Oh, sure, so if you ask people whether they have free will, or whatever, then they're often interested. Sometimes in their fumbling attempts to discuss it, they even accidentally reinvent certain proto-philosophical discourse moves. But not very many people know or care about what happens in the discipline.

I guess you redefine philosophy as anything you like it's more true, but that's just a verbal thing.

I don't think that's true. Do you have any examples? I've never met anyone outside of academia or philosophy forums that cared about philosophy (to the extent they knew anything about it).

Don't what? Have that interest? I agree with that. I think this whole discussion is something the vast majority of people will never have to worry or care about. It's an academic thing.

My interest would be an anthropological ad historical one. Why the tradition arose, and how, interests me.

I think for someone that doesn't have this interest, they should literally just ignore philosophy entirely (and most people do, because they don't care).

Those to things aren't mutually exclusive. The analogy with hadith here again is good – it's a technical discipline that few people understand.

People on the street who have a broad interest in philosophy don't really have much notion what is actually contained in philosophical works, or what the discipline is involved in doing. Sure, I agree there are people with broad interests in 'questions of life,' and maybe they project that onto famous figures from their civilization. But very few people who claim an interest in Plato will have a notion of what he wrote or did.

I don't think those people actually know much of anything about philosophy. That would extend to a lot of people on this forum.

My take on philosophy is entirely about "conversation" as you put it, because the process of inquiry is basically a conversation, both literally between people doing that inquiry, and more figuratively between the inquirers and the world they're inquiring into. — Pfhorrest

That's not true, though – substantive inquiry is certainly not just a conversation. Philosophy puts on some of the superficial trappings of inquiry, which involves discussion, but if you look closer, often no inquiry is happening.

I looked up Avner Baz - he appears to be a professor of philosophy. — csalisbury

Yep. The lack of self-reflection comes in part from the fact that only natives study the tradition. People outside of it either suspect it is what it says it is (because they are part of the same civilization), or simply hold inarticulate contempt for it. It would be nice if that could change. I like the idea of the culture that used to house philosophy becoming post-philosophical.

Are you saying that it is completely impossible to even attempt to do what philosophy purports to be about, or just that there is no concerted effort to do that which thus has a name? — Pfhorrest

The latter, I think. I'm not sure what an effort like that would look like, but I wouldn't rule it out as impossible a priori. The point is, whatever philosophy is doing, it's clearly not that.

To be clear, the 'Is X a case of Y?' question is a characterization from the outside. I doubt that philosophy self-consciously understands itself to be doing this (even though it is the form in which questions are often put – again, it's a blind spot).

There is a guy named Avner Baz who came across something like 'the method from cases' which he takes to be philosophy's primary technique, and one that is useless because it only ever asks about cases for which the answer is indeterminate or relies on a subtle confusion of ordinary categories (otherwise, no one would bother asking). Therefore its methodology is fundamentally dysfunctional, by design.

I think something in this ballpark is right. Philosophy's defectiveness is sort of like a survival mechanism for it – its exploiting a cognitive blind spot gives its questions the illusion of depth even as it makes them literally unanswerable, and so able to be discussed in perpetuity. There is no interesting answer to questions like, 'when the hand is closed to form a fist, does a new object form? are there now two objects, the hand and the fist?' But this is basically what all such questions are like.

Note how the industry perpetuates itself – we can now have camps (the 'hand and fist are separate objects' camp, the 'hand and fist are one' camp, the 'fists don't exist, but hands do' camp), and then these can go on to form new syntheses ('both the hand and fist exist, in the form of the same material object'), etc. This process is obviously endless – you can meaninglessly shuffle about these categories, and form new questions of the same sort, until kingdom come. Of course, no inquiry into the nature of hands, fists, etc. is going on here.

Something like that, but I wouldn't put it in the form of an argument.

The reason is that there is no deep logical reason that things happened this way. It's a cultural accident having to do with classical Greece's litigious culture. People happened, contingently, upon a few weird verbal tricks in trying to defend themselves in law courts, and this evolved into rhetoric and sophistry. Philosophy is just sort of the realization that you can apply these verbal techniques to 'anything,' and so give the appearance that you are inquiring into 'anything.'

But yeah, the larger problem is that philosophy asks about things besides conversation, and believes it can gain knowledge about them by conversing. This can happen sometimes, and of course conversation isn't totally useless, but the idea that you can get knowledge about the fundamental features of the world by talking about them as if you are in a courtroom is absurd, and, so I claim, culturally contingent. Like many culturally contingent things, from the outside it even looks absurd.

