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3rd December 2012, 12:16 PM | #481 |
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3rd December 2012, 12:18 PM | #482 |
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I must say that I find the condescension,insulting attitude and arrogance of some of the philosophy fans here quite breathtaking.
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3rd December 2012, 12:36 PM | #483 |
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3rd December 2012, 12:36 PM | #484 |
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Then teach us, oh great master!
Instead of asking "how should we treat each other?", what question should we ask? Instead of asking "how do we want the world to be in the future?", what question should we ask? By what criteria are your questions better? (Ooh, that's a tricky one, it's almost like in order to answer it you have to do philosophy...)
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Teach me, oh great master. I just can't see how you do it without some prior, philosophical value judgment.
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Philosophers would call this the distinction between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition, and interestingly enough it's this kind of subtle reasoning about causation that non-philosophers tend to bollocks up. |
3rd December 2012, 12:42 PM | #485 |
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3rd December 2012, 12:42 PM | #486 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:16 PM | #487 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:25 PM | #488 |
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I suppose you would prefer not to be disagreed with, dafydd, but that's not how this works. You advance a clearly flawed proposition and people point out your Emperor's quite visible butt crack. I'm certain that it's embarrassing to see your ideas treated thus, especially in light of the fact that you thought you were showing Philosophy's nakedness.
It seems that your greatest complaint about philosophy is that you don't understand it. I don't understand Chinese, but I'm not so arrogant as to assume those who speak it are simply making random and unintelligible noises. Philosophy is often difficult to understand, but so are higher math, physics, biology, chemistry, and a whole host of other human endeavors. I have hated them all because they require study, but I didn't dismiss them as nonsense, I made an effort to learn something about them and I was rewarded for having done so. Make no mistake, I still have questions about philosophy's usefulness. I've seen interesting arguments on this thread from other posters, but all I see from you is arrogant, insulting, condescending, and ultimately uninformed dismissals of the entire field. If you think I or anyone else is being condescending, then try advancing an argument that you can actually defend. |
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3rd December 2012, 01:27 PM | #489 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:32 PM | #490 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:34 PM | #491 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:35 PM | #492 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:36 PM | #493 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:38 PM | #494 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:38 PM | #495 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:44 PM | #496 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:44 PM | #497 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:45 PM | #498 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:46 PM | #499 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:49 PM | #500 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:50 PM | #501 |
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3rd December 2012, 01:53 PM | #502 |
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Do you know why it works? Or better still, would you be able to tell if it didn't, and to what degree that it didn't?
Be careful not to use any logic in your answer, and be certain that you make no epistemological claims either. That would be basing your argument on pseudoscientific "philosophy". |
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3rd December 2012, 01:56 PM | #503 |
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3rd December 2012, 02:06 PM | #504 |
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I'm sure you know exactly what I meant, but here goes:
Musing (which is what philosophy is) doesn't really give us any information about objective reality. It's better than superstition or fantasy, but it's far from the better alternative. It's a fun thing to do, but it's ultimately useless.
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3rd December 2012, 02:09 PM | #505 |
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3rd December 2012, 02:09 PM | #506 |
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3rd December 2012, 02:11 PM | #507 |
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3rd December 2012, 02:28 PM | #508 |
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3rd December 2012, 02:29 PM | #509 |
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3rd December 2012, 02:34 PM | #510 |
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3rd December 2012, 02:34 PM | #511 |
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P1. The questions that human beings generally find most important are moral questions, (i.e. questions that concern themselves with 'right and wrong' and values) and questions of deeper meaning, (e.g. Is my life purposeful?, How do I lead a good life). Moral questions and questions of deeper meaning are often interlinked.
P2. Moral questions and questions of deeper meaning have no scientific meaning. Therefore science cannot frame or answer the questions that people generally find most important. The flip side to this is that we instead say that science is correct and moral questions and questions of deeper meaning are meaningless. In which case we are left with Logical Positivism or something similar, which is essentially self-refuting; a philosophy that asserts that there is no synthetic a-priori knowledge, which is in itself a synthetic a priori statement. So science can answer questions, just not the ones that are really important for many people. Philosophy provides answers to some of those important questions, but these are not scientific answers. Science is very worthwhile, but I'm not sure why anyone would consider it worthwhile unless they already had answers to some of those important questions that they were happy with, even if the answer was Logical Postivism, which is inescapably, philosophy. |
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3rd December 2012, 03:02 PM | #512 |
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You should probably go back and read the thread again. It was pretty early on when the anti-philosophy camp made the claim that all the useful (to science) aspects of philosophy, like formal logic or math, are not really the domain of philosophy but are science and math.
Logic and epistemology are fields of philosophical study. You'd like to pretend that they're not, and therefore philosophy is useless. I'll have to call BS on that. |
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3rd December 2012, 03:11 PM | #513 |
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Suppose philosophy never gave a single answer to any question, would it still be a worthwhile pursuit?
