What do people think philosophy is about?
(Edit to add: The impetus behind this question is reflecting on how at different stages of my life, prior to having actually studied philosophy, if someone asked me "what's your philosophy?" my answer would have been an answer to one or another specific sub-field of philosophy. For example at one point someone asked that question I basically told them that I believed in string theory, taking the question to mean roughly "what is real?". Another time half a decade later someone asked the same question and I basically described utilitarianism, taking the question to mean roughly "what is moral?" So I'm wondering what first comes to mind when most people hear "philosophy").
Feel free to answer this either for yourself personally, or instead for what you imagine the average person would say...
Feel free to answer this either for yourself personally, or instead for what you imagine the average person would say...
Comments (31)
I picked 'other'.
Whether folks are conscious of it or not, almost all domains of Philosophy, at some point, asks the question about how that something, got started in the first place. And when asking that question, causation rears its head. Thus, a Deity or a God can't be avoided or invoked, or ignored, etc..
And so the regressive Turtle argument can't be avoided, particularly when using the logic of language that Philosophy is doomed to rely so much on for its truth value (versus, say, phenomenology or cognitive science and/or empirical sciences).
The implicit tip-off's if you will, often include an evasive style of euphemistic double speak that tries to explain the nature of a thing or things, and/or of Being.
An example could be something like this:
Socrates: you cannot even explain the nature of your own conscious existence, nor explain how and why we got here and how the universe came into being, so how can you really know what you know is true?
Plato: because if you take the logic of language and multiply Pi times ?, then you extrapolate the square root of the hypotenuse into the cognitive process by which all that can be known or unknown, eventually one will be able interpolate the existence of the cosmological order through a positive regression that requires nothing outside itself for it to be and become beyond the paradoxical nature of time itself, and thus can further be thought of why human's temporal finitude is...ad nauseum.
Philosophy student 101/unassuming person: Wow, Plato, you've said a lot of words...!!! They don't really make sense, but because you said so much, you must be right!
Plato: thank you
In all seriousness (as it relates to the OP), if Philosophy itself, cannot answer the questions of self-awareness and the nature of existence (causation), and if most people are misguided into thinking it can, does it simply become an interminable exercise in politics?
Please note that question does not consider all the other obvious benefits of practicing Philosophy itself in everydayness, and the body of knowledge viz the human condition.
In my opinion, legitimate philosophy is about scanning knowledge databases for surprising or otherwise interesting patterns. In all practical terms, it revolves around the following questions:
Why does something belong in that knowledge database (ontology)?
How do they justify their knowledge claims in that knowledge database (epistemology)?
Traditionally, logic, metaphysics, and ethics are also considered to be subdivisions in philosophy. To cut a long story short, I think that this view is in all three cases (very) badly flawed.
Well said. I wish Philosophy would focus more on that... .
And there is also an important unmet need for that.
For example, there are all these scientific publications supposedly backed by experimental testing that absolutely nobody else has ever repeated.
If someone just added the attribute "experiment confirmed" to the metadata of the publication, it would trivially put a stop the existing "citation carousel", which is an incredibly large fraud that plagues the world of scientific publication.
It would certainly raise the bar for pharmaceutical companies to peddle in pure fraud.
[i]OxyContin
People also search for: Hydrocodone, Fentanyl, Tramadol,
Purdue Pharma sales representatives were instructed to encourage doctors to write prescriptions for larger ...[/i]
One could even save a lot of lives just by adding a minuscule piece of metadata to scientific publications concerning the confirmation status of experimental test data.
The impetus behind this question is reflecting on how at different stages of my life, prior to having actually studied philosophy, if someone asked me "what's your philosophy?" my answer would have been an answer to one or another specific sub-field of philosophy. For example at one point someone asked that question I basically told them that I believed in string theory, taking the question to mean roughly "what is real?". Another time half a decade later someone asked the same question and I basically described utilitarianism, taking the question to mean roughly "what is moral?" So I'm wondering what first comes to mind when most people hear "philosophy".
Philosophy is to be on the side of the reason, the reasonable, the most likelily believable, on the side of valid logical deducing, on the side of coming to logically sound, reasonable conclusions.
Everything else in philosophy is just variations on a theme.
And this has never been a-changing at any time in any point in the course of my long, varied, and tumultuous life.
Pretentiousness. That's what l always feel secretly when reading philosophy.
I feel pretentiousness in bad philosophy.
In good philosophy I feel there is a tiger.
Socrates was a good philosopher in this sense. I read the Republic and I was surprised by how easy a read it was. (Modern, good translation.) There are bad and good translations of everything.
Pretense comes from being hifolutin, from feeling important, or from feeling one rubs shoulders with the greats. I hope I don't come across as possessing any of these. I believe in independent thought, in freedom to explore, in fearlessness in the face of overwhelmning odds, and in the disrespect of authority.
Mind you, this applies to me in philosophical debate. If it came to street fighting, or staying in jail, fighting in an army as an involuntary recruit, or being employed by a bank, my attitude would be drastically different.
I said other because strictly speaking philosophy covers three categories: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. But that covers a vast, if not all-encompassing territory....
Thing is, that most things that philosophy may not be seeking to answer itself are needed for philosophers to know in order to answer other actually philosophical questions.
I choose other because I specifically wanted to add the linguistic stuff, because that is how philosophy tries to answer the question, by examining and understanding language.
