One way to understand the legitimacy and value of non-analytic philosophy is first to realize that the unmeasurable complexity of the world defies complete exposition by rigorous analytical methods. We must then ask ourselves, are we to bury our heads in the sand and consider only what is provable and what yields to such methods? There is certainly a great deal of value in doing this, modern civilization is built upon brilliant scientists and technicians who have done just that. But to deny the very existence of things outside the scope of analytical methods is to deny fundamental truths about the world.
Ok, if we want to pick our heads up and look around, what are we to make of what we see? How are we to navigate in this strange environment where grotesque and beautiful things undulate, merge, unmerge and dance almost tauntingly all around us at a frenetic pace? The first thing is to give up any hope of tracing this process by unambiguous cause and effect, which in turn means giving up on proof or replicability. Crucially however, one need not give up on truth, for there is a world out there and things are really happening, and it is possible to describe the action you observe, in spite of it not being reducible to neat and tidy chains of reason.
The difficulty with this is that we cannot necessarily share our findings and observations with others and expect them to agree, or hope to build a stable consensus, because the sorts of truths we are concerned with are not trivially derived in the way that mathematical truth is, in its exposition, trivial. Thus in occupying ourselves with these things, we condemn ourselves in a way to perpetual conflict, both internal and external. But the important things to remember is, reality is still out there, it's still happening in a particular way at a particular time, whether we can agree on it or not.
I don't believe that analytic philosophy covers everything that the world has to offer.
But I have yet to find anything of value to me in "continental philosophy". I realize that the distinction is arbitrary and tendentious, and the "continental philosophers" would not use that term for themselves.
Still... if we're not going to place the values of analytic philosophers at the fore, then we have to use our own. The only tool I have at my disposal is "I don't like it". Other people find meaning in it, and that's fine for them, but we don't seem to have any meeting ground and no good way to find one.
Which is fine. Neither of us is wrong. I just have to avoid resenting the ways that (in my estimation) continental philosophers act as if they were possessed of arcane secrets and it's my fault that I fail to understand them.
I think it’s entirely reasonable to resent this behaviour. By portraying their musings as weighty and learned discourse rather than unfalsifiable speculation, they’re wasting our time.
Falsifiability isn't the be-all and end-all. It's an important way of looking at the world, but it's also limiting.
The limits are great at helping us identify absolute bullshit. And all of that bullshit is aggravating because it makes it seem impossible that there could be anything else. But it's still important to avoid the intellectual laziness of dismissing it automatically out of hand and potentially missing something else that matters to us.
>the unmeasurable complexity of the world defies complete exposition by rigorous analytical methods.
Do you mean that it would be impossible to explain the world in such a way even if we had an unlimited amount of time and ability, or just that we would never have access to what would even be theoretically necessary to rigorously explain the world?
The latter seems undeniable, the former I don't think we can claim to know for sure but I want to say the opposite is true.
>Crucially however, one need not give up on truth, for there is a world out there and things are really happening, and it is possible to describe the action you observe, in spite of it not being reducible to neat and tidy chains of reason.
It seems like you're saying that we have mathematical truths, and "tricky truths" that can't be derived but should still be sought out. This totally makes sense to me. However, it seems like you're trying to imply a kind of equivalence between these kinds of truths and de-emphasizing the importance of mathematical reasoning when it seems like instead there should be a preference for mathematical truths that don't as easily lead to the kinds of conflict or disagreements that you're describing.
I.e. it seems like beliefs about these "tricky truths" should be held less strongly than beliefs about mathematical truths, should be grounded in something like Bayesian reasoning that we can derive mathematical truths about, and we should be constantly searching for ways to tie our beliefs about these "tricky truths" together in ways that follow something like rigorous analytical methods.
I think you’re exactly right. In philosophy this Bayesian thinking is called “verisimilitude”, or to quote Stephen Colbert, “truthiness”.
Hume and Wittgenstein did a good job in their own ways of elucidating why judgements cannot stem only from facts. The “is ought problem” and “picture theory of language” are approachable places to google on the matter.
But we make judgements all day and it does seem like there are better judgements than others. We don’t have easy answers for what is right, wrong, beautiful, ugly, redeemable, or important. But these unscientific concerns are the most important aspects of anyone’s life, and philosophers can provide a lot of insight.
>One way to understand the legitimacy and value of non-analytic philosophy
I don’t think HN is even sold on the value and legitimacy of analytic philosophy. It’s best to get people on board with that first, before moving on to the weird stuff.
