My argument is that the thing that matters to Mr. Davidson is not a thing that matters in the context of life, concrete existence, it is simply an abstract, formal consideration. Don't take my word for it: "I dip into these matters only to distinguish them from the problem raised by malapropisms and the like." — JerseyFlight
What makes you think that Davidson cares about whether his distinction matters "in the context of life. concrete existence". Does music matter in that context, does poetry or the arts generally? Any pursuit, which is not a purely practical pursuit only matters insofar as it gives pleasure, exercises and strengthens the emotions, the intellect and/or the body in some way (preferably all three).
Pursuit of disciplines that one is genuinely interested in is better than mindless passive entertainment, because insofar as they develop the emotions, intellect and the body, people's lives are improved by such pursuits, and the improvement of individuals benefits society. In fact without the improvement of individuals there is not any benefit to society; no improvement of society at all. Society has never been improved by ideologues, or any other form of dogmatist.
It seems to me it's your notion of 'only that matters which benefits society' in its narrow ideological conception that is an abstraction and is elitist and idealist to boot. You are a walking performative contradiction; imputing to others, and attacking them for, all the negatives you exemplify.
"Further, philosophy can't explain this, it belongs to the domain of psychology." Jersey Flight
Please tell us just what it is, in the context of these kinds of questions of distinction, that philosophy can't explain but that psychology can, and how?
What makes you think that Davidson cares about whether his distinction matters "in the context of life. concrete existence". Does music matter in that context, does poetry or the arts generally? — Janus
I never claimed that one cannot ascend, rather, descend to an aesthetic pursuit of analytical philosophy. In that case we must stop pretending like it carries some kind higher relevance, or counts as some kind of higher social discourse. It doesn't, the real objective work is being done in other areas, analytical philosophy is an exercise in abstract games. I would even argue that this particular social form detracts from what can actually be achieved with language, it literally has a negative social value. This is not hard to prove:
Here I merely need to repeat my practical argument: 'You will still be using language just like we are still using mathematics after Gödel. And what matters most of all, is not papers like Davidson's, but those who figure how to use words to make the world a better place. Should we get a million people to read this paper by Davidson, or should we get a million people to read, "The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog," by Perry and Szalavitz? There is no contest. What these authors are doing in terms of relevance blows Davidson out of the water. And remember, life is short, so this is a decision we must make over and over again, and this is what I know: analytical philosophy loses.'
Language is psychological as well as developmental, you will not explain it by multiplying analytical philosophy's abstractions. If you miss vital stages of development you will be cognitively impaired, most especially in your language capacity. This is not an abstract consideration... analytical philosophy doesn't tell us anything here! What people are doing on this thread cannot even be justified in terms of real-world-relevance. As your response betrays, it's just an aesthetic game that analyzes abstract ideals. One is entitled to it, but one is not entitle to call it responsible philosophy.
"Another reason this [Analytical Philosophy] is fruitless is that the analyses we devise would not be particularly useful, even if one of them were widely accepted. The analyses that epistemologists now debate are so complicated and confusing that you would never try to actually explain the concept of knowledge to anyone by using them. So what is the point?..." Michael Huemer
The "point" is merely to sharpen one's mind in this particular game, just to explore the possibilities of a certain kind of analysis. If you enjoy it, then there's a point to it; if not then not.
Who are you to simply pronounce that this pursuit "has a negative social value"? If it is "not hard to prove", then why have you not done so? In what way do you think it has a negative social value, and what's your argument for thinking so?
Instead of derailing this thread, why not start another entitled "Analytic Philosophy Has a Negative Social Value", and make your case there?
Who are you to simply pronounce that this pursuit "has a negative social value"? — Janus
I did not merely pronounce it, I provided a practical argument. Further the quote by Huemer, who has written 60 plus books (I don't like this game but will do it anyway only because of how analytical philosophers think, which is in terms of elitism) -- how many books have you written?
In what way do you think it has a negative social value, and what's your argument for thinking so? — Janus
Quite simple: people are communicating all over the place. Not all communication is the same, neither is it equivalent in terms of social value. Just take a look at this thread for instance, there are vast problems in the world and here we have a bunch of people talking about the abstract ideals of language, as refugees shuffle from island to island, as America collapses into authoritarianism, as the globe continues warming, as children lack essential nutrients and come from broken homes that shatter their cognitive quality and potential, and you stand here, bold faced, defending the doctrinaire, academic eccentricities of one Donald Davidson?
Let me tell you what the men who wrote the book I referenced have done with their communication. They have probed deeply into the damage that trauma inflicts on young lives, and they have sough to find a way to heal these poor, young, abused members of our species. There is no contest. The very fact that analytical philosophy has conditioned you to come at me the way you are is only further proof of its elitism, irrelevance and special pleading for its prolix form and idealist cause. Tell me, what are you really doing with your time when you spend it probing this kind of stuff? There is a vast world of productive and relevant communication beyond it! Communication that actually achieves real world value. And if you are not giving your time to this, then you are blinded, you are playing at mere abstraction, as Peter Unger said, a bunch of "empty ideas" that lead nowhere.
I did not merely pronounce it, I provided a practical argument. Further the quote by Huemer, who has written 60 plus books (I don't like this game but will do it anyway only because of how analytical philosophers think, which is in terms of elitism) -- how many books have you written?
I still haven't seen your argument. Here we have instead a classic appeal to authority, and an implied ad hominem to top it off. Nice work!
The very fact that analytical philosophy has conditioned you to come at me the way you are is only further proof of its elitism, irrelevance and special pleading for its prolix form and idealist cause. Tell me, what are you really doing with your time when you spend it probing this kind of stuff?
I actually haven't studied much analytic philosophy. Mostly Spinoza, the German Idealists, Heidegger, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, some Peirce, some James, some Dewey, some Frankfurt School, a smattering of Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, bits and pieces of Zizek, some phenomenology. I am a self-admitted dilettante. I read as much poetry as I do philosophy. In any case why are you seeking to make this about me, rather than addressing my arguments?
As to what I am doing with my time: in participating in the discussion this new thread has been copied from, I'm pursuing ideas that are of some interest or that I feel offer some new insight, some way of looking at things I haven't encountered before.
There is a vast world of productive and relevant communication beyond it! Communication that actually achieves real world value. And if you are not giving your time to this, then you are blinded, you are playing at mere abstraction, as Peter Unger said, a bunch of "empty ideas" that lead nowhere.
Of course practical research and communication in the everyday world may produce "real world value". Training in Analytic Philosophy may sharpen the critical intellect, which could then benefit any practical discipline, thus enhancing its "real world value".
To say Analytic Philosophy is nothing but "empty ideas that lead nowhere" is a dogmatic pronouncement that smacks of wowserism. This is no better than religious puritanism which arrogates to itself the right to declare what has value and what doesn't for others.
If you’re a person curious about ideas, you’d probably find something you like in such broad categories if you dig enough. That is, if you’re actually curious about ideas, instead of treating it as sports. I mean intellectual history of schools of thought has some importance, but ultimately, why should anyone care.
StreetlightSeptember 25, 2020 at 02:25#4557300 likes
Yeah. This shit is like the idpol of philosophy. Drama for the small minded (not this thread, @Janus - which rightly de-tumored Banno's - but those who like to label and belittle on the basis of said labels).
JerseyFlightSeptember 25, 2020 at 02:32#4557340 likes
Training in Analytic Philosophy may sharpen the critical intellect
In what sense does it sharpen it? Unto what end? Unto what purpose? Every critical thinking book I have read in my life has been vastly superior to the analytical philosophy I have encountered. Critical thinking is far more efficient.
Mostly Spinoza, the German Idealists, Heidegger, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, some Peirce, some James, some Dewey, some Frankfurt School, a smattering of Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, bits and pieces of Zizek,
Only Wittgenstein would be considered an analytical philosopher from this list.
JerseyFlightSeptember 25, 2020 at 02:54#4557380 likes
I'm going to make a single point and then leave you to your crusade.
By all accounts, Bertrand Russell was one of the founders of what came to be called analytic philosophy. He was also a prominent antiwar activist among many other things.
Michael Dummett, one of the most prominent philosophers in the analytic tradition essentially suspended his professional work for a few years to campaign for immigrants' rights and racial equality.
The point of these examples and of the Tarski quote I posted isn't that analytic philosophy can save the world, but that we don't need you to tell us the world is on fire. Do you think Tarski, after he fled Poland, forgot? Do you think any of us here live in the Ivory tower you imagine us building?
Presumption.
JerseyFlightSeptember 25, 2020 at 04:00#4557620 likes
Michael Dummett, one of the most prominent philosophers in the analytic tradition essentially suspended his professional work for a few years to campaign for immigrants' rights and racial equality.
And these things have value, right?
And these activities are not Analytical Philosophy, right?
In fact, one must forsake Analytical Philosophy in order to pursue them, right?
Were Russell and Dummett wise to forsake Analytical Philosophy to pursue these things?
The point of these examples and of the Tarski quote I posted isn't that analytic philosophy can save the world, but that we don't need you to tell us the world is on fire.
My argument is not about the world being on fire, but that Analytical Philosophy is lacking in value, that it's a personal hobby. My argument is also that it's just one form of communication, and when we view it as a form of communication among many forms of communication, we can see that it comes out at a very low place in terms of relevance and real world value.
PfhorrestSeptember 25, 2020 at 04:18#4557680 likes
This argument is dumb. Analytic and Continental philosophy both tackle important questions. There is a continuous spectrum from mathematical, ideal, or linguistic abstractions, to the experiential, embodied, practical life. (That's why I subtitled my book "from the meaning of words to the meaning of life").
Neglect either and the other suffers for its absence. This is true of Analytic philosophy for neglecting the experiential/embodies/practical side, but it's also true of Continental philosophy for neglecting the mathematical/ideal/linguistic side. Both have their value, and each is of greater value in combination with the other.
Also, this kind of back-and-forth between abstract and practical philosophy has been a pattern for pretty much the entire history of the whole thing:
JerseyFlightSeptember 25, 2020 at 04:33#4557750 likes
This is true of Analytic philosophy for neglecting the experiential/embodies/practical side, but it's also true of Continental philosophy for neglecting the mathematical/ideal/linguistic side.
I am not talking about Analytical Philosophy versus Continental Philosophy. I am talking about forms of communication and real world value in contrast to Analytical communication. Neither am I claiming that mathematics or linguistics are not important, but these are not Analytical Philosophy. Analytical Philosophy might have their own questions they like to ask of these disciplines, but I am specifically referring to Analytical Philosophy. This thread was taken from a thread on Donald Davidson. Please go read the paper by Davidson and come back here and report on its value. I am open and ready to hear it.
PhilosophimSeptember 25, 2020 at 04:38#4557770 likes
Janus, if you wish to have a discussion, that is fine. But we should not call other members out on the board like this. If you wish to have a discussion with the people you are citing, then private message them. Calling them out, out of context publicly is not what we're here for.
The analytical approach lends itself to getting lost in the weeds, because it ignores the need for a constant back and forth between synthesis and analysis. Like a painter who takes a step back to look at the whole picture, the philosopher needs to « zoom out » once in a while, This allows him to briefly check that he is making sense at the aggregate, big picture experience level, before diving in the weeds of analysis again.
That it’s biggest problem: too detail oriented, not enough big picture coherence. Another issue is that some fake philosophers used this propensity of analysis to get lost in details intentionally, as a way to hash out facile, fake, meaningless philosophy that bewilders the average Joe, so this brings it a bad reputation.
Reply to Philosophim I have no idea what you are talking about, all I've done is moved the discussion I was already having to this new thread since it was derailing the other.
That's what Peter Unger argued in his Oxford book against Analytical Philosophy. It's even titled, "Empty Ideas."
I'm not interested in references to works unless you want to quote passages from them that contain arguments to support your claims. I haven't seen an actual argument yet or any attempt to address any of the points I've made.
Analytic philosophy, considered as the broad thrust of English-speaking philosophy since Moore and Russell, is now pretty much ubiquitous; indeed so much so that little is served by attempting to differentiate it from other approaches. The last forty or fifty years can characterised in terms of the application of analytic techniques to areas previously not consider part of the analytic analytic - Phenomenology, psychology and psychiatry, social theory... All use the techniques and strategies developed under the analytic umbrella.
Analytic philosophy is also pretty demanding, drawing on the extraordinary growth in logic after Frege; the understanding of language that came from work in Cambridge and Oxford; the analysis of scientific method and method more generally, form Quine, the Vienna circle, Popper; the focus on metaethics and deontology that resulted in new ways to view ethical issues... A dilettante is likely to mistake the puddles around the edges for what is a deep and broad sea.
And in the end, criticism from the ignorant is not critique.
JerseyFlightSeptember 25, 2020 at 07:45#4558130 likes
I think it's best just to stick with Davidson. Just tell me about the value of his essay? This is all I really care about. Or tell me about the value of Analytical Philosophy in general? Life is exceedingly short, and I know of all kinds of tremendously valuable forms of communication scattered throughout the social sciences, Analytical Philosophy is not one of them. You show me what you can draw from Davidson, and I will show you what I have drawn from Perry and Szalavitz. This approache cuts through the abstraction and forces these forms to produce content. I call your bluff, now it's time to show your hand.
unenlightenedSeptember 25, 2020 at 07:46#4558140 likes
One has to wonder why someone who is cognisant of the terrible effects of trauma on human development is so negative, aggressive, accusatory, and unsympathetic to us, the traumatised, who are merely wasting our damaged lives in a fruitless roundabout of words as a diversion from the pain we all suffer. It is as if he sought to cure alcoholism by interrupting the winos on the street and smashing their bottles and beating them up.
JerseyFlightSeptember 25, 2020 at 08:03#4558200 likes
It is as if he sought to cure alcoholism by interrupting the winos on the street and smashing their bottles and beating them up.
You want to compare the academic elitism of Analytical Philosophy to the suffering of homeless addicts? You're claiming that you are like a poor, helpless Analytical Philosopher who is being physically beat and needs to be saved? I do indeed have a problem with this, and so should everyone else. I don't even know what to say.
JerseyFlightSeptember 25, 2020 at 08:04#4558210 likes
The last forty or fifty years can characterised in terms of the application of analytic techniques to areas previously not consider part of the analytic analytic - Phenomenology, psychology and psychiatry, social theory
Examples? It's very strange you claim this, because the social sciences have moved away from idealism and into the domain of concrete observation. If one just takes the example of Neurobiology, this has nothing to do with Analytical Philosophy, it's all based on observation. And I might add, it has a thousand times more explanatory power than any of the abstraction contained in your field.
180 ProofSeptember 25, 2020 at 13:08#4559050 likes
Old fortune cookie:
Missing forest for trees is blind, missing trees for forest is empty.
:death: :flower:
StreetlightSeptember 25, 2020 at 13:21#4559090 likes
Or tell me about the value of Analytical Philosophy in general?
As often the case, the term is also a way to define oneself in opposition to the other, i.e. "continental philosophy" in this case. Moreover, the word "analytical" in this context functions less as a methodological commitment to analysis (as opposed to say, synthesis) than as a critique of "continental philosophy" as generally "non-analytical" (mystical, poetic, intuitive, fun to read perhaps but not logical and rational).
By defining him or herself as an analytic philosopher, one is therefore saying: "I'm none of them heady continentals. I'm the dry, rational, English-speaking type of philosopher".
Other than that, what? How do you define the class of all 'analytical philosophy'?
Srap TasmanerSeptember 25, 2020 at 16:17#4559370 likes
Back when I played tournament chess, I noticed that we amateurs were always a generation or two or three behind what was going on in chess at the highest levels. It's that ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny thing again. When you're a young player, one of the best ways to improve and become more successful is to study old books like My System or Zurich 53 or My 60 Memorable Games because the people you're playing against tend to be at a level of chess where the techniques and approaches of grandmasters from years gone by are really effective. But real chess has long since moved on.
I often find myself thinking the same thing about philosophy. We amateurs are often still catching up to where philosophy was generations ago.
Analytic philosophy, I think, hasn't really been a thing for some time now. But philosophy doesn't have crosstables, and it doesn't have Elo ratings, and that only leaves fashion.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 25, 2020 at 16:22#4559410 likes
My apologies then, I stepped out of line. I suppose I will weigh in then.
While we can criticize individual philosophy writings "style", noting one paper being of little use is not enough to criticize all papers using this style. Further, what can be attributed to analytic philosophy is broad and varied. It is a shed word that we shove a bunch of other tools of thinking into.
And tools are how we should approach methods of thinking. Sometimes one approach to analysis is successful where another tool would be better. Stating one tool is "worthless in all cases" requires a great amount of citation and logical critique, which is not being offered here. Without this, it is merely an opinion war. A screwdriver may be worthless when one wants to hammer nails, but its pretty effective when they want to use screws instead.
Unless someone can point out very real negative value to society caused by the countless analytic philosophy papers that have been released over the centuries, continuing to assert that analytic philosophy is harmful as a whole would not be a philosophical conversation.
Reading further replies, it appears JerserFlight realizes this and want to focus on Davidson again in particular. JerseyFlight, since you've read the paper, what did you find worthless about Davidson's argument? While we cannot say all of analytic philosophy is worthless, it may be the case for this particular paper.
"Another reason this [Analytical Philosophy] is fruitless is that the analyses we devise would not be particularly useful, even if one of them were widely accepted. The analyses that epistemologists now debate are so complicated and confusing that you would never try to actually explain the concept of knowledge to anyone by using them. So what is the point?..." Michael Huemer
Thanks for this quote. Got me googling. Here is the (oh so true) source:
https://fakenous.net/?p=1130
Summarized by the author as: "Analytic philosophers focus too much on playing with concepts, and not enough on thinking about the parts of reality that matter."
I will be starting a thread later that is related to this one. I'll briefly explain myself here and make a fuller accounting in the other thread. The reason I won't post it here is because the thread will also address other ideas besides Analytical philosophy.
Now, Jersey already knows some of my thoughts on Analytical philosophy, an area where our views share some overlap, however I feel he has misinterpreted the meaning I was trying to convey. Which is my fault for not being substantive enough to do my own point justice.
What I have said, Privately; Analytic philosophers are very good at being half of a philosopher.
Now you'll probably be thinking "only a continental philosopher would say such a thing." But then you'd be making the same assumption I am about to demonstrate.
This statement may sound like an attack on analytic philosophy, but it's actually just an attack on some analytical philosophers. Which is a very important distinction to make.
Now Jerseys issues revolve around the behaviour of some analytic philosophers. He attributes the behaviour to analytical philosophy. This, is an assumption on his part that he has correctly identified the cause of the behaviours.
In order to demonstrate what I mean;
Lets say that X is a belief about philosophy.
Y is a belief about ethics.
Z is a questionable behaviour with a cause.
For the next part, I'm going to use some famous philosophers names as examples but will not be talking about their historically held beliefs, I'll just be saying their belief is X and/or Y for the purposes of the explanation.
Wittgenstein Believes X
Wittgenstein Believes Y
Wittgenstein Engages in Z
Socrates does not Believe X
Socrates Believes Y
Socrates engages in Z
Hume Believes in X
Hume does not Believe Y
Hume does not engage in Z
Dewey does not Believe in X
Dewey does not Believe in Y
Dewey does not engage in Z
Based on this, what causes Z?
X or Y?
Now so I'm not making a single cause Fallacy, let's assume that Socrates did not engage in Z. This would suggest that in order to engage in Z, one must believe in X and Y at the same time. Meaning the combination of X and Y creates another value, which we will call W, that we can say is the cause of Z.
Personally, I think that the problem isn't analytical philosophers in general. The problem is the beliefs some analytical philosophers have.
Like any tool, analytical philosophy has it's uses. It is down to the believer to make sure the belief is being applied correctly to the context. This will mean that sometimes it's useless, other times it will not be. We can never be certain if a tool is useless in a given situation when what may be stopping the tool from working is in fact another tool we are using along with it.
I can make pancake batter with a whisk and a bowl, I cannot cook pancakes without a pan and a heat source.
Which is why I say that analytical philosophers are very good at being half a philosopher. All that means is that a tool user is good at using his tool or he isn't. He can't do his job without all the tools he needs.
I can give you a tool, I can teach you how to use it. What I can't do, is tell you that it's a universally applicable tool. There may be some kind of job I've never done with that tool in order to find out it is useless.
Can't believe how unjustifiably full of themselves some people on this forum are and how rude they can be when ignoring people who disagree with them. Trust me @Banno your time is not that important that it requires you to be so picky about where and who you spend it on. Methinks someone is just trying a little too hard to control their public image, not realising that they barely have one worth trying to control. I'd say get down from your ivory tower, but I can see you have just walked up a hill and are pretending to have built an ivory tower only you can see. Boring.
But philosophy doesn't have crosstables, and it doesn't have Elo ratings...
Could we do that? I'm in. But I'd not expect a high score; my Lichess correspondence score never gets over 1600, and blitz, never over 1200.
You are right. The analytic/continental distinction was waning when I went to school fifty years ago. What I see in my small understanding of contemporary philosophy is the application of analytic techniques to issues that would have then been classified as continental. Always small steps that are not going to impress the folk in the stalls, but interesting enough for me.
Could we do that? I'm in. But I'd not expect a high score; my Lichess correspondence score never gets over 1600, and blitz, never over 1200.
You are right. The analytic/continental distinction was waning when I went to school fifty years ago. What I see in my small understanding of contemporary philosophy is the application of analytic techniques to issues that would have then been classified as continental. Always small steps that are not going to impress the folk in the stalls, but interesting enough for me.
@JerseyFlight The above quote is where you should look for the thing with the real negative social value. It isn't Analytic philosophy. Just ignore him. Not worth your time. He can barely reciprocate any of the time I spend on him. It's just getting transparent as to why now too. Don't throw gems into a feeding trough. You'll just lose the gems. Don't even waste your time trying to show him how to use the toy he chose to buy when it was literally able to be picked up outside.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 25, 2020 at 21:41#4560520 likes
CiceronianusSeptember 25, 2020 at 22:02#4560570 likes
Analytic philosophy, as I understand it, is a tonic, a roborant. It's a cure for what ails philosophy to the extent philosophy is assailed by the grotesqueries and mummeries of certain practitioners, which arise from the misuse of language, the appeal to the mystical, reification, dualism, Romanticism, jargon and other blights. It may restore clarity and vigor to critical thought, and ferret out appeals to the occult (meaning hidden or concealed) as explanation. Good training for analytical thinking of the kind employed by the finest lawyers too. That's social value enough for me.
Analytic philosophy, as I understand it, is a tonic, a roborant...
...and an emetic!
JerseyFlightSeptember 25, 2020 at 22:10#4560630 likes
Unless one dislodges the elitist assumption, that lies at the base of this elitist position, the elitism will remain. This assumption states that one is engaged in a superior philosophy because one is engaged in a more sophisticated form. Nothing has been offered to sustain this assumption aside from the fact of the bare form itself, but no one has shown what it is that gives this form value. In the alternative form I provided, it would be nearly impossible to deny that its form produced value -- and not just an aesthetic value, but a value the goes beyond mere subjectivity -- social value.
JerseyFlightSeptember 25, 2020 at 22:15#4560650 likes
Analytic philosophy, as I understand it, is a tonic, a roborant. It's a cure for what ails philosophy to the extent philosophy is assailed by the grotesqueries and mummeries of certain practitioners, which arise from the misuse of language
You are quite mistaken. Davidson's article was one of skepticism, "there is no such thing as a language." Analytical Philosophy does not bring clarity, and neither does it make real-world-progress, what it does is produce a semantic narrowing! I contend that you only think this about Analytical Philosophy because it purports to be so logical, but the way in which it is logical, ends up negating both value and relevance.
JerseyFlightSeptember 25, 2020 at 22:26#4560680 likes
I take this to be a strong antithesis to the Analytical form: one doesn't have to use the Analytical style to arrive at truth. One doesn't have to use the Analytical form to state a true premise. Conclusion: the Analytical form must justify itself against the relevance and value of other forms. Why? Because life is exceedingly short. The Analytical form demands that truth take on a certain form in order to be considered valid or valuable, this is false, even as the Analytical Philosopher makes more use of other forms than he does his own form. He does this because his own form is lacking in real-world-value. His form is a game that is not conducive to reality.
I'm just gonna come right out and say it. I am putting in a lot of effort to honestly engage with individuals on this site and contribute something, anything I can of value to the discussions. I do not get the same in return. I am ignored and excluded from conversations in which I have the same right as anyone to take part in. This is a public forum and last I checked there wasn't a sign on the door saying "People with degrees only."
I don't know if it is cowardice, jealousy or just plain ignorant arrogance but it's pretty pathetic and removes a lot of the general respect I have for everyone, from the individuals that do this. Show me something to respect and prove me wrong.
180 ProofSeptember 25, 2020 at 23:16#4560790 likes
Davidson's article was one of skepticism, "there is no such thing as a language." Analytical Philosophy does not bring clarity, ...
Seems fallacious to blame an entire philosophical school for the sins of one (or a even few) of its renown acolytes. I think it's more accurate to say "Davidson's philosophy does not bring clarity ..." (I agree).
I call your bluff, now it's time to show your hand.
That's hailarious! I haven't claimed anything about the value of analytic philosophy other than that it, like other intellectual pursuits, can sharpen the critical mind. It also can reveal insights specific to its domain, that obviously would not come to light if no one studied it. This is true of any area of intellectual pursuit. You are the one claiming that it has "negative social value". So, I think the burden is on you to make an actual argument to support your claim.
Reply to Janus Well, if the shoe fits. If it encourages outright bullying, discrimination and exclusion then it does have a negative social value.
I did provide an argument in defense of the analytical method, but the behaviour being displayed by some of the individuals here, also defending it, is utterly shocking to me. It utterly shocks me because these people are clearly aware of what they are doing yet still holding high opinions of themselves while trying to make others feel inferior. So I don't even know what to make of my own argument.
Maybe Belief in X is the cause of Z if this displayed behaviour is supposed to be evidence of it.
Nevermind, I'm not going to change my thoughts. Some people just aren't aware of their privilege and sense of entitlement I guess.
Reply to Ciceronianus the White :up: yes, and the kind of iconoclastic analysis you are referring to is not confined to the anal tradition either! The intercontinentals also did their fair share Reply to Banno :lol: laxative too for the anally retentive. :joke:
Reply to MSC Why are you worried about the behavior of individuals? Aren't you here to do some philosophy, to learn? The people you refer to can likely teach you something if you stop focusing on their behavior and pay attention to what they are saying. Of course if you're not interested in what they are saying, that's fine to; but if that were the case then why would you bother engaging them in the first place? Surely not to castigate them for their allegedly bad behavior?
