Interesting perspective, but I’m not convinced. It looks as though philosophy is seen as just science without the empiricism.
I don’t think we can evaluate competing schools of philosophical thought on this basis. If you look at competing ethical standpoints, for example, you’ll find that many of them employ and depend on logical argument. The differences between them are accounted for by what they accept as fundamental values whose importance is proposed to be axiomatic (in the correct sense). If you agree that such-and-such a philosophical value (“truth”, say) is of paramount importance, then much will follow logically from that. If you assign a greater value to “justice” or to “friendship” or whatever then you may draw different ethical conclusions. But I don’t think you can use the scientific method, or anything remotely analogous to it, to determine which of these values is in fact paramount. The selection of any of them as paramount is axiomatic, meaning that it isn’t shown to be paramount.
Science can, I suppose, be seen as just another philosophy - not an ethical philosophy, but a study of what is real, and what is meant by reality. Like any other philosophy it proceeds from its own unproven, unprovable axioms. The universe is real, not illusory; the universe is regular; our sensory perceptions correspond to reality; etc. If these things are not true, the scientific method cannot reliably tell us anything about reality. But, for that reason, we cannot employ the scientific method to demonstrate that these things are true. Therefore, we must accept them as axioms if we are going to “do science”.
So, to argue that science is a fit subject of study in a way that, e.g., ethics is not is to argue for the privileging of the foundational axioms of science over the foundational axioms of other fields of study. But since the whole point of an axiom is that its validity cannot be demonstrated, this really tends towards an unsupported demand for the privileging of the axioms that I choose to accept and whose implications I choose to study over the axioms that you accept and wish to study.
Perhaps the word Sage Rat is thinking of is “theorem”, a statement that has been proven true, which you can then use as an antecedent (or, informally, “axiom”, I suppose) for proving further statements and theorems. But that’s more math/philosophy than science.
Besides, when you’re talking about science and education in this meta way, discussing the way things should be, and reasons why, what do you think you’re doing besides philosophy? Great Debates is an entire forum devoted amateur philosophy. Philosophy is what we’re doing right now discussing this.
That would be an ideal case, but probably does not conform to reality. If you remove reality, then there’s nothing to distinguish philosophy from math.
I have no idea. And I should have pointed that out since John Mace explicitly asked for a cite.
As said in my first post, I am aware that philosophy is working towards a more rigorous methodology. Where they are on that path, I don’t know. But something like what I described is the sort of transition that would be necessary for it to become a science.
Maybe my description is correct and this is what they’re doing, but I have guessed the terminology wrongly. Maybe they’ll find an alternate methodology than the sort I have envisioned. But certainly, if there’s a hard break from “people pontificating in a vacuum” to “evidence backed and mathematically sound”, that would make the study of historic philosophies largely moot, except in regards to where the systems of logic were derived from.
There is nothing to distinguish philosophy from maths, in the sense that maths is a branch of philosophy.
Well, that depends on your definition of “science”, of course. The word has quite a few established senses, and many of those senses would already embrace philosophy. So I think what your argument requires is (a) a definition of “science” for the purposes of your argument, and (b) an account of why philosophy needs to become a science in that sense if it is to be worthy of study.
Well, hold on. Euclidean geometry is precisely people pontificating in a vacuum" and there is no sense in which it is “evidence backed”. And this is true for pure mathematics in general.
This, of course, underlines my point that maths is a branch of philosophy, but it tends to undermine your point that philosophy is unworthy of study. Indeed, your demand that a subject be “mathematically sound” in order to be worthy of study seems to me to make the worthiness of all fields of study - the natural sciences included - conditional on their philosophical rigour.
Here’s a great essay by a philosopher on how certain buddhist concepts in philosophy are leading to new paths of thinking.
I think there’s still a lot of uncomfortable work to be done in delving into the synthesis between Western and non-Western philosophies which isn’t really happening. Western philosophy places a great deal of primacy on symbolic manipulation. Western thought develops from the ability to make concepts explicit and then reason through transformations of concepts.
A lot of Eastern philosophy comes from a different intellectual lineage that far more prizes embodied knowledge. Insight is gained through meditation, mood altered states and the contemplation of paradoxes and contradictions. In particular, I think a lot of Eastern thought around ineffability is extremely valuable but deprioritized in Western thought since ineffable things can’t be talked about (by definition). Western philosophy is all about what is true, Eastern philosophy is more about how to get to a place to discover truth.
The problem is that any attempt to translate Eastern thought into a Western paradigm is largely doomed to fail which is why Eastern philosophy has a reputation for pointless mysticism and fuzzy thinking. Instead, to properly integrate the two schools requires developing a new paradigmic basis under which useful synthesis can be done.