If the world is immeasurably complex, then we will only see the part of that we can measure, meaning our world is measurably complex. We don't have any ability to measure or otherwise interact with the immeasurable part, such as the Universe beyond the observable Universe.
I used to think similarly, but learning about the proven incompleteness of sufficiently rigorous analytic systems has moved me towards appreciating less rigorous ways of interfacing with reality.
Veritasium has a nice video on Godel’s incompleteness theorem. It’s quite ironic that it was mathematically provable that analytic systems can never be complete, and can’t be provably coherent.
Oh I studied this, I'm well aware of those theorems, and I don't think they are the death bell of logic some make them to be.
If you somehow find an unprovable theorem (quite rare), you can always try with a different set of axioms. Mathematics are not about proving absolute truths of the universe but rather of pushing reasoning over a set of axioms the furthest possible.
Also as a nitpick, analytic systems that don't contain arithmetic can be complete and proven coherent.
As for the real world, facts that can neither be proven true nor false (existence of an immaterial soul for example), I think should be left at that. It is useless speculating about things we can't ever know of. I leave that to religion/spirituality.
"It is useless speculating about things we can't ever know of."
And how do you know which things we can know of and which we cannot? Trusting your gut instinct on that isn't scientific. And why is speculating about immaterial things useless? I'm sure many great mathematicians heard some form of "what you're doing is useless and has no use or relation in the real world" especially in the realm of pure mathematics.
You bring up the soul which is a convenient example, but let's instead use a concept which YOU know exists for yourself which is consciousness. Can we ever know anything more about the mystery of consciousness or life or why any of this world and universe exists? Are those unknowable? Should we not talk about them? Should we only try to apply the lens of science here and for some reason not try to advance our understanding using philosophy even though it might not be as formal and unambiguous as math?
Yea, the previous posters take is just outright crazy to me....
Imagine reality as the problem space of all things that could exist within the constraints of physics. The problem with observational evidence that it is only providing a tiny window into what is possible, really only the most probable are going to be what you see for the most part. Philosophy gives a means of meta views of systems and simplified system views that allow us to find otherwise unreachable islands of what can exist in our reality.
Here is my reasoning: immaterial objects (such as the soul) are by definition outside of the material world, and thus unobservable. We can't ever (dis)prove the existence of an unobservable object.
As for the other questions you mentioned, I still haven't found any reason to believe their answers are unkowable.
If anyone disproves my first reasoning, I will have to consider the question of the soul as worth pursuing again.
Just like in mathematics, if you have sufficient proof that a theorem is unprovable, it is useless trying to prove it!
So no, I don't trust my gut feeling about wether or not to seek the answer to something.
Consider turbulent systems, or systems which are affected by random processes. Such things exist in the world. The sorts of things I'm talking about as being beyond cause and effect or our ability to consider analytically are not merely the "big questions" but are real physical processes!
Not death of logic, since logic is still consistent. Gödel didn't say math was wrong, just incomplete.
So philosophy might step into the space beyond where a current logical set of axioms can reach. To explore something un-provable and maybe find a new set of axioms that were not reachable through logic built on the previous axioms.
> I think that if someone is completely unable to justify an observed truth to others, then it might not be a truth at all.
What if the observed truth that someone is trying to communicate is paradoxical and hard to communicate in and of itself? What if the truth is ambiguous? What constitutes ambiguous or unambiguous?
At the end of the day ambiguity is a real concept, so is a paradox, therefore there will exist things that are ambiguous and paradoxical and pointing that out does have value.
There is no reason that ambiguities or paradoxes can't be expressed analytically and formally. Math and computer science are full of such things and they are celebrated.
Being hard to communicate is precisely why it's important to communicate rigorously and formally.
We have a ton of examples of great mathematicians who also happened to be great philosophers and vice-versa. Some philosophers also tried to incorporate mathematical symbols and such into their work. We value both their philosophical works and mathematical works. They were smart people and chose different mediums to express different concepts.
How can you try to explore the ego, consciousness, unconsciousness, dreams, suffering, life's purpose, subjective beauty, symbolism, truth, religion, god, ethics and whatever else that is not easily formalized? We might very well arrive at a formal and unambiguous description of these sometime in the far future, so are we not supposed to at least try to talk about these concepts now? You use different tools for different concepts, and science and philosophy is just 2 of those tools. At the end of the day philosophy undeniably changed the world, so there is at least some value to it. Philosophy is not anti-logic, it is very much for logic.
