On The Philosophy of, well, Philosophy

There now, nator. You'll feel better after it's done.Imagine the relief you will feel at the commencement ceremony, when the newly minted PhD honoree proudly processes into the hall wearing a hood lined in blue--the colour of philosophy.Imagine the thrill you will feel when you see the same hue draped around the shoulders of all those other PhD giants in all those other fields of human endeavour: the sciences, the arts, the humanities.Imagine the joy you will feel when the newly minted PhD graduate joins a community of scholars who represent that vast array of fields, to work alongside them in adding to and sharing that great body of human knowledge of which the sciences are a part.Imagine the pride you will feel on that day when you look to the wall and see it gleaming in the light--that evidence of Everest conquered, that document of intellectual achievement that asks--no, demands--respect from all the world:

Doctor of Philosophy

__________________Edited by Archer Opterix, : brev.

I'd like to see crashfrog address these fields, too, anglagard. It's a reasonable request.He's already started down the road of making rulings. He may as well finish it.

I'm glad you shared this. It is certainly true that philosophy has generated empirically verifiable answers. It's just that, as soon as the answers can be verified in this way, they no longer belong to philosophy. It's no one's fault. It's true by definition.The idea of atoms and the idea of a round earth are both ideas that belong to ancient Greek philosophy. The people who came up with these ideas didn't imagine they were doing science. Science had yet to be invented. They were doing philosophy. But answers they are, and they have stuck.Philosophy's business is contemplation. As such, philosophy serves as an incubator for hypotheses. Here conjectures are born, tested, and refined. And here they remain, until new developments propel them elsewhere.Another misconception exists. Because philosophy specializes in 'unanswerable' questions (more precisely, because the answers it offers remain hypotheses), people often think every idea offered in philosophy is equally valid and that all ideas exist in a perpetual state of stalemate.Not so. Ideas get introduced and they get tested. The application of logic is ruthless. Some ideas gain ground. Some lose.You have already commented on the rising and falling fortunes of Aristotelian and Platonic models.We find another example in the literature of the late Middle Ages (the nascent period for science). There one encounters a lot of discussion of substances. It was a hot topic. This concern with substances has left its mark on the Nicene Creed and other period documents.The philosophical concern with substances falls off, though, after the Renaissance. Research replaced conjecture. The ancient hypothesis of atoms was confirmed and refined. Among philosophers the discussion shifted toward epistomology: how do we know? Throughout the scientific age this has continued to be a subject of great interest. It's as hot a topic today as ever.Philosophy is an incubator for hypotheses. It is useful because hypotheses are useful. And it is useful because, even in the absence of conclusive data, hypotheses may be tested by logic and observation and refined through discussion.There were things Aquinas said that, later, no one could. Discussion over time--and the application of logic, straight--led to progress.It's important to note, though, that not every useful hypothesis philosophy generates passes in time into the realm of natural science. This is because philosophy deals with much more than just natural phenomena. Some of its ideas bear fruit elsewhere.Aristotle, for example, contemplated form. He liked to think about the shapes of things. He suspected that many forms exist that, because of their scale or their medium, we do not discern readily with the human eye. He wanted to make some progress toward describing these things.Theatre was very popular in Athens. Aristotle, being a fan himself, decided to describe the form of plays. He noticed that some plays had a very powerful and satisfying effect on audiences while others--as eloquently scripted and performed as the first--left the audience frustrated and feeling a bit cheated. He described the forms of each. He noted certain common features shared by satisfying plays that, when missing from a play, prompt feelings of disappointment.Today this subject belongs to the field of aesthetic theory. Every time you sit in the cinema and feel tempted to throw popcorn at the screen over the way the story ended, it's a safe bet that the mistake is one Aristotle warned against.Aristotle was equally interested in describing what form the earth had. He noted the evidence, applied logic, and decided it was round. He even ventured an estimate of its size. (He called its circumference at twice the size it really is. Not bad for a guy in a Bronze Age town filled with flat-earthers.) Today, of course, the subject belongs to geology. But Aristotle wasn't doing science. Science did not exist. His business was contemplation. For him, contemplating the shape of the earth was no different that contemplating the shape of a good play. These were just two of the many things that people who enjoy thinking find worthwhile to think about.____________Edited by Archer Opterix, : html.Edited by Archer Opterix, : brev.Edited by Archer Opterix, : typo repair.

Archer Opterix Well I think this is where the difference between science and philosophy occurs. Though the greeks speculated on the existence of atoms, science has gone the extra step to show that the atomic hypothesis is correct to the best level of probability.
That said ,just what the atom is is only known in the sense that we can understand the models that pertain to it.
The Bohr atom that is used in elementary school is replaced by the quantum orbital variety that is used in high school ,however even with the mathematical model, the human mind simply cannot realize how an atom is actually structured.As jar is fond of saying, the map is not the territory.I feel that the philosophers position is to stretch the envelope however, unlike the past centuries, it must now be subsumed by the rulings of science concerning what properties the world is allowed to possess.

