Relevance of philosophy

Great Debates
1

Philosophy and the various philosophical musings of ‘great’ philosophers, do they really have any truly relevant messages for mankind, and how weighty are these messages? Or can we just count with the fingers in our hands the truly useful messages of philosophy? Now that we are possessed of such sciences as are called social sciences (like sociology, anthropology, politics… am I right?), and all the variety and diversity of psychological investigations, do we in fact still need philosophy, today?

Whatever your reactions to my queries, you can do me a great service if you can please provide free online sites where people who write intelligently take philosophy and ‘great’ philosophers to task.

In my own case, I understand philosophy – after all these years of reading, thinking, and exchanging views with people most probably more qualified or trained than myself (not at all exhaustive and extensive and comprehensive, I must admit for my own part) – according to this description, in my own words:

My own impression is that to really know a discipline, like religion, and in our present concern, philosophy, reading the thoughts of intelligent people who take the discipline to task can be a very effective way of getting to its straight dope.

I must make this confession, though: the more I try to read and think carefully some of the ‘great’ philosophers like Nietzsche, the more I have the suspicion that what they are saying that makes sense is just plain common sense, that any man in the streets bred in the university of hardknocks can come to in the course of an observant life; and anything I can’t make any sense of: on the one hand I fear that my intelligence is not up to the challenge, or that they are talking nonsense or engaging in fallacious semanticism.

Another confession, I seem to know now what religion is all about, and I sum it up in the following description:

This kind of a description of religion is in terms of methodology akin to what everyone might describe sex when he has satisfied by personal experiences and reflections on sex.

Coming back to philosophy, please at least, people here who are genuinely interested in sharing their learning and knowledge that has been attained by truly personal quests, not founded upon essentially other peoples’ thoughts and expositions (which other peoples do in many instances give me the temptation to imagine that they themselves don’t in fact know what they are talking about) - if you can still follow me - please at least give me your own bashings of philosophy and philosophers, or also very important, refer me to free online sites where such intelligently critical bashings can be encountered.

Thanks and God bless.

Susma Rio Sep

2

I don’t see a factual question here.

Off to Great Debates.

DrMatrix - GQ Moderator

3

quote:

Philosophy is the continuous unending quest for the programming that exists or might exist or should exist in everything by speculative reasoning.

Susma, this definition is not clear to me. What do you mean by “programming”?

4

And what do you mean by “relevance of philosophy”? Do you mean philosophy’s relevance to political or social questions? Do you mean philosophy’s relevance to an individual trying to make sense of the universe? Or what?

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By programming i mean an order or design or scheme or system or scenario or arrangement or pattern or setup or establishment or ordination (back to order) that can be both static and dynamic, still or moving, inert or active.

By relevance…, I think you got me there. Let me try:

Money is relevant, sex is relevant, message boards are relevant, war on Iraq is relevant (but not in my estimate justified). Relevance I consider to be first anything that can fill a receptivity in our being, or even more broadly anything that will relieve a stress in our being. On this basis, the bathroom is relevant so is the kitchen; and the war on Iraq is relevant, it fills up so much receptivities and instances of stress in our being. Receptivities? Of the mind and the heart. Stress? Tensions all around among peoples.

Let’s hear from you what you understand by relevance. But I must be falling into the same trap that I thought I seem to find in philosophy and in philosophers, so much about meanings of words when they can be understood in their plain meanings as a decent mastery of English in the present concern can make clear.

Do you know of any free websites where I might read some intelligent critical bashings of philosophy? I am really very interested in these websites if any. There must be a good number, only I am not successful so far in locating them. What I find are a lot of sites on philosophy but not philosophy bashing.

Forgive me for being simplistic; but we are told by wise people that to know ourselves better we should ask others to tell us about ourselves. So, I like to ask non-philosophers who are intelligent and critical to tell me what is philosophy; but being naughty as I am, I like them to do bashings of philosophy and philosophers.

It’s like: if we want to know what Bush and his people are really up to, even maybe they themselves don’t know what they are up to; then we might profitably ask people who are really Bush bashers in their declared sympathies: let’s hear their bashings then we will decide whether they are intelligent and critical.

So also, I think we can learn a lot of philosophy and philosophers’ teachings by listening to their bashings from intelligent and critical people.

Susma Rio Sep

6

You touch on a lot of subjects in your post; I can’t even begin to go into all of them. Let me just say this.

Philosophy has the funny characteristic that it is for a large part concerned with the question what philosophy is, or whether it is any use (see for example Hume and Wittgenstein). The result is that if you find ‘intelligent bashings’ of philosophy, it will itself be philosophy.

Furthermore, philosophy is in essence discussion. You say messageboards are relevant. What are messageboards, if not primarily discussion?

If you don’t like such rhetoric: is philosophy relevant when it debates the concept of rights or democracy, when it discusses ethical question like abortion or euthanasia? Is it relevant when it turns to logic or philosophy of language?

What I’m getting at, is that your question seems to assume that there is an essence of philosophy that allows you to condemn it in one fell swoop as being irrelevant. The way you put things you don’t allow for the possibility that certain parts might be clearly relevant, while with other parts the relevance might be dubious. Is modern mathematics (which mostly has no immediately clear practical use) relevant? Is it relevant to think about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang? Is archaeology relevant?