If you're saying that philosophy is just one culture-specific take on that general field of inquiry, then what is the name of that general field of inquiry itself? — Pfhorrest

There is no general field of inquiry.

This wins the prize for the stupidist, most unphilosophical, thing a primate has grunted so far today. Good job, Snake! :shade: — 180 Proof

If the best defense you have of philosophy changing is the existence of string theory, who can convince you? My posts aren't for the true believers. There are others watching who doubt.

I don't recall a "question" of the ontology of quantum mechanics in Plato's Dialogues. Or "questions" of mind-body interaction, or demarcating science from pseudo-science, or free will, or the reality of time, or semantics (via e.g. language-games, speech-acts, or rigid designators), or turing computation (re: nature of information), or Maxwell's demon, or the role of the unconscious in agency (e.g. cognitive biases), ... and on and on — 180 Proof

This is just non-philosophical things changing, and philosophy talking about them, because it has an empty form and so claims to 'talk about anything.' The questions are all the same.

In isolated milieus no doubt they do. On the contrary, however, the "European tradition" (e.g. Western Philosophy) has been, for the most part, cosmopolitan, globalist and syncretic. — 180 Proof

Western philosophy is isolated. No one cares about it except philosophers.

The questions discussed in philosophy today are the same as those discussed by Socrates via Plato, and those discussions are conducted in much the same way. Many folk traditions don't change all that much over thousands of years.

But if what I was interested in all that time, the fundamentals about what is real and what is moral, wasn't actually philosophy, because philosophy is just one culture's folk tradition and isn't "really" about those topics, then what was I into back when I didn't have the name "philosophy" to describe it with? — Pfhorrest

You were probably expressing an adolescent malaise of some sort, which may have had genuine impulses, but got routed through the appropriate channels for your culture. Philosophy advertises itself as being about 'big questions,' so you figured, that as someone interested in that, that was what you should think about or do. If you lived in another culture, you would have done something else, or had different malaises.

Don't look at what things say they are in their marketing; look at what they are.

Isn't it more like, say, Kabbalah ?- there's a throughline, some continuity, but there are some genuine ruptures and changes that alter the core practice (like with all folk traditions?) — csalisbury

I don't think so. Anyone familiar with the tradition isn't going to see anything new in Kant. Remember, the 'Copernican Revolution' line is his own propaganda. We tend to see differences because we're ignorant, and read 'great figures' in isolation. Reading more always dispels the illusion.

I already answered that above ^

In the Socratic / Western tradition, the basic practice of philosophy is to do something like say 'Imagine scenario X. Is X a case of Y?' That's what most philosophy boils down to.

No. Read a book.

The ascetic ideal is certainly central to (certain varieties of) religion. Not so much to philosophy.

Say that you want to distinguish the folk practice of philosophy from how it's been professionalized over the years; — fdrake

I don't see all that much difference. What the professionals do today is not much different from what's in the Platonic dialogues. Philosophy has never been something 'people in general do.' It's a folk practice in the sense that it belongs to a parochial cultural tradition and is explicable in terms of that (and not explicable in terms of its efficacy, or something else), not in the sense that random people on the street do it.

I like that idea, but it's not an accurate historical representation of philosophy. Plato had a lot of interesting quasi-religious ideas, which haven't been historically at the core of philosophy. They were also already present in religious beliefs, and have been since then, while the Socratic method is a 'new' social development.

None of that is true.

I wouldn't say a wound – I don't think it's what it claims to be, but that doesn't mean it's evil or degenerate.

The Platonic Socrates comes off to me as a disingenuous interlocutor with strong positive views. The aporia is ironic.

This is not a productive discussion. But I'll just say an account of academia that makes the Academy not academic is pointless. I'm not responding again.

Philosophy has not always been, and is not now exclusively, or even predominately, an academic pursuit. — Janus

This is just historically wrong. Philosophers invented Academia, literally, and philosophy was the original discipline housed therein.

Read a philosopher? You're thinking like an academic. If you want to know how to live, you must enquire into the question. That enquiry just is the practice of philosophy. Reading other philosophers may or may not help. Much of written philosophy consists in over-intellectualizing fairly simple questions. — Janus

I don't think that inquiring about concrete questions in life has much of anything to do with philosophy.

And philosophy is an academic discipline, and always has been. Philosophers founded the actual Academy. So that distinction is not viable / historically ignorant.

I don't think that's a historically plausible view. If I wanted to know how to live, would I read a philosopher? Why would I?

