What does it take to do philosophy?
In an earlier thread we discussed the question of how to do philosophy. In this thread I'd like to discuss what it takes to do that, the faculties needed to enact such a philosophical method.
I hold that all that is needed, strictly speaking, is personhood; or rather the function that I hold to define personhood, which is sapience. "Sapience" literally means just "wisdom" in Latin, but I mean it in a more technical sense as a reflexivity of the mind and will; as self-awareness and self-control, the ability to have opinions about your opinions, to be aware of what you are thinking, to assess whether you are thinking the correct things, and if you deem that you are not, to cause yourself to think differently.
In the methods thread, I argued that philosophy uses the tools of logic and rhetoric to do its job. This reflexivity of sapience in turn allows you to look upon your thoughts in the third person as though they were someone else's thoughts that you were judging, allowing you to assess the validity of the inferences you make, and so to do logic, to tease apart the relations between your various ideas. That reflexivity also allows you to put yourself in the place of another person and imagine what influence it would have on them if you were to make an argument in one way or another, and so to do rhetoric, to package and deliver your ideas in a way to make them easy to accept.
In another ongoing thread it was asked whether other intelligent problem-solving animals engaged in philosophical thinking. I argue that it is not intelligence at all per se but this reflexivity, sapience, that matters.
I hold that all that is needed, strictly speaking, is personhood; or rather the function that I hold to define personhood, which is sapience. "Sapience" literally means just "wisdom" in Latin, but I mean it in a more technical sense as a reflexivity of the mind and will; as self-awareness and self-control, the ability to have opinions about your opinions, to be aware of what you are thinking, to assess whether you are thinking the correct things, and if you deem that you are not, to cause yourself to think differently.
In the methods thread, I argued that philosophy uses the tools of logic and rhetoric to do its job. This reflexivity of sapience in turn allows you to look upon your thoughts in the third person as though they were someone else's thoughts that you were judging, allowing you to assess the validity of the inferences you make, and so to do logic, to tease apart the relations between your various ideas. That reflexivity also allows you to put yourself in the place of another person and imagine what influence it would have on them if you were to make an argument in one way or another, and so to do rhetoric, to package and deliver your ideas in a way to make them easy to accept.
In another ongoing thread it was asked whether other intelligent problem-solving animals engaged in philosophical thinking. I argue that it is not intelligence at all per se but this reflexivity, sapience, that matters.
Comments (34)
Perhaps, we think the same thing, but slightly differently. For now I'll stand by what I wrote months ago.
Quoting 180 Proof
In other words, (at minimum) one needs the courage - nerve - to question questions and problematize problems without giving-in to the temptation to offer "answers" or "solutions" (à la self-help / sophistry), in order to do philosophy well (that is, limiting 'beliefs-in' to make room for agency (i.e. capabilities for judging, etc)).
So I am judging my judgements. Understand my understandings.
Cognize my cognitions? Know my knowledge?
I see no profit in allowing myself to do that which I am mandated by my very nature to have already done.
What it takes to do philosophy is the same as what it takes for a human to do anything of conscious intent: reason.
Quoting Mww
I don’t understand this sentence.
Quoting Mww
I agree, in that sapience basically is the capacity for reason, and consciousness and intention flesh out to that self-awareness and self-control that sapience consists of.
First, as a matter of mere personal preference, I find myself rejecting your re-arrangement of sapience from wisdom to reflexivity, because by doing so, salience then belongs in a different category, from a quality (schema: limitation) to a modality (schema: community).
Second, left as it was, sapience remains that by means of which a rational agent and the quality of his wisdom are related, thus relieving it of anything to do with the capacity for reason, already imbued in him by his own nature. Reason then becomes the method by which wisdom is obtained or enlarged.
Taken together, I might grant that sapience consists of self-control, as a possible derivative of wisdom, I hesitate to ascribe to it self-awareness, that being the purview of the transcendental ego representing the manifold of consciousness united under a singular rational agency.
But it’s your creation, this exchange of sapience with reflexivity, so.......run with it.
So what it takes to practice 'the love of wisdom' is ... "wisdom"? :confused:
Scifi commonly misuses the word “sentient” in place of this sense of “sapient”.
@Mww I understand you even less in that post, but I hope the above addresses something for you too.
Is personhood sufficient to do brain surgery? No.
Is personhood sufficient to sit on the couch and watch tv? Yes (plus owning a tv, having electric service, and being physically able to operate the remote).
