PfhorrestOctober 18, 2019 at 20:5114750 views157 comments
I'm surprised that I can't find a thread like this here already. Also not sure if this belongs in general or the lounge, mods feel free to move as necessary.
Comments (157)
god must be atheistOctober 18, 2019 at 21:05#3431490 likes
My teachers only opened my eyes... I do all the thinking. To me philosophy is a way of exercising my freedom to develop my thinking. It is a similar experience for me in my life to writing fiction. And both pay about the same.
Silly me... I thought he and she and he and he (have taken two electives in my pursuing a degree in math, and after that, many years later, I audited two courses (audit means listen to the lectures, but not work toward a credit, not needing to give account of my progress via tests etc.)) did it for the money.
god must be atheistOctober 18, 2019 at 21:26#3431580 likes
FWIW, I think it's interesting to see the percentage of people here with formal training versus self-taught.
I mean, I always had my suspicions, but it's still interesting.
Deleted UserOctober 19, 2019 at 00:34#3431940 likes
I took some classes in it but ultimately didn't like how it was being taught by one of my profs.. I felt she was attempting to instill her own political ideologies into the text while attempting to teach it .. and I didn't like that; it felt distracting and irrelevant to the course. In other words, it felt like she was teaching an ideology in the form of an agenda - she was also somewhat restrictive - in a way that iffy.... There was just something off. But I don't have any degrees in it or anything like that.
I had some philosophy classes at university but back then they rather struck me as "unimportant".
The issue got propelled to the forefront because of the ontological and epistemological questions that arose while being involved in software engineering projects: Is there nothing more serious than the snake-oil bullshit en provenance from commercial software vendors?
With free and open-source software (FOSS) going mainstream, that particular problem got smaller. Still, FOSS tends to create its own trouble. It is still possible to start hyping nonsense and push millions of people in the wrong direction.
What I learned from the issues in that microcosmos, is: If millions of people believe in nonsense, this is always the result of a small cartel having a vested interest, and spending a lot of money, in getting these people to believe that nonsense. The converse is also true: If powerful interests spend a lot of money on stamping out a particular, popular belief, then this belief is most likely truthful. In that sense, the beliefs propagated by the ruling elite is almost a perfect "How not to do it" manual.
Therefore, the challenge is to learn how to reconstruct the truth from their lies.
If millions of people believe in nonsense, this is always the result of a small cartel having a vested interest, and spending a lot of money, in getting these people to believe that nonsense. The converse is also true: If powerful interests spend a lot of money on stamping out a particular, popular belief, then this belief is most likely truthful.
A gloriously cynical half-truth. Perfect p0m0 ur-conspiracy fodder. Amen. :pray:
A gloriously cynical half-truth. Perfect p0m0 ur-conspiracy fodder. Amen.
Well, knee-jerk distrust of the ruling elite -- an otherwise standard libertarian view -- has worked out really nicely for me. It has allowed me to dodge quite a few bullets, the most important of which is that you cannot, under no circumstances, organize your private life on the jurisdictional territory of a so-called western democracy. That is a gigantic bullet dodged.
Jurisdiction decoupling -and shopping is simply a necessity.
For example, do you buy the house in which you live?
No. Never.
Buy a house in another jurisdiction, rent it out, and with the proceeds, pay the rent of the house in which you live. You will still own a house -- if that is what you want -- but it will be several orders of magnitude more difficult to confiscate it from you.
I totally distrust the ruling elite, and that view is not negotiable. Furthermore, I still need to run into the first person who will defeat me in stubbornly nay saying.
Reply to alcontali Agreed - not inconsistent, however, with my previous comment. Btw, same here with property-rental jurisdiction 'shopping'. Left-Libertarian though. "Ruling elites" aren't the problem; the people themselves are their own self-inflicted problem ... to the degree they exchange (surrender) liberty & equality for (elite-creditor) security.
Agreed - not inconsistent with my previous comment. Btw, same here with property-rental juridiction 'shopping'. Left-Libertarian though.
The power of the ruling elite ultimately rests on the fact that you trust them, even though you have no reason to do so.
Their power is generally exercised by broadcasting deceptive and manipulative messages that usually include some kind of fake morality, such as e.g. :
"Pay lots of taxes to us because that is the right thing to do!"
Yeah, why exactly?
The fact that the ruling elite brandish their weapons and wholesale threaten violence is way less of a source of power than generally believed. It is the ability to fabricate morality, which the masses will then believe, that gives them their power.
It is obvious why the ruling elite may not like religion. It is clear that religion can act as an impediment to fabricating new moralities. It could also assist in doing that, but that depends on the religion. Hence, the religions that the ruling elite dislikes, are always the good ones. There can only be some truth in them.
So, you need to investigate every arrangement in which you enter and dig up the underlying, implicit assumptions of unwarranted trust that you would extend to the ruling elite. For example, do you trust your savings to the fiat bankstering system? Halt there, because doing that, is wrong. You should never trust the ruling bankstering elite.
A ruling elite should always be treated with utter distrust, and all their messages should always be investigated thoroughly, in order to find new reasons to totally disbelieve them.
It is obvious why the ruling elite may not like religion. It is clear that religion can act as an impediment to fabricating new moralities. It could also assist in doing that, but that depends on the religion. Hence, the religions that the ruling elite dislikes, are always the good ones. There can only be some truth in them.
:chin:
< Sample quotes on 'elites & religion' >
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful."
~Lucius Annaeus Seneca
"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."
~Napoleon Bonaparte
[i]"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions."[/i]
~Karl Marx
I like sushiOctober 19, 2019 at 04:30#3432280 likes
I am curious what people class as ‘self taught’. If it means they’ve read a couple of philosophical works then I’d call that ‘Not at all’.
Even if you’re self-taught that means - to me at least - that you’ve actively written about various works and have reasonable grasp of logic, or that you’ve seriously studied philosophical works rather than merely perusing them.
DeleteduserrcOctober 19, 2019 at 04:30#3432300 likes
There is no better way to pacify a righteous rage at real injustice than to give it a fake but clear decoy and let it feel falsely empowered through continuously destroying it (cf. ritual, compulsion, the need for a scapegoat to contain rage) - Cynicus of Alexandria
Cynicus, fake as he is, was only scratching the surface. I think, if he was real, he'd have something to add about religions based around sacrifice and the tonal quality - straight prophets- of those who get drawn to the performative rejection of those religions. As Joanna Newsom says 'what's redacted will repeat.'
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful."
~Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Seneca was talking about the Roman imperial cult, which was an umbrella of numerous pagan theories, including the Greek pantheon, but of which the truly active element was to believe that the adoptive son of the previous emperor was the son of a god.
It is a well-known consideration that you should not believe your own lies. That will obviously go wrong.
Therefore, the youngsters of the ruling elite ("the (future) rulers") were be trained by Greek philosophers ("the wise") to disbelieve that lie, but never to express their disbelief in any way in front of commoners ("the common people"), who were supposed to, and nudged to, believe in the divinity of the emperor.
Two religions were hated by the Roman imperial elite: Judaism and Christianity. These beliefs were throwing a spanner in the works.
Judaism was staunchly monotheist and did not allow for any other divinity that the single one they worshipped. Hence, it was subjected to violent reprisals by the Roman elite, who even destroyed their temple. Still, the Romans acquiesced and compromised. They tolerated Judaism, on the condition that the Jews paid a heavy tax, the Fiscus Iudaicus, and that they henceforth refrained -- on a mos maiorum basis -- from converting anybody else to their religion.
Christianity was possibly even worse. Christians said that the alleged criminal hanging from a cross was the true son of a god, and not that Roman emperor, who was clearly just an impostor. So, they worshipped the man hanging from a cross while refusing to pay tribute to the Roman emperor. In fact, this was the only firmly-enforced rule in early Christianity. The early Christians did not particularly care what else you did, as long as you did not pay tribute to the Roman emperor.
Lapsi. After the 250 AD Decian Persecution, Cyprian of Carthage held a council sometime after Easter 251 AD, in which Lapsi were classified into five categories:
Sacrificati: Those who had actually offered a sacrifice to the idols. Christians that made sacrifices, especially to Roman gods, were only offered absolution on their deathbeds.
Thurificati: Those who had burnt incense on the altar before the statues of the gods. From Latin thurificare – "burn incense"
Libellatici: Those who had drawn up attestation (libellus), or had, by bribing the authorities, caused such certificates to be drawn up for them, representing them as having offered sacrifice, without, however, having actually done so. A two-year sanction was imposed as penance. From Latin libellus – "little book; letter; certificate"
Acta facientes: Those that made false statements or other acts to save their lives. From Latin – "those doing the acts"
Traditores: Those who gave up sacred scriptures, artifacts and/or revealed names of fellow Christians. From Latin tradere - "hand over; deliver; betray" (source of the English "traitor”).
Early Christianity was anti-Statism on steroids.
Unfortunately, its doctrines were sufficiently malleable for the ruling elite to shoehorn its imperialist principles into it. The very first principle issued under supervision of Constantine the Great was a complicated statement meant to disavow strict monotheism: the Nicaean trinity. Just like the Holy Ghost, the Roman emperor became an aspect of God, instead of a god in his own right. Christianity was simply re-purposed to allow the Roman empire to organize religious persecutions at a level never seen before.
But then again, at that point, there was no place any longer for a conspiracy between "the wise" and "the rulers" on an atheist basis. There are modern attempts at resuscitating that practice by using atheist scientists to disparage contemporary religion to the youngsters of the ruling elite, but it certainly does not work as well as in antiquity.
Reply to I like sushi That is a good point. I was imagining those who would answer “not at all” as being those who feel no confidence in their own philosophical studies while those who answer “self-taught” would be those who had done enough independent reading to feel confidently educated, but Dunning-Kruger would suggest that both states of (un)confidence are probably dubious, and perhaps some of those who would answer “none at all” deserve the title of “self-taught” better than many who would answer “self-taught”.
I like sushiOctober 19, 2019 at 05:14#3432440 likes
Reply to Pfhorrest I put ‘self-taught’. Only because I’ve read in a number of different areas and practiced articulating various ideas in essay form.
It’s impossible to read everything. I’m not really up on any current philosophers - one or two sparsely, that’s all.
The issue is that "autodidactic" is not an answer to the question of "how much" education you have. Reading a single book on your own is autodidactic education.
The structure of the poll also suggests that autodidact is less than "some college classes". Perhaps there should be different categories for "some eclectic reading" and "thorough studies"
I like sushiOctober 19, 2019 at 07:09#3432640 likes
I would be interested to see how many works of philosophy people have actually read cover to cover with care whilst taking notes - I don’t include ‘guides’ in this.
As for myself, not a huge amount ... Plato x3, Aristotle x1, Heidegger x1, Kant x1, Husserl x1, Nietzsche x3, John Stuart Mill x1, Rousseau x1 and a few others I hesitate to call works of philosophy including Camus x1, Schiller x1 and Foucault x1.
So that makes the total count of books read from cover to cover 12. I actually thought it was less than that and I’m probably forgetting one or two thinner volumes.
There are about another dozen I have not read from cover to cover; either I got distracted halfway through and/or I bought them more to skim through (and reference) than to sit down and read front to back. Of note, for good and bad, would be Wittgenstein (have read it in fits and starts), various works of Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Derrida, Hume and Russell. Most of those I’ve only read the odd essay or chapter of.
I think that falls into the category of ‘self-taught’. I did attend a class - wasn’t at all interesting to me at the time - on existentialism when I was 17 or 18. I naively expected the class to involve lively discussion and people to express their ideas and views. It was incredibly stale and I’d probably feel fairly similar about the class today if I attended it due to the manner it was advertised.
Anyway, I read these things because I thought it would be stimulating. In some cases it has been. Kant was a turning point for me as was Heidegger. With Kant I couldn’t believe something could hold such a complex investigation in their head let alone express such a complex question with such precision - toughest read of my life by far (I remember picking up Dickens after finishing CoPR and it felt like I was reading a comic book!). Heidegger’s Being and Time struck me because I was shocked that anyone could regard such obvious sophistry as ‘philosophy’ and it quickly made me realise that what I had been thinking, and considering writing, was hardly obtuse compared to imprecision and evasion Heidegger uses - not that I didn’t find any it worthwhile: I certainly did.
Of all I would say Nietzsche and Husserl are the most valuable to me - maybe because they are modern? I’ve looked ag some contemporary stuff from time to time but find it either superficial or obscure (I’m not going to pretend I‘ve looked that hard at contemporary works though!)
Given what I’ve laid out above - and to add I’m interested in aesthetics, ethics, psychology, neuroscience and anthropology - could anyone suggest a contemporary philosopher I might find of interest across these areas? May as well ask after that little biographical account! :D
I like sushiOctober 19, 2019 at 07:15#3432660 likes
Reply to Echarmion Anyone can read words in a book. I wouldn’t call all reading ‘education’. If you want proof ask someone if they’ve read an article recently and then ask them what it was about - many people take in gist meanings rather than analysing what they are reading with any kind of rigor (of course interest makes a big difference, but even then some will read a chapter then ask themselves wtf did I just read? I know I’ve done this. The difference is being willing to go back and reread chapters rather than pushing forward - good luck to anyone trying to tackle Kant without almost constantly referring back to previous chapters/pages!
