Why philosophy?
Hello. I'm old here.
Until recently i held on to the opinion that philosophy is really needed for the sake of philosophy itself.
By which i mean philosophy is needed for the sake of philosophy itself and those that philosophise.
My opinions regarding the matter have changed. I swore an oath to uphold a Wittgensteinian view regarding philosophy and that psychoanalysis is a ruse.
Let us suppose the strong-minded view regarding philosophy is correct, that the opinions of philosophy writers, (excluding those that write also psychoanalysis and hegelese) ... of writers need reading. By the way sorry to intrude, i have only hesitated to take the burden of outing one elephant in the room due to my ADHD which doesn't allow me to take seriously any philosophy or philosophers.
Do enlighten me.
Until recently i held on to the opinion that philosophy is really needed for the sake of philosophy itself.
By which i mean philosophy is needed for the sake of philosophy itself and those that philosophise.
My opinions regarding the matter have changed. I swore an oath to uphold a Wittgensteinian view regarding philosophy and that psychoanalysis is a ruse.
Let us suppose the strong-minded view regarding philosophy is correct, that the opinions of philosophy writers, (excluding those that write also psychoanalysis and hegelese) ... of writers need reading. By the way sorry to intrude, i have only hesitated to take the burden of outing one elephant in the room due to my ADHD which doesn't allow me to take seriously any philosophy or philosophers.
Do enlighten me.
Comments (26)
I am here.
To staff philosophy departments.
I do think, however, that philosophy pertaining to human behavior and societal matters is appropriate. Morals. ethics, the law, etc. are all excellent venues for philosophical deliberations.
Metaphysics, not so much. It seems to lead nowhere.
Even Stephen Hawking fell for that. :grin:
Answer: it's using reason to investigate reality.
What's its value?
Answer: first, the question itself presupposes the value of philosophy, for answering it requires doing philosophy (thus, the questioner displays either insincerity or stupidity or both). Second, it is intrinsically valuable. Third, it is instrumentally valuable, as you can quickly discover for yourself by simply not using your reason to figure out what's what and then seeing what happens.
Why do we have philosophy departments and professional philosophers and universities?
Answer: universities were created by philosophers (Plato and Aristotle respectively) to teach philosophy. People who went to their universities became very clever. Very clever people thrive, stupid people don't. Thus, nations that make their populations clever by putting them through universities become wealthier, healthier places to live. Hence why any half-way sensible state funds universities and philosophy programmes even though in philosophy you are taught to trust reason over state authorities and traditions.
I trust your questions are now answered.
I almost answered something like this. Statements that attempt to reduce the status of philosophy are often philosophical. 'Metaphysics is bunk' is a 'metaphysical' statement.
Elementary.
Oh dear . . .
The rest is scholarship - a worthy and often thankless task! I believe the bast majority of ‘philosophers’ offer more in terms of ‘scholarship’ than instigating a ‘push beyond comfort’.
Quoting Per Chance
I don’t have ADHD and I don’t take anything anyone says too seriously - philosopher or otherwise (to be honest I’m inclined to pay less attention to most philosophers, yet find philosophies interesting play things).
despair
(i.e. sisyphean opposing of stupidity)
I came to the field in a completely different way.
I was customizing software, maintaining software, writing new programs, and otherwise doing really practical stuff for dollars, when I realized that I found myself surrounded by commercial messages that were sheer bullshit. These completely false beliefs were only meant to make other people money; people, who owned the corporations that were advertising these piles of lies.
So, what exactly was I doing? What was it? That is where ontology kicked in.
So, how else are we supposed to be doing the things that we were doing? That is where epistemology kicked in.
The beginning of the solution was to move to linux and open source. That got rid of the corporate nonsense that otherwise kept cropping up in my own work. The funny thing was that getting rid of the commercial vendors also allowed me to make more money.
Still, part of the problem remained. When people started hyping their particular choice of open-source solutions as the be-all and end-all, I understood that the battle wasn't over. We still needed better knowledge justification. Mathematics is part of the solution. The combination ontology+epistemology, aka, philosophy, is the other part.
Quoting I like sushi
Sure thing. I find your insight helpful.
