Working on some inforgraphics tackling gender bias a while back, I was'accused' of producing data visualization art. I defended the intellectual rigor of my work, yet lost the argument - my 'accuser' turned out to be the curator of data visualization art at the Tate Modern. He won the argument by pointing out that the work, though based on hard data, was designed to evoke an emotional rather than an intellectual response.
Ao much philosophy is taught as if it were a niche area of literary criticism, rather than as raw materials for the creation of algorithms for intentional living, it probably is fair to regard much philosophy as if art, or even art criticism.
There's something to be said for the notion that, in the modern world, anyone who is a "professional philosopher" is just incapable of doing the kind of "here's how you should live" work that dominates early Western and Asian philosophy. Among modern professions, the only ones that can bear the legal liability of such a line of inquiry are in the health sciences.
In this sense, philosophy professors cannot be doing what Socrates thought he was doing, except while teaching. But, as a rule, teaching is not considered the "productive work" of any professors. The "serious" work of academics is to produce tomes and articles, and to manage their citations like investments.
I don't understand where you got the idea that people who tell others how to live have legal liability: if that were the case your local preacher would be in serious trouble.
There's a thin line between cult and religion, and a lot of it has to do with institutional age. Although, yeah, there are a lot of christian, and buddhist for that matter, cults. Often these do end up breaching legal boundaries, as I've described, but more often they merely offend common morality or decency, which also reveals the problem of trying to tell people how to live, outside of accepted avenues (i.e. health sciences and, as you've pointed out, established religions).
I highly doubt that they are breaching legal boundries. Doctors only have a monopoly on formal medical advise- they do not have a monopoly on "telling people how to live". Nobody thinks their local preacher or philosopher is giving formal medical advise- so there is unlikely to be any liability at all outside of gratuitously bad behavior like telling people to drink bleach.
Wouldn't this imply that doctors, perticularly those working in mental health, are practicing philosophy on their patients while not being experts in it?
the wording of your parent comment is ambiguous (maybe on purpose), but the early (western) philosophers weren't so concerned with telling people how to live than they were with raising the question of what it means to lead a good life, which are two different things.
mental health professionals today are more concerned with the former than they are with the latter. the ones who do practice the latter are very marginalized in the united states (i heard it's less the case in europe), but they do really interesting political work that might or might not start a flame war if i talk about it here so i won't.
But that's really a problem with academia, not philosophy per se? I'm not sure e.g. academic engineers working in materials science are ready to just take the place of an engineer in a construction site.
(Then, people like Norvig are a counter-example to this claim. But positions created in MAGFA for top academics like Norvig, Varian, etc. will always have a tailor-made character and defer to celebrity status.)
Well, processing data correctly is a form of art. Raw data contain systemic biases and are not ethical. It takes an artist to cleanse data, and present them without bias in an ethical and moral way.
> Well, processing data correctly is a form of art. Raw data contain systemic biases and are not ethical. It takes an artist to cleanse data, and present them without bias in an ethical and moral way.
This is one of the most dystopian things I've read in recent memory. Raw data is bias but it's art to "cleanse" the data and make them "ethical and moral"? The system is bias, but the artist is without and can bring purity.
This is some truly Ministry of Truth level thinking and it's quite disturbing to know people genuinely believe this. No wonder we have a replication crisis.
I think of philosophy of the art of words and ideas, just like literature is generally the art of words and stories. But, for historical reasons, many people and most philosophers claim philosophy is much more than this.
Spinoza was convinced he was "engaged in the pursuit of truth", as the article writes, and he probably thought he had built a logical proof of the existence of god. But his concepts are fuzzy, so his reasoning is unprovable, and his apparent rigorousness is not at all scientific. Many philosophers disagree with his theories, and none of them are wrong or better or worse than Spinoza, since there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy.
Apart from these points (proof, progress, consensus), there are many indices for classifying philosophy among the arts. No one would claim to be an expert of a philosopher without reading and studying his book and articles. But, if the substance was more important than the form, it should not matter. One can master Gauss' mathematics or Einstein's physics without reading the original works.
Wouldn’t that imply that no philosophy is true? I think of it as the search for truths that we can’t empirically prove, contrasted to science and math which are purely logical. But math and science have their bases in philosophy through universal laws and propositions, which are unprovable but necessary.
Art is more concerned with human experience and seems like a different thing.
At the cost of being extremely annoying, what does "a truth we can't empirically prove" look like?
> Art is more concerned with human experience and seems like a different thing.
Isn't the same true for philosophy? Part of the reason why philosophy is a meaningful field of study as opposed to complete charlatanry is that it "points" towards parts of human experience that aren't quite captured by math/science/models. Philosophers trying to be natural scientists would make terrible philosophy and terrible science.
Minor nitpick:
> science and math
Science and math are very different beasts. Math is a meaningless game you play with symbols. I'm not serious, but I'm not joking either. There are zero assumptions of any kind mathematics makes (except primitive concepts and axioms, which are themselves mathematical objects), as the old joke goes: science talks about the universe, math talks about a universe. Math is kind of unique in this respect, no other discipline is quite like it.
To add some nuance, the boundary between science and philosophy is always changing as we get more information about how the world works. Philosophical truths help us make better decisions about the future.
DNA and quantum mechanics are 2 areas where the boundary between philosophy and science has shifted over time. All the modern talk about multiverses, universe simulations, and AGI seem philosophical, but might become scientific in the future. But people who believe in these concepts will take different actions than people who don’t, so you can’t say it just doesn’t matter because we can’t prove it yet.
I wasn’t trying to lump math and science together and agree they’re very different, although both based on core propositional truths that are taken on faith.
At the cost of being extremely annoying for the second time today, what does "a truth we can't empirically prove" look like?
> All the modern talk about multiverses, universe simulations, and AGI
None of the things you mention are "philosophical truths". The first is one of many interpretations of QM, the second is a meme, the third is a vague, unclear teleological goal of computer science. I'm not objecting to the fact that you can speculate, I myself said that pointing to new things, as vague and undefined they may be, is generally useful and stimulating. I'm objecting to the idea that you can have "truths you can't prove".
> I wasn’t trying to lump math and science together and agree they’re very different, although both based on core propositional truths that are taken on faith.
There's a difference between making a definite claim and pointing out that Newton's model allows the existence of such an object. I'm not going into "quid est veritas?" type of discussions because it's a bottomless pit that leads nowhere, but it seems to me like "black holes could exist" is a statement much like "an artificial general intelligence could exist". It's not ruled out by the model, but a-priori we have no idea.
Much of mathematics isn’t empirically provable, except in a very fuzzy sort of way. You prove math... with math. Not by conjuring up physical experiments. That’s called, well, physics.
I am a strong proponent of distinguishing „truth“ from „certainty“. That is to say, a theory (philosophical or not) might be true in the sense that it corresponds to the things it says something about. But since all human beings are fallible we can never be certain not to have made mistakes. So a philosophy can be true. But we can not be certain about it. EDIT: If OP writes that "there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy" they might imply that no philosophy is true. Yet I would only agree that no philosophy is certain.
> I think of it as the search for truths that we can’t empirically prove, contrasted to science and math which are purely logical.
What (empirical) scientists usually mean when they call a theory or hypothesis „empirically proven“ is that there is evidence that meets some arbitrary criterion of strength. What mathematicians usually mean when they call a theorem proven is that it can be logically deduced from a set of axioms. So not only is the word "proof" used very differently in (empirical) science and mathematics, the way to obtain such proofs is usually very different as well. To lump these procedures together under the term "purely logical" seems to me to mix up important differences.
> But math and science have their bases in philosophy through universal laws and propositions, which are unprovable but necessary.
Neither the laws and propositions in math nor in the (empirical) sciences are necessary in the sense that practitioners are forced to assume them. Nothing prevents anyone from assuming something else whenever they wish to and important discoveries have been made that way (e.g. non-euclidean geometry, theory of relativity). Maybe you refer to some other kind of necessity though.
Language vs. meta-language. I completely subscribe to parent's point of view: because concepts expressed in natural language are so massively overloaded, it's very hard to make precise statements.
When disciplines acquire their own method and formal language, they tend to splinter off philosophy. Think about mathematics, physics, biology, economics...
I do not understand what this is supposed to mean or demonstrate.
> because concepts expressed in natural language are so massively overloaded, it's very hard to make precise statements.
That's why philosophers clarify meanings and ask for clarification for terms when they think are vague. That something is "overloaded" (amphiboly) doesn't mean you can't determine which meaning is used or, right? When you read something, you're not grading papers. You're interpreting things in a sensible way.
> When disciplines acquire their own method and formal language, they tend to splinter off philosophy. Think about mathematics, physics, biology, economics...
Formalization isn't magic. To formalize something, you have to get to a place where you have a clear enough and correct enough understanding so that you can express it in that language. And in any case, philosophers do employ formalization when they think it useful. It isn't always. Frankly, even mathematicians, practitioners of the most formal of sciences, don't use formal methods to express their _reasoning_ in most cases.
> I do not understand what this is supposed to mean or demonstrate.
Parent said 'Stating "there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy" while then going on to do the same seems incongruent'. I was just refuting this. It's essentially the same argument as "everything is philosophy" or "everything is politics", technically true but only in a vacuous sense.
> That something is "overloaded" (amphiboly)
I don't mean this. If I say "automorphism", I mean one thing and one thing only, because formal languages allow us to have precise definitions. Natural language doesn't have that. Words like 'truth', 'beauty', 'justice' are vague, imprecise meshes of meaning, so much that making precise statements about them is extremely problematic even conceptually.
> Formalization isn't magic. To formalize something, you have to get to a place where you have a clear enough and correct enough understanding so that you can express it in that language.
I completely agree. One of the major contributions of philosophy is that it attempts to untangle the mess. I have already said that I find this useful and productive. I'm not bashing philosophers, here.
> And in any case, philosophers do employ formalization when they think it useful. It isn't always. Frankly, even mathematicians, practitioners of the most formal of sciences, don't use formal methods to express their _reasoning_ in most cases.
I don't think these two cases are even remotely comparable. Mathematicians certainly do write informally when they write proofs, but that's only a way of communicating the result to another human. Any proof could be, given enough time, be rewritten completely formally, for example in a way that could be checked by a machine. If it can't, then it's wrong.
Formalization employed by philosophers is essentially just a writing device they are using in order to prove a point. The subtext "we could break this down to a deduction tree, but it's too boring to actually do that" that underlies a mathematical proof is completely missing.
Many authors have written literature using mathematical notation. It doesn't make their books math, for the same reason.
> It's essentially the same argument as "everything is philosophy" or "everything is politics", technically true but only in a vacuous sense.