Reading further replies, it appears JerserFlight realizes this and want to focus on Davidson again in particular. JerseyFlight, since you've read the paper, what did you find worthless about Davidson's argument? While we cannot say all of analytic philosophy is worthless, it may be the case for this particular paper.
I think Jersey does want to claim worthlessness for the whole tradition, and even negative social value. Surely he couldn't be concerned about the negligible negative social value of just poor ole Davidson could he!?
Why are you worried about the behavior of individuals? Aren't you here to do some philosophy, to learn? The people you refer to can likely teach you something if you stop focusing on their behavior and pay attention to what they are saying. Of course if you're not interested in what they are saying, that's fine to; but if that were the case then why would you bother engaging them in the first place? Surely not to castigate them for their allegedly bad behavior?
Believe me, I've payed plenty of attention to the individuals I am talking about. What isn't happening is reciprocity. I'm here, I'm very interested in what people have to say. If they have something to say to me then say it instead of ignoring me and excluding me from the conversation.
Do you really need to ask why the behaviour of individuals worries me? Am I not supposed to call out anti-social behaviour when I can see it clear as day?
I also made a lot of effort to engage without bringing behaviour into the discussion at all. How patient do people reasonably expect me to be before I start noticing that they aren't returning any of the respect I have made every effort to give them? If this was happening in a school, other students actively ignoring everything I say in a moderated debate we are being graded in, do they really think their silence would get them a good grade? Please. I'm not stupid or ignorant enough to believe that. So don't you act like you are and don't act like you wouldn't feel just as insulted.
You were tagged because you have been extremely relevant to the discussion and as Jerseys most recent interlocutor at the time, I figured what I had to say may be valuable to you or that you would have some useful criticisms for me. I don't know if my logic is correct. I need feedback, just like everyone else. Otherwise I may as well just write a monologue and never share it.
You were tagged because you have been extremely relevant to the discussion and as Jerseys most recent interlocutor at the time, I figured what I had to say may be valuable to you or that you would have some useful criticisms for me. I don't know if my logic is correct. I need feedback, just like everyone else.
I got you.
Thing is, I wish I had never engaged with the guy. It was a mistake. I do that. Now and then I let my frustration get the better of me.
Discussions about this or that school of philosophy are really of no interest to me. I responded to himself because he kept disrupting conversations and I wanted him to stop doing that. I tried a couple different ways of doing that -- well, they seemed different to me -- but I don't know why. It's really clear this is just an ideological thing for him, and I shouldn't have allowed myself to get sucked in.
Anyway, that's why I didn't have anything to say about your causal analysis. While himself may have been attacking something he puts a name on, I wasn't ever trying to mount a defense of that, since I'm not sure it's a thing and if it is I doubt he knows what it is. At most I was mounting a modest defense of those being swept up in his accusations. What you're writing about -- I just don't have anything to say.
If they have something to say to me then say it instead of ignoring me and excluding me from the conversation.
I know how you feel. But people have different styles, and some simply won't respond if they don't find what you have said interesting or relevant enough to bother, no matter how polite and non-contentious you are being. It's happened to me plenty of times, but I wouldn't take it personally, just realize that some people are pompous asses at times, and sometimes it really is because what I've said is uninteresting or irrelevant. We can't be geniuses all the time. :wink:
At another time, on another subject, you might find you are able to engage with them. No one on here is under any obligation to respond; you have to deal with others as you find them.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 00:39#4561140 likes
My main reason to post is if I have something to say -- that's not entirely or even mostly, I think, a judgment about whether the post is good or interesting.
Thing is, I wish I had never engaged with the guy. It was a mistake. I do that. Now and then I let my frustration get the better of me.
Discussions about this or that school of philosophy are really of no interest to me. I responded to himself because he kept disrupting conversations and I wanted him to stop doing that. I tried a couple different ways of doing that -- well, they seemed different to me -- but I don't know why. It's really clear this is just an ideological thing for him, and I shouldn't have allowed myself to get sucked in.
Anyway, that's why I didn't have anything to say about your causal analysis. While himself may have attacking something he puts a name on, I wasn't ever trying to mount a defense of that, since I'm not sure it's a thing and if it is I doubt he knows what it is. At most I was mounting a modest defense of those being swept up in his accusations. What you're writing about -- I just don't have anything to say.
That's all pretty fair. I do understand why he is viewed as abrasive by some, maybe I'd find him that way too if our beliefs, experiences and emotions shared less overlap. He is 13 years older than me though, so I don't know if I should be putting so much focus on helping him.
It might seem like an ideological thing. I think it is a psychological thing though. He feels wronged by people whom he views as similar to you, you are his proxy. If you respond in the way his original harmer or harmers did, he's just going to see it as evidence of why you are a good proxy. My advice there would be to speak less as your philosophical identity and speak to his humanity and ask about his experiences, instead of his views. It might be that in the same or similar circumstances you'd be doing the same thing. It might be that although you ideologically match his harmer in one way, you don't match it in another.
It might seem like a cry for attention, because that is partly what it is, in my experience though people seek out what their life has been lacking. Seeking attention for the right reasons, and in the right way is okay. Do I feel his reasons are right? Probably. Do I feel his methods for getting it are the right way? Probably not. Do people sometimes ignore what they want from others because they aren't getting it from someone else? Absolutely.
Be that as it may, it's your choice to engage or not engage, with him and with me. What I'd like you to consider is that there may be a right and wrong way to even not engage someone. That might seem counter intuitive but it's something to think about.
No hard feelings between me and you. I won't turn down a reasonable explanation, when it is given.
I know how you feel. But people have different styles, and some simply won't respond if they don't find what you have said interesting or relevant enough to bother, no matter how polite and non-contentious you are being. It's happened to me plenty of times, but I wouldn't take it personally, just realize that some people are pompous asses at times, and sometimes it really is because what I've said is uninteresting or irrelevant. We can't be geniuses all the time. :wink:
At another time, on another subject, you might find you are able to engage with them. No one on here is under any obligation to respond; you have to deal with others as you find them.
I'll keep this in mind. I don't believe I am a genius, even some of the time, but then I have a definition of genius with a high bar for deserving that label. I can solve problems, I can't stop new problems from occuring. Doing that, takes and makes, a true genius. However, maybe philosophy is the wrong field for that definition of genius to be applicable. At least I'm not the "strong and stable genius" running things where I am. ;)
Analytic philosophy, I think, hasn't really been a thing for some time now.
This insight is right on target. It is not the case that analytic philosophy is vacuous or useless or fruitless. Rather, the charge should be that it is finished as it is constructed. It is done. The real questions are What is next? Which way should 21st century philosophy turn?
This insight is right on target. It is not the case that analytic philosophy is vacuous or useless or fruitless. Rather, the charge should be that it is finished as it is constructed. It is done. The real questions are What is next? Which way should 21st century philosophy turn?
Critical Contextualism. We've built and tested many different tools. Time to start using them and experimenting with them.
Ultimately philosophy is at a cross roads where it needs to decide if it still wants to only discuss problems or if it wants to try its hand at actually solving them.
There are roadblocks to this however. Indecision, lack of leadership and fears of making mistakes with real world consequences. Which means another road block is ethical consensus. Lack of ethical consensus breeds enormous amounts of mistrust. It makes collaboration difficult and contributes to philosophies lack of power to apply thought into societal action. We can only talk so much, without the attention and trust of the general population, we might never get the chance to find or provide evidence to back up what we claim. Which is what we need right now in order to get the attention amd trust of the general population.
Basically, Philosophy has finished school but no one wants to give it a job until it can show it has enough experience to do the job. It certainly doesn't help that the social sciences are vilified in popular media and by the hard sciences.
My way of confronting this is to try and convince philosophers to enter into politics, not just political philosophy I mean seriously try to get into politics. The right polemic method, support, the right kind of charisma and the ability to simplify complex ideas, could potentially take on the political elite who normally enter into politics. Above all, what will be required is a realistic vision for our species that is both attractive and possible.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 02:19#4561320 likes
My way of confronting this is to try and convince philosophers to enter into politics, not just political philosophy I mean seriously try to get into politics.
Which way should 21st century philosophy turn?
— magritte
Sorry, I just don't get the point of this question. (See, MSC this kind of thing.)
That's because you're not imagining the psychological reasons behind asking the question. I know that ultimately this says more about a persons view of philosophy than it does about philosophy. But what does their desire to ask the question say about philosophy? These are things that interest me, but then, my education started in psychology before philosophy, so I would say something like that ;)
My main reason to post is if I have something to say -- that's not entirely or even mostly, I think, a judgment about whether the post is good or interesting.
Do you mean a judgement about the post you are making or the post you are responding to? If the latter, would it not be the case that if you didn't find it relevant or interesting, then there would be nothing to respond to, and hence no reason to post (other than just a sense of obligation on account of politeness if there be such) ?
I meant: whether I respond absolutely isn't a judgment on whether a post was interesting or relevant or right. People say stuff and sometimes I have stuff to say about what they said, but usually I don't. Even if a post is good, that doesn't mean I have anything to say. Sometimes I want to have something to say, but I don't.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 03:13#4561580 likes
I responded to himself because he kept disrupting conversations and I wanted him to stop doing that. I tried a couple different ways of doing that -- well, they seemed different to me -- but I don't know why. It's really clear this is just an ideological thing for him, and I shouldn't have allowed myself to get sucked in.
By "disruption" one cannot mean, "that which contradicts or challenges my theology." If that is the case then we can dismiss all philosophy simply by noting that it contradicts our belief.
What all positivity longs for in the presence of negation: "I wanted him to stop doing that."
No engagement with any objection, just ad hominem dismal, hence the term, "ideological."
Two prominent professors have already been cited as advocating the same position.
"Analytic philosophers focus too much on playing with concepts, and not enough on thinking about the parts of reality that matter." Michael Huemer
StreetlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 04:05#4561730 likes
Ah yes, the same Michael Huemer who also said that "Many people interested in Continental philosophy are perfectly nice people. That said, analytic philosophy is obviously better... The other thing to point out is that the substantive doctrines most commonly associated with continental philosophers are false".
The correct conclusion, of course, is that Michael Huemer is a wanker whose blog posts on these topics are embarrassing, second only to anyone who takes them seriously.
Of course it says alot that the zealot for 'reason' here is indulging in a couple of totally fallacious appeals to authority while offering about as much substantive critique as an empty juice box.
PhilosophimSeptember 26, 2020 at 04:18#4561760 likes
I think Jersey does want to claim worthlessness for the whole tradition, and even negative social value. Surely he couldn't be concerned about the negligible negative social value of just poor ole Davidson could he!?
I think he initially did, but realized his error later on and stated Quoting JerseyFlight
I think it's best just to stick with Davidson. Just tell me about the value of his essay? This is all I really care about.
JerseyFlight is passionate and opinionated, but he also claims to value logical thinking. Philosophical arguments can get heated, and it is easy to push too far. I think when someone states they are willing to bring the scope of the argument back down to a reasonable and philosophical level, it is respectable to take it. If you are expecting any person in philosophy to come out and state, "I was wrong," you might be waiting until the heat death of the universe. Its not the point. The refocus is on a real philosophical question, and that is whether Davidson's particular paper had a point of value.
I do not know what the previous conversation on Davidson was, but if you want to salvage this thread from a PC vs. Apple argument, you could try presenting the positives that we can glean out of Davidson's argument, and JersyFlight can present his negatives. As long as it is understood this cannot be a judgement on analytic philosophy as a whole, there might be an actual conversation here worth salvaging.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 04:45#4561830 likes
a real philosophical question, and that is whether Davidson's particular paper added value to society, detracted value from society, or is largely irrelevant to society.
My first instinct is that this is not a question we're likely to be able to answer. By "society" I assume we want something maximal, all people now and in the future. By "value", the well-being and flourishing of all those people. Something like this, right? I'm trying not to get stuck on semantic issues. Let's say we can even measure something like this -- because we're talking about it increasing or decreasing. Even given all that, is there much prospect for measuring the impact of something like this? We can point to examples like The Turner Diaries or Mein Kampf and say, this bit of writing had a negative impact on society. I'm not sure what you could get as large a number of people to agree on for a positive impact, because a lot of people are going to reach for a sacred text.
If we don't talk about measuring, we can just say we think things are good. I think The Last Unicorn is good for the world. I think One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is good for the world. I'm not measuring their impact; I'm saying I approve of them, that's all. I'll bet they've both made the world a slightly better place than it would have been without them. But that's assuming the causal analysis is dead simple. If someone blows up an office building in Atlanta and we find his manifesto online and it identifies the presence of wicked King Haggard in the modern world and our bomber's belief that he has taken up the role of Prince Lir -- then what? (The Catcher in the Rye has to deal with this -- book that meant a lot to a generation or two but not all of them righteous.)
What do we do if we can't measure? How do we judge? In the usual way.
The refocus is on a real philosophical question, and that is whether Davidson's particular paper had a point of value.
I do not know what the previous conversation on Davidson was, but if you want to salvage this thread from a PC vs. Apple argument, you could try presenting the positives that we can glean out of Davidson's argument, and JersyFlight can present his negatives. As long as it is understood this cannot be a judgement on analytic philosophy as a whole, there might be an actual conversation here worth salvaging.
Well, we'll have to wait for Jersey to return and state whether he is only concerned with the "negative social value" of this particular paper of Davidson's or whether he still wants to claim that analytic philosophy in general has a negative social value. Once he has done that then the onus would be on him to support his claim, whichever it is, with some actual argument.
Surely he couldn't be concerned about the negligible negative social value of just poor ole Davidson could he!?
leaving it open for him to voice his concern about Davidson, and explain just what it consists in. Although this thread is nominally about analytic philosophy in general, I'm flexible enough to accept a focus just on Davidson if he wants it that way, without complaining about the thread being derailed.
Reply to Srap Tasmaner :up: I agree that the question almost certainly cannot be plausibly answered. If Jersey will either admit that or submit an answer, then we can put this to rest.
Analytic philosophers are very good at being half of a philosopher.
That sums it up for me. It's a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 06:38#4561990 likes
That sums it up for me. It's a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work.
I am genuinely puzzled by this, because it sounds like the sort of anti-intellectualism I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board; it sounds like the sort of sweeping generalization I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board; it sounds like the sort of baseless impugning of other people's motives I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board.
I just can't figure out how else to read it. Even if you had filled in exactly what you mean by "actual productive work" instead of leaving us to guess, it would still be all of those things.
Once I attented a basic analytical philosophy course at the University of Peshawar, of all places. I was totally into Popper at the time, and knew from reading him how much contempt he had for the likes of Wittgenstein, so I was curious, but I left before the august teacher could reach Wittgenstein. Fredge and the foundation of set theory was good stuff, I must admit, and if analytical philosophy as ever "won" anything, that may be in helping found set theory.
Then he moved on to Russel, which proved a big disappointment. Minuscule, sluggish thinking, especially on linguistics, where I knew something and could compare with the structuralist approach started by Saussure... I became impatient.
Then at some point the question was raised, of whether the following proposition is true, false, meaningless or what: "The king of France is bald."
I left the course a little after that. By then I understood Popper's contempt for poseurs, and shared it. He was writing about how to define science, and how to defend democracy against mounting fascism, while down the corridor at Cambridge, some clowns were wondering if a non-existent French king could be said to be lacking a non-existent hair...
So here is one negative: at least some analytic philosophy is futile, a vacuous game that distracts from real and important problems.
I was not the first student to leave the course. Imagine them young Pakistani boys (there was no girl in the class) trying to enter life in a poor and dictatorial country, having to go through a painstakingly slow interrogation of the purported baldness of imaginary French kings... The difference between their real life and the vacuous word games of some philosophers couldn't be brought in sharper contrast.
And that brings me to the second negative: it drive people away from philosophy.
PfhorrestSeptember 26, 2020 at 06:57#4562010 likes
My way of confronting this is to try and convince philosophers to enter into politics, not just political philosophy I mean seriously try to get into politics.
While that is a lovely idea, I think it would take a very rare personality to both do philosophy well and also survive a political race. Most people with aptitude in one arena seem to lack it in the other.
I am genuinely puzzled by this, because it sounds like the sort of anti-intellectualism I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board; it sounds like the sort of sweeping generalization I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board; it sounds like the sort of baseless impugning of other people's motives I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board.
So what type of discourse do you think is appropriate for a philosophic board? One that doesn't ever question anyone's motive? One that respects intellectuals, always and without distinction? One that forever gets lost in details without ever attempting a generalization?
JerseyFlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:13#4562050 likes
Of course it says a lot that the zealot for 'reason' here is indulging in a couple of totally fallacious appeals to authority while offering about as much substantive critique as an empty juice box.
Come now friend, you only say this because you demand the Analytical form as a bias of value. I do indeed hope you will not ban me for contradicting you, that would indeed be a tragic move for the state of philosophy on this Forum. Let emotion fall to the side, nothing is personal here. We must let this form hang in the balance for the sake of value itself. I only need here to repeat myself. Do not attack me, just deal with the premises:
'I take this to be a strong antithesis to the Analytical form: one doesn't have to use the Analytical style to arrive at truth. One doesn't have to use the Analytical form to state a true premise. Conclusion: the Analytical form must justify itself against the relevance and value of other forms. Why? Because life is exceedingly short. The Analytical form demands that truth take on a certain form in order to be considered valid or valuable, this is false, even as the Analytical Philosopher makes more use of other forms than he does his own form. He does this because his own form is lacking in real-world-value. His form is a game that is not conducive to reality.'
JerseyFlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:15#4562070 likes
I am genuinely puzzled by this, because it sounds like the sort of anti-intellectualism I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board
This doesn't mean anti-intellectualism. This means you must agree with me, not question me, not challenge me, in order to be considered an intellectual.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:19#4562080 likes
This doesn't mean anti-intellectualism. This means you must agree with me, not question me, not challenge me, in order to be considered an intellectual.
No it really doesn't.
I wouldn't find this an acceptable way to talk about "modern philosophy" or "Marxist philosophy" or "feminist philosophy" or "German philosophy".
We can do better, can't we?
StreetlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:19#4562090 likes
Reply to JerseyFlight I'm about as much a proponent of 'the analytical form' as I am a coconut. What I am against however, is the peddling of ignorance by the ignorant and arrogant.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:20#4562100 likes
I'm about as much a proponent of 'the analytical form' as I am a coconut. What I am against however, is the peddling of ignorance by the ignorant and arrogant.
This is just emotion and ad hominem. Come now friend, just refute my premises. Let us deal with the truth or error of my premises, not our emotive psychology.
StreetlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:22#4562130 likes
Reply to JerseyFlight There is nothing to deal with. You're speaking at a level of generality so broad as to be useless. There's no there there.
JerseyFlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:25#4562150 likes
There is nothing to deal with. You're speaking at a level of generality so broad as to be useless. There's no there there.
Then it should be super easy to refute.
'I take this to be a strong antithesis to the Analytical form: one doesn't have to use the Analytical style to arrive at truth. One doesn't have to use the Analytical form to state a true premise. Conclusion: the Analytical form must justify itself against the relevance and value of other forms. Why? Because life is exceedingly short. The Analytical form demands that truth take on a certain form in order to be considered valid or valuable, this is false, even as the Analytical Philosopher makes more use of other forms than he does his own form. He does this because his own form is lacking in real-world-value. His form is a game that is not conducive to reality.'
Do I need to adhere to the analytical form to arrive at truth? Do I need to use the analytical form to state a true premise? Why should I submit to this form when my life is exceedingly short? Do you consider these questions and premises invalid because they are not presented in analytical form? What form do you use when you navigate the world in which you live?
I haven't attacked a single person, I am simply dealing with beliefs and the presumption of forms. I am not the one getting emotional here.
StreetlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:27#4562170 likes
Reply to JerseyFlight No, I consider these 'invalid' because 'the analytical form' corresponds to nothing but an incoherent fantasy that exists nowhere but in your head. Ironically, not unlike the present king of France.
Reply to Srap Tasmaner It was not a defense, rather a series of question. What type of discourse is appropriate (or inappropriate) on a board such as this one, according to you?
I'm trying to figure out your position, your critique.
From my position, all philosophers are not necessarily nice people. Some of them I dispise. But this is not out of anti-intellectualism, it is just because I happen to care for what philosophers actually do and contribute to society.
For example, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Derida have done more harm than good to society with their thinking, in my view. Because their thinking was wrong and yet people adhered to it.
They might have been very polite, so if you judge by that, they were good guys, but their words did some damage nevertheless, in my judgment.
JerseyFlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:34#4562200 likes
No, I consider these 'invalid' because 'the analytical form' corresponds to nothing but a fantasy that exists nowhere but in your head.
There is no need for either one of us to get emotional here. This is how philosophy works, it contradicts positive knowledge to make gains in knowledge. So you claim that Analytical Philosophy doesn't have its own distinct style or approach?
SophistiCatSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:37#4562210 likes
Analytic philosophy, I think, hasn't really been a thing for some time now.
Was it ever a thing? Is "analytic philosophy" a meaningful and useful designation? I think philosophers tend to answer in the negative. (And the same with "continental philosophy.")
StreetlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:39#4562220 likes
Reply to JerseyFlight It has a multitude of styles and approaches. Davidson being as different from Sellars as different from Anscombe as different from Nussbaum as different from Cracy as different from the Chruchlands. And each different among themselves, no less.
JerseyFlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:40#4562230 likes
I need to make it clear, for me the distinction is not between Analytical Philosophy and Continental Philosophy, but these taken together in contrast to Dialectical Philosophy, or if you will, Idealism versus Materialism.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:52#4562250 likes
a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work
I'm not being super-subtle here. We're just talking about things a lot of grown-ups learn to quit doing, and you'd hope pretty much everyone who thinks a good use of their free-time is talking about philosophy: you don't make sweeping generalizations, you don't impugn people's motives without some reason, and you don't indulge in anti-intellectual bias when you're talking philosophy of all things.
Nothing fancy. This is basic stuff.
JerseyFlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:54#4562260 likes
But there is a common thread that runs between them, a very intensive kind of logical analysis that emphasizes the attributes of concepts.
"If asked what ‘analysis’ means, most people today immediately think of breaking something down into its components; and this is how analysis tends to be officially characterized. In the Concise Oxford Dictionary, for example, ‘analysis’ is defined as the “resolution into simpler elements by analysing (opp. synthesis)”, the only other uses mentioned being the mathematical and the psychological. And in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, ‘analysis’ is defined as “the process of breaking a concept down into more simple parts, so that its logical structure is displayed”. The restriction to concepts and the reference to displaying ‘logical structure’ are important qualifications, but the core conception remains that of breaking something down." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/
"Analytic philosophy, also called linguistic philosophy, a loosely related set of approaches to philosophical problems, dominant in Anglo-American philosophy from the early 20th century, that emphasizes the study of language and the logical analysis of concepts... Analytic philosophers conduct conceptual investigations that characteristically, though not invariably, involve studies of the language in which the concepts in question are, or can be, expressed. According to one tradition in analytic philosophy (sometimes referred to as formalism), for example, the definition of a concept can be determined by uncovering the underlying logical structures, or “logical forms,” of the sentences used to express it." Britannica, Analytical Philosophy: https://www.britannica.com/topic/analytic-philosophy
Analytical Philosophy: a philosophical movement that seeks the solution of philosophical problems in the analysis of propositions or sentences: Merriam Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/analytic%20philosophy
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 07:59#4562280 likes
Big shrug. I think it was kind of a thing early in the 20th. I think Russell thought it was what he might defend against ordinary language philosophy.
I tend to go with the broad usage that it's the overlapping strands that run from Russell & Moore up through, I don't know, the seventies. There's room in their for lots of isms including a notable strain of pragmatism that ebbs and flows. It feels like that begins to change around the time of Rorty and Cavell at least. That's when the writing first feels post-analytic to me.
StreetlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 08:01#4562290 likes
Reply to JerseyFlight Yes, this kind of 60,000ft view is made for outsiders and neophytes to satisfy a misplaced craving for generality. It takes the ignorant or the impudent to think anything substantive can be said on the basis of it.
JerseyFlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 08:02#4562300 likes
I wouldn't find this an acceptable way to talk about "modern philosophy" or "Marxist philosophy" or "feminist philosophy" or "German philosophy".
The only thing that matters is whether a premise is stating something accurate in this sense. You demonstrate exactly what I've been saying, a bias for the Analytical Form, but I have already presented a valid challenge to this that has not yet been answered:
'I take this to be a strong antithesis to the Analytical form: one doesn't have to use the Analytical style to arrive at truth. One doesn't have to use the Analytical form to state a true premise. Conclusion: the Analytical form must justify itself against the relevance and value of other forms. Why? Because life is exceedingly short. The Analytical form demands that truth take on a certain form in order to be considered valid or valuable, this is false, even as the Analytical Philosopher makes more use of other forms than he does his own form. He does this because his own form is lacking in real-world-value. His form is a game that is not conducive to reality.'
Of course, the logical approach is to try to deny that there is such a thing as the Analytical Form.
JerseyFlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 08:07#4562320 likes
es, this kind of 60,000ft view is made for outsiders and neophytes to satisfy a misplaced craving for generality. It takes the ignorant or the impudent to think anything substantive can be said on the basis of it.
Come on man, this is all ad hominem: "outsiders," "neophytes," "misplaced craving," "ignorant," "impudent." Do you realize you just condemned three major philosophical dictionaries?
I made a valid argument. You then tried to bypass it by claiming there is no such thing as an Analytical Form, I responded with an argument and evidence demarcating the Analytical Form.
(Notice I am not saying anything about you, not attacking you, not characterizing your position, just trying to deal with your ideas)? This is how philosophy should proceed.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 08:11#4562330 likes
You demonstrate exactly what I've been saying, a bias for the Analytical Form
I literally do not know what you mean by this. Is "Analytical Form" a term some people use? I just don't know what it means.
And again I wasn't defending my tribe or anything. You could go to any (pre-covid) college campus and if you found some freshmen or sophomores who actually like thinking and talking sitting around thinking and talking, you'd probably hear one of them say, "No, come on, man, you're overgeneralizing."
This is like kindergarten stuff I'm talking about. Nothing fancy.
StreetlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 08:12#4562340 likes
It sounded to me like you said the great bulk of philosophy written in English in the last century was
a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work
— Olivier5
I'm not being super-subtle here.
Quite true, that last bit.
