I’ve just read the Wiki page on Philosophy and now I am wondering how the general populace looked at the philosophers of their time. Did the public perceive genuine benefit from listening to their endless pontifications, or even understand what they were talking about? Since it was no small challenge for me to read that page without my eyes glazing over, I am wondering just how much interest the people of more primitive times could possibly have had.
Who are the modern day philosophers? Have they all moved on to universities and talk radio?
From the wiki page, the philisophical “eras” were:
Ancient philosophy (c. 600 B.C.–c. A.D. 500)
Medieval philosophy (c. A.D. 500–c. 1350)
Renaissance (c. 1350–c. 1600)
Early modern philosophy (c. 1600 – c. 1800)
Nineteenth century philosophy
Contemporary philosophy (c. 1900 – present)
Politicians may have been the primary consumers of philosophers’ output. These days it seem like everybody (especially the politicians) develops and holds on to their own personal understanding of fundamental causes and principles of existence, the universe, the nature of good and evil, the importance of the pursuit of knowledge, etc. It can be next to impossible to get people to change philisophical viewpoints, even when they are presented with a broader awareness.
If Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were to suddenly appear in the present year 2009, where would they find gainful employment?
Well, take Nietzsche at the end there; he wrote a lot of books. Ditto for Sartre and Bergson and Russell and Camus, all of whom got awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. That’s the Twentieth Century, anyhow; it used to be that other fields were encompassed by philosophy and philosophers, but not so much for the guys who nowadays rack up Nobel Prizes for chemistry or whatever. (Of course, you still get the philosophers of science hashing out evidentiary criteria and falsifiability in between getting taken seriously on bioethics, but AFAIK there are no modern-day Descartes-types who revolutionize mathematics and make breakthroughs in physics and writing on metaphysics and epistemology.)
That said, what’s left is pretty good. Like you point out, politicians eat this stuff up because there’s a real market for well-written arguments in favor of a cause; whether you’re rallying for Jeffersonian ideals or Marxist ideology, whether you’re Gandhi or MLK, having a theoretical underpinning for catchy sloganeering genuinely seems to help. Think “jurisprudence as applied philosophy,” at a start.
It is also the old, “I understand, so it must be true,” bullshit. Look at the current non-fiction bestsellers and you will find several (many) of the books have no quantifiable basis in reality, but they make sense to the readers’ most basic level of understanding. “The Secret” is as much a book on Big-P Philosophy as anything Plato wrote.
Indeed, philosophy is just people espousing their own world view without any particular ability to actually prove anything. Game theory and economics actually make an attempt to prove stuff in a quantifiable way, which is where scientific progress actually enters the picture.
Philosophy took a long time to separate itself into different branches. Indeed, it took a chap from a small village in Surrey to suggest making as fundamental a distinction as natural and supernatural philosophy.
Supernatural philosophy allowed powerful rulers to clearly set out orthodox doctrine, such that they could avail themselves of the resources of any heterodox group by laying against them a charge of heresy. For good or ill, this was “useful” to said authorities (though admittedly not being particularly useful to the general public, who might nevertheless benefit from a more clear-cut doctrine by which to live.)
Natural philosophy, as practised by many of the great innovators who also happened to be philosophers, is now called science. Anyone who thinks that this has not benefitted humanity is invited to eschew it completely in their daily lives for a while.
I’d disagree with this rather strongly. The Secret is pop psychology elevated to the level of Philosophy by the author, the publisher and Oprah. It’s no more philosophy than Dianetics. As Sentient Meat pointed out, Philosophy has branched out over the centuries. Many forms of Philosophy have tenets that are not as quantifiable as in others but I’d hardly lump them all into one group. Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter base their work on empirical data, for example.
While it is true that powerful rulers have abused so-called “supernatural philosophy” to their own ends, it is also true that powerful rulers have abused “natural philosophy” in such a manner that it has ended up as something quite different from science. Like the the regimes of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mao, using so-called “social Darwinism” and similar warped pseudo-sciences to achieve and justify their nefarious ends.
There are, I believe, both good and bad people who adopt either sort of philosophy (giving, for the sake of argument, the dichotomy that the Wiki article has drawn). The philosophy, I think, is not what motivates them. For those who are bent on evil, the philosophy is simply what they adopt in order to rationalize what they’re doing.