I'm not convinced that we need to reach for the everything-is-philosophy hammer in order to make a reasonable case that we are doing philosophy when we argue that, for example:
> Words like 'truth', 'beauty', 'justice' are vague, imprecise meshes of meaning, so much that making precise statements about them is extremely problematic even conceptually.
The problem isn't that it's possible to un-overload natural language - it's that the overloading is unconscious. In reality there are different meta-languages of relationships and assumptions built into natural language at every level of use and sophistication.
Formalisation will not fix this. It's just as likely to bake the unconscious assumptions into a formal language as to remove them.
Philosophy done well can un-overload those assumptions, but done badly it can also provide rhetorical frameworks for perpetuating assumptions that should really be questioned.
FWIW, I once read a claim that someone had found ca 30 different meanings of 'paradigm' in Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Both works might represent good practice of philosophy.
>> Stating "there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy" while then going on to do the same seems incongruent.
>> Language vs. meta-language.
> I do not understand what this is supposed to mean or demonstrate.
I believe the intended meaning is that there is a difference between statements within philosophy and statements about philosophy.
Here's an example of a statement within philosophy:
A) Every beginning is in time, and every limit of extension in space.
Here's an example of a statement about philosophy:
B) Statement A, along with the rest of metaphysics, is meaningless.
On the surface, this critique looks promising if you're a scientifically-minded person who doesn't want a bunch of philosophical bullshit in their worldview.
But the problem is: if statement B isn't philosophy, then what exactly is it?
> his apparent rigorousness is not at all scientific.
It is more scientific than Galileo, just less empirical.
Spinoza's contributions to thought lie on the logic axis, not the empirical axis. That didn't really get going until the British empiricists, culminating with Newton, who absolutely saw himself as a philosopher, and saw his physics as part of his philosophical work[1].
But Spinoza's historical axis includes Leibniz, on whose work both Gottlieb Frege and Bertrand Russell saw themselves as building when they formalized mathematical logic as we now know it[2][3]. Turing is another few steps down this road, and knew it[4]. Further down Spinoza's road we also get Kant, who Einstein targeted when he was trying to understand what space actually is[5].
It's also worth mentioning that the whole logic thing starts with the Greek philosophers, who saw themselves as extending Euclid's geometry into other domains. Aristotle formalized several still accepted forms of logical inference and rigorously taxonomized fallacies, as well as inventing the notion of taxonomies (and biology) to begin with[6]. Incidentally, much later, Descartes finished the work of applying Euclid's work to other domains, by marrying algebra and geometry[7], while trying to prove that God exists[8].
> there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy.
This is plainly false. Every philosopher in the Western canon saw themselves as refuting earlier philosophers and traditions. Sometimes, these refutations were so spectacular that they became sciences.
I don't know man. To me, even when these guys fuck up, they still produce an awful lot of cool tools.
> many people and most philosophers claim philosophy is much more than this.
Yes, philosophy is ultimately motivated by the search for truth. (Art, too, if we are talking about something like literature, is motivated by expressing the truth, otherwise it is worthless.)
> Spinoza was convinced he was "engaged in the pursuit of truth", as the article writes, and he probably thought he had built a logical proof of the existence of god [sic]. But his concepts are fuzzy, so his reasoning is unprovable, and his apparent rigorousness is not at all scientific.
Putting aside the question of whether this is true, let us assume it is. So what? This is what philosophical discourse will involve: clarifying what needs clarifying, arguing, counterarguing, etc. Second, you've fallen prey to the mystique surrounding the word "scientific" as if science were somehow more definitive or competent or whatever, or that none of these problems afflict science. And of course, that in itself is a philosophical assertion!
> Many philosophers disagree with his theories, and none of them are wrong or better or worse than Spinoza, since there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy.
They aren't? That, again, is a philosophical assertion. And the very act of defending it would tacitly presuppose that _your_ philosophical argument is better than Spinoza's, which would make it self-refuting. Because if it's all the same, then so your argument.
> Apart from these points (proof, progress, consensus),
What is a proof? An argument. People disagree over those.
What is progress? You assume there isn't contentious.
How does consensus make something true? (It doesn't.)
> No one would claim to be an expert of a philosopher without reading and studying his book and articles. But, if the substance was more important than the form, it should not matter. One can master Gauss' mathematics or Einstein's physics without reading the original works.
This is neither here no there. The reason an expert on Spinoza should have read Spinoza is because everything that is about Spinoza's work is commentary and all commentary involves interpretation. So, yeah, if you're a scholar of Spinoza, and we have surviving works by Spinoza, it would seem rather odd if you didn't know what Spinoza said and only what others have said about Spinoza. You might disagree. The same would hold if you were a scholar of Einstein. A physicist, however, is not a scholar of Einstein, and as such, is not so interested in what he thought per se, however illuminating the original texts might be.
Because philosophy is the precursor to science. The idea that one needed hypotheses which were then verified with rigorous experiments was not yet popular. It's the paradigm that came before science.
They were trying to do the same thing as scientists but did not have as strong of an approach.
Exactly; I can't see how someone can say you can't refute philosophy, as though it's not based on argumentation and premises that lead to a conclusion. When you demonstrate that a premise is wrong (e.g. philosophically, mathematically, empirically, etc.) then the philosophy (or rather, that argument for the philosophy) is 'refuted'.
> No one would claim to be an expert of a philosopher without reading and studying his book and articles. But, if the substance was more important than the form, it should not matter. One can master Gauss' mathematics or Einstein's physics without reading the original works.
I don't think that's fair. I'd generally expect an expert (a professor, say) to be familiar with the original work regardless of whether it's philosophy or physics.
You don't need to be fluent in Ancient Greek to get a philosophy degree. It's not as if there's an unwavering insistence on reading the original work in its original form.
I doubt there are many professors of mathematics who have read the original Gauss! Certainly in my field of mathematics, nobody ever talked about reading older work in its original. It feels like something only of interest for historians. Mathematical notation has improved immensely and the important ideas have been clarified and refined.
Broadly speaking, math is made up of theorems. The goal is to prove the theorem by establishing a proof, or disprove the theorem using a counterexample.
In math textbooks and courses I’ve had, there tends to be footnotes on who produced some foundational result (statement of the theorem, proof, or counterexample). So you study or learn about the original work, but you’re not doing so from the primary source (original work).
This could be because the proof of original work was:
- in a different language,
- required advanced knowledge the learner doesn’t have,
- a more simplified proof was found,
- a more enlightening proof was found,
- an informal proof suffices,
- the statement of the theorem is all that’s needed,
- the proof is left as an exercise to the reader,
- the proof is a special case of a more general proof,
- or any number of other reasons
What a dull essay by someone who studied lots of things about philosophy, but never practiced any. Which is, by the way, simply thinking about thinking. Complex terms and systems are strictly secondary, thinking is the thing. Questioning positions, wondering whether they are right or wrong for real — not because it's some logical exercise, what is true and what is false in principle, how do thoughts form and interact with each other, and so on. From this grow all big questions about the truth itself, and the world as a whole. And most often the ideas to doubt are your own, but self-criticism is all but absent from the essay.
Even according to his own standard of “practical utility” (ugh), philosophy would help a lot. It would probably prevent relying on textbook stereotypes, like the one about “Dark Ages”, and looking condescendingly on all those “stupid ancient people”, help believe less in common propaganda, and generally hint that 19th century militant scientism is a bit dated position (in addition to being not that smart from the start). Of course, cork hats and cranium measurements fell out of fashion, but the rest looks quite familiar in people who are so loudly happy about “SCIENCE!!!”. Obviously, the description of “science” presented is as far from real science as this description of philosophy is far from real philosophy.
I'm reminded of a story from "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" where he asks a bunch of philosophy graduate students on what the definition of a certain phrase was, and everyone actually had a different idea. This ambiguity of language is why in my opinion philosophy is most certainly an art and not a science.
Ya. I started chewing thru History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast last year. It's been great. Learning that many of our current debates are millennia old helped me calm down.
Regrettably, since I skipped college, my awareness of the classics and liberal arts is very deficient.
Now I firmly believe K-12 curriculum should include (age appropriate) ethics, civics, classics, logics, epistemology, etc. In response to "fake news", some progressives are advocating "media literacy". That's not nearly ambitious enough.
Philosophy can be thought of as a field of study akin to psuedo science. Think about it. There is a philosophy of aesthetics and religion along with a philosophy of science and logic.
Science and logic attempt to describe something central to the universe while religion and aesthetics are central to only the human experience. To place the two in the same box is a huge category error akin trying to scientifically derive creationism.
Philosophy is essentially just a mish mash of deep thoughts and ponderings of unrelated topics. There is no deeper overarching connection here. Academia came to realize later that certain deep thoughts were “better” then others and formalized those deep thoughts into math and science.
Historically things like science and math and logic comes from “philosophy” but ultimately philosophy is just an old way of thinking in the sense that we as humans now have enough information to understand that aesthetics, religion and science don’t belong in the same category. Philosophy is a outmoded concept that only is still around for the same reason technical debt in software is still around.
The inevitable philosophers response to this is that all experience is technically human in nature. We cannot experience the universe without human bias injected into the observation thus it is not a category error to place Christianity in a field side by side with number theory because it’s all human made up stuff anyway.
To which I respond that all of academia is structured around hypothetical axioms. We can’t prove anything is real but we assume it’s all real. We can’t prove that there is any other way to experience the universe outside of the human experience yet we still assume and structure our science such that the human experience is not central to the universe. Our observations of the universe lead us to believe that the human experience is just a random phenomena in the corner of some galaxy and that is the best available information we have. To discuss anything outside of what we know is like trying to ask someone who is born blind to describe color.
That's perhaps a bit too harsh an assessment of the field. Betrand Russell, in his "A history of western philosophy" defines Philosophy as a no man's land or speculative region between religion/theology and science. It is a bucket of thought which is sceptical, probing, speculative of itself and the world. It can sometimes turn into science, and sometimes otherwise. Essentially it can be seen as an expression of human curiosity, which is the seed of definite knowledge.
How can my judgement seem harsh when you basically said the same thing I said? Philosophy is artistic pseudo scientific speculations and we are both in 100% agreement here.
Can such speculations lead to real science? Sure. Does this continue to make the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science being placed in the same “philosophy” bucket a category error? Yes. You can still speculate on science within science and you can still speculate on religion within religion. No need to classify both under “philosophy”
Pseudo refers to pretensions/shams. Philosophy need not pretend to be science, it can openly speculate, without the rigors of the scientific method. In science, a hypothesis can be made, but that has very many parameters restricting what can be said through it.
I believe it is a bit pretentious. The word philosophy lends extra weight to what is otherwise random speculations. Many philosophers in fact claim that science is a just sub field of philosophy and that philosophy is “above” it.
