I think of philosophy as the pursuit of wisdom, and the pursuit of wisdom as the attempt to find ways to live better. So, the analytic pursuit of conceptual clarity might help some, and modeling one's life on, or simply gleaning insights from, the Stoics or the Epicureans or the existentialists or the postmodernist or following some religion or other might help others.

I don't think the right way can be determined, if by "right way" is meant " one way for all". Humans are diverse, which means we are left to find our own ways. I don't have much patience for authoritarian or traditionalist thinking, because those modes of thought and their ideologue adherents do inevitably posit one way for all.

So, it is not "philosophy" which we can rely on to determine what living better means but our own individual experience and practice of philosophy―philosophy as such cannot decide anything―it is individuals who must decide for themselves what living better means for them (and not for others) or else blindly follow others if they don't want to or can't make such decisions. The term 'help' may be ambiguous, but surely it is possible for individuals to come to know, even if only via trail and error, what helps, and what hinders, them? Can anyone else decide for you?

Perfect example is how Antiquity turned into Middle Ages and what we call the "Dark Ages". Talk about a collapse in trade and in globalization. That's all it takes. Once North Africa couldn't feed Rome (as Vandals conquered it), then Rome's population started to shrink rapidly. Once that happened, then professionals and artists that relied for income from an advance economy simply didn't have any demand for their work. And then simply things like drawing, sculpture, engineering etc. simply regressed. — ssu

I'm not convinced that the visual arts, at least, regressed in the so-called Dark Ages. Anyhgow thanks for the historical insight―I wasn't aware of the African connection with the fall of Rome.

My favorite example of this is when an university professor, perhaps teaching the language that is spoken in country, has to have a second job as perhaps a taxi driver. This is reality in many Third World countries as universities simply cannot afford to pay a reasonable salary to their teachers. It's not reality yet in the Western World, but it surely can be. — ssu

Thanks again, I wasn't aware of the kind of situation university professors can find themselves facing in the Third World. I agree with you that such a situation could be coming in the West. I'm not economist, but I think that any apparent general increase of prosperity in the West over the last twenty years or perhaps longer is largely "smoke and mirrors".

Thanks J...whenever you are ready. I think life is more important than philosophy. If philosophy cannot help us to live better, then what use can it be beyond being an interesting diversion?

History already shows with many examples that there isn't continuous progress and that basically we can have such collapses that knowledge is forgotten. Yet as I said to Skalidris above (on a comment he wrote pages earlier) that knowledge and new insights, be they scientific or philosophical, are created on the present knowledge. — ssu

I agree, we must always start from where we are. It seems to me that hankering for ancient, "lost" wisdom is a fool's errand, given that we may well be misunderstanding the contexts within which ancient literature found its meaning.

We have much greater knowledge today, and we might call that progress, but have we acquired the wisdom to deal with it? It seems not, and that failure cannot be rightly seen as progress in my view.

That's not crazy and reminds me that when talking about Plato I wanted to point out that changes in technology, and especially in expertise and "know how", are well known as social factors driving the dialogues.

These experts and artisans have a new sort of authority based on their specialized knowledge. Well, what sort of knowledge is that? What kinds of specialized knowledge are there? Can you have special knowledge of wisdom? Of goodness? Etc etc — Srap Tasmaner

I seem to remember that in Aristotle's' understanding phronesis or 'practical wisdom' acquired by artisans in their practices could assist them in understanding the arguments regarding goodness, beauty, justice and so on.

Is there an absolute, context-free wisdom? Most of us here are probably familiar with Socrates' notion of wisdom regarding virtue, goodness, justice etc. consisting in knowing that we do not know. Within some context we may know, in the sense of wisely judge, what is good, virtuous or just, but beyond that...?

Apologies, I somehow missed both of your replies.

Hmm. Is the cogito meant to be an example of metaphysical certainty? Many philosophers do disagree that the cogito does what Descartes wanted it to, but to say it's been "amply demonstrated" is an exaggeration, wouldn't you say? Or perhaps you have some other level of metaphysical certainty in mind. — J

I'm not sure what you are referring to. Perhaps I didn't articulate my thoughts well there―I meant to say that it has been amply demonstrated that metaphysical certainty in the traditional "absolutist" sense is impossible to attain. Would you not agree that Descartes was attempting to discover what he (and by extension, we) could be certain of vis à vis what necessarily exists?