Been reading philosophy since my teens, got a PhD in humanities with a minor in Critical & Cultural Theory, most of which I read on my own, not in classes.
god must be atheistOctober 19, 2019 at 10:32#3433050 likes
Most books are padded to the max, and i have no patience of waddling through the chaff to get to the pearl.
I found Plato's Republic refreshingly modern, readable, and lively, and yet that was too much, too long, for me as well. I guess for most students of philosophy in first year classes that is the norm. But the book, listen to the prof, not read the book, and write a C- essay for a term paper. Except mine were A+. (At the risk of sounding boastful.)
I would be interested to see how many works of philosophy people have actually read cover to cover with care whilst taking notes - I don’t include ‘guides’ in this.
I have found Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Incerto series of books a really good read: "Black swan", "Antifragile", "Fooled by randomness", "Skin in the game", ... I have also read many of his blog posts. His focus is on epistemology, i.e. the question, "What is knowledge?", always centred around, and starting from the question of how we deal with randomness.
I found the list of possibilities given didn't fit me at all. As I think I said before, my English teacher quoted Aristotle (I think he said) to the effect that philosophy was a study for old men, and all I read suggested it was a fairly tedious study in linguistics. As part of my degree I had to take a paper called 'English Moralists', and I had a deep dislike of both groups, though, in fairness, the persons studied tended to be neither. I hold a Degree as a Doctor of \Philosophy, however, which has always seemed to me bizarre!
Deleted UserOctober 19, 2019 at 13:29#3433370 likes
The Masters is actually in Ethics but it’s still a branch of philosophy so totally counts.
it's almost like you're vaguely characterizing capitalism? free enterprising ? $s ? power ? influence (conspire?) ? maintain (free enterprising etc) ? ...
We have known for a long time now that capitalism is not the same as free enterprise.
That confusion was deliberately introduced. Capitalism is about having two classes of people in the economy: the class that owns the means of production and the class that sells labour to them. What does that have to do with "free enterprise"? Capitalism is much more like feudalism, where the nobles owned the land, and the serfs worked it with their labour.
The funny thing is that the so-called defenders of labour, i.e. the trade unions, have long ago been co-opted to defend capitalism.
The trade unions want all employment in the economy to be funnelled through wage-slave contracts between capitalist corporations and the thoroughly individualized workers whom they would pretend to represent. The trade unions defend that view with deceptive and manipulative messages claiming that "Your wage-slavery is good for you". The trade unions want to prevent at all cost that employees, who are dependent for work and income on their employers, would become more autonomous or even self-employed.
It is the wage-slave system that is the corner stone of capitalism.
It also allows the government to collect lots of taxes at the source. That is what tremendously increases government power. In countries where people are generally not wage slaves, the government has way less power and way less money, which makes the government also way less intrusive.
By collecting your income as a salary, you perpetuate this system of wage slavery. I never do that. I have always invoiced for whatever I sold. Since switching to bitcoin, I also refuse to accept payments into a bank account. By accepting that kind of payments, you perpetuate the system of bank slavery.
You change the world, bit by bit, by being stubborn, intransigent, intolerant, and recalcitrant. You win by defeating the adversary in nay saying. Never listen to any manipulative or deceptive messages, and always repeat your nonnegotiable position. That is how you make the other side cave in; or else, you just move on to the next potential trade. Don't look back.
Deleted UserOctober 20, 2019 at 02:53#3434790 likes
Reply to Artemis applies ethics is pretty broad and it should go without saying, it isn’t the same as a masters in business ethics. It could be, but it’s not and I don’t know why you find this funny.
I realize that. But in the course of a master's degree in any field you'll narrow your research down to a specfic project by the end, even if you did start out with a broad education.
Notice there are no master's theses titled "applied ethics: a broad and general analysis of all that might apply."
And he was definitely wrong suggesting business ethics is not always a branch of applied ethics.
Deleted UserOctober 20, 2019 at 15:15#3435930 likes
Reply to Artemis So you’re annoyed that I didn’t tell you what my thesis was about? Also it isn’t wrong to say that not all business ethics is applied ethics because first you have to agree that all of our business ethics is actually ethical in the first place.
So, I could lie and say that a few business ethics classes amount to a masters in applied ethics (it doesn’t) just to satisfy your preconceived notions or I could just tell you that applied ethics is really broad because it is.
The question was what level of education do you have? Not; what was your masters thesis about? I don’t really have time to sort out your trust issues.
Far from being annoyed, I'm rather amused. What does this have to do with trust? I never invoked trust. I was just curious what your specialization was, and then I pointed out an error in your post.
But the case does get curiouser and curiouser. Now you're claiming studies in business ethics are not a branch of philosophy because not all people agree that all business practices are ethical? Huh?
That's like saying studying socialism is not part of political theory because not all people agree that it's a viable system. Or like saying pro-life positions are not part of the study of ethics because not everyone agrees with them.
Terrapin StationOctober 20, 2019 at 15:26#3435960 likes
Yeah, your thesis is going to be on something more specific, but the degree would be in Applied Ethics. You didn't ask him what his thesis was on, though.
I've been asking him what he specialized in. Same dif.
Deleted UserOctober 20, 2019 at 15:34#3435990 likes
Reply to Artemis you never asked me what it was on and I never told you? Where have you asked that?
No I’m hinting at what I believe. You really need to read what is being said more carefully. You’re using false equivalences and you’re suspiciously trying to dig up identifying details on me. I’m not telling you what I specialised in as within five minutes you’ll look it up and learn my identity.
Does a masters in applied ethics include classes on business ethics? Yes. Do I have to agree with everything said in that class? No. Did I specialise in business ethics? No. Your questions are answered.
For the love... I'm not interrogating anyone. I asked a simple question and then pointed out that he's wrong about business ethics, and continues to say incorrect things about it. What constitutes business ethics might belong in another thread, but it hardly is an interrogation to disagree with someone about that.
Everything else implied by persons other than myself in this thread about my intentions is just projection.
What constitutes business ethics might belong in another thread, but it hardly is an interrogation to disagree with someone about that.
Fine, we'll leave that for another thread then.
Deleted UserOctober 20, 2019 at 16:01#3436100 likes
Reply to Artemis yes, I’ve clearly been projecting that I want to know who you are this whole time. Get a life. I’m not letting you bait me into showing you my certifications and you can believe whatever the hell you want to believe.
I never asked for them. But you're still wrong about business ethics.
Deleted UserOctober 20, 2019 at 16:22#3436200 likes
Reply to Artemis Okay, font of all grounding knowledge. Let us all bow to your opinion on what is right and wrong.
“You mean like law or business ethics?” No, it is a Masters in Applied ethics. It’s not the same degree as business ethics. It’s not wrong to say they are two different certifications.
What I actually said: “it isn’t the same as a masters in business ethics.” because they are two different certifications. However I never once made the claim that they don’t relate to each other. Not once. You are saying I’ve said that, but I never said it once. Copy and paste exactly where I said “they don’t relate to one another.” They aren’t the same certification is what I am saying and it is all I ever claimed to say. So where are you getting these notions that I’m saying wrong things about these fields as a whole? Words into my mouth the entire time and the entire argument you’re making is at this point comically illogical.
“And he was definitely wrong suggesting business ethics is not always a branch of applied ethics” Yeah it would have been wrong. If I said that. Fortunately what I actually said was they aren’t the same degree.
If you want to have a discussion about how fields relate to each other and how all business ethics are attempts at applied ethics. Fine. But you do not get to lie and say I said this or that, especially when I can just go back and quote myself. READ WHAT PEOPLE ARE WRITING PROPERLY.
SophistiCatOctober 20, 2019 at 17:21#3436430 likes
Hah, I can't believe I am the only one so far to have owned up to possessing no philosophical education. Of course, if this counts as education...
I have found Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Incerto series of books a really good read: "Black swan", "Antifragile", "Fooled by randomness", "Skin in the game", ... I have also read many of his blog posts. His focus is on epistemology, i.e. the question, "What is knowledge?", always centred around, and starting from the question of how we deal with randomness.
Also it isn’t wrong to say that not all business ethics is applied ethics because first you have to agree that all of our business ethics is actually ethical in the first place.
And not to split hairs, but an accusation of lying again implies you know intent. You don't know my intent and have been baselessly accusing me of all sorts of ill-will from the get-go here.
The irony is that you're telling me I'm putting things in your mouth when you've done almost nothing but ascribe to me thoughts and goals and predispositions that you could really not logically infer from my posts.
While technically not education per se, as a formal discipline, I tend toward being instructed by a particular kind of philosophy, rather then educated in it generally.
Terrapin StationOctober 20, 2019 at 21:17#3437110 likes
Hah, I can't believe I am the only one so far to have owned up to possessing no philosophical education.
I'd own up to barely remembering a crapload of stuff, if that counts.
Deleted UserOctober 20, 2019 at 21:34#3437130 likes
Reply to Artemis “Also it isn’t wrong to say that not all business ethics is applied ethics because first you have to agree that all of our business ethics is actually ethical in the first place.” Okay, so are you saying that trickledown, middleground and trickleup economics are all ethically valid just because they are all attempts at applied business ethics? Or can we debate which of the three options is more ethical? If we can debate them, then how is it wrong for me to suggest that I don’t believe they are all ethical? There is a distinct difference between saying something is an attempt at an ethical business model and saying it actually is ethical.
If you’re not inferring I’m lying then why the interrogation and why aren’t you putting anyone else here under scrutiny? We both know full well you’re entire argument is a veiled ad hom attack for no other reason than to troll someone whom you 1, know nothing about, 2, can verify absolutely nothing about. If you weren’t inferring this then why the 3rd degree and the unfounded skepticism?
I did two years of philosophy as part of a four year bachelor of arts. Units in philosophy of science, early modern philosophy, Pre-socratics, David Hume, logical positivism, among other things (although ultimately I majored in comparative religion).
Looking back philosophy of science was a great class - started with Alan Chalmers' 'What is this thing called science'? Also studied Kuhn, Polanyi and Feyerabend. I didn't realise the significance of these thinkers until much later in life. I never did a unit in Kant's CPR, which I regret, although I've read quite a bit of it since. (Incidentally, noticed a scathing book about Kuhn last year.)
Deleted UserOctober 20, 2019 at 22:01#3437220 likes
Reply to Artemis Out of curiosity what did you answer in this poll? I’m
Assuming you are qualified to make a formal assessment of someones level of education based on a few comments on a web forum?
I said bachelor's degree. And I don't mind being more specific: I hold a dual degree in Philosophy and in another field and my senior thesis was on the intersection of the two. I have a master's in the other field and I am working on a PhD therein. Hence my knowledge of how academia works.
I would have pursued a career in philosophy, but it's a tough job market for which you have to be willing to move and I really like where I'm living and I like my chosen field just as much as philosophy. But sometimes the bug strikes me and I wind up here talkin to y'all.
Taleb considers himself less a businessman than an epistemologist of randomness, and says that he used trading to attain independence and freedom from authority.[33]
Until a few years ago, I could not easily afford to spend an inordinate amount of time on something like the epistemology of randomness. Back then, I still had to make money.
B.A. magna cum laude in Religious Studies from an ivy league with heavy philosophy component ...looks like I'd better upload a copy of my diploma to "prove it" though, right? ...seeing as how there's a credentials cop who checks on this thread once an hour to flame others?
With how much student debt have they saddled you in exchange for their worthless paperwork?
Expensive paperwork from the academia, which translates into enslaving IOU paperwork to the banksters and/or other scumbags of the ruling elite, does NOT signal that someone would be smart or competent.
These days, it rather signals the very opposite.
Furthermore, at least 80% of the subject matter taught at university does not satisfy the epistemic definition for the term "knowledge".
What a ridiculous scam. A fool and his money are easily parted ...
Since other people are posting more details than just a poll answer I guess I should post something about myself too.
I’ve got a BA summa cum laude in philosophy, and besides the basic lower division intro, historical surveys, logic and critical thinking stuff, I did upper division studies on Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, and Leibniz, and topical courses on metaphysics, philosophy of space and time, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, ethics, metaethics, moral psychology, free will, theories of justice, and political philosophy.
I'm self-taught. My main areas of interest are hellenistic philosophy (mostly scepticism. cynicism and stoicism), philosophy of science, daoism and certain folks with a connection to the school of Brentano.
I like sushiOctober 21, 2019 at 08:51#3439260 likes
Reply to god must be atheist The Republic is certainly a good read. Whether you side with Plato’s views or not it offers an approach into most modern issues in society.
Dialogues can be quite misleading, but overall I found Plato to be crisp enough is his thoughts rather than pandering to heavily toward this or that bias of opinion.
Reply to alcontali Thank you. I’ll keep his name in mind next time I order some books.
Are there any particular essays of his currently online I could look at that you’d recommend as a general overview of his perspective?
I agree that schools in America are outrageously expensive. And I agree that capitalism has pushed especially for-profit schools to accept more and more students who are ill-prepared for college and push them through despite lacking performances. And it's certainly not the only way to educate yourself provided you have the right attitude.