It is a practical question. Sometimes we need to have or choose a hard answer to make a decision. It inevitably isn't going to be solved formally.
Any more than what is the dividing line between a chair and not-chair. Many patterns we encounter have fuzzy non-formal edges.
Perfect consensus is impossible, but any consensus is valuable. So we invent and argue about the "best" way to "understand" these things.
These arguments are partly objective, partly subjective, partly emergent, and partly just farmed out to favorite "authorities" or social pressure. But important and unavoidable.
--
At the highest level, even how we percieve reality is important. It impacts our values, our motivations, our ethics, how we cope with events, etc. Trickling down to every day choices.
"What is real?" ends up being an important question, no matter how lacking in formal rigor the answers we each have are.
I'm not a professional philosopher but I did study the subject at one time.
The main point about philisophy isn't its concepts or theories as these can and do change over time and through circumstance. For instance the question about what is consciousness has changed as we've become more knowledgeable about neurology and even of quantum mechanics.
What philosophy does is to teach one to think and reason in ways that one otherwise would not have done. It enlarges one's worldview which makes it easier for one to grasp new ideas and concepts, and to be open to fields of knowledge that one may have otherwise bypassed.
Add to that reading the works of great philosophers is a mind-opening experience. Many of these works have stood the test of time because the ideas they contain have widened the minds of those who've studied them.
A few centuries ago, philosophy was a knowledge. Its concepts and theories were central in most educations. Spinoza proved the existance of God. Charles Fourier defined new societies. Now that sciences and technology rule the knowledge field, philosophy's enthusiasts just claim that philosophy helps learning to think and widens one's spirit. These claims are dubious and unprecise.
> What philosophy does is to teach one to think and reason in ways that one otherwise would not have done. It enlarges one's worldview which makes it easier for one to grasp new ideas and concepts, and to be open to fields of knowledge that one may have otherwise bypassed.
If that were true, I think philosophy would be a mandatory study to anyone interested in advanced scientific theories, because it's hard to grasp concepts about higher dimensions, or the relativity of space-time, etc. Recent history shows that the modern flow is in the other direction: Einstein's theories influenced philosophers, not the other way around.
I strongly doubt that people who read philosophy are significantly more receptive to foreign concepts and cultures. Many factors seem more important. It's like saying a religious belief makes people more open to others, while experiments tend to show the opposite is true.
Even so, most arts can claim the same: "grasp new ideas" and "open to fields of knowledge". In my case, I could say that for literature. Like any art, the form is important: almost nobody studies Gauss' scientific concepts through original texts, while almost nobody reads a modern wording of classical novels or philosophy works. Like literature, philosophy is a peculiar form of artistic culture.
> A few centuries ago, philosophy was a knowledge.
It's still the love of knowledge to this day.
> Now that sciences and technology rule the knowledge field, philosophy's enthusiasts just claim that philosophy helps learning to think and widens one's spirit.
Science ( aka natural philosophy ), is just a small part of what we call knowledge.
> If that were true, I think philosophy would be a mandatory study to anyone interested in advanced scientific theories,
Science is a part of philosophy. When you get a PhD in physics for example, you get a doctorate in philosophy. It's just philosophy confined to the study of the natural world guided by empiricism. Certainly most scientists have studied some philosophy.
> Even so, most arts can claim the same: "grasp new ideas" and "open to fields of knowledge". In my case, I could say that for literature.
We can say philosophy is an art form centered around reason. Using the broader definition of art, everything is an art.
I'd say this exchange is excellent evidence of how ideological "science" (as it is, in all its manifestations in human minds) is, and the poor faith[1] based thinking style it teaches. The internet is overflowing with this sort of content, but it is impossible to see for most (both believers and non-believers), similar to how the delusions of religious people are invisible to those who share the same beliefs and cognitive methodologies, axioms, etc.
It is funny that this is the way it is, especially considering it is 2024.
[1] Belief without adequate proof, evidence, heuristics perceived as logic, belief perceived as knowledge, etc.
> Einstein's theories influenced philosophers, not the other way around.
Untrue:
"At thirteen, when his range of enthusiasms had broadened to include music and philosophy, Einstein was introduced to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant became his favorite philosopher"
"In 1902, Einstein and some friends whom he had met in Bern formed a group that held regular meetings to discuss science and philosophy." "The thinkers whose works they reflected upon included Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach and David Hume, all of whom significantly influenced Einstein's own subsequent ideas and beliefs."