I highly disagree with this.
A statement made on the basis of logic or science has more weight then any sort of random speculation made in “aesthetics” yet philosophy places them on equal grounds. There is a clear error in hierarchy here similar to the phylum based nomenclature in biology.
> Many philosophers in fact claim that science is a just sub field of philosophy and that philosophy is “above” it.
You've really totally misunderstood what they were describing. Metaphysics is "above" physics because it is about what the word "physics" even means. For example, Newton's first big intellectual accomplishment was to have a strongly opinionated metaphysics which supported his experimental and theoretical approach.
In the contemporary world, proper metaphysics (as described above) is mostly done by physicists themselves, occasionally in cooperation with philosophers. See [1] for a fairly recent example. Similarly, proper metamathematics is most often done by mathematicians, with occasional contributions from philosophers, e.g. [2].
Any time a physicist is writing about the fundamental methodology of the discipline, or about a topic that is not, for now, empirically testable, he is doing metaphysics, often with a hefty dose of mathematics.
The problem here is you have the philosophy of animism sitting side by side with metaphysics as if there’s some meta category that encapsulates the two.
Yeah I can meta the entire universe together if I wanted to. What’s the set of all things that can be talked about? Metaphysics and the Milesian school of thought are both elements in that set. There’s no point in this categorization however compelling you find the arguments within their respective fields.
> you have the philosophy of animism sitting side by side with metaphysics as if there’s some meta category that encapsulates the two.
Sorry, what are you referring to? Where do these things sit side by side?
> Yeah I can meta the entire universe together
Metaphysics is very specifically about the underlying assumptions of physics. It always has been, even though the meaning of the word physics has changed wildly over time. The current meaning of "physics" dictates that it is a metaphysical question whether, for example, quantum theory or string theory are correct. This is metaphysical because it is about underlying assumptions which cannot yet be tested experimentally.
You seem to be taking anyone who uses the word "metaphysics" as actually doing metaphysics, but no professional physicist or philosopher believes this. Some people may well call themselves "physicists" and then talk about ghosts, but it is nonetheless widely understood in the profession that physics is in no way about ghosts. This is similarly true of metaphysics and animism.
When we speak of historical beliefs that are no longer current in civilization, then sure, animism might show up and be presented as "metaphysical", but so what? Newton was wrong about corpuscles being the fundamental unit of matter, but that doesn't mean he wasn't doing physics. It just means he was wrong about part of his system of thought, which is always to be expected when looking at past thinkers.
> sorry, what are you referring to? Where do these things sit side by side?
Animism sits side by side with metaphysics under philosophy.
>...
When I say meta Without “physics” as a suffix I mean anything from metareligion to metagrassonyourlawn. You can even metameta. I’m saying the legitimacy of talking about metaphysics is different from the legitimacy of say metatoilets.
Animism is a philosophy btw. And it’s still a philosophy to this very day. This isn’t history class that I’m talking about here. If some scientist is wrong about something, that hypothesis is discarded from science. Animism has not been discarded... it is a school of thought discussed side by side with the philosophy of science. This is the category error I’m talking about.
You're really just arguing against an imagined opponent, at this point.
> Animism is a philosophy btw. And it’s still a philosophy to this very day.
No it isn't. I'm talking about professional philosophers.
> it is a school of thought discussed side by side with the philosophy of science.
No it isn't. Not by anyone that matters.
> When I say meta Without “physics” as a suffix I mean anything from metareligion to metagrassonyourlawn.
I don't care. Metaphysics is where "meta" comes from, and it has a specific meaning and interpretation, within professional philosophy. You are not referring to this specific meaning, and so I don't care what your thoughts are anymore.
Animism is still discussed under a new pseudonym: Philosophy of religion.
> You're really just arguing against an imagined opponent, at this point.
Nonsensical statement. You're either calling yourself imaginary or your saying you completely agree with me and I'm completely right and therefore I am arguing with no one.
Random speculations? Certain philosophies at least survived the test of time (we are talking about millennia) while we still have to see a scientific theory survive a handful of centuries...
Of course I'm pushing back with my statement, but really claiming philosophy is "random speculations" sounds really uninformed and naive.
That's the problem with philosophy. It's archaic. It doesn't self improve. Christianity and Muslims have been around almost as long as philosophy. It doesn't make their opposing views automatically valid nor does it eliminate the randomness of some arbitrary beliefs in each respective religion (why is jesus named jesus, for example).
Feel free to consciously ignore the developments of the last few thousands year, and to hold the immature view that religious myths have to be taken literally. This sounds like something my teenage nephew would say, so I have lost interest in arguing with you on these topics.
This is a personal attack which is against the rules here.
I think you took my words as an attack because you’ve been personally invested in philosophy for so long defending it like a cultist who refuses to take reality at face value. Greek mythology and Chinese mythology and most mythology were invented in the past as literal explanations of reality.
The penchant today to not take things literally is an excuse. Our understanding of reality has changed and the archaic explanations of of the past no longer work yet blind loyalty still binds you to religious explanations. This is why people twist the explanations and say to not take them literally. Were people in the past so stupid that they had to wrap every explanation in the symbolism of a fantastical myth? Doubtful. This is more likely the excuse made by someone who cannot reconcile rationality with there loyalty to a religion.
I don’t think you actually lost interest. I think you just know you lost.
Such empty words. Calling my views immature and using other insults and saying I'll never understand are methods used to ignite war. You lost, and youre lashing out.
You had a simple option. Explain your point, but you failed to do that. You resorted to insults and now you suddenly want peace? Contradictory and emotional reactions are a sign of impending loss.
What I write is inexplicably true and you are scared. Because what I write is tearing down beliefs you've invested years in and you can't face the truth. Your insult is a defensive wall to protect that belief.
If logic was available to defend your beliefs you would've used it. Here's your final chance.
I never claimed you will never understand. I said the exact opposite (read again), and again you are twisting my words to play a pointless game that you so much want to win, it seems so important to you because you keep on using these childish words win/lose... shrug.
I am definitely attacking your arguments, which I find ignorant. Not you. I don't care, I don't know you.
It's factually wrong to claim that religious myths are to be taken literally or that they were ever meant to do so. Or that philosophy is random speculations. You are missing the concept of "plausibility" as opposed to truth, which would help you navigate these topics. I can suggest the book Perennial Philosophy by Huxley to start getting a cursory understanding of what we are talking about here, which ultimately boils down to the inability of language to capture transcendental experiences which every society, all over the planet for the whole of recorded history had and thought about capturing in stories that survived to these days. To call that "random speculations" is so ridicule that can hardly be commented against.
What you write is not tearing anything down, is making me laugh, actually: it sounds exactly like me 20 years ago.
>I am definitely attacking your arguments, which I find ignorant. Not you. I don't care, I don't know you.
You think people are so stupid that some technicality like this isn't a personal attack? Arguments can't know things therefore arguments can't be ignorant. Only people can be ignorant. You are insulting me 100 percent by calling me ignorant.
Your post is seething with personal attack.
>which ultimately boils down to the inability of language to capture transcendental experiences which every society, all over the planet for the whole of recorded history had and thought about capturing in stories that survived to these days.
Many people on HN trust material logic and science and hold my viewpoint of atheism. Talk about transcendence is not logical to them. To them and me the inability to describe trancendence indicates that it doesn't really even exist. It's just an emotion that that is the result of chemical reactions in your brain no different then what happens when someone gets a transcendental experience doing heroin or lsd. This is the opinion held by many on this site and many consider it to be far more "plausible" then your view point. They would argue that it is ridiculous to think that all religious documents are not written literally as if scholars were unable to comprehend the concept of a literal message. If you want someone to understand something you use literal messages not symbolic stories why would religious scholars not do the same? It is in fact ludicrous to believe that all religions are just some form of symbolic message as if the literal manuals we use in modern society to explain things are only a recent phenomenon.
This topic is a worthwhile debate but Your attitude is slander against the many who hold an opposing opinion.
The transgression here is that you called me and this idea held by many members of hn ignorant and you insulted your nephew and me and laughed in my face.
When you debate someone logically you must remain completely impartial. If you have to retort to personal insults I suggest you try that kind of thing in real life, see how far you can get.
I also suggest you read the rules of HN, don't presume the mods are so stupid as to not be able to see your intention. Your words are akin to: "I'm not calling you an idiot, it's just everything you do and say is idiotic and I'm laughing at it."
I believe that if you were completely confident about your views you wouldn't resort to these tactics. Some part of you knows that your beliefs stand on shaky grounds and you are again lashing out in a desperate attempt to hold on to these views.
You broke the site guidelines badly in this thread, repeatedly crossing into personal attack. Please don't post in the flamewar style here. It's not what this site is for.
> I believe it is a bit pretentious. The word philosophy lends extra weight to what is otherwise random speculations. Many philosophers in fact claim that science is a just sub field of philosophy and that philosophy is “above” it.
It can be above, below, side-by-side, wherever. Or nowhere. Or maybe impossible to say. Whatever the relation is, where is the possibility of pretension here? Philosophers make claims, scientists make claims too. But that is the characteristic of the practitioners, not the field of study.
Effort. You can create a field called the “philosophy of this rock sitting on my lawn.” And this field would fit your definition of philosophy. But there is a clear hierarchy here that is not being obeyed.
Religion from certain perspectives is just made up stories. Should these made up stories be made into a field of study that is a sibling branch of science? Call it the study of religion or made up stories, no point in calling it a philosophy and giving it the same weight as science.
Consider Newton. He pursued physical theories, alchemy and theological studies with similar amount scholarship and zest. His physical theories obtained popularity due to its utility. And his theological and alchemical studies didn't give the world any material benefits and so the world calls those areas of his output "random speculations". But at the core of all these three attempts is a probing, speculative mind. That is my definition of philosophy, that there is an intensely curious mind, which will pour forth effort in understanding the world (including oneself). Newton's subject area was called "Natural Philosophy" for nothing. There are less "successful" philosophers and streams of philosophy, of course.
‘A probing speculative mind” is the rule for what goes into philosophy? I’m sure that the people who came up with a technical basis for creationism also were probing and quite speculative making creationism a philosophy.
Some vague “ a probing speculative mind” is not a good definition for a field of study. It’s way to broad and lacks preciseness.
Philosophy is a PROCESS of enquiry (hopefully "skilled"). It is difficult to compress a long-running & haphazard process into precise definition. You can label the process, talk about various aspects of the process, share examples and so on, but it is perhaps not sensible to define it too precisely. Theories you get at the end of any process of enquiry, whether they are workable or not, are PRODUCTS. Products by their very nature will be well-defined or precise.
Sure but teaching you how to think doesn’t address the category error I’m describing here.