I think you know from past discussions that I would be the last to indulge in human exceptionalism and conclude that we are somehow more than mere animals. We are only exceptional inasmuch as we are very unusual animals. That said, there are also many other very unusual animals.
— Janus
Sorry. That remark was intended in general, not in particular. I write quite quickly when I finally get to the keyboard. Sometimes I don't put things precisely enough. But I've found that if I write too slowly, I end up not writing at all. — Ludwig V

just in case there has been a misunderstanding I was not thinking you were accusing me of human exceptionalism, so no apology needed.

It seems to me to be a question of what we can logically doubt, and I think the answer is 'anything that can be imagined to be false without logical contradiction'. It seems we cannot doubt the LNC itself without falling into incoherence.
— Janus
There's a good point there. If Descartes does try to doubt the LNC, the project will fall apart. Same thing if he doubts his memory. He makes quite a fuss about that at the end of the first meditation.

As I think Ludwig is suggesting my point was that any discourse which purported to deny the LNC must necessarily be involved in an incoherent performative contradiction because to do so would undermine discourse itself.

The obverse is what we can absolutely certain of; and I think that would be only what is true by definition or according to some rule or set of rules we have accepted; i.e. tautologies and mathematics and they really tell us nothing outside of their contexts.
— Janus
Yes. That's a trap. The price of absolutely certainty is paralysis in the empirical world. But perhaps we don't live in the empirical world? If we want to return to normal life (a dubious prospect, but still..) we need to re-cast this conceptual space. That's what Wittgenstein is trying to do - and, in his way, Moore.

I don't see people as living wholly within the empirical world. As Sellars pointed out we live with both the scientific images and the manifest images of the world, or within the space of causes and the space of reasons. The latter cannot be understood (parsimoniously at least) solely in terms of causes.

Thanks, I seem to have hit my target! — Count Timothy von Icarus

That leaves me wondering what target you think you might have hit.

Well now it cannot be moralizing and 'holier than thou' and vacuous, so now I'm questioning your original compliment. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure it can―it can be moralizing and holier and thou in terms of attitude, while being vacuous in terms of content.

And as to post-modernism―I think it is simply the idea that we should drop the myth that history is necessarily a story of continuous progress or that there is a real underlying telos at work in history.

I think Heidegger is referring to his distinction between between vorhanden "present at hand" knowledge and zuhanden "ready to hand" wisdom. I see that distinction as being basically similar to the distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how".

So if the vorhanden is that which merely exists in a contextless way (as for example a hammer is merely a configuration of material or materials), the zuhanden is the hammer as a useful tool that exists in a context of nails, timber, building design and construction and so on. The realm of "knowing that" can be seen as a realm of mere factoids, whereas "knowing how" can be seen as the realm of practical wisdom and creativity in general.

Can you take a stab at what you think it means?

I have no criticism of anyone finding anything funny (barring cruelty or real misfortune). Perhaps the funniest thing is that the diatribe was meant to be taken seriously. The attention sought there seemed to me to be an attention acquiescing to purportedly profound wisdom, not merely an attention finding amusement in some clever name-dropping and recondite allusions. Whatever wisdom is, I don't think it consists in such attention-seeking.

Ignores the simple fact that Plato and Socrates belong to a very different time.
On a different note...the burgeoning partisanship on this site is becoming nauseating.

Yes really, apart from the "entertaining" part...at least as it strikes me, but clever yes...like a monkey. As Wittgenstein said " It's more important to be good than to be clever". Attention-seeking is not good philosophy in my world. I’m not going to play politics..this sort of moralizing 'holier than thou' diatribe turns my stomach.

Seems more like vacuous self-indulgent name-dropping garbage to me.

Yes, indeed. Though, of course, the powerful, when they are not complacent, live in fear that the powerless will get themselves together - and then they are unstoppable. Cardinal Bellamine said it best - "The voice of the people is the voice of God". — Ludwig V

True, if the individually powerless could manage to coordinate and agree to act to secure their interests, the powerful would have no chance. It's just that, in the absence of egregious oppression and lack of quality of life, this never seems to happen.

