Yes! That’s the sort of thing i was saying! Yay for philosophy 
Fran
Cite, please.
I find it amusing that the people who attack philosophy and try to dismiss it as baloney have never studied it…or worse have read the atrocity that is Sophie’s World and think that it qualifies them to sit in judgement over it. Philosophy graduates spend 3 years reading complicated and dense books trying to understand problems which still perplex humanity to this day. Imagine how arrogant you’d sound dismissing some higher branch of maths, or psychology, or linguistics if you’d never studied them at all. (Incidentally, all the above subjects are still connected to philosophy. Eg, Russell’s Principia Mathematica is a work of both maths and philosophical logic.)
The achievement of Western philosophy has been to establish what we can and can’t know about the world. In the last century or so it has given rise to other disciplines such as psychology and linguistics as stated, but it was also a philosopher, Alan Turing, influenced to some extent by Wittgenstein who conceived of the first computer. It would be the very zenith of arrogance to assume that suddenly, at the beginning of the 21st century, that philosphy has served its purpose.
(Quick digression on Plato, Marx and Freud. It is possible to study all those three without doing much philosophy.
1)Modern philosophy has little to do with the ancient greek kind - figures like Plato are usually studied as teaching aids, or for their own sake as the history of ideas. Platonism is interesting as regards the development of classical thought towards Christianity.
2)Marx did train as a philosopher but was mostly concerned with social and political theory. His economics and historical materialism are empirical theories, that is they are claims about the nature of the world. Unlike philosophical theories which can usually be disproved be reason alone, Marx’s claims are subject to the facts and can be disproved by reference to them.
- Freud was not a philosopher. His claim was again empirical, in this case about the structure and development of the human mind. (In fact it is very bad science, being impossible to prove or refute either way. According to many commentators these days his methodology left a lot to be desired as well. And while we’re having a go at Freud, he was by no means the first to posit the existence of a subconscious. Details on request.)
Anyhoo…
Just because many of philosophy’s subjects have trasformed into disciplines of their own does not mean philosophy vanishes. Go deep enough into most academic subjects and you end up doing philosophy: the physical and social sciences, history, arts, political theory, linguistics (sorry to keep mentioning it…I just like the word), maths… (By my use of the three dots I mean to imply I could go on though in fact I’m stuck now.)
As for the other point, that ethics can be best left to religion…goes next door to calm down…
Religion is literally the last place you should go to find an answer to ethical dilemmas, unless you want to solve your modern problem by reference to the tribal laws of an ancient desert-dwelling people.
If ethics amounts to obeying the laws of a God, then we have the following problem. Take a ‘bad’ action like theft. If it is against God’s law to steal then it is bad to do so either a) just because God says so, or b) because God says so and he should know what’s wrong, after all.
If (a) is true, then it seems irrelevant to the action whether it really is bad, whether it causes suffering or not. If something is wrong just because God says so, then it doesn’t seem to be a moral thing to obey, just sensible (to avoid going ot hell or something).
If (b) is true though, that God forbids it because it is wrong, then the wrongness must have nothing to do with God, he just happens to have a useful insight into these things. In this case the morality of actions has nothing to do with God’s existence.
Either way, moral actions, i.e those motivated by good intentions or toward good ends seem to have nothing to do with any religious conviction. QED.
Thankyou for your kind attention. Goes to have a lie down.
Alex hits a home run on his first post.
Also, ethics is contra religion. We can’t underestimate the damage of racism, homophobia, witch-burning, religious wars, destruction of religious freedom, destruction of art, women’s oppression, anti-environmentalism, and forced breeding/inbreeding by command.
Another thought, I don’t believe in absolute evil. But, I believe that what can be called absolutely evil is also that which poses as absolute good and pretends to identify absolute evil (a tricky thought to hold onto to). So there is my criticism of religion in a nutshell. It is a demonology, therefore wrong at its core conception (not just accidently wrong) by institutionalizing what is dogmatically right and wrong and providing necessity to its own declared “goodness” even when it is clearly unethical.