Henri Poincaré and Ernst Mach where physicists that worked in the same domains as Einstein. Mixing in the philosopher Hume make your citation very unprecise. Yet, even is debating about Hume had "significantly influenced Einstein's own subsequent ideas and beliefs", that does not mean it had an influence on his relativity theory.
Though I recon that Einstein philosophical and religious beliefs did influence his theory. IIRC, it lead him to alter his model of the universe so that it would be stable. After much criticism, he dropped the magic constant he had created for this.
How does this show the philosophers influenced Einstein? I studied a little philosophy in university, but if I were to make advances in any field ~e~x~c~e~p~t~ including philosophy I doubt I would credit my philosophy classes.
YES! And if it enlarges one's worldview, it's because Philosophy stands as the root, the superset if you will, of all other areas of knowledge, art, science, etc. For example, if Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem explores the boundaries of what Mathematics can know and we want to seriously understand what this means, then we are entering Philosophy.
Exactly, Philosophy does stand at the root. I often wonder why some—perhaps all too many—scientists (especially physicists) dismiss Philosophy as being irrelevant and pooh-pooh its ideas. For me, Philosophy and Science are and have always been complementary, after all Science was once called Natural Philosophy. I say that as someone whose main profession is electronics (it pays the bills).
Re Gödel: I'd like to have been in the same room as Russell and Whitehead when they were reading Gödel's Incompleteness papers of 1930/'31 for the first time. In the light of Principia Mathematica one wonders what they must have thought. There are some references† but it's a pity they aren't more enlightening.
Perhaps the answer is here in the words of the man himself (it's very hard not to think so): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihaB8AFOhZo. For those who doubt the value of Philosophy then these few words of inspirational wisdom ought to put their minds at rest.
As a Physicist, let me explain my own viewpoint, not necessarily shared by other physicists.
Think of musicians. Most of the great musicians across never studied music theory, and never studied philosophy relevant to music in some way. But every good musician practices philosophy. They ask, what is good music, what does it mean to produce good music? What is relationship of my audience with my music? Why does this kind of music produce these kinds of emotions? And they discuss this with other musicians quite a lot.
They are engaging with philosophy as it concerns their profession. Physicists/scientists also do this. Some more than others. What do the results of this experiment truly mean? Can we trust the results? What criteria should we use to judge a new theory? These discussions happen all the time. Physicists are obviously not opposed to any of this because it is part of their profession.
What philosophers mean, when they say, why do Physicists not read the stuff we want you to read. And invariably that stuff is a hundred or five hundred years old. Physicists love and revere Einstein, so they take his words and rewrite it and improve it a thousand times, so that a century later we have a far far far more sophisticated philosophical understanding of general relativity and, say, entanglement, than he ever did. This is what Physicists are interested in. Improving the quality of the body of our knowledge and beliefs.
If philosophers want Physicists to read philosophy, at minimum, they will have to rewrite and improve the stuff of dusty old men, and make strong connections with modern physics research. And ask people to read this new stuff.
> I often wonder why some—perhaps all too many—scientists (especially physicists) dismiss Philosophy as being irrelevant and pooh-pooh its ideas.
Should this be surprising? What does one learn in Physics that could give one the ideas and methods to identify and escape the Naive Realism that default consciousness/reality is composed of? Is this not a bit like being surprised that philosophers can't do physics?
That's one aspect. Another aspect is cognitive training: if you are a member of a community, you are subject to indoctrination of the beliefs of the ideology, and the beliefs of the ideology cannot be understood to be false/flawed without the right knowledge and methods.
What we should wonder about imho is why things are like this, because this problem is fundamental, it is always and everywhere.
I read Plato's Gorgias, I believed Callicles over the Conventionalists.
I got my mind opened. Philosophy is words by old people in control, Science is the reality of things. Thousands of years later Niztsche says something similar. 200 years later, we are back to teaching Stoicism.
So what is going to happen, people who read philosophy learn a religion of virtue, find out another set of truths, and go through an existential crisis that causes anti-social behavior?
"Philosophy is words by old people in control, Science is the reality of things."
Why do you say 'old people'? I don't see that as being prerequisite, nor from history is there indication that philosophers have been in control. Science is the study of reality but why should that conflict with philosophical ideas? Perhaps you should read my reply to mykowebhn.
Perhaps Gorgias is a bad example, perhaps Plato was making a point about rhetoric and problems with sophistry generally. In my opinion a much better example of the philosophical tradition is Book One of Republic, here Plato sets out a clear distinction between the shallowness of sophistry and solid philosophical reasoning. The dialogue between the sophist Thrasymachus and philosopher Socrates where Socrates systematically demolishes Thrasymachus's proposition that justice is every man for himself by reasoned argument is one of the most wonderful documents to be handed down from ancient times.