Yes, symbolic language is very important. But I get worried when people try to deduce that we are not animals.
Reification is a major curse for any philosopher that has an ear (eye) for language. — Ludwig V

I think you know from past discussions that I would be the last to indulge in human exceptionalism and conclude that we are somehow more than mere animals. We are only exceptional inasmuch as we are very unusual animals. That said, there are also many other very unusual animals.

We're pushing doubt a level up, instead, and asking what is possible to doubt, not how we would go about settling an actual occasion of doubt. — J

It seems to me to be a question of what we can logically doubt, and I think the answer is 'anything that can be imagined to be false without logical contradiction'. It seems we cannot doubt the LNC itself without falling into incoherence.

The obverse is what we can absolutely certain of; and I think that would be only what is true by definition or according to some rule or set of rules we have accepted; i.e. tautologies and mathematics and they really tell us nothing outside of their contexts.

It seems to me that Descartes was pushing for metaphysical certainty, and I think it has been amply demonstrated that metaphysical certainty is impossible.

"You know me, sir!"

That's funny, but I choose not to drink regardless as I have not yet developed enough immunity.

Only an idiot such as yourself would agree with such nonsense — Leontiskos

Only a fool such as yourself would think that I was serious. (Don't imagine for a moment that I am being serious here or that I imagined you were being serious either, or your foolishness will be exponentially increased).

I can't understand 'true belief' in light of a bollocks set of evidence (for instance). — AmadeusD

Right, I get that―such "true beliefs" are just a matter of dumb luck. Let's not get into the gutter with the gettier mess as to whether they may be justified.

On the one hand, the desire of the powerless to restrain the powerful and on the other hand, the desire of the powerful to control the powerless. — Ludwig V

The inability of the powerless to coordinate in order to restrain the powerful just might be a candidate for the major source of human misery―the central pathos of the human condition.

Perhaps the ability and desire to push things further is what lies behind the tendency to look for ever more ultimate ultimates and get lost, as it were, in outer space. That's one thing that I don't see in non-human animals. — Ludwig V

Right, that certainly seems to be a major human tendency. I also think humans love to pull things apart to see how they work, and then that search for constitutive function focuses on the smaller and smaller and smaller.. Both of these searches―for the greatest overarching principles and the smallest constitutive entities would seem to be impossible without symbolic language, which is probably why we don't see such concerns in other animals―and there would also seem to be a powerful element of misleading reification in both.

Perhaps we are talking about different things. If someone believes something to be the case based on false information and what they believe to be the case is the case then their belief is not false, but the information the belief is based on is false. Agree

I'm afraid I'm doing to have to respectfully disagree. :razz: — Leontiskos

OK then, I agree that you respectfully disagree. :wink:

The deeper question that I think we should be talking about is what lies behind the ancient philosophical tradition of denying common sense reality. — Ludwig V

What lies behind the traditional philosophical denial of common sense would seem to be the assumption that this world, not being perfect, cannot be the true world. The human desire for a transcendent reality, as opposed to this "mere shadow world" has a lot to do with the desire for life to be fair―that is to punish the wicked hereafter when they elude punishment down here, and to provide us with salvation and eternal life. Most of us would rather not die; so being in denial of the fact of death is one strongly motivated strategy for coping with it.

I've said why. Often, 'common sense' is absolute horseshit. That's why we have things like 'folk psychology' to dismiss. — AmadeusD

Some common sense may be based on illusion to be sure. The idea we have of the nature of consciousness and self are good candidates. On the other hand if such "folk" notions cannot be definitively refuted, and if they are "native" to the human mind, then perhaps they serve a useful purpose, even though they tell us nothing substantive about the real nature of things―given that the real nature of things in the ultimate sense that the human mind seems so addicted to entertaining is not at all decidable.

This is what the eliminativist says about consciousness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why change the subject to consciousness. Consciousness is obviously amply demonstrated.