In other words, religion is a self-justified antithesis and is synonymous with human strife (and creates it) via the principle of opposition–a bonafide anti-ethics by negating freedom and development that ethics assumes.
The fact that religionists assume that living the letter of their law results in human goodness is partial proof it is nonsense from an ethics point of view (and that the law is not worthy of human freedom and responsibility). Ethics assumes that each action can be considered for its rightness and wrongness based on the ability to reason. The letter of the law approach assumes that humans are incapable of independent ethical reasoning. If humans are incapable of ethical reasoning, then religious law is designed to condemn our behavior negatively, not encourage it positively–which is a contradiction to reason itself (by eliminating the need for it). This would be a low-expectations guilt-based approach that requires fear to achieve. If anyone says this letter-of-law is better, then they are speaking as a contolled and self-admitted anti-logical being and are logically contradicting themselves because they aren’t supposed to be free or able to reason about ethics in the first place. If they claim they are exempt from the letter approach, while claiming others require it, then that is an ethical contradiction.
Note to alexb: Platonism is still pretty popular. The idea that what we percieve as reality is but a poor representation of [capital r]Reality can, and as far as I know is, considered platonism. I would say that many of the modern “subjectivist” groups of thought would rely on this “fact” (axiom) and move from there… Some feeling that the consciousness can divine (no deity implied) the True Nature of Everything (caps added for no good reason), some feeling that not only is our perception false, but truth about the universe is not guaranteed through reason or empirical data.
Marc: there are plenty of philosophers who believe in an objective existence. The question that troubles even (a lot of—but not all of)them is how we know that our perceptions are equal. Those who merely stumble into philosophy usually have remarks like, “Of course everything is subjective/objective/ false/ true” and really have no clue that they have made a huge number of unsupported assumptions along the way. You might want to read pages 2 and 3 of the thread I linked above to see what “we can’t know anything” really means.
I do that(unsupported assumptions) all the time, and hail Eris and praise Cecil for this board because there are a number of people here to correct what I don’t pick up from personal reading, and probably wouldn’t pick up from personal reading either. There is no substitute for sharing ideas.
jmull, I wasn’t aware that Plato had much, if anything, to do with set theory which was, IIRC, originated by Cantor, Frege, et al circa 1800’s. Revolutionized math and all of that. I’ve never, ever seen Plato mentioned in a math book. Aristotle, of course, did much for the process of reasoning and what we intuitively call logic is largely his influence. But still, the Greek’s math has had little affect on us today except as a stepping stone. If you were to read Euclid’s “Elements” then go on to compare it to a modern geometry book, you’d think they were written in two different languages—even the translated ones! We couldn’t have gotten here without it, to be sure, but it has largely been filled and replaced like mineral deposits in fossilized bones.
All of them? Every single last one? You ARE aware that there are more than three religions in the world, aren’t you? Because I can’t think of any other explanation for such a blatantly stereotyped and painfully incorrect statement.
You’re not doing too well, Mr. Bunnyhurt.
Can I add that to my sig? 
Well, it isn’t Zeno proving motion is impossible, or Plato suggesting somewhere in the heavens there is an idealized “chair” on which all others are versions. I don’t think the goddess Sophia would frown on the idea that worrying about tomorrow when tomorrow never comes is foolish in all applications.
It seems like a like weaving “religion is the root of all evil” into “What do philosophers do” is a bit of a stretch.
Well, I suppose you went to a pretty lousy school. But I know where you are coming from – and that is exactly why I support school vouchers.
Say what? OK, maybe Marx was demonized. But Adam Smith, Thoreau, Emerson, Thomas Payne, Jefferson, among a few others are all philosophers I had to study in school. Sure, they didn’t make us read Mein Kamf. I don’t see any evidence of suppression. If they don’t have a class called philosophy that’s only because ultimately everything taught in school is philosophical at one level or another.
Well, I may be a deist and sympathize with those who live Christian lives – but I’m still a pragmatist at heart. Like you, I can see the controlling factors in my life, but as long as I’m content and others are unwilling to help themselves be free, there’s no reason for change. If circumstances change or I get motivated, my pragmatism may change.