But all that doesn't really lead to the logical conclusion that nobody stands anything to gain from studying and researching a subject intensely under the tutelage of people who've also studied and researched these fields intensely.
Or perhaps, when you have brain cancer someday, you'll prefer some random guy off the street to do your surgery over the doctor who went to medical school and was taught how to do it right?
But all that doesn't really lead to the logical conclusion that nobody stands anything to gain from studying and researching a subject intensely under the tutelage of people who've also studied and researched these fields intensely.
Education hasn't changed for 150 years. It is still the same schools and largely the same curriculum. Every other industry has changed drastically. How comes?
Of course, there's now Coursera, Udemy, Edx, and so on.
Subscriptions are typically priced from $39 to $89 per month for access to one Specialization, with no long-term commitment required.
The pricing for online education looks much more reasonable anyway.
Furthermore, if you want to engage in cheap credentialism, you can "get a degree" in much cheaper countries. In some places, it's only $500/year. You may not even need to fly there (just do it online). Since employers in the USA happily hire Indian engineers with Indian degrees, why wouldn't they hire you with a cheap, credentialist, foreign degree?
Or perhaps, when you have brain cancer someday, you'll prefer some random guy off the street to do your surgery over the doctor who went to medical school and was taught how to do it right?
Maybe he will also prescribe me some opioids and make sure I join the breakfast club of dead bodies?
My knee-jerk reaction is to engage extensively in jurisdiction shopping.
If the situation is markedly different between two different countries, then the reason for that is almost always some government bullshit.
You can fly to Vietnam or Mexico, have your operation in an upmarket private hospital over there, first-class everything, spend a month in a holiday resort for recovery, and then fly back, all of that for a tenth of the price that it would cost you to have the operation locally in the USA.
And no, I do not necessarily trust doctors, or anybody else for that matter. Why would I? It is always necessary to do your research, ask for second opinions, and so on. If it becomes clear that everybody keeps saying something different, then that is indeed a problem.
A medical opinion is not expensive here. They will diagnose your problem for $20-$50 including laboratory tests over here. All private service. If you don't like the first opinion, ask for a second one somewhere else.
Education hasn't changed for 150 years. It is still the same schools and largely the same curriculum. Every other industry has changed drastically. How comes?
It really depends on what you mean by "changed"? As far as curriculum goes, that only holds true in part. Plato and Aristotle and Kant are still being taught because they are still important foundations. Nussbaum and Singer and Wolff couldn't have been taught 150 years ago, because they weren't alive then, but they are being taught now. So the curriculum, in my experience, carries a healthy load of traditional as well as new content.
As for methodology, most humanities classes depend on a textbook, discussion, a knowledgeable instructor, willing students, and some writing exercises. That hasn't changed for more than 150 years. It hasn't really changed since the Ancients. It's just not a wheel that needs reinventing.
Do girls receive education where you live? Just curious.
Probably. There are different communities with different views on different subjects, of which I do not seek to figure out the nitty-gritty details because they are not my personal problem.
As for methodology, most humanities classes depend on a textbook, discussion, a knowledgeable instructor, willing students, and some writing exercises. That hasn't changed for more than 150 years. It hasn't really changed since the Ancients. It's just not a wheel that needs reinventing.
I believe that you either use the machine, or else you build or program the machine, because in all other cases, you are simply trying to be the machine.
As a consequence, every time something else gets automated, particular classes no longer make sense.
You know, back in the 1850ies, when the public education system first got developed, it really made sense to be good at manual calculations and arithmetic, because back then there were quite a few clerical jobs in which you had to be good at that. It also made sense to memorize textbooks, because they tended to be expensive and also difficult to get.
I am not impressed with the amount of rote memorization that is still customary in public education. Furthermore, very few people who come out of that system have the slightest clue about epistemology.
They may have read lots of other things, but they simply fail to distinguish between knowledge and non-knowledge. But then again, that is rather a feature than a bug in the public-school indoctrination camp. I do not believe for a second that they would even like it if these students were able to make that distinction.
A lot of what the Ancients wrote, was not knowledge either. In fact, only some of it is worth reading today. But then again, the ability to determine that requires a good understanding of epistemology, and that is exactly what the public indoctrination camps will avoid.
They want to be able to bring trannies to school for them to lecture the children on gender fluidity. If the kids were able to distinguish between knowledge and mere ideology, they wouldn't believe the trannies.
I was going to respond to you, but that last paragraph disparaging trans persons made me lose my interest in anything you have to say.
I do not have any opinion about them -- seriously who cares? -- but I would not agree that they lectured anything to my children. But then again, it is a non-issue because the other parents here wouldn't agree either, and since these schools are private, it is the parents who decide.
It also allows the government to collect lots of taxes at the source. That is what tremendously increases government power. In countries where people are generally not wage slaves, the government has way less power and way less money, which makes the government also way less intrusive.
Rand-y Neoliberalism's an unmitigated bust everywhere yet trolling that same old strident libertarian scheiße is still a thing? ?????? - w/hy's t/rump f/ree!
god must be atheistOctober 22, 2019 at 00:00#3441730 likes
As part of my degree I had to take a paper called 'English Moralists', and I had a deep dislike of both groups, though, in fairness, the persons studied tended to be neither.
If English is not your first language, I pre-apologize for the harsh criticism in this post of mine. Please only regard the following if you earned any of your degrees in an English-language environment.
Check your degree again. It may be fake.
- you don't take a paper. You take a course. You take a letter. Or you take a sheet of paper. When you take a paper which is not yours, you are shoplifting.
- "English Moralists" grammatically and to the uninitiated is one group. Yet you deeply disliked both groups, the other one not named, not referenced. Makes awkward reading.
- "The persons studied tended to be neither." Neither English moralists, nor...????
Maybe you meant neither English nor moralists. You have a deep dislike for the English as a group. The first thing that pooped into my mind with this interpretation was "prejudiced". Are you Irish, from south Belfast? Or a Quebecois, from Quebec City?
In all, you must have liked the course and admired the writers whose papers you read then, because they were not English, not moralists, and not English moralists and you have a deep dislike for the English, for the moralists, and therefore for the English Moralists.
god must be atheistOctober 22, 2019 at 00:05#3441760 likes
Furthermore, very few people who come out of that system have the slightest clue about epistemology.
Heck, I am one of the great many unwashed who has no clue what the word "epistemology" means. I have got by nevertheless as a computer programmer, forum respondent, and diabetic type II in the world.
What does the word "epistemology" actually mean, @alcontali? I'm not pretending to be stupid. I am really ignorant.
Reliable statistics could be built that show that most people think Albert Einstein himself did not know what "epistemology" meant.
What does the word "epistemology" actually mean, alcontali?
Let me check if I can agree with the wikipedia page on the matter:
[i]Epistemology (/??p?st??m?l?d?i/ (About this soundlisten); from Greek ????????, epist?m?, meaning 'knowledge', and -logy) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge.
Epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief. Much debate in epistemology centers on four areas: (1) the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and how it relates to such concepts as truth, belief, and justification,[1][2] (2) various problems of skepticism, (3) the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief, and (4) the criteria for knowledge and justification. Epistemology addresses such questions as: "What makes justified beliefs justified?",[3] "What does it mean to say that we know something?",[4] and fundamentally "How do we know that we know?"[5][/i]
Yes, I think that I am more or less ok with the definition proposed, but I also think that it can be simplified.
Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, with knowledge meaning: justified belief. Hence, epistemology is the wholesale inventory of standard and accepted knowledge-justification methods.
Question:
Imagine that we have a claim Q. When can we say that Q is knowledge?
Answer:
Q is only knowledge, if there exists a statement P, as such that: P => Q, i.e. : Q "necessarily follows" from P.
The term "necessarily follows" depends on the accepted knowledge-justification method for the epistemic domain of Q. For formal (=written) knowledge, the three main, dominant knowledge-justification methods are:
Therefore, knowledge justification starts by pointing out the epistemic domain to which the question belongs. Next, we verify if the justifying argument conforms with the rules and regulations of the knowledge-justification method associated with the epistemic domain.
In this view, a knowledge claim can be verified mechanically, i.e. "objectively". In that sense, modern epistemology harks back to the 1936 Church-Turing thesis:
A claim is formal knowledge, only if there exists a purely machine-mechanical procedure to verify its justification.
god must be atheistOctober 22, 2019 at 01:21#3441970 likes
Amazing. I really appreciate your good will, and the effort you put into answering my honest question. The sad (and said) truth remains, @alcontali, that it seems that this expression, "epistemology" is too rich, roo ambitious for what I can take in and digest as knowledge. I can't grasp its essence, because its essence, as per the Vikipaedia excerpt, is numerous. I can't conceptualize this word, because it does not cover one concept, but a whole slew of concepts.
I can't grasp its essence, because its essence, as per the Vikipaedia excerpt, is numerous.
In its modern understanding, epistemology amounts to computability:
Computability is the ability to solve a problem in an effective manner. It is a key topic of the field of computability theory within mathematical logic and the theory of computation within computer science. The computability of a problem is closely linked to the existence of an algorithm to solve the problem.
Modern epistemology simply says that there must always exist a computable procedure to verify the justification of formal knowledge. Otherwise, it is not formal knowledge.
Note that there does not need to exist a computable procedure to discover the justification of formal knowledge. From Gödel's incompleteness theorems, we know that such requirement would be impossible to satisfy.
Reply to god must be atheist Cymro dw'i. My Wife always tells me English isn't my native language, which is sort of right, because I was brought up in a bit of a mixture. I always forget that we must in no circumstances ever make jokes about the poor, persecuted Master Race! :)
Amazing. I really appreciate your good will, and the effort you put into answering my honest question. The sad (and said) truth remains, alcontali, that it seems that this expression, "epistemology" is too rich, roo ambitious for what I can take in and digest as knowledge. I can't grasp its essence, because its essence, as per the Vikipaedia excerpt, is numerous. I can't conceptualize this word, because it does not cover one concept, but a whole slew of concepts.
When you're doing philosophy, you can focus on various subjects, various types of phenomena, etc. For example, there's philosophy of (or about) science, philosophy of (or about) art, philosophy of (or about) morality, etc. Some of those focuses have unique names, like aesthetics (philosophy of art) and ethics (philosophy of morality). Philosophy of science doesn't have a unique name, by the way. It's simply known as philosophy of science.
Well, epistemology is simply philosophy of knowledge. The focus is on questions like "What is knowledge," "What are the criteria for saying that we know something," etc.
In its modern understanding, epistemology amounts to computability:
That sounds fishy to me. We're flesh and blood with history, not Turing machines. I know philosophers have fantasized about perfect languages which would allow for god machines with which we could crank out truth after truth after truth....But that strikes me not only as impossible but also undesirable.
[quote=Dostoevsky]
But these are all golden dreams. Oh, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when man has acted only from his own interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, CONSCIOUSLY, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness.
[/quote]
Modern epistemology simply says that there must always exist a computable procedure to verify the justification of formal knowledge. Otherwise, it is not formal knowledge.
What I take from modern philosophy is that most knowledge and the most important kinds of knowledge are not only not formal but not explicit at all. Formal knowledge is charming. It's a little star that twinkles in the darkness. 2 + 2 = 4.
god must be atheistOctober 22, 2019 at 23:56#3445080 likes
When you're doing philosophy, you can focus on various subjects, various types of phenomena, etc. For example, there's philosophy of (or about) science, philosophy of (or about) art, philosophy of (or about) morality, etc. Some of those focuses have unique names, like aesthetics (philosophy of art) and ethics (philosophy of morality). Philosophy of science doesn't have a unique name, by the way. It's simply known as philosophy of science.
Well, epistemology is simply philosophy of knowledge. The focus is on questions like "What is knowledge," "What are the criteria for saying that we know something," etc.
Thanks, folks, we found a winner.
Thanks, TS.
god must be atheistOctober 23, 2019 at 00:13#3445160 likes
I strongly believe that "the most intolerant wins".
You change the world, bit by bit, by being stubborn, intransigent, intolerant, and recalcitrant.
Albert Einstein, Karl Guttenberg, Keppler, Galileo, the inventor of the Steam Engine, the sheep, the wheel, intromarital sex, the Information Superhighway, were all stubborn derrieres?
Then again, Ghenghis Khan was, as well as Lenin, Hitler, Moses, Jesus, and God.
I know philosophers have fantasized about perfect languages which would allow for god machines with which we could crank out truth after truth after truth...
That would not be possible anyway. Knowledge cannot be discovered by machines. It can be verified by machines, however. Furthermore, only empirical knowledge purports to somehow correspond to the truth.
What I take from modern philosophy is that most knowledge and the most important kinds of knowledge are not only not formal but not explicit at all. Formal knowledge is charming.
The problem with informal knowledge is that it has no objective justification. Therefore, its status as knowledge is necessarily uncertain.
Deleted UserOctober 23, 2019 at 18:00#3448210 likes
That's not a view I agree with. So how would it be the case that you find that everywhere in the world?