A lot of religious people ascribe to a religion because some aspect of that religion helped the in some way. Does this make all aspects of the religion the absolute truth? People following this flawed wisdom end up supporting creationism as the one and only truth. Are people doing the same thing with philosophy?
Sure you can learn logic from a philosophy class, but that logic cannot in turn explain why “aesthetics”, “religion” and “ethics” is a sibling philosophical field of study to “science”.
Asking the right questions doesn't negate the fact that there's a category error here. Either way, "asking questions" is not what people classically think of when they talk about philosophy.
The category error exists whether or not the questions are right or wrong, it is irrelevant to my point.
Let me put it this way. Part of philosophy is the Milesian school of thought. The idea that everything is made of water. A completely ludicrous idea that I would argue makes the practitioner ask the wrong questions as we now know things are made of complex particles.
Does this have anything to do with the category error I’m describing? No. Science and the Milesian school of thought simply don’t belong together regardless of what right or wrong questions your favorite field makes you ask.
> Science and logic attempt to describe something central to the universe while religion and aesthetics are central to only the human experience. To place the two in the same box is a huge category error akin trying to scientifically derive creationism.
I do not see in what respect this might be a category error. The „box“ all these things are put into is the box of things we can ask questions of the form „What do we mean when we talk about X?“ about. This is possible for religion, science, aesthetics and logic likewise. And that’s what philosophers are doing.
In that sense your own post is engaging in the very philosophy you deem obsolete. Not only do you reflect on what we actually refer to when we talk about philosophy – thus engaging in metaphilosophy – your entire last paragraph is full of metaphysical and epistemological theses about the world and our knowledge of it. This is the problem of most critics who want to reject philosophy as a whole. They cannot argue for their thesis without already starting to philosophize themselves.
Classic. Every philosopher responds with “your argument is philosophy, it’s ironic.”
Sure if you classify all deep thought as philosophy then any argument against philosophy that is deep is in itself philosophy. It’s just meta games with words no point in bringing it up.
Your argument basically says philosophy is an umbrella term for everything in existence. There’s no point for such a term that asks “what do we mean when we talk about x”. In fact such a term already exists without the pretentiousness. It’s called “definition” you can look up the definition of science and religion on Wikipedia. Does that make Wikipedia a philosophy web site?
> Sure if you classify all deep thought as philosophy then any argument against philosophy that is deep is in itself philosophy. It’s just meta games with words no point in bringing it up.
I did not classify all deep thought as philosophy but a very specific subset of thought: answers on questions of the form „What do we mean when we talk about X?“. Reflections on our own concepts if you will. The point of bringing it up is that as far as I can see you are taking a self-contradictory position.
I agree that you can answer the question „What do we mean when we talk about X?“ with a definition. That is one way of understanding the question. Yet we judge definitions to be inappropriate when it doesn’t capture what we _actually_ mean when we talk about X (just as your rhetorical question suggests that defining Wikipedia to be a „philosophy web site“ is inappropriate). So there is obviously a second meaning to the question „What do we mean when we talk about X?“, one that is not asking for a definition of X but for our concept of X on which we judge definitions to be appropriate or inappropriate. It is this latter sense in which I consider philosophy to be concerned with that question.
X can be anything on the face of the universe. ‘What do we mean when we talk about all deep thought?” It is not a subset, it’s the set of all things that can be x. It’s really just a huge black hole whenever philosophers act smug and bring this up.
Basically by placing “logic” under philosophy all logical arguments against philosophy become contradictory. Just make up a field called religionology and have logic and worshipping a cat god as it’s main tenants. Then any “logical” argument against it is part of “religionology” and therefore contradictory. Let’s all worship cats now because no logical argument can prove religionology wrong.
> one that is not asking for a definition of X but for our concept of X on which we judge definitions to be appropriate or inappropriate.
It’s still too broad. You can still apply this question to a rock on the ground. What do I really mean by that? Call it the philosophy of the rock and study it like I study science. Clearly there is a category error here as studying what I mean when I talk about that rock is not actually a philosophy.
Even if X could be "anything on the face of the universe“ (which I did not contend) it does not follow that philosophy is concerned with „the set of all things that can be x“ (which you seem to imply). I rather clearly stated that philosophy is instead concerned with the answers to questions of the form „What do we mean when we talk about X?“
Your „religionology“ argument surely has a point. The critic of religionology would have to specifically criticize the worshipping of the cat rather than religionology as a whole. So you as a critic of philosophy would likewise have to target those aspects of philosophy you don’t practice yourself in the very moment you are arguing against it. That is indeed my point when claiming that you contradict yourself. I believe your criticism would benefit from nuance.
> studying what I mean when I talk about that rock is not actually a philosophy.
I agree. I think the misunderstanding lies in your belief that X can be anything on the face of the universe. Not everything is equally worth asking the question what we mean when we talk about it. By popular convention, religion, science, aesthetics and logic are worth it. Philosophy therefore turns to them rather than rocks.
By contending nothing (YOU) imply anything. You need to type class your variable, otherwise it's assumed to be of type Any.
>That is indeed my point when claiming that you contradict yourself. I believe your criticism would benefit from nuance.
The nuance is just missed by you. I did address this. Multiple times. My initial post did mention that science and logic arose out of philosophy (and by implication is a part of it). The failure in this case is technically not on me, it's on your usage of the argument.
>I agree. I think the misunderstanding lies in your belief that X can be anything on the face of the universe. Not everything is equally worth asking the question what we mean when we talk about it. By popular convention, religion, science, aesthetics and logic are worth it. Philosophy therefore turns to them rather than rocks.
And my claim, which you don't agree with, is that aesthetics is just like the rock when compared to philosophy of science. That is the category error. If you can lump science with religion then you can lump it with rocks too.
If you claim X is not anything that can possibly exist. Then type class X for me. What is it? Formalize your claim. Because by not type classing X you've basically said anything goes or you have not said anything meaningful at all. It's equivalent to saying "My argument is X" and then not defining it.
This is the essence of the argument. My claim is basically X is typed really poorly and arbitrarily with little formalism let alone sense.
I did not say that I contend nothing but that I did not contend that X could be „anything on the face of the universe“. But even if I did contend nothing I certainly wouldn’t imply anything. How does contending nothing imply something? What kind of reasoning is this?
> The nuance is just missed by you. I did address this. Multiple times. My initial post did mention that science and logic arose out of philosophy (and by implication is a part of it). The failure in this case is technically not on me, it's on your usage of the argument.
You are criticizing philosophy (as a whole) as „essentially just a mish mash of deep thoughts and ponderings of unrelated topics“, „archaic“ and „just an old way of thinking“. Now you insist that you meant science and logic to be by implication a part of philosophy. So are you saying that they are archaic as well? You can’t have it both ways. If you don’t include science and logic in your criticism you should clarify which parts of philosophy you reject. That would be the nuance I am missing.
> If you claim X is not anything that can possibly exist. Then type class X for me.
I attempted to type class X in my last comment: X is what – by popular convention – is worth asking the question what we mean when we talk about it. So I have to concede: That could indeed be anything. But in fact it isn’t. So I’m still failing to grasp the relevance of your argument. One day you could probably ask yourself what you mean when talking about a rock and call that philosophy because it would be considered worthwhile. So what?
> This is the essence of the argument. My claim is basically X is typed really poorly and arbitrarily with little formalism let alone sense.
Do you have the same demands on your own area of expertise? Would you mind formalizing it non-arbitrarily? I guess that would help me understand your expectations.
EDIT: Removed a remark that was due to a misunderstanding.
>I did not say that I contend nothing but that I did not contend that X could be
You don't have to say that you contended nothing in order to contend nothing. Simply by not contending anything and creating some random variable X and not even hinting at would X could be is equivalent to contending nothing.
>Now you insist that you meant science and logic to be by implication a part of philosophy
Just because "logic" is part of "religionology" doesn't mean it lends any form of credibility to it. "Religionology" is still crap as a whole even though someone decided to conveniently include "logic" as a part of it. It's the same with philosophy. The whole thing is illegitimate as a whole and "logic" conveniently being part of it doesn't change that the fact that overall philosophy is akin to psuedo science.
You can't even say Scientology is completely wrong. There has got to be moral tenants even in Scientology that are correct. But none of these things allows Scientology to be even remotely legitimate.
>by popular convention
That's your type class? So Philosophy is the study of anything that is "popular." That's weak. So anything we humans find as popular is now philosophy.
The relevance of my argument is that Scientology has popularity. Creationism has popularity. Anime has popularity. There is no legitimate academic field on earth that just picks and chooses what to think about based purely on popularity. And this is precisely where the problem lies.
Because all the fields of study in philosophy are chosen by "popularity" or aka "arbitrarily" you get these strange lumps of studies that have nothing to do with each other. How does logic have anything to do with aesthetics? Why call both of these things "philosophy"
Popular convention is essentially the same as anything goes. So Philosophy is essentially a mishmash of deep thoughts of whatever people deem popular. This is the conclusion given by your own rationale.
>Do you have the same demands on your own area of expertise? Would you mind formalizing it non-arbitrarily? I guess that would help me understand your expectations.
Yes. There is a much more narrow set of demands within any field of expertise. If I'm an aerospace engineer it means building machines related to flight, not building machines related to what's popular convention.
What other field on earth is basically the study of the meaning of X where X anything that is "popular convention"? Literally that's like the broadest definition ever. Comes close to the study of "everything" which is essentially the most pointless field of study.
Science and philosophy are complementary to each other, but it would be a mistake to take science as the ultimate arbiter of what reality is. That is not science business, that is exactly philosophy business. Science is the practice of finding theories which can predict the patterns of blinking lights and ticking sounds of our sensors and instruments. In other words, it describes the behavior of the universe, while being agnostic on its nature. Philosophy on the other hand is concerned with what the universe intimately is.
They are complementary because they inform each other and philosophy must stay coherent with empirical findings, but we also do science driven by certain assumptions which come from philosophy (materialism is a world-view, aka a philosophy).
Science and philosophy have very different validity constraints, for instance, while science should be predictive, philosophy only needs to be internally consistent and parsimonious.
They are the sides of the same coin, the what and the how.
I think it's ludicrous to think that evolved monkeys will "figure out reality". No, the best we can do is to create for ourselves a coherent, empirically verified, integral and parsimonious world-view, and we will call that reality. This will come from philosophy, it will be informed by science sure, but those very scientists will be doing philosophy when interpreting their behavioral findings.
Science is not the ultimate arbiter. There is no arbiter, foundational science rests on axiomatic assumptions and even with these assumptions in place it is not possible to prove a any statement to be true within the framework of science. Disproof is even technically not possible due to limited accuracy of our observational tools.