I don't know about most people, but for me, Philosophy is simply Rational Inquiry (Science), as contrasted with the automatic un-examined learning of animals and humans. It's an act of information-seeking and validating.
The kind of knowledge sought is both self-understanding and practical environmental knowledge. But since pragmatic Science has taken-over most of the physical inquiry, and Psychology is probing into the Self and Society, what's left for Philosophy is mainly metaphysical subject matter : the spooky stuff that remains mysterious. The moral & mental questions were left to religious philosophers for many millennia. But now we can use the discoveries of physical Science to validate some of the ancient insights that were expressed in emotional and magical terminology. Today, Philosophy is Metaphysical Science.
Metaphysics : Metaphysics is a type of philosophy or study that uses broad concepts to help define reality and our understanding of it. Metaphysical studies generally seek to explain inherent or universal elements of reality which are not easily discovered or experienced in our everyday life.
https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/metaph-body.html
Every philosophical position has it's own strength and weaknesses and even if l argue for a certain idea in philosophy. l have an overwhelming feeling of being wrong or uncertain at best.
Interesting. I've never had that problem. I think it's because in my worldview some philosophies are replete with errors (spiritual worldviews), and some are not (scientific, reason-based world views, determinism, the theory of evolution, the rejection of supernatural and the rejection of absolute belief in the truth as served up by religions texts and scriptures, and such-like.)
I simply refuse to accept the truth of badly constructed arguments that go against the views I hold.
I never regard religious topics worth debating in the context of philosophy. I just think reasoning doesn't really work there.Those who want to believe will do so and those who don't, won't believe.Besides that, all other topics can be discussed in philosophy without forcing oneself to take a definite position.
I get what you mean, but I don't think it's so simple as that. A year ago I was so fraught with existential dread and angst that I found myself searching for anything I could think of that would just make me stop feeling that, including trying to turn to religion after a lifetime of irreligiosity. I wanted to believe... but I couldn't find any arguments that I didn't immediately see holes through, so I couldn't convince myself no matter how I tried.
Maybe I shouldn't have put an "other" option. Philosophy polls probably shouldn't even have an "other" option, because every philosofan thinks they're a special snowflake with unique uncategorizable opinions.
I haven't been watching your responses, so to know I must ask you: what do you say when someone poses to you an argument that is deitic? that is, invokes god or spirituality? You just leave it unanswered?
My guess is that then you would get hardly any votes, but an equal number of responses to what this thread gets now.
Actually, reasoning works, but not to the extent of convincing the religious of the wrongness of their thinking. But reasoning still works for me, for you, for many others. Why abandon reason in the face of blind faith? You'd only further the cause of religiosity.
What do others think? :chin:
If the other person shares the same fundamental beliefs that l have with regards to the topic. Then,any argument within that constraint will be meaningful. It will be easier to settle the debate. If two people don't share the same fundamental vision. At the very best, they will agree to disagree.
It is still interesting to see the debates as they allow us to see how two people can reach polar opposite conclusions despite both being capable of reasoning .
Even if we apply reasoning to everything, we will still face problems that will take perhaps a few hundred more years to be resolved. In those matters, we can resort to belief. In matters that don't even regard sense data as a basis for knowledge. It will be reasonable to have faith in that case. Empiricism and reasoning aren't the same in my opinion.
(By sense data as a basis , l mean verification of knowledge via experience of the content of our knowledge. )
I think the pictures of metaphysics you get if you immerse yourself in a field differ a lot from field to field, and even subfield. Dive into physics, maybe you end up seeing reality as a collection of coupled fields and asking questions like "are space and time emergent properties?"; much different from what is imagined in mechanics. Dive into politics, maybe you end up seeing a perpetual struggle for power between social institutions and groups of people. Dive into biology, maybe you see a self differentiating flow of biomass adapting to environments and its own internal conflicts. The entities stipulated differ, how they relate within fields differ, how you imagine the fundamental principles differs.
That's somewhat of a vertical picture; what you end up thinking about the principles of the entities from descending into a domain of study. But it's also possible to do metaphysics laterally, to draw connections between domains, come up with uniting metaphors and vocabulary, describe process commonalities between domains of study in an abstract manner. This can be productive, or as is common, produces short circuits of thought and impassable problems; or interpret the impasses of what you have thought as contradictions or omissions within or between domains. Often both happen at once; by insulating over a live wire, productive simplifications engender broader world views, unaware of the limitations of their pictures, believing they have written all that needs be written until the inevitable, fatal, shock. Holding the background fixed with a violated assumption residing within it; avoiding shocking revelations by papering over their source [hide=*](and sometimes highlighting relevance by such papering over, as in the formation of one tradition through reaction to another's productive insanities)[/hide].
Such short circuits are common forum posts; people taking folk notions, dipping into the concepts of a field, then finding a something counter intuitive they declare as an impasse, or essential for understanding of, or as an internal contradiction of the domain. Professional philosophers are not immune to producing such impasses, however, and you can feel the tensions; the subject in phenomenology devouring the autonomy of nature, the contradiction between the universality of rationally revealed structures and their presence alongside contingent events, institutions, social norms and emotion [hide=**](a very general pattern of non-relativism and relativism, realism and anti-realism)[/hide], and the unbridgeable, but already crossed, chasm between mind and body.
Typically philosophy consists of both impulses; being drawn down conceptual rabbit holes and being drawn to dig sideways and make a warren of them.