You didn't read Gorgias, you read a wikipedia/summary.
I don't want to hear that "REPUBLIC is better". It isnt. "The Republic" was easier to get people's hands on. The logic isnt sound, the character in-favor of might based justice was a comedic relief. Callicles has genuine arguments in favor of reality.
Anyway, that was funny how you didn't read Gorgias, but you read a summary, and told me that I was wrong with a point that is a mere blip in the dialog.
"You didn't read Gorgias, you read a wikipedia/summary."
Sorry, it was part of our work dealing with logic, argument, and rhetoric in the Greek tradition in the late 1970s well before Wiki and the Web even existed. (I wish I'd had the Web back then, it would have made study much easier).
Unfortunately, it's this kind of negative discussion that those who criticize Philosophy latch onto to discredit the subject. Of course you are entitled to your opinion. Why are you so upset that someone could actually disagree with you?
Incidentally, why did you say that I said you were wrong when I never said any such thing? I could proceed to debate that you are deliberately taking the sophist's line to buy an argument but I've said enough already.
You read it 40 years ago? You didn't remember anything or have any takeaways, so you read the wikipedia article, was dismissive then got defensive.
Idk, it seems faux-intellectual when you read a wikipedia page and copypaste a minor point of contention irrelevant to the topic and declare it 'no big deal'.
The fact that you mention sophists, mean you are way out of your element.
OH! You read some plato as a college kid! I'm talking to someone who is pretending they read plato under their own free will. Heck, you never even read Gorgias!
1. With respect, you haven't answered my questions.
2. I have a personal library of over two hundred physical books on philosophy including most of my original textbooks. I'm unsure of the number of ebooks but it would much fewer than that.
3. Unfortunately, my Greek is limited to only a few words so my copies of Gorgias, Phaedrus and others are in English—translation Jowett. You seem so knowledgeable about the subject presumably you read your copy untranslated.
4. Tell me about yourself. Presumably you lecture at some university in philosophy.
Think you are misinterpreting Nietzsche, and others, some. He was often critical of the 'academic' philosophers, that they are just playing with words and wondering what is for lunch. When 'true philosophers' are grappling with life and creating something new.
But that is true in every branch of science. How many 'academic' scientist are breaking new ground, or are they just churning out safe low-risk proposals.
Everyone in every generation can't be a Socrates or a Nietzsche, but that there are a lot of people that call themselves scientist or philosophers that maybe don't deserve the title, doesn't mean the entire field should be cast away.
> Nietzsche advocated what we would today call Social Darwinism
Not really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy addressed the question of artificial selection, yet Nietzsche's principles did not concur with Darwinian theories of natural selection. Nietzsche's point of view on sickness and health, in particular, opposed him to the concept of biological adaptation as forged by Spencer's "fitness". Nietzsche criticized Haeckel, Spencer, and Darwin, sometimes under the same banner by maintaining that in specific cases, sickness was necessary and even helpful.
In fact, Nietzsche experienced a number of health problems himself.
Social Darwinism is not an incredibly useful term (and it's interesting the extent to which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy buries it: I was going to try and find you a better reference and to some extent failed https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html), not to mention it's not a good concept, but that Wikipedia page is really not a good exploration of the topic. Nevertheless, note that Nietzsche is listed in the "proponents" section.
Social Darwinism, when used as a concept by people in practice, has never been about a rigorous application of Darwin's theory.
A lot of the sciences (as all fields of study at the university) is more art than science (in the English sense). Locking in philosophy to be more like the sciences, narrows down the enquiry. Take the social sciences, where philosophy is crucial to provide epistemology, how do we know, that is crucial to look at when conducting a study. Or ontology, what is there really, what are social relations, what is culture. Philosophy's metaphysics grounds the sciences, the project of Kant who came from the sciences, and was shocked by rationalism and empiricism, which shake the very foundations, the former basically saying we cannot trust our senses and have to derive everything from thought alone, and empiricism, saying thought is messy, everything has to based on sense-data. Kant then provides the synthesis of both concepts, and in the culture wars we can still see its reminiscences. We never have cold facts, all of what we know is based on apriori knowledge, things we take for granted, learned, are influenced by society. So philosophy is crucial as a base layer. Trying to abolish this layer only impoverishes the sciences.