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"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."Albert Einstein

Pornography can be defined, especially if you were going to quantify it. "How much pornography do you have?" "Oh! About 50GB" Are SETI quantifying intelligence? Actually it can give accurate predictions (where Mars will be in the night sky, for example). It just can't predict as many things as heliocentrism (the phases of Venus, for example). Well I'm not going to agree or disagree with that. However, you use philosophical concepts and so you must think that verificationism is either fallacious or tautological. How do we know that any given principle or technique based upon a principle is able to discern between truth and fiction reliably, without circular reasoning? Thankfully, it was philosophers that developed the principles of verification and falsification, empiricism and positivism and the subsequent rejection of metaphysics and theology. But don't let that get in your way It wasn't empiricism it was verificationism, look back and you'll see: If you didn't know what I meant by it, why didn't you just look it up? wiki -

quote:

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a criterion for meaningfulness that requires a non-analytic, meaningful sentence to be either verifiable or falsifiable

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The point is that culture determines what we consider 'obvious'...if we look at the history of human thought, what was considered 'obvious' about the nature of reality has changed considerably.I'm not sure why you think that none of them thinks that it is obvious. It has been part of their cultural religion for a long time. Mystics tend to become so because knowing of Maya, they seek to pierce the veil. To do that requires years of meditation or other rituals and learning etc. If you'd like we could try something more familiar to both of us: some people think it is obvious that a transcendal deity exists and that it created the universe as a temporary holding place for humans, after which we will find ourselves in an eternal realm of paradise or hell.I don't think that is particularly obvious at all, but people absorb their culture quite readily and believe that the cultural conclusions are 'obvious'. That humans have differing views on what is obvious should be...ahem...obvious. Given that philosophers are human, it is natural that this tendency is reflected there. To Bohr it was obvious the universe had at its heart a probabilistic core...it was not obvious to Einstein. Well yes, but don't confuse that with meaning that philosophy is a single methodology. There are different ways of thinking, different questions that can be asked. Different frameworks within which to answer them. There are different schools of thought within science, eventually one becomes more accepted or even universal - and this happens within the field of philosophy too. I know, but you've acted like this is a problem. You can't tell me that Logical Positivism/Empiricism is a right philosophy despite the fact that you have basically been arguing its superiority. You speak on about how philosophy can't decide these things, which means your philosophy can't decide which philosophy is right either. That doesn't mean you don't have a philosophy, and it doesn't discount your philosophy. If pushed, I'm sure you can successfully defend the philosophical principles that you clearly believe are superior to the principles you reject. However you cannot prove your philosophy is right, because to do so requires philosophy -which as you pointed out, cannot (by its very nature) resolve the issue. Philosophy has a lot of uses. One use would be in learning about stuff. You posit that in order to consider something as being a true statement we must be able to verify it, it must be coherent and we have to define knowledge in a way which takes into account the tentativity of what we can say we know. It might seem obvious to you, but for the majority of human history people didn't think this way. Sure, those ideas were more or less taken into consideration here and there, but not in a formal or exclusive way. Humans honestly thought it obvious that there were other ways that we could gain knowledge - and many humans thought (and some still think) that these other ways are superior to empirical methods and that were verification should be adhered to it should empirical knowledge being verified by spooky knowledge (eg., where empirical knowledge contradicts say, theological knowledge, empirical knowledge is fiction).It took a lot of philosophical debate to get humanity in the position where a significant number of people can agree that the principles argued by empiricists have significant merit and should be employed exclusively as a means to learning about the world we inhabit. And to the surprise of many, this philosophical debate continues to this day! Fortunately, despite the fact that philosophy cannot tell us which side we are on, we are still able to decide which side is superior.Another use is to try to discuss questions about which we cannot currently get answers to, but which we may one day be able to. Take consciousness for example. Dan Dennett is known for discussing this as a philosopher, and he has put up a philosophical argument, which I think is very strong, criticising certain methods of dealing with question that have been proposed. He looks at the field of neuroscience and tries to argue where scientists should be looking and what kind of theories might be proposed, and what a theory of consciousness would have explain, and what a pointless theory would look like.Philosophy is quite useful when it comes to trying to get to grips with what it is exactly we are trying to explain, what an explanation will have to include to be defined as an adequate explanation and so on and so forth.We can have confidence in the conclusions and ideas reached by philosophy - you have been showing confidence in some of those very ideas. How much confidence we can have, is up to the individual. I have quite a lot of confidence in empiricism, but not everybody does. I can think them fools, but I cannot 'prove' them wrong.

Does that mean you think that abolition, emancipation of women, freedom of man all that kind of thing, have not meaningfully contributed to human problems?