And that's not really the point. If such a faculty is accepted as a hinge proposition, it shows that the theory of hinge proposition itself is not presuppositionless, but fails to obtain given certain assumptions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Are you suggesting that noesis has been accepted as a hinge proposition? If so, what evidence do you have that that is so?

Noesis has not been demonstrated to exist. If you disagree then show the evidence that it exists. And note, I am treating the belief in noesis as the idea that our metaphysical intuitions can be known to give us, or at least sometimes can be known to give us, a reliable guide to the nature of realty―not reality as sensed, which is obviously intelligible to us, but reality in a purportedly absolute or ultimate sense.

Hume's attack on induction — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hume did not attack induction―he merely pointed out that inductive reasoning is not logically necessary in the way that valid deductive reasoning is.

It is good that we can agree on something!

In your example the state of affairs isn't false (jury is out, as it were, as described) but the belief is clearly false. — AmadeusD

If the actuality is undetermined then the truth or falsity of the belief will also be undetermined. If someone believes something for reasons based on false information then the belief is unsupported, but not necessarily false.

For instance, I don't think one has the demonstrate that a faculty of noesis exists in order to point out that presupposing as a given that it doesn't seems unwarranted. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You are presupposing that it is a mere presupposition. How about thinking that in the absence of any possibility of demonstrating that a faculty of noesis exists, the conclusion that is does not is warranted? Or more modestly a pragmatic conclusion that if it cannot be demonstrated to exist then it is of no philosophical use?

So saddening! Rest in peace, Vera―I always enjoyed your wit, creativity and high, yet down to earth, intelligence.

Thanks for that. I agree, though not necessarily about the erudition; many people on TPF are indeed erudite about specific philosophers, no posturing. Such knowledge on its own isn't enough, sadly, to lead to thoughtful conversation. — J

It's true that there are quite a few people here who are well-read in specific areas. I see that as a good thing provided their erudition has not become ideology―but sadly, that is not always the case, even with the most erudite. My point was in line with your point about erudition not being enough to lead to thoughtful conversation―erudition displayed for its own sake just is posturing―it certainly doesn't count, at least not in my book, as good philosophy. It is prominently on display when people quote extensive passages as substitute for their own words.

You're right―it wasn't that the thread could have been interesting, it was interesting until it became a "shitshow".

It was Banno who specifically asked to kill it. — Fire Ologist

It was @Banno who requested that it be buried after the sophists (mostly you and @Leontiskis) had already killed it. As @Srap Tasmaner said "you ought to be ashamed of yourselves". But of course I understand why you won't be.

Up for an autopsy? — Fire Ologist

What could have been an interesting thread was killed by the resident sophists who can be relied upon to prefer participating in culture wars over philosophy. Question their biases and they become nasty, obfuscate, misrepresent or just refuse to engage.

By refusing in turn to engage with them we give them no air...which is as it should be. Posturing erudition is no substitute for sound thinking and good will.

It is relevant because the thread has veered into the question of authoritarian versus liberal thinking.

The ad verecundiam fallacy concerns appeals to authority or expertise. Fundamentally, the fallacy involves accepting as evidence for a proposition the pronouncement of someone who is taken to be an authority but is either not really an authority or a relevant authority. This can happen when non-experts parade as experts in fields in which they have no special competence — The Core Fallacies | SEP

Expertise is demonstrable within the sciences and practical matters in general. How could expertise of a purported religious authority be demonstrated?

As we see earlier Janus disagreed with my classifying Hume as a nit-picker, — Moliere

Not quite―I disagreed with an assessment (which I was not accusing you of making) that Hume was merely a nitpicker.

But the liberal/authoritarian dimension isn't an accepted emotional fundamental, so far as I am aware - more a part of pop psychology.

SO I don't think that philosophical differences are ultimately "explained" by psychology. I suspect you do? — Banno

I've been following along even though I haven't much time to engage in depth right now. Is not the 'argument from authority' generally (and rightly) considered to be a fallacious argument in philosophy, or at least contemporary philosophy?
If this is so then debunking an argument from authority would not need to rely on psychological (ad hominem) grounds.