Deleuze defined philosophy as something like “the creation of concepts.” I’ve always found that to be the best way to think of the field. It’s also a refreshingly creative one, because “philosophy” courses tend to really be “history of philosophy” courses that cover already-existing concepts.
It can be the studying of past ideas that have deeply influenced the cultural, societal, political and scientific norms. Something as fundamental as Cartesian epistemology characterises much of the Enlightenment and its values. It's a fundamental belief about the nature of human knowledge that has far-reaching effects. German post-Kantian idealism is the breeding ground for grand-narrative political ideologies and nationalism. Wittgenstein's analytical approach to language and his rejection of most philosophy as a language play is the basis for the post-modern worldview.
Although I find the notion of philosophy being like "the creation of concepts" rather limiting (philosophy can be this, but much more), if we stick with this notion, I still think it's not entirely correct.
If philosophy were to create concepts, then the question immediately arises of how one would determine whether these concepts were created correctly, or truthfully. The understanding here is that concepts are universal, and not contingent on anything, including on how they were "created". Instead, I think Deleuze should have defined philosophy as something like "the discovery of concepts, a discovery that, once accomplished, reveals to us something we had already known."
Full disclosure: I'm defining concept not in the regular, everyday way, but more in line with Hegelian, Idealist way--der Begriff.
I don’t think I’d call Deleuze “wrong” based on my one line description, if you haven’t read him yourself.
The rest of your comment seems predicated on a Platonic idea of concepts; which is definitely not in line with how Deleuze thinks about things. His ideas are very much not in line with the typical way of thinking about concepts as universal things we discover.
Edit: I should note here that I’m not an expert on Deleuze or Platonism, but I would probably say that Deleuze’s skepticism makes more intuitive sense to me.
At the university I work at, Université Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis, where Gilles Deleuze was a faculty and one of the founder of the philosophy department (along with Michel Foucault, François Chatelet, François Lyotard, and René Scherer), the philosophy department is a part of the "UFR Arts" (UFR, unité de formation et de recherche, are components of the university in which the departments exists) along with the departments of cinema, musicology, theater, photography, dance, images technology, and plastic arts.
I don't like categorizing Philosophy as an art form. People don't read philosophy like they would poetry. They want to learn something about the world, something factual, preferably.
If philosophy can't "prove or disprove facts", then what's its use ? To be pleasant to read ? To provide endless empty rhetorical discourse on wether we have a soul or whatever other useless question ?
> People don't read philosophy like they would poetry. They want to learn something about the world, something factual, preferably.
People often expect much from the philosophy. They hope for personal enhancement or a better understanding of the world.
But no facts. I've read quite a few philosophical texts, from Platon to Castoriadis, and I think there never was anything factual in them. It's almost orthogonal to what we call philosophy.
> If philosophy can't "prove or disprove facts",
A philosophical proof is not a scientific proof. You can't prove that an assertion by Kant is wrong, or that Heidegger made a mistake in a particular concept. There is no progress through confirmation, refutation or reproductibility.
> then what's its use ?
The notion of use is ill-defined. What's the use of painting? or novels? Of course, many answers are possible and there is no single truth. So that's in the field of philosophy.
> To be pleasant to read ?
Even if a text is not factual, it can bring new thoughts. Just like meeting someone can be just shallow chatting, or bring strong emotions, or mind-twisting revelation.
> To provide endless empty rhetorical discourse on wether we have a soul or whatever other useless question ?
A relative of mine is a profesional philosopher, and I remember the first of the texts he authored: it was a "philosophical proof" that racism was wrong because it was inconsistant. I do think the text is a "rhetorical discourse", but the question is not useless. Debating such themes can be quite useful, in a certain way. If the debate is formal, that's philosophy.
There's certainly philosophy that where poetry and philosophy overlaps. Neitzsche is perhaps the strongest example of this approach. There's also philosophy that reads like program code, or like a stage play.
> If philosophy can't "prove or disprove facts", then what's its use ? To be pleasant to read ? To provide endless empty rhetorical discourse on wether we have a soul or whatever other useless question?
Philosophy is perhaps best characterized as a process for elliminating false certainty, to raise difficult questions.
Philsophy would identify your implicit assumptions that things need a purpose to exist, and ask why that is, and what is the nature of having a purpose, and interrogate you about the purpose of having a purpose.
This seems like a set of frivolous questions, but it's very to walk around with a bunch of assumptions you were told at some point and never really questioning them. Above all, philosophy is as toolset for identifing implicit ideas and dragging them out in the light for closer scrutiny.