I completely understand why you’ve made this point. However, “Everywhere” here doesn’t mean literally everywhere. This is the compartmentalised geographic everywhere, meaning in every country. What is trying to be said here, is that the majorities of most countries would agree with at the very least, not having unnecessary suffering inflicted upon themselves individually, as a community, as a country. The majority of people on the planet probably have at least one person in their life who will definitely not want them unnecessarily harmed, whether it is yourself, parents, family, friends, employers, colleagues and even random good natured strangers who try and apply that to everyone. Even the parents of murderers are still prone to not wishing anymore unnecessary harm to their child than they’ve already caused for themselves by committing murder.
@StreetlightX Might I ask that this debate about moral nihilism/relativism/whatever be split into its own thread? Would rather it not swamp this one. Thanks in advance.
Reply to Artemis I mean technically it's self-published online right now. I don't have any particular plans to get like a professional publisher to put it in dead tree format or anything like that, though if somehow that happened that'd be cool I guess, but I'm not looking to make or spend any money on the project.
I am hoping to get some pseudo-peer-review from folks here on this forum once I'm done with it. (Over the course of this year I restarted the project from scratch, and have just recently finished my first pass of writing it all out in the new format, and now I'm spending the rest of the year going back through 300-something notes to myself I've accumulated over the past decade-plus to make sure I didn't miss writing about anything I thought was important, and then when I'm done with that I'll ask for proper feedback).
StreetlightOctober 24, 2019 at 00:46#3449170 likes
The problem with informal knowledge is that it has no objective justification. Therefore, its status as knowledge is necessarily uncertain.
You seem to imply that certainty requires justification. I don't think so. To even begin to justify is to assume that there is a community out there, a world out there. One has to already speak a language. Such certainties can't be justified, since we need them in order to justify.
Thing is, everyone knows something. Even if they don't know why that knowledge is justified.
Think about the classical division between coherence and correspondence theories of truth. Let's assume a debate between a strong coherence theorist and a strong correspondence theorist. Both can't be correct, yet both possess knowledge. The inability to codify or explicate the foundations of knowledge doesn't militate against the acquisition of knowledge.
Here, less than half of correspondents have done any serious study.
True, but I count about 20 or so people involved in this discussion and 31 polled, so most who polled also contributed some comments about it. Few of these are the contributors I would suspect have done some serious study, so I'm not so sure the poll is reflective of the community, but you may be right.
Of equal interest to me is the very premise behind such a question. This being an anonymous site, no one has any constraint to give an honest answer, so respondents, I think, will divide into three camps.
Those who see their best interests served by claiming some qualifications (whether real or not is irrelevant here).
Those who feel that they cannot sustain such an impression (again whether real but forgotten or not real makes no difference) and so had better go with a robust defence of auto didactia.
Those who feel that either claim (again no matter how truthful) automatically makes them seem like someone in either of the first two camps and so refrains from saying anything.
I suspect that serious students are here may well disproportionately fall into the last category and so be less well represented in the poll (presuming most who vote also comment, or course).
Reply to Isaac Interesting. I would assume that anyone professing any interest in philosophy would already have come to terms with the non-negotiability of truth.
Those who feel that they cannot sustain such an impression (again whether real but forgotten or not real makes no difference) and so had better go with a robust defence of auto didactia
Or they are the types, who for whatever reason reject the idea that formal training is important/beneficial for doing philosophy. (Fear of brainwashing seems to be a phobia possible of explaining that for some.)
Terrapin StationOctober 25, 2019 at 12:57#3452770 likes
True, but I count about 20 or so people involved in this discussion and 31 polled, so most who polled also contributed some comments about it. Few of these are the contributors I would suspect have done some serious study, so I'm not so sure the poll is reflective of the community, but you may be right.
Of equal interest to me is the very premise behind such a question. This being an anonymous site, no one has any constraint to give an honest answer, so respondents, I think, will divide into three camps.
Those who see their best interests served by claiming some qualifications (whether real or not is irrelevant here).
Those who feel that they cannot sustain such an impression (again whether real but forgotten or not real makes no difference) and so had better go with a robust defence of auto didactia.
Those who feel that either claim (again no matter how truthful) automatically makes them seem like someone in either of the first two camps and so refrains from saying anything.
I suspect that serious students are here may well disproportionately fall into the last category and so be less well represented in the poll (presuming most who vote also comment, or course).
People have a tendency online, especially in anonymous contexts, to be skeptical of any claims of achievement or status. There are a number of reasons for this, but I suspect that one of the primary reasons is that people tend to assume that the anonymous people they're interacting with must be more or less in the same boat as they are.
It's rather pointless to claim any particular achievements or status online. The vast majority of the time people either just ignore it or they get pissy about it.
1.) The evidence is out there for anyone to see, that of all the trades available for human endeavor, philosophers tend to pick on each other moreso than others.
2.) The more one exposes himself to the thoughts of philosophers, the more he tends to think himself worthy of being the copy of one. And the more one adopts the philosophy of an established author, the more he relinquishes the philosophy of others, at the real risk of becoming the proverbial one-trick pony in the world’s metaphysical rodeo.
3.) I’m never going to tell anybody how much philosophy I’ve studied, because I’m self-antiquated by 2.) and thereby I am deathly afraid of 1.)
This being an anonymous site, no one has any constraint to give an honest answer,
Thing is, unless I'm reading the site interface wrong, there's no way to tell who voted for what, only how many people voted for each option, so unless a voter also comments to say how they voted, voting is just throwing an anonymous token in a bucket.
I will say that the results so far surprise me some. I was expecting mostly autodidacts, then students, then decreasing numbers of the increasingly higher degrees, and while there are mostly autodidacts and degrees in descending order as expected, I'm surprised that there are no students or associate's degrees.
I'm surprised that there are no students or associate's degrees.
I dunno about the associate's degrees (maybe those are just in general less common?) but I assume students of philosophy share at least one reason with professors of philosophy for not being here: they're already philosophizing all day long, plus homework and/or grading, and the last thing you want to do is get into another conversation about free will.
I will say that the results so far surprise me some. I was expecting mostly autodidacts, then students, then decreasing numbers of the increasingly higher degrees, and while there are mostly autodidacts and degrees in descending order as expected, I'm surprised that there are no students or associate's degrees.
Hm, I don't post much, but I might have voted, as voting as a low-effort activity. But I couldn't because what formal education I have doesn't easily fit into the poll.
First, the subdivision of school/university isn't easily translatable. I'm Austrian, have an elementary school, some sort of middle school, and then some sort of commercial college. After that I went to University where I earned a "Magister" (which is probably somewhat comparable to a Master but in reality might be somewhere between a Bachelor and Master, not at all sure).
Next problem I have is how to map "philosophy" onto my education. Philosophy wasn't part of the elementary school education. "Philosophy" was part of the syllabus in Middle school only in the sense that it was integrated in "German" as part of German/Austrian literary history. It could have been part of my education had I stayed on the school for 4 more years (roughly a highschool equivalent - and I would have had to choose either a humanities or a nat-sci branch) , but I changed to a commercial college, where philosophy wasn't part of the syllabus much (you don't get through a commercial college without hearing about "the invisible Hand" and stuff like that).
However, philosophy was a huge part of may sociology studies at University. Social philosophy (utopias, anarchy, etc.), philosophy of science (even if you didn't take the specifically targeted courses, which I did, you'd hear about Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, etc.), and depending on the theories you end up interested in you'll need to familiarise yourself with certain philosophers, though secondary literature usually suffices. (Marx, Husserl, Derrida...)
I'd say "some incidental university classes" would maybe fit what I went through? I definitely don't have a degree in philisophy, though my univerity degree has included the most philosophy, formally. But it's not easily comparable to either a Bachelor or a Master (though it's definitely not a doctorate). And some of my philosophical knowledge is audtodidact (e.g. whatever little I know about Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Sartre...).
As it is, I finished my degree over 20 years ago and have never done anything with it - I'm both out of the loop and unpractised, and I'm not confident at all. I can read logical notation but sometimes need a table to remind myself what some of the less frequent signs mean, and it's slooooowwwwww going in any case. An autodidact with the adequate passion will know more than I do.
So what should I vote? Autodidact? Some incidental college classes? I chose not to vote at all.
Reply to Dawnstorm I did worry that differences in educational systems would make this poll difficult to answer for some. In my American English dialect "college" and "university" are roughly synonyms. (There are two-year colleges, which give Associate's degrees, that are not universities, but they are equivalent to the lower division of a Bachelor's degree, and many people do two years there, then finish up the last two years of their Bachelor's degree at a proper four-year university; I did that myself).
In any case, since it sounds like you didn't major in philosophy, but studied some of it as coursework in another degree, I would put "some incidental college classes", which is meant to include that kind of scenario. (I would likewise answer "some incidental college classes" if the same kind of poll were asked about sociology or cultural anthropology or religious studies, for example, since I did a bunch of those as electives alongside my philosophy major).
Reply to Pfhorrest "Some incidental college classes" would have been my first choice, even though it didn't occur to me that "university" and "college" could be synonyms. Thanks for the clarification. I voted now.
Or they are the types, who for whatever reason reject the idea that formal training is important/beneficial for doing philosophy.
Yeah, I think a lot of people confuse philosophy (small p) with Philosophy (capital P). You can train in both, but you can only really claim authority in the latter. Philosophy (as the imfamous badinage goes) really is the history of who said what when, and people who haven't learnt it aren't going to have a clue no matter what their native skill. Contrarily, philosophy with a small p is more like a skill, one could be trained in it (and so good), but equally one might simply be natively good at it, or train themselves. And yes, those who choose to get trained in it formally will inevitably pick up a bit of 'brainwashing' along with the methodology. It's not hard to break out of, but I think it's naive to image some kind of culturally neutral 'how to think' instruction could ever happen.
unless a voter also comments to say how they voted, voting is just throwing an anonymous token in a bucket.
Yeah, that's why I linked the number of posters (20 odd) to the number of voters (31). I was presuming that most people who voted also commented, but if not, then you're right.
Philosophy (as the imfamous badinage goes) really is the history of who said what when, and people who haven't learnt it aren't going to have a clue no matter what their native skill.
I had that impression when I first started studying it too, especially when I would be introduced to a new topic, form an opinion on it quickly, and someone would immediately label me a Whoever-ist, as though that dead Greek guy owned the idea I had just come up with myself. In time though, I came to view it more sympathetically: it's not so much that it's important who said what, as it is what questions are there to ask (by looking at all the questions that have been asked), and what is the range of possible answers there are to them (by looking at all the different answers that have been proposed), with the names of the figures asking questions and proposing answers often just convenient names for those questions and answers, because we've got to label them something if we want to refer to them without restating them in whole over and over again.
nd yes, those who choose to get trained in it formally will inevitably pick up a bit of 'brainwashing' along with the methodology. It's not hard to break out of, but I think it's naive to image some kind of culturally neutral 'how to think' instruction could ever happen.
One of the things that I liked most about philosophy classes as opposed to any other humanities classes was how we were never judged on what our answer was, but on how well-supported our argument for it was. So long as you explicitly called out any strange assumptions you were starting from, and made only valid inferences from them, any strange conclusion could be acceptable; how you get there was what was important. In contrast, most other humanities classes seemed unbearably dogmatic, whole fields often taking for granted philosophical positions that I knew were contentious because we were just talking about the ongoing arguments for against them in another class an hour ago!
SophistiCatOctober 26, 2019 at 15:21#3457180 likes
Philosophy (as the imfamous badinage goes) really is the history of who said what when, and people who haven't learnt it aren't going to have a clue no matter what their native skill.
As an outsider, I get a perhaps distorted impression that much of academic philosophy is indeed more of a philology - a study, interpretation and analysis - sometimes apologetic, rarely critical - of texts, as well as a history of ideas, or as you said, who said what when.
philology - a study, interpretation and analysis - sometimes apologetic, rarely critical - of texts, as well as a history of ideas, or as you said, who said what when.
Probably depends on the department and who your profs are. My professors did that but also had us study texts of various sides of a debate on which basis we then critically discussed the subject as a group.
But there is a lot to be said for slowing students down in their knee-jerk criticisms and trying to get them to understand before they disagree.
And yes, those who choose to get trained in it formally will inevitably pick up a bit of 'brainwashing' along with the methodology. It's not hard to break out of, but I think it's naive to image some kind of culturally neutral 'how to think' instruction could ever happen.
As you might be aware of/be interested to learn, there are several contemporary capital-P-hilosophers taking on that very issue. I'm currently reading Harvey Siegel's "Educating Reason" after having read "Rationality Redeemed" a little while ago. He's most commonly referenced in Phil of Education circles, but he is more broadly applicable, I think. Anywho, he argues in that first book that a certain degree/kind of indoctrination is necessary in education, but that of course you're counterbalancing that (hopefully) with giving students the very skills to then question the "indoctrinated" values, etc.
I am curious what people class as ‘self taught’. If it means they’ve read a couple of philosophical works then I’d call that ‘Not at all’.
I've read a couple of philosophical works. But mostly, I've lived for 70+ years and have actively inquired what the nature of our life together is. I've read history, science, sociology, psychology, politics, theology, literature, etc.
