Interesting technique you linked.
I can’t just pick one philosophy, they are all to awesome.
I believe in the Beyblader philosophy, for I am one who Beyblades.
[media=youtube]ljVvIHYX_9U[/media]
I liked that before I even watched the video.
Also…
Someone should make Dreiblades.
As far as I’m concerned that fad never happened, Yu-Gi-Oh! just got old enough to finally have it’s bar mitzvah .
You have to remember that Buddhist believe that karmic effects can span over lifetimes. Good and bad deeds in this life may not necessarily come to fruition “externally” in this life, but it will eventually (i.e. a person repaying kindness, screw you over in the next life - thus, the “bad things happening to good people” factor).
Karma is just a fancy word for cause and effect. Practically speaking, all of our actions have reactions on a conscious / sub-conscious basis. Like a fighting game, once you make the commitment to stop being a scrub, you do your best to avoid the creating bad habits.
To this day I do not know how to explain(nor fully understand) the Hegalian Dialectic. A lot of people say that it is one of the most important concepts of philosophy today, since it happens everywhere. So anybody want to try to give me their take on it? For those of you who don’t know, here is a brief explanation:
Testing abstractions (such as philosophy, which is all theoretical) is insanely difficult, theres an infinite number of variables at play in many situations.
I tend to agree here, though, I have a bit of a wording issue with you. I would say physics and math are in fact subsets of certain philosophies. Math being part of the rationalist tradition, and science being part of the empirical tradition.
The entire field of ethics and political philosophy has a vast influence on the world directly. There wasn’t much of a distinction between sociology, political theory and philosophy in the past when and the lines are still blurry. The core ideas of our system of government and every political ideal subsequent comes out of the western philosophical tradition. I can name a few big names - John Locke, Karl Marx, and John Rawls just to scratch the surface.
Existentialism applies to almost exclusively to people’s lives, especially since it pivots on questions of authenticity and personal freedom. Same with pragmatism, a philosophy that started in the US, and a lesser extent phenomenology – the study of consciousness.
Also a lot of philosophers in the late middle ages in Europe were monks, so theology has deep, inextricable ties to philosophy and ethical thinking from that era and beyond. Buddhism can square with a secular outlook on life too.
I think the logical and mathematic dimension of the field gets emphasized in the US because of religious fundamentalists trying to seize discussions on ethics and the like. Another thing to consider is that philosophers are really horrible at writing becuase they’re dealing with novel ideas a lot of the time so it can seem impenetrable and abstract even if it’s relevant to how people view the world and themselves.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/ - Just as a quick topical thing - This guy influenced the neoconservative political movement. Especially the “noble lies” idea he discusses. There is a whole ongoing discussion on how people ought to live and be governed between people that carry a lot of intellectual authority due to their credentials alone.
“I think the logical and mathematic dimension of the field gets emphasized in the US because of religious fundamentalists trying to seize discussions on ethics and the like.”
Lol. We live in different countries obviously. They must be testing my area.
Hawking recently wrote “philosophy is dead”, but jesus I think most of us were onto that for the last one hundred years or so. You cannot even begin to prove that most of the ‘questions’ aren’t word games, the battle about free-will is still ongoing (and its obviously just wiggling about in illogical bullshit), etc. Basically all of the cool stuff is still vaporous and on the shoulders of science. I guess people like D. Dennett are looking into some real things, but generally i think that guy is trying to find reasons for ethics were there are none.
I’m not saying it has zero merit to a human, as its always great to take in and think about systems but I don’t see it offering much else.
Edited to say: Obviously I have it all figured out.
Stephen Hawking? He’s a physicist. There are a lot of popular science writers that have tried to frame philosophical debates around scientific discoveries in similar ways. Sam Harris and Dawkins have written some pretty bad, irresponsible books on philosophical topics so I just tune it out. Is there anything he’s written on philosophy?
I think the sheer amount of what gets produced in any academic field these days is what’s truly daunting at least for me. No one is left to filter the ideas and make them accessible to the outside world – which cuts both ways. I’m sure we get a much richer picture of the thoughts people have about the world than we do at any other time in human history. Yet at the same time sorting out what parts of the discussion are important, which are tangential or just bs is a monumental task. I’d imagine it’s a task that isn’t something people can feasibly do and still get paid to write about what interests them.
Correct me if I’m wrong here – philosophers have sorted out that there are some things we may never have certainty about and that’s cause for abandoning the field. In my view, that’s the worst possible way to go about a discussion as diverse as philosophy, but maybe I’m a product of the environment you’re describing. We aren’t escaping symbolic communication’s tail-chasing, nor are we going to always be sure of empiricism or just how free our physical minds are so it’s a dead end.
I just don’t see how any one thinker or tradition could expect to resolve these problems definitively or why that would be cause to jettison the entire field.
“philosophers have sorted out there are some things we may never have certainty about” - i would say logicans/mathematicians (godel/turing even) did this. I also think that its important to note that philosophy means something different depending on what historical perspective you’re using, at one point a good deal of our philosophers were also mathematicians and the like.
"We aren’t escaping symbolic communication’s tail-chasing, nor are we going to always be sure of empiricism or just how free our physical minds are? "
I wanted to answer that, but couldn’t.
I’m sorry I’ll go back and edit it for you so you can make more snarky comments.
Right, so philosophy has a strong link to mathematics back to the pre-Socratics. The OP was asking how the field could be personally significant.
My questions for you are:
Why is it so important to stake the whole project on whether specific philosophical questions are answerable or coherent?
If we’re trapped inside mere words/symbols discussing philosophy (we are with anything, for that matter) isn’t that more of a given than something to despair over?