You see what I’m doing here? I’m questioning the very assumptions of your question and the meaning of your words. You might say I’m doing philosophy.

7

There is a difference between facts and meaning. If all the sciences were involved with was the collection of facts, you’d end up with a pile of information and no schematic way of summarizing it and making sense out of it. The art of making sense out of things is theory, or theorization if you prefer.

Philosophy is grand theory, or theory about theory.

Yeah, it’s relevant.

8

I think I am making very good progress here. Thanks to all you guys so far.

So, there is sense and nonsense in philosophy and among philosophers.

The work now is to find the nonsense in philosophy and among philosophers.

Reading about nonsense in a solemn discipline and among solemn thinkers is enjoyable, don’t you think so, and profitable to learning?

Susma Rio Sep

9

AHunter3 I think theory construction as such is a part of science itself, not philosophy. It is scientists alone who have the expertise to construct individual theories out of data (Relativity, Evolution,etc.) and then to interpret new data in light of the theories, or occasionaly, to develop new theories when new data makes the old ones untenable.

Your description of philosophy as theory about theory is correct. The scientist comes up with theories the philosopher says what scientific theories in general mean.

However this is philosophy of science, which is only one branch of philosophy.

10

I love philosophy and think of myself as a philosopher, but, perhaps like the OP, I feel like there is something terribly wrong with the field of philosophy.

For one thing, philosophy courses seem to be more about the history of philosophy that the state-of-the-art of philosophy. Perhaps there IS no state-of-the-art in philosophy. We may have made little progress in 3000 years.

In science courses they spend little time with the history of science. I think it’s because they have lots of genuinely useful material they need to teach instead.

A long time ago I was reading Plato’s Republic and got to some argument by analogy (humans are like wheat, wheat is like this, so humans are like this) which was so obviously ridiculous that I couldn’t believe an intelligent person could write such a thing. Shortly afterwards I quit reading it, sensing I wasn’t learning anything.

The physicist Richard Feynman told of attending a philosophy seminar at Princeton where they were discussing “essential objects”. They asked him if he thought an electron was an essential object. He admitted he wasn’t sure what it meant - could they clarify by telling him whether a brick was an essential object? The discussion broke down as the philosophers couldn’t agree.

I think one reason philosophy makes so little progress is that it tries to make deductions based on ill-defined traditional concepts such as “good”, “free-will”, and “mind”. I suspect arguments go on for centuries that amount to little more than debates about semantics.

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Larry Borgia

Except that they engage this practice with regards to music theory and theory of literature and other venues which utilize theory but which are not science. Disciplines other than science also use theory to make sense out of information and organize it schematically into a world-model of sorts.

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Well, what can I say, but thanks to all you guys for the enlightenment you have shared with me.

Deference and even reverence is due to the great thinkers of the past; but I guess wicked as I am, I do enjoy sharp minds of today pointing out the Achilles’ heels of these great philosophers of the past.

If a lot of philosophizing even to the present is centered around semantics or words and ideas and ne’er nothing to do with the everyday world of the man in the streets, I am still wondering if we can do without philosophy altogether; now that we have various disciplines of science dealing with words and ideas, like linguistics, semantics, and what other ‘tics’, of which there must be a lot, their labels escape me or unfamiliar to me.

One of the tough things with philosophy and philosophers even today is the lack of a method of attack that is consistently employed inexorably, my impression of course. I have tried on several occasions to reduce the interminable musings of some philosophers into propositions; but there are so much edgings and hedgings with every proposition I could formulate, that I got the impression the philosopher I was trying to decipher does not know simple clear concise writing; and his mind might not have been simple, clear and concise. At least, if anything, a writing can be very verbose but make it clear.

But do philosophers have a method to their philosophy, at least in the exposition thereof; or do they think and arrogate to themselves that they are dispensed and exempted in regard to methods?

We are having a constructive exchange here, thanks, to all you guys who have reacted so far. May I just voice out my awkward fear, that maybe I should just excuse myself from philosophy and philosophers, and concentrate on the writers of science and the scientists, in particular thinkers occupied with the states of mankind today and the shapes of things to come as soon as tomorrow or next week? But then are not these guys then also in fact doing philosophy?

Susma Rio Sep

13

My uninformed opinion i s that philosophy is good for asking questions and sometimes for clarifying issues, but generally useless at coming up with any answers

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Your question as phrased is not like asking Bush’s opponents for their opinions of him, it’s like asking people who hate politics for their opinions on politics. If you want to discuss philosophy, it’s a bad idea to specifically ask only for non-philosophers to come forward and “bash” the discipline.

15

I can’t agree with this last part of your reply. Since it helps - or should I say: forces - you to reflect on questionable issues and that on itself can lead to find certain answers/solutions or leads to a new insight in or view at the problems.

Salaam. A

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On the other hand, if you study literature, you will spend a considerable amount of time discussing literature of the past. The same is true of art, languages, and history (unsurprisingly). Even if you study physics, you will spend a great deal of time with things like Newton’s laws of motion and theory of gravity. Most seriously-studied philosophy (Kant, Hume, Descartes, Hegel, and later) is contemporaneous with or post-dates Newton. Or do you reject Newton because of his antiquity? And much of what Aristotle and Plato discussed (e.g. Aristotle’s ethics and Plato’s discussion of government) are still relevant today since many aspects of human nature have not changed in 2500 years.