My ire is aimed at the fakes only, or those I consider fake, not to all AP (assuming this is a meaningful category). So that's one distinction. There is also a big difference between 20th century English-speaking philosophers and AP. Granted that the two sets overlap quite a bit but it's not an equivalence.
I don't know if Searle is considered AP but I like him a lot. Popper is Austrian (like Wittgenstein) but wrote much in English, and he is a favorite of mine... So no, no sweeping generalization is due. But they ARE some poseurs, yes, and I listed a few I believe are poseurs, including a French guy and a German...
We're cool, you can get down your high horse now.
JerseyFlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 08:20#4562360 likes
A fallacious appeal to authority is not 'evidence'. It's laziness and shitty pseudo-scholarship three times over.
If it's considered a false appeal to authority to quote from philosophical dictionaries, how do you propose we go about defining the Analytical style then?
JerseyFlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 08:25#4562370 likes
My reply was to state that the only thing that matters in this sense 'is whether a premise is stating something accurate.' You can talk about ways of talking all day long, you can say that a way is false, but if it's articulating something accurate, or achieving value, then this charge doesn't matter.
StreetlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 08:28#4562400 likes
Reply to JerseyFlight I wouldn't, because there is no singular 'analytical style'. As if something as ephemeral as 'style' determined anything at all in the first place.
JerseyFlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 08:36#4562420 likes
I wouldn't, because there is no singular 'analytical style'. As if something as ephemeral as 'style' determined anything at all in the first place.
Analytical philosophy conducts conceptual investigations, specifically into linguistic, idealistic logical structures. Well, one does not need to do this to arrive at truth, further, this kind of appraoch has a very limited value. Notice Banno did not reply back to me when I asked him for examples? This is because this is not the procedure, method or form of the social sciences. Looking at these structures has not proven to be very fruitful. This is not the direction that linguistic studies have gone, they have gone in the direction of neurobiology and hard observation coupled with modern psychology. Analytical Philosophy is desperately lacking explanatory power. It has no future. It's simply a philosophical aesthetic form.
StreetlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 08:37#4562430 likes
No, I wasn't at all saying that whether it's true or not it's not "acceptable" and that whether it's acceptable is more important. Of course not.
A lot of people over the age of, I don't know, 16, tend to avoid sweeping generalizations without considerable evidence because they usually turn out to be false. See, that's a generalization but I'm pretty comfortable with it, because all you have to do is think about what kind of evidence you'd have to accumulate to support a claim like "Canadians are nicer than Americans" or "Black people are lazy" and you quickly realize this is not an idea you're readily going to have enough evidence to support. That makes it an idea you probably shouldn't trust and certainly one you shouldn't promote.
Similarly for impugning the motives of people you don't even know. @Olivier5's opinion is that Hegel was a poseur. That strikes me as idiotic whether Hegel's your guy or not.
There was just nothing especially analytic or jesus even all that philosophical about my complaint. It's the common sense of grown-ups.
We can at least expect that much in a forum devoted to philosophy, can't we?
JerseyFlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 08:39#4562450 likes
Asserting that your view is "grown-up" is like an exercise in self-justification. One merely needs to go to your thread of Plato to see your Analytical Philosophical style. There is nothing controversial here. Further, I have been very specific. These conversations began with my criticism of Davidson. If there is no general category of Analytical Philosophy then why does the category exist, more importantly, on what basis do you make a complaint against philosophical style, "anti-intellectualism" and the like, which you have done to me several times? Can you not see that a great deal of your objections amount to form and style? In other words, if philosophers don't want to analyze things in terms of the linguistic logical structure, then you should be content with this and simply validate it as an alternative approach. But this is not what you do, you authoritate that it is both wrong and invalid and constitutes a violation of philosophical authenticity. This is the presumption that motivates your authoritarian rebukes.
Olivier5's opinion is that Hegel was a poseur. That strikes me as idiotic whether Hegel's your guy or not.
And that strikes as a bit naïve, if you don't mind me saying so.
1. Since there's been trade, there's been fake trade. Pliny the Elder wrote about it, how the guys in Puntland could mix up and fake their frankincense for instance.
2. Philosophy is a trade and always has been. There's money and power in it, however small at present.
3. Therefore, it's to be expected that at least some philosophers may have sold snake oil.
That is to say, there is no reason to believe that all philosophers are intellectually honest. There are only human, traders like everyone else. That's a truism, I know. But then if this is the case, does it matter? Should we be concerned about it, or is it unimportant that there be fake (disingenuous) philosophy out there?
The answer to that question depends on whether one thinks philosophy is important or not. Also on whether one believes in "fair trade" as some sort of public good, à la Kant.
I believe in philosophy as a serious and useful trade. That's all. And all trades have their freewheelers and fakers.
JerseyFlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 09:08#4562510 likes
I think a serious problem in philosophical discourse is that individuals feel like their intelligence is being attacked when their belief is being attacked. In my experience Analytical Philosophers are exceedingly intelligent, most especially in terms of comprehension. I would think all of the people I have had extended discourse with on this Forum are smarter than me, but that doesn't mean their program is one of relevance or that their beliefs are accurate. We all have to continually challenge our beliefs in this sense. I think there's a good rule here, where there is pain and psychological defensiveness, that's usually the direction we need to go.
AnsiktsburkSeptember 26, 2020 at 09:09#4562530 likes
For example, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Derida have done more harm than good to society with their thinking, in my view. Because their thinking was wrong and yet people adhered to it.
They might have been very polite, so if you judge by that, they were good guys, but their words did some damage nevertheless, in my judgment.
Wittgenstein was probably the least polite philosopher you’ll ever encountered but he was bloody well not wrong. As no philosopher who has survived the decades was. Noone is totally right, but Wittgenstein was probably more right than you and me. An asshole, though.
AnsiktsburkSeptember 26, 2020 at 09:15#4562540 likes
I think a serious problem in philosophical discourse is that individuals feel like their intelligence is being attacked when their belief is being attacked. In my experience Analytical Philosophers are exceedingly intelligent, most especially in terms of comprehension. I would think all of the people I have had extended discourse with on this Forum are smarter than me, but that doesn't mean their program is one of relevance or that their beliefs are accurate. We all have to continually challenge our beliefs in this sense. I think there's a good rule here, where there is pain and psychological defensiveness, that's usually the direction we need to go.
Where does imagination and creativity fit in with analytical philosophy? I find it so boring to read that I really do not know it , other from a popular pow. Will an Ayer, a wittgenstein or a Quine say stop dreaming? Or is it like a gauge to measure the correctness of what pops up?
Reply to Ansiktsburk Yeah. Bits and pieces of ideas, among which a good one bubbles up once in a long while... Even the most dishonest trader has to deliver the real stuff every now and then.
That sums it up for me. It's a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work.
— Olivier5
I am genuinely puzzled by this, because it sounds like the sort of anti-intellectualism I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board; it sounds like the sort of sweeping generalization I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board; it sounds like the sort of baseless impugning of other people's motives I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board.
I just can't figure out how else to read it. Even if you had filled in exactly what you mean by "actual productive work" instead of leaving us to guess, it would still be all of those things.
Why does this seem okay to you?
Have to agree here. I may have said the original quote but I didn't say anything about productivity. Analytical philosophers were obviously productive.
That sums it up for me. It's a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work.
Okay, let's say it is narrow minded. What if philosophy is travelling through a tunnel?
How do you think the Analytical school is beneficial for philosophy as a whole?
I'd observe that every philosopher, by way of their humanity, has tunnel vision to some extent. All individuals are narrow minded. It is only when they come together that their field of vision increases and blindspots are revealed.
While that is a lovely idea, I think it would take a very rare personality to both do philosophy well and also survive a political race. Most people with aptitude in one arena seem to lack it in the other.
I agree to some extent, what I disagree with however is characterizing philosophy and politics as just two arenas, one is happening in a centre with multiple arenas, one is a warzone where many weapons are used. I can function in both formats, so long as I've practiced hard with my weapon in one of the arenas. The harder I practice and the more weapons I learn to use, the more effective I can be in the warzone.
CiceronianusSeptember 26, 2020 at 13:28#4563070 likes
So when I complained about you suggesting that a huge chunk of modern philosophy is just a bunch of poseurs, your response was that surely some philosophers are poseurs, Hegel for instance, and painted me as suggesting none are.
When I complain about you claiming Hegel was a poseur, you respond that surely some philosophers are poseurs, and paint me as suggesting none are.
Do you understand that your reasoning here is faulty? That it's the sort of thing most people learn not to do without ever setting foot in a philosophy classroom?
@JerseyFlight, does standing up for some basic standards of reason, I'll even say "logic", does that make me an analytic philosopher? If so, that's what I am, but I'm still waiting for you to defend Hegel against this slander.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 16:32#4563410 likes
All individuals are narrow minded. It is only when they come together that their field of vision increases and blindspots are revealed.
Something a lot like this is actually one of the core cultural values of what we've been calling "analytic philosophy", its cooperative spirit. Sometimes this is described as doing philosophy "piecemeal". Sometimes it's an attempt to model the doing of philosophy on science. In the case of John Austin, he had been responsible for coordinating radar intelligence during World War II and imagined coordinating the analysis of English usage in a similar way, with teams of people working on various different sorts of things people say, because he believed some basic understanding of such things was necessary before you could even start doing philosophy.
Note that I am not claiming "analytic philosophy" invented cooperation or has a monopoly on it. But historically it arose as a reaction against big idealist systems that are typically stamped with a single individual's name and being against such big individual systems was baked into the approach. It is something analytic philosophy has been very self-conscious about for a long time. It is probably one reason philosophers like Peirce and Sellars have been somewhat marginalized, and eventually that sort of neglect was seen as a limitation of the approach. I don't think philosophers today have the distrust of systematic philosophy you can see everywhere in later Wittgenstein, for instance. They even read Heidegger. On the other hand, someone like Rorty, on one reading, takes the idea even further, and claims we need even less theory than we thought, but should instead see philosophy like science not as a particular way of doing things but as the work of a community with the capacity for self-correction. He too calls for greater public engagement and cites Dewey as a model.
But this is what I mean when I say "analytic philosophy is over because it won": insofar as English-speaking philosophers feel ready to start system-building again, insofar as they take seriously calls to greater public engagement (and that applies to all of academia, and especially science -- look at Carl Sagan's pleas for scientists to get out there and explain what they do), they're going to do so without giving up any of the gains made in logic, precision, or sensitivity to the complexities of language and its tendencies to mislead or temptations to be misused. We're keeping all that.
Can you not see that a great deal of your objections amount to form and style?
In my dust-up with @Olivier5 they absolutely do not. Sweeping generalizations are a known evil. It doesn't take any advanced philosophy to know that. My dad knew that. Judging others to be poseurs because they say things you disagree with or don't understand is juvenile, and again this is not a matter of advanced philosophy but being a reflective human being.
For example, my oldest son's a musician and he cares a lot about some musicians that are not to everyone's taste, like Tom Waits and Van Morrison. Some people just pass by disagreements over "what's good" -- de gustibus non est disputandum, as the man said. But you'll also find, and quite easily on the internet, a different reaction: the belief that no one really likes Tom Waits, I mean the guy totally sucks, and if you claim to like his music, you're lying, and you must be hipster and a poseur. That's not just juvenile, it's toxic, and it's closed-minded.
In other words, if philosophers don't want to analyze things in terms of the linguistic logical structure, then you should be content with this and simply validate it as an alternative approach.
Absolutely! Yes! Yes! Yes! I do what I do, and if you take a different approach, why should I care? The one caveat is what I said at the end of this post above: some of us are loathe to give up the precision we've gained by attention to logic and language. That doesn't mean we think logic and language are the subject matter of philosophy -- good lord, no! But words are our tools, and we believe you need to handle them with care and that attention to detail is no sin. Same for reasoning and inference. It's just care for the tools you do your work with.
@JerseyFlight, I'll bet we could wholeheartedly agree on that.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 17:03#4563490 likes
Some philosophers being poseurs (among them Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) does not entail almost all the academic philosophy in the English-speaking world in the 20th century being "a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work."
To claim that Hegel was a not poseur is not to claim that no philosopher anywhere at any time was a poseur.
And I stand by my claim that most people figure out this sort of thing without ever setting foot in a philosophy classroom. If you like, I could do it up in formal symbolism, or make it look like an Aristotelian syllogism, but I'd need to introduce a quantifier to account for your use of "generally".
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 17:23#4563560 likes
To speak candidly, it looks to me now like you're a victim of a certain sort of iconoclastic philosopher. For me, it was Nietzsche, and then later Wittgenstein. I didn't know Popper was one of those.
I had the misfortune of reading Nietzsche when I was young. This is no judgment on the value of his work, but one of the messages a young person just discovering philosophy is going to get is that almost all philosophers before Nietzsche were full of shit. This is also true of Wittgenstein, who gives the impression of being broadly dismissive of most other philosophers -- since he barely mentions them! -- except Frege. (And even when he does mention someone by name it's often for critique -- only it turns out this is a sign of respect; he actually thought well of William James and G. E. Moore.)
This is terribly dangerous for a young person. It's a shortcut you're invited to take -- you don't have to slog through the boring blinkered past but can jump straight to the end of the story where now we finally know what's what. I think I finally started to come out of it when, after probably years of dismissing Husserl because I was steeped in Heidegger and Derrida, I actually read Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and thought it was brilliant.
So it looks to me -- and I am frankly guessing, if I'm wrong I'm wrong, c'est la vie -- like you're a victim of finding too early a certain kind of philosopher who sweeps you up with his denunciations of the bullshit everyone else is up to.
And that's disappointing to me because I've been wanting to read Popper but if he's full of stuff like this it's going to make it hard for me.
all the academic philosophy in the English-speaking world
I have already answered that. They are quite a few academic English-speaking philosophers who don't define themselves as analytical philosophers. Who's making a sweeping generalization now?
I had the misfortune of reading Nietzsche when I was young. [...]
This is terribly dangerous for a young person
Possibly so... I read Nietzsche as an old person.
I honestly tried to read Hegel, I did, also Wittgenstein. The latter is never even attempting to structure any of his intuitions much. It's bits and pieces. It feels a bit like a flee market. The former was evidently a very smart guy who managed to explain how it's okay to hold two diametrically opposite ideas, as long as you say something like 'Well, both are kinda true at the same time, you know?".
Most importantly, in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel told the Germans that helping the poor through social programmes or charity is dishonorable, that "it is only through being a member of the state [Prussian, supposedly] that the individual himself has objectivity, truth, and ethical life", that the state is God's march on earth, that the state is that "objective spirit that subsumes family and civil society and fulfills them." Etc. Etc.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 18:27#4563730 likes
Even when speaking loosely, and explaining how I'm using the term "analytic philosophy" as I go, a way of using the term I believe to be consonant with casual usage as when people compare "analytic" and "continental", even then I was still more careful than you're being by misquoting me. I mean seriously, leaving "almost" out of the phrase "almost all"? That was an oversight right?
If you didn't understand Hegel or didn't like what he had to say, that doesn't make him a fraud or a charlatan or a poseur. If you didn't understand Wittgenstein or didn't like what he had to say, that doesn't make him a fraud or a charlatan or a poseur.
You want to know what my standards are for discussing philosophy? They're higher than that. In fact, my standards for discussing anything are higher than that.
Indeed it was. So almost all it is. Are you confident that almost all English-speaking academic philosophers self-identify as analytical?
I know a few American thinkers who make perfect sense most of the time, but they don't waste their time wondering if the king of France is bold, or if there is anything called "meaning" or "the self"... They deal with our rapport to the environment, the mind, ethics, language as a fact of life, culture as a tool of domination, scientific paradigms, etc.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 19:09#4563840 likes
Are you confident that almost all English-speaking academic philosophers self-identify as analytical?
No, I'm confident they don't much care, certainly not for the last thirty or forty years, and I've been perfectly clear and repetitive about how I'm using the phrase, and it has nothing to do with how people self-identify.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 19:09#4563850 likes
(( phone double post ))
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 19:18#4563880 likes
And again: insofar as philosophers range more widely than they did in the first three quarters of the 20th, they do so with a rigor that academic philosophy these days takes as a requirement, a rigor that was achieved through the analysis of reasoning and language carried out by our forebears.
Reply to Srap Tasmaner Well, I have no reason to doubt your word that almost all English-speaking are academic philosophers, whether they agree or not. I haven't got a clue, statistically speaking, nor do I know of a good criterion to tell AP and non-AP apart... But it's not my understanding. I understand the term to have a more limited extension in time, to be a bit passé now.
In short, you may be talking of a set much broader than the one I'm talking about.
insofar as philosophers range more widely than they did in the first three quarters of the 20th, they do so with a rigor that academic philosophy these days takes as a requirement, a rigor that was achieved through the analysis of reasoning and language carried out by our forebears.
I'm curious. You have an example of any clarity brought by the analytic tradition? Or, alternatively, of such rigorous modern philosophers?
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 19:58#4563990 likes
You could glance at Scott Soames's historical work to get a sense of how broadly the term "analytic philosophy" is usually taken. There's little point in us getting into the weeds about this here.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 20:49#4564250 likes
You have an example of any clarity brought by the analytic tradition? Or, alternatively, of such rigorous modern philosophers?
I think so. You find Searle clear and you must know that Searle's work is based originally on very careful patient work done by J. L. Austin, published after his death as [I] How to Do Things with Words[/i]. We probably wouldn't even have the concept of "speech acts" if Austin weren't so fastidious.
Here's a quote from a book intended as a popular treatment of political philosophy by Michael Sandel:
Is it wrong for sellers of goods and services to take advantage of a natural disaster by charging whatever the market will bear? If so, what, if anything, should the law do about it? Should the state prohibit price gouging, even if doing so interferes with the freedom of buyers and sellers to make whatever deals they choose?
I recognize this way of writing. There is an effort, even here in a work written for non-philosophers, to be quite precise in distinguishing the several different questions that may come to mind in talking about price gouging. Sandel intends to be rigorous, precise, careful. He's not talking about language and logic, but justice, and he is doing so in a way that owes much to the sort of care you can see at work in Austin's treatment of speech acts.
Soames appears to define himself as AP, so his enthusiasm may affect his diagnosis. I'm not looking for an hagiography.
I had a look at one of his books:
Rethinking Language, Mind, and Meaning
Scott Soames
In this book, Scott Soames argues that the revolution in the study of language and mind that has taken place since the late nineteenth century must be rethought. The central insight in the reigning [sic] tradition is that propositions are representational. To know the meaning of a sentence or the content of a belief requires knowing which things it represents as being which ways, and therefore knowing what the world must be like if it is to conform to how the sentence or belief represents it. These are truth conditions of the sentence or belief. But meanings and representational contents are not truth conditions, and there is more to propositions than representational content. In addition to imposing conditions the world must satisfy if it is to be true, a proposition may also impose conditions on minds that entertain it. The study of mind and language cannot advance further without a conception of propositions that allows them to have contents of both of these sorts. Soames provides it.
He does so by arguing that propositions are repeatable, purely representational cognitive acts or operations that represent the world as being a certain way, while requiring minds that perform them to satisfy certain cognitive conditions. Because they have these two types of content—one facing the world and one facing the mind—pairs of propositions can be representationally identical but cognitively distinct. Using this breakthrough, Soames offers new solutions to several of the most perplexing problems in the philosophy of language and mind.
Sounds like fascinating stuff, doesn't it? And it comes with a nice attention-grabbing title, too. It should sell well.
I see ordinary language philosophy as more a refutation of AP and its obsession with logical propositions and perfect T-languages. A return to sanity, in short.
It's a very natural way of thinking, very 'continental' too. Natural languages have much wisdom to teach, if one cares to listen. Ethymology is always a good start to understand the meaning of a word for instance. It can be overdone too of course, like anything.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 22:19#4564580 likes
I only mentored him because he's the de facto "official" historian of the analytic tradition, and a glance at the historical work might give you a sense of the bigness of the tradition's tent. I wasn't commending his work. I haven't read him. And I'm not about to defend every last piece of writing someone calls "analytic philosophy". You again seem to be struggling with how generality and particularity work.
JerseyFlightSeptember 26, 2020 at 22:20#4564590 likes
I recognize this way of writing. There is an effort, even here in a work written for non-philosophers, to be quite precise in distinguishing the several different questions that may come to mind in talking about price gouging. Sandel intends to be rigorous, precise, careful. He's not talking about language and logic, but justice, and he is doing so in a way that owes much to the sort of care you can see at work in Austin's treatment of speech acts.
What? Even if what you're saying is accurate in terms of Sandel... (so very strange you're making it sound like Sandel is contingent on Austin)... you're trying to argue that logical precision is credited to Analytical Philosophy. Then what did we have in the world before this school came into existence? Further, nearly all of the branches within the social sciences do not use Analytical Philosophy, their procedures are scientific, observation, and they also make use of reason, but not because Analytical Philosophy imparted this ability to culture. Even more so, the social sciences are conscious of their methodological procedures, and here one does not find a discourse on the value of Analytical Philosophy. Look up any textbook on Sociology, Psychology, Biology, you will not find Analytical Philosophy, but you will find the scientific method.
While Analytical Philosophy is critique, the kind of critique it is pulls humans away from the world and locks them in a web of idealist abstraction. You have a good mind, you could have spent it helping children develop their ability to speak, cognitive communication studies, instead of analyzing the ideals of language, you actually could have made progress in language theory, like so many people are now doing and have been doing. Perry is trying to figure how to fix humans that have missed vital stages in their development, what you are doing is analyzing grammatical and linguistic structures because it tickles your intellectual fancy.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 22:24#4564610 likes
I see ordinary language philosophy as more a refutation of AP and its obsession with logical propositions and perfect T-languages. A return to sanity, in short.
Well there was a fight between different camps that went on for a while. But if you read anything written after OLP's heyday, you'll see that everyone learned the lesson, that you need to be very careful how you treat linguistic usage.
did they find out in the end the solution to that little riddle, about whether that French king was bald or not?
Did you have it explained to you, while doing that course, that what was at stake was our capacity to render what we say into a logical form? Are you aware that this little riddle led to the revelation that mathematics can never be complete? Do you understand that the workings of your mobile phone stem, fairly directly, from those considerations?
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 23:16#4564760 likes
you're trying to argue that logical precision is credited to Analytical Philosophy. Then what did we have in the world before this school came into existence?
I'm really not saying anything that simplistic.
I think in the Chalmers survey from maybe a decade ago, David Hume won the sweepstakes as the favorite of English-speaking philosophers. What we value about Hume is not primarily, or at all, specific doctrines but his clarity, plain-spokenness and attention to logic. He's the spiritual founder of analytic philosophy, to me anyway.
The actual founder most would say is Frege, who of course was German. That Frege substantially improved the logical tools available to mathematicians and philosophers is, I hope, beyond question. That those developments had an outsize impact on English-language philosophy is a matter of historical chance. It means that analytic philosophers, broadly construed, expect you to be careful about issues resolvable by the use of formal reasoning. That's it.
We are people who understand that "four" in "The king's carriage was pulled by four horses" does not play the same role in that sentence that "black" plays in "The king's carriage was pulled by black horses." (The example is Frege's.) Understanding that is worth doing, but it is especially worth doing if that sort of analysis helps you better evaluate arguments that could directly impact human wellbeing.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 26, 2020 at 23:16#4564770 likes
Do you have any idea what the point of the example was?
I'm accused of playing word games but you're pretending to think that generations of philosophers were genuinely uncertain whether the non-existent king of France is bald.
Isaac Asimov once said that scientific discoveries begin not with "Eureka!" but "That's funny..."
Reply to Olivier5 So you understand that the theory of definite descriptions was part of the same research, and that this led to Turing's development of the mathematics of computing.
Good.
That'll be an end to it then.
180 ProofSeptember 27, 2020 at 04:25#4565420 likes
Look up any textbook on Sociology, Psychology, Biology, you will not find Analytical Philosophy, but you will find [s]the scientific method[/s].
That's like saying 'when studying music you find music theory but not mathematical logic'. So what? Not even so-called "analytical philosophers" confuse what they're getting up to with science (in contrast to the quasi-scientistic likes of e.g. Leibniz, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Husserl, Cassirer, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser et al do, respectively, with their 'concept-systems') as you insinuate they inadequately do, Jersey, with that "textbook" remark. Apples and oranges - yeah, both are fruit - should not be compared, or one reduced to the other, if intellectual clarity in philosophizing via avoiding nonsense, etc, is what (I assume) you're after.
That said, comrade, my bias (blindspot?) is sympatico with yours, but qualified:
I need to make it clear, for me the distinction is not between Analytical Philosophy and Continental Philosophy, but these taken together in contrast to Dialectical Philosophy, or if you will, Idealism versus Materialism.
Yeah, but they're "Idealisms" IFF their respective concepts (or methods) are reified; otherwise, as I understand the distinction
as complementaries they are compatible with both classical atomism and (varieties of) methodological materialism. To wit: dialectics (critique) versus dogmatics (ideology, apologetics); perennially: philosophy versus sophistry.
Alan Turing drew much between 1928 and 1933 from the work of the mathematical physicist and populariser A. S. Eddington, from J. von Neumann's account of the foundations of quantum mechanics, and then from Bertrand Russell's mathematical logic.
It is readily shown, using a ‘diagonal’ argument first used by Cantor and familiar from the discoveries of Russell and Gödel, that there can be no Turing machine with the property of deciding whether a description number is satisfactory or not.
Not to make too fine a point of philosophical history, but the Principia Mathematica, to which your quotes certainly refer, were authored by Whitehead and Russel, in that order on the cover. Russel was Whitehead's student. They both authored it, and Whitehead was in the lead.
If the analytic tradition exists, and if it has any claim to fame, it is because of PM. And mind you, you will find no mention of French kings anywhere in its three volumes.
PM break down logic into it's fundamental bits and in turn, describe arithmetics into purely formal logic. In doing so, it indeed made it possible for machines to understand, or rather perform, logical and arithmetic operations. Hence the information revolution, computers etc. The price to pay is that they needed dozen of pages to define the addition. Something a kid can grasp in less than 10 seconds was painstakingly broken down in myriads of elementary statements covering dozens of pages. In other words, machine language. Code.
Why is it then that Whitehead, the lead author of this seminal work, is rarely mentioned or even remembered? That has a lot to see with what he wrote AFTER, which was at a brutal variance with AP.
By then, AP had become "the reigning tradition" (aka a dominant force in the halls of English-speaking academia). A host of AP professors disliked Whitehead's quasi mysticism with all the passion they could summon. Granted that was not very much, but that's why you never hear of him. He's been ghosted.