Or, we could just recognize that you're equivocating on the term "philosophy" - which, like most things academic, is used in the context of "PhD" to refer to its medieval definition, not its modern definition.In other words - once again you're improperly attributing to philosophy that which it did not accomplish.Again, I have to ask you - why isn't it possible to defend philosophy without being dishonest?

Ah, but if we went image by image, movie by movie, and examined each, we might very well find much on your hard drive that you thought was porn but I didn't feel rose to that level. For instance:See, I'd call this something like "cheesecake", but someone from a much stricter culture would certainly decry it as pornographic. That was the recognition of the Supreme Court in the famous ruling; what determines "pornography" may not be expressible in words, but we know it when we see it. Sure, by accident it can give "accurate" predictions. That's not accuracy, though, that's luck. If you try to use the geocentric model to predict where most of the mass in the Solar System is located, of course, then you find your predictions very inaccurate.That's the point. When you take all of the predictions of genocentrism, instead of just cherry-picking examples that were right by accident, you find that most of them are highly inaccurate. Thus, geocentrism can be rejected.Look, if you disagree, take it up with your local astronomy department. I assure you that they're not going to pay much attention when you tell them "just because a model gives bad predictions in almost every case, that's no reason to think it's a bad model." I know that philosophy considers empiricism to be fallacious (and, no, I'm not doing philosophy just because I happen to remember something about it); I'm of the opinion that empiricism is true, which is something completely different than philosophy. We look, and see. "I refute it thus!"You're still asking for a philosophical justification of empiricism, but you must know by now that none can be provided. You think that's a failure of empiricism, but it's obviously a failure of philosophy. You said that in response to us talking about empiricism, so I just assumed you misspoke.Why are you trying to change the subject? I don't know what "verificationism" is supposed to be, Firefox doesn't even recognize it as a word, and I can't for the life of me see how it came up in discussion. I rebutted this point. Even the religions and cultures that consider reality to be "truly" an illusion still recognize that treating reality as real is obvious; they just assert that it's incorrect to do so.But I'm not sure that it is. Every human culture in the world understands that the simplest mode of thought is to take experience at face value, not to load it up with preconceptions or ignore reality in favor of dogma or ideology. (You know, like "mature theology.") When someone approaches the world around them with an open mind, free of preconceptions, we say that that person is "childlike", representing that children typically act this way simply because they haven't had the time to form a buch of preconceptions about things before they experience them. Anybody who's ever seen a child learn has seen how they occasionally approach problems from radically different angles, simply because they have no idea yet what is the "wrong" way to do things.So, again, you're completely wrong. All human cultures recognize that treating reality as real is the simplest, most childlike way to approach the world. Those cultures differ on whether or not that's the "right" way to approach the world, but they all recognize that it's the simplest way to do so. That's my point. They don't say that piercing the veil is obvious, they say that it takes decades of dedication and meditation. Not piercing the veil is what they consider obvious. Seeing reality as an illusion is what they consider a mystery. That's why they're "mystics", get it? Try not to forget that my position is that philosophy has no valid methodology, ok? Remember? No rigor? Of course philosophy isn't a single methodology. It has an arbitrary number of methodologies, because without rigor, there's no way to discard the invalid methodologies.Philosophy is like a Polish swiss army knife - it has a hundred blades but none of them are sharp. It contains an arbitrary number of different ways to think about things, but no means to reject the invalid tools. The only problem is one of wasted time, I guess. If you want to waste your time in philosophy, asking questions that can't be answered, unless you're using it to get laid I can't possibly see the merit in doing so.But then plenty of people spend their time doing things I can't see the merit in. Just don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining, ok? Don't expect me to consider it anything but a waste of time. Don't expect me to give all deference when you act like you've accomplished something. I'm not saying that its a right philosophy. I'm saying that it's true. Philosophy can't tell me that empiricism is right. Empiricism tells me that empiricism is right. Philosophy tells me that's circular.Well, that's philosophy's problem, not empiricism's. Except we can't learn from philosophy if we can't distinguish truth from fiction in it. With no rigor, it might as well be the Library of Babel. Sure, on its infinite shelves (where every finite sequence of letters can be found) you might find a book called "The capitals of American States", but since every possible book can be found in this great imaginary library, including one called "The capitals of American States" that doesn't actually have the right capitals in it, you can't have any confidence at all that you're going to get the right information from the book. Because you have no way to tell, a priori, that the statements of this book represent real information about American capitals. Yes - thanks to philosophy. Philosophy was the origin of the idea that empiricism wasn't reliable, that it was childish, that even though it was obvious that reality is real, it actually wasn't. People didn't just start up with mystical thinking on their own, they were taught to think that way by the earliest philosophers.