I agree. I'm not sure if it's a fair representation of Margaret Maconald's view or not, but it's definitely inadequate. Philosophy has always been considered a "science" in the old sense of a discipline that allows you to actually know something. If it doesn't do that, then you might as well just turn to poetry and literature, because philosophy won't offer anything new.
However I think it is worth recognizing that what the modern scientific form of verification is pretty new (falsifiability requirements, data sets, hypothesis, experiments, and so on), and doesn't have a monopoly. It's just so commonly accepted nowadays that it feels that way. But there are other methods of verification that work well in philosophy: consistency, finding agreement from other reasonable people, clarity, etc.
I agree that Philosophy shouldn't just be labelled as an art form, although I think it's not too distinct from calling "Math" an art form. Like partly, but depends on what you're doing with it.
I disagree that Philosophy should be some sort of objective tool to determine facts, typically I think of it as a way to explore new ideas, discuss insights into things which ~might~ have tangible outcomes. It's been a few years since i've heard it, but people were jumping to the theory of forms to interpret some of the modern ml stuff thats going around
> I disagree that Philosophy should be some sort of objective tool to determine facts
In order to rely on words like “objective” and “facts”, you need the philosophical underpinnings that explore the assumptions, meanings, and implications of those words and what they refer to.
Philosophy isn’t a method for directly determining facts, but trying to determine what is factual is intrinsically linked to a philosophical foundation of ideas.
I agree and admit I probably didn't phrase that too well
>Philosophy isn’t a method for directly determining facts, but trying to determine what is factual is intrinsically linked to a philosophical foundation of ideas.
Absolutely, although I would add that it seems to me that the majority of people don't distinguish the axioms that underpin our current understanding of the universe (e.g facts and objective "things") as being strictly an upstream philosophical decision leading to our downstream science from just science itself.
I love art and philosophy and I think categorizing philosophy an art is simply wrong. So wrong I don't think this is even worth the time to think about.
How can it be dead if "All that is left is for philosophers to propose thought experiments that make you think" is what it was always doing. That is philosophy, so if that is all there is left, then it continues on doing what it does.
And of course somewhere along the line, maybe "make you think", causes someone to think of something new and it turns into a new science. And of course, once it spawns a new science, it will no longer be called 'philosophy'.
I'd actually never heard of Margaret MacDonald before, but this approach sounds similar to the more contemporary Richard Rorty, for example in "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" (which is more artistic and less academic than Rorty's earlier book "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature").
The most value I’ve gotten from philosophy is the discovery of “anti-philosophy”. Or rather analytically countering thoughts and ideas that are not fruitful. Maybe Quietism?
The mind constantly makes philosophy. Kind of. Or mine does. Why this, why that. What if this and that. Sometimes it is useful to just let the thoughts be. Sometimes to more analytically counter it: this is not worth neither worrying about nor philosophizing about because A, B, C.
See for example William James and his counter-arguments to philosophers (according to him) who worries about “Angels balancing on a needle’s pin” (Pragmatism).
I’ve also incorporated William James thoughts on religion to reconcile my atheism with my spiritual/religious beliefs (The Will to Believe). He says something like: if you believe, what are the upsides, what are the downsides? You might not be able to prove it scientifically, but is that necessary? How I’ve applied it: if I believe in religion X and I find out before I die that it was not true, have I wasted my time? (This is more about praxis than theory.) This is counter to a lot of theists and atheists who mix religion too much with identity. I.e. I am rational therefore I ought to not believe. To be concrete: if I practiced Buddhist meditation for five years and found out that Buddhism is not true,[1] will it have been for nothing? Probably not because the benefits of meditation are well-documented at this point.
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The most fascinating philosophy is the Tibetan Buddhist philosophy that rigorously analyzes things in order to ultimately arrive at conclusion that sort of says that most of metaphysics are ineffable to the analytic mind. Because you might need the process of analysis in order to arrive at that non-answer. Maybe that was something that Wittgenstein did in his first book?
He says something like: if you believe, what are the upsides, what are the downsides? You might not be able to prove it scientifically, but is that necessary?
What'll really bake your noodle is what happens when a thing only comes into existence if you believe in it? I think that is a super interesting question, and not one that seems to have been addressed much in the context of religion. The closest idea I've come across is hyperstition, from the CCRU group.
> What'll really bake your noodle is what happens when a thing only comes into existence if you believe in it?