Agrippa's trilemma is a classic philosophical move though, not something extra philosophical. It seems to me like you want to have your cake and eat it too; to see philosophy from the outside as a folk practice, but to be non-neutral about what its internal logic can demonstrate. — fdrake

This isn't part of some defense of Skepticism – it really doesn't matter to me. Though I will say that mature Skepticism was geared precisely toward exploding philosophy from inside and leaving it – it was compared to a laxative, and made you shit philosophy out and the bug it carried with it. Of course, the Skeptics continued the investigation, but only as a ward against further infection.

That's extremely oversimplified though. What makes, say, people like the Churchlands or Metzinger cease to be talking about the brain, — fdrake

Because they just aren't. Eliminative materialism for example isn't a real hypothesis about the world or the brain or anything, it's just a suggestion to stop saying people have beliefs, etc., which is just shuffling about some words / categories.

In the same regard, "consciousness" is made up, as is the idea of a folk practice. — fdrake

It's not made up any more than trees or rocks are. Words or practices referring to it, maybe.

you can derive correct conclusions through reasoning well. Correct in the sense that if you're an architect, say, you can tell if a given structure will be able to support its own weight through general principles. — fdrake

I don't think you can in the way philosophy traditionally has thought. The Skeptics actually already understood this, that all valid deductive arguments just beg the question. There is a sense in which they therefore don't produce 'new knowledge' (and why would they?). But what you can do with them is keep your behaviors in consistent order, or make sure commitments line up with each other, or realize that certain commitments, if followed through, require other commitments. And this can keep you straight if you're an architect or whatever. But pure deductive reasoning has, in my opinion, little to do with real intellectual life, and is an artifact of the folk circumstances surrounding the rise of philosophy. It preserves, again, a kind of shadow of reasoning in a limited case.

Wilfred Sellars speaks about the "manifest image", which is roughly the landscape of conceptual and behavioural commitments that we have by virtue of being in (life situations like this one); it's perspectival and normative. He also spoke of the "scientific image", which is roughly the a-perspectival description of nature and ourselves, it uses patterns of reason in the manifest image, but updates and modifies them as well as being able to postulate new entities and see what these postulations do. — fdrake

I think the manifest / scientific distinction isn't real. I don't have much to say about it – it's made up and I don't know where the idea came from.

Philosophy navigates both of them; it (used to) posit entities regularly (like atoms, and logos, and Geist, and the transcendental subject, and the cogito...), now it seems (post Kant?) to posit explanatory categories more than new entities; to rethink and reconceptualise what is given rather than innovating new parts of nature (though the two aren't mutually exclusive). Having a "scientific image" of philosophy as a practice is an interesting project. — fdrake

I don't think the function of the discipline has changed at all. The 'posits' of the older and newer philosophers aren't real 'posits' in the way a physicist posits things, because they're not interested in asking about how things are, they're just ways of shuffling categories and verbal commitments about. There might be some value to doing that, but philosophers rarely do it valuably, because they lack the self-reflection to understand what they're doing, so their movements tend to be pretty much random and and the whim of intellectual fashion.

Though this is biased for famous philosophers and academics generally, the intractable cases like us (presumably) who are suspicious of the enterprise — fdrake

I wouldn't say I'm 'suspicious' of the enterprise, any more than I'm 'suspicious' about Islamic hadith. That would imply I think Islamic hadith might really be a faithful account of the Prophet's actions, but I just have to reconsider how, or something. I'm more interested in discovering the origins of the practice anthropologically. I am not 'suspicious' that something is wrong with philosophy because that would imply I am also 'suspicious' that it is something like that it claims to be, and I know that it's not, in the same way I know the hadith don't actually have any historical basis.

Considering that people in the discipline seem to know that something is deeply weird about lots of its practice, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to leave out this instance of reflexivity from seeing it as a folk tradition. — fdrake

There's been the suggestion that philosophers are sort of like people with anosognosia. I think that's right – they sometimes get the inkling something is deeply wrong, but there is a cognitive block stopping them from understanding. Though some philosophers have 'understood' – and what happens to these people (historically, empirically) is that they stop doing philosophy in the usual mode at all, not that they add another self-reflexive layer to it. Historical figures to whim this apparently happened include Wittgenstein possibly, but definitely Morris Lazerowitz and Richard Rorty.

Lazerowitz describes his transformation as something that 'clicked' and couldn't be undone when it happened – somehow the cognitive loop stopped working on him. There is something of a mystical quality to how breaking out is described (and Wittgenstein has the metaphor of the fly-bottle).

I take the discovery of the syllogism to be a kind of nascent natural language semantics, hit upon accidentally during considering how legal arguments worked. That is, people noticed certain properties of sentences: given the linguistic conventions, people who were committed to some then became committed to others 'automatically.'