Mostly though, it is reflecting on life as we live it, for better and for worse. That is the main entrepôt for evaluating reality. Scholars write weighty books which are quoted here (Aristotle, Hume, Nietzsche and so on). Were all the books in the philosophical library to disappear, it would only be the end of philosophy as a 'literature'. Philosophy as a practice would continue on.
If all the books about yoga and meditation were to disappear, yoga and meditation would continue. There is a literature of yoga and a practice of yoga; the two are not the same.
It is good for civilization to have the literature of various and sundry fields: accounting, yoga, medieval French poetry, geology, history, math, architecture, agriculture, and much more. It is good to read and learn from the literature of the various fields. But in philosophy (or theology) it is important to live the field.
It is certainly the case that many people do not inquire into the nature of life together, and do not gain much insight as time goes on. Some of them are faultless, and some of them are guilty of the shallowest, narrowest, of lives.
Anywho, he argues in that first book that a certain degree/kind of indoctrination is necessary in education, but that of course you're counterbalancing that (hopefully) with giving students the very skills to then question the "indoctrinated" values, etc.
That's interesting. Contrast that with the work of free-educationalists like Sugata Mitra or Peter Gray. I'm not so sure the initial indoctrination is required because I'm not so sure the initial teaching is required. Put someone in an educational establishment with a test/reward system and you immediately set up a limbic system response which inhibits activity in the very frontal cortex you're hoping to stimulate.
It's surprising how children question indoctrination when left to their own devices anyway.
with the names of the figures asking questions and proposing answers often just convenient names for those questions and answers, because we've got to label them something if we want to refer to them without restating them in whole over and over again.
:up:
Right. I'd just add that philosophers can be enjoyed also as characters. We get to know strange, fascinating personalities.
One of the things that I liked most about philosophy classes as opposed to any other humanities classes was how we were never judged on what our answer was, but on how well-supported our argument for it was.
Whether an argument is 'well-supported' or not is no less questionable a framework than the philosophical positions you could not bear the humanities classes taking for granted. Rationality is just a way of thinking afterall. No system can justify itself without assuming axioms. I'm not saying the humanities can't be dogmatic in areas where they really shouldn't be, but in their fundamental philosophical commitments. That's just not what they're there to study,
I like sushiOctober 27, 2019 at 09:42#3459330 likes
I think there is a distinct difference between studying about the development of human ideas and thinking about life. In terms of practical living (laws, politics and ethics) we’re all reasonably involved. I doubt many people really sit down and thrash out an essay on the subject that goes beyond the surface details - there is a tendency to go with anecdotal evidence and loose analogy when it comes to armchair philosophising
I had a few classes of it during highschool, but nowadays I'm reading Dolores Canon's books and having reiki lessons which has surely helped me to widen my knowledge regarding the philosophy field and what it entitles, more specifically metaphysics! :)
Sure. Pragmatism is all about actual effects in the world. I don't see that implying any kind of relativism though, if that is what you were suggesting?
Reply to Mark Dennis Yeah I would like to know that too. Or even who the few people with Masters degrees are.
Deleted UserNovember 06, 2019 at 12:00#3493970 likes
Reply to Pfhorrest I did a masters in applied ethics but I kind of regret voting and divulging that here. Dunno who the others are but one of those votes is mine.
Terrapin StationNovember 06, 2019 at 15:24#3494490 likes
I did a masters in applied ethics but I kind of regret voting and divulging that here.
Yeah, as I wrote earlier: "People have a tendency online, especially in anonymous contexts, to be skeptical of any claims of achievement or status . . . It's rather pointless to claim . . . The vast majority of the time people either just ignore it or they get pissy about it."
I love philosophy. I just wish I weren't this lazy so I could read more about it. : (
Deleted UserNovember 06, 2019 at 16:02#3494640 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station As they should be really. I don’t require anyone’s belief in my claim for it to be an honest one. I’m not a moderator here so it doesn’t give me any authority and I would expect anyone else who has these qualifications would know that. Realistically the only thing the qualification gives me is the ability to evaluate logical consistency in Ought moral arguments and historical knowledge of those arguments. Correctness of conclusion isn’t something I can claim authority on unless I can point to real life examples where the conclusion can maybe be evaluated against as either correct or incorrect within that context. However it will always be in line with the pragmatic definition of truth.
However without divulging my identity and my published works no one needs to believe in that authority at all.
It is ultimately pointless to divulge though. I’ve only had the qualification for a year, so I’m chalking it up to youthful exuberance/arrogance on my part that I answered the question in the OP.
Terrapin StationNovember 06, 2019 at 16:08#3494660 likes
I don't think that people should be pissy about it. ;-)
Part of what I left out in quoting myself was that I think the background of the reactions is that people tend to figure that the people they're interacting with are probably in the same boat that they are. That's not a very intelligent thing to figure, though. More likely there are people with a wide variety of statuses, backgrounds, etc. interacting with each other on boards like this.
Deleted UserNovember 06, 2019 at 16:14#3494700 likes
Are we going to get into another pointless debate over me agreeing with you that it is pointless? I’m sorry I answered the question honestly and that makes you feel intimidated. You happy?
Terrapin StationNovember 06, 2019 at 16:17#3494730 likes
Was I being pissy about it? I was answering you tagging me?
It was a joke. I said that people tend to ignore or be pissy about status/achievement claims, and then you endorsed that "they should be." (I know you were saying should be skeptical--hence the joke.)
Deleted UserNovember 06, 2019 at 16:19#3494740 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station in what way is it a joke to misquote yourself and then mock me for the response to the full quote you omitted? It just makes you seem dishonest.
Deleted UserNovember 06, 2019 at 16:20#3494770 likes
"Does anyone else feel like a fair number of individuals on this site could do with some humility? . . . we may have differing views, cultures and backgrounds . . ." Etc.
Posting like a defensive, oversenstive tool in response to a joke (that I shouldn't have had to explain in the first place . . . partially because explaining ruins jokes and the last thing I want to do is get into an argument about a joke) doesn't seem in line with the attitude you were encouraging in that other thread. (Although I knew that wouldn't last long because of the overall tenor of interaction in this place.)
Deleted UserNovember 06, 2019 at 16:53#3494950 likes
So it’s not humble to honestly tell someone your qualifications when asked? Okay. I’ll lie next time to protect your ego even though I never meant to attack it in the first place.
Terrapin StationNovember 06, 2019 at 16:57#3494990 likes
Right. I figured as much. I joke around a lot normally. But try to just not worry about it. I'm more interested in your response to the other thread (the ethics thing).
Reply to Mark Dennis I don't think Terrapin was saying that answering the question about your education was un-humble, but that your reaction to his joke seemed less than humble (because it seemed defensive, and defensiveness can be a sign of fragile egotism). But you just didn't get the joke, so I think it's understandable that you would react differently than if you had understood he was joking. And it's clear that there's already some bad blood between you two from elsewhere on the forum, so tensions are understandably high to begin with.
I notice that we now have at least one student, a couple more people who say they have no philosophical education at all, and someone who took some pre-college classes. Welcome all!
I'm curious, whoever it is that took some pre-college classes, what they were like. I had a philosophy class in high school and I don't feel like I came away from it with an understanding of what philosophy was at all, but that could have been because I was a dense scientism-ist at the time.
(We really need a word for a proponent of scientism, because "scientist" obviously isn't it).
PantagruelNovember 22, 2019 at 16:26#3552920 likes
I had a philosophy class in high school and I don't feel like I came away from it with an understanding of what philosophy was at all, but that could have been because I was a dense scientism-ist at the time.
I think being a teenager as well as a total novice at anything at all, including philosophy, just means that in the intro courses lots and lots is going to be lost on you.
After I graduated from college, I worked for several years as a paraprofessional in the public school system (one-on-one with disabled students who may or may not be integrating into regular classrooms) and so basically retook a lot of school classes with my students. I kept thinking "Wait! I learned this before? Where the heck was I? If all students actually remembered all this stuff after school, everyone would be so smart!"
(I remember the teacher of the class asking something like what's my philosophy, and I started to explain string theory to him, completely not getting what the question even was. A few years later, in a political science class my first year in college, I remember thinking that "my philosophy" was an ethical stance I had come up with that was basically utilitarianism though I'd never heard that word yet).
basically retook a lot of school classes with my students. I kept thinking "Wait! I learned this before? Where the heck was I? If all students actually remembered all this stuff after school, everyone would be so smart!"
I remember having a similar thought after re-learning some basic grammar concepts (like subjects and objects of sentences, predicates, etc) incidental to learning logic as I started to study philosophy, though in my case it was more that memories of having studied these topics in elementary school came back to me as I learned them anew, and I was shocked to remember that something like this was being taught in elementary school.
I think an offshoot of that thought process was how I came to the conclusion that basic propositional logic should be taught in junior high alongside elementary algebra, since they use a lot of the same mental skills. I literally exclaimed out loud, upon seeing propositional logic for the first time in my first English class at college, "it's like algebra with words!"
Comments (157)
That was your teachers' goal! :wink:
update:
I don't count my formal education / training; pace Nicholas of Cusa - in philosophy (as opposed to "Philosophy") only unlearned ignorance matters.
Silly me... I thought he and she and he and he (have taken two electives in my pursuing a degree in math, and after that, many years later, I audited two courses (audit means listen to the lectures, but not work toward a credit, not needing to give account of my progress via tests etc.)) did it for the money.
I am sure it's @3017amen. The rest of us are pretty stupid so we act reasonably. That's what I'd say.
Same as life's.
FWIW, I think it's interesting to see the percentage of people here with formal training versus self-taught.
I mean, I always had my suspicions, but it's still interesting.
Anything else is just on my own or with others.
I had some philosophy classes at university but back then they rather struck me as "unimportant".
The issue got propelled to the forefront because of the ontological and epistemological questions that arose while being involved in software engineering projects: Is there nothing more serious than the snake-oil bullshit en provenance from commercial software vendors?
With free and open-source software (FOSS) going mainstream, that particular problem got smaller. Still, FOSS tends to create its own trouble. It is still possible to start hyping nonsense and push millions of people in the wrong direction.
What I learned from the issues in that microcosmos, is: If millions of people believe in nonsense, this is always the result of a small cartel having a vested interest, and spending a lot of money, in getting these people to believe that nonsense. The converse is also true: If powerful interests spend a lot of money on stamping out a particular, popular belief, then this belief is most likely truthful. In that sense, the beliefs propagated by the ruling elite is almost a perfect "How not to do it" manual.
Therefore, the challenge is to learn how to reconstruct the truth from their lies.
A gloriously cynical half-truth. Perfect p0m0 ur-conspiracy fodder. Amen. :pray:
Well, knee-jerk distrust of the ruling elite -- an otherwise standard libertarian view -- has worked out really nicely for me. It has allowed me to dodge quite a few bullets, the most important of which is that you cannot, under no circumstances, organize your private life on the jurisdictional territory of a so-called western democracy. That is a gigantic bullet dodged.
Jurisdiction decoupling -and shopping is simply a necessity.
For example, do you buy the house in which you live?
No. Never.
Buy a house in another jurisdiction, rent it out, and with the proceeds, pay the rent of the house in which you live. You will still own a house -- if that is what you want -- but it will be several orders of magnitude more difficult to confiscate it from you.
I totally distrust the ruling elite, and that view is not negotiable. Furthermore, I still need to run into the first person who will defeat me in stubbornly nay saying.
The power of the ruling elite ultimately rests on the fact that you trust them, even though you have no reason to do so.
Their power is generally exercised by broadcasting deceptive and manipulative messages that usually include some kind of fake morality, such as e.g. :
"Pay lots of taxes to us because that is the right thing to do!"
Yeah, why exactly?
The fact that the ruling elite brandish their weapons and wholesale threaten violence is way less of a source of power than generally believed. It is the ability to fabricate morality, which the masses will then believe, that gives them their power.
It is obvious why the ruling elite may not like religion. It is clear that religion can act as an impediment to fabricating new moralities. It could also assist in doing that, but that depends on the religion. Hence, the religions that the ruling elite dislikes, are always the good ones. There can only be some truth in them.
So, you need to investigate every arrangement in which you enter and dig up the underlying, implicit assumptions of unwarranted trust that you would extend to the ruling elite. For example, do you trust your savings to the fiat bankstering system? Halt there, because doing that, is wrong. You should never trust the ruling bankstering elite.
A ruling elite should always be treated with utter distrust, and all their messages should always be investigated thoroughly, in order to find new reasons to totally disbelieve them.
:chin:
< Sample quotes on 'elites & religion' >
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful."
~Lucius Annaeus Seneca
"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."
~Napoleon Bonaparte
[i]"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions."[/i]
~Karl Marx
Even if you’re self-taught that means - to me at least - that you’ve actively written about various works and have reasonable grasp of logic, or that you’ve seriously studied philosophical works rather than merely perusing them.
There is no better way to pacify a righteous rage at real injustice than to give it a fake but clear decoy and let it feel falsely empowered through continuously destroying it (cf. ritual, compulsion, the need for a scapegoat to contain rage) - Cynicus of Alexandria
Cynicus, fake as he is, was only scratching the surface. I think, if he was real, he'd have something to add about religions based around sacrifice and the tonal quality - straight prophets- of those who get drawn to the performative rejection of those religions. As Joanna Newsom says 'what's redacted will repeat.'