Is it that the nature of language creates a barrier to expressing coherent philosophical statements of truth past a certain point?
Ouch. Sorry to come off snarky, that just wasnt a question.
Why is it so important to stake the whole project on whether specific philosophical questions are answerable or coherent? I guess its because if everything in regards to philosophy is going to be subjective then why not just say that and be done with it? There is lots of different types of ‘philosophy’ though, using it as a tool to study history, pedagogy, or something seems like it might be worthwhile. But its not a tool for describing reality or human nature.
If we’re trapped inside mere words/symbols discussing philosophy (we are with anything, for that matter) isn’t that more of a given than something to despair over?
I didnt mean to imply any despair.
Is it that the nature of language creates a barrier to expressing truthful, coherent philosophical arguments past a certain point?
Spoken language is very abstract. Just sounds corresponding to a concept, so yeah its hard enough getting anything real across. I don’t understand what you mean by “philosophical arguments”, philosophical arguments in response to what?
I meant despair as it relates to the view that people might just be better off throwing in the towel when it comes to the whole field. Considering people have devoted entire lifetimes to philosophy it isn’t a stretch to characterize giving up as ‘despair’.
Personally, I don’t see a reason to give up since the realization that there is ‘no escaping text’ – as that slippery Derrida guy puts it – has been obvious in one form or another since people started thinking critically about how to put ideas into words. I think of it in terms of Plato’s cave allegory - we’re at a stage where we feel compelled to assume the cave is all that’s there. The thought of that upsets me because it’s based around unrealistic demands for what philosophy or really any human endeavor can actually accomplish since we’re stuck with symbolic communication.
Pragmatically speaking, I cannot take this defeatism seriously in a world where there’s no shortage of people in other fields (social sciences/evo psych/certain biologists especially) who may need to overstate the importance of their discoveries for prestige and grant money. It’s competitive. The gatekeepers of money and prestige really only seek information about subjects that fit an existing worldview or benefit human society in ways they find significant.
What I see occurring, though, is that part of the scientific community couches their data and conclusions in a way that necessarily makes them subject to the same cultural and linguistic pitfalls philosophers must deal with. Popper and Kuhn described part of this dynamic although not in the same way, iirc. Social scientists are especially bad at it when they rely on ethnographic studies, interpretations of human behavior drawn from observations that constantly struggle to be free of implicit normative judgement, and taking these norms further into faulty, bizarre correlates in evolutionary biology. That’s just my opinion from the outside looking in.
In my view, philosophy is an iterative process of communicating ideas (yes even about reality or human nature, which are problematic terms in themselves), albeit historically contingent ones. The questions thinkers wrestle with in philosophy are often a function of this process also – hence why I asked about it the last post. Ideas that aren’t actionable or don’t have direct consequences with how people live don’t resonate with most human beings and really shouldn’t define philosophy – this is what I imagine Wittgenstein was trying to do away with at the beginning of his career. I’ve only read excerpts from the Tractatus so I may be off-base. Any idea immediately becomes subject to synthesis, revision and re-interpretation once a person communicates it. It’s similar to what happens in literature to some extent. The situation philosophy is in bears this out: no one philosopher or school of thought has been able to even define criteria absolute truth or the content of it, so why make those demands?
You really need to stop nitpicking what I say, by the way. This is an informal discussion. If you need clarification then please ask for it directly. I have a hard time believing that what I’m getting at is actually that confusing to you. I can keep revising previous posts to help sort this out, but it just sounds like you want to troll my sloppy terminology more than anything else. I’m a weekender when it comes to this, not a professional.
Don’t consider it defeat, consider it an evolution. I still don’t understand what information you’re trying to get from it. So I suppose my question is: What do you see as the purpose of philosophy?
“The situation philosophy is in bears this out: no one philosopher or school of thought has been able to even define criteria absolute truth or the content of it, so why make those demands?” - What i gather from this is you would like a philosophy that basically covers day to day things, and ethics (something that resonates with people?), and much like you state, these types of things are indeed going to be subjective (they have no real truth/corresponding proof). And since its subjective, just pick the one with the biggest church.
The problem with subjectivity, popularly understood, is that it also collapses in on itself. If contradictory statements are equally true or false in a strict sense, then we’re stuck with yet another contradiction. Perspectivism is a bit of an obscure term, but it more accurately describes the situation imo – principles, ideas, lower case-t truths, etc. are a product of the perspective from which they originate. Subjectivity, as a specific term, does imply problematic subject-object relationship even when it’s used carefully in a way that’s similar to what I mean by perspectivism.
The personal nature of philosophy doesn’t make it pointless to communicate the ideas, nor does a church really lay claim to a monopoly on that process. It’s iterative, it’s often pragmatic and has plenty to do with the human dimension as much as something objective or absolute (often this is merely a tangential concern). It also affects the realm of human affairs to an such extent that makes it important and valuable. How should one live? How should one regard others? What is justice? How should people be governed?
Ultimately even if the answers to these questions are bullshit in different ways, they can and have resulted in the suffering and death of millions of people and dire consequences for our future. They are also a clear expression of an individual’s thought processes and do genuinely give people hope. I don’t know what about taking these questions into consideration isn’t compelling from simple moral standpoint, and science has no answers for humans on this score unless you decide drink Sam Harris’ particularly glib brand of utilitarian kool-aid.
It’s one thing to say ideas are mere products of personal bias reinforced by the perceived authority of the people uttering them (churches, old dudes with PhDs), yet being able to observe that dynamic via introspection and reasoning makes it hard to for me to swallow that it’s the whole picture as well.
I described various philosophies in my original post that go to great lengths to address these things, maybe not in a way that’s satisfactory, but they’re there for those who seek them out.
Well, this thread died.