The idea isn't, of course, that folk traditions can't house real knowledge. But I don't think the way the discovery of the syllogism was interpreted (as involving a transcendental binding glue to the universe called 'logic') is at all correct.

Yeah, fuck Paris!

I would like a real history of philosophy to be written. Not a summary of what philosophers have thought, but an actual historical account of what the heck it is and how it came to be in Greece. I'm particularly fascinated by the relation between philosophy, sophistry (something that I think may not really be distinct from philosophy, and was only thought to be so as part of a propaganda campaign that was pretty uncritically swallowed), rhetoric, and the Greek legal tradition. Looking back on it from 'outside the fly bottle,' what Socrates does is so weird, and it's an interesting historical question how such a practice comes about.

I'm particularly interested in how philosophy relates to the sophist's claim to be able to 'speak about anything,' an ability made possible by the emptiness and verbal nature of the sophist's claims and practices. Philosophers don't seem to understand that they make the same claim – to be able to 'speak about anything.' But isn't this a stupid claim!

Cool. I've never read Laurelle, but I've heard the name. I like the idea of 'non-philosophy,' but I'd rather not give it a pretentious name like that, and just do an ordinary anthropology (that happens to have Westerners as its object).

Yeah, sure, so it's a folk art, but clearly a verbal / legalistic one. But my point is that it's as local as studying hadith. It's not a universal discipline, doesn't ask 'the biggest questions,' etc. It's a set of practices developed out of the Greek legal system, and outside of it, it can't really be taken seriously as what it claims to be (just like the hadith).

Reality is not only fake, but also gay. Monad gang.

The core practices of philosophy consist in a family of dialectical moves. The basic idea within which they're housed is that you can 'think about anything' simply by asking questions about it and then answering them – that is, a conversation in of itself is taken to be some kind of 'inquiry.' This is a false belief.

Some of these moves remain invariant, for example, saying 'Take case X. Is X an example of category Y?' or rephrased for the general case, 'what is Y?' This is perhaps the most important move of all, and is the Socratic move, but others consist in, for example, demanding that a premise taken for granted be rejected, and seeing what consequences follow from this according to the logic of the culture of language, so that you shuffle about the domain of several cultural concepts, with no 'cognitive' effect, but a reallocation of the way certain terms are applied in a small domain.

Something that maybe distinguishes philosophy from religion and other folk traditions (when describing it from this exterior viewpoint) is that you can almost arbitrarily change the content of a philosophical work, and its form, and still be doing philosophy. Philosophy can be about anything, use anything, be done in any way. — fdrake

It might superficially seem so, but I deny this. Its core practices are unchanged since Plato, and so is its content.

It can be 'about anything' in the sense that the sophists could talk 'about anything' – that is, it has an emptiness to it that is mistaken for breadth.

arising from the ability to take anything as grist for the mill, in any way, and draw distinctions of any character. — fdrake

This is not quite right – as a blind spot, philosophy isn't capable of making its own operations 'grist for its mill.' Seriously questioning philosophy from the inside simply ends it rather than creating a new meta-field where new distinctions can be drawn. The latter one is the play-reflexiveness that philosophers themselves indulge in. Much of philosophy is like play – it plays at reasoning, or is an empty shadow of actual reasoning, taking on superficial aspects of its form and moving them around.

I suppose the effect of characterizing philosophy as a folk-tradition only works if philosophy thinks of itself as something different, so characterizing it that way says something new, reframes things. If it is the same as any other folk tradition, that characterization should have the same effect for any folk tradition (one says 'this is a folk tradition' and sees what the effect is) That may be the case. — csalisbury

In general, only an outside view sees something as a 'folk tradition.' For the people in the tradition, it's just 'what's done,' or 'the tradition.' So if you ask a performer of the tradition, they'll say 'it's the most general form of inquiry' or 'it's the study of how things hang together in the broadest sense' or 'it's an inquiry into the deepest questions,' but these things aren't true. So what is it really...? Well that question hasn't been properly asked yet, because al the histories are written by natives, who give you the party line.

Philosophy is 'self-reflexive,' OK, but so is Islamic hadith, and so on. Westerners have a blind spot for philosophy because it's their folk tradition, but an outsider is able to see that it isn't what it claims to be from the inside.

Yet how can we deny and transcend the essence of what we are (i.e. will)? — jancanc

Because it's not what we are, not really. Schop. never really put that last piece together, but his conclusions might imply it.

Not any more than other folk traditions. If you doubt it, well, you're a native, so prone to ethnocentrism...there's lots of ways in which philosophy is profoundly unreflective as well, as to its own nature, and so on.