You have a limited fuzzy understanding of science and I believe it is interfering with how you interpret the fusion of philosophy and science how it generates category errors.
The same can be said of your understanding of philosophy and the ranking of your comments is telling.
There is no category error. You are just simulacring one to put science on a higher pedestal because it is evident you have vested interest. If you'd actually analyze why you consider science superior to philosophy, you would be hard pressed not to notice that they are both endeavor of the human intellect that simply happen to use different axioms and validity constraints. It is just as "random", and as you mention in your very last comment, ultimately non falsifiable. How can there be a category error when they share such fundamental characteristics? The only thing that leaks out of your arguments is that you just "don't like" philosophy.
> How can there be a category error when they share such fundamental characteristics? The only thing that leaks out of your arguments is that you just "don't like" philosophy.
Because every possible thing you can think of as a statement in the universe is unfalsifiable. Every single religion, to theory, to poem uttered by a little kid. Yet although they share the same flaw, Not all of these things are worth studying nor are they worth placing in the same random category.
Only specific things line up with observation consistently according to our best available observations. Religion and ethics are not among these things. Logic and probability is. So why place these two things side by side and call it philosophy? It’s like randomly creating the philosophy of the paint on that wall and studying it as much as science. Both are completely arbitrary choices.
Personally, I do "formal philosophy" at least to some extent/in some papers, i.e., lots of logic, decision theory, a bit of applied mathematics. This kind of analytic philosophy superficially looks like science, at least to people who don't know much about the STEM fields. However, in my opinion it is clearly not science.
IMHO, it's best to take philosophy as a discipline on its own. If I am pressed to decide between art and science, I'd call it an art, if not to annoy those people who erroneously believe that philosophy is a science. I personally find it hard to accept any discipline that does not follow the scientific method a science. Many other parts of the humanities in my opinion do not really qualify as science either. Or, perhaps they could be called "soft sciences" or "intellectual studies."
However, philosophy is in the same boat as mathematics in this respect, which is also traditionally not considered a science but rather a discipline of its own, pursued for its own sake and with its own evaluation criteria. Few would call mathematics an art, though, or would they? I'm not sure.
> Few would call mathematics an art, though, or would they? I'm not sure.
Many would, precisely because it is not empirical, as indicated by the fact that mathematics departments are often in Arts faculties.
As Sir Michael Atiyah put it: "The art in good mathematics, and mathematics is an art, is to identify and tackle problems that are both interesting and solvable."
Mathematicians will often wax philosophical when speaking about mathematical beauty and elegance, which is widely considered to be a central pursuit of mathematics, second only to correctness.
The problem here is that too many people are trying to use the word "science" to mean "the only thing that produces knowledge", in which case "mathematics is not a science, but does produce knowledge" is a heretical statement, even though a sizable portion of mathematicians would agree with it.
"Mathematical induction" is a deductive proof technique with an unfortunately confusing name, but unrelated to the inductive reasoning of empirical science.
Not true. Classically, philosophy was most certainly about the truth. How could you know what better living is without knowing the truth? What "better" or "living" really are? Ethics, which is about what a good life is, depends on an understanding of human nature.
What do you think Socrates was doing when he attacked the sophists of Athens? Living better? I guess, if you like taking hemlock.
That is precisely why Socrates did what he did. And the truth is certainly important for living better—but there is knowledge in philosophy that goes beyond verbal truths.
Philosophers asked metaphysical and epistemological questions in ancient Greece, India and China as well as questions about how to live a good life. Philosophy has always been plenty diverse.
I disagree. Classically, philosophy was about establishing truth (which is why it is called philosophy - literally love of knowledge). But establishing truth was seen as a subset of better living.
Sure, if you want to spite the bullshit artists in the field by calling what they're doing "performance art", that's fine. But if you're a real philosopher, then you are ultimately interested in the truth by definition, while recognizing that it isn't always easy to get to, that it might take a lot of effort to even put together a sensible response or claim in the first place, and even more time refining the position in an engagement with other philosophers. So in that sense, the philosophical disciplines are sciences, and in fact, the highest and most general sciences. No other science can answer metaphysical questions, for example. Sure, other sciences can inform the discussion, but they cannot replace the philosophical science that draws from them.
The article is behind a paywall, so I could not read beyond the first couple pages or so, but from the comments I sense that there is some strange conviction that philosophy is ultimately an obsolete kind of wankery that the empirical sciences have long since superseded. Of course, this is rather a sign of profound ignorance and philistinism rather than a statement about how things actually are.
Very hard to definite art as qm constructuinis quit an art. That is why I love the Popper Criteria can it be refuted. And may I add is that the theory is trying its best to be refuted. If it is, science. If it is not, arts.
And any good effort is an art. Unless some has to add an element of empathy, demonstrating something extra.
Not a perfect train of thought, but correct enough. If that is the hierarchy of the scientific world, I would argue that Philosophy is the "Mathematics" of art world. Every other art form is "applied Philosophy."
Philosophy is the (surprisingly fertile) dowager empress of the sciences.
Physics may be the king, and Math the queen, but they always seem to be grinding their teeth and wishing that old biddy Philosophy would just finally die one day, and hand over the last her her powers, and she never really does.
It's like a layer between the sciences and the people these days. You almost certainly will always need something like that. Science can make discoveries but it doesn't amount to much until they get transposed to the human realm.
"Everyone has to stand before a picture as before a prince, waiting to see whether it will speak and what it will say to him; and, as with the prince, so he himself must not address it, for then he would hear only himself. It follows from all this that all wisdom is certainly contained in the works of the pictorial or graphic arts, yet only virtually or implicitly. Philosophy, on the other hand, endeavors to furnish the same wisdom actuality, to make it explicit: in this sense, philosophy is related to the arts as wine is to grapes" (Schopenhauer)
I studied art as an option back in high school, and in College I studied it in a more "scientific" context like gestalt theory, color science, principles (proportions, perspective).
My opinion of art is that it is simply a computational resource that human beings use to store emotions.
It may be art from an artisan or craft used in a trade. It may be intellectual such as a mathematical proof. It may arguably be non-human art or bad art--but it is art.
Agreed, 'art' as something distinct from any other creative activity is a fairly recent western invention. If you take art at face value from it's basic definition it just means something like 'technique' and that meaning is good enough to make sense of it all imho.
Since it seems everyone is giving their opinion, I'll leave mine before reading the article: The concept of philosophy predates the concept of art, it also predates science. So, if one is more fundamental than the other(and fundamental TO the other emergence), doesn't this make the question pointless?
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadIn this sense, philosophy professors cannot be doing what Socrates thought he was doing, except while teaching. But, as a rule, teaching is not considered the "productive work" of any professors. The "serious" work of academics is to produce tomes and articles, and to manage their citations like investments.
-- Frank Zappa
mental health professionals today are more concerned with the former than they are with the latter. the ones who do practice the latter are very marginalized in the united states (i heard it's less the case in europe), but they do really interesting political work that might or might not start a flame war if i talk about it here so i won't.
You can give advice on how to live, many people do. There are whole booshelves of self-help advice which is literally giving advice on how to live.
(Then, people like Norvig are a counter-example to this claim. But positions created in MAGFA for top academics like Norvig, Varian, etc. will always have a tailor-made character and defer to celebrity status.)
This is one of the most dystopian things I've read in recent memory. Raw data is bias but it's art to "cleanse" the data and make them "ethical and moral"? The system is bias, but the artist is without and can bring purity.
This is some truly Ministry of Truth level thinking and it's quite disturbing to know people genuinely believe this. No wonder we have a replication crisis.
Spinoza was convinced he was "engaged in the pursuit of truth", as the article writes, and he probably thought he had built a logical proof of the existence of god. But his concepts are fuzzy, so his reasoning is unprovable, and his apparent rigorousness is not at all scientific. Many philosophers disagree with his theories, and none of them are wrong or better or worse than Spinoza, since there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy.
Apart from these points (proof, progress, consensus), there are many indices for classifying philosophy among the arts. No one would claim to be an expert of a philosopher without reading and studying his book and articles. But, if the substance was more important than the form, it should not matter. One can master Gauss' mathematics or Einstein's physics without reading the original works.
Art is more concerned with human experience and seems like a different thing.
> Art is more concerned with human experience and seems like a different thing.
Isn't the same true for philosophy? Part of the reason why philosophy is a meaningful field of study as opposed to complete charlatanry is that it "points" towards parts of human experience that aren't quite captured by math/science/models. Philosophers trying to be natural scientists would make terrible philosophy and terrible science.
Minor nitpick:
> science and math
Science and math are very different beasts. Math is a meaningless game you play with symbols. I'm not serious, but I'm not joking either. There are zero assumptions of any kind mathematics makes (except primitive concepts and axioms, which are themselves mathematical objects), as the old joke goes: science talks about the universe, math talks about a universe. Math is kind of unique in this respect, no other discipline is quite like it.
DNA and quantum mechanics are 2 areas where the boundary between philosophy and science has shifted over time. All the modern talk about multiverses, universe simulations, and AGI seem philosophical, but might become scientific in the future. But people who believe in these concepts will take different actions than people who don’t, so you can’t say it just doesn’t matter because we can’t prove it yet.
I wasn’t trying to lump math and science together and agree they’re very different, although both based on core propositional truths that are taken on faith.
> All the modern talk about multiverses, universe simulations, and AGI
None of the things you mention are "philosophical truths". The first is one of many interpretations of QM, the second is a meme, the third is a vague, unclear teleological goal of computer science. I'm not objecting to the fact that you can speculate, I myself said that pointing to new things, as vague and undefined they may be, is generally useful and stimulating. I'm objecting to the idea that you can have "truths you can't prove".
> I wasn’t trying to lump math and science together and agree they’re very different, although both based on core propositional truths that are taken on faith.
Sorry, my fault. Tomato, tomato.
Law of causation, Doomsday argument, complex processes that can't be recreated, historical processes which leave faint empirical markers, etc.
I am a strong proponent of distinguishing „truth“ from „certainty“. That is to say, a theory (philosophical or not) might be true in the sense that it corresponds to the things it says something about. But since all human beings are fallible we can never be certain not to have made mistakes. So a philosophy can be true. But we can not be certain about it. EDIT: If OP writes that "there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy" they might imply that no philosophy is true. Yet I would only agree that no philosophy is certain.
> I think of it as the search for truths that we can’t empirically prove, contrasted to science and math which are purely logical.
What (empirical) scientists usually mean when they call a theory or hypothesis „empirically proven“ is that there is evidence that meets some arbitrary criterion of strength. What mathematicians usually mean when they call a theorem proven is that it can be logically deduced from a set of axioms. So not only is the word "proof" used very differently in (empirical) science and mathematics, the way to obtain such proofs is usually very different as well. To lump these procedures together under the term "purely logical" seems to me to mix up important differences.