Neither the abolition of slavery, nor emancipation of women, nor freedom and democracy contributed anything to human problems until they were put into practice, and that was the work of lawmakers, lawyers, and politicians - people actually implementing solutions.It's the easiest thing in the world to have an idea like "people should be free", but the idea is essentially useless. Writing a Constitution that guarantees freedom is very hard all by itself, and then creating a country that uses that document to govern is even harder. But that's what it takes to solve the problem of human slavery - not just thinking "people should be free."

Interestingly, you stumbled upon a truth that you've been denying so far. Yes, a branch of philosophy says that "Empiricism tells me that empiricism is right" is circular. That branch is logic. It's your problem as well, if you want to claim that empiricism is anything more than the exact same kind of tautology that you've been slamming philosophy for.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin FranklinWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

That's right. All that philosophers did was realize the value of these ideals, describe them in ways that can be applicable to human societies, then convince the rest of society that they were right. But the credit for all that should go to the lawmakers, lawyers and politicians (many of whom were actually philosophers) who listened to the philosophers and decided they were right.Never let it be said that you don't give credit where credit is due.I must say, this thread has turned out to be considerably more entertaining than I expected it to be. Thanks, crash.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin FranklinWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

Logic is properly considered a branch of mathematics, not philosophy. Of course it's a tautology, philosophically. That's the critical failure of philosophy - the only justification it can provide for empiricism is tautological.That's my point. If tautological justification - which is no justification at all - is the best philosophy can provide, then greater's the failure of philosophy.

Says you! I suppose it's easy to win any argument by simply defining the terms conveniently for your position. Got any support for you claim? Let's see you define empiricism and justify it without running into a tautology.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin FranklinWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

Perhaps we can deal with some of the particulars later. Let's see if we can't boil this down. First off, I'd like to see you define philosophy as best as you are able - or provide something from an online source you agree with.With regards to verificationism, I talked about it because you said that one of the weaknesses in what I'll call philosophy_crash (whatever that is) is that it lacks the ability to verify something. I mentioned verificationism (the principle that underpins the idea that verification is needed for something to be meaningful) and it's own logical weakness (that it cannot be verified). I gave you a definition and advised you look it up. If you think it is an issue that Firefox's default dictionary does not know the word, I present to you the mighty Therapsid classification.You say that philosophers encouraged people to get all mystical, and that naturally they are empiricists. That requires evidence but I can counter the claim with evidence of my own. First philosophers are people, so in fact people encouraged people that empiricism was childish in your statement. Further, the human brain is fallible. A human brain, that is not trained otherwise, will come to conclusions about the world based on their own personal observation. This leads to superstition and confirmation bias, and leads to a further observation: Other people have reached different conclusions, so who is right?How do I convince someone that dancing widdershins does not increase the bounty of the hunt, but that the true way is to go into a trance? In my experience trances have increased the bounty, but in his widdershins dancing works. Perhaps both do? Perhaps neither do? We need a system of telling truth from fiction. Voila - philosophy.Being infallible they got it very wrong for so long. Things that appeared self-evident to people turned out not to be after they were critically examined. We got better at understanding what we mean by 'truth' and 'fiction' and we got better at developing ways and means to get at it. Not all people were investigating this at this deep level - some where happy appeasing the gods they thought must obviously exist because in their experience, sacrificing to them had a perceived benefit.Anyway, then a great swathe of humanity got infected with a terrible parasite called christianity which managed to get state backing and a 'think like us or die' mentality which set back honest enquiry into the proceedings by centuries. It still went on, much to the chagrin of The Church (and it went on in other regions that were not so infected). Philosophers kept working on other systems of knowledge, and a proto-scientific method managed to get a foothold based on the works of Greek philosophers, as well as Arabian knowledge, in the 12th Century. Unfortunately the Arabian investigation was severely hampered by a mutated form of the christianity virus and that set them back massively. Then as proto-science advanced new discoveries were made that challenged The Church and the philosophical arguments that ensued managed to weaken the strain of christianity towards a more moderate variant (eventually). As science started getting to what we would now see as science, there was a dispute over induction and how science should deal with it. The logical positivists were seen by some to lead to science with too much induction in it, leading to unsound theories, Popper came along and proposed falsification and the philosophy of science took its latest major philosophical move into analytical philosophy. The hypotheses that were developed according to the new worldview were more sound, and older theories were able to be dismissed as not being falsifiable in any practical way (how falsifiable is another philosophical discussion of course).So - that's a ridiculously rapid overview of philosophy from my perspective and hopefully that might help you understand what I am talking about. It's history is not one of getting to the 'obvious' answer right away but of thousands of years of thought. Much of that thought is tosh, but it was a necessary path unfortunately.Philosophy_crash sounds terribly pointless, and I wouldn't bother defending it. Even if you don't think it is an accurate or correct description, do you think that philosophy_mod is equally pointless?Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

So your position then is that people can act without first having an idea?