So in my understanding of what historically happened, AP, based on the success of PM in making arithmetics understandable by machines, proceeded to make philosophy understandable by machines... Whitehead saw that this was going too far. I guess he figured that his 'code' needed dozens of pages to describe what a kid could grasp in 10 second, so translating Kant in formal logic seemed undoable... There's only so much formal logic can do. In any case, he went another way. The AP's just fossilized progressively into philosophy for computers. A few of them woke up a bit late to the idea that language always has a human context, a locutor, interlocutors, intentions and the likes, and therefore (gasp!) that ambiguity exists. Irreducible, central to the philosophical pursuit.
At a fundamental level, philosophy is about the ambiguities of the human condition, which we try to clarify and disambiguate. So precision is indeed necessary, to the extent possible, and I appreciate that care. But human language is fundamentally ambiguous, and that's also a strength, not just a weakness. It's about being flexible.
At a fundamental level, philosophy is about the ambiguities of the human condition, which we try to clarify and disambiguate. So precision is indeed necessary, to the extent possible, and I appreciate that care. But human language is fundamentally ambiguous, and that's also a strength, not just a weakness. It's about being flexible.
Reply to Banno "Perhaps" indeed! My criticism of Wittgenstein is that he made a futile and pretentious attempt at philosophy for computers in the Tractatus, realized his mistake (a cookie for him) and then forever wallowed in ambiguity, rather than reckon with ambiguity and fight a bit with it. Hence his lack of attempt at building coherence between his bits and pieces -- he is afraid of having to be coherent. Once bitten twice shy.
But human language is fundamentally ambiguous, and that's also a strength, not just a weakness. It's about being flexible.
It's also about being economical, word savy. A child doesn't need 20 pages of machine code on addition. She needs 10 seconds to grasp the concept of putting one set with another. Explain it to her in 10 seconds then. That's another function of language plasticity: it saves you words. The fact that one can apply words metaphorically, and twist and turn them almost at will, helps us to keep the total number of words to learn and remember manageable, and the length of our statements short.
Reply to Banno I think the important point here is that all language is an act, an action of a person with some sort of intent. Locutors are operating within a certain historical, geographic and social context which has certain economic, political, and other dimensions and one needs to keep this context that in mind to figure out what a locutor is trying to do with his words.
Now if you apply this quite reasonable principle to philosophers, what do you see? You see that motive questioning is a perfectly valid line of enquiry in philosophy. Because philosophers too do act with their words, and have intentions which are important to eek out.
Some philosophers have done a lot of politics with their words. Some good politics, some bad. And some of them were a bit too slavish to power in my view, like Hegel, who peddled propaganda for the dictatorial state that was paying his salary for his tenure of the chair of philosophy, inherited from Fichte, in the official (Humboldtian) Berlin University. Hegel became the leading quasi-official philosopher of the Prussian state. And that's precisely the context in which he wrote his Philosophy of Right. In the preface, he justifies the state censorship of another (liberal) Prussian philosopher, Jakob Friedrich Fries, before proceeding to lay the conceptual foundations for Mussolini's fascism. The book is a political act. Hegel was licking up the hand that feeds him by grandiloquing on the State as God's way on earth...
And if you want to understand that, if you have to take context into consideration, then you have to question his motives. To take this sort of philosophy as merely a set of propositions that can be true or false misses the point. It's a con act, posturing as genuine descriptive philosophy in order to sell you snake oil.
Some German-speaking philosophers saw right through this act because they are intimate with the context of Hegel's work. Popper is one (Hegel is one of the 'enemies' in 'The Open Society and its Enemies'). Marx another:
"Hegel goes almost as far as servility. We see him totally contaminated by the miserable arrogance of Prussian functionaryism, which, from its narrow bureaucratic mind, looks down on the self-confidence of the (subjective) opinion of the people. Everywhere here the "state" is to be identified with the "government".
-- Karl Marx in a recession on Hegel's Philosophy of Right
Reply to Olivier5 Sure, that's an interesting approach, but let's not pretend it is the whole of philosophy. The analytic approach has its own merits. The two approaches need not be antagonistic. Indeed, they are complimentary.
So a thread such as this... has negative social value...
Reply to Banno Not if you realize that we're circling around agreement here.
180 ProofSeptember 27, 2020 at 10:53#4566140 likes
Reply to Banno Some folks surf the latest waves. Some folks, however, dive deep. And some folks just kick-up sand on the beach. Another thread's washed up and now rots.
That sums it up for me. It's a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work.
I would once have used the very same words. About that Continental junk.
This thread is of no value. I'm sure we could find something more productive to talk about.
I went to church yesterday for the first time in a decade or two... A wedding. I didn't get all the sermon (in Italian) but the priest kept coming back to the importance of charity, the most important among the three Paulinian virtues according to him (faith and hope being the other two, if anyone needs to know)... I took that as a piece of marital advice to the bride who's a bit control-oriented. And then I thought that maybe in my very secular approach to philosophy I had forgotten about the importance of charity. Certainly in that quote above.
So let me ask forgiveness from the priest, his God, and all the good folks out here, you @banno included, if I was less than charitable for a moment.
Reply to Olivier5 A bit of self-reflection can be good for the soul.
Or would be, if we had them.
Have you any interest in Žižek? I've been trying to make sense of his treatment of ideology. I rather like it, at least in how it undermines the classic marxist approach...
Thinking of starting a thread, but not sure of a suitable approach.
Never heard of him. Seems he is a Lacanian, which raises a few flags for my unquiet soul. I liked Freud a lot at some point, but it proved a bit too esoteric and fact-free for my taste. He was clearly onto something though. Then I landed on Bateson, a brilliant mind (English-speaking all right) who made much more sense to me, and I never went into Lacan. My sense is that Freud 'goes on a limb' (produces much non-empirical theory, as pointed by Popper again), and that Lacan goes on that limb even further...
Some AP guys go around on the same old beaten track all the time. Some continental philosophers do the exact opposite: they rush as fast as their mind can go, like Willy the Coyote, way beyond the cliff of empirical facts.
Another flag is his use of language. BS philo producers tend to use opaque convoluted language to look like Kant and fool their preys. Certainly that's a mark of Hegel and Heidegger and Derida. And Lacan also uses his own esoteric, sui generis language instead of plain French. At best, it raises the cost of entry into his thinking, comparatively to other philosophers. Life is short. At worse, it's a smoke screen.
But if someone like Žižek can boil Lacan down for us, I'm all for it.
StreetlightSeptember 27, 2020 at 16:54#4566870 likes
One thing to mention: all these silly labels that people like to use - 'analytic' or 'continental' or whathaveyou - these are nothing more than ecologies of conversation. They are bounded by nothing other than their proximity among themselves, which they use to develop and complexify along all sorts of divergent paths, not unlike rich old rainforests. To the degree that there is anything like an analytic or continental or XYZial camp of philosophy, at best we are simply talking about one, two, three or other various biomes of ideas and motivations. The idea that any of these ecologies are defined by certain essences or uniform techniques or whathaveyou is just stupid: the kind of thing you tell an idiot child to get them to shut up while the adults are working.
JerseyFlightSeptember 27, 2020 at 23:01#4567470 likes
Apples and oranges - yeah, both are fruit - should not be compared, or one reduced to the other, if intellectual clarity in philosophizing via avoiding nonsense, etc, is what (I assume) you're after.
That depends on what we are trying to do with our criticism? Not all criticism is of equal value. When philosophy begins talking about the attributes of concepts, and I would encourage you to think about this deeply, it is falling back in on itself in a kind of negative negation.
JerseyFlightSeptember 27, 2020 at 23:10#4567500 likes
The idea that any of these ecologies are defined by certain essences or uniform techniques or whathaveyou is just stupid: the kind of thing you tell an idiot child to get them to shut up while the adults are working.
This is an incredibly weak and emotional argument. Further, it is elitist: "while the adults are working." This validates everything I have been saying about Analytical Philosophy. You guys presume that you are doing the most important thing and that you are engaged in real philosophical work. This has not been substantiated but merely presumed. At which point is this elitist branch humbled? The social sciences have been making progress without Analytical Philosophy! In fact, this method would only get in the way. Should I read Davidson or choose to devote my time and energy to Perry? My claim is that this is not a subjective consideration. I do not deny Analytical Philosophers the aesthetic right to play their analytical games, but what I do deny is its presumption of elitism and relevance.
I do not deny Analytical Philosophers the aesthetic right to play their analytical games, but what I do deny is the presumption of elitism and relevance.
Relevance to what? Do you think they should reciprocate and not deny you the aesthetic right to play your dialectical games (or however you style them) but deny your presumption of elitism and relevance?
180 ProofSeptember 27, 2020 at 23:37#4567650 likes
Reply to JerseyFlight I hear ya. It's for us, though - students of philosophy - to dialectically apply e.g. conceptual analysis and discursive hermeneutics to knowledge practices and/or our experiences. That is how we translate 'idealist' methods into 'materialist' critiques (and vice versa), turning Hegel on his head so to speak (à la Feuerbach or Peirce or Adorno). Don't blame the (master's) tools or the tool-makers for not showing us (the precariat) how to use them.
PhilosophimSeptember 27, 2020 at 23:45#4567670 likes
JerseyFlight, you profess to be a man that wishes to foster thought that benefits human kind. Look at the replies to your responses in this thread. Are you meeting your goals? If you are to rise to the ideals you set, you must be the example of this.
Currently this thread is no longer discussing philosophy. It is an opinion pissing contest. Several people have remarked that you do not have the evidence to attribute the entirety of analytic philosophy as useless to society. It is useless to YOU. And that is fine. That is the only thing which can be logically concluded from this discussion.
So will you continue to partake in this pissing contest? Because this conversation is not furthering thought, or good will in mankind. Will you rise to your ideals, are are they simply words you put forth to make people think you are better than you are?
JerseyFlightSeptember 28, 2020 at 00:16#4567720 likes
It's for us, though - students of philosophy - to dialectically apply e.g. conceptual analysis and discursive hermeneutics to knowledge practices and/or our experiences. That is how we translate 'idealist' methods into 'materialist' critiques (and vice versa), turning Hegel on his head so to speak (à la Feuerbach or Peirce or Adorno). Don't blame the (master's) tools or the tool-makers for not showing us (the precariat) how to use them.
I have no problem with conceptual analysis, in Analytical Philosophy this analysis has gone off on a tangent. It has yet to be demarcated that Analytical Philosophy is in fact a form of bourgeois philosophy. (Live long enough and you will be able to view it as a school of thought). It is a revival of idealism in the most tragic sense of the term, here tragic is a reference to its emphasis, which is not the world, not even concepts that matter to reality, just the attributes of concepts.
JerseyFlightSeptember 28, 2020 at 00:25#4567760 likes
Currently this thread is no longer discussing philosophy. It is an opinion pissing contest. Several people have remarked that you do not have the evidence to attribute the entirety of analytic philosophy as useless to society.
Quite the contrary, the presumption of value has not been sustained.
Since you want to thrust yourself into the fight: what exactly was wrong with the definitions I provided?
I suggested an evidential contrast between Davidson's content and Perry's content.
180 ProofSeptember 28, 2020 at 00:27#4567780 likes
I don't know, personally, if the entirety of analytic philosophy is useless to society - probably not, but a lot of it is. Philosophers very often vastly disagree on different central questions, so there's not much unity in the field in contrast to many other fields where there is widespread agreement on the basics that they can teach students. Even in the rare cases that there is widespread agreement, like with the Gettier paper, no one outside of philosophy really seems to care and there doesn't seem to be direct applications for it.
I feel bad sometimes for studying philosophy. Other fields are focusing on actual problems like how to stop COVID or how to help countries with serious economic problems while philosophers shut them selves off from the outside world to go play in their own heads or provide extensive commentary on a long dead philosopher that no one cares to read and often requires a second language to fully understand. It sometimes makes talking with them about contemporary issues extremely frustrating as facts and evidence clash their a priori presuppositions. Every once in a while though the old armchair philosopher will come down from his ivory tower and become strong proponents for a cause, if not lead the charge themselves like Peter Singer.
Existence, the concrete and contingent life we live on this infinitesimal rock.
If you're referring to practical, political or ecological relevance, then so what? No philosophy really has direct practical relevance, and only political philosophy has political relevance. Whatever Analytic Philosophy is it is not concerned with politics and never pretended to be. Of course that doesn't mean its practitioners are not interested in politics.
In general it is other fields, not philosophy, that have more direct social relevance to general human life. Why do you think there is no Nobel Prize for philosophy, when there is for, for example, a Nobel prize for literature? Is it not because literature is considered to have more general social relevance?
So, if you wanted to say that Critical Philosophy (as represented by Adorno, Horkheimer et al) is more socially relevant, is that not because it is more closely aligned with sociology than with it is with philosophy (as it has been traditionally conceived)?
JerseyFlightSeptember 28, 2020 at 00:40#4567880 likes
Says the dude whose only 'evidence' has been some second hand quotes and word garble
I wonder, are other people buying your line of reason, that is, that the quotes I provided are invalid? You did not refute my position, you didn't even have the conversation, you simply dismissed my argument with ad hominems as you are doing now. The presumption seems to be that I need to do more in order to refute Analytical Philosophy's presumption of value. I flat out deny it, this presumption bears the burden of its own proof, and further, it doesn't stack up very well against other forms of communication. The social sciences, where all the progress in society has been made, don't make use of Analytical Philosophy. One might be infatuated with it, but it's doubtful that an Analytical Philosopher would ever advise their child to pursue this path professionally. One cannot even approach society through this eccentric communication. The question remains: what are Analytical Philosophers doing, where do their word games lead? Not a single person on this thread has even used the Analytical Method to defend the Analytical Method. Some people require a great deal of sophistication before they will ascent to a simple premise. Is this really a sign of intelligence? I don't think it is, and everyone had better figure it out because the mortal clock is ticking. Should you spend your life reading Davidson or Perry? This is a decision, as philosophers, we all must make over and over again.
StreetlightSeptember 28, 2020 at 00:42#4567900 likes
That same argument has been aimed at other sorts of philosophy.
The premiss of this thread, as I pointed out earlier, is to treat philosophy like a competition between teams; like it was a game of football. The argument itself trivialises philosophy.
If you have a choice not to do philosophy, then don't. If you are going to do philosophy, do it well.
This thread is not good philosophy.
PfhorrestSeptember 28, 2020 at 00:45#4567950 likes
Reply to BitconnectCarlos I think the thing that makes analytic philosophy as such as socially ineffectual as it is, is precisely its aversion to system-building. While piecemeal investigating particular problems can be productive in those areas, I think it’s also very important to keep the big picture in mind.
For example, I can easily see myself in a political argument ending up talking about speech-acts and other philosophy of language stuff. See, my political principles are grounded in my normative ethical principles, which in turn depend on my meta-ethical framework, including moral semantics, which invokes philosophy of language concepts such as speech-acts. The normative ethics itself also depends a lot on deontic logic and so logic and language generally, and the pragmatics of my politics hinges a lot on linguistic pragmatics and related rhetorical theory.
It’s all connected, so it all has to be able to fit together, every view on every topic has implications on the possibilities in many other topics. That big picture, and the practical application that it enables, is what analytic philosophy seems to miss the most. It makes some great tools, it just need to actually put them to the job too.
PfhorrestSeptember 28, 2020 at 00:46#4567960 likes
In general it is other fields, not philosophy, that have more direct social relevance to general human life.
I have a very different view of philosophy, knowing it to be thought. But to answer you from the basis of your own premise: then what does philosophy tell you about Analytical Philosophy? Here you have already affirmed a distinction of value.
PhilosophimSeptember 28, 2020 at 00:56#4568000 likes
I don't know, personally, if the entirety of analytic philosophy is useless to society - probably not, but a lot of it is.
As long as you don't pretend to claim you have the authority to blanket an entire history of thought process as useless to society, that's fine. To a person who cares about such things, analytic philosophy might provide some use to them as a tool. What an individual finds useful can vary from person to person, and it is not for us to judge if something we find personally meaningless provides another fulfillment.
True, the history of philosophy is often a study of its failures. Not everyone is interested in seeing how thought processes have evolved. Still, Karl Popper's contribution to the scientific method of today can be a nice read if you're interested in such things. The Gettier paper is a nice starting point for people interested in tackling epistemology as well.
Some philosophers are interested in the history of philosophy for its own sake. It is a hobby of puzzles to themselves. That is fine. We all entertain ourselves in our own particular way, and taken objectively, they're all frivolous in the face of the big questions in life. Sometimes people study it to improve their own and others lives. It sounds like you are interested in philosophy to tackle questions of today and the future. Then use that as your guide. Don't concern yourself with what others find meaningful, if it inhibits what you find meaningful.
JerseyFlightSeptember 28, 2020 at 00:56#4568010 likes
I feel bad sometimes for studying philosophy. Other fields are focusing on actual problems like how to stop COVID or how to help countries with serious economic problems while philosophers shut them selves off from the outside world to go play in their own heads or provide extensive commentary on a long dead philosopher that no one cares to read and often requires a second language to fully understand. It sometimes makes talking with them about contemporary issues extremely frustrating as facts and evidence clash their a priori presuppositions. Every once in a while though the old armchair philosopher will come down from his ivory tower and become strong proponents for a cause, if not lead the charge themselves like Peter Singer.
This is exactly the question, what does thought tell us we should do? How should philosophy be used? The reason you are able to arrive at these conclusions about philosophy is because the philosophical enterprise has been focused on idealism. In Marx a split occurred, philosophy was brought back down to earth, rescued from the games and error of the supernatural idealists. There have been lots of philosophers who labor in the realm of relevant theory, as opposed to abstract idealism. (Of course, even this is objectionable, but at least the emphasis is relevant).
I agree with what you're saying. My claim is that philosophers have to do better than mere subjectivity, otherwise their entire program turns to dust. If one is just playing an aesthetic game, and they claim that's what it is, then they have already refuted themselves. There is no valid request for a formal refutation or argument after this, one can simply dismiss it on hedonistic terms. One can even characterize it however they want, as long as it brings value to them.
JerseyFlightSeptember 28, 2020 at 00:57#4568020 likes
I'll first mention that I completely agree with you when it comes to your assessment of analytic philosophy today. When I think back to the system builders I think back to really the mid 19th century with Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant, and a few other who were really very ambitious, and we don't really see that anymore, and I think part of the reason is just because there's so much knowledge out there that I just don't see how anyone can put forth something like that today, but I know your project and I do wish you luck.
The premiss of this thread, as I pointed out earlier, is to treat philosophy like a competition between teams; like it was a game of football. The argument itself trivialises philosophy.
Not all philosophical forms are of equal value. As a philosopher wouldn't you want to know that you were practicing a form of language and analysis that had the maximum potential of relevance? Why not?
Perhaps, as an antidote to this rather nasty little thread, we might compose a list of philosophers who are socially active.
Peter Singer, of course. A student of R. M. Hare.
Baroness Warnock, part of the same Oxford circle as Hampshire, Strawson, Berlin...
Hanna Ardent.
Martha Nussbaum, who takes Aristotle into modern law.
Add to the list, let's see what it looks like. At present it looks like there is more of a problem with male philosophers than with analytic philosophers.
PfhorrestSeptember 28, 2020 at 01:10#4568100 likes
I think part of the reason [we don't really see system-builders anymore] is just because there's so much knowledge out there that I just don't see how anyone can put forth something like that today
Someone else mentioned up thread, in a way better than I can recount from memory, how one of the founding principles of analytic philosophy was the rejection of system-building, so I don't just think that it's hard to do, I think it's being actively avoided, for reasons I still don't really comprehend. The lack of systematization, or architectonics as @apokrisis would say, is the thing that I found most lacking in my own (analytic) philosophical education, and the thing that spurred me to start my project.
my political principles are grounded in my normative ethical principles, which in turn depend on my meta-ethical framework, including moral semantics, which invokes philosophy of language concepts such as speech-acts
So politically, I'm a socialist because I'm a libertarian, and I'm a libertarian because of my deontological normative ethics (something like the non-aggression principle that you're probably familiar with), and my deontological ethics hinges on there being things that are objectively right or wrong (if it's not actually wrong to aggress upon people, but just "unpopular" or "illegal" or something, then the whole politics falls apart), and that account of things being objectively right or wrong can't be explained without explaining what "right" and "wrong" (etc) even mean, which is an account of moral semantics, which of mine hinges on the concept of speech-acts, but in any case all moral semantics, being semantics, hinge on some linguistic concepts or other.
The lack of systematization... is the thing that I found most lacking in my own (analytic) philosophical education, and the thing that spurred me to start my project.
I think it one of the best aspects of philosophy since Moore and Russell. Grand systems, by their very nature, are wrong; and I mean both in terms of truth and morality.
My claim is that philosophers have to do better than mere subjectivity, otherwise their entire program turns to dust.
Then why are you insisting that your own subjectivity has any philosophical value? Objectively you know you cannot make a blanket statement that analytic philosophy is harmful to society. You have no statistics, no control and variable that has been tested. There is nothing objective in this thread. Your definitions are moot, because the entire premise of this argument from the beginning is a subjective opinion.
And that has been my entire point. You are the one who is continuing this. JerseyFlight, you got a lot going for you, but you seem completely unaware that this criticism you keep levying at others is the very thing you are doing. Many posters have tried to tell you this, and you keep focusing on the way they've crafted the message, instead of the message itself. Granted, it could be crafted better, but people expect you to be BETTER than a hypocrite, and often get mad that you would continue to insist on being one.
At this point, I have enough respect for your intelligence that I am going to assume that you must see this. It is your call what you do from this point. I would hope you take the path of someone who accepts they have made mistakes in the pursuit of their ideals and moves on to the next problem, and not the path of an intellectual narcissist.
JerseyFlightSeptember 28, 2020 at 01:26#4568160 likes
Someone else mentioned up thread, in a way better than I can recount from memory, how one of the founding principles of analytic philosophy was the rejection of system-building
Interesting - I've never heard that explicitly said or taught, but come to think of it it does make sense to me intuitively.
So politically, I'm a socialist because I'm a libertarian, and I'm a libertarian because of my deontological normative ethics (something like the non-aggression principle that you're probably familiar with), and my deontological ethics hinges on there being things that are objectively right or wrong (if it's not actually wrong to aggress upon people, but just "unpopular" or "illegal" or something, then the whole politics falls apart), and that account of things being objectively right or wrong can't be explained without explaining what "right" and "wrong" (etc) even mean, which is an account of moral semantics, which of mine hinges on the concept of speech-acts, but in any case all moral semantics, being semantics, hinge on some linguistic concepts or other.
Yes, I'm very familiar with NAP. It's very popular among right-libertarians as well. Personally, it's not what I follow and I've actually debated some right libertarians or anarcho-capitalists on the NAP a few years back. Since I reject NAP - or any deontologic/principles-based grounding for my libertarian-leaning beliefs I don't consider myself a full-blooded libertarian. I prefer to describe myself as libertarian-leaning more due to the values that libertarianism encompasses, and I suppose these values come from reflecting on my own way of being and conception of truth in society. I feel strongly about encouraging entrepreneurship and investing and that goes beyond me.
Come on - Who are the socially active philosophers? who are we talking about?
Don't concern yourself with if they are positive or negative; we can look at that after, if need be. Who are they?
StreetlightSeptember 28, 2020 at 02:00#4568340 likes
One has to wonder about the complicity of this middle-management demand for 'value'. You should not play this vapid game @Banno.
Via Ray Brassier: "Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. ... Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter".
JerseyFlightSeptember 28, 2020 at 02:03#4568360 likes
I have been talking about philosophy, specifically philosophical form and method, what you have raised is a red herring or an equivocation, but even so we can ask relevant questions. Was Russell wise to forsake Analytical Philosophy to engage in political activity? Clearly he thought this activity had value -- in contrast to what, mere theory? Do these examples rebuke the Analytical Philosophers on this forum or validate their program? (Please keep in mind my objection is not that Analytical Philosophers are arm chair theorists, but that their philosophical emphasis is lacking in value).
Srap TasmanerSeptember 28, 2020 at 02:36#4568490 likes
In Marx a split occurred, philosophy was brought back down to earth, rescued from the games and error of the supernatural idealists. There have been lots of philosophers who labor in the realm of relevant theory, as opposed to abstract idealism.
Supposing I grant that the theory you have in mind is more "relevant".
Clearly he (( Russell )) thought this activity had value -- in contrast to what, mere theory?
What about Critical Theory: are you sure it's more than mere theory?
I can be convinced, but you have to point to something more than the subject matter.
I did my time as a Marxist, read lots of his writing, picked up Gramsci along the way and the cultural stuff. Spent a fair amount of time later in Foucault-Deleuze land, which is not Marxist but far from anti-Marxist, and I think aspired to be what we could call "materialist" in a Marxist sense.
I never did the Frankfurt school though, so that's a big gap for me, and your particular area.
But we're still by and large just talking about people's reading habits. Does Critical Theory make sure people are fed and housed and given the resources to flourish? Or is it mere theory?
Would it make the world a better place if I went back to reading Marx and talked about him all the time? I suppose if I really took your criticism to heart, it might assuage my guilty conscience; I could now claim to be focusing on my energy on things that really matter. But would that be true? There's plenty of reason to think Marxism is primarily a theoretical, and, to a substantial degree, academic, pursuit.
If you wanted to tell me every minute I spend talking about stuff on the internet is a minute I could have spent helping people -- that would just be true, I guess. But I'm not sure why it matters what I'm talking about on the internet. Would I be excused if I were talking about Adorno? Shouldn't I still shut up and go help people?
Whatever Analytic Philosophy is it is not concerned with politics and never pretended to be. — Janus
Popper sure seemed concerned with the political implications of his philosophy of science and etymology.
Sure, but Popper is both a philosopher of science and a political philosopher, and would not usually be considered an analytic philosopher since his main concern was not with language, semantics and logic.
Also, I think you meant 'epistemology' not "etymology".
The other points are that bioethics is nowadays considered to be a part of the philosophy of science, and that whatever a philosopher, insofar as she might be identified as a particular kind of philosopher, is interested in does not necessarily reflect what the kind of philosophy she might be identified with is concerned with.
All these categories are not rigid and essential but loose and somewhat arbitrary.
I have a very different view of philosophy, knowing it to be thought. But to answer you from the basis of your own premise: then what does philosophy tell you about Analytical Philosophy? Here you have already affirmed a distinction of value.
I don't know what you mean by "knowing it to be thought". Philosophy doesn't "tell me anything" it is ideology that would "tell me things". There is no essence of philosophy, and generally philosophers come to different conclusions about what is important to them.