Yes, and here are a few reasons why. 1) Exploring questions allows you to figure out which tools are useful and which not. So, for example, examining underlying suppositions on which an argument rests exposes the links between where you start and where you end up. Philosophy examines premises and connections. 2) Finding out that attractive notions, which may have seemed like answers are nothing of the sort eliminates a false sense of arriving at a firm conclusion. Philosophy introduces doubt. 3) We can expose some questions as having many more dimensions than we might have originally thought. Philosophy expands horizons. 4) We can accept some limitations because those types of answers, while not complete, work in practice (here is where the claims about science come in). Philosophy can describe limits. 5) We are not prohibited from exploring ideas without knowing where we will end up and having no clear objective in mind. Philosophy helps frame the discussion. I should like to point out that science doesn't offer any more answers than philosophy does. Both provide partial answers restricted by context. So, for example, if I want to know the boiling point of some substance, I can claim I have "an" answer, but the real answer (if there is one) is hidden behind a veil of measurement problems and ultimately, uncertainty. Philosophy does the same thing. It has a built in "plus or minus" made from natural language instead of numbers, and neither enterprise makes a claim of final truth. |
3rd December 2012, 03:12 PM | #514 |
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Most people I have met are concerned with where will the food come from, where will i live and how can I make a living.
What are those answers that philosophy provides, the last time I asked I was told that the answers had to come from within and that I was ignorant for asking the questions but posters here are constantly telling me that philosophy answers the Great Questions then get mad when I ask what the answers are. |
3rd December 2012, 03:15 PM | #515 |
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3rd December 2012, 03:21 PM | #516 |
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That's right. If you want to use logical inference or a rational way of thinking in general, say deduction, you're using the tools of philosophy. It doesn't matter the slightest that you personally protest that this isn't philosophy. What philosophy means, is conventional, just like any name given to any field of study - we all agree on what it means so that we can meaningfully use it in communication. The conventional definition, scope and description of philosophy has been given here more times than I care to count. You have been given links to articles, wiki entries, dictionary definitions, personal testimonies and takes on what philosophy means, quoted professional opinions and a lot of people have been unbelievable resilient (Kevin_Lowe, marplots, etc) in answering questions that I personally have deemed unworthy of any attention because of their apparent intentional emotion-provoking content and delivery (there's a specific name for that, innit) and complete disregard for intellectual integrity and contextual history of the argument.
So you're going nowhere arguing philosophy is useless that way (what other way could you argue? beats me, but try to surprise us). It's like trying to say "language conveys no meaning" by using language to convey that meaning. Also, I find your complaint of "losing the argument" quite telling. You're in it for the win? Figures. I was here merely to explain the worth of knowledge from my perspective. |
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3rd December 2012, 03:43 PM | #517 |
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That's because (and this is really going to annoy you) there is no way of telling what the answers are. That is, there are many ways of answering the same question, and, most often, it is difficult to come up with a means of ranking the answers such that here is only one that is the best.
Now, that may be ultimately unsatisfying to you, but you display the greatest arrogance when you insist that you lack of satisfaction with the answers implies either that there are no answers or that searching for answers is a waste of time. If you want to learn how some of the "Great Questions" have been answered, you would be better served to--oh, I don't know--google philosophy and read some secondary or tertiary sources and then, if you're still intersted, continue on to the primary source. Your're currently asking to be spoon-fed an education in philosophy when you have been offered some resources already. |
3rd December 2012, 03:52 PM | #518 |
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So your answer to the question "what's philosophy worth?' is that everything is philosophy so you can't even ask the question without using philosophy.
Yet still I see no answers to the Great Questions which I've been assured that philosophy has. Congratulations on your pure desire to teach us. It's nice when someone points out that they are taking the high road. |
3rd December 2012, 04:18 PM | #519 |
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No. Let me quote myself from the post I just made, since obviously it was very confusing statement and semantic wordplay lost in wall of text impossible to decipher and lost in obscurity:
Originally Posted by TeapotCavalry
And why would I even engage in a sincere discussion with someone who just spews that kind of bitterness for no rational reason? It's not every day you see every sentence of a post be a separate straw man. Well done. |
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3rd December 2012, 04:20 PM | #520 |
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I've snipped quite a lot of your post...but I really don't see where the philosophy is coming in. I don't think maths and stats ask deep questions with no answers to be honest. They are just tools to help us model the world. But again maybe I'm missing your meaning.
You don't generally learn anything new about the world by asking yourself questions you don't know the answer to, particularly if you then take what you come up with as some great revelation.
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How to do what exactly? Formulate questions that neither science nor philosophy can provide answers to? But hell if you want a better question than 'How should we live?' try 'How can I help stop children in Africa dying of malaria?' or 'How can we ensure the world has enough drinking water to sustain the population in the future?'. Useful practical questions which may have answers that might actually benefit real people with real problems.
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Interesting maybe, but not particularly worthwhile. Testing things against reality would probably help you figure out most of the example you give just as well. We're alsogetting into the kind of territory here where 'thinking something through' is 'doing philosophy' and I'm not buying that
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