated somehow from that possibility and more at peace with the isolation. I was in bands with close friends for about a decade, and it's deeply satisfying to share the sense of making something great with true friends. And we were so immersed in it that we just ignored the fact that we were poor and irresponsible. Some became addicts and others became parents. I became neither and went to grad school.
But I am nostalgic at times for an era that can't be repeated. Some of those nights were so grand. The friendship, the music, the drugs. Dionysian mysteries, the 'truth' in rock'n'roll lyrics.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm glad it's never come back on you. I don't like having a proper legal name stamped on me like a penned animal. It's a toe tag. I think Derrida felt something like this, given his writing on the signature. Limited Inc is one of my favorite texts. It has a certain embarrassing nudity. It's not unlike one of the better clashes on this forum. 'Sarl' is the enemy or status quo dragon, intellectual complacence incarnate. 'Sec' is the impish knight trying to force a rich and unruly consciousness on Dad who has it all figured out in his sleepy deafness and blindness. As others have written, there's something like a (admittedly vague) 'experience of language' beneath it all. Phenomenology is dangerously close to mysticism in some ways, but perhaps anything that isn't a publicly useful/reliable machine is suspect.
I hadn't heard of Durant, well at least not Will, cause I had heard of Kevin! Reading a summary of his work 'The story of Philosophy', I think that he sees a continuation, or better a continuity, in philosophy, and therefore, irrespective of whether he is right or wrong, he will not do in this topic, since we are trying to spot and find discontinuities: we do not want people to tell us how similar philosophy is throughout all of (its) history, but how dissimilar.
Quoting jjAmEs
Key issue, for what? But anyway, yeah, early philosophers were not scholars, pro's or academics, they were just people doing philosophy for ... for, dunno, maybe just for the fun of it? I am not sure, but I think that their reasons were very different than contemporary ones. Just like early footballers and basketballers had different reasons for playing football and basketball than the nowdays millionary professionals. I mean the game is still much the same, chase a ball and score, but it is different to watch poor folk chasing a ball, than watching millionaires do the same.
Haven't heard of Lee Braver either, Paul Graham neither, William James rings a bell, oh right he was that bloke that founded psychology, we in europe have Freud for that.
This seems to mix up is an ought some. As a description of the way people actually behave, that sounds accurate to me. As a prescription for the correct way we should behave, I have objections. We do foreclose avenues of discourse irrationally, but we shouldn't; conversely, we should foreclose some avenues of discourse for good reasons, but nevertheless we irrationally don't.
Quoting jjAmEs
Those various answers suggest to me that the question you're talking about presumes that "here" was created with conscious intent (that we're trying to discern), which it appears not to have been. If you ask "Why did x happen?" and the answer is "x didn't happen", that's a pretty empty answer to a pretty empty question.
If instead the question were "what good is there to 'here being here'?", and it is genuinely possible (as I think it is) for things to be good for things, then you can answer that question -- you're basically asking the most general "what is good?" question in a roundabout way -- though that's not really what I would consider a properly philosophical question (how to answer it is), but I recognize that normative ethics is still considered a part of philosophy today, even though I think it should be spun off just like "natural philosophy" was.
I hear you, but I guess my point is that the strong philosophical dream of rationally justifying everything seems dead to me. I'm also invested in universal rationality, enlightenment humanism, etc. It's something we strive toward. I sympathize with those see the dream of perfect sanity as one more flavor of madness.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No, I'm an atheist. To me it's a more abstract point, the necessity of contingency. All explanation (I have argued before) is intra-worldly. The world as a whole 'must be' a brute fact. From this perspective, theologians and meta-physicians do what they can to evade this. They sweep the contingency under the rug.
It's possible that our views are actually close, despite our tonal habits. I think that maybe 'what is there a here?' is wisely described as (sometimes) no more than a lyrical grunt. I relate in an important way to the 'empty questions' approach. I even relate to the philosophy-as-meta-engineering paradigm. All words are just tools for a clever animal, and this tool metaphor itself is one more tool. To me, thought, this is post-philosophical pragmatism. The insight cuts against the attachment to a certain earnest and hyper-rational style. Philosophers are just poet-engineers, offering their software on the market. You and I are two more characters on the great stage of fools who take more pleasure than others in articulating our verbal response to lives we were thrown into. Along these lines, 'pious' philosophies that demarcate Science from non-science are the sad shadows of technology that just does or does not work reliably. Stuff people buy, stuff people win wars with. We are confectioners. But I can only say this with a certain irony, because I'm invested in the game nevertheless.
IMV the story of philosophy demonstrates discontinuity. Compare Dewey and Plotinus. Philosophy looks roughly like big-picture thinking. Just as humans vary considerably in their fundamental visions of the world, so do the specialists who carefully articulate and argue for such views.
True, one could find discontinuities and dissimilarities as easily as one would find continuities and similarities, depending on the POV and the semantics of same and different. So I think it's pretty useless this method of investigation, as it would lead to any possible conclusion. So I think it's better to go to the beginning, where it all started, and try to notice any divergence there.
:up: :100:
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/who-killed-homer
I know :sad: