Do you talk about Philosophy w/ people who don't know much about it?
I've been making an attempt to talk about it w/ a group I've been drinking coffee w/ in the mornings. Does anyone else talk about philosophy w/ people not already interested?
Comments (64)
Philosophy flows better with beer in the evening than with coffee in the morning.
As well they should be.
Don't they serve hard liquor where you live? Do you dislike vodka, gin, whisky, and bourbon too?
Maybe you could find a socialist or atheist study group. They are usually relentlessly sober, and drink coffee in the evening.
I do like port. And Mike's Hard Lemonade. And Mudslides... and Long Island Iced tea. I drank a bottle of Angry Orchard hard cider the other night.
Yes, so long as they seem genuinely interested. When discussing philosophy with some friends a few months back, the topic came up: what even is philosophy? All sorts of answers (it's how you live!, it's like science but less cool!, it's kinda stupid!) were given until I, the great darthbarracuda, laid waste to the terrain and enlightened everyone with my unquestionably superior view, that philosophy is rational speculation into the nature of the world and humanity's relationship to it.
Many heads nodded in agreement and two days later I received an envelope in the mail asking if I wished to be the head lecturer at my university's philosophy department. I declined, of course, because I won't support the nihilistic regime known as contemporary analytic philosophy.
This is 100% true.
So yes, yes I do.
Very true.
For example, I recently visited an old friend at the countryside. His uncle was at the table with us, and he is a peasant who doesn't know how to either write or read. So I said like: "I notice a lot of people here going to Church, is there a lot of belief here?" And the uncle said "Well some believe in Mohammed, others in God, others in Zeus, others in Allah - one doesn't know what to believe anymore"
Obviously his lack of culture shows - but he makes exactly the same point that many atheists make for not believing - many big headed atheists with a lot more refinement than him. He clearly for example doesn't understand that Mohammed is a prophet, and Allah is the God, and so forth. He doesn't understand the differences because of his lack of knowledge and culture. And yet he makes a fair point - if there are so many options to believe one can't be expected to know what is true anymore,
So even those who aren't learned at all enjoy talking about the big issues, but you have to be able to talk in their language, and talk at their level. Don't try to teach everyone something, not everyone can be taught. But discuss the issues, explore their beliefs.
Quite so. It's often the only way to have a conversation with someone intelligent.
I'm still looking. :s
But did he really not understand? Did you give him the chance to explain himself?
I like to think it's mostly about critical thinking and thinking about the way we think...(but, yeah.... "rational speculation into the nature of the world and humanity's relationship to it" sounds pretty good) and I don't want to lecture, either.
Not understand what?
I was referring to this:
Quoting Agustino
I post on these forums don't I?
I know that is horrible, but the set up was too good to resist.
What is it that you know about philosophy, that others on these forums don't?
Relax it was a joke.
Didn't see the question coming? In reality, I am relaxed. I honestly wondered what it was that you deemed important for us to know.
I find that most people just find it off-putting, because they don't quite get it.
My suggestion is that the problem is most likely a communication barrier.
Can you recommend some philosophers who have overcome this barrier?
Albert Camus is clearly the most prominent figure that comes to mind. His ability to put philosophy into an easily digestible format is a skill to envy by both philosophers and writers.
If you really want to know how to effectively communicate philosophical concepts I would suggest you explore literature and poetry. Writing is very much connected to philosophy. These people explore philosophical concepts, but in a manner much different than philosophers do.
But Camus is writing about a very specific philosophical idea.. namely, absurdism. I'm thinking about an overview of just what philosophy even is.
I read Dostoyevsky back when I didn't care a whit about philosophy. He's a great writer, but I read him and remained ignorant about even the basics of philosophy.
Or at the very least have a patient listener who never disagrees and laughs at my obscure jokes! Though there are some sensitive topics I don't bring up with myself until i've had some wine... :D
I am not even sure philosophers know what philosophy is, I mean I have a very focused idea of what it is, but I am sure we had a few threads in the past forums about it that never reached any solid conclusion.
I have always found Plato to be very accessible. I find that many religious people can relate to Soren Kierkegaard. Poets tend to be adapt at comprehending most abstract thoughts. Anyone in the fields of science you can always talk about the philosophy of science with. You just need to find a common ground as a starting point.
Dostoevsky is a great source of philosophical literature, really all those existentialist writers are.
Here is a short easy read if you have the time:
http://opie.wvnet.edu/~jelkins/lawyerslit/stories/death-of-ivan-ilych.pdf
meh... I'm overthinking it.
I post here, don't I?
Seriously, though, I don't bring up philosophy with anyone who doesn't bring it up first. A lot of my friends and family have no interest in it. A lot of them have very little interest in anything "intellectual." That's one of the reasons I frequent this place. I don't have people I regularly interact with offline to discuss anything philosophical with.
I already said that.
That's about where I'm at. I'd like to change it, if possible.
Actually I thought his answer was perfectly adequate. Lots of people don't know what to believe anymore. You weren't giving him a cultural literacy test, you asked him a reasonable question, he gave you a reasonable answer.
But why do you take my retelling so? I never suggested he was inferior or irrational. Quite the contrary, I admire his reason, and looked with scorn upon the bookworms - that's why I offered him as an example. Even apparently uncultured and uneducated folks can reason/philosophise.
How do you still have friends mate?
:D haha! Explain plz why you no like the analytic philosophy?
No sir, they like their iphones and their facebooky feeds about crap nonsense and laughs and thats aboooout it. You get the odd few who actually ENJOYED university and studying something like Law, History etc. but it's dependant on their personality.
With the squareheads, I do as someone else stated here... ask them questions about their believes and them laugh at them and point out how stupid they are whilst lifting my chin, pouting and walking away with grace.
Can't that be said for all academia though? Usually after you studied you are so specialized that it makes no sense to make it public to people because they don't understand. That is the essence of why we create groups in the first place, to gather with people who know all the relevant information on how to be a klu klux klan etc.
Otherwise, if you're looking to talk to people in real life outside of academia, look for conferences or seminars held by academics in whatever city you live in. Some are free, some you'll have to pay for, but it's where the types who are keen on this stuff tend to gather, and they're all generally itching to talk to other people as well. Just try searching things like 'philosophy conference [your city here]' in Google. Or look for the facebook pages of active philosophy circles, where they generally advertise this stuff and are great for keeping up to date.
I find that most people (or at least most people I'd seek conversation with) have an interest at least in non-academic philosophy or the "philosophy of life." I actually embrace the challenge of taking things from my reading of Hegel, for instance, and seeing whether I can put them in appealing terms for someone less exposed to the tradition. To the degree that I can't, this encourages me to rethink the value of said thinker for contemporary individual life. Not everyone is terribly interested in intellectual history. While I am, I can respect a present-and-future oriented focus. Perhaps most will agree that the best philosophers of the past allow us to view the present and the future with new eyes, and that, for me, is the key to making these thinkers relevant --connecting them to the present and future, if possible, via unpretentious (ok, less pretentious) paraphrasings and examples.
Quick anecdote for you: I was on a plane to a conference in Prague this September and sat next to a very nice gentleman visiting family. We got to chatting, he was a manager at a bank or something. He asked what I do - I told him I was post-doc researcher in philosophy. And like clockwork he opens his mouth and goes, "Let me tell you my philosophy!" After a fifteen minute exposition that basically ended up being a long diatribe against Donald Trump, he brought up Descartes... Because everyone who took a damn philosophy class in college brings up Descartes. But as it just so happens I am not a Descartes scholar, hell I haven't read Descartes since I was an undergrad. So I gingerly pointed out to the guy that I didn't know what the hell he was talking about and that I focus on what students usually call "Continental" philosophy. The conversation immediately died. I spent the remainder of my time in the air reading.
What's my point? Well once you get into the biz of academic philosophy you don't want to waste time talking about things you don't know/have the time to read or to people who know even less. In no small part because it's your job - it's not a hobby. I would have much rather talked to the guy about how many licks it takes to get to the center of Tootsie Pop or why Ben Stiller should never be taken seriously as an actor. I don't want to talk to people about my job all the time, because I literally do it every day. I already have to read asinine papers and listen to students blather on about things that they pretend to read - I don't want to have to do it on a plane with a complete stranger and not get paid for it.
So enjoy it. Go talk to people. Engage with the world in person or on sites like this. Because at the end of the day that's where the raw fun of philosophy is. In a very real sense, what you're doing with your coffee group is substantially more pure philosophically then what academics do. Sure - you might not be as specialized, but you're enjoying it! And maybe by chatting with a few people about your interests, you'll encourage a few other people to get into philosophy as well.
LOL. So true, the exact same thing happened to me recently.
Thanks for this. I do remember a time when philosophy seemed really weird to me. I would like to find ways to popularize it.. that is my basic goal.
I posted this book in the last forum, but it's worth the repost: https://www.amazon.com/Socrates-Cafe-Fresh-Taste-Philosophy/dp/039332298X
I joined a group found on this model (in a small town, even -- so you don't need a city), and even led it for a couple of years after joining. It's worth a read for anyone whose interested in philosophy "in the streets", so to speak.
Every discipline has it's esotericism. It's just that philosophy, especially analytic philosophy, tends to be almost entirely esoteric. It's meaningless, worthless, and an Other to those who have never studied it.
Seriously, the analytic metaphysicians have some good stuff but it's also almost entirely separated from any relevant scientific inquiry. This means two things:
1.) There is no communication between the relevant sciences, especially physics and the biological sciences, and philosophy, specifically metaphysics.
2.) Because of this, metaphysical questions might be better suited for science, or relevant scientific theories are not being taken in account when metaphysicians "work".
Problems arise when you think you know everything and you actually don't. We see this on both sides and it's only really not a problem when you are knowledgeable and active in both philosophy and the relevant sciences. Philosophy divorced from science is pure, unaided speculation without natural constraints (it can come across more like intellectual art than actual inquiry; everyone tries to make the most aesthetically pleasing or excitingly surprising theory, even if it's outlandish), and science divorced from philosophy makes it crude and dogmatic.
Perhaps the question is whether philosophy as a specialized discipline is still philosophy in the grand sense at all. I suppose we are just talking about what we want to name a certain kind of conversation that is called "philosophy" away from the academic types that "know better." I thought Carbon's post was great.
Quoting Carbon
In the non-academic sense of the word, philosophy is sometimes a life and death matter like religion (our way of making peace with ugly aspects of experience that allows us to thrive rather than self-destruct) and sometimes the ecstasy of the soaring over our own previous relatively-cramped perspectives on the world ---often and maybe especially both at the time. Some people are less bookish and get their philosophy from song lyrics or youtube videos, etc., which is to say from personalities who aren't classified as philosophers. But I don't think this necessarily makes their philosophy inferior. Some of these people have more social intelligence than the bookish loner. I guess my point is that the "official" philosophical tradition can indeed be an Other, but this speaks as much against the irrelevance of much of the tradition to modern life as it does against those who don't read it. There's a wisdom in not reading what bores one, and there's a foolishness in slogging through what is possibly just a fad whose appeal if founded on the opportunities that obscurity presents for posing. (This cuts both ways. Anti-intellectualism is also the sometimes the mask of mental sloth or weakness.)
I have experienced exactly the same with people in relation to the "big issues". But people generally hate talking about logic-chopping academic philosophical issues; they think it is meaningless, inconsequential bullshit. I have tested this out on quite a few highly intelligent artists, engineers, scientists, writers and musicians who don't have much familiarity with academic philosophy or the history of ideas in general. Nearly always they are interested in questions concerning the overall meaning of life, but many, if not most, have followed the current fashion of disdaining any religion.
Perhaps there is a growing disdain for traditional religion as a general rule, but I'm inclined to view this as a change of religion, especially since religion in a generalized sense seems to be almost spontaneously generated by human beings. In our "DJ culture," most are happy to assemble a rough system using parts that weren't manufactured as a set.
Quoting John
It is a big "ask" with an uncertain payoff. I don't think that people have stopped believing in wisdom, but I do think that "logic chopping" comes across as "scientistic." Maybe the age of Kant, still dazzled by Newton, expected wisdom to "smell" like science. But maybe technology is now so banal, so ubiquitous, that we get the sages who advise us to "declutter" our lives or put away our smartphones. I'm also aware of some "new age" personalities becoming popular online. In this electronic culture, it's as if we not only want to see our singers dance --and often in the nude --- but also experience our sages more viscerally. (And there are those who get their wisdom from Miley, who's really pretty likable.) Anyway, we seem to have developed a taste for complete audio-visual personalities. Those content with text are perhaps an endangered species on the outskirts of the global village.
I think this is right, although only in a certain sense; there are more or less trivial inauthentic kinds of "generalized" religion and then there is genuine religion, I would say.
Really? I thought scientists were more bigoted than philosophers. A lot of science types I have met seem to think that we can know everything there is to ever know and that we will find a theory of everything even despite me pointing out that they are a finite brain with limited computational resources.
That reminds me of "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." which should actually read "Science without Philosophy is lame, Philosophy without science is blind."
If science is about facts then who is doing the interpretation? Scientists? Aren't philosophers the masters of interpretation?
This reminds me of the sectarianism in the churches hundreds of years ago that prohibited the manufacturing of literature etc. Bastards, just like scientists. Narrow minded pricks who think their interpretations are WIN.
I mean, I wouldn't say every single scientist is a narrow minded prick. In fact I would say that a vast majority of them are normal human beings who decided to be scientists out of curiosity, or perhaps some idealistic goal, only to be disappointed with the academic wall and the bureaucratic bullshit in the way of scientific advancement.
Quoting intrapersona
The truth is that there really isn't a turf war between science and philosophy, contrary to what those pop-science pricks make it seem. Actually, it's a fairly recent phenomenon for scientists to be dissociated with philosophy. Not to name drop but Einstein was heavily influenced by Kantian metaphysics, and thought highly of Schopenhauer as well. So were his contemporaries.
It's always philosophy + science that produces real results. Not everyone can be a genius and do both, so you need specialization. But with that you also need communication, something that seems to be lacking in today's academic world. Instead of isolating themselves, philosophers should be branching out to other fields, and instead of claiming superiority over everything, scientists (especially those annoying pop-science physicist pricks) should be less confident and more reflective.
Well don't go to scientists for philosophical advice. Fuck the modern trope that makes scientists out to be these omniscient gurus, the priests of knowledge and power. As if working in a laboratory makes you any more wise than anyone else.