[quote = who]
Thus we now meet the view very usually taken of the history of Philosophy which ascribes to it the narration of a number of philosophical opinions as they have arisen and manifested themselves in time...This history, considered only as the enumeration of various opinions, thus becomes an idle tale, or, if you will, an erudite investigation...If the history of Philosophy merely represented various opinions in array, whether they be of God or of natural and spiritual things existent, it would be a most superfluous and tiresome science...
[/quote]
Later in the text, after being told that philosophy evolves toward the truth, we find that
[quote=who]
the study of the history of Philosophy is the study of Philosophy itself, for, indeed, it can be nothing else.
[/quote]
Quoting Per Chance
If you successfully made sense of the quotes above, you already know Hegelese. I've also read biased writers warning against the dangers of Hegel. Well, Hegel is readable (most of the time). And, as to Freud, isn't there a middle ground between believing whatever he says and writing it off because he said it?
Quoting Per Chance
Which view is that? I'm curious.
Quoting Per Chance
Philosophy feels to me like what I, as a human being, was born to do. 'Doing' philosophy largely means studying philosophy which largely means reading the history of philosophy. Metaphorically speaking, there is just one philosopher who leaps from dying ape to dying ape. In the same way a single flame from leap from melting candle to melting candle. To participate in philosophy is to be more than a harried self-concerned ape.
Quoting softwhere
I was halfway through zizek's hegelese/less than nothing when my ADHD medication was cut off. For which i have my mother, father and the pompous psychiatrist to blame who probably/authentically thought he has the right to decide what i am into or onto. He said when i am into software engineering i have no right to also study philosophy along with it. Hence no, I can't say for sure i know hegelese or least hegel through zizek. And no, i was referring to zizek when i said psychoanalysis.
The view that all philosophical problems are linguistic problems.
Thanks. I think there is some truth in that, but those linguistic problems are also the problems of what it means to be human, as I see it. What is language?
I think the later Wittgenstein saw that language is inseparable from social existence. So problems of language quickly become problems of social existence. Who have we been? Who are we? Who shall we be?
Quoting Per Chance
That would be tough. Less Than Nothing was less than I hoped it would be. I like Zizek, but I prefer Kojeve on Hegel. And then of course one should just read Hegel.
Quoting Per Chance
Just to be clear, those quotes in my first post were from Hegel. I was trying to dispel the common notion (among those who haven't studied him) that Hegel is word salad.
Lacan via Zizek is fascinating. I can understand your frustration. Zizek has a lovable persona. He tempts one to read history backwards. But it's hard to read Hegel without having read Kant, and it's hard to make sense of Lacan without making sense of Freud. The temptation is to skip to the end, to find the result. But, as Hegel tells us, philosophy doesn't work like that. The result is a dead string of words without the process of its construction. It's only at the end of that difficult cognitive journey that the result (an aphoristic summary) has real meaning. I'm not saying that any mortal human can grasp it all. But one can make real progress over the years.
Quoting Per Chance
Ah. That's complicated. I should be studying software engineering right now. I could improve my marketability. Instead I'm obsessed with softwhere engineering. Anyway, sounds like a tough situation. To me philosophy is one of the better vices. As I understand it, social skills are quite valuable in the software world. One has to work on teams, project oneself as valuable, etc. And then philosophy is conceptually challenging. I suspect that studying philosophy helps with most intellectual pursuits, as long as one doesn't forget to practice coding.
Alright, I'm someone with a philosophy degree here so I'll try to give you my take on this.
Yes, morals, ethics, and law are all fascinating subjects that initially drew me into philosophy. The thing is, when you dive deeper into these topics and you start working some of those fundamental assumptions it inevitably goes into metaphysics.
Metaphysics is just unavoidable. For instance, one ethical system (e.g. virtue ethics) could be very compatible with one metaphysical assumption (possibly some sort of teleological theism) but I've never quite been able to make sense of it under a sort of atheistic materialism. What counts as a virtue? Who decides?
Couldn’t be any other way, if one digs deep enough.
“....For, as the world has never been, and, no doubt, never will be without a system of metaphysics of one kind or another, it is the highest and weightiest concern of philosophy to render it powerless for harm, by closing up the sources of error....”
(1787)