> But math and science have their bases in philosophy through universal laws and propositions, which are unprovable but necessary.
Neither the laws and propositions in math nor in the (empirical) sciences are necessary in the sense that practitioners are forced to assume them. Nothing prevents anyone from assuming something else whenever they wish to and important discoveries have been made that way (e.g. non-euclidean geometry, theory of relativity). Maybe you refer to some other kind of necessity though.
When disciplines acquire their own method and formal language, they tend to splinter off philosophy. Think about mathematics, physics, biology, economics...
I do not understand what this is supposed to mean or demonstrate.
> because concepts expressed in natural language are so massively overloaded, it's very hard to make precise statements.
That's why philosophers clarify meanings and ask for clarification for terms when they think are vague. That something is "overloaded" (amphiboly) doesn't mean you can't determine which meaning is used or, right? When you read something, you're not grading papers. You're interpreting things in a sensible way.
> When disciplines acquire their own method and formal language, they tend to splinter off philosophy. Think about mathematics, physics, biology, economics...
Formalization isn't magic. To formalize something, you have to get to a place where you have a clear enough and correct enough understanding so that you can express it in that language. And in any case, philosophers do employ formalization when they think it useful. It isn't always. Frankly, even mathematicians, practitioners of the most formal of sciences, don't use formal methods to express their _reasoning_ in most cases.
Parent said 'Stating "there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy" while then going on to do the same seems incongruent'. I was just refuting this. It's essentially the same argument as "everything is philosophy" or "everything is politics", technically true but only in a vacuous sense.
> That something is "overloaded" (amphiboly)
I don't mean this. If I say "automorphism", I mean one thing and one thing only, because formal languages allow us to have precise definitions. Natural language doesn't have that. Words like 'truth', 'beauty', 'justice' are vague, imprecise meshes of meaning, so much that making precise statements about them is extremely problematic even conceptually.
> Formalization isn't magic. To formalize something, you have to get to a place where you have a clear enough and correct enough understanding so that you can express it in that language.
I completely agree. One of the major contributions of philosophy is that it attempts to untangle the mess. I have already said that I find this useful and productive. I'm not bashing philosophers, here.
> And in any case, philosophers do employ formalization when they think it useful. It isn't always. Frankly, even mathematicians, practitioners of the most formal of sciences, don't use formal methods to express their _reasoning_ in most cases.
I don't think these two cases are even remotely comparable. Mathematicians certainly do write informally when they write proofs, but that's only a way of communicating the result to another human. Any proof could be, given enough time, be rewritten completely formally, for example in a way that could be checked by a machine. If it can't, then it's wrong.
Formalization employed by philosophers is essentially just a writing device they are using in order to prove a point. The subtext "we could break this down to a deduction tree, but it's too boring to actually do that" that underlies a mathematical proof is completely missing.
Many authors have written literature using mathematical notation. It doesn't make their books math, for the same reason.
I'm not convinced that we need to reach for the everything-is-philosophy hammer in order to make a reasonable case that we are doing philosophy when we argue that, for example:
> Words like 'truth', 'beauty', 'justice' are vague, imprecise meshes of meaning, so much that making precise statements about them is extremely problematic even conceptually.
Formalisation will not fix this. It's just as likely to bake the unconscious assumptions into a formal language as to remove them.
Philosophy done well can un-overload those assumptions, but done badly it can also provide rhetorical frameworks for perpetuating assumptions that should really be questioned.
>> Language vs. meta-language.
> I do not understand what this is supposed to mean or demonstrate.
I believe the intended meaning is that there is a difference between statements within philosophy and statements about philosophy.
Here's an example of a statement within philosophy:
A) Every beginning is in time, and every limit of extension in space.
Here's an example of a statement about philosophy:
B) Statement A, along with the rest of metaphysics, is meaningless.
On the surface, this critique looks promising if you're a scientifically-minded person who doesn't want a bunch of philosophical bullshit in their worldview.
But the problem is: if statement B isn't philosophy, then what exactly is it?
It is more scientific than Galileo, just less empirical.
Spinoza's contributions to thought lie on the logic axis, not the empirical axis. That didn't really get going until the British empiricists, culminating with Newton, who absolutely saw himself as a philosopher, and saw his physics as part of his philosophical work[1].
But Spinoza's historical axis includes Leibniz, on whose work both Gottlieb Frege and Bertrand Russell saw themselves as building when they formalized mathematical logic as we now know it[2][3]. Turing is another few steps down this road, and knew it[4]. Further down Spinoza's road we also get Kant, who Einstein targeted when he was trying to understand what space actually is[5].
It's also worth mentioning that the whole logic thing starts with the Greek philosophers, who saw themselves as extending Euclid's geometry into other domains. Aristotle formalized several still accepted forms of logical inference and rigorously taxonomized fallacies, as well as inventing the notion of taxonomies (and biology) to begin with[6]. Incidentally, much later, Descartes finished the work of applying Euclid's work to other domains, by marrying algebra and geometry[7], while trying to prove that God exists[8].
> there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy.
This is plainly false. Every philosopher in the Western canon saw themselves as refuting earlier philosophers and traditions. Sometimes, these refutations were so spectacular that they became sciences.
I don't know man. To me, even when these guys fuck up, they still produce an awful lot of cool tools.
---
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton-philosophy/
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/40693547?seq=1
[3] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-4020-524...
[4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/#TurMacCom
[5] https://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/si...
[6] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-biology/
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_geometry
[8] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/#FirResNewMisMe...
on the other hand many people and most artists claim art is much more than philosophy.
Nice.
Art is short for artifact, meaning human created. So of course philosophy is an art.
The "what is art" debate gets turgid when it drifts into "fine art" vs "pop art". Whatever. It's all art. Making distinctions is sophistry.
Yes, philosophy is ultimately motivated by the search for truth. (Art, too, if we are talking about something like literature, is motivated by expressing the truth, otherwise it is worthless.)
> Spinoza was convinced he was "engaged in the pursuit of truth", as the article writes, and he probably thought he had built a logical proof of the existence of god [sic]. But his concepts are fuzzy, so his reasoning is unprovable, and his apparent rigorousness is not at all scientific.
Putting aside the question of whether this is true, let us assume it is. So what? This is what philosophical discourse will involve: clarifying what needs clarifying, arguing, counterarguing, etc. Second, you've fallen prey to the mystique surrounding the word "scientific" as if science were somehow more definitive or competent or whatever, or that none of these problems afflict science. And of course, that in itself is a philosophical assertion!
> Many philosophers disagree with his theories, and none of them are wrong or better or worse than Spinoza, since there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy.
They aren't? That, again, is a philosophical assertion. And the very act of defending it would tacitly presuppose that _your_ philosophical argument is better than Spinoza's, which would make it self-refuting. Because if it's all the same, then so your argument.
> Apart from these points (proof, progress, consensus),
What is a proof? An argument. People disagree over those.
What is progress? You assume there isn't contentious.
How does consensus make something true? (It doesn't.)
> No one would claim to be an expert of a philosopher without reading and studying his book and articles. But, if the substance was more important than the form, it should not matter. One can master Gauss' mathematics or Einstein's physics without reading the original works.
This is neither here no there. The reason an expert on Spinoza should have read Spinoza is because everything that is about Spinoza's work is commentary and all commentary involves interpretation. So, yeah, if you're a scholar of Spinoza, and we have surviving works by Spinoza, it would seem rather odd if you didn't know what Spinoza said and only what others have said about Spinoza. You might disagree. The same would hold if you were a scholar of Einstein. A physicist, however, is not a scholar of Einstein, and as such, is not so interested in what he thought per se, however illuminating the original texts might be.
They were trying to do the same thing as scientists but did not have as strong of an approach.
That is not true at all. Much philosophy throughout history has been shown to be incorrect by later science, for example.
I don't think that's fair. I'd generally expect an expert (a professor, say) to be familiar with the original work regardless of whether it's philosophy or physics.
You don't need to be fluent in Ancient Greek to get a philosophy degree. It's not as if there's an unwavering insistence on reading the original work in its original form.
In math textbooks and courses I’ve had, there tends to be footnotes on who produced some foundational result (statement of the theorem, proof, or counterexample). So you study or learn about the original work, but you’re not doing so from the primary source (original work).
This could be because the proof of original work was: - in a different language, - required advanced knowledge the learner doesn’t have, - a more simplified proof was found, - a more enlightening proof was found, - an informal proof suffices, - the statement of the theorem is all that’s needed, - the proof is left as an exercise to the reader, - the proof is a special case of a more general proof, - or any number of other reasons
Even according to his own standard of “practical utility” (ugh), philosophy would help a lot. It would probably prevent relying on textbook stereotypes, like the one about “Dark Ages”, and looking condescendingly on all those “stupid ancient people”, help believe less in common propaganda, and generally hint that 19th century militant scientism is a bit dated position (in addition to being not that smart from the start). Of course, cork hats and cranium measurements fell out of fashion, but the rest looks quite familiar in people who are so loudly happy about “SCIENCE!!!”. Obviously, the description of “science” presented is as far from real science as this description of philosophy is far from real philosophy.
Deciding what to philosophize about is the real art.
Reading him, it's interesting how often "new ideas" are actually old ideas that have been forgotten and are now being recycled.
Regrettably, since I skipped college, my awareness of the classics and liberal arts is very deficient.
Now I firmly believe K-12 curriculum should include (age appropriate) ethics, civics, classics, logics, epistemology, etc. In response to "fake news", some progressives are advocating "media literacy". That's not nearly ambitious enough.
Science and logic attempt to describe something central to the universe while religion and aesthetics are central to only the human experience. To place the two in the same box is a huge category error akin trying to scientifically derive creationism.
Philosophy is essentially just a mish mash of deep thoughts and ponderings of unrelated topics. There is no deeper overarching connection here. Academia came to realize later that certain deep thoughts were “better” then others and formalized those deep thoughts into math and science.
Historically things like science and math and logic comes from “philosophy” but ultimately philosophy is just an old way of thinking in the sense that we as humans now have enough information to understand that aesthetics, religion and science don’t belong in the same category. Philosophy is a outmoded concept that only is still around for the same reason technical debt in software is still around.
The inevitable philosophers response to this is that all experience is technically human in nature. We cannot experience the universe without human bias injected into the observation thus it is not a category error to place Christianity in a field side by side with number theory because it’s all human made up stuff anyway.
To which I respond that all of academia is structured around hypothetical axioms. We can’t prove anything is real but we assume it’s all real. We can’t prove that there is any other way to experience the universe outside of the human experience yet we still assume and structure our science such that the human experience is not central to the universe. Our observations of the universe lead us to believe that the human experience is just a random phenomena in the corner of some galaxy and that is the best available information we have. To discuss anything outside of what we know is like trying to ask someone who is born blind to describe color.