If that is your line, then Zeno wasn’t a philosopher, nor Democritus, and so on – at least for the theories they are best known for.
Exactly. Brian’s idea that there is a “vast right wing conspiracy” keeping philosophy out of school is bizarre in this light.
That is an overly broad generalization. You can say that about pre-Torah Judaism, or some Protestant sects, and even some schools of Islam. You can’t say that about all religions.
Here’s a link to what one religion teaches about theft. You are greatly over simplifying the philosophical efforts of some religions to explain morality.
The two questions that are the common thread between philosophy as done by Plato and philosophy today are: (1) what can we know, and (2) how should we live. All philosophy can be viewed as an answer to either or both questions.
It’s true that fields that used to be considered part of philosophy are now independant - physics and math are one, optics is another - but that hasn’t made the core questions either answered or moot. We still ask after what we can know about ourselves and the universe, and we still ask for guidance in the conduct of our lives. Cognitive science and psychology are empirical disciplines that are supported by empirical assumptions; religion is supported by dogmatic assumptions. The aim of philosophy is to avoid those foundational assumptions that set the terms of the debate; you could say that philosophy aims at finding the right set of assumption on which build.
Given that, some philosophers (Richard Rorty, John Dewey) have said that the proper social role of the philosopher is that of cultural critic: a person who constantly examines the issues of the day, exposing their assumptions and the terms of the debate to criticism. She is a person who makes a wise comment on the unseen or the unknown about a particular issue; she is a guardian of critical thinking and a dialectical watchman.
If I had my way, everyone would be required to do a B.A. in philosophy after high school. While I didn’t leave university with particularly strong philosophical convictions, my mind was far sharper than it had ever been, and probably would ever be without the training. At the very least, it’s valuable as gym class for the mind.
pretend to be intelligent and waste other people time and collect a pay check. it’s worse than welfare. at least they don’t waste other peoples time.
took some course in engineering school b4 i dropped out.
the man was talking about the ancient geeks and whether time was linear or circular. and i’m thinking it’s 65 years after special relativity. so i volunteer that time is like a helix, a slinky. linear and circular characteristics in a single object, you just have to go to 3 dimensions.
he stands there staring at me with a blank expression.
Dal Timgar
You both were correct, I now believe that we should’ve started a new thread on the subject, no one knows we are debating religion. Oh well, there’s always “tomorrow…”
Jmull,
Not having philosophy in HS may be a national disaster for many reasons unrelated to casual information but related to information processing (you were referring to names as philosphy, I still think of ideas, like Plato’s chair, in fact I’m sitting in it right now). As for this elective class (so not to anger the preachers in town), the elementary logic alone would be worth it, which is hard to forget since we struggle for it daily.
I know a guy who was in my same undergrad program and went on to law school, but hated working in a legal sweatshop, so he got a great job teaching in an elite private school in Hawaii–you guessed it, critical thinking (to 8th graders). If I went down to my local school district today and proposed to teach such a class for free, although qualified, I’d be laughed out of the building.
Let me say again that reading philopsophy is critical in just knowing that such arguments exist. I meet people everyday who look at me like I’m insane for questioning Mormonism, they think it has been proven, and I’m not exagerrating. Same with ultra-conservatism and other ideas.
By the way, religious bans against theft is problematic because it means nothing religiously, everyone knows it is wrong because we all have something we value. What bothers me here is that is assumes a certain kind of desperate theft and ignores financial injustice. To think petty theft is a big religious question kinda assumes a hierarchy over poverty. Murder, rape, and assault are not wrong because religion said so, ask any victim. Rather, the “injustice” occurs when religion allows things to happen because they are not banned, or perhaps passively encouraged (such as gender bias and racism). That’s where religion gets into big trouble, for allowing crimes to happen by protecting dogma and hierarchy, not people in general (clitorectomy in the middle-east, for instance).