I think Terry Pratchett put it the best in Small Gods:
“That’s why it’s always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it’s all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There’s No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they’re going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy’s ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.”
-- The many and varied advantages of philosophy (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
Yes, you’re quite right, though I wouldn’t say they appealed much to natural philosophy - it was rather more like anti-supernatural philosophy, and in any case very little like it was much in evidence “historically” ie. before, say, the Age of Reason/Terror in France.
I guess the difference is how easily either can be co-opted. Natural philosophy asks “What does nature say?” in a way which is more difficult to bend to one’s own ends (though not impossible, as your examples show) than the question “What does God say?”.
There are millions of people, if not hundreds of millions or more, who do not benefit from science (by which I presume you really meant technology in this context) because rulers and other politicians have made it unavailable to them. Science is a wonderful thing, and you know that I respect it in its place among the epistemological models of modern man. But until and unless the heart of man changes, such that he cares about his fellow man, no amount of science or technology will ease the pain and suffering of so many people.
Amen. I would, however, suggest that the fact that some of our lives no longer balance on a prehistoric knife edge is a net benefit compared to all living so precariously, and further tentatively suggest/hope that the proportion will rise as the descendents of natural philosophy mature. I guess I’m ever the optimist …
You are confusing philosophy with its opposite, rhetoric. The art of making people believe something by making them feel good about it, or appealing to their preconceived prejudices, is rhetoric. Rhetorical arguments (done right) are easy to understand and seem convincing, usually because they appeal to people’s emotions, but have no particular relationship to truth. Rhetoricians want people to turn off their critical faculties, stop thinking, and accept what is said because it makes them feel good.
Philosophy is the attempt to understand things through rational logical analysis and through the application of one’s critical faculties with utmost possible rigor. Philosophical arguments tend to be complex and hard to follow, and they quite often make people uncomfortable because they expose the irrationality of their preconceived prejudices. (That was what got Socrates put to death.) You have to work hard to follow most philosophical arguments, and the process is not generally emotionally appealing. (The conclusions may or may not be, that is beside the point, just as truth is beside the point for rhetoric.) That is why people often (with reason) complain that philosophy is dry. (The pleasures of doing philosophy, such as they are, are akin to the pleasures of doing mathematics. It is not for everyone.) Once you have understood a philosophical argument, you may or may not be able to see flaws in it. In practice, most of the work done by philosophers is critical work, uncovering the (usually very subtle) logical errors in the arguments of their predecessors.
Philosophy and science are essentially in the same business, and use the same methods, and, historically speaking, science grew out of philosophy and remains, in a way, a particularly flourishing branch of philosophy. It is the branch in which the basic theoretical principles have become sufficiently well understood (after many centuries of philosophical work) that it has become apparent what sorts of detailed observational data will be worth obtaining, and what sorts of problems are likely to yield to detailed mathematical analysis. About 300 years ago, we reached that point in our understanding of the physical world. The point is marked, pretty much, by the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis. (He knew he was a philosopher, and was proud of it. So was Galileo, who fought hard to be granted the official title of philosopher, because he did not want to be thought of as a mere] mathematician.) From around that time, the science branch of philosophy has done very well in advancing our understanding of the natural world, and it has rendered large swaths of older philosophy (though by no means all of it) obsolete, and thus of merely historical interest.
But there are still things that people would very much like to understand better - such as the difference between right or wrong, or the nature of meaning, or, indeed, the nature of knowledge (scientific or otherwise) - but that science does not have much to say about, and where it is not obvious that any new observational data is likely to help very much (or at any rate, we have no clear idea what sort of data it would be useful to look for). In those areas, philosophy (i.e., thinking as hard and as critically about it as you can) is still the best method we have, as it was the best method (the only alternative to religious myths, really) for trying to understand the natural world through most of the history of civilization. Maybe that will change one day, and we will come to understand the issues well enough to know how to approach them “scientifically,” but the only way to get to that point (as it was the only way to get the point where physical science was ready to take off - it took about 2,000 years) is to work hard at the philosophy.