Can such speculations lead to real science? Sure. Does this continue to make the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science being placed in the same “philosophy” bucket a category error? Yes. You can still speculate on science within science and you can still speculate on religion within religion. No need to classify both under “philosophy”
I highly disagree with this.
A statement made on the basis of logic or science has more weight then any sort of random speculation made in “aesthetics” yet philosophy places them on equal grounds. There is a clear error in hierarchy here similar to the phylum based nomenclature in biology.
You've really totally misunderstood what they were describing. Metaphysics is "above" physics because it is about what the word "physics" even means. For example, Newton's first big intellectual accomplishment was to have a strongly opinionated metaphysics which supported his experimental and theoretical approach.
In the contemporary world, proper metaphysics (as described above) is mostly done by physicists themselves, occasionally in cooperation with philosophers. See [1] for a fairly recent example. Similarly, proper metamathematics is most often done by mathematicians, with occasional contributions from philosophers, e.g. [2].
Any time a physicist is writing about the fundamental methodology of the discipline, or about a topic that is not, for now, empirically testable, he is doing metaphysics, often with a hefty dose of mathematics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singular_Universe_and_the_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_and_Refutations#Impact_...
Yeah I can meta the entire universe together if I wanted to. What’s the set of all things that can be talked about? Metaphysics and the Milesian school of thought are both elements in that set. There’s no point in this categorization however compelling you find the arguments within their respective fields.
Sorry, what are you referring to? Where do these things sit side by side?
> Yeah I can meta the entire universe together
Metaphysics is very specifically about the underlying assumptions of physics. It always has been, even though the meaning of the word physics has changed wildly over time. The current meaning of "physics" dictates that it is a metaphysical question whether, for example, quantum theory or string theory are correct. This is metaphysical because it is about underlying assumptions which cannot yet be tested experimentally.
You seem to be taking anyone who uses the word "metaphysics" as actually doing metaphysics, but no professional physicist or philosopher believes this. Some people may well call themselves "physicists" and then talk about ghosts, but it is nonetheless widely understood in the profession that physics is in no way about ghosts. This is similarly true of metaphysics and animism.
When we speak of historical beliefs that are no longer current in civilization, then sure, animism might show up and be presented as "metaphysical", but so what? Newton was wrong about corpuscles being the fundamental unit of matter, but that doesn't mean he wasn't doing physics. It just means he was wrong about part of his system of thought, which is always to be expected when looking at past thinkers.
Animism sits side by side with metaphysics under philosophy.
>...
When I say meta Without “physics” as a suffix I mean anything from metareligion to metagrassonyourlawn. You can even metameta. I’m saying the legitimacy of talking about metaphysics is different from the legitimacy of say metatoilets.
Animism is a philosophy btw. And it’s still a philosophy to this very day. This isn’t history class that I’m talking about here. If some scientist is wrong about something, that hypothesis is discarded from science. Animism has not been discarded... it is a school of thought discussed side by side with the philosophy of science. This is the category error I’m talking about.
> Animism is a philosophy btw. And it’s still a philosophy to this very day.
No it isn't. I'm talking about professional philosophers.
> it is a school of thought discussed side by side with the philosophy of science.
No it isn't. Not by anyone that matters.
> When I say meta Without “physics” as a suffix I mean anything from metareligion to metagrassonyourlawn.
I don't care. Metaphysics is where "meta" comes from, and it has a specific meaning and interpretation, within professional philosophy. You are not referring to this specific meaning, and so I don't care what your thoughts are anymore.
You're tilting at windmills my friend.
> You're really just arguing against an imagined opponent, at this point.
Nonsensical statement. You're either calling yourself imaginary or your saying you completely agree with me and I'm completely right and therefore I am arguing with no one.
Please try to keep this conversational logical.
Of course I'm pushing back with my statement, but really claiming philosophy is "random speculations" sounds really uninformed and naive.
I think you took my words as an attack because you’ve been personally invested in philosophy for so long defending it like a cultist who refuses to take reality at face value. Greek mythology and Chinese mythology and most mythology were invented in the past as literal explanations of reality.
The penchant today to not take things literally is an excuse. Our understanding of reality has changed and the archaic explanations of of the past no longer work yet blind loyalty still binds you to religious explanations. This is why people twist the explanations and say to not take them literally. Were people in the past so stupid that they had to wrap every explanation in the symbolism of a fantastical myth? Doubtful. This is more likely the excuse made by someone who cannot reconcile rationality with there loyalty to a religion.
I don’t think you actually lost interest. I think you just know you lost.
You had a simple option. Explain your point, but you failed to do that. You resorted to insults and now you suddenly want peace? Contradictory and emotional reactions are a sign of impending loss.
What I write is inexplicably true and you are scared. Because what I write is tearing down beliefs you've invested years in and you can't face the truth. Your insult is a defensive wall to protect that belief.
If logic was available to defend your beliefs you would've used it. Here's your final chance.
I am definitely attacking your arguments, which I find ignorant. Not you. I don't care, I don't know you.
It's factually wrong to claim that religious myths are to be taken literally or that they were ever meant to do so. Or that philosophy is random speculations. You are missing the concept of "plausibility" as opposed to truth, which would help you navigate these topics. I can suggest the book Perennial Philosophy by Huxley to start getting a cursory understanding of what we are talking about here, which ultimately boils down to the inability of language to capture transcendental experiences which every society, all over the planet for the whole of recorded history had and thought about capturing in stories that survived to these days. To call that "random speculations" is so ridicule that can hardly be commented against.
What you write is not tearing anything down, is making me laugh, actually: it sounds exactly like me 20 years ago.
You think people are so stupid that some technicality like this isn't a personal attack? Arguments can't know things therefore arguments can't be ignorant. Only people can be ignorant. You are insulting me 100 percent by calling me ignorant.
Your post is seething with personal attack.
>which ultimately boils down to the inability of language to capture transcendental experiences which every society, all over the planet for the whole of recorded history had and thought about capturing in stories that survived to these days.
Many people on HN trust material logic and science and hold my viewpoint of atheism. Talk about transcendence is not logical to them. To them and me the inability to describe trancendence indicates that it doesn't really even exist. It's just an emotion that that is the result of chemical reactions in your brain no different then what happens when someone gets a transcendental experience doing heroin or lsd. This is the opinion held by many on this site and many consider it to be far more "plausible" then your view point. They would argue that it is ridiculous to think that all religious documents are not written literally as if scholars were unable to comprehend the concept of a literal message. If you want someone to understand something you use literal messages not symbolic stories why would religious scholars not do the same? It is in fact ludicrous to believe that all religions are just some form of symbolic message as if the literal manuals we use in modern society to explain things are only a recent phenomenon.
This topic is a worthwhile debate but Your attitude is slander against the many who hold an opposing opinion.
The transgression here is that you called me and this idea held by many members of hn ignorant and you insulted your nephew and me and laughed in my face.
When you debate someone logically you must remain completely impartial. If you have to retort to personal insults I suggest you try that kind of thing in real life, see how far you can get.
I also suggest you read the rules of HN, don't presume the mods are so stupid as to not be able to see your intention. Your words are akin to: "I'm not calling you an idiot, it's just everything you do and say is idiotic and I'm laughing at it."
I believe that if you were completely confident about your views you wouldn't resort to these tactics. Some part of you knows that your beliefs stand on shaky grounds and you are again lashing out in a desperate attempt to hold on to these views.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It can be above, below, side-by-side, wherever. Or nowhere. Or maybe impossible to say. Whatever the relation is, where is the possibility of pretension here? Philosophers make claims, scientists make claims too. But that is the characteristic of the practitioners, not the field of study.
Religion from certain perspectives is just made up stories. Should these made up stories be made into a field of study that is a sibling branch of science? Call it the study of religion or made up stories, no point in calling it a philosophy and giving it the same weight as science.
Some vague “ a probing speculative mind” is not a good definition for a field of study. It’s way to broad and lacks preciseness.
Heck anything that is a "process" that involves speculative probing is a philosophy according to that definition.
A lot of religious people ascribe to a religion because some aspect of that religion helped the in some way. Does this make all aspects of the religion the absolute truth? People following this flawed wisdom end up supporting creationism as the one and only truth. Are people doing the same thing with philosophy?
Sure you can learn logic from a philosophy class, but that logic cannot in turn explain why “aesthetics”, “religion” and “ethics” is a sibling philosophical field of study to “science”.
The fact that people have misconception of what philosophy is doesn't change anything.
Let me put it this way. Part of philosophy is the Milesian school of thought. The idea that everything is made of water. A completely ludicrous idea that I would argue makes the practitioner ask the wrong questions as we now know things are made of complex particles.
Does this have anything to do with the category error I’m describing? No. Science and the Milesian school of thought simply don’t belong together regardless of what right or wrong questions your favorite field makes you ask.
I do not see in what respect this might be a category error. The „box“ all these things are put into is the box of things we can ask questions of the form „What do we mean when we talk about X?“ about. This is possible for religion, science, aesthetics and logic likewise. And that’s what philosophers are doing.
In that sense your own post is engaging in the very philosophy you deem obsolete. Not only do you reflect on what we actually refer to when we talk about philosophy – thus engaging in metaphilosophy – your entire last paragraph is full of metaphysical and epistemological theses about the world and our knowledge of it. This is the problem of most critics who want to reject philosophy as a whole. They cannot argue for their thesis without already starting to philosophize themselves.
Sure if you classify all deep thought as philosophy then any argument against philosophy that is deep is in itself philosophy. It’s just meta games with words no point in bringing it up.
Your argument basically says philosophy is an umbrella term for everything in existence. There’s no point for such a term that asks “what do we mean when we talk about x”. In fact such a term already exists without the pretentiousness. It’s called “definition” you can look up the definition of science and religion on Wikipedia. Does that make Wikipedia a philosophy web site?
I did not classify all deep thought as philosophy but a very specific subset of thought: answers on questions of the form „What do we mean when we talk about X?“. Reflections on our own concepts if you will. The point of bringing it up is that as far as I can see you are taking a self-contradictory position.
I agree that you can answer the question „What do we mean when we talk about X?“ with a definition. That is one way of understanding the question. Yet we judge definitions to be inappropriate when it doesn’t capture what we _actually_ mean when we talk about X (just as your rhetorical question suggests that defining Wikipedia to be a „philosophy web site“ is inappropriate). So there is obviously a second meaning to the question „What do we mean when we talk about X?“, one that is not asking for a definition of X but for our concept of X on which we judge definitions to be appropriate or inappropriate. It is this latter sense in which I consider philosophy to be concerned with that question.