Is philosophy therefore more like sitting on the couch and watching tv than it is like brain surgery?
Or by philosophy do you mean typing idle thoughts into a philosophy forum, which is no more involved that watching tv; as opposed to excelling in academic philosophy, which typically takes years of focussed study?
Please clarify your terms.
Questioning the social consensus in current culture involves questioning science, because in a secular-scientific culture, science is the yardstick by which everything else is judged. The problem with that being that science is third-person, and philosophy deals with many questions that can only be grappled with first person. (That particular point is made strongly by Kierkegaard.)
So I think it also takes a degree of willingness to go out on a limb, in that you’ll often find yourself in disagreement with a lot of people, with nothing more to go on than your reasoned conviction.
I use agent where you use "person" and agency where you use "sapience" and judgment instead of "wisdom". Our respective terms are more or less sympatico. A person, however, I think of as an agent (that's) capable of anticipating and recognizing suffering other than her own, or sentience (which you seem to dismiss).
Still, your "sapience" corresponds to my intellectual courage (inherited aptitude), which is necessary for doing any abstract, intelligent, adaptive practice but I don't think, absent moral courage (lived competence), is sufficient for philosophizing well.
I feel like I shouldn’t even respond to this, but I don’t mean that mere sapience is all it takes to do philosophy WELL. Just that people who do philosophy, well or otherwise, aren’t using any special faculties or abilities besides their capacity for reflection, honed to various degrees. And that other faculties like intelligence, as in problem-solving ability, all by themselves, no matter how well-honed, don’t make someone able to do philosophy, without first adding in that capacity for reflection.
Quoting Wayfarer
Agreed, and I think this is the same courage that 180 Proof mentions. But your examples also make me think that such courage must be countered as well by temperance or serenity, lest one be so eager to surpass the wisdom of the crowds that they buy into the first amazing-sounding account from the first supposed wise man they meet. One needs to be as skeptical of those who say they are wiser than the crowds as they are of the crowds themselves.
Quoting 180 Proof
Agency is the behavioral half of sapience or personhood as I mean them. There is also a corresponding experiential half. Agency, or will, is the self-control part, being self-directed. Just as important, though, is consciousness, self-awareness, or self-knowledge.
Quoting 180 Proof
That is a consequence of sapience as I mean it, as I described in the OP. The ability to look upon yourself reflexively, as though in the third person, comes with it the ability to imagine a first person perspective for others who look, in the third person, like yourself.
Quoting 180 Proof
Sentience as I mean it is the capacity for perception and desire, for feeling in general. I don’t mean to dismiss it at all — sapience is built on it, made by turning sentience upon itself, feeling things about your feelings, perceiving that you perceive and desire things, and desiring to perceive and desire otherwise sometimes. I only remarked that scifi writers often misuse “sentient” (feeling) when they really mean “sapient” (thinking). All sapient things are sentient, but not all sentient things are sapient.
Interesting question. I would say philosophy is like sitting on the couch watching a Science Channel show on brain surgery, then chatting knowingly about it with others in the room. Hmmm . . . :chin:
I'll pick this nit, P, with non-sentient sapients - like (yeah speculative but plausable) strong AI. Sentience seems a pecularly biological-mammalian, phenomenal function and, at least from functionalist-connectionist or enactivist perspectives(?), not (strictly) required for sapience. :chin:
(From another here, only not attributing because the context in which the quote was quoted so differs)
Rilke:
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer"
It might leave something out, but I don't think so. Maybe there are different ways to approach the same thing. Clenched resolve or long-lashed languid acceptance, we're all circling around the same idea.
Sentience on my account is the initial, first-order, unreflective interpretation of experiences into both a model with mind-to-world fit (perceptions) and another model with world-to-mind fit (desires), the difference between which drives the subsequent behavior. Sapience is what you get when you turn a system like that upon itself: reflective self-experience generating higher-order assessments of both what its own perceptions and desires are (self-perception) and what they should be (self-desire), and then self-behavior driven by the difference between those to change its own first-order perceptions and desires from what (it thinks) they are to what (it thinks) they should be.
You could totally have intelligence without sentience, as in a sophisticated problem-solving ability, but not sapience, since that just is reflective, higher-order sentience.
:chin: Okay, works for me ...
EDIT:
'Sentience-Sapience' is merely aptitude, as I pointed out above, and aptitude alone is not sufficient for any adaptive, intellectual, endeavor, including philosophy. That's my point. Competence of a relevant kind must be developed through discipline and experience; moral courage - reflectively practicing without dogmatic commitments or sophist preaching - is what I think is required to 'live philosophically'. As Freddy says
[quote=Untimely Meditations III]I profit from a philosopher only insofar as he can be an example.[/quote]
[quote= The Antichrist]Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the freedom which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners.[/quote]
[quote=Ecce Homo]Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains—seeking out everything strange and questionable in existence, everything so far placed under a ban by morality.[/quote]
Re: provocations (aporias à la koans) - no 'answers', no 'solutions'.
:death: :flower:
See I have a problem with this. There's philosophizing like we used to do late at night in the dorm, or as we can do in an online forum; then there's academic philosophizing. I get the feeling the OP means the former and not the latter. There are years, decades of technical training and acquired knowledge and skill. "Shooting the breeze about the universe" doesn't count except as, let's call it amateur philosophy or forum philosophy. And I think there's a big difference between a forum and an academic paper in philosophy! A difference in kind not only in degree, that would be my point.
I don't know why. If you feel you shouldn't respond to something I write, you probably shouldn't. I surely meant no offense and don't understand why you wrote that. But if it's true you shouldn't have replied! Or perhaps asked for clarification.
Quoting Pfhorrest
If they are using "special faculties or abilities," then they are like surgeons: starting out as disciplined and ambitious learners, and acquiring much knowledge and many skills over the years and sometimes building to true mastery only after decades. Just as academic philosophers take years to develop their skills and abilities.
Again if you're just talking about philosophizing as shooting the breeze around the dorm or bar room or online forum, that's not actually what passes for philosophy these days. It would be helpful if you say which use of the word philosophizing you're using: breeze-shooting or academic research or at least serious philosophy, even if done by amateurs.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Ok. If your entire point was to say that a capacity for reflection is necessary, then I understand your point. I don't actually agree. I'd say that good philosophizing might require that, but plenty of what passes for philosophy these days falls short of reflection and sometimes even coherence. Wouldn't you agree? Or would you go No True Scotsman and say, "Well that's not really philosophy!" In which case your position reduces to a tautology.
Again, from mere personal preference, I favor sapience as the capacity for wisdom much more than sapience as the capacity for reason, in as much as the categorical error is remediated.
At any rate......carry on.
I got a strong sense of hostility in your post, which was perhaps a mistake on my part. If so, my apologies.
Quoting fishfry
I don’t see those as different in kind, but more of a spectrum of quality: doing the same thing at its core, but with different degrees of skill and sophistication.
How much technical knowledge of the subject would enable a serious philosopher to formulate ideas that would be sophisticated and impactful? Could a purely qualitative understanding of the subject suffice, like reading popular accounts of discoveries? In some instances, my answer would be yes. In others, no.
For example, in another forum I watched an intelligent and productive debate between a professional philosopher and a professional physicist concerning Bell's Theorem. Logical inference was the particular concern. On the other hand, I believe some degree of competence in, say, quantum theory, would be necessary for a philosopher to attempt to untangle the mysteries of that subject, when physicists, themselves, have had only limited success. But maybe not. Wouldn't be the first time I've been wrong!
No prob. Please quote the exact phrase that set you off so that I can analyze it and adjust my programming. At my end it felt like sharp questions in response to vague and ambiguous thinking. You could just as well have thanked me.
My curiosity is genuine. Please quote the phrase I wrote that set you off so that I can learn from it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
By that standard a high schooler cutting up a frog in biology class is engaged in the same essential activity as an experienced surgeon. In which case you've said nothing.
I reject your argument and don't find your arguments convincing. That's not hostile. It's an invitation for you to tighten up your thinking and your writing.
It was this bit, which felt like an accusation that what I'm / we're doing here on this forum / in this thread is somehow deridable:
Quoting fishfry
Quoting fishfry
FWIW this also seems hostile to me. Because it seems condescending, I guess? (Not trying to attack you here, you just seem to want feedback like this).
Quoting fishfry
They are, just to different degrees of importance and with different degrees of skill. The important similarity for this analogy with philosophy (amateur and professional) is that if you were to build a robot to do both of those things, the robot would need to have basically the same abilities in either case (sapience not being one of them, but things like vision, dexterity, and the programming to interpret what it sees into contextually appropriate plans of action), it would just need much more refined and reliable versions of those abilities to do human surgery than it would need to dissect a frog at a high school level.