Wisdom is not some eternal dogmatic standard, but something that may be arrived at by an individual, and that wisdom is proper to them and to them alone (apart from other individuals who may be so moved by their works as to adopt it, of course).
There is no universal standard in other words; philosophy is the most singular of pursuits. Having said that it might be thought that of all philosophies AP has the most universal standard on account of its concern with logic.
StreetlightSeptember 28, 2020 at 02:48#4568570 likes
It's been reported to me that @JerseyFlight has been harassing other posters with PMs. If you've been on the receiving end of one of these, kindly let me know.
PfhorrestSeptember 28, 2020 at 03:02#4568610 likes
Sure, but Popper is both a philosopher of science and a political philosopher, and would not usually be considered an analytic philosopher since his main concern was not with language, semantics and logic.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that Popper is socio-historically located within the stream of analytic philosophers. I know this has been a topic of contention in this thread, but as I understand the term "analytic philosophy", it is not the philosophy narrowly concerned with language, semantics, and logic as topics, but the philosophy that approaches any of its topics, including things like political philosophy, in the manner pioneered by the Vienna Circle et al, with logical rigor, breaking things down into pieces analytically, hence the name.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that Popper is socio-historically located within the stream of analytic philosophers. I know this has been a topic of contention in this thread, but as I understand the term "analytic philosophy", it is not the philosophy narrowly concerned with language, semantics, and logic as topics, but the philosophy that approaches any of its topics, including things like political philosophy, in the manner pioneered by the Vienna Circle et al, with logical rigor, breaking things down into pieces analytically, hence the name.
I take "AP" to refer to philosophy which is predominately concerned with logic, language and semantics. I think "logical rigour', however that has been conceived historically, has been a common concern to almost all philosophy.
The Logical Positivists were predominantly concerned with epistemology as far as I am aware. Both Popper and Wittgenstein were associated with the Vienna School, and both for different reasons distanced themselves from logical positivism.
As far as I remember Popper did so because he rejected the LP criterion of verifiability, and Wittgenstein did so because he rejected the LP idea that any talk which does not consist in empirically verifiable propositions is without value (he may have agreed that such talk is without sense, but not that it is without value). (Someone who knows more about this history may want to correct me on this).
It's been reported to me that JerseyFlight has been harassing other posters with PMs. If you've been on the receiving end of one of these, kindly let me know.
I like to keep these kind of things private, only because they don't belong on the threads, but you have accused me here in public, no doubt, because you could not make your case and are exceedingly annoyed that I got the best of Banno, so much so that you deleted our exchange and threatened to ban me if I posted on the Davidson thread again. Is this what philosophical objectivity looks like? Is this what psychological maturity looks like? This is what dogmatism and elitism look like, it is the way of tyranny to censor. And it is exactly what happens when you challenge the people who claim to be "the adults in the room." Strange, all you Analytical advocates stand here denying the very elitism in which your community exists, and by which you proceed.
By "harassment" you are referring to my my letter to Philosophim, here it is in its entirety:
[i]I have not quite figured out how to deal with your own special brand of moral authoritarianism. I give you credit in that it's exceedingly effective, but out of all the people I have discoursed with on this thread you are to me the most loathsome and underhanded. You do not seek to make progress through reason, but through negative characterizations, your ad hominems (and that's what they are) are so subtly put together that they come across as a form of intelligence, and yet they are totally lacking in rational engagement. It is good for me to [be] subjected to them, though I do not like them, because it forces me to figure out how to deal with them. I have met many theists whose entire polemical program is exactly what you repeatedly practice on this thread. I find it contemptible and believe I will figure it out. There is only power in being a one-trick-pony if the trick continues to work.
I think I know what lies behind it, I could be wrong, but I have a theory. Do you like pornography?[/i]
If I had posted this on the threads I think it would have been out of line, but as a private conversation I don't see how it can be called harassment? (And keep in mind we are having the conversation here because you attempted to slander me to this entire community). If Philosophim had asked me to stop contacting him and I had ignored his request, this would no doubt be a form of harassment. Further, I am specifically talking about his ad hominem style and am telling him that I will figure out how to rationally counter his underhanded fallacies. The reason I asked him if he likes pornography, which I am quite fond of, is because I suspect him to very much be a moralist. In other words, he is so threatened by liberal culture that he even considers the question of pornography to be a form of harassment. As far as not liking him, I am entitled to it, but I don't let this interject into the argument. Where he is a moralist you may consider me the very opposite: I like to moralize against the moralizers. I'm not sure that there is a type in our species that is more dangerous.
I think what the appropriate thing to do would have been for Philosophim to contact me himself and express his concerns, but he did not do this, because like you, he's after censorship. His way is underhanded it is not direct. Some people are far too emotive to be involved in moderation, in their hands it becomes a form of tyranny.
“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” ? George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
JerseyFlightSeptember 28, 2020 at 05:38#4568940 likes
I think it would be worth the time to have a listen: In Defense of the Polemicist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsvKyCvCBi8
Reply to Banno In theory, all philosophy is political. Philosophers speak from somewhere, they have political inclinations like everybody else, and they often act on them, including in their writing.
I think that the formal political engagement of philosophers is interesting to study because it says a lot about where they come from and what their theory means to them in practice. But I don’t think philosophers make good politicians. They tend to lack what’s called (I think) street smarts. And beside the politics of the authors, what’s interesting is also the politics of their writings. I.e. how are these interpreted and quoted and used politically, what’s the impact of their ideas on political discourse and action.
Like, for better or worse, Marx changed the course of history.
Like, for better or worse, Marx changed the course of history.
That's basically the thesis of Popper's "Open Society": philosophers since antiquity have taken side. He starts with Aristotle, teacher of Alexandre at the Macedonian court. One should not expect Aristotle's political philosophy to be pro-democratic. That doesn't invalidate other parts of his philosophy though and I think Popper lays it a bit thick on Aristotle. But that's only the mandatory liminar remarks about antiquity. What Popper is really after is German political philosophy in the 19th century, which according to him gave rise to both Communism (via of course Marx) and Fascism (via Hegel). Popper analyses their philosophy to show how it is "Historicist" i.e. based on the idea that history has laws like physics.
In other words, Popper is not dong motive questioning or label shaming: he is not saying "Booh booh Marx was a communist, how dare he". He is instead comparing Marx and Hegel's historical theories with practice, using his criteria of falsifiability, and showing it's pure BS. Those guys essentialize history as some grand necessary trajectory that has nothing to see with reality.
In doing so Popper explains why Nazism emerged in Germany, one of the most philosophy-oriented culture on earth at the time: it was not in spite of all their smart philosophers that the Germans descended into the abyss. On the contrary, some German philosophers led them to the abyss.
AnsiktsburkSeptember 28, 2020 at 08:27#4569410 likes
In other words, Popper is not dong motive questioning: he is not saying "Booh booh Marx was a communist, how dare he". He is instead comparing Marx and Hegel's historical theories with practice, using his criteria of falsifiability, and showing it's pure BS. Those guys essentialize history as some grand necessary trajectory that has nothing to see with reality.
He¨s not throwing them aside as BS. What he says is that capitalism can be controlled, with institutions in a nation, limiting the possibilities for the market to ursurp the citizens, with laws and regulations. He specifically mention social democraties in western Europe to be successful examples.
And to call Marx totally "German" is not totally correct. Hegel had his adepts in the UK, and Marx did base many of his studies, as Popper mentions, on the conditions for workers in English industrial towns, which were awful. He also spent like half his life as a Bourgeoise Londoner. Also, at the time when Marx developed most of his ideas there were no such place as Germany. Just a mishmash of areas earlier conquered by Napoleon.
Now, The Open society was written half a century ago, things have changed a lot since then. The markets are global, automatization has been developed further, work resources can be bought cheap from any country. Things are more messy now.
He¨s not throwing them aside as BS. What he says is that capitalism can be controlled, with institutions in a nation, limiting the possibilities for the market to ursurp the citizens, with laws and regulations. He specifically mention social democraties in western Europe to be successful examples.
He does refute historicism. But yes, Popper was always a socialist, in fact a theorist of social democracy and advocate of social enginering.
SophistiCatSeptember 28, 2020 at 18:39#4571100 likes
I feel bad sometimes for studying philosophy. Other fields are focusing on actual problems like how to stop COVID or how to help countries with serious economic problems while philosophers shut them selves off from the outside world to go play in their own heads or provide extensive commentary on a long dead philosopher that no one cares to read and often requires a second language to fully understand.
Well, this is true for a lot of academic disciplines, both in humanities and in physical sciences.
Exactly. This demand for (whatever) philosophy to justify itself in terms of its measurable value to society ought to be resisted.
I'm not sure we should avoid the question of whether it has value to society, after all tuition and tax money goes into educational programs and the issue will inevitably pop up, spending money on something when it could be used for something else needs to be justified.
That doesn't mean that I think we should crush the value of learning into easily quantified units, but I do think we should explain to people about the history of ideas. My take is there are plenty of incidences of how abstract ideas with seemingly no practical applications but it turned out they did (Hardy's Apology for Number Theory for instance turned out to have applications in combinatorics) But we should explain to people that the only way this kind of progress happens is if we allow people to learn for learning‘s sake.
What should be valued is "comprehensiveness" how it brings progress into domains of thought, and the practical applications should be trusted to follow, even if it takes decades or even centuries. I don't know your take on this, but this also goes into the question of whether String Theory should continue on or whether it takes up academic resources.
CiceronianusSeptember 28, 2020 at 19:16#4571170 likes
I almost listed him... but went instead for his former lover, finding her more readable, more interesting and more palatable
His political engagements were with other Jews, and of another kind entirely, of course. Though I suppose he could be said to have screwed them as well.
This demand for (whatever) philosophy to justify itself in terms of its measurable value to society ought to be resisted.
At the least, it’s reasonable to ask that philosophers try not to do too much harm, I think.
SophistiCatSeptember 28, 2020 at 20:46#4571290 likes
Reply to Saphsin I take your point that as any pursuit that depends largely on public support, philosophy has a burden of justifying its existence. But as I think you agree, this question should not be considered transactionally, but in the wider context of the value of learning. (After all, philosophy is not much different in this respect from many of our other pursuits, and not only academic.)
But I want to stress that value here does not have to be a measurable material value. We don't support philosophy in the hopes of possibly getting Velcro or strong encryption out of it somewhere down the road. This is value in a broader axiological sense.
JerseyFlightSeptember 28, 2020 at 21:14#4571320 likes
But as I think you agree, this question should not be considered transactionally, but in the wider context of the value of learning.
There are already fields in the social sciences that do this much better than philosophy. If you are here rehashing the argument that has already been attempted, that is, Analytical Philosophy imparts the ability to think. I have already raised valid objections to this claim, critical thinking does this much more efficiently. Further, thought in and of itself doesn't contain value, just like physical strength in and of itself doesn't contain value, it is only when the strong man puts his strength to some social use that it obtains value beyond subjectivity. One can make a strong machine only to let it rot in rust. As for my argument against subjectivity I have addressed it here:
'My claim is that philosophers have to do better than mere subjectivity, otherwise their entire program turns to dust. If one is just playing an aesthetic game, and they claim that's what it is, then they have already refuted themselves. There is no valid request for a formal refutation or argument after this, one can simply dismiss it on hedonistic terms. One can even characterize it however they want, as long as it brings value to them.'
But I want to stress that value here does not have to be a measurable material value.
What? How did you arrive at this rule? Who allowed you to make it?
Philosophy is negation pure and simple, the value it has to offer comes through this negation. Philosophy can do no better than to strike out against its own irrelevance and abstraction for the sake of negating itself in order to hammer itself back in the direction of being. Philosophy must regulate itself if it would ever achieve the status of intelligence.
So e.g. 'modal logic' and 'reflective equilibrium' and 'nonreductive physicalism' ... are instances of "mere subjectivity"?
This is a red herring. The counter of subjectivity arises from the claim that one cannot define "importance," that the idea of value is entirely subjective, and hence the argument against the Analytical position fails. This is what I'm countering, the claim that philosophy is merely a preference and that one cannot ask the question of its value. You will not find me here discussing the objectivity of modal logic, reflective equilibrium or nonreductive physicalism. You are free to make any case you wish.
Srap TasmanerSeptember 28, 2020 at 21:59#4571420 likes
1. Some of us would be doing more good if we were doing something else; if you measure the effect of your actions against the most good you could do, we are doing relative harm.
2. What some of us do leads others into the (1) scenario above, so that others are now doing less good than they might; thus there is a compounded relative harm.
180 ProofSeptember 28, 2020 at 22:25#4571490 likes
This is what I'm countering, the claim that philosophy is merely a preference and that one cannot ask the question of its value.
So you've not read a word of e.g. Peirce, Popper, Quine, Sellars or Wittgenstein? Or understood them. Questioning "the value of philosophy" is nearly a raison d'etre. You're "countering" a strawman, Jersey.
JerseyFlightSeptember 28, 2020 at 22:38#4571540 likes
So you've not read a word of e.g. Peirce, Popper, Quine, Sellars or Wittgenstein? Or understood them.
Not sure why you assume that only those who agree with these thinkers would have been the one's to comprehend them? I have had this fallacious argument served to me many times by theists. But further, this is just another red herring. The conversation here is not a comparison of reading lists, this thread is about the social value of Analytical Philosophy.
1. Some of us would be doing more good if we were doing something else; if you measure the effect of your actions against the most good you could do, we are doing relative harm.
As I said in a recent PM, it would be an extraordinary presumption on someone's part to see us here doing this, and suppose to themselves that that is all we do.
2. What some of us do leads others into the (1) scenario above, so that others are now doing less good than they might; thus there is a compounded relative harm.
One may show the fly the way out of the flytrap; but the fly is unfortunately not obligated to follow. One does what one can...
:wink:
Srap TasmanerSeptember 28, 2020 at 22:47#4571570 likes
I don't entirely object to the discussion. I do object to it interrupting other discussions.
JerseyFlightSeptember 29, 2020 at 01:19#4571890 likes
I would suggest a philosophical experiment to bring an end to this thread. Let us contrast this paper of Davidson with these aphorisms by Gracian. It is important to note that Gracian represents all the things Analytical Philosophers have railed against on this thread, generality and a lack of logical rigor applied to grammatical and linguistic structures. Gracian tries to impart wisdom with words, Davidson tries to criticize the structure of words. I am making a revolutionary claim, that humans are wasting their lives and energy on sophistical forms, and that these forms are not needed to obtain knowledge or achieve quality in life. In fact, these forms often serve to detract from both knowledge and quality. What I find most interesting is the objector who wants to claim that this appraoch is invalid, 'that this is not a proper way to approach the subject of knowledge or value.' And yet, here we are doing it, here we are contrasting two forms, here we are deriving imparted knowledge from Gracian's form. The question is why should one give their life over to Davidson's form, why can't one just proceed along the path of Gracian?
What I am most interested to hear from readers is what they got out of reading Davidson contrasted with Gracian? What specific value did you derive from Davidson? What specific value did you derive from Gracian? Did you think Davidson's paper was a waste of time, did you think Gracian's aphorisms were a waste of time? Would you read Davidson's paper again, would you read Gracian's aphorisms again? Do you want to read more of Davidson, do you want to read more of Gracian?
I suppose there are those who will claim that the issue of value cannot be settled this way, in one sense I admit they are correct, because value cannot always be immediately perceived, in another sense they are wrong, because life is short and it must choose between forms, and one of the ways it must do this is in terms of relevance.
SophistiCatSeptember 29, 2020 at 08:22#4572600 likes
Reply to BannoReply to Srap Tasmaner For my part, I am not really paying attention to this pompous ass, but there is not reason why we can't discuss analytical philosophy or the value of philosophy.
Reply to SophistiCat I mostly agree, I mean I pursue philosophy for self-improvement and pleasure that can’t be reduced to those concerns.
Only I'm less hesitant to explicitly value the economic or welfare outcome (wider categories than transactional) of a pursuit. If certain pursuits have no such outcomes in a particular society, I see a potential critique how that society is badly designed to exploit full utilization of those skills rather than seeing discouragement of the value of that pursuit. And if it truly has no practical applications whatsoever, it makes me question how in tune those ideas are with reality. Maybe I’m being optimistic about the interconnectedness of the world and thinking everything of value can lead to contributions to society is wishful thinking, but I think the abstract ideas leading to contributions speculation worked out quite well in history so far.
Yes of course, Nietzsche is a case in point. Derida too in my view, in the sense that his particularly terrorist (Foucault's words not mine) and toxic form of post-modernism produced a generation or two of 'post-truth' confused people. One should be careful with one's words, they can do damage.
Reply to JerseyFlight They are simply different approaches to different subjects. There is no absolute measure of value by which they could be compared.
JerseyFlightSeptember 30, 2020 at 00:02#4574220 likes
Yes, so each individual decides what has value for their life and its limits.
Society, that accounts for your individual quality, plays a part in the overall calculation of value. This is how we avoid pure egoism/subjectivity, but there is a level at which this breaks down... a horizon we are fast approaching.
Society, that accounts for your individual quality, plays a part in the overall calculation of value. This is how we avoid pure egoism/subjectivity, but there is a level at which this breaks down... a horizon we are fast approaching.
Of course we value on account of how we have been socially conditioned, and how we have reacted to that and worked with it, or not. Community values, a sense of community, have indeed, and are continuing to be, broken down. Is that a good or bad thing? There is no absolute answer to that, because any answer will still be filtered somehow through the lens of the very values in question.
The whole point of this thread has been to show that it is not coherent to claim that AP (or any other branch of philosophy or intellectual pursuit) has "negative social value" unless empirical evidence can be provided showing that AP has eroded, or is eroding, specific social values.
To sustain such a claim it would also be necessary to specify just what social value is in the first place, and why it should be thought to be such.
Returning to the point raised in the post before last. Having said what is said there, I acknowledge that it must be thought to be a bad thing if social cohesion, as opposed to any specific social value, breaks down. Because we are social animals; we depend on one another, and intellectual honesty demands that that be acknowledged. We are too weak to become solitary predators.
But the question is: just what does social cohesion consist in? I would venture to say that it consists in concern for others. So concern for others is one social value that cannot be eroded without loss of social cohesion. Could it be shown that AP necessarily erodes concern for others? I'm not seeing it.In fact I think saying that AP has negative social value erodes social value more than AP ever could.
I think there are far bigger fish to fry! How about financial capitalism?
Comments (264)
I still haven't seen your argument. Here we have instead a classic appeal to authority, and an implied ad hominem to top it off. Nice work!
Quoting JerseyFlight
I actually haven't studied much analytic philosophy. Mostly Spinoza, the German Idealists, Heidegger, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, some Peirce, some James, some Dewey, some Frankfurt School, a smattering of Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, bits and pieces of Zizek, some phenomenology. I am a self-admitted dilettante. I read as much poetry as I do philosophy. In any case why are you seeking to make this about me, rather than addressing my arguments?
As to what I am doing with my time: in participating in the discussion this new thread has been copied from, I'm pursuing ideas that are of some interest or that I feel offer some new insight, some way of looking at things I haven't encountered before.
Of course practical research and communication in the everyday world may produce "real world value". Training in Analytic Philosophy may sharpen the critical intellect, which could then benefit any practical discipline, thus enhancing its "real world value".
To say Analytic Philosophy is nothing but "empty ideas that lead nowhere" is a dogmatic pronouncement that smacks of wowserism. This is no better than religious puritanism which arrogates to itself the right to declare what has value and what doesn't for others.
In what sense does it sharpen it? Unto what end? Unto what purpose? Every critical thinking book I have read in my life has been vastly superior to the analytical philosophy I have encountered. Critical thinking is far more efficient.
Quoting Janus
Only Wittgenstein would be considered an analytical philosopher from this list.
Not at all. Read more carefully next time: 'has conditioned you to come at me the way you are...' This is a reference to your approach, your method.
Quoting Janus
That's what Peter Unger argued in his Oxford book against Analytical Philosophy. It's even titled, "Empty Ideas."
Quoting Janus
If you want to see real life puritans try questioning the value of the Analytical form and see what happens.
I'm going to make a single point and then leave you to your crusade.
By all accounts, Bertrand Russell was one of the founders of what came to be called analytic philosophy. He was also a prominent antiwar activist among many other things.
Michael Dummett, one of the most prominent philosophers in the analytic tradition essentially suspended his professional work for a few years to campaign for immigrants' rights and racial equality.
The point of these examples and of the Tarski quote I posted isn't that analytic philosophy can save the world, but that we don't need you to tell us the world is on fire. Do you think Tarski, after he fled Poland, forgot? Do you think any of us here live in the Ivory tower you imagine us building?
Presumption.
If we're going to be analytical, you made more than a single point.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And these things have value, right?
And these activities are not Analytical Philosophy, right?
In fact, one must forsake Analytical Philosophy in order to pursue them, right?
Were Russell and Dummett wise to forsake Analytical Philosophy to pursue these things?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
My argument is not about the world being on fire, but that Analytical Philosophy is lacking in value, that it's a personal hobby. My argument is also that it's just one form of communication, and when we view it as a form of communication among many forms of communication, we can see that it comes out at a very low place in terms of relevance and real world value.
Neglect either and the other suffers for its absence. This is true of Analytic philosophy for neglecting the experiential/embodies/practical side, but it's also true of Continental philosophy for neglecting the mathematical/ideal/linguistic side. Both have their value, and each is of greater value in combination with the other.
Also, this kind of back-and-forth between abstract and practical philosophy has been a pattern for pretty much the entire history of the whole thing:
I am not talking about Analytical Philosophy versus Continental Philosophy. I am talking about forms of communication and real world value in contrast to Analytical communication. Neither am I claiming that mathematics or linguistics are not important, but these are not Analytical Philosophy. Analytical Philosophy might have their own questions they like to ask of these disciplines, but I am specifically referring to Analytical Philosophy. This thread was taken from a thread on Donald Davidson. Please go read the paper by Davidson and come back here and report on its value. I am open and ready to hear it.
That it’s biggest problem: too detail oriented, not enough big picture coherence. Another issue is that some fake philosophers used this propensity of analysis to get lost in details intentionally, as a way to hash out facile, fake, meaningless philosophy that bewilders the average Joe, so this brings it a bad reputation.
No, you were making unwarranted assumptions about what I have been "conditioned" by.
Quoting JerseyFlight
I'm not interested in references to works unless you want to quote passages from them that contain arguments to support your claims. I haven't seen an actual argument yet or any attempt to address any of the points I've made.
Quoting JerseyFlight
This is a completely unsupported generalization. You should be able to provide something more substantive.
Moving off-topic discussion is standard practice.
Analytic philosophy, considered as the broad thrust of English-speaking philosophy since Moore and Russell, is now pretty much ubiquitous; indeed so much so that little is served by attempting to differentiate it from other approaches. The last forty or fifty years can characterised in terms of the application of analytic techniques to areas previously not consider part of the analytic analytic - Phenomenology, psychology and psychiatry, social theory... All use the techniques and strategies developed under the analytic umbrella.
Analytic philosophy is also pretty demanding, drawing on the extraordinary growth in logic after Frege; the understanding of language that came from work in Cambridge and Oxford; the analysis of scientific method and method more generally, form Quine, the Vienna circle, Popper; the focus on metaethics and deontology that resulted in new ways to view ethical issues... A dilettante is likely to mistake the puddles around the edges for what is a deep and broad sea.
And in the end, criticism from the ignorant is not critique.
I think it's best just to stick with Davidson. Just tell me about the value of his essay? This is all I really care about. Or tell me about the value of Analytical Philosophy in general? Life is exceedingly short, and I know of all kinds of tremendously valuable forms of communication scattered throughout the social sciences, Analytical Philosophy is not one of them. You show me what you can draw from Davidson, and I will show you what I have drawn from Perry and Szalavitz. This approache cuts through the abstraction and forces these forms to produce content. I call your bluff, now it's time to show your hand.
You want to compare the academic elitism of Analytical Philosophy to the suffering of homeless addicts? You're claiming that you are like a poor, helpless Analytical Philosopher who is being physically beat and needs to be saved? I do indeed have a problem with this, and so should everyone else. I don't even know what to say.
Examples? It's very strange you claim this, because the social sciences have moved away from idealism and into the domain of concrete observation. If one just takes the example of Neurobiology, this has nothing to do with Analytical Philosophy, it's all based on observation. And I might add, it has a thousand times more explanatory power than any of the abstraction contained in your field.
:death: :flower:
As often the case, the term is also a way to define oneself in opposition to the other, i.e. "continental philosophy" in this case. Moreover, the word "analytical" in this context functions less as a methodological commitment to analysis (as opposed to say, synthesis) than as a critique of "continental philosophy" as generally "non-analytical" (mystical, poetic, intuitive, fun to read perhaps but not logical and rational).
By defining him or herself as an analytic philosopher, one is therefore saying: "I'm none of them heady continentals. I'm the dry, rational, English-speaking type of philosopher".
Other than that, what? How do you define the class of all 'analytical philosophy'?
Back when I played tournament chess, I noticed that we amateurs were always a generation or two or three behind what was going on in chess at the highest levels. It's that ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny thing again. When you're a young player, one of the best ways to improve and become more successful is to study old books like My System or Zurich 53 or My 60 Memorable Games because the people you're playing against tend to be at a level of chess where the techniques and approaches of grandmasters from years gone by are really effective. But real chess has long since moved on.
I often find myself thinking the same thing about philosophy. We amateurs are often still catching up to where philosophy was generations ago.
Analytic philosophy, I think, hasn't really been a thing for some time now. But philosophy doesn't have crosstables, and it doesn't have Elo ratings, and that only leaves fashion.
Btw, your thread should be called "Does Analytical Philosophy Have a Negative Social Value?" just to make it clear it's not about anything at all.
My apologies then, I stepped out of line. I suppose I will weigh in then.
While we can criticize individual philosophy writings "style", noting one paper being of little use is not enough to criticize all papers using this style. Further, what can be attributed to analytic philosophy is broad and varied. It is a shed word that we shove a bunch of other tools of thinking into.
And tools are how we should approach methods of thinking. Sometimes one approach to analysis is successful where another tool would be better. Stating one tool is "worthless in all cases" requires a great amount of citation and logical critique, which is not being offered here. Without this, it is merely an opinion war. A screwdriver may be worthless when one wants to hammer nails, but its pretty effective when they want to use screws instead.
Unless someone can point out very real negative value to society caused by the countless analytic philosophy papers that have been released over the centuries, continuing to assert that analytic philosophy is harmful as a whole would not be a philosophical conversation.