I’ll accept that math may be defined as being a subset of philosophy, but I would personally argue that it is not. Making math part of philosophy would be like making hammers part of philosophy. Math is a tool. It’s a useful tool, but still nothing more than a tool. It’s a method for communicating and manipulating concepts, just the same as speech, yet we don’t consider speech to be “philosophy”. They’re both just tools that are useful to philosophers. I suspect that the reason for math and philosophy to be linked is because some of the early mathematicians were also philosophers. But, there’s really no reason to link them together, if you ignore that.
Science - The study of reality.
Historically, one would have said:
Philosophy - The study of reality.
But most of the subsections of reality have been broken out into their own fields of study; i.e., the sciences.
So, minus reality, you have math. But that immediately excludes all of the sciences and philosophy. Philosophy cannot be divorced from reality, otherwise you’re just talking fiction or math.
I didn’t demand that the subject be mathematically sound. I demanded that the core tenets (or axioms as I was calling them) be based on reality based on scientific rigor, and anything that was not an axiom be derived from that axiom via mathematical proof.
Not just half of the apple. The whole apple.
And that’s the same with the other sciences. They need to have performed rigorous tests, and any conclusions that they take from their tests need to be mathematically sound - e.g., incorporating margins of error, taking into account mathematical logic (p implies q does not mean p is q, etc.), and so on.
But in the case of graffiti, they are right. It’s like child pornography: any value it might have as an artform is overshadowed by the fact that innocent people are victimised in its creation. In order for graffiti-style art to be a legitimate artform, it first has to separate itself from the petty vandals who are its most common performers and proponents.
I disagree. In maths, we devise concepts which have no material reality, things that we can never encounter in nature - e.g. a point, a line, a circle, a number, a ratio - and we reflect on them and make inferences and deductions leading to statements which can meaningfully be said to be “true” or “false”, “proven” or “unproven”, etc, even though they are statements about imagined, non-existent, never-observed entities. That seems to fall pretty squarely with the mainstream conception of what philosophers do.
Stop right there. Because before you can make that claim you have to ask yourself what you mean by “real”. If you don’t have an answer to that question, then you don’t have a coherent conception of science. And of course the question “what do we mean by ‘real’?” is pre-eminently a question addressed by philosophy. So what you’re proposing here is a conception of science which, far from distinguishing science from philosophy, makes science dependent on philosophy.
I’m not making a smart point here. I actually do not know what you mean by “reality”. If you think reality means “that which is material” then that produces one understanding of science which looks a lot like the natural sciences. If you expand your concept of reality to include, e.g., human behaviour, the choices humans make, then you have a concept of science which embraces the social sciences (sociology, psychology, economics, history, linguistics) but it also includes at least some branches of philosophy , most obviously ethics. If you think numbers, etc, are real, then you have a conception of science which embraces maths. If you think that abstract concepts like “truth” are real, then you have a concept of science which embraces epistemology, logic and most other “mainstream” branches of philosophy, and also embraces some other fields, e.g. theology, literature, since we can meaningfully or usefully discuss whether theological or literary statements are true or false. (And if we can’t meaningfully or usefully discuss whether propositions are true or false, where does that leave science?)
And here’s the rub. Whether you adopt any of these conceptions of “real” or a different one again, once you start to explain, defend or justify that conception as against alternative conceptions you’re doing philosophy. And it’s obviously a self-defeating position to find yourself doing philosophy in order to demonstrate that philosophy is not worth doing.
We can in fact cut to the chase on this, perhaps. Almost any meaningful conception of “science” is going to involve an attempt to know whether propositions are true or false. (“The gravitational attraction between two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them” is either true or it is not, and science classically attempts to ascertain which through empirical observation.) But we can’t claim to know either that a proposition is true or that it is false unless we understand what it is to “know” something. And “What does it mean to know something?” is the central question addressed by epistemology. And if you can find anybody who thinks epistemology is not a branch of philosophy, now would be a good time to point to him.
All scientists employ an epistemology, and quite a specific one. They may employ an epistemology which has been handed to them as part of their scientific training, and which they have accepted without examining it or reflecting on it. If so, I’m not criticising that. What I am criticising is the claim that it is not worth examining or reflecting on it; that there is no point in doing so; that doing so is not a fit subject of study. And yet that would be a necessary corollary of the assertion that philosophy is not a worthy subject of study.
I think there is too much of a focus on schools of philosophy or particular philosophers.
I would hope that the reason that few courses include an explicit Eastern Philosophy component or course, say, is because the courses are more conceptual than that. For example, that consciousness is discussed as a concept, with all the different ideas on what consciousness is, debated and discussed at the same time. Maybe some of those ideas come from Eastern philosophy but that’s beside the point.