Also, minor quibble, but you needn’t put “vast right wing conspiracy” in quotes. I never said anything like that and, on another thread, someone did that very same technique and then people started quoting their quote again as if I really said what they were trying to mock using quotes. Thanks. Feel free to quote me anytime, sig or otherwise. To assume I am a troll assumes this is a thematically dedicated board.
Spoofer
All of them? Well, that depends if the divine realm is defined or not. Religion is not so broad of a description here. If the Supreme Court denies “non-traditional” religions from court protection, then the term is deemed limitable as related to dogma. I probably should have said “dogmatic religion,” but then too many people like Mormons and Catholics would say, “Oh, that’s not my religion. Phew!” Some even say Buddhism isn’t a religion. I wonder why not. Using the word “religion” as a catch-all does have problems, but it is used here as opposed to ethics, so hopefully only those who “profess” one religion over another and eschew ethics as “philosophies of men” would take offense. Notice that there is no such thing as general religion.
One of my professors has explained it about as well as I’ve seen it explained:
What is philosophy for?
Brian Martine
Professor and Chair
Department of Philosophy
The University of Alabama in Huntsville
“Good sense must be the best distributed thing in the world: for people generally think themselves so well provided with it that even those most difficult to please in all other things are not in the habit of wanting more of it than they already have.”
This is the way that Descartes chose to open a small but tremendously influential work called the Discourse on Method about halfway through the seventeenth century. On the face of it, it seems that he obviously intends to be ironic. If Descartes had really supposed that everyone was already sufficiently provided with “good sense,” he would scarcely have been bothering to detail a new method for the development of what he and others were calling “the new science.” On the other hand, he might be understood to mean just what he says, that he believes that everyone does have sufficiently good sense to understand things clearly -and for the same reason: if he didn’t think so, why bother to articulate a new method and publish it? Deciding which of these things he intends to say, or, perhaps, whether he actually means both, requires figuring out what he has in mind when he speaks of “good sense.” OK, you think, but why should I bother? I’d like to suggest that there are at least a couple of reasons why you should, one particular and one general, and in saying something about them, I hope to give you some idea of the point of studying philosophy.
While “good sense” is a literal translation of the expression Descartes used, le bon sens, it always seems to me that what he means is more closely tied to what we usually mean by the expression “common sense.” But what do we mean when we talk about common sense? Balanced judgment? Being able to cut through various silly ideas to see things “as they really are”? How exactly do we decide which judgments are balanced, what the world is “really” like? We often suppose common sense is just the ability to make clear decisions about such questions. But given lots of conflicting claims concerning the nature of things - whether we encounter those conflicts in a physics classroom, in the current political campaigns, or just in serious conversations with our friends - how are we to decide on the criteria that will allow us to make clear decisions? It often turns out that in the cases where this seems most important, the criteria are fuzzier rather than more distinct. As he mentions good sense (or common sense), Descartes is launching a proposal not about what people have meant by this in the past (his past), but about what he thinks they ought to mean by this in the future (our past). And everyone reading these paragraphs knows what he proposed, whether you are aware of it or not.
What he proposed was what came to be called “the scientific method,” the very method that in some version or other was introduced to all of you in the very early stages of your education. More important than that formal introduction was the informal introduction to this way of thinking about the world that you drew in along with the first breath you took in this century. A good deal of what most people mean by “common sense” these days is in fact just the method that Descartes was anxious to articulate and the conclusions about the world that have issued from it during the past several centuries. This is the “particular” reason I mentioned above for bothering to figure out what Descartes meant by “good sense.” What we call “common sense,” that is, the accepted assumptions on the basis of which we form our ordinary judgments about the world, is not what it is sometimes taken to be. Those assumptions are not eternal truths recognized and accepted by all people at all times. They are just assumptions. They are, in other words, certain ways of looking at the world which themselves have a history, which are invented at certain times by certain people, and which, like other such assumptions will probably outlive their usefulness and be replaced by other perhaps quite different views. But we can only think clearly enough to see this, and that means that we can only think clearly enough to modify our assumptions in such a way as to come up with better ideas, if we first identify them for what they are. And this leads to the “general” reason for trying to figure out what Descartes meant.