:cool:
Seneca was talking about the Roman imperial cult, which was an umbrella of numerous pagan theories, including the Greek pantheon, but of which the truly active element was to believe that the adoptive son of the previous emperor was the son of a god.
It is a well-known consideration that you should not believe your own lies. That will obviously go wrong.
Therefore, the youngsters of the ruling elite ("the (future) rulers") were be trained by Greek philosophers ("the wise") to disbelieve that lie, but never to express their disbelief in any way in front of commoners ("the common people"), who were supposed to, and nudged to, believe in the divinity of the emperor.
Two religions were hated by the Roman imperial elite: Judaism and Christianity. These beliefs were throwing a spanner in the works.
Judaism was staunchly monotheist and did not allow for any other divinity that the single one they worshipped. Hence, it was subjected to violent reprisals by the Roman elite, who even destroyed their temple. Still, the Romans acquiesced and compromised. They tolerated Judaism, on the condition that the Jews paid a heavy tax, the Fiscus Iudaicus, and that they henceforth refrained -- on a mos maiorum basis -- from converting anybody else to their religion.
Christianity was possibly even worse. Christians said that the alleged criminal hanging from a cross was the true son of a god, and not that Roman emperor, who was clearly just an impostor. So, they worshipped the man hanging from a cross while refusing to pay tribute to the Roman emperor. In fact, this was the only firmly-enforced rule in early Christianity. The early Christians did not particularly care what else you did, as long as you did not pay tribute to the Roman emperor.
Lapsi. After the 250 AD Decian Persecution, Cyprian of Carthage held a council sometime after Easter 251 AD, in which Lapsi were classified into five categories:
Early Christianity was anti-Statism on steroids.
Unfortunately, its doctrines were sufficiently malleable for the ruling elite to shoehorn its imperialist principles into it. The very first principle issued under supervision of Constantine the Great was a complicated statement meant to disavow strict monotheism: the Nicaean trinity. Just like the Holy Ghost, the Roman emperor became an aspect of God, instead of a god in his own right. Christianity was simply re-purposed to allow the Roman empire to organize religious persecutions at a level never seen before.
But then again, at that point, there was no place any longer for a conspiracy between "the wise" and "the rulers" on an atheist basis. There are modern attempts at resuscitating that practice by using atheist scientists to disparage contemporary religion to the youngsters of the ruling elite, but it certainly does not work as well as in antiquity.
It’s impossible to read everything. I’m not really up on any current philosophers - one or two sparsely, that’s all.
I never approach ‘philosophy’ with affection.
The issue is that "autodidactic" is not an answer to the question of "how much" education you have. Reading a single book on your own is autodidactic education.
The structure of the poll also suggests that autodidact is less than "some college classes". Perhaps there should be different categories for "some eclectic reading" and "thorough studies"
As for myself, not a huge amount ... Plato x3, Aristotle x1, Heidegger x1, Kant x1, Husserl x1, Nietzsche x3, John Stuart Mill x1, Rousseau x1 and a few others I hesitate to call works of philosophy including Camus x1, Schiller x1 and Foucault x1.
So that makes the total count of books read from cover to cover 12. I actually thought it was less than that and I’m probably forgetting one or two thinner volumes.
There are about another dozen I have not read from cover to cover; either I got distracted halfway through and/or I bought them more to skim through (and reference) than to sit down and read front to back. Of note, for good and bad, would be Wittgenstein (have read it in fits and starts), various works of Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Derrida, Hume and Russell. Most of those I’ve only read the odd essay or chapter of.
I think that falls into the category of ‘self-taught’. I did attend a class - wasn’t at all interesting to me at the time - on existentialism when I was 17 or 18. I naively expected the class to involve lively discussion and people to express their ideas and views. It was incredibly stale and I’d probably feel fairly similar about the class today if I attended it due to the manner it was advertised.
Anyway, I read these things because I thought it would be stimulating. In some cases it has been. Kant was a turning point for me as was Heidegger. With Kant I couldn’t believe something could hold such a complex investigation in their head let alone express such a complex question with such precision - toughest read of my life by far (I remember picking up Dickens after finishing CoPR and it felt like I was reading a comic book!). Heidegger’s Being and Time struck me because I was shocked that anyone could regard such obvious sophistry as ‘philosophy’ and it quickly made me realise that what I had been thinking, and considering writing, was hardly obtuse compared to imprecision and evasion Heidegger uses - not that I didn’t find any it worthwhile: I certainly did.
Of all I would say Nietzsche and Husserl are the most valuable to me - maybe because they are modern? I’ve looked ag some contemporary stuff from time to time but find it either superficial or obscure (I’m not going to pretend I‘ve looked that hard at contemporary works though!)
Given what I’ve laid out above - and to add I’m interested in aesthetics, ethics, psychology, neuroscience and anthropology - could anyone suggest a contemporary philosopher I might find of interest across these areas? May as well ask after that little biographical account! :D
Not quite. I can't.
I can read a 10 page article, if.
Most books are padded to the max, and i have no patience of waddling through the chaff to get to the pearl.
I found Plato's Republic refreshingly modern, readable, and lively, and yet that was too much, too long, for me as well. I guess for most students of philosophy in first year classes that is the norm. But the book, listen to the prof, not read the book, and write a C- essay for a term paper. Except mine were A+. (At the risk of sounding boastful.)
I have found Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Incerto series of books a really good read: "Black swan", "Antifragile", "Fooled by randomness", "Skin in the game", ... I have also read many of his blog posts. His focus is on epistemology, i.e. the question, "What is knowledge?", always centred around, and starting from the question of how we deal with randomness.
You mean like law or business ethics?
That could still be law or business ethics :lol:
free enterprising ? $s ? power ? influence (conspire?) ? maintain (free enterprising etc) ? ...
We have known for a long time now that capitalism is not the same as free enterprise.
That confusion was deliberately introduced. Capitalism is about having two classes of people in the economy: the class that owns the means of production and the class that sells labour to them. What does that have to do with "free enterprise"? Capitalism is much more like feudalism, where the nobles owned the land, and the serfs worked it with their labour.
The funny thing is that the so-called defenders of labour, i.e. the trade unions, have long ago been co-opted to defend capitalism.
The trade unions want all employment in the economy to be funnelled through wage-slave contracts between capitalist corporations and the thoroughly individualized workers whom they would pretend to represent. The trade unions defend that view with deceptive and manipulative messages claiming that "Your wage-slavery is good for you". The trade unions want to prevent at all cost that employees, who are dependent for work and income on their employers, would become more autonomous or even self-employed.
It is the wage-slave system that is the corner stone of capitalism.
It also allows the government to collect lots of taxes at the source. That is what tremendously increases government power. In countries where people are generally not wage slaves, the government has way less power and way less money, which makes the government also way less intrusive.
By collecting your income as a salary, you perpetuate this system of wage slavery. I never do that. I have always invoiced for whatever I sold. Since switching to bitcoin, I also refuse to accept payments into a bank account. By accepting that kind of payments, you perpetuate the system of bank slavery.
I strongly believe that "the most intolerant wins".
You change the world, bit by bit, by being stubborn, intransigent, intolerant, and recalcitrant. You win by defeating the adversary in nay saying. Never listen to any manipulative or deceptive messages, and always repeat your nonnegotiable position. That is how you make the other side cave in; or else, you just move on to the next potential trade. Don't look back.
It's funny because, actually, business ethics is a kind of applied ethics, as you should know (?).
And as broad as applied ethics can be, presumably you would have had to narrow it down in some fashion or another by the end of your studies.
There are schools that have applied ethics degrees:
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=applied+ethics+degree
I realize that. But in the course of a master's degree in any field you'll narrow your research down to a specfic project by the end, even if you did start out with a broad education.
Notice there are no master's theses titled "applied ethics: a broad and general analysis of all that might apply."
And he was definitely wrong suggesting business ethics is not always a branch of applied ethics.
So, I could lie and say that a few business ethics classes amount to a masters in applied ethics (it doesn’t) just to satisfy your preconceived notions or I could just tell you that applied ethics is really broad because it is.
The question was what level of education do you have? Not; what was your masters thesis about? I don’t really have time to sort out your trust issues.
Methinks the Mark doth protest too much.
Far from being annoyed, I'm rather amused. What does this have to do with trust? I never invoked trust. I was just curious what your specialization was, and then I pointed out an error in your post.
But the case does get curiouser and curiouser. Now you're claiming studies in business ethics are not a branch of philosophy because not all people agree that all business practices are ethical? Huh?
That's like saying studying socialism is not part of political theory because not all people agree that it's a viable system. Or like saying pro-life positions are not part of the study of ethics because not everyone agrees with them.
Yeah, your thesis is going to be on something more specific, but the degree would be in Applied Ethics. You didn't ask him what his thesis was on, though.
I've been asking him what he specialized in. Same dif.
No I’m hinting at what I believe. You really need to read what is being said more carefully. You’re using false equivalences and you’re suspiciously trying to dig up identifying details on me. I’m not telling you what I specialised in as within five minutes you’ll look it up and learn my identity.
Does a masters in applied ethics include classes on business ethics? Yes. Do I have to agree with everything said in that class? No. Did I specialise in business ethics? No. Your questions are answered.
Like what?
Quoting Mark Dennis
Qed.
Quoting Mark Dennis
As is your prerogative. Does your agreement with the class determine whether it is a branch of applied ethics? Nopity nope nope.
Quoting Mark Dennis
That's all projection on your part.
Drop it, please. It's not the "interrogate Mark Dennis" thread.
For the love... I'm not interrogating anyone. I asked a simple question and then pointed out that he's wrong about business ethics, and continues to say incorrect things about it. What constitutes business ethics might belong in another thread, but it hardly is an interrogation to disagree with someone about that.
Everything else implied by persons other than myself in this thread about my intentions is just projection.
Fine, we'll leave that for another thread then.
I never asked for them. But you're still wrong about business ethics.
“You mean like law or business ethics?” No, it is a Masters in Applied ethics. It’s not the same degree as business ethics. It’s not wrong to say they are two different certifications.
What I actually said: “it isn’t the same as a masters in business ethics.” because they are two different certifications. However I never once made the claim that they don’t relate to each other. Not once. You are saying I’ve said that, but I never said it once. Copy and paste exactly where I said “they don’t relate to one another.” They aren’t the same certification is what I am saying and it is all I ever claimed to say. So where are you getting these notions that I’m saying wrong things about these fields as a whole? Words into my mouth the entire time and the entire argument you’re making is at this point comically illogical.
“And he was definitely wrong suggesting business ethics is not always a branch of applied ethics” Yeah it would have been wrong. If I said that. Fortunately what I actually said was they aren’t the same degree.
If you want to have a discussion about how fields relate to each other and how all business ethics are attempts at applied ethics. Fine. But you do not get to lie and say I said this or that, especially when I can just go back and quote myself. READ WHAT PEOPLE ARE WRITING PROPERLY.
Quoting alcontali
Except here:
Quoting Mark Dennis
And not to split hairs, but an accusation of lying again implies you know intent. You don't know my intent and have been baselessly accusing me of all sorts of ill-will from the get-go here.
The irony is that you're telling me I'm putting things in your mouth when you've done almost nothing but ascribe to me thoughts and goals and predispositions that you could really not logically infer from my posts.
I'd own up to barely remembering a crapload of stuff, if that counts.
If you’re not inferring I’m lying then why the interrogation and why aren’t you putting anyone else here under scrutiny? We both know full well you’re entire argument is a veiled ad hom attack for no other reason than to troll someone whom you 1, know nothing about, 2, can verify absolutely nothing about. If you weren’t inferring this then why the 3rd degree and the unfounded skepticism?
:up:
Looking back philosophy of science was a great class - started with Alan Chalmers' 'What is this thing called science'? Also studied Kuhn, Polanyi and Feyerabend. I didn't realise the significance of these thinkers until much later in life. I never did a unit in Kant's CPR, which I regret, although I've read quite a bit of it since. (Incidentally, noticed a scathing book about Kuhn last year.)
Assuming you are qualified to make a formal assessment of someones level of education based on a few comments on a web forum?
I said bachelor's degree. And I don't mind being more specific: I hold a dual degree in Philosophy and in another field and my senior thesis was on the intersection of the two. I have a master's in the other field and I am working on a PhD therein. Hence my knowledge of how academia works.
I would have pursued a career in philosophy, but it's a tough job market for which you have to be willing to move and I really like where I'm living and I like my chosen field just as much as philosophy. But sometimes the bug strikes me and I wind up here talkin to y'all.
:nerd:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT)?
His wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
You can also try to check out his subreddit; https://www.reddit.com/r/nassimtaleb
NNT has a similar history to Thales of Miletus:
Taleb considers himself less a businessman than an epistemologist of randomness, and says that he used trading to attain independence and freedom from authority.[33]
Until a few years ago, I could not easily afford to spend an inordinate amount of time on something like the epistemology of randomness. Back then, I still had to make money.
With how much student debt have they saddled you in exchange for their worthless paperwork?