Similarly, if you were to build an AI to do philosophy, the important functions it needs to do either amateur or professional philosophy would be the same (different functions than a surgery robot needs), it would just need to be much better at them to do professional philosophy rather than amateur.
Some people seem to want to make "doing philosophy" mean using big words and constructing complicated thoughts. It shouldn't be. And frankly, much of what passes for "doing philosophy" is little more than pretentious babble.
Some "philosophical thought", in fact, is just a relatively unlearned person speaking the way he/she supposes a learned person speaks.
Waking in the morning and wondering, "What should I do first today?" is more "doing philosophy" than many of the musings of supposed "philosophers."
:up:
Quoting Frank Apisa
I wouldn’t say that exactly, but the immediate followup question of “How do I decide?” definitely is philosophy.
:up:
There is a difference between overthinking for thinking's sake and critical thinking. We all could use a little bit more of this : " It entails effective communication and problem-solving abilities as well as a commitment to overcome native egocentrism and sociocentrism."
Yep.
:up:
Indeed.
:up:
For a person to actually use this faculty of sapience, to exercise their mind and will, to examine their thoughts and change them if needed, their mind must be sufficiently enlightened, and their will sufficiently empowered. Which is to say, they must have the curiosity to wonder whether their thoughts are the right ones, and the courage to admit when they are not, and so to change them. But this is not a faculty separate from sapience, rather only the refinement of it: curiosity is just more mindfulness to that of which one is unsure, and courage is just more willfulness toward that of which one is afraid. And more mindfulness of oneself, more willfulness toward oneself, more self-awareness and self-control, together just are sapience itself.
And yes, this means that in order to effectively use one's sapience, one must already have sufficiently developed sapience, but there is no paradox there. It is simply just like one can more effectively use one's muscles when one already has well-developed muscles. Sapience is a faculty, like many, that is further developed by its use, and the development of which enables and encourages its further use.
But I absolutely reiterate the question. It's the heart of my objection to your thesis. You conflate idle forum chitchat to the work of professional philosophers. The former is available to anyone; the latter requires years of formal training.
If you regard this as hostile I truly can't help that. You are equating a kid stabbing a doll with a knife, with a trained surgeon excising a tumor. You're claiming the actions are essentially the same. That's nonsense.
I hope I haven't triggered you even more. I challenged your core assumption with a sharp question. Isn't that what philosophers do? Amateurs AND professionals!
Why do you label a clarifying question as derision?
I mistook it for an attempt at derision; at putting down what we're doing here by comparison to what others do.
In any case, I already addressed the actual content of your question like this earlier:
Quoting fishfry
It's not nonsense to say that what you need to do both is eyes, hands, a knife, and the ability to coordinate what you see with your eyes and the knife in your hand. You have to be much better at that to be a surgeon than to be a kid stabbing a doll, but the kinds of things you need are the same, differing in quality, not kind.
Okay. IMO, that's (an) aptitude - necessary but not sufficient. By courage I understand the competence - as Spinoza says '"intellect and will" are one and the same' - to judge that's acquired - adaptively disciplined - by taking considered (physical and/or psychological) risks in decision-making in which facts-of-the-matter push-back hard against judgments. I think of "mindfulness" and "curiosity" more as dispositions, or stances, towards experience rather than competences, and thereby applicable to any intelligent endeavor, but not unique to 'doing philosophy'. "Sapience" alone seems to me too disembodied, or disinterested, for 'LOVING Wisdom' (i.e. OPTIMIZING - via ecstasis/alterity - Agency). :death: :flower:
Curiosity and a modicum of intelligence. We all "philosophy" when we contemplate virtually anything. It's a bell curve with mere babbling on the far left and academic scholarship on the far right. But to only contemplate falls a bit short. There seems to be an impulse to express one's self, as well. Is there philosophy without telling others?
Ok. I'm willing to agree that a couple of kids dribbling a basketball on the playground differs from an NBA game only in quality and not in kind. I don't actually believe that, but it's at least arguable.
But what professional philosophers do and what people on an online forum like this do is, I'd maintain, different in kind and not just in quality. I guess we can agree to disagree because it's ultimately a matter of opinion. All I can say is that I've read some papers on philosophy and I've read a lot of posts on this forum and I can't imagine changing my opinion on this.