Reading further replies, it appears JerserFlight realizes this and want to focus on Davidson again in particular. JerseyFlight, since you've read the paper, what did you find worthless about Davidson's argument? While we cannot say all of analytic philosophy is worthless, it may be the case for this particular paper.
Thanks for this quote. Got me googling. Here is the (oh so true) source:
https://fakenous.net/?p=1130
Summarized by the author as: "Analytic philosophers focus too much on playing with concepts, and not enough on thinking about the parts of reality that matter."
I will be starting a thread later that is related to this one. I'll briefly explain myself here and make a fuller accounting in the other thread. The reason I won't post it here is because the thread will also address other ideas besides Analytical philosophy.
Now, Jersey already knows some of my thoughts on Analytical philosophy, an area where our views share some overlap, however I feel he has misinterpreted the meaning I was trying to convey. Which is my fault for not being substantive enough to do my own point justice.
What I have said, Privately; Analytic philosophers are very good at being half of a philosopher.
Now you'll probably be thinking "only a continental philosopher would say such a thing." But then you'd be making the same assumption I am about to demonstrate.
This statement may sound like an attack on analytic philosophy, but it's actually just an attack on some analytical philosophers. Which is a very important distinction to make.
Now Jerseys issues revolve around the behaviour of some analytic philosophers. He attributes the behaviour to analytical philosophy. This, is an assumption on his part that he has correctly identified the cause of the behaviours.
In order to demonstrate what I mean;
Lets say that X is a belief about philosophy.
Y is a belief about ethics.
Z is a questionable behaviour with a cause.
For the next part, I'm going to use some famous philosophers names as examples but will not be talking about their historically held beliefs, I'll just be saying their belief is X and/or Y for the purposes of the explanation.
Wittgenstein Believes X
Wittgenstein Believes Y
Wittgenstein Engages in Z
Socrates does not Believe X
Socrates Believes Y
Socrates engages in Z
Hume Believes in X
Hume does not Believe Y
Hume does not engage in Z
Dewey does not Believe in X
Dewey does not Believe in Y
Dewey does not engage in Z
Based on this, what causes Z?
X or Y?
Now so I'm not making a single cause Fallacy, let's assume that Socrates did not engage in Z. This would suggest that in order to engage in Z, one must believe in X and Y at the same time. Meaning the combination of X and Y creates another value, which we will call W, that we can say is the cause of Z.
Personally, I think that the problem isn't analytical philosophers in general. The problem is the beliefs some analytical philosophers have.
Like any tool, analytical philosophy has it's uses. It is down to the believer to make sure the belief is being applied correctly to the context. This will mean that sometimes it's useless, other times it will not be. We can never be certain if a tool is useless in a given situation when what may be stopping the tool from working is in fact another tool we are using along with it.
I can make pancake batter with a whisk and a bowl, I cannot cook pancakes without a pan and a heat source.
Which is why I say that analytical philosophers are very good at being half a philosopher. All that means is that a tool user is good at using his tool or he isn't. He can't do his job without all the tools he needs.
I can give you a tool, I can teach you how to use it. What I can't do, is tell you that it's a universally applicable tool. There may be some kind of job I've never done with that tool in order to find out it is useless.
Maybe, Maybe not. I do however have very little faith in your ability to recognise who the ignorant are and are assuming it is not you.
I do think some analytical philosophers do.
I can tell people what I think is the thing that has the negative social value, but people won't like to hear that ugly truth.
Could we do that? I'm in. But I'd not expect a high score; my Lichess correspondence score never gets over 1600, and blitz, never over 1200.
You are right. The analytic/continental distinction was waning when I went to school fifty years ago. What I see in my small understanding of contemporary philosophy is the application of analytic techniques to issues that would have then been classified as continental. Always small steps that are not going to impress the folk in the stalls, but interesting enough for me.
@JerseyFlight The above quote is where you should look for the thing with the real negative social value. It isn't Analytic philosophy. Just ignore him. Not worth your time. He can barely reciprocate any of the time I spend on him. It's just getting transparent as to why now too. Don't throw gems into a feeding trough. You'll just lose the gems. Don't even waste your time trying to show him how to use the toy he chose to buy when it was literally able to be picked up outside.
?
...and an emetic!
You are quite mistaken. Davidson's article was one of skepticism, "there is no such thing as a language." Analytical Philosophy does not bring clarity, and neither does it make real-world-progress, what it does is produce a semantic narrowing! I contend that you only think this about Analytical Philosophy because it purports to be so logical, but the way in which it is logical, ends up negating both value and relevance.
I don't know if it is cowardice, jealousy or just plain ignorant arrogance but it's pretty pathetic and removes a lot of the general respect I have for everyone, from the individuals that do this. Show me something to respect and prove me wrong.
:smirk:
You old farts are the bees' knees. Sláinte. :mask:
Quoting JerseyFlight
Seems fallacious to blame an entire philosophical school for the sins of one (or a even few) of its renown acolytes. I think it's more accurate to say "Davidson's philosophy does not bring clarity ..." (I agree).
That's hailarious! I haven't claimed anything about the value of analytic philosophy other than that it, like other intellectual pursuits, can sharpen the critical mind. It also can reveal insights specific to its domain, that obviously would not come to light if no one studied it. This is true of any area of intellectual pursuit. You are the one claiming that it has "negative social value". So, I think the burden is on you to make an actual argument to support your claim.
I did provide an argument in defense of the analytical method, but the behaviour being displayed by some of the individuals here, also defending it, is utterly shocking to me. It utterly shocks me because these people are clearly aware of what they are doing yet still holding high opinions of themselves while trying to make others feel inferior. So I don't even know what to make of my own argument.
Maybe Belief in X is the cause of Z if this displayed behaviour is supposed to be evidence of it.
Nevermind, I'm not going to change my thoughts. Some people just aren't aware of their privilege and sense of entitlement I guess.
I think Jersey does want to claim worthlessness for the whole tradition, and even negative social value. Surely he couldn't be concerned about the negligible negative social value of just poor ole Davidson could he!?
Did you mean analytically retentive?
Oh dear, if it's not about anything at all does that mean its worthless, or even has negative social value? Do you have an argument for that? :wink:
Now, that's an interesting question! Are the analytics analyitcally retentive or analytically expressive? (I have known quiet a few anal expressives).
I was just wondering why you tagged me or that post or both.
Sorry, all I meant was "huh?"
Believe me, I've payed plenty of attention to the individuals I am talking about. What isn't happening is reciprocity. I'm here, I'm very interested in what people have to say. If they have something to say to me then say it instead of ignoring me and excluding me from the conversation.
Do you really need to ask why the behaviour of individuals worries me? Am I not supposed to call out anti-social behaviour when I can see it clear as day?
I also made a lot of effort to engage without bringing behaviour into the discussion at all. How patient do people reasonably expect me to be before I start noticing that they aren't returning any of the respect I have made every effort to give them? If this was happening in a school, other students actively ignoring everything I say in a moderated debate we are being graded in, do they really think their silence would get them a good grade? Please. I'm not stupid or ignorant enough to believe that. So don't you act like you are and don't act like you wouldn't feel just as insulted.
@Srap Tasmaner
You were tagged because you have been extremely relevant to the discussion and as Jerseys most recent interlocutor at the time, I figured what I had to say may be valuable to you or that you would have some useful criticisms for me. I don't know if my logic is correct. I need feedback, just like everyone else. Otherwise I may as well just write a monologue and never share it.
I got you.
Thing is, I wish I had never engaged with the guy. It was a mistake. I do that. Now and then I let my frustration get the better of me.
Discussions about this or that school of philosophy are really of no interest to me. I responded to himself because he kept disrupting conversations and I wanted him to stop doing that. I tried a couple different ways of doing that -- well, they seemed different to me -- but I don't know why. It's really clear this is just an ideological thing for him, and I shouldn't have allowed myself to get sucked in.
Anyway, that's why I didn't have anything to say about your causal analysis. While himself may have been attacking something he puts a name on, I wasn't ever trying to mount a defense of that, since I'm not sure it's a thing and if it is I doubt he knows what it is. At most I was mounting a modest defense of those being swept up in his accusations. What you're writing about -- I just don't have anything to say.
I know how you feel. But people have different styles, and some simply won't respond if they don't find what you have said interesting or relevant enough to bother, no matter how polite and non-contentious you are being. It's happened to me plenty of times, but I wouldn't take it personally, just realize that some people are pompous asses at times, and sometimes it really is because what I've said is uninteresting or irrelevant. We can't be geniuses all the time. :wink:
At another time, on another subject, you might find you are able to engage with them. No one on here is under any obligation to respond; you have to deal with others as you find them.
My main reason to post is if I have something to say -- that's not entirely or even mostly, I think, a judgment about whether the post is good or interesting.
That's all pretty fair. I do understand why he is viewed as abrasive by some, maybe I'd find him that way too if our beliefs, experiences and emotions shared less overlap. He is 13 years older than me though, so I don't know if I should be putting so much focus on helping him.
It might seem like an ideological thing. I think it is a psychological thing though. He feels wronged by people whom he views as similar to you, you are his proxy. If you respond in the way his original harmer or harmers did, he's just going to see it as evidence of why you are a good proxy. My advice there would be to speak less as your philosophical identity and speak to his humanity and ask about his experiences, instead of his views. It might be that in the same or similar circumstances you'd be doing the same thing. It might be that although you ideologically match his harmer in one way, you don't match it in another.
It might seem like a cry for attention, because that is partly what it is, in my experience though people seek out what their life has been lacking. Seeking attention for the right reasons, and in the right way is okay. Do I feel his reasons are right? Probably. Do I feel his methods for getting it are the right way? Probably not. Do people sometimes ignore what they want from others because they aren't getting it from someone else? Absolutely.
Be that as it may, it's your choice to engage or not engage, with him and with me. What I'd like you to consider is that there may be a right and wrong way to even not engage someone. That might seem counter intuitive but it's something to think about.
No hard feelings between me and you. I won't turn down a reasonable explanation, when it is given.
Quoting Janus
I'll keep this in mind. I don't believe I am a genius, even some of the time, but then I have a definition of genius with a high bar for deserving that label. I can solve problems, I can't stop new problems from occuring. Doing that, takes and makes, a true genius. However, maybe philosophy is the wrong field for that definition of genius to be applicable. At least I'm not the "strong and stable genius" running things where I am. ;)
This insight is right on target. It is not the case that analytic philosophy is vacuous or useless or fruitless. Rather, the charge should be that it is finished as it is constructed. It is done. The real questions are What is next? Which way should 21st century philosophy turn?
Critical Contextualism. We've built and tested many different tools. Time to start using them and experimenting with them.
Ultimately philosophy is at a cross roads where it needs to decide if it still wants to only discuss problems or if it wants to try its hand at actually solving them.
There are roadblocks to this however. Indecision, lack of leadership and fears of making mistakes with real world consequences. Which means another road block is ethical consensus. Lack of ethical consensus breeds enormous amounts of mistrust. It makes collaboration difficult and contributes to philosophies lack of power to apply thought into societal action. We can only talk so much, without the attention and trust of the general population, we might never get the chance to find or provide evidence to back up what we claim. Which is what we need right now in order to get the attention amd trust of the general population.
Basically, Philosophy has finished school but no one wants to give it a job until it can show it has enough experience to do the job. It certainly doesn't help that the social sciences are vilified in popular media and by the hard sciences.
My way of confronting this is to try and convince philosophers to enter into politics, not just political philosophy I mean seriously try to get into politics. The right polemic method, support, the right kind of charisma and the ability to simplify complex ideas, could potentially take on the political elite who normally enter into politics. Above all, what will be required is a realistic vision for our species that is both attractive and possible.
Sorry, I just don't get the point of this question. (See, @MSC this kind of thing.)
Is somebody being asked to decide what 21st century philosophy will be? Not me.
I always have ideas about what I want to do next and I assume everybody does.
Analytic philosophy is over for the same reason ordinary language philosophy is over: it won.
One of my old philosophy professors did run for Congress. Oh, and it turns out he's running for Senate.
Agreed, philosophy is going to change, it always has. It now looks almost nothing like it did 100 years ago, nevermind a thousand.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Did it win? Or was it playing a game with itself?
Tell your old philosophy tutor some random asshole on the internet thinks very highly of him. I'm sure he'll care haha
Seriously though I hope he wins, but not before the person he may replace gives a big fuck you to the rest of the GOP, before they go into retirement.
That's because you're not imagining the psychological reasons behind asking the question. I know that ultimately this says more about a persons view of philosophy than it does about philosophy. But what does their desire to ask the question say about philosophy? These are things that interest me, but then, my education started in psychology before philosophy, so I would say something like that ;)
Do you mean a judgement about the post you are making or the post you are responding to? If the latter, would it not be the case that if you didn't find it relevant or interesting, then there would be nothing to respond to, and hence no reason to post (other than just a sense of obligation on account of politeness if there be such) ?
Pretty much.
I meant: whether I respond absolutely isn't a judgment on whether a post was interesting or relevant or right. People say stuff and sometimes I have stuff to say about what they said, but usually I don't. Even if a post is good, that doesn't mean I have anything to say. Sometimes I want to have something to say, but I don't.
Yes it did. And thanks for reminding me about the chess thing, which I am honor-bound to comment on.
Excellent! I need another critical eye on that. It's messing with my head and I wrote the bloody thing, now regretting doing so haha
This is an emotional state acting on itself transitioning into authoritarianism:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
By "disruption" one cannot mean, "that which contradicts or challenges my theology." If that is the case then we can dismiss all philosophy simply by noting that it contradicts our belief.
What all positivity longs for in the presence of negation: "I wanted him to stop doing that."
No engagement with any objection, just ad hominem dismal, hence the term, "ideological."
Two prominent professors have already been cited as advocating the same position.
"Analytic philosophers focus too much on playing with concepts, and not enough on thinking about the parts of reality that matter." Michael Huemer
The correct conclusion, of course, is that Michael Huemer is a wanker whose blog posts on these topics are embarrassing, second only to anyone who takes them seriously.
Of course it says alot that the zealot for 'reason' here is indulging in a couple of totally fallacious appeals to authority while offering about as much substantive critique as an empty juice box.
I think he initially did, but realized his error later on and stated Quoting JerseyFlight
JerseyFlight is passionate and opinionated, but he also claims to value logical thinking. Philosophical arguments can get heated, and it is easy to push too far. I think when someone states they are willing to bring the scope of the argument back down to a reasonable and philosophical level, it is respectable to take it. If you are expecting any person in philosophy to come out and state, "I was wrong," you might be waiting until the heat death of the universe. Its not the point. The refocus is on a real philosophical question, and that is whether Davidson's particular paper had a point of value.
I do not know what the previous conversation on Davidson was, but if you want to salvage this thread from a PC vs. Apple argument, you could try presenting the positives that we can glean out of Davidson's argument, and JersyFlight can present his negatives. As long as it is understood this cannot be a judgement on analytic philosophy as a whole, there might be an actual conversation here worth salvaging.
My first instinct is that this is not a question we're likely to be able to answer. By "society" I assume we want something maximal, all people now and in the future. By "value", the well-being and flourishing of all those people. Something like this, right? I'm trying not to get stuck on semantic issues. Let's say we can even measure something like this -- because we're talking about it increasing or decreasing. Even given all that, is there much prospect for measuring the impact of something like this? We can point to examples like The Turner Diaries or Mein Kampf and say, this bit of writing had a negative impact on society. I'm not sure what you could get as large a number of people to agree on for a positive impact, because a lot of people are going to reach for a sacred text.
If we don't talk about measuring, we can just say we think things are good. I think The Last Unicorn is good for the world. I think One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is good for the world. I'm not measuring their impact; I'm saying I approve of them, that's all. I'll bet they've both made the world a slightly better place than it would have been without them. But that's assuming the causal analysis is dead simple. If someone blows up an office building in Atlanta and we find his manifesto online and it identifies the presence of wicked King Haggard in the modern world and our bomber's belief that he has taken up the role of Prince Lir -- then what? (The Catcher in the Rye has to deal with this -- book that meant a lot to a generation or two but not all of them righteous.)
What do we do if we can't measure? How do we judge? In the usual way.
Its at A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs.
WEll, that's were the discussion about Davidson is. This was not a discussion about Davidson, hence it's change of location.
Quoting Philosophim
Well, we'll have to wait for Jersey to return and state whether he is only concerned with the "negative social value" of this particular paper of Davidson's or whether he still wants to claim that analytic philosophy in general has a negative social value. Once he has done that then the onus would be on him to support his claim, whichever it is, with some actual argument.
I said earlier:
Quoting Janus
leaving it open for him to voice his concern about Davidson, and explain just what it consists in. Although this thread is nominally about analytic philosophy in general, I'm flexible enough to accept a focus just on Davidson if he wants it that way, without complaining about the thread being derailed.
:up: I agree that the question almost certainly cannot be plausibly answered. If Jersey will either admit that or submit an answer, then we can put this to rest.
That sums it up for me. It's a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work.
I am genuinely puzzled by this, because it sounds like the sort of anti-intellectualism I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board; it sounds like the sort of sweeping generalization I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board; it sounds like the sort of baseless impugning of other people's motives I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board.
I just can't figure out how else to read it. Even if you had filled in exactly what you mean by "actual productive work" instead of leaving us to guess, it would still be all of those things.
Why does this seem okay to you?
Then he moved on to Russel, which proved a big disappointment. Minuscule, sluggish thinking, especially on linguistics, where I knew something and could compare with the structuralist approach started by Saussure... I became impatient.
Then at some point the question was raised, of whether the following proposition is true, false, meaningless or what: "The king of France is bald."
I left the course a little after that. By then I understood Popper's contempt for poseurs, and shared it. He was writing about how to define science, and how to defend democracy against mounting fascism, while down the corridor at Cambridge, some clowns were wondering if a non-existent French king could be said to be lacking a non-existent hair...
So here is one negative: at least some analytic philosophy is futile, a vacuous game that distracts from real and important problems.
I was not the first student to leave the course. Imagine them young Pakistani boys (there was no girl in the class) trying to enter life in a poor and dictatorial country, having to go through a painstakingly slow interrogation of the purported baldness of imaginary French kings... The difference between their real life and the vacuous word games of some philosophers couldn't be brought in sharper contrast.
And that brings me to the second negative: it drive people away from philosophy.
While that is a lovely idea, I think it would take a very rare personality to both do philosophy well and also survive a political race. Most people with aptitude in one arena seem to lack it in the other.
So what type of discourse do you think is appropriate for a philosophic board? One that doesn't ever question anyone's motive? One that respects intellectuals, always and without distinction? One that forever gets lost in details without ever attempting a generalization?
Come now friend, you only say this because you demand the Analytical form as a bias of value. I do indeed hope you will not ban me for contradicting you, that would indeed be a tragic move for the state of philosophy on this Forum. Let emotion fall to the side, nothing is personal here. We must let this form hang in the balance for the sake of value itself. I only need here to repeat myself. Do not attack me, just deal with the premises:
'I take this to be a strong antithesis to the Analytical form: one doesn't have to use the Analytical style to arrive at truth. One doesn't have to use the Analytical form to state a true premise. Conclusion: the Analytical form must justify itself against the relevance and value of other forms. Why? Because life is exceedingly short. The Analytical form demands that truth take on a certain form in order to be considered valid or valuable, this is false, even as the Analytical Philosopher makes more use of other forms than he does his own form. He does this because his own form is lacking in real-world-value. His form is a game that is not conducive to reality.'
This doesn't mean anti-intellectualism. This means you must agree with me, not question me, not challenge me, in order to be considered an intellectual.
No it really doesn't.
I wouldn't find this an acceptable way to talk about "modern philosophy" or "Marxist philosophy" or "feminist philosophy" or "German philosophy".
We can do better, can't we?
And I don't understand how you think this is any kind of defense.
This is just emotion and ad hominem. Come now friend, just refute my premises. Let us deal with the truth or error of my premises, not our emotive psychology.
Then it should be super easy to refute.
'I take this to be a strong antithesis to the Analytical form: one doesn't have to use the Analytical style to arrive at truth. One doesn't have to use the Analytical form to state a true premise. Conclusion: the Analytical form must justify itself against the relevance and value of other forms. Why? Because life is exceedingly short. The Analytical form demands that truth take on a certain form in order to be considered valid or valuable, this is false, even as the Analytical Philosopher makes more use of other forms than he does his own form. He does this because his own form is lacking in real-world-value. His form is a game that is not conducive to reality.'
Do I need to adhere to the analytical form to arrive at truth? Do I need to use the analytical form to state a true premise? Why should I submit to this form when my life is exceedingly short? Do you consider these questions and premises invalid because they are not presented in analytical form? What form do you use when you navigate the world in which you live?
I haven't attacked a single person, I am simply dealing with beliefs and the presumption of forms. I am not the one getting emotional here.
I'm trying to figure out your position, your critique.
From my position, all philosophers are not necessarily nice people. Some of them I dispise. But this is not out of anti-intellectualism, it is just because I happen to care for what philosophers actually do and contribute to society.
For example, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Derida have done more harm than good to society with their thinking, in my view. Because their thinking was wrong and yet people adhered to it.
They might have been very polite, so if you judge by that, they were good guys, but their words did some damage nevertheless, in my judgment.
There is no need for either one of us to get emotional here. This is how philosophy works, it contradicts positive knowledge to make gains in knowledge. So you claim that Analytical Philosophy doesn't have its own distinct style or approach?
Was it ever a thing? Is "analytic philosophy" a meaningful and useful designation? I think philosophers tend to answer in the negative. (And the same with "continental philosophy.")
I need to make it clear, for me the distinction is not between Analytical Philosophy and Continental Philosophy, but these taken together in contrast to Dialectical Philosophy, or if you will, Idealism versus Materialism.
See, now an example of a sweeping generalization would be "All philosophers are nice people", and you know that would be an indefensible thing to say.
It sounded to me like you said the great bulk of philosophy written in English in the last century was
Quoting Olivier5
I'm not being super-subtle here. We're just talking about things a lot of grown-ups learn to quit doing, and you'd hope pretty much everyone who thinks a good use of their free-time is talking about philosophy: you don't make sweeping generalizations, you don't impugn people's motives without some reason, and you don't indulge in anti-intellectual bias when you're talking philosophy of all things.
Nothing fancy. This is basic stuff.
But there is a common thread that runs between them, a very intensive kind of logical analysis that emphasizes the attributes of concepts.
"If asked what ‘analysis’ means, most people today immediately think of breaking something down into its components; and this is how analysis tends to be officially characterized. In the Concise Oxford Dictionary, for example, ‘analysis’ is defined as the “resolution into simpler elements by analysing (opp. synthesis)”, the only other uses mentioned being the mathematical and the psychological. And in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, ‘analysis’ is defined as “the process of breaking a concept down into more simple parts, so that its logical structure is displayed”. The restriction to concepts and the reference to displaying ‘logical structure’ are important qualifications, but the core conception remains that of breaking something down." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/
"Analytic philosophy, also called linguistic philosophy, a loosely related set of approaches to philosophical problems, dominant in Anglo-American philosophy from the early 20th century, that emphasizes the study of language and the logical analysis of concepts... Analytic philosophers conduct conceptual investigations that characteristically, though not invariably, involve studies of the language in which the concepts in question are, or can be, expressed. According to one tradition in analytic philosophy (sometimes referred to as formalism), for example, the definition of a concept can be determined by uncovering the underlying logical structures, or “logical forms,” of the sentences used to express it." Britannica, Analytical Philosophy: https://www.britannica.com/topic/analytic-philosophy
Analytical Philosophy: a philosophical movement that seeks the solution of philosophical problems in the analysis of propositions or sentences: Merriam Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/analytic%20philosophy
Big shrug. I think it was kind of a thing early in the 20th. I think Russell thought it was what he might defend against ordinary language philosophy.
I tend to go with the broad usage that it's the overlapping strands that run from Russell & Moore up through, I don't know, the seventies. There's room in their for lots of isms including a notable strain of pragmatism that ebbs and flows. It feels like that begins to change around the time of Rorty and Cavell at least. That's when the writing first feels post-analytic to me.
The only thing that matters is whether a premise is stating something accurate in this sense. You demonstrate exactly what I've been saying, a bias for the Analytical Form, but I have already presented a valid challenge to this that has not yet been answered:
'I take this to be a strong antithesis to the Analytical form: one doesn't have to use the Analytical style to arrive at truth. One doesn't have to use the Analytical form to state a true premise. Conclusion: the Analytical form must justify itself against the relevance and value of other forms. Why? Because life is exceedingly short. The Analytical form demands that truth take on a certain form in order to be considered valid or valuable, this is false, even as the Analytical Philosopher makes more use of other forms than he does his own form. He does this because his own form is lacking in real-world-value. His form is a game that is not conducive to reality.'
Of course, the logical approach is to try to deny that there is such a thing as the Analytical Form.
Come on man, this is all ad hominem: "outsiders," "neophytes," "misplaced craving," "ignorant," "impudent." Do you realize you just condemned three major philosophical dictionaries?
I made a valid argument. You then tried to bypass it by claiming there is no such thing as an Analytical Form, I responded with an argument and evidence demarcating the Analytical Form.
(Notice I am not saying anything about you, not attacking you, not characterizing your position, just trying to deal with your ideas)? This is how philosophy should proceed.
I literally do not know what you mean by this. Is "Analytical Form" a term some people use? I just don't know what it means.
And again I wasn't defending my tribe or anything. You could go to any (pre-covid) college campus and if you found some freshmen or sophomores who actually like thinking and talking sitting around thinking and talking, you'd probably hear one of them say, "No, come on, man, you're overgeneralizing."
This is like kindergarten stuff I'm talking about. Nothing fancy.
A fallacious appeal to authority is not 'evidence'. It's laziness and shitty pseudo-scholarship three times over.
Quite true, that last bit.
My ire is aimed at the fakes only, or those I consider fake, not to all AP (assuming this is a meaningful category). So that's one distinction. There is also a big difference between 20th century English-speaking philosophers and AP. Granted that the two sets overlap quite a bit but it's not an equivalence.
I don't know if Searle is considered AP but I like him a lot. Popper is Austrian (like Wittgenstein) but wrote much in English, and he is a favorite of mine... So no, no sweeping generalization is due. But they ARE some poseurs, yes, and I listed a few I believe are poseurs, including a French guy and a German...
We're cool, you can get down your high horse now.
If it's considered a false appeal to authority to quote from philosophical dictionaries, how do you propose we go about defining the Analytical style then?