Expensive paperwork from the academia, which translates into enslaving IOU paperwork to the banksters and/or other scumbags of the ruling elite, does NOT signal that someone would be smart or competent.
These days, it rather signals the very opposite.
Furthermore, at least 80% of the subject matter taught at university does not satisfy the epistemic definition for the term "knowledge".
What a ridiculous scam. A fool and his money are easily parted ...
I’ve got a BA summa cum laude in philosophy, and besides the basic lower division intro, historical surveys, logic and critical thinking stuff, I did upper division studies on Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, and Leibniz, and topical courses on metaphysics, philosophy of space and time, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, ethics, metaethics, moral psychology, free will, theories of justice, and political philosophy.
Dialogues can be quite misleading, but overall I found Plato to be crisp enough is his thoughts rather than pandering to heavily toward this or that bias of opinion.
Thank you. I’ll keep his name in mind next time I order some books.
Are there any particular essays of his currently online I could look at that you’d recommend as a general overview of his perspective?
I agree that schools in America are outrageously expensive. And I agree that capitalism has pushed especially for-profit schools to accept more and more students who are ill-prepared for college and push them through despite lacking performances. And it's certainly not the only way to educate yourself provided you have the right attitude.
But all that doesn't really lead to the logical conclusion that nobody stands anything to gain from studying and researching a subject intensely under the tutelage of people who've also studied and researched these fields intensely.
Or perhaps, when you have brain cancer someday, you'll prefer some random guy off the street to do your surgery over the doctor who went to medical school and was taught how to do it right?
Education hasn't changed for 150 years. It is still the same schools and largely the same curriculum. Every other industry has changed drastically. How comes?
Of course, there's now Coursera, Udemy, Edx, and so on.
Subscriptions are typically priced from $39 to $89 per month for access to one Specialization, with no long-term commitment required.
The pricing for online education looks much more reasonable anyway.
Furthermore, if you want to engage in cheap credentialism, you can "get a degree" in much cheaper countries. In some places, it's only $500/year. You may not even need to fly there (just do it online). Since employers in the USA happily hire Indian engineers with Indian degrees, why wouldn't they hire you with a cheap, credentialist, foreign degree?
Quoting Artemis
Maybe he will also prescribe me some opioids and make sure I join the breakfast club of dead bodies?
My knee-jerk reaction is to engage extensively in jurisdiction shopping.
If the situation is markedly different between two different countries, then the reason for that is almost always some government bullshit.
You can fly to Vietnam or Mexico, have your operation in an upmarket private hospital over there, first-class everything, spend a month in a holiday resort for recovery, and then fly back, all of that for a tenth of the price that it would cost you to have the operation locally in the USA.
And no, I do not necessarily trust doctors, or anybody else for that matter. Why would I? It is always necessary to do your research, ask for second opinions, and so on. If it becomes clear that everybody keeps saying something different, then that is indeed a problem.
A medical opinion is not expensive here. They will diagnose your problem for $20-$50 including laboratory tests over here. All private service. If you don't like the first opinion, ask for a second one somewhere else.
Right, capitalism has made education and medical care expensive in America compared to other countries.
It still does not follow that there's nothing to be gained from either.
All that follows is that these goods should be made accessible and affordable for all people who want it.
Quoting alcontali
It really depends on what you mean by "changed"? As far as curriculum goes, that only holds true in part. Plato and Aristotle and Kant are still being taught because they are still important foundations. Nussbaum and Singer and Wolff couldn't have been taught 150 years ago, because they weren't alive then, but they are being taught now. So the curriculum, in my experience, carries a healthy load of traditional as well as new content.
As for methodology, most humanities classes depend on a textbook, discussion, a knowledgeable instructor, willing students, and some writing exercises. That hasn't changed for more than 150 years. It hasn't really changed since the Ancients. It's just not a wheel that needs reinventing.
Ah, but from whom?
Probably. There are different communities with different views on different subjects, of which I do not seek to figure out the nitty-gritty details because they are not my personal problem.
I believe that you either use the machine, or else you build or program the machine, because in all other cases, you are simply trying to be the machine.
As a consequence, every time something else gets automated, particular classes no longer make sense.
You know, back in the 1850ies, when the public education system first got developed, it really made sense to be good at manual calculations and arithmetic, because back then there were quite a few clerical jobs in which you had to be good at that. It also made sense to memorize textbooks, because they tended to be expensive and also difficult to get.
I am not impressed with the amount of rote memorization that is still customary in public education. Furthermore, very few people who come out of that system have the slightest clue about epistemology.
They may have read lots of other things, but they simply fail to distinguish between knowledge and non-knowledge. But then again, that is rather a feature than a bug in the public-school indoctrination camp. I do not believe for a second that they would even like it if these students were able to make that distinction.
A lot of what the Ancients wrote, was not knowledge either. In fact, only some of it is worth reading today. But then again, the ability to determine that requires a good understanding of epistemology, and that is exactly what the public indoctrination camps will avoid.
They want to be able to bring trannies to school for them to lecture the children on gender fluidity. If the kids were able to distinguish between knowledge and mere ideology, they wouldn't believe the trannies.
I was going to respond to you, but that last paragraph disparaging trans persons made me lose my interest in anything you have to say.
I do not have any opinion about them -- seriously who cares? -- but I would not agree that they lectured anything to my children. But then again, it is a non-issue because the other parents here wouldn't agree either, and since these schools are private, it is the parents who decide.
Which countries would those be?
If English is not your first language, I pre-apologize for the harsh criticism in this post of mine. Please only regard the following if you earned any of your degrees in an English-language environment.
Check your degree again. It may be fake.
- you don't take a paper. You take a course. You take a letter. Or you take a sheet of paper. When you take a paper which is not yours, you are shoplifting.
- "English Moralists" grammatically and to the uninitiated is one group. Yet you deeply disliked both groups, the other one not named, not referenced. Makes awkward reading.
- "The persons studied tended to be neither." Neither English moralists, nor...????
Maybe you meant neither English nor moralists. You have a deep dislike for the English as a group. The first thing that pooped into my mind with this interpretation was "prejudiced". Are you Irish, from south Belfast? Or a Quebecois, from Quebec City?
In all, you must have liked the course and admired the writers whose papers you read then, because they were not English, not moralists, and not English moralists and you have a deep dislike for the English, for the moralists, and therefore for the English Moralists.
Republic of Haiti, Mozambique, Papua-New Guinea, etc. Maybe even Hungary, if things continue to go the way they do there.
Heck, I am one of the great many unwashed who has no clue what the word "epistemology" means. I have got by nevertheless as a computer programmer, forum respondent, and diabetic type II in the world.
What does the word "epistemology" actually mean, @alcontali? I'm not pretending to be stupid. I am really ignorant.
Reliable statistics could be built that show that most people think Albert Einstein himself did not know what "epistemology" meant.
Let me check if I can agree with the wikipedia page on the matter:
[i]Epistemology (/??p?st??m?l?d?i/ (About this soundlisten); from Greek ????????, epist?m?, meaning 'knowledge', and -logy) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge.
Epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief. Much debate in epistemology centers on four areas: (1) the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and how it relates to such concepts as truth, belief, and justification,[1][2] (2) various problems of skepticism, (3) the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief, and (4) the criteria for knowledge and justification. Epistemology addresses such questions as: "What makes justified beliefs justified?",[3] "What does it mean to say that we know something?",[4] and fundamentally "How do we know that we know?"[5][/i]
Yes, I think that I am more or less ok with the definition proposed, but I also think that it can be simplified.
Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, with knowledge meaning: justified belief. Hence, epistemology is the wholesale inventory of standard and accepted knowledge-justification methods.
Question:
Imagine that we have a claim Q. When can we say that Q is knowledge?
Answer:
Q is only knowledge, if there exists a statement P, as such that: P => Q, i.e. : Q "necessarily follows" from P.
The term "necessarily follows" depends on the accepted knowledge-justification method for the epistemic domain of Q. For formal (=written) knowledge, the three main, dominant knowledge-justification methods are:
Empirical (=real-world):
Platonic (=abstract-world):
Therefore, knowledge justification starts by pointing out the epistemic domain to which the question belongs. Next, we verify if the justifying argument conforms with the rules and regulations of the knowledge-justification method associated with the epistemic domain.
In this view, a knowledge claim can be verified mechanically, i.e. "objectively". In that sense, modern epistemology harks back to the 1936 Church-Turing thesis:
A claim is formal knowledge, only if there exists a purely machine-mechanical procedure to verify its justification.
I don't. I can't.
In its modern understanding, epistemology amounts to computability:
Computability is the ability to solve a problem in an effective manner. It is a key topic of the field of computability theory within mathematical logic and the theory of computation within computer science. The computability of a problem is closely linked to the existence of an algorithm to solve the problem.
Modern epistemology simply says that there must always exist a computable procedure to verify the justification of formal knowledge. Otherwise, it is not formal knowledge.
Note that there does not need to exist a computable procedure to discover the justification of formal knowledge. From Gödel's incompleteness theorems, we know that such requirement would be impossible to satisfy.
Forget all the technical garble.
It's just the study of what we can know. Simply put: it's the area of philosophy that tries to distinguish justified true belief from mere opinion.
Hope that helps. :)
When you're doing philosophy, you can focus on various subjects, various types of phenomena, etc. For example, there's philosophy of (or about) science, philosophy of (or about) art, philosophy of (or about) morality, etc. Some of those focuses have unique names, like aesthetics (philosophy of art) and ethics (philosophy of morality). Philosophy of science doesn't have a unique name, by the way. It's simply known as philosophy of science.
Well, epistemology is simply philosophy of knowledge. The focus is on questions like "What is knowledge," "What are the criteria for saying that we know something," etc.
That sounds fishy to me. We're flesh and blood with history, not Turing machines. I know philosophers have fantasized about perfect languages which would allow for god machines with which we could crank out truth after truth after truth....But that strikes me not only as impossible but also undesirable.
[quote=Dostoevsky]
But these are all golden dreams. Oh, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when man has acted only from his own interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, CONSCIOUSLY, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness.
[/quote]
What I take from modern philosophy is that most knowledge and the most important kinds of knowledge are not only not formal but not explicit at all. Formal knowledge is charming. It's a little star that twinkles in the darkness. 2 + 2 = 4.
Thanks, folks, we found a winner.
Thanks, TS.
Albert Einstein, Karl Guttenberg, Keppler, Galileo, the inventor of the Steam Engine, the sheep, the wheel, intromarital sex, the Information Superhighway, were all stubborn derrieres?
Then again, Ghenghis Khan was, as well as Lenin, Hitler, Moses, Jesus, and God.
That would not be possible anyway. Knowledge cannot be discovered by machines. It can be verified by machines, however. Furthermore, only empirical knowledge purports to somehow correspond to the truth.
The problem with informal knowledge is that it has no objective justification. Therefore, its status as knowledge is necessarily uncertain.
I completely understand why you’ve made this point. However, “Everywhere” here doesn’t mean literally everywhere. This is the compartmentalised geographic everywhere, meaning in every country. What is trying to be said here, is that the majorities of most countries would agree with at the very least, not having unnecessary suffering inflicted upon themselves individually, as a community, as a country. The majority of people on the planet probably have at least one person in their life who will definitely not want them unnecessarily harmed, whether it is yourself, parents, family, friends, employers, colleagues and even random good natured strangers who try and apply that to everyone. Even the parents of murderers are still prone to not wishing anymore unnecessary harm to their child than they’ve already caused for themselves by committing murder.
So are you going to publish your book someday?
I am hoping to get some pseudo-peer-review from folks here on this forum once I'm done with it. (Over the course of this year I restarted the project from scratch, and have just recently finished my first pass of writing it all out in the new format, and now I'm spending the rest of the year going back through 300-something notes to myself I've accumulated over the past decade-plus to make sure I didn't miss writing about anything I thought was important, and then when I'm done with that I'll ask for proper feedback).
New thread here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6909/ethics
You seem to imply that certainty requires justification. I don't think so. To even begin to justify is to assume that there is a community out there, a world out there. One has to already speak a language. Such certainties can't be justified, since we need them in order to justify.
Think about the classical division between coherence and correspondence theories of truth. Let's assume a debate between a strong coherence theorist and a strong correspondence theorist. Both can't be correct, yet both possess knowledge. The inability to codify or explicate the foundations of knowledge doesn't militate against the acquisition of knowledge.
Here, less than half of correspondents have done any serious study.
Probably the same demographic attends. We just remember the exemplary and contrast it to the usual.
True, but I count about 20 or so people involved in this discussion and 31 polled, so most who polled also contributed some comments about it. Few of these are the contributors I would suspect have done some serious study, so I'm not so sure the poll is reflective of the community, but you may be right.
Of equal interest to me is the very premise behind such a question. This being an anonymous site, no one has any constraint to give an honest answer, so respondents, I think, will divide into three camps.
Those who see their best interests served by claiming some qualifications (whether real or not is irrelevant here).
Those who feel that they cannot sustain such an impression (again whether real but forgotten or not real makes no difference) and so had better go with a robust defence of auto didactia.