At least as interesting imho: belief can cause nonexistence to come into existence also: "There is no reason to believe", "There is no evidence", etc.
Even stranger: education very often amplifies and reinforces the illusion.
Consciousness and culture are are arguably the two most powerful forces in existence (we've picked most of the powerful low hanging fruit in science), too bad we don't study them with any sort of "real" seriousness. I wonder if it is purely accidental.
The common English idiom/concept of "art vs. science" presents an appealing duality at a fundamental level.
The modern world is a stark departure from the world of the past. This we know.
Fields of art and study naturally fall into a binary categorisation. This we know.
It is the division of philosophy into two distinct forms -- one that seeks explanations of reality through reason and the other that attempts to use reason to explain reality -- that allowed this modern world to exist. This we know.
An analytical thinker uses poetic thinking (and poetry) as an argument. Dude was mad or mad satire.
By "art" some readers think "not methodical" or esoteric/unsharable because the language is denormalized.
I think what's meant is closer to Nietzsche saying (post-Kant) that philosophy is justified aesthetically, i.e., by its ability to actually change minds.
A mathematician or logician wants to establish, hold, and apply principles -- no surprise that it's engendered by conservative wealthy people. MacDonald listening to Wittgenstein and pulling herself out of sickness and poverty was more interested in the transformation possible - the aesthetic effect - and its impact on what might be called one's moral sense.
Plato never severed the social context or personal agency from the discourse. Readers (gleaners?) who pluck words from his dialogs as "ideas" without appreciating the dramatic moment generate all sorts of straw-man misconceptions. Plato presented a host of ways people failed to change their minds, through learning or critique (elenchus), giving us (at least) a catalog of fault models that still apply, and which the reader is supposed to learn and avoid.
Math and CS today change minds in a sense (mostly because that's where the money is), but nothing actually or historically prevents those people from building bombs, surveilling populations, manipulating markets intended to discipline power, and generally disclaiming responsibility for their work product.
It's similar to the opportunism driving social justice warriors to have anti-social effects. Structuralism provided methods for disclosing cultural systems, post-structuralism reduced that to critique undercutting the systems (of oppression). Impact is its own justification.
In MacDonald's terms, math and critical theory enlarge certain aspects of existence (and diminish others). Nietzsche and Plato pose the question of responsibility for that effect: what happens after (the man-made illusion of) God is killed? Was Socrates as teacher responsible for his students becoming democratic tyrants? (If you could influence the thinking of generations, wouldn't that be even better than the immortality of fame? But how can you avoid unleashing generations of sophistry?)
I think it minimizes MacDonald to say she was only concerned with acknowledging the value of artistic appreciation, as if philosophy were arm-candy for the real men of science. At that moment, nothing bothered scientists and logicians more than knowing their domain is incomplete, so that's the main thing she established. But the real question that posed is what's considered moral philosophy: what thinking leads to good people?
I could not read past the first 50 words of schoolman precepts.
Philosophy perfects human nature by arriving at harmonious agreement between men on what is the good life.
It is certainly:
Healthy
Beautiful
Fortunate
It focuses on the agreement of achieving these ends for all through the faculty of reasoning ergo obedience to the truth ergo lawfulness in the cosmos.
No, philosophy is fishing, in one's subconscious sea. For most people anyway.
Prove me wrong!
Of course, creating software is a science, er, I mean engineering. Oh hell, a craft? Guess and test?
In both cases there is a core of mathematical thinking and science-like exploration, inspiring the higher minded names for the subjects. All wrapped in a massive amount of less formal stuff and activity whose nature is not really emphasized or formally named.
Ok, if we want to pick our heads up and look around, what are we to make of what we see? How are we to navigate in this strange environment where grotesque and beautiful things undulate, merge, unmerge and dance almost tauntingly all around us at a frenetic pace? The first thing is to give up any hope of tracing this process by unambiguous cause and effect, which in turn means giving up on proof or replicability. Crucially however, one need not give up on truth, for there is a world out there and things are really happening, and it is possible to describe the action you observe, in spite of it not being reducible to neat and tidy chains of reason.
The difficulty with this is that we cannot necessarily share our findings and observations with others and expect them to agree, or hope to build a stable consensus, because the sorts of truths we are concerned with are not trivially derived in the way that mathematical truth is, in its exposition, trivial. Thus in occupying ourselves with these things, we condemn ourselves in a way to perpetual conflict, both internal and external. But the important things to remember is, reality is still out there, it's still happening in a particular way at a particular time, whether we can agree on it or not.
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