You spoke about "acceptable ways of talking," no?
My reply was to state that the only thing that matters in this sense 'is whether a premise is stating something accurate.' You can talk about ways of talking all day long, you can say that a way is false, but if it's articulating something accurate, or achieving value, then this charge doesn't matter.
Analytical philosophy conducts conceptual investigations, specifically into linguistic, idealistic logical structures. Well, one does not need to do this to arrive at truth, further, this kind of appraoch has a very limited value. Notice Banno did not reply back to me when I asked him for examples? This is because this is not the procedure, method or form of the social sciences. Looking at these structures has not proven to be very fruitful. This is not the direction that linguistic studies have gone, they have gone in the direction of neurobiology and hard observation coupled with modern psychology. Analytical Philosophy is desperately lacking explanatory power. It has no future. It's simply a philosophical aesthetic form.
Word salad pretending to be meaningful speech.
Oh yes, I see.
No, I wasn't at all saying that whether it's true or not it's not "acceptable" and that whether it's acceptable is more important. Of course not.
A lot of people over the age of, I don't know, 16, tend to avoid sweeping generalizations without considerable evidence because they usually turn out to be false. See, that's a generalization but I'm pretty comfortable with it, because all you have to do is think about what kind of evidence you'd have to accumulate to support a claim like "Canadians are nicer than Americans" or "Black people are lazy" and you quickly realize this is not an idea you're readily going to have enough evidence to support. That makes it an idea you probably shouldn't trust and certainly one you shouldn't promote.
Similarly for impugning the motives of people you don't even know. @Olivier5's opinion is that Hegel was a poseur. That strikes me as idiotic whether Hegel's your guy or not.
There was just nothing especially analytic or jesus even all that philosophical about my complaint. It's the common sense of grown-ups.
We can at least expect that much in a forum devoted to philosophy, can't we?
All three of the academic sources I quoted from say the same thing I just said.
Is this the Trump method of truth telling? Say and cite it enough and it becomes so?
Asserting that your view is "grown-up" is like an exercise in self-justification. One merely needs to go to your thread of Plato to see your Analytical Philosophical style. There is nothing controversial here. Further, I have been very specific. These conversations began with my criticism of Davidson. If there is no general category of Analytical Philosophy then why does the category exist, more importantly, on what basis do you make a complaint against philosophical style, "anti-intellectualism" and the like, which you have done to me several times? Can you not see that a great deal of your objections amount to form and style? In other words, if philosophers don't want to analyze things in terms of the linguistic logical structure, then you should be content with this and simply validate it as an alternative approach. But this is not what you do, you authoritate that it is both wrong and invalid and constitutes a violation of philosophical authenticity. This is the presumption that motivates your authoritarian rebukes.
And that strikes as a bit naïve, if you don't mind me saying so.
1. Since there's been trade, there's been fake trade. Pliny the Elder wrote about it, how the guys in Puntland could mix up and fake their frankincense for instance.
2. Philosophy is a trade and always has been. There's money and power in it, however small at present.
3. Therefore, it's to be expected that at least some philosophers may have sold snake oil.
That is to say, there is no reason to believe that all philosophers are intellectually honest. There are only human, traders like everyone else. That's a truism, I know. But then if this is the case, does it matter? Should we be concerned about it, or is it unimportant that there be fake (disingenuous) philosophy out there?
The answer to that question depends on whether one thinks philosophy is important or not. Also on whether one believes in "fair trade" as some sort of public good, à la Kant.
I believe in philosophy as a serious and useful trade. That's all. And all trades have their freewheelers and fakers.
Wittgenstein was probably the least polite philosopher you’ll ever encountered but he was bloody well not wrong. As no philosopher who has survived the decades was. Noone is totally right, but Wittgenstein was probably more right than you and me. An asshole, though.
Where does imagination and creativity fit in with analytical philosophy? I find it so boring to read that I really do not know it , other from a popular pow. Will an Ayer, a wittgenstein or a Quine say stop dreaming? Or is it like a gauge to measure the correctness of what pops up?
Then I suspect he will be slapped on the wrist by some here if he ever posts from hell.
Maybe he is, its only nicks here. But I wouldn’t try, I dont like to be wristslapped, the probable outcome .
Indeed!
Wonder who. Probably more than 1k posts and short ones,
Have to agree here. I may have said the original quote but I didn't say anything about productivity. Analytical philosophers were obviously productive.
Okay, let's say it is narrow minded. What if philosophy is travelling through a tunnel?
How do you think the Analytical school is beneficial for philosophy as a whole?
I'd observe that every philosopher, by way of their humanity, has tunnel vision to some extent. All individuals are narrow minded. It is only when they come together that their field of vision increases and blindspots are revealed.
I agree to some extent, what I disagree with however is characterizing philosophy and politics as just two arenas, one is happening in a centre with multiple arenas, one is a warzone where many weapons are used. I can function in both formats, so long as I've practiced hard with my weapon in one of the arenas. The harder I practice and the more weapons I learn to use, the more effective I can be in the warzone.
Perhaps its most significant function.
I don't know Davidson. I was thinking more of Wittgenstein, Austin, Ryle and others.
There's a value in showing the fly the way out of the bottle, and freeing ourselves from the bewitchment of language, to paraphrase Wittgenstein.
So when I complained about you suggesting that a huge chunk of modern philosophy is just a bunch of poseurs, your response was that surely some philosophers are poseurs, Hegel for instance, and painted me as suggesting none are.
When I complain about you claiming Hegel was a poseur, you respond that surely some philosophers are poseurs, and paint me as suggesting none are.
Do you understand that your reasoning here is faulty? That it's the sort of thing most people learn not to do without ever setting foot in a philosophy classroom?
@JerseyFlight, does standing up for some basic standards of reason, I'll even say "logic", does that make me an analytic philosopher? If so, that's what I am, but I'm still waiting for you to defend Hegel against this slander.
Something a lot like this is actually one of the core cultural values of what we've been calling "analytic philosophy", its cooperative spirit. Sometimes this is described as doing philosophy "piecemeal". Sometimes it's an attempt to model the doing of philosophy on science. In the case of John Austin, he had been responsible for coordinating radar intelligence during World War II and imagined coordinating the analysis of English usage in a similar way, with teams of people working on various different sorts of things people say, because he believed some basic understanding of such things was necessary before you could even start doing philosophy.
Note that I am not claiming "analytic philosophy" invented cooperation or has a monopoly on it. But historically it arose as a reaction against big idealist systems that are typically stamped with a single individual's name and being against such big individual systems was baked into the approach. It is something analytic philosophy has been very self-conscious about for a long time. It is probably one reason philosophers like Peirce and Sellars have been somewhat marginalized, and eventually that sort of neglect was seen as a limitation of the approach. I don't think philosophers today have the distrust of systematic philosophy you can see everywhere in later Wittgenstein, for instance. They even read Heidegger. On the other hand, someone like Rorty, on one reading, takes the idea even further, and claims we need even less theory than we thought, but should instead see philosophy like science not as a particular way of doing things but as the work of a community with the capacity for self-correction. He too calls for greater public engagement and cites Dewey as a model.
But this is what I mean when I say "analytic philosophy is over because it won": insofar as English-speaking philosophers feel ready to start system-building again, insofar as they take seriously calls to greater public engagement (and that applies to all of academia, and especially science -- look at Carl Sagan's pleas for scientists to get out there and explain what they do), they're going to do so without giving up any of the gains made in logic, precision, or sensitivity to the complexities of language and its tendencies to mislead or temptations to be misused. We're keeping all that.
So are you critiquing the form of my statement or its substance?
Quoting JerseyFlight
In my dust-up with @Olivier5 they absolutely do not. Sweeping generalizations are a known evil. It doesn't take any advanced philosophy to know that. My dad knew that. Judging others to be poseurs because they say things you disagree with or don't understand is juvenile, and again this is not a matter of advanced philosophy but being a reflective human being.
For example, my oldest son's a musician and he cares a lot about some musicians that are not to everyone's taste, like Tom Waits and Van Morrison. Some people just pass by disagreements over "what's good" -- de gustibus non est disputandum, as the man said. But you'll also find, and quite easily on the internet, a different reaction: the belief that no one really likes Tom Waits, I mean the guy totally sucks, and if you claim to like his music, you're lying, and you must be hipster and a poseur. That's not just juvenile, it's toxic, and it's closed-minded.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Absolutely! Yes! Yes! Yes! I do what I do, and if you take a different approach, why should I care? The one caveat is what I said at the end of this post above: some of us are loathe to give up the precision we've gained by attention to logic and language. That doesn't mean we think logic and language are the subject matter of philosophy -- good lord, no! But words are our tools, and we believe you need to handle them with care and that attention to detail is no sin. Same for reasoning and inference. It's just care for the tools you do your work with.
@JerseyFlight, I'll bet we could wholeheartedly agree on that.
Some philosophers being poseurs (among them Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) does not entail almost all the academic philosophy in the English-speaking world in the 20th century being "a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work."
To claim that Hegel was a not poseur is not to claim that no philosopher anywhere at any time was a poseur.
And I stand by my claim that most people figure out this sort of thing without ever setting foot in a philosophy classroom. If you like, I could do it up in formal symbolism, or make it look like an Aristotelian syllogism, but I'd need to introduce a quantifier to account for your use of "generally".
To speak candidly, it looks to me now like you're a victim of a certain sort of iconoclastic philosopher. For me, it was Nietzsche, and then later Wittgenstein. I didn't know Popper was one of those.
I had the misfortune of reading Nietzsche when I was young. This is no judgment on the value of his work, but one of the messages a young person just discovering philosophy is going to get is that almost all philosophers before Nietzsche were full of shit. This is also true of Wittgenstein, who gives the impression of being broadly dismissive of most other philosophers -- since he barely mentions them! -- except Frege. (And even when he does mention someone by name it's often for critique -- only it turns out this is a sign of respect; he actually thought well of William James and G. E. Moore.)
This is terribly dangerous for a young person. It's a shortcut you're invited to take -- you don't have to slog through the boring blinkered past but can jump straight to the end of the story where now we finally know what's what. I think I finally started to come out of it when, after probably years of dismissing Husserl because I was steeped in Heidegger and Derrida, I actually read Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and thought it was brilliant.
So it looks to me -- and I am frankly guessing, if I'm wrong I'm wrong, c'est la vie -- like you're a victim of finding too early a certain kind of philosopher who sweeps you up with his denunciations of the bullshit everyone else is up to.
And that's disappointing to me because I've been wanting to read Popper but if he's full of stuff like this it's going to make it hard for me.
I have already answered that. They are quite a few academic English-speaking philosophers who don't define themselves as analytical philosophers. Who's making a sweeping generalization now?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Possibly so... I read Nietzsche as an old person.
I honestly tried to read Hegel, I did, also Wittgenstein. The latter is never even attempting to structure any of his intuitions much. It's bits and pieces. It feels a bit like a flee market. The former was evidently a very smart guy who managed to explain how it's okay to hold two diametrically opposite ideas, as long as you say something like 'Well, both are kinda true at the same time, you know?".
Most importantly, in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel told the Germans that helping the poor through social programmes or charity is dishonorable, that "it is only through being a member of the state [Prussian, supposedly] that the individual himself has objectivity, truth, and ethical life", that the state is God's march on earth, that the state is that "objective spirit that subsumes family and civil society and fulfills them." Etc. Etc.
Quoting Olivier5
Duh.
Quoting Olivier5
Even when speaking loosely, and explaining how I'm using the term "analytic philosophy" as I go, a way of using the term I believe to be consonant with casual usage as when people compare "analytic" and "continental", even then I was still more careful than you're being by misquoting me. I mean seriously, leaving "almost" out of the phrase "almost all"? That was an oversight right?
If you didn't understand Hegel or didn't like what he had to say, that doesn't make him a fraud or a charlatan or a poseur. If you didn't understand Wittgenstein or didn't like what he had to say, that doesn't make him a fraud or a charlatan or a poseur.
You want to know what my standards are for discussing philosophy? They're higher than that. In fact, my standards for discussing anything are higher than that.
Indeed it was. So almost all it is. Are you confident that almost all English-speaking academic philosophers self-identify as analytical?
I know a few American thinkers who make perfect sense most of the time, but they don't waste their time wondering if the king of France is bold, or if there is anything called "meaning" or "the self"... They deal with our rapport to the environment, the mind, ethics, language as a fact of life, culture as a tool of domination, scientific paradigms, etc.
No, I'm confident they don't much care, certainly not for the last thirty or forty years, and I've been perfectly clear and repetitive about how I'm using the phrase, and it has nothing to do with how people self-identify.
And again: insofar as philosophers range more widely than they did in the first three quarters of the 20th, they do so with a rigor that academic philosophy these days takes as a requirement, a rigor that was achieved through the analysis of reasoning and language carried out by our forebears.
In short, you may be talking of a set much broader than the one I'm talking about.
I'm curious. You have an example of any clarity brought by the analytic tradition? Or, alternatively, of such rigorous modern philosophers?
You could glance at Scott Soames's historical work to get a sense of how broadly the term "analytic philosophy" is usually taken. There's little point in us getting into the weeds about this here.
I think so. You find Searle clear and you must know that Searle's work is based originally on very careful patient work done by J. L. Austin, published after his death as [I] How to Do Things with Words[/i]. We probably wouldn't even have the concept of "speech acts" if Austin weren't so fastidious.
Here's a quote from a book intended as a popular treatment of political philosophy by Michael Sandel:
I recognize this way of writing. There is an effort, even here in a work written for non-philosophers, to be quite precise in distinguishing the several different questions that may come to mind in talking about price gouging. Sandel intends to be rigorous, precise, careful. He's not talking about language and logic, but justice, and he is doing so in a way that owes much to the sort of care you can see at work in Austin's treatment of speech acts.
I had a look at one of his books:
Rethinking Language, Mind, and Meaning
Scott Soames
In this book, Scott Soames argues that the revolution in the study of language and mind that has taken place since the late nineteenth century must be rethought. The central insight in the reigning [sic] tradition is that propositions are representational. To know the meaning of a sentence or the content of a belief requires knowing which things it represents as being which ways, and therefore knowing what the world must be like if it is to conform to how the sentence or belief represents it. These are truth conditions of the sentence or belief. But meanings and representational contents are not truth conditions, and there is more to propositions than representational content. In addition to imposing conditions the world must satisfy if it is to be true, a proposition may also impose conditions on minds that entertain it. The study of mind and language cannot advance further without a conception of propositions that allows them to have contents of both of these sorts. Soames provides it.
He does so by arguing that propositions are repeatable, purely representational cognitive acts or operations that represent the world as being a certain way, while requiring minds that perform them to satisfy certain cognitive conditions. Because they have these two types of content—one facing the world and one facing the mind—pairs of propositions can be representationally identical but cognitively distinct. Using this breakthrough, Soames offers new solutions to several of the most perplexing problems in the philosophy of language and mind.
Sounds like fascinating stuff, doesn't it? And it comes with a nice attention-grabbing title, too. It should sell well.
I see ordinary language philosophy as more a refutation of AP and its obsession with logical propositions and perfect T-languages. A return to sanity, in short.
It's a very natural way of thinking, very 'continental' too. Natural languages have much wisdom to teach, if one cares to listen. Ethymology is always a good start to understand the meaning of a word for instance. It can be overdone too of course, like anything.
I only mentored him because he's the de facto "official" historian of the analytic tradition, and a glance at the historical work might give you a sense of the bigness of the tradition's tent. I wasn't commending his work. I haven't read him. And I'm not about to defend every last piece of writing someone calls "analytic philosophy". You again seem to be struggling with how generality and particularity work.
What? Even if what you're saying is accurate in terms of Sandel... (so very strange you're making it sound like Sandel is contingent on Austin)... you're trying to argue that logical precision is credited to Analytical Philosophy. Then what did we have in the world before this school came into existence? Further, nearly all of the branches within the social sciences do not use Analytical Philosophy, their procedures are scientific, observation, and they also make use of reason, but not because Analytical Philosophy imparted this ability to culture. Even more so, the social sciences are conscious of their methodological procedures, and here one does not find a discourse on the value of Analytical Philosophy. Look up any textbook on Sociology, Psychology, Biology, you will not find Analytical Philosophy, but you will find the scientific method.
While Analytical Philosophy is critique, the kind of critique it is pulls humans away from the world and locks them in a web of idealist abstraction. You have a good mind, you could have spent it helping children develop their ability to speak, cognitive communication studies, instead of analyzing the ideals of language, you actually could have made progress in language theory, like so many people are now doing and have been doing. Perry is trying to figure how to fix humans that have missed vital stages in their development, what you are doing is analyzing grammatical and linguistic structures because it tickles your intellectual fancy.
Well there was a fight between different camps that went on for a while. But if you read anything written after OLP's heyday, you'll see that everyone learned the lesson, that you need to be very careful how you treat linguistic usage.
What I'm wondering is: did they find out in the end the solution to that little riddle, about whether that French king was bald or not?
Grammatici certant et adhuc sub judice lis est.
-- Horace
("Grammarians argue and it's yet to be decided", about who invented the elegiac style)
Did you have it explained to you, while doing that course, that what was at stake was our capacity to render what we say into a logical form? Are you aware that this little riddle led to the revelation that mathematics can never be complete? Do you understand that the workings of your mobile phone stem, fairly directly, from those considerations?
I'm really not saying anything that simplistic.
I think in the Chalmers survey from maybe a decade ago, David Hume won the sweepstakes as the favorite of English-speaking philosophers. What we value about Hume is not primarily, or at all, specific doctrines but his clarity, plain-spokenness and attention to logic. He's the spiritual founder of analytic philosophy, to me anyway.
The actual founder most would say is Frege, who of course was German. That Frege substantially improved the logical tools available to mathematicians and philosophers is, I hope, beyond question. That those developments had an outsize impact on English-language philosophy is a matter of historical chance. It means that analytic philosophers, broadly construed, expect you to be careful about issues resolvable by the use of formal reasoning. That's it.
We are people who understand that "four" in "The king's carriage was pulled by four horses" does not play the same role in that sentence that "black" plays in "The king's carriage was pulled by black horses." (The example is Frege's.) Understanding that is worth doing, but it is especially worth doing if that sort of analysis helps you better evaluate arguments that could directly impact human wellbeing.
Yes.
Thanks for the laugh.
An odd reply. You have heard of Kurt Gödel?
Do you have any idea what the point of the example was?
I'm accused of playing word games but you're pretending to think that generations of philosophers were genuinely uncertain whether the non-existent king of France is bald.
Isaac Asimov once said that scientific discoveries begin not with "Eureka!" but "That's funny..."
Good.
That'll be an end to it then.
:up:
Quoting JerseyFlight
That's like saying 'when studying music you find music theory but not mathematical logic'. So what? Not even so-called "analytical philosophers" confuse what they're getting up to with science (in contrast to the quasi-scientistic likes of e.g. Leibniz, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Husserl, Cassirer, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser et al do, respectively, with their 'concept-systems') as you insinuate they inadequately do, Jersey, with that "textbook" remark. Apples and oranges - yeah, both are fruit - should not be compared, or one reduced to the other, if intellectual clarity in philosophizing via avoiding nonsense, etc, is what (I assume) you're after.
That said, comrade, my bias (blindspot?) is sympatico with yours, but qualified:
Quoting JerseyFlight
Yeah, but they're "Idealisms" IFF their respective concepts (or methods) are reified; otherwise, as I understand the distinction
as complementaries they are compatible with both classical atomism and (varieties of) methodological materialism. To wit: dialectics (critique) versus dogmatics (ideology, apologetics); perennially: philosophy versus sophistry.
Alan Turing: The Turing Machine and Computability
Exactly. A sense of humor is useful in philosophy...
If the analytic tradition exists, and if it has any claim to fame, it is because of PM. And mind you, you will find no mention of French kings anywhere in its three volumes.
PM break down logic into it's fundamental bits and in turn, describe arithmetics into purely formal logic. In doing so, it indeed made it possible for machines to understand, or rather perform, logical and arithmetic operations. Hence the information revolution, computers etc. The price to pay is that they needed dozen of pages to define the addition. Something a kid can grasp in less than 10 seconds was painstakingly broken down in myriads of elementary statements covering dozens of pages. In other words, machine language. Code.
Why is it then that Whitehead, the lead author of this seminal work, is rarely mentioned or even remembered? That has a lot to see with what he wrote AFTER, which was at a brutal variance with AP.
By then, AP had become "the reigning tradition" (aka a dominant force in the halls of English-speaking academia). A host of AP professors disliked Whitehead's quasi mysticism with all the passion they could summon. Granted that was not very much, but that's why you never hear of him. He's been ghosted.
So in my understanding of what historically happened, AP, based on the success of PM in making arithmetics understandable by machines, proceeded to make philosophy understandable by machines... Whitehead saw that this was going too far. I guess he figured that his 'code' needed dozens of pages to describe what a kid could grasp in 10 second, so translating Kant in formal logic seemed undoable... There's only so much formal logic can do. In any case, he went another way. The AP's just fossilized progressively into philosophy for computers. A few of them woke up a bit late to the idea that language always has a human context, a locutor, interlocutors, intentions and the likes, and therefore (gasp!) that ambiguity exists. Irreducible, central to the philosophical pursuit.
At a fundamental level, philosophy is about the ambiguities of the human condition, which we try to clarify and disambiguate. So precision is indeed necessary, to the extent possible, and I appreciate that care. But human language is fundamentally ambiguous, and that's also a strength, not just a weakness. It's about being flexible.
Wittgenstein would perhaps have agreed.
It's also about being economical, word savy. A child doesn't need 20 pages of machine code on addition. She needs 10 seconds to grasp the concept of putting one set with another. Explain it to her in 10 seconds then. That's another function of language plasticity: it saves you words. The fact that one can apply words metaphorically, and twist and turn them almost at will, helps us to keep the total number of words to learn and remember manageable, and the length of our statements short.
Well, that's not the Wittgenstein I see. But hey, go for it.
Now if you apply this quite reasonable principle to philosophers, what do you see? You see that motive questioning is a perfectly valid line of enquiry in philosophy. Because philosophers too do act with their words, and have intentions which are important to eek out.
Some philosophers have done a lot of politics with their words. Some good politics, some bad. And some of them were a bit too slavish to power in my view, like Hegel, who peddled propaganda for the dictatorial state that was paying his salary for his tenure of the chair of philosophy, inherited from Fichte, in the official (Humboldtian) Berlin University. Hegel became the leading quasi-official philosopher of the Prussian state. And that's precisely the context in which he wrote his Philosophy of Right. In the preface, he justifies the state censorship of another (liberal) Prussian philosopher, Jakob Friedrich Fries, before proceeding to lay the conceptual foundations for Mussolini's fascism. The book is a political act. Hegel was licking up the hand that feeds him by grandiloquing on the State as God's way on earth...
And if you want to understand that, if you have to take context into consideration, then you have to question his motives. To take this sort of philosophy as merely a set of propositions that can be true or false misses the point. It's a con act, posturing as genuine descriptive philosophy in order to sell you snake oil.
Some German-speaking philosophers saw right through this act because they are intimate with the context of Hegel's work. Popper is one (Hegel is one of the 'enemies' in 'The Open Society and its Enemies'). Marx another:
"Hegel goes almost as far as servility. We see him totally contaminated by the miserable arrogance of Prussian functionaryism, which, from its narrow bureaucratic mind, looks down on the self-confidence of the (subjective) opinion of the people. Everywhere here the "state" is to be identified with the "government".
-- Karl Marx in a recession on Hegel's Philosophy of Right
So a thread such as this... has negative social value...
Quoting Olivier5
I would once have used the very same words. About that Continental junk.
This thread is of no value. I'm sure we could find something more productive to talk about.
What changed your mind?
I became more polite.
(Stop laughing, @Baden...)
I went to church yesterday for the first time in a decade or two... A wedding. I didn't get all the sermon (in Italian) but the priest kept coming back to the importance of charity, the most important among the three Paulinian virtues according to him (faith and hope being the other two, if anyone needs to know)... I took that as a piece of marital advice to the bride who's a bit control-oriented. And then I thought that maybe in my very secular approach to philosophy I had forgotten about the importance of charity. Certainly in that quote above.
So let me ask forgiveness from the priest, his God, and all the good folks out here, you @banno included, if I was less than charitable for a moment.
Or would be, if we had them.
Have you any interest in Žižek? I've been trying to make sense of his treatment of ideology. I rather like it, at least in how it undermines the classic marxist approach...
Thinking of starting a thread, but not sure of a suitable approach.
Never heard of him. Seems he is a Lacanian, which raises a few flags for my unquiet soul. I liked Freud a lot at some point, but it proved a bit too esoteric and fact-free for my taste. He was clearly onto something though. Then I landed on Bateson, a brilliant mind (English-speaking all right) who made much more sense to me, and I never went into Lacan. My sense is that Freud 'goes on a limb' (produces much non-empirical theory, as pointed by Popper again), and that Lacan goes on that limb even further...
Some AP guys go around on the same old beaten track all the time. Some continental philosophers do the exact opposite: they rush as fast as their mind can go, like Willy the Coyote, way beyond the cliff of empirical facts.
Another flag is his use of language. BS philo producers tend to use opaque convoluted language to look like Kant and fool their preys. Certainly that's a mark of Hegel and Heidegger and Derida. And Lacan also uses his own esoteric, sui generis language instead of plain French. At best, it raises the cost of entry into his thinking, comparatively to other philosophers. Life is short. At worse, it's a smoke screen.
But if someone like Žižek can boil Lacan down for us, I'm all for it.
That depends on what we are trying to do with our criticism? Not all criticism is of equal value. When philosophy begins talking about the attributes of concepts, and I would encourage you to think about this deeply, it is falling back in on itself in a kind of negative negation.
This is an incredibly weak and emotional argument. Further, it is elitist: "while the adults are working." This validates everything I have been saying about Analytical Philosophy. You guys presume that you are doing the most important thing and that you are engaged in real philosophical work. This has not been substantiated but merely presumed. At which point is this elitist branch humbled? The social sciences have been making progress without Analytical Philosophy! In fact, this method would only get in the way. Should I read Davidson or choose to devote my time and energy to Perry? My claim is that this is not a subjective consideration. I do not deny Analytical Philosophers the aesthetic right to play their analytical games, but what I do deny is its presumption of elitism and relevance.
Relevance to what? Do you think they should reciprocate and not deny you the aesthetic right to play your dialectical games (or however you style them) but deny your presumption of elitism and relevance?
JerseyFlight, you profess to be a man that wishes to foster thought that benefits human kind. Look at the replies to your responses in this thread. Are you meeting your goals? If you are to rise to the ideals you set, you must be the example of this.
Currently this thread is no longer discussing philosophy. It is an opinion pissing contest. Several people have remarked that you do not have the evidence to attribute the entirety of analytic philosophy as useless to society. It is useless to YOU. And that is fine. That is the only thing which can be logically concluded from this discussion.
So will you continue to partake in this pissing contest? Because this conversation is not furthering thought, or good will in mankind. Will you rise to your ideals, are are they simply words you put forth to make people think you are better than you are?
Existence, the concrete and contingent life we live on this infinitesimal rock.
Says the dude whose only 'evidence' has been some second hand quotes and word garble that no one can make sense of.
I have no problem with conceptual analysis, in Analytical Philosophy this analysis has gone off on a tangent. It has yet to be demarcated that Analytical Philosophy is in fact a form of bourgeois philosophy. (Live long enough and you will be able to view it as a school of thought). It is a revival of idealism in the most tragic sense of the term, here tragic is a reference to its emphasis, which is not the world, not even concepts that matter to reality, just the attributes of concepts.
Quite the contrary, the presumption of value has not been sustained.
Since you want to thrust yourself into the fight: what exactly was wrong with the definitions I provided?
I suggested an evidential contrast between Davidson's content and Perry's content.
I don't know, personally, if the entirety of analytic philosophy is useless to society - probably not, but a lot of it is. Philosophers very often vastly disagree on different central questions, so there's not much unity in the field in contrast to many other fields where there is widespread agreement on the basics that they can teach students. Even in the rare cases that there is widespread agreement, like with the Gettier paper, no one outside of philosophy really seems to care and there doesn't seem to be direct applications for it.
I feel bad sometimes for studying philosophy. Other fields are focusing on actual problems like how to stop COVID or how to help countries with serious economic problems while philosophers shut them selves off from the outside world to go play in their own heads or provide extensive commentary on a long dead philosopher that no one cares to read and often requires a second language to fully understand. It sometimes makes talking with them about contemporary issues extremely frustrating as facts and evidence clash their a priori presuppositions. Every once in a while though the old armchair philosopher will come down from his ivory tower and become strong proponents for a cause, if not lead the charge themselves like Peter Singer.
If you're referring to practical, political or ecological relevance, then so what? No philosophy really has direct practical relevance, and only political philosophy has political relevance. Whatever Analytic Philosophy is it is not concerned with politics and never pretended to be. Of course that doesn't mean its practitioners are not interested in politics.
In general it is other fields, not philosophy, that have more direct social relevance to general human life. Why do you think there is no Nobel Prize for philosophy, when there is for, for example, a Nobel prize for literature? Is it not because literature is considered to have more general social relevance?
So, if you wanted to say that Critical Philosophy (as represented by Adorno, Horkheimer et al) is more socially relevant, is that not because it is more closely aligned with sociology than with it is with philosophy (as it has been traditionally conceived)?
I wonder, are other people buying your line of reason, that is, that the quotes I provided are invalid? You did not refute my position, you didn't even have the conversation, you simply dismissed my argument with ad hominems as you are doing now. The presumption seems to be that I need to do more in order to refute Analytical Philosophy's presumption of value. I flat out deny it, this presumption bears the burden of its own proof, and further, it doesn't stack up very well against other forms of communication. The social sciences, where all the progress in society has been made, don't make use of Analytical Philosophy. One might be infatuated with it, but it's doubtful that an Analytical Philosopher would ever advise their child to pursue this path professionally. One cannot even approach society through this eccentric communication. The question remains: what are Analytical Philosophers doing, where do their word games lead? Not a single person on this thread has even used the Analytical Method to defend the Analytical Method. Some people require a great deal of sophistication before they will ascent to a simple premise. Is this really a sign of intelligence? I don't think it is, and everyone had better figure it out because the mortal clock is ticking. Should you spend your life reading Davidson or Perry? This is a decision, as philosophers, we all must make over and over again.
:lol:
Ah, my mistake, I thought you were even half-serious. My mistake, carry on.
That same argument has been aimed at other sorts of philosophy.
The premiss of this thread, as I pointed out earlier, is to treat philosophy like a competition between teams; like it was a game of football. The argument itself trivialises philosophy.
If you have a choice not to do philosophy, then don't. If you are going to do philosophy, do it well.
This thread is not good philosophy.
For example, I can easily see myself in a political argument ending up talking about speech-acts and other philosophy of language stuff. See, my political principles are grounded in my normative ethical principles, which in turn depend on my meta-ethical framework, including moral semantics, which invokes philosophy of language concepts such as speech-acts. The normative ethics itself also depends a lot on deontic logic and so logic and language generally, and the pragmatics of my politics hinges a lot on linguistic pragmatics and related rhetorical theory.
It’s all connected, so it all has to be able to fit together, every view on every topic has implications on the possibilities in many other topics. That big picture, and the practical application that it enables, is what analytic philosophy seems to miss the most. It makes some great tools, it just need to actually put them to the job too.
Popper sure seemed concerned with the political implications of his philosophy of science and epistemology.
I have a very different view of philosophy, knowing it to be thought. But to answer you from the basis of your own premise: then what does philosophy tell you about Analytical Philosophy? Here you have already affirmed a distinction of value.
As long as you don't pretend to claim you have the authority to blanket an entire history of thought process as useless to society, that's fine. To a person who cares about such things, analytic philosophy might provide some use to them as a tool. What an individual finds useful can vary from person to person, and it is not for us to judge if something we find personally meaningless provides another fulfillment.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
True, the history of philosophy is often a study of its failures. Not everyone is interested in seeing how thought processes have evolved. Still, Karl Popper's contribution to the scientific method of today can be a nice read if you're interested in such things. The Gettier paper is a nice starting point for people interested in tackling epistemology as well.
Some philosophers are interested in the history of philosophy for its own sake. It is a hobby of puzzles to themselves. That is fine. We all entertain ourselves in our own particular way, and taken objectively, they're all frivolous in the face of the big questions in life. Sometimes people study it to improve their own and others lives. It sounds like you are interested in philosophy to tackle questions of today and the future. Then use that as your guide. Don't concern yourself with what others find meaningful, if it inhibits what you find meaningful.
This is exactly the question, what does thought tell us we should do? How should philosophy be used? The reason you are able to arrive at these conclusions about philosophy is because the philosophical enterprise has been focused on idealism. In Marx a split occurred, philosophy was brought back down to earth, rescued from the games and error of the supernatural idealists. There have been lots of philosophers who labor in the realm of relevant theory, as opposed to abstract idealism. (Of course, even this is objectionable, but at least the emphasis is relevant).
I agree with what you're saying. My claim is that philosophers have to do better than mere subjectivity, otherwise their entire program turns to dust. If one is just playing an aesthetic game, and they claim that's what it is, then they have already refuted themselves. There is no valid request for a formal refutation or argument after this, one can simply dismiss it on hedonistic terms. One can even characterize it however they want, as long as it brings value to them.
See the point about subjectivity I made above.
I'll first mention that I completely agree with you when it comes to your assessment of analytic philosophy today. When I think back to the system builders I think back to really the mid 19th century with Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant, and a few other who were really very ambitious, and we don't really see that anymore, and I think part of the reason is just because there's so much knowledge out there that I just don't see how anyone can put forth something like that today, but I know your project and I do wish you luck.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Interesting, could you explain please? Maybe cite an example?
Not all philosophical forms are of equal value. As a philosopher wouldn't you want to know that you were practicing a form of language and analysis that had the maximum potential of relevance? Why not?
Peter Singer, of course. A student of R. M. Hare.
Baroness Warnock, part of the same Oxford circle as Hampshire, Strawson, Berlin...
Hanna Ardent.
Martha Nussbaum, who takes Aristotle into modern law.
Add to the list, let's see what it looks like. At present it looks like there is more of a problem with male philosophers than with analytic philosophers.
Someone else mentioned up thread, in a way better than I can recount from memory, how one of the founding principles of analytic philosophy was the rejection of system-building, so I don't just think that it's hard to do, I think it's being actively avoided, for reasons I still don't really comprehend. The lack of systematization, or architectonics as @apokrisis would say, is the thing that I found most lacking in my own (analytic) philosophical education, and the thing that spurred me to start my project.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
I did, right after the bit you quoted in that post:
Quoting Pfhorrest
So politically, I'm a socialist because I'm a libertarian, and I'm a libertarian because of my deontological normative ethics (something like the non-aggression principle that you're probably familiar with), and my deontological ethics hinges on there being things that are objectively right or wrong (if it's not actually wrong to aggress upon people, but just "unpopular" or "illegal" or something, then the whole politics falls apart), and that account of things being objectively right or wrong can't be explained without explaining what "right" and "wrong" (etc) even mean, which is an account of moral semantics, which of mine hinges on the concept of speech-acts, but in any case all moral semantics, being semantics, hinge on some linguistic concepts or other.
I think it one of the best aspects of philosophy since Moore and Russell. Grand systems, by their very nature, are wrong; and I mean both in terms of truth and morality.
Save us from systematisation.
Popper's student George Soros; so beloved by the right wingnuts.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/456809
Then why are you insisting that your own subjectivity has any philosophical value? Objectively you know you cannot make a blanket statement that analytic philosophy is harmful to society. You have no statistics, no control and variable that has been tested. There is nothing objective in this thread. Your definitions are moot, because the entire premise of this argument from the beginning is a subjective opinion.
And that has been my entire point. You are the one who is continuing this. JerseyFlight, you got a lot going for you, but you seem completely unaware that this criticism you keep levying at others is the very thing you are doing. Many posters have tried to tell you this, and you keep focusing on the way they've crafted the message, instead of the message itself. Granted, it could be crafted better, but people expect you to be BETTER than a hypocrite, and often get mad that you would continue to insist on being one.
At this point, I have enough respect for your intelligence that I am going to assume that you must see this. It is your call what you do from this point. I would hope you take the path of someone who accepts they have made mistakes in the pursuit of their ideals and moves on to the next problem, and not the path of an intellectual narcissist.
This is not my argument.
Quoting Philosophim
I do not subscribe to your characterization of this conversation.
What was wrong with the definitions I provided? (I have little interest in how you see the situation, my interest is in your reason).
Interesting - I've never heard that explicitly said or taught, but come to think of it it does make sense to me intuitively.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, I'm very familiar with NAP. It's very popular among right-libertarians as well. Personally, it's not what I follow and I've actually debated some right libertarians or anarcho-capitalists on the NAP a few years back. Since I reject NAP - or any deontologic/principles-based grounding for my libertarian-leaning beliefs I don't consider myself a full-blooded libertarian. I prefer to describe myself as libertarian-leaning more due to the values that libertarianism encompasses, and I suppose these values come from reflecting on my own way of being and conception of truth in society. I feel strongly about encouraging entrepreneurship and investing and that goes beyond me.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/456809
Explain?
Don't concern yourself with if they are positive or negative; we can look at that after, if need be. Who are they?
Via Ray Brassier: "Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. ... Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter".
I have been talking about philosophy, specifically philosophical form and method, what you have raised is a red herring or an equivocation, but even so we can ask relevant questions. Was Russell wise to forsake Analytical Philosophy to engage in political activity? Clearly he thought this activity had value -- in contrast to what, mere theory? Do these examples rebuke the Analytical Philosophers on this forum or validate their program? (Please keep in mind my objection is not that Analytical Philosophers are arm chair theorists, but that their philosophical emphasis is lacking in value).
Supposing I grant that the theory you have in mind is more "relevant".
Quoting JerseyFlight
What about Critical Theory: are you sure it's more than mere theory?
I can be convinced, but you have to point to something more than the subject matter.
I did my time as a Marxist, read lots of his writing, picked up Gramsci along the way and the cultural stuff. Spent a fair amount of time later in Foucault-Deleuze land, which is not Marxist but far from anti-Marxist, and I think aspired to be what we could call "materialist" in a Marxist sense.
I never did the Frankfurt school though, so that's a big gap for me, and your particular area.
But we're still by and large just talking about people's reading habits. Does Critical Theory make sure people are fed and housed and given the resources to flourish? Or is it mere theory?
Would it make the world a better place if I went back to reading Marx and talked about him all the time? I suppose if I really took your criticism to heart, it might assuage my guilty conscience; I could now claim to be focusing on my energy on things that really matter. But would that be true? There's plenty of reason to think Marxism is primarily a theoretical, and, to a substantial degree, academic, pursuit.
If you wanted to tell me every minute I spend talking about stuff on the internet is a minute I could have spent helping people -- that would just be true, I guess. But I'm not sure why it matters what I'm talking about on the internet. Would I be excused if I were talking about Adorno? Shouldn't I still shut up and go help people?
Sure, but Popper is both a philosopher of science and a political philosopher, and would not usually be considered an analytic philosopher since his main concern was not with language, semantics and logic.
Also, I think you meant 'epistemology' not "etymology".
The other points are that bioethics is nowadays considered to be a part of the philosophy of science, and that whatever a philosopher, insofar as she might be identified as a particular kind of philosopher, is interested in does not necessarily reflect what the kind of philosophy she might be identified with is concerned with.
All these categories are not rigid and essential but loose and somewhat arbitrary.
I don't know what you mean by "knowing it to be thought". Philosophy doesn't "tell me anything" it is ideology that would "tell me things". There is no essence of philosophy, and generally philosophers come to different conclusions about what is important to them.
Wisdom is not some eternal dogmatic standard, but something that may be arrived at by an individual, and that wisdom is proper to them and to them alone (apart from other individuals who may be so moved by their works as to adopt it, of course).
There is no universal standard in other words; philosophy is the most singular of pursuits. Having said that it might be thought that of all philosophies AP has the most universal standard on account of its concern with logic.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that Popper is socio-historically located within the stream of analytic philosophers. I know this has been a topic of contention in this thread, but as I understand the term "analytic philosophy", it is not the philosophy narrowly concerned with language, semantics, and logic as topics, but the philosophy that approaches any of its topics, including things like political philosophy, in the manner pioneered by the Vienna Circle et al, with logical rigor, breaking things down into pieces analytically, hence the name.
Quoting Janus
Correct, I must've clicked the wrong autocomplete button on my phone.
I take "AP" to refer to philosophy which is predominately concerned with logic, language and semantics. I think "logical rigour', however that has been conceived historically, has been a common concern to almost all philosophy.
The Logical Positivists were predominantly concerned with epistemology as far as I am aware. Both Popper and Wittgenstein were associated with the Vienna School, and both for different reasons distanced themselves from logical positivism.
As far as I remember Popper did so because he rejected the LP criterion of verifiability, and Wittgenstein did so because he rejected the LP idea that any talk which does not consist in empirically verifiable propositions is without value (he may have agreed that such talk is without sense, but not that it is without value). (Someone who knows more about this history may want to correct me on this).
No one should. But there it is.
The whole exercise is a response to a post from , to which I did not reply.
Apparently not replying has its own complications, as @MSC demonstrated.
I'm not just looking for analytics. Anyone who is socially active. He is often cited as a philosopher, so no debate from me.
I like to keep these kind of things private, only because they don't belong on the threads, but you have accused me here in public, no doubt, because you could not make your case and are exceedingly annoyed that I got the best of Banno, so much so that you deleted our exchange and threatened to ban me if I posted on the Davidson thread again. Is this what philosophical objectivity looks like? Is this what psychological maturity looks like? This is what dogmatism and elitism look like, it is the way of tyranny to censor. And it is exactly what happens when you challenge the people who claim to be "the adults in the room." Strange, all you Analytical advocates stand here denying the very elitism in which your community exists, and by which you proceed.
By "harassment" you are referring to my my letter to Philosophim, here it is in its entirety:
[i]I have not quite figured out how to deal with your own special brand of moral authoritarianism. I give you credit in that it's exceedingly effective, but out of all the people I have discoursed with on this thread you are to me the most loathsome and underhanded. You do not seek to make progress through reason, but through negative characterizations, your ad hominems (and that's what they are) are so subtly put together that they come across as a form of intelligence, and yet they are totally lacking in rational engagement. It is good for me to [be] subjected to them, though I do not like them, because it forces me to figure out how to deal with them. I have met many theists whose entire polemical program is exactly what you repeatedly practice on this thread. I find it contemptible and believe I will figure it out. There is only power in being a one-trick-pony if the trick continues to work.
I think I know what lies behind it, I could be wrong, but I have a theory. Do you like pornography?[/i]
If I had posted this on the threads I think it would have been out of line, but as a private conversation I don't see how it can be called harassment? (And keep in mind we are having the conversation here because you attempted to slander me to this entire community). If Philosophim had asked me to stop contacting him and I had ignored his request, this would no doubt be a form of harassment. Further, I am specifically talking about his ad hominem style and am telling him that I will figure out how to rationally counter his underhanded fallacies. The reason I asked him if he likes pornography, which I am quite fond of, is because I suspect him to very much be a moralist. In other words, he is so threatened by liberal culture that he even considers the question of pornography to be a form of harassment. As far as not liking him, I am entitled to it, but I don't let this interject into the argument. Where he is a moralist you may consider me the very opposite: I like to moralize against the moralizers. I'm not sure that there is a type in our species that is more dangerous.
I think what the appropriate thing to do would have been for Philosophim to contact me himself and express his concerns, but he did not do this, because like you, he's after censorship. His way is underhanded it is not direct. Some people are far too emotive to be involved in moderation, in their hands it becomes a form of tyranny.
“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” ? George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
What a nice grand system you got there...
Err, Heidegger was politically engaged in the 30s and 40s...
I think that the formal political engagement of philosophers is interesting to study because it says a lot about where they come from and what their theory means to them in practice. But I don’t think philosophers make good politicians. They tend to lack what’s called (I think) street smarts. And beside the politics of the authors, what’s interesting is also the politics of their writings. I.e. how are these interpreted and quoted and used politically, what’s the impact of their ideas on political discourse and action.
Like, for better or worse, Marx changed the course of history.
That's basically the thesis of Popper's "Open Society": philosophers since antiquity have taken side. He starts with Aristotle, teacher of Alexandre at the Macedonian court. One should not expect Aristotle's political philosophy to be pro-democratic. That doesn't invalidate other parts of his philosophy though and I think Popper lays it a bit thick on Aristotle. But that's only the mandatory liminar remarks about antiquity. What Popper is really after is German political philosophy in the 19th century, which according to him gave rise to both Communism (via of course Marx) and Fascism (via Hegel). Popper analyses their philosophy to show how it is "Historicist" i.e. based on the idea that history has laws like physics.
In other words, Popper is not dong motive questioning or label shaming: he is not saying "Booh booh Marx was a communist, how dare he". He is instead comparing Marx and Hegel's historical theories with practice, using his criteria of falsifiability, and showing it's pure BS. Those guys essentialize history as some grand necessary trajectory that has nothing to see with reality.
In doing so Popper explains why Nazism emerged in Germany, one of the most philosophy-oriented culture on earth at the time: it was not in spite of all their smart philosophers that the Germans descended into the abyss. On the contrary, some German philosophers led them to the abyss.
He¨s not throwing them aside as BS. What he says is that capitalism can be controlled, with institutions in a nation, limiting the possibilities for the market to ursurp the citizens, with laws and regulations. He specifically mention social democraties in western Europe to be successful examples.
And to call Marx totally "German" is not totally correct. Hegel had his adepts in the UK, and Marx did base many of his studies, as Popper mentions, on the conditions for workers in English industrial towns, which were awful. He also spent like half his life as a Bourgeoise Londoner. Also, at the time when Marx developed most of his ideas there were no such place as Germany. Just a mishmash of areas earlier conquered by Napoleon.
Now, The Open society was written half a century ago, things have changed a lot since then. The markets are global, automatization has been developed further, work resources can be bought cheap from any country. Things are more messy now.
He does refute historicism. But yes, Popper was always a socialist, in fact a theorist of social democracy and advocate of social enginering.
Well, this is true for a lot of academic disciplines, both in humanities and in physical sciences.
Quoting StreetlightX
Exactly. This demand for (whatever) philosophy to justify itself in terms of its measurable value to society ought to be resisted.
I'm not sure we should avoid the question of whether it has value to society, after all tuition and tax money goes into educational programs and the issue will inevitably pop up, spending money on something when it could be used for something else needs to be justified.
That doesn't mean that I think we should crush the value of learning into easily quantified units, but I do think we should explain to people about the history of ideas. My take is there are plenty of incidences of how abstract ideas with seemingly no practical applications but it turned out they did (Hardy's Apology for Number Theory for instance turned out to have applications in combinatorics) But we should explain to people that the only way this kind of progress happens is if we allow people to learn for learning‘s sake.
What should be valued is "comprehensiveness" how it brings progress into domains of thought, and the practical applications should be trusted to follow, even if it takes decades or even centuries. I don't know your take on this, but this also goes into the question of whether String Theory should continue on or whether it takes up academic resources.
His political engagements were with other Jews, and of another kind entirely, of course. Though I suppose he could be said to have screwed them as well.
At the least, it’s reasonable to ask that philosophers try not to do too much harm, I think.
But I want to stress that value here does not have to be a measurable material value. We don't support philosophy in the hopes of possibly getting Velcro or strong encryption out of it somewhere down the road. This is value in a broader axiological sense.
There are already fields in the social sciences that do this much better than philosophy. If you are here rehashing the argument that has already been attempted, that is, Analytical Philosophy imparts the ability to think. I have already raised valid objections to this claim, critical thinking does this much more efficiently. Further, thought in and of itself doesn't contain value, just like physical strength in and of itself doesn't contain value, it is only when the strong man puts his strength to some social use that it obtains value beyond subjectivity. One can make a strong machine only to let it rot in rust. As for my argument against subjectivity I have addressed it here:
'My claim is that philosophers have to do better than mere subjectivity, otherwise their entire program turns to dust. If one is just playing an aesthetic game, and they claim that's what it is, then they have already refuted themselves. There is no valid request for a formal refutation or argument after this, one can simply dismiss it on hedonistic terms. One can even characterize it however they want, as long as it brings value to them.'
Quoting SophistiCat
What? How did you arrive at this rule? Who allowed you to make it?
Philosophy is negation pure and simple, the value it has to offer comes through this negation. Philosophy can do no better than to strike out against its own irrelevance and abstraction for the sake of negating itself in order to hammer itself back in the direction of being. Philosophy must regulate itself if it would ever achieve the status of intelligence.
Try that on Nietzsche.
Or Peter Singer.
So e.g. 'modal logic' and 'reflective equilibrium' and 'nonreductive physicalism' ... are instances of "mere subjectivity"?
This is a red herring. The counter of subjectivity arises from the claim that one cannot define "importance," that the idea of value is entirely subjective, and hence the argument against the Analytical position fails. This is what I'm countering, the claim that philosophy is merely a preference and that one cannot ask the question of its value. You will not find me here discussing the objectivity of modal logic, reflective equilibrium or nonreductive physicalism. You are free to make any case you wish.
There have actually been two claims:
1. Some of us would be doing more good if we were doing something else; if you measure the effect of your actions against the most good you could do, we are doing relative harm.
2. What some of us do leads others into the (1) scenario above, so that others are now doing less good than they might; thus there is a compounded relative harm.
So you've not read a word of e.g. Peirce, Popper, Quine, Sellars or Wittgenstein? Or understood them. Questioning "the value of philosophy" is nearly a raison d'etre. You're "countering" a strawman, Jersey.
Not sure why you assume that only those who agree with these thinkers would have been the one's to comprehend them? I have had this fallacious argument served to me many times by theists. But further, this is just another red herring. The conversation here is not a comparison of reading lists, this thread is about the social value of Analytical Philosophy.
As I said in a recent PM, it would be an extraordinary presumption on someone's part to see us here doing this, and suppose to themselves that that is all we do.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
One may show the fly the way out of the flytrap; but the fly is unfortunately not obligated to follow. One does what one can...
:wink:
The very word I reached for on page 1 of this thread.
Ha! Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You and I both have the failing of not being able to leave this shite alone. We ought take Street's advice:
Quoting StreetlightX
I don't entirely object to the discussion. I do object to it interrupting other discussions.
What I am most interested to hear from readers is what they got out of reading Davidson contrasted with Gracian? What specific value did you derive from Davidson? What specific value did you derive from Gracian? Did you think Davidson's paper was a waste of time, did you think Gracian's aphorisms were a waste of time? Would you read Davidson's paper again, would you read Gracian's aphorisms again? Do you want to read more of Davidson, do you want to read more of Gracian?
I suppose there are those who will claim that the issue of value cannot be settled this way, in one sense I admit they are correct, because value cannot always be immediately perceived, in another sense they are wrong, because life is short and it must choose between forms, and one of the ways it must do this is in terms of relevance.
Only I'm less hesitant to explicitly value the economic or welfare outcome (wider categories than transactional) of a pursuit. If certain pursuits have no such outcomes in a particular society, I see a potential critique how that society is badly designed to exploit full utilization of those skills rather than seeing discouragement of the value of that pursuit. And if it truly has no practical applications whatsoever, it makes me question how in tune those ideas are with reality. Maybe I’m being optimistic about the interconnectedness of the world and thinking everything of value can lead to contributions to society is wishful thinking, but I think the abstract ideas leading to contributions speculation worked out quite well in history so far.
Yes of course, Nietzsche is a case in point. Derida too in my view, in the sense that his particularly terrorist (Foucault's words not mine) and toxic form of post-modernism produced a generation or two of 'post-truth' confused people. One should be careful with one's words, they can do damage.
Your life and its limits, this is both the criteria and the measure.
Yes, so each individual decides what has value for their life and its limits.
Society, that accounts for your individual quality, plays a part in the overall calculation of value. This is how we avoid pure egoism/subjectivity, but there is a level at which this breaks down... a horizon we are fast approaching.
Of course we value on account of how we have been socially conditioned, and how we have reacted to that and worked with it, or not. Community values, a sense of community, have indeed, and are continuing to be, broken down. Is that a good or bad thing? There is no absolute answer to that, because any answer will still be filtered somehow through the lens of the very values in question.
To sustain such a claim it would also be necessary to specify just what social value is in the first place, and why it should be thought to be such.
But the question is: just what does social cohesion consist in? I would venture to say that it consists in concern for others. So concern for others is one social value that cannot be eroded without loss of social cohesion. Could it be shown that AP necessarily erodes concern for others? I'm not seeing it.In fact I think saying that AP has negative social value erodes social value more than AP ever could.
I think there are far bigger fish to fry! How about financial capitalism?