Those who feel that either claim (again no matter how truthful) automatically makes them seem like someone in either of the first two camps and so refrains from saying anything.
I suspect that serious students are here may well disproportionately fall into the last category and so be less well represented in the poll (presuming most who vote also comment, or course).
Or they are the types, who for whatever reason reject the idea that formal training is important/beneficial for doing philosophy. (Fear of brainwashing seems to be a phobia possible of explaining that for some.)
People have a tendency online, especially in anonymous contexts, to be skeptical of any claims of achievement or status. There are a number of reasons for this, but I suspect that one of the primary reasons is that people tend to assume that the anonymous people they're interacting with must be more or less in the same boat as they are.
It's rather pointless to claim any particular achievements or status online. The vast majority of the time people either just ignore it or they get pissy about it.
2.) The more one exposes himself to the thoughts of philosophers, the more he tends to think himself worthy of being the copy of one. And the more one adopts the philosophy of an established author, the more he relinquishes the philosophy of others, at the real risk of becoming the proverbial one-trick pony in the world’s metaphysical rodeo.
3.) I’m never going to tell anybody how much philosophy I’ve studied, because I’m self-antiquated by 2.) and thereby I am deathly afraid of 1.)
Thing is, unless I'm reading the site interface wrong, there's no way to tell who voted for what, only how many people voted for each option, so unless a voter also comments to say how they voted, voting is just throwing an anonymous token in a bucket.
I will say that the results so far surprise me some. I was expecting mostly autodidacts, then students, then decreasing numbers of the increasingly higher degrees, and while there are mostly autodidacts and degrees in descending order as expected, I'm surprised that there are no students or associate's degrees.
I dunno about the associate's degrees (maybe those are just in general less common?) but I assume students of philosophy share at least one reason with professors of philosophy for not being here: they're already philosophizing all day long, plus homework and/or grading, and the last thing you want to do is get into another conversation about free will.
I assume that's similar in most professions.
Hm, I don't post much, but I might have voted, as voting as a low-effort activity. But I couldn't because what formal education I have doesn't easily fit into the poll.
First, the subdivision of school/university isn't easily translatable. I'm Austrian, have an elementary school, some sort of middle school, and then some sort of commercial college. After that I went to University where I earned a "Magister" (which is probably somewhat comparable to a Master but in reality might be somewhere between a Bachelor and Master, not at all sure).
Next problem I have is how to map "philosophy" onto my education. Philosophy wasn't part of the elementary school education. "Philosophy" was part of the syllabus in Middle school only in the sense that it was integrated in "German" as part of German/Austrian literary history. It could have been part of my education had I stayed on the school for 4 more years (roughly a highschool equivalent - and I would have had to choose either a humanities or a nat-sci branch) , but I changed to a commercial college, where philosophy wasn't part of the syllabus much (you don't get through a commercial college without hearing about "the invisible Hand" and stuff like that).
However, philosophy was a huge part of may sociology studies at University. Social philosophy (utopias, anarchy, etc.), philosophy of science (even if you didn't take the specifically targeted courses, which I did, you'd hear about Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, etc.), and depending on the theories you end up interested in you'll need to familiarise yourself with certain philosophers, though secondary literature usually suffices. (Marx, Husserl, Derrida...)
I'd say "some incidental university classes" would maybe fit what I went through? I definitely don't have a degree in philisophy, though my univerity degree has included the most philosophy, formally. But it's not easily comparable to either a Bachelor or a Master (though it's definitely not a doctorate). And some of my philosophical knowledge is audtodidact (e.g. whatever little I know about Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Sartre...).
As it is, I finished my degree over 20 years ago and have never done anything with it - I'm both out of the loop and unpractised, and I'm not confident at all. I can read logical notation but sometimes need a table to remind myself what some of the less frequent signs mean, and it's slooooowwwwww going in any case. An autodidact with the adequate passion will know more than I do.
So what should I vote? Autodidact? Some incidental college classes? I chose not to vote at all.
In any case, since it sounds like you didn't major in philosophy, but studied some of it as coursework in another degree, I would put "some incidental college classes", which is meant to include that kind of scenario. (I would likewise answer "some incidental college classes" if the same kind of poll were asked about sociology or cultural anthropology or religious studies, for example, since I did a bunch of those as electives alongside my philosophy major).
I've been reading (and more importantly living) philosophy for about 25 years. My formal education is in something more objective and less fun.
What about the entire pragmatism movement?
Yeah, I think a lot of people confuse philosophy (small p) with Philosophy (capital P). You can train in both, but you can only really claim authority in the latter. Philosophy (as the imfamous badinage goes) really is the history of who said what when, and people who haven't learnt it aren't going to have a clue no matter what their native skill. Contrarily, philosophy with a small p is more like a skill, one could be trained in it (and so good), but equally one might simply be natively good at it, or train themselves. And yes, those who choose to get trained in it formally will inevitably pick up a bit of 'brainwashing' along with the methodology. It's not hard to break out of, but I think it's naive to image some kind of culturally neutral 'how to think' instruction could ever happen.
Yeah, that's why I linked the number of posters (20 odd) to the number of voters (31). I was presuming that most people who voted also commented, but if not, then you're right.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yeah, I think @Artemis nailed that one.
I had that impression when I first started studying it too, especially when I would be introduced to a new topic, form an opinion on it quickly, and someone would immediately label me a Whoever-ist, as though that dead Greek guy owned the idea I had just come up with myself. In time though, I came to view it more sympathetically: it's not so much that it's important who said what, as it is what questions are there to ask (by looking at all the questions that have been asked), and what is the range of possible answers there are to them (by looking at all the different answers that have been proposed), with the names of the figures asking questions and proposing answers often just convenient names for those questions and answers, because we've got to label them something if we want to refer to them without restating them in whole over and over again.
Quoting Isaac
One of the things that I liked most about philosophy classes as opposed to any other humanities classes was how we were never judged on what our answer was, but on how well-supported our argument for it was. So long as you explicitly called out any strange assumptions you were starting from, and made only valid inferences from them, any strange conclusion could be acceptable; how you get there was what was important. In contrast, most other humanities classes seemed unbearably dogmatic, whole fields often taking for granted philosophical positions that I knew were contentious because we were just talking about the ongoing arguments for against them in another class an hour ago!
As an outsider, I get a perhaps distorted impression that much of academic philosophy is indeed more of a philology - a study, interpretation and analysis - sometimes apologetic, rarely critical - of texts, as well as a history of ideas, or as you said, who said what when.
Probably depends on the department and who your profs are. My professors did that but also had us study texts of various sides of a debate on which basis we then critically discussed the subject as a group.
But there is a lot to be said for slowing students down in their knee-jerk criticisms and trying to get them to understand before they disagree.
As you might be aware of/be interested to learn, there are several contemporary capital-P-hilosophers taking on that very issue. I'm currently reading Harvey Siegel's "Educating Reason" after having read "Rationality Redeemed" a little while ago. He's most commonly referenced in Phil of Education circles, but he is more broadly applicable, I think. Anywho, he argues in that first book that a certain degree/kind of indoctrination is necessary in education, but that of course you're counterbalancing that (hopefully) with giving students the very skills to then question the "indoctrinated" values, etc.
I've read a couple of philosophical works. But mostly, I've lived for 70+ years and have actively inquired what the nature of our life together is. I've read history, science, sociology, psychology, politics, theology, literature, etc.
Mostly though, it is reflecting on life as we live it, for better and for worse. That is the main entrepôt for evaluating reality. Scholars write weighty books which are quoted here (Aristotle, Hume, Nietzsche and so on). Were all the books in the philosophical library to disappear, it would only be the end of philosophy as a 'literature'. Philosophy as a practice would continue on.
If all the books about yoga and meditation were to disappear, yoga and meditation would continue. There is a literature of yoga and a practice of yoga; the two are not the same.
It is good for civilization to have the literature of various and sundry fields: accounting, yoga, medieval French poetry, geology, history, math, architecture, agriculture, and much more. It is good to read and learn from the literature of the various fields. But in philosophy (or theology) it is important to live the field.
It is certainly the case that many people do not inquire into the nature of life together, and do not gain much insight as time goes on. Some of them are faultless, and some of them are guilty of the shallowest, narrowest, of lives.
That's interesting. Contrast that with the work of free-educationalists like Sugata Mitra or Peter Gray. I'm not so sure the initial indoctrination is required because I'm not so sure the initial teaching is required. Put someone in an educational establishment with a test/reward system and you immediately set up a limbic system response which inhibits activity in the very frontal cortex you're hoping to stimulate.
It's surprising how children question indoctrination when left to their own devices anyway.
:100:
Quoting Pfhorrest
:up:
Right. I'd just add that philosophers can be enjoyed also as characters. We get to know strange, fascinating personalities.
Whether an argument is 'well-supported' or not is no less questionable a framework than the philosophical positions you could not bear the humanities classes taking for granted. Rationality is just a way of thinking afterall. No system can justify itself without assuming axioms. I'm not saying the humanities can't be dogmatic in areas where they really shouldn't be, but in their fundamental philosophical commitments. That's just not what they're there to study,
I think there is a distinct difference between studying about the development of human ideas and thinking about life. In terms of practical living (laws, politics and ethics) we’re all reasonably involved. I doubt many people really sit down and thrash out an essay on the subject that goes beyond the surface details - there is a tendency to go with anecdotal evidence and loose analogy when it comes to armchair philosophising
Sure. Pragmatism is all about actual effects in the world. I don't see that implying any kind of relativism though, if that is what you were suggesting?
Yeah, as I wrote earlier: "People have a tendency online, especially in anonymous contexts, to be skeptical of any claims of achievement or status . . . It's rather pointless to claim . . . The vast majority of the time people either just ignore it or they get pissy about it."
However without divulging my identity and my published works no one needs to believe in that authority at all.
It is ultimately pointless to divulge though. I’ve only had the qualification for a year, so I’m chalking it up to youthful exuberance/arrogance on my part that I answered the question in the OP.
I don't think that people should be pissy about it. ;-)
Part of what I left out in quoting myself was that I think the background of the reactions is that people tend to figure that the people they're interacting with are probably in the same boat that they are. That's not a very intelligent thing to figure, though. More likely there are people with a wide variety of statuses, backgrounds, etc. interacting with each other on boards like this.
Are we going to get into another pointless debate over me agreeing with you that it is pointless? I’m sorry I answered the question honestly and that makes you feel intimidated. You happy?
It was a joke. I said that people tend to ignore or be pissy about status/achievement claims, and then you endorsed that "they should be." (I know you were saying should be skeptical--hence the joke.)
Holy moley. Just take a breath and relax.
Didn't you write this not too long ago?
"Does anyone else feel like a fair number of individuals on this site could do with some humility? . . . we may have differing views, cultures and backgrounds . . ." Etc.
Posting like a defensive, oversenstive tool in response to a joke (that I shouldn't have had to explain in the first place . . . partially because explaining ruins jokes and the last thing I want to do is get into an argument about a joke) doesn't seem in line with the attitude you were encouraging in that other thread. (Although I knew that wouldn't last long because of the overall tenor of interaction in this place.)
So it’s not humble to honestly tell someone your qualifications when asked? Okay. I’ll lie next time to protect your ego even though I never meant to attack it in the first place.
Right. I figured as much. I joke around a lot normally. But try to just not worry about it. I'm more interested in your response to the other thread (the ethics thing).
I'm curious, whoever it is that took some pre-college classes, what they were like. I had a philosophy class in high school and I don't feel like I came away from it with an understanding of what philosophy was at all, but that could have been because I was a dense scientism-ist at the time.
(We really need a word for a proponent of scientism, because "scientist" obviously isn't it).
"Scientologist"? No, that's not quite right....
Realist? Non-hog-wash-ian? Educated? Jk :razz:
Quoting Pfhorrest
I think being a teenager as well as a total novice at anything at all, including philosophy, just means that in the intro courses lots and lots is going to be lost on you.
After I graduated from college, I worked for several years as a paraprofessional in the public school system (one-on-one with disabled students who may or may not be integrating into regular classrooms) and so basically retook a lot of school classes with my students. I kept thinking "Wait! I learned this before? Where the heck was I? If all students actually remembered all this stuff after school, everyone would be so smart!"
(I remember the teacher of the class asking something like what's my philosophy, and I started to explain string theory to him, completely not getting what the question even was. A few years later, in a political science class my first year in college, I remember thinking that "my philosophy" was an ethical stance I had come up with that was basically utilitarianism though I'd never heard that word yet).
Quoting Artemis
I remember having a similar thought after re-learning some basic grammar concepts (like subjects and objects of sentences, predicates, etc) incidental to learning logic as I started to study philosophy, though in my case it was more that memories of having studied these topics in elementary school came back to me as I learned them anew, and I was shocked to remember that something like this was being taught in elementary school.
I think an offshoot of that thought process was how I came to the conclusion that basic propositional logic should be taught in junior high alongside elementary algebra, since they use a lot of the same mental skills. I literally exclaimed out loud, upon seeing propositional logic for the first time in my first English class at college, "it's like algebra with words!"
A PhD in math, during the time of the dinosaurs.
Out to pasture, now. :cool: