I took one philosophy class in college and it was a huge turnoff. Far from the love of knowledge, it came off much more like the celebration of ignorance in many ways. The professor vehemently discredited nearly all modern science, including evolution and the big bang, because of some ridiculous “proofs” that a bright 8th grader could’ve seen were flawed. She claimed to know a lot about science, but when we were talking about the signs of life I brought up homeostatis and she said she had never heard the word. She promoted Intelligent Design (even though she wasn’t conventionally religious; she thought it was sound science) and she gave out extra credit for watching the movie “What the Bleep do we Know?”, which she loved.
That being said, there were some valuable and worthwhile elements hidden amongst all the bullshit. Mostly in the book. Just like in any other subject, you have to dig around yourself to find them.
I think the first entrance to philosophy should be put in the proper context of understanding ideas historically.
Take the idea of value, that one can assign values to something that are not inherent physical properties of that unit. That should be something straight forward for a computer programmer.
Then realize that someone somewhere had to come up with the idea of value and the idea of value has been debated and discussed throughout history.
You might be surprised to learn that philosophy didn’t end in 1862. Bertrand Russell could hardly be called an introvert. Neither was Foucault or Quine. And I hear Habermas is pretty outgoing. I know Thomas Nagel is not a loner.
I’ve had the same problem with understanding philosophy. I do well with English, math, science, and so forth, but much of what I’ve read on philosophy simply makes no sense to me.
Much of it also seems to be arguing about word definitions. To take a simple example, “if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?” is often presented as a philosophical or logical question. It isn’t. If you define sound as oscillations in a certain frequency range, the answer is “yes.” If you define it as the human ear’s interpretation of such oscillations, the answer is “no.” I simply don’t understand how people can discuss this at length. Ditto most of the koans I’ve heard. Pointless and illogical.
Entertainment. Can you say, “willing suspension of disbelief”?
Socrates was such a great philosopher the locals killed him because he just wouldn’t shut up. Sort of.
I’m with mswas today. Probably just this once though. It feels odd.
I took a few of those classes back in the day. The concepts as explained by the prof usually seemed at least understandable, even if I though some were BS. I even found some actually interesting and thought provoking.
However, the assigned readings regarding these same concepts were more often than not some of the most turgid, self important, circular reasoning, bloviated, giant piles of bull squeezings I’ve ever had to read.
So, maybe most philsophical writings are just poorly written and you’ve havent found the good writings yet.
Damned if this doesn’t happen whenever I want to post something on a thread on SDMB! It’s a great introduction to philosophical thought and is even appropriate for children.
The scientific method really isn’t good training for understanding philosophy. Especially when you get to Foucault and later. Reading in the more abstruse, theoretical depths of the humanities might be better…the dark backstage workings of cultural or artistic theory, where abstractions push and pull on one another like a Rube Goldberg device made entirely out of impressions implied by words. It’s a device you can’t see, hear, or feel working, but if you’ve read a whole lot and played the game of gazes against glosses against problematics against hermeneutics, you might just have a feeling in your gut about how it works.
It’s about impressions, maybes, what-ifs - concepts given the weight of fact, just for a moment, so we can run eeensy fiddly little domino chains of Gedankenexperimenten with them and arrive at…someplace. Someplace we can write about, and if everything goes really well, even talk about with some vague hope of internal consistency. Or not…Derrida didn’t give a damn about that, I know.
Yes, I know philosophers. I’ve never met Derrida or Hilary Putnam (though I’ve seen them speak), but one of my very best friends is a grad student in one of the best philosophy departments in the US. I consider him and his colleagues to be philosophers.
You said that because someone is a computer programmer they might not understand something so simple as an allegory. It doesn’t sound like you hold the intelligence of a computer programmer in high esteem.
I understand philosophy, theology, mysticism and multi-level movies but not great literature, poetry or algebra. Guess some people’s brains are just wired different.
Yup. I know philosophers as well. One of my best friends is a political theorist.
As an aside, I just finished Putnam’s Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and I would absolutely love to hear him speak somewhere. This is my first encounter with Putnam (and through him, Vivian Walsh). Now I have my work cut out for me.
That’s because the philosophers are dealing in minutiae. That’s why philosophy classes can actually work because a lot of the big ideas can be summed up rather easily. Also, most philosophers are writing for other philosophers not for the layman.
Ok, I believe you. But I am assuming you don’t disagree that a whole fucking lot of philosophers have been misanthropes, right?
Hardly, I’ve just found that in my experience computer programmers are either really into philosophy or not into it much at all. I was trying to get a sense of his thought process, not demean him. I didn’t think he doesn’t know what an allegory is just that he might have a sort of resistance to them as I see displayed VERY often around these parts. So actually the opposite is kind of true, that he understands his limitations gives me MORE respect for his intelligence rather than less. It’s a lot easier to overcome your shortcomings if you understand them.
That is so odd to me, because great literature and philosophy are intertwined. Have you read Candide? One of the quickest and best reads out there IMO. Quite philosophical and downright hysterical. I can’t hear a Dr. Pangloss joke without a smile coming to my face.
Ockham is definitely one of those philosophers that everyone quotes but whom no one has read.
You actually would like the Putnam book, I think. It does attack naive positivist scientism, which can be a bit of a problem around here. I read it because he specifically calls into question some of the basic assumptions of the kind of rational choice theory I do. Here is the gist by Martha Nussbaum, also a great philosopher for whom I have considerable admiration.
Interesting. Will my innumeracy make it difficult for me to read it? It does sound really cool. And naive positivist scientism is a fucking awesome term. I am going to have to remember that and abuse it.