Just as you learn something crucial to and about your own thinking by finding out that a good deal of it is founded upon the ideas of someone you might never have heard of, you also learn something about your own ability to think and the responsibility that this ability carries along with it. Having discovered that what you took to be the Truth about things actually has more the character of a particular judgment - a carefully considered one, perhaps, but a judgment nonetheless - you find yourself in a position both exhilarating and alarming. You have the freedom to think in new and possibly quite different ways, to follow paths that you mark out for yourself by deciding which views you will accept and which you will reject, and this freedom is exciting. But it comes at a price. If you are free to mark out your own path, you are also responsible for making sure that it is a good one, or at least for trying to do so. And in any case, once having recognized the fundamental human freedom to think as you will, you cannot avoid the equally fundamental human responsibility for accepting the consequences of your ideas as they contribute to shaping the world around you. Learning to come to terms with this freedom and this responsibility is the crucial task of philosophical reflection, and it is a kind of learning in the absence of which there can be no hope of “good sense” now or in the future.
And some of them, at least, think well.
It is a skill I personally wish were more widely used and more highly valued in our society.
Plenty of good responses here.
I’ll just add that philosophy does what all of the liberal arts do: it teaches critical thinking. A smattering of philosophical training is useful no matter what field you eventually study because there will inevitably be someone somewhere who will try to snow you. A knowledge of engineering may make you a great engineer but it won’t protect you from being snowed. A gift with words may make you a great copywriter but it won’t protect you from being snowed either. Skill at comparing ideas and determining inconsistencies are what you need and studying philosophy can give you that skill.
Professional philosophers aren’t great in number. Neither are novelists. Does that mean the rest of us have nothing to gain from reading novels?
phi·los·o·phy
2 a : pursuit of wisdom b : a search for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative rather than observational means.
Surely every great scientific hypothesis started out as mere speculation.
Philosophers are not the ones to unravel the burning questions, but the ones to realize and vocalize the questions no one else has been considering. The sciences are the ones to prove the speculation true or false.
Well, seriously – philosophy is taught. But we can agree that schools could do a better job. OK?
That is why we should have school vouchers. If you think your public schools are being controlled by a religious group you should have the option of pulling your kids out.
Did you read the link I gave above regarding theft? I’m a little confused if you did and you just wrote what you wrote! You have the traditional Christian teaching completely upsidedown IF I’m understanding you correctly.
Sorry! I regeted that the second I submitted it. I think most people know I’m really quoting Senator Clinton, not you, but I should have made that more clear. I might do you good though to get out of Utah and see that the rest of us don’t have quite the same degree of cultural indoctrination that y’all have to put up with.
Oh. You mean FUNDIES. Then I agree with just about everything you’ve said.
I can think of few more useful to a society than her philosophers.
Saying that, I am reminded of this old joke:
The engineer: “How does this work?”
The physicist: “What makes this work?”
The mathematician: “Why does this work?”
The arts student: “Do you want fries with that?”
pan
More useful to society than her philosophers? You have already assumed forms of utilitarianism, sociology, nationalism, and workism.
Kabbes, of course I know what you mean. But do you know what I mean?
I won’t go as far as saying I’m a philosopher. I think it would be terribly embarassing to deal with the questions that followed that kind of statement. I will say two things, though. I’ve spent five years now pondering the nature of truth. (Not THE truth, but truth. I’m nitpicky about the distinction.) The conclusion I’ve come to regarding truth has forced me to reconsider some of my other beliefs, and what started out as one idea came to embrace about seven or eight others. My initial decision to ponder truth came from wanting to make sense of certain aspects of my life. I can’t speak for anyone else, but if anyone considers what I’ve done “philosophical,” then I guess I can say that philosophers generally try to make sense out of things.
Brian, touché.
But how could you miss the epistimological implications of my using the word “think”!
pan
[sub]ps in case it wasn’t obvious: yes, I do know what you mean.[/sub]