Of course, Sturgeon’s law applies to philosophy, as it does to everything else. There is plenty of bad philosophy about, just as there is plenty of bad science (I think it has been estimated that something like 90% of published experimental results eventually turn out to have been wrong, or, even more often, simply turn out to be of no real importance). A lot of the work and skill, in doing science or philosophy, is in sorting out the good stuff from the bad. It takes years of diligent study to even begin to know how. Reading a Wikipedia article, even a really good one, or even reading two or three really good introductory books on the subject, is not enough for you to acquire a real understanding of philosophy (or any branch of it), any more than it is enough to give you a real understanding of quantum physics or molecular genetics. They are all highly technical subjects that are pursued by some very clever people, who push their intellects to their limits.
There is, though, one superficial difference between many cutting-edge philosophical publications and most cutting-edge science. A lot of philosophy does not use an awful lot of jargon or mathematical-style symbolism. (There is some of both, but not nearly as much as you find in most of the sciences.) This means that an intelligent person, ignorant of philosophy, may often be able to read an article or book intended for other philosophers and, if they make a good effort, sort of understand what is being said. What they probably will not be able understand, however (without a real education in philosophy) is what the point of it is, how this one little contribution fits into the bigger philosophical enterprise and is relevant to issues that anyone cares about. (Or sometimes the big issue at stake may be plain enough, but the point of approaching it in this sort of way will not be apparent.) That is why, I think, some smart but intellectually conceited people who have read a little bit of philosophy sometimes come to the conclusion that although it is complicated and clever, it is a silly waste of time. In fact, they haven’t really understood it, because they don’t know its intellectual context, which you can only get to know through reading a lot of other related stuff. (Of course, they may also have read some of the, by Sturgeon’s Law, 90% of crap.) Science research publications, by contrast, are often so obviously technical, that a layperson will not even be tempted into imagining that they understand it. (In the case of a scientific research publication, you also usually need to understand the intellectual context as well as the content in order to really understand. But, in this case, people are not nearly so likely to imagine that they understand the content well enough to be able to judge its value.) This issue is made worse by the fact that in philosophy, the line between technical work addressed to other philosophers, and things like student textbooks, and popularizing works intended to give the “intelligent layman” a little taste of the subject, is a lot more fuzzy than it is in most sciences these days, so it is sometimes had to tell whether or not you are reading something that you, as a layman, shouldn’t really expect to be able to see the point of.
That is an incredibly ignorant statement, and I am truly shocked to see it from a member of the SDSAB. Have you read a word of Plato? If you did, I can only conclude that you very quickly gave up trying to follow any of the arguments. (It is hard work.)
Plato utterly despised rhetoricians (called sophists in his day). His contempt for them (and for their contempt for truth) was a large part of what made him devote his life to philosophy.
Also, you entirely missing the point if you think philosophers today (or throughout most of history) care about Plato because they think he was right about anything very much. Very few people have thought that for many centuries now (with the exception of a few mathematicians).We do not study Plato because we believe his conclusions. (Or even because we would like to believe them: I sure as hell hope The Republic does not give us the blueprint for the best possible form of government!) We still study him because, read critically, he provides an excellent and relatively palatable education by example in the art of rational argumentation, and, much more importantly, understanding what Plato was about is still a very important part of understanding the overall philosophical context that you need to understand in order to understand what philosophers today (or at other points in history) are up to.
The Secret is nasty meretricious bit of rhetoric, designed to part people from their money by appealing to their greed, vanity and laziness, in order to suppress their critical faculties. It is the antithesis of philosophy. I very much doubt that it contains as much as two consecutive lines of rational argumentation. It would have made Plato vomit.
Perhaps the same sorts of places they did back then:
Plato: much sought after teacher and head of university
Aristotle: same, plus biological research
Descartes: professional soldier (and, possibly, spy), and author
Kierkegaard: clergyman and author
Nietzsche: professor and independent author
Those are all still viable careers today.
(Of course, Plato and Aristotle were authors too, but to the best of my knowledge they did not try to make money directly from that.)
Or did you mean how would they do if they were snatched, by a time-machine, as adults, and brought to our time? In that case I doubt that they would do very well (well, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche might just possibly manage to adapt).
However, if you were snatched by time-machine back into any of their times, I do not suppose you would do very well either. :rolleyes:
I submit with the utmost respect that your proposition hinges upon a point of view — yours. The point of view of an Ethiopian refugee mightly likely be entirely the opposite. I’m just saying, is all.
I think a good example would be the piety initiatives put in place by Augustus Caesar in Rome. I think that had a profound impact on Roman society which at the time of Julius Caesar was incredibly debauched.