Basically by placing “logic” under philosophy all logical arguments against philosophy become contradictory. Just make up a field called religionology and have logic and worshipping a cat god as it’s main tenants. Then any “logical” argument against it is part of “religionology” and therefore contradictory. Let’s all worship cats now because no logical argument can prove religionology wrong.
> one that is not asking for a definition of X but for our concept of X on which we judge definitions to be appropriate or inappropriate.
It’s still too broad. You can still apply this question to a rock on the ground. What do I really mean by that? Call it the philosophy of the rock and study it like I study science. Clearly there is a category error here as studying what I mean when I talk about that rock is not actually a philosophy.
Your „religionology“ argument surely has a point. The critic of religionology would have to specifically criticize the worshipping of the cat rather than religionology as a whole. So you as a critic of philosophy would likewise have to target those aspects of philosophy you don’t practice yourself in the very moment you are arguing against it. That is indeed my point when claiming that you contradict yourself. I believe your criticism would benefit from nuance.
> studying what I mean when I talk about that rock is not actually a philosophy.
I agree. I think the misunderstanding lies in your belief that X can be anything on the face of the universe. Not everything is equally worth asking the question what we mean when we talk about it. By popular convention, religion, science, aesthetics and logic are worth it. Philosophy therefore turns to them rather than rocks.
EDIT: Rephrased first sentence.
By contending nothing (YOU) imply anything. You need to type class your variable, otherwise it's assumed to be of type Any.
>That is indeed my point when claiming that you contradict yourself. I believe your criticism would benefit from nuance.
The nuance is just missed by you. I did address this. Multiple times. My initial post did mention that science and logic arose out of philosophy (and by implication is a part of it). The failure in this case is technically not on me, it's on your usage of the argument.
>I agree. I think the misunderstanding lies in your belief that X can be anything on the face of the universe. Not everything is equally worth asking the question what we mean when we talk about it. By popular convention, religion, science, aesthetics and logic are worth it. Philosophy therefore turns to them rather than rocks.
And my claim, which you don't agree with, is that aesthetics is just like the rock when compared to philosophy of science. That is the category error. If you can lump science with religion then you can lump it with rocks too.
If you claim X is not anything that can possibly exist. Then type class X for me. What is it? Formalize your claim. Because by not type classing X you've basically said anything goes or you have not said anything meaningful at all. It's equivalent to saying "My argument is X" and then not defining it.
This is the essence of the argument. My claim is basically X is typed really poorly and arbitrarily with little formalism let alone sense.
I did not say that I contend nothing but that I did not contend that X could be „anything on the face of the universe“. But even if I did contend nothing I certainly wouldn’t imply anything. How does contending nothing imply something? What kind of reasoning is this?
> The nuance is just missed by you. I did address this. Multiple times. My initial post did mention that science and logic arose out of philosophy (and by implication is a part of it). The failure in this case is technically not on me, it's on your usage of the argument.
You are criticizing philosophy (as a whole) as „essentially just a mish mash of deep thoughts and ponderings of unrelated topics“, „archaic“ and „just an old way of thinking“. Now you insist that you meant science and logic to be by implication a part of philosophy. So are you saying that they are archaic as well? You can’t have it both ways. If you don’t include science and logic in your criticism you should clarify which parts of philosophy you reject. That would be the nuance I am missing.
> If you claim X is not anything that can possibly exist. Then type class X for me.
I attempted to type class X in my last comment: X is what – by popular convention – is worth asking the question what we mean when we talk about it. So I have to concede: That could indeed be anything. But in fact it isn’t. So I’m still failing to grasp the relevance of your argument. One day you could probably ask yourself what you mean when talking about a rock and call that philosophy because it would be considered worthwhile. So what?
> This is the essence of the argument. My claim is basically X is typed really poorly and arbitrarily with little formalism let alone sense.
Do you have the same demands on your own area of expertise? Would you mind formalizing it non-arbitrarily? I guess that would help me understand your expectations.
EDIT: Removed a remark that was due to a misunderstanding.
You don't have to say that you contended nothing in order to contend nothing. Simply by not contending anything and creating some random variable X and not even hinting at would X could be is equivalent to contending nothing.
>Now you insist that you meant science and logic to be by implication a part of philosophy
Just because "logic" is part of "religionology" doesn't mean it lends any form of credibility to it. "Religionology" is still crap as a whole even though someone decided to conveniently include "logic" as a part of it. It's the same with philosophy. The whole thing is illegitimate as a whole and "logic" conveniently being part of it doesn't change that the fact that overall philosophy is akin to psuedo science.
You can't even say Scientology is completely wrong. There has got to be moral tenants even in Scientology that are correct. But none of these things allows Scientology to be even remotely legitimate.
>by popular convention
That's your type class? So Philosophy is the study of anything that is "popular." That's weak. So anything we humans find as popular is now philosophy.
The relevance of my argument is that Scientology has popularity. Creationism has popularity. Anime has popularity. There is no legitimate academic field on earth that just picks and chooses what to think about based purely on popularity. And this is precisely where the problem lies.
Because all the fields of study in philosophy are chosen by "popularity" or aka "arbitrarily" you get these strange lumps of studies that have nothing to do with each other. How does logic have anything to do with aesthetics? Why call both of these things "philosophy"
Popular convention is essentially the same as anything goes. So Philosophy is essentially a mishmash of deep thoughts of whatever people deem popular. This is the conclusion given by your own rationale.
>Do you have the same demands on your own area of expertise? Would you mind formalizing it non-arbitrarily? I guess that would help me understand your expectations.
Yes. There is a much more narrow set of demands within any field of expertise. If I'm an aerospace engineer it means building machines related to flight, not building machines related to what's popular convention.
What other field on earth is basically the study of the meaning of X where X anything that is "popular convention"? Literally that's like the broadest definition ever. Comes close to the study of "everything" which is essentially the most pointless field of study.
They are complementary because they inform each other and philosophy must stay coherent with empirical findings, but we also do science driven by certain assumptions which come from philosophy (materialism is a world-view, aka a philosophy).
Science and philosophy have very different validity constraints, for instance, while science should be predictive, philosophy only needs to be internally consistent and parsimonious.
They are the sides of the same coin, the what and the how.
I think it's ludicrous to think that evolved monkeys will "figure out reality". No, the best we can do is to create for ourselves a coherent, empirically verified, integral and parsimonious world-view, and we will call that reality. This will come from philosophy, it will be informed by science sure, but those very scientists will be doing philosophy when interpreting their behavioral findings.
You have a limited fuzzy understanding of science and I believe it is interfering with how you interpret the fusion of philosophy and science how it generates category errors.
There is no category error. You are just simulacring one to put science on a higher pedestal because it is evident you have vested interest. If you'd actually analyze why you consider science superior to philosophy, you would be hard pressed not to notice that they are both endeavor of the human intellect that simply happen to use different axioms and validity constraints. It is just as "random", and as you mention in your very last comment, ultimately non falsifiable. How can there be a category error when they share such fundamental characteristics? The only thing that leaks out of your arguments is that you just "don't like" philosophy.
Because every possible thing you can think of as a statement in the universe is unfalsifiable. Every single religion, to theory, to poem uttered by a little kid. Yet although they share the same flaw, Not all of these things are worth studying nor are they worth placing in the same random category.
Only specific things line up with observation consistently according to our best available observations. Religion and ethics are not among these things. Logic and probability is. So why place these two things side by side and call it philosophy? It’s like randomly creating the philosophy of the paint on that wall and studying it as much as science. Both are completely arbitrary choices.
IMHO, it's best to take philosophy as a discipline on its own. If I am pressed to decide between art and science, I'd call it an art, if not to annoy those people who erroneously believe that philosophy is a science. I personally find it hard to accept any discipline that does not follow the scientific method a science. Many other parts of the humanities in my opinion do not really qualify as science either. Or, perhaps they could be called "soft sciences" or "intellectual studies."
However, philosophy is in the same boat as mathematics in this respect, which is also traditionally not considered a science but rather a discipline of its own, pursued for its own sake and with its own evaluation criteria. Few would call mathematics an art, though, or would they? I'm not sure.
Many would, precisely because it is not empirical, as indicated by the fact that mathematics departments are often in Arts faculties.
As Sir Michael Atiyah put it: "The art in good mathematics, and mathematics is an art, is to identify and tackle problems that are both interesting and solvable."
Mathematicians will often wax philosophical when speaking about mathematical beauty and elegance, which is widely considered to be a central pursuit of mathematics, second only to correctness.
The problem here is that too many people are trying to use the word "science" to mean "the only thing that produces knowledge", in which case "mathematics is not a science, but does produce knowledge" is a heretical statement, even though a sizable portion of mathematicians would agree with it.
What do you think Socrates was doing when he attacked the sophists of Athens? Living better? I guess, if you like taking hemlock.
Sure, if you want to spite the bullshit artists in the field by calling what they're doing "performance art", that's fine. But if you're a real philosopher, then you are ultimately interested in the truth by definition, while recognizing that it isn't always easy to get to, that it might take a lot of effort to even put together a sensible response or claim in the first place, and even more time refining the position in an engagement with other philosophers. So in that sense, the philosophical disciplines are sciences, and in fact, the highest and most general sciences. No other science can answer metaphysical questions, for example. Sure, other sciences can inform the discussion, but they cannot replace the philosophical science that draws from them.
The article is behind a paywall, so I could not read beyond the first couple pages or so, but from the comments I sense that there is some strange conviction that philosophy is ultimately an obsolete kind of wankery that the empirical sciences have long since superseded. Of course, this is rather a sign of profound ignorance and philistinism rather than a statement about how things actually are.
And any good effort is an art. Unless some has to add an element of empathy, demonstrating something extra.
Biology is applied Chemistry
Chemistry is applied Physics
Physics is applied Mathematics
Not a perfect train of thought, but correct enough. If that is the hierarchy of the scientific world, I would argue that Philosophy is the "Mathematics" of art world. Every other art form is "applied Philosophy."
Physics may be the king, and Math the queen, but they always seem to be grinding their teeth and wishing that old biddy Philosophy would just finally die one day, and hand over the last her her powers, and she never really does.
My opinion of art is that it is simply a computational resource that human beings use to store emotions.
With NFTs this is now more true than ever, on multiple levels
It may be art from an artisan or craft used in a trade. It may be intellectual such as a mathematical proof. It may arguably be non-human art or bad art--but it is art.
Science emerged as a standard methodology much later.
Abstract bullshitting, which is mistakenly called philosophy too, may be considered as an art, like storytelling.
To clarify - fancy philosophical systems have nothing to do with philosophy. They are just piles of abstractions.