That said, here with Tim and Leon, we seem to be dealing with arguments for authority. Could such arguments stand without also allowing arguments from authority to stand?It seems obvious that all arguments from authority cannot possibly pass muster―which seems to leave us with the obvious and difficult question as to what criteria, in the absence of empirical or logical support, could be used to assess the soundness of any purported authority?

A nice corrective to 'all or nothing' authoritarian thinking!

A rather facile response! As with the arts, where quality, although it is recognizable to the tutored eye, is impossible to strictly define, so with phenomenological accounts derived from intelligent, unbiased reflection on human practices and experience.

There is also philosophy as the study of the history of ideas, not necessarily as a tendentious attempt to find authoritative confirmation for the enquirer's own beliefs, but just for its own sake.
— Janus

It is a pleasure unto itself, and this is enough to justify one's activity in doing philosophy.

But then I think when we do that -- read philosophy for its own sake (and here I only mean the sorts of names that frequently come up within a particular culture's practice of philosophy) -- we see there's more than just two ways to do philosophy.

Naturally I want to progress by way of example, so something that comes to mind is Spinoza's Ethics where we have a logic derivation of. . . everything? And on the other hand we have Hume as the nitpicker.

In more modern times I might contrast David Chalmers with Daniel Dennett. — Moliere

Right, for me the great philosophers' ideas and systems have aesthetic value. They present us with novel ways to think about things―and they are admirable just on account of their sustained complexity of inter-related ideas.

As to Chalmers and Dennett―the latter seems to me by far the more imaginative philosopher. I also see Hume as an immensely creative thinker and not at all a mere "nitpicker".

I think this is a pretty major misunderstanding of the concept. Intellectus has nothing to do with the creative imagination, which is its own faculty in medieval psychology (and roughly parallels what we tend to mean by the term today). Perhaps you meant to say that you think the faculty of intellectus is just creative imagination? That would make more sense. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, I was mixing up the jargon there. I did mean to say that I think intellectus or intellectual intuition is just creative imagination, at least when it posits metaphysical theses.

I don't deny that it is logically possible that intellectual intuitions may be revelatory, but I see no reason to believe that they are. Even if it is assumed for the sake of argument that intellectual intuitions are, at least sometimes, revelatory, the question as to just what they are revelatory of remains.

Although, this still has very large difficulties if it is to be a total rejection, because acknowledging nothing but ratio would essentially commit us to something like eliminitive materialism and behaviorism (i.e. understanding would be illusory, or at least "theoretically uninteresting" as Dennett put is re Nagel's "What is It Like be a Bat.") For anything more robust, ratio needs to take on some of the properties of intellectus vis-a-vis cognitive understanding, else reason would simply be rule following devoid of content. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think this gets it entirely wrong. Reasoning can indeed be, as is the case with abductive reasoning, an exercise of creative imagination. Reasoning is not rule-bound, other than the most basic rule that an exercise in reasoning should be internally consistent.

Reason alone tells us nothing beyond what we are capable of consistently and coherently imagining. There can be no purely logical proofs of metaphysical theses, and since they are also not amenable to empirical testing, they count as undecidable.

The idea of intellectus cannot stand on its own it seems―it requires the belief in God, the human-inspiring Divine intellect, to support it.

This is not the case even in medieval thought. There are illuminative explanations of noesis, which Mark Burgess covers well in his dissertation, but there is also the Aristotlian conception of "natural" noesis, which is a biological function. It flows from the basic idea that:

1. Things exist as some definite actuality prior to preception.
2. For perception to be "of things" it must involve to communication of some of this actuality (form) through the senses (even through sensation is "of" the interaction between the sense organ and the surrounding media, form travels through the media in the form of light, sound waves, etc.)
3. The senses inform memory and intellect.
4. The active intellect is able to abstract the form communicated through the senses, and thus the form of what is known is partially in the knower. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The pattern recognition involved in the intelligibility of what we sense has nothing to do with intellectus, unless you want to include the animals as possessing intellectus. Cognition and re-cognition are enabled by memory and pattern, similarity and difference, that allow us, with the further aid of symbolic language, to generalize from particulars. The idea of intellectual intuition revealing transcendent, metaphysical truths is an entirely different matter. Conflating the two will only lead to confusion.