Additionally, I would hope philosophy and theology are kept nicely separate…
I hope. </morgan_freeman>
You can certainly study branches of philosophy that aren’t theology, but you can’t completely separate the two disciplines.
On the wider issue, the question of whether Eastern philosophical traditions are worth studying, or or less worthy of study than the Western traditions, or however you want to frame the question, is itself a philosophical question which can only be answered within the framework of a particular philosophical standpoint. And, obviously, if you’re schooled in the western philosophical tradition, that might tend toward one particular answer to the question whereas, if you’re schooled in the eastern tradition, that might tend towards another. Just sayin’.
If what we’re talking about here is undergraduate-level education in philosophy then my instinct - and it’s only an instinct, not an argument - is to say that, yes, undergraduates should be introduced to diverse philosophical traditions. If only because, if they aren’t, they are hardly equipped to make any judgement about whether they are valuable, interesting, worthy of study, etc.
When I started university, I was not ignorant enough to independently formulate Zeno’s Paradoxes. I was not agnostic about the solution to these questions (and so would not identify them as being paradoxes) because I had already solved them - it’s literally high school level mathematics.
First of all I didn’t say anything about Eastern philosophy not being worth studying, or less worthy. I was saying I don’t see any need to bracket it separately like that. In science we don’t talk make any significant distinction between russian science and german science, science is science and you just study the topics.
And as for it being a philosophical question what is worth studying, well everything comes down to philosophical questions ultimately, including, say, whether studying philosophy is something we should be doing.
As humans we have no choice but to draw the line at some point and make practical decisions.
I have no issue with a practical decision to say “We should study ideas from anywhere but not feel obliged to study all ideas from everywhere. We should prioritize novel, and not refuted, ideas”.
I don’t know about philosophy, 'cause I snored, but history as it is taught is hugely euro-centric, too. Everybody knows SPQR and Caesar, most people vaguely recall Anne Boleyn or Charlemagne. But Cao-Cao, Mansa Musa, Suleiman or Nobunaga : it’s blank stares all the way down. Hell, even Slavic history is a no-show, and they’re European (quick, who is John III Sobieski and what’d he do ?) !
Don’t get me started on literature and the arts. Michaelangelo ? Great dude, everybody knows the Sixtine. Zhang Zeduan ? Is that a video game or something ?
While the philosophy that studies logic and truth is certainly interesting, i am more drawn to the philosophy that studies morality. Both “where does it come from” and “what is good? How should we act?”
Didn’t mean to attribute that to you, Mijin. When I moved on to talk about the “wider issues” I meant issues raised in the wider thread, rather than in your post. Sorry I didn’t make that clearer. It was in fact Sage Rat who dismissed
“non-provable philosophy”.
Which is pretty much my point. Sage Rat’s dismissal of the value of non-provable philosophy is itself a non-provable philosophical assertion.
Sure. There may be good practical reasons for offering this philosophical course and not that one, starting with “we don’t have somebody to teach that course” and “there aren’t sufficient students wishing to take that course to justify us offering it”, but no doubt there could be many more. But “this is not worth studying” looks like a worryingly obscurantist reason for a university to offer, and certainly wouldn’t count as a practical reason.
In general I don’t disagree. But I would point out that, when attempting to survey any intellectual field, we very often take a historical approach, and it’s necessary or useful to study refuted ideas, if only to see how and in what way they were refuted, and to understand the ideas which have succeeded them, and which were formed in reaction to them.
After all, in science we study Newtonian ideas, despite the fact that as a fundamental theory of the universe they were supplanted by Einstein. And we study Galileo, though we now know his cosmology was wrong.
And I don’t think that philosophical ideas get refuted in quite the way that scientific ideas do. Scientific theories can be disproven, but many philosophical ideas cannot. Instead, they become outmoded or unfashionable, or they are neglected because they address questions that people are no longer interested in asking, or they appeal to values that few people hold.
Since you bring it up:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
One of the few surviving lines from the school, “a one-foot stick, every day take away half of it, in a myriad ages it will not be exhausted,” is obviously an independent formulation of Zeno’s paradoxes.
[/QUOTE]
No, it isn’t. It’s reminiscent of one of Zeno’s paradoxes, only without the paradoxical part.
I think, yes, it can be useful to study refuted ideas. But, as a nitpick, I think you picked a bad example with Newtonian and Galilean physics.
People commonly think of these ideas as refuted, but most engineers do not routinely use relativistic physics. They use Newtonian equations, and in turn, indirectly, Galilean relativity.
These models make useful predictions.
So they’re not “wrong” per se, they are crude models, usefully crude, that produce accurate predictions for a particular domain of problems.