Part of the thinking that went on before posting here was a rejection of those very terms, and the selection of 'discourse' and 'dissection', in the hope of leaving behind the baggage of the term "analytic". And don't mention "continental". — Banno

Yes, the terms 'analytic' and 'synthetic' of course do carry philosophical baggage. That said I would say "dissection" is synonymous with 'analysis' and discourse is always a putting together of ideas which would count as synthesis.

Anyway a mere terminological point should not matter.

as 180 Proof points out that philosophical practice cannot be neatly categorized in a strictly binary manner.
— Janus
Again, I'm happy with that, but still think the distinction worth some consideration. — Banno

Right, I agree the distinction is a valid one and is useful.

What I want to propose is that there are two different ways of doing philosophy. There are those who do philosophy through discourse. These folk set the scene, offer a perspective, frame a world, and explain how things are. Their tools are exposition and eulogistics. Their aim is completeness and coherence, and the broader the topics they encompass the better. Then there are those who dissect. These folk take things apart, worry at the joints, asks what grounds the system. Their tool is nitpicking and detail. Their aim is truth and clarity, they delight in the minutia.

The discourse sets up a perspective, a world, a game, an activity, whatever we call it. The dissection pulls it apart, exposing its assumptions, underpinnings and other entrails. Perhaps you can't have one without the other, however a theory that explains any eventuality ends up explaining nothing, and for a theory to be useful it has to rule some things out. — Banno

A well thought through piece Banno. I have long thought of the two broadly different ways of philosophizing as the analytic and the synthetic. I see the analytic approach as a critical approach that really begins with Kant and his critique of traditional metaphysics, which had been based on the idea of intellectual intuition yielding the highest form of knowledge, as yielding wisdom. So, I see the traditional view as relying critically on the belief that there is a god or higher power that inspires the philosopher in their best moments of intuitive intellectual insight.

If this is right, then the traditional approach is a synthetic approach. That said I don't think all synthetic approaches rely on the authority of God or a higher power―for example some philosophers such as Peirce, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty Whitehead and some of the semiotic thinkers attempt to create cohesive philosophical pictures which are consistent with modern science.

Such endeavors overstep, as you rightly point out, if they purport to explain everything about human, or even animal, life, or actually, even existence itself.. It seems inevitable that our pictures will always be adumbrations, sketches, incomplete and never wholly adequate to their subjects.

The critical analytic approach has also opened up new and different ways of thinking, and it could thus be said to have its own synthetic dimensions, which means as @180 Proof points out that philosophical practice cannot be neatly categorized in a strictly binary manner.

There are also, of course, philosophers such as the Stoics, the Epicureans and the existentialists who are concerned with discovering how best to live, that is with ethics, much more than they are with metaphysical system building.

There is also philosophy as the study of the history of ideas, not necessarily as a tendentious attempt to find authoritative confirmation for the enquirer's own beliefs, but just for its own sake.

You have opened up a fascinating topic, and there is much more I would like to say, but I am out of time right now and will have to come back to it.

You are nothing more than a sophist just like Leon. I'm done with you and him. Good luck with your search for confirmation of your biases.

:100: I don't think you are missing anything.

Is there any purely rational justification for not doing it? Or not raping? Based on your standards, I would think not. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The default is not to do it, obviously. The logic of living in community precludes treating others merely as means.

But there are. The Pope for instance. And there is practical justification for this. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There might be practical justification for treating the pope as head of the church―it certainly doesn't follow that his word is the infallible word of God. There is also no justification, practical or otherwise, for excluding women from the role.

Ethics can be based on absence of bias―that is there is no purely rational justification for treating others any differently than one would expect oneself to be treated. There may be practical reasons for according special privileges to some people, but certainly no purely rational justification for doing so.

You seem to be endeavoring to dismiss my argument by egregious extension. I would hope to see better argumentation from you.

In any case that my position entails that all political theory, ethics and even history is mere bias has not been argued but merely asserted. Give it a go if you can be bothered.

Authority is justifiable (when it is) for practical reasons in my view. The important point in relation to the conversation at hand is that there are no metaphysical authorities.