Western philosophy is a European folk tradition that has remained practiced, pretty much unchanged, since Socrates (as portrayed by Plato). — Snakes Alive

Well read in the "tradition", I find this 'essentialist' position, at best, unwarranted (pace Whitehead). Reeks of p0m0 over-simplification and poseur faux-erudition. What could be more oxymoronic than an - (implied) essentalist relativism - "unchanged" "folk tradition" (which is both polyglot (i.e. not exclusively "European") and, at least, twenty-five centuries old)?

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.

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

That was the whole point of my anecdote. In my broad interests across many topics, I wanted to investigate the most core or central topics, the ones that other topics reduced to or depended upon. I didn't know to begin with what those were, and I didn't see any of them being advertised as such. I just looked for connections to different things. I thought that physics on the one hand, and either economics or political science or some combination or super-field of the two on the other hand, were what I was looking for, and (in my youthful naivete) that I was pushing into new ground in asking about the foundational issues that underlaid those things: what, ultimately, is real, and what, ultimately, is moral?

Nothing ever said "philosophy is the field that answers those kinds of questions". I had had wildly inaccurate and inconsistent ideas of what philosophy was across my adolescence: at one time when asked what my philosophical views were I basically recounted string theory (to the best of my understanding at the time, at least), at another time within a few years I basically recounted utilitarianism (without knowing it was called that, thinking I had made it up).

Then as part of my general ed requirements in junior college I took a Philosophy 101 class, and just looking at the syllabus, I realized that this was a field full of people who had already been asking the same things about what I had previously thought were two separate topics. My fringe "physics" speculation had veered into metaphysics, and my pontification about rights and duties and such in the context of political science and economics was really getting into ethics... and hey, here's one already-existing field that covers both of those topics, philosophy.

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? If I had "known" back then what you're saying now, and so "should" have avoided getting "trapped and detoured" into philosophy instead of pursuing the true course toward the answering of those big questions, what field should I have gone into instead?

↪180 Proof 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. — Snakes Alive

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 the role of 'the unconscious' in agency (e.g. cognitive biases), or either economic or existential 'alienation', or the inalienability & universality of 'human rights' ... and on and on.

The "questions" themselves have changed as the scientific, technological, political-economic, aesthetic and social circumstances to which they've been applied have changed. How could they not?

Many folk traditions don't change all that much over thousands of years.

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-hegemonic and syncretic.

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.

:up:

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

What about that @Snakes Alive?

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

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

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.

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.

Non sequitur via strawman. :mask:

Yeah there is: philosophy. :monkey:

There is no general field of inquiry. — Snakes Alive

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?

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. — Snakes Alive

Oof.

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. — Snakes Alive

Let's grant that this is the core principle of philosophy. Is it connected to philosophy's manner of becoming disconnected from how things are?

I can see some argument for it.

(1) Philosophical arguments consist of addressing questions of the form "Is X a case of Y?".
(2) X and Y are explanatory categories philosophy has not created.
(3) In order to be connected to how things are, X and Y would need to be created by philosophical practice.
(4) No philosophical argument is connected to how things are.

Do you think this is close to your position?

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.

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.

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.

@Snakes Alive
I do think that philosophy is closer to Kabbalah (something evolving, ramifying and so on) than a fixed tradition whose core we can isolate. I agree that Philosophy's self-characterization seems flimsier the more you read, that it's a mistake to read Big Names in isolation and so forth. I can't weigh the extent of my germane reading against yours - I don't know how they compare - but I have read enough to have a broad sense of the lay of the land.

I agree with what you've said about snapping out of philosophy as something less like a philosophical epiphany than an extra-philosophical spiritual realization of having been confused in a certain way. Ideally, what that would lead to is finding what you were mistakenly using philosophy for outside of philosophy. Then, if you want, you can participate in philosophy as a detached hobbyist, or someone who enjoys it as a pastime.

There's something that you see in people like UG Krishnamurti where they sometimes play the game by its rules, but if challenged, switch to saying the game is bs. Back and forth, as they see fit, so long as they are seen as being the most authoritative source in the room. This is kind of like 'leaving a relationship' as a move in a relationship. We know that 'overcoming philosophy' is a big part of the folk tradition of philosophy. I looked up Avner Baz - he appears to be a professor of philosophy.

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. — Snakes Alive

I know that this isn't universal across philosophers, either contemporary or historically, but the core subject that I view philosophy being about is not features of the world itself, but the process of inquiring into those features. 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.

This is a very common theme in Analytic philosophy, which explicitly makes its focus all about language, and in doing so does actually dismiss a lot of previous philosophy, and contemporary philosophy that doesn't follow that route. I see a lot of it in Pragmatic philosophy too, where the content of an idea (about which we might talk) is grounded in the practical implications of that idea. I think it's the pragmatic grounding of talking about talking that really makes philosophy what it is. I said about as much earlier:

If you're doing ordinary work, that's not philosophy.
If you're administering the technology or businesses involved in doing that work, that's not philosophy.
If you're creating new technologies or businesses, that's not philosophy.
If you're investigating the "tools" and "jobs" out of which / toward which to create new technologies or businesses, that's not philosophy.
If you're asking how to go about doing that investigation, analyzing the ideas involved, and trying to persuade others that those are the ideas that are useful in conducting such an investigation, now you're doing philosophy.
If you're just analyzing the structure or presentation of those ideas, without regards to their practical applications anymore, then you're not doing philosophy anymore.
If you're just studying the language used to even discuss any of that, you're still not doing philosophy anymore.

... the core subject that I view philosophy being about is NOT features of the world itself, but the process of inquiring into those features.

If you're doing ordinary work, that's NOT philosophy.

If you're administering the technology or businesses involved in doing that work, that's NOT philosophy.

If you're creating new technologies or businesses, that's NOT philosophy.

If you're investigating the "tools" and "jobs" out of which / toward which to create new technologies or businesses, that's NOT philosophy.

If you're asking how to go about doing that investigation, analyzing the ideas involved, and trying to persuade others that those are the ideas that are useful in conducting such an investigation, now you're doing philosophy.

If you're just analyzing the structure or presentation of those ideas, without regards to their practical applications anymore, then you're NOT doing philosophy anymore.

If you're just studying the language used to even discuss any of that, you're still NOT doing philosophy anymore. — Pfhorrest

:100: :clap: :fire:

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.

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.

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. — Snakes Alive

I disagree. Empirically, anecdotally... i just mean reflecting on people I talk to day to day. A lot of people are interested in philosophy - that's why the guardian, the atlantic, the times etc puts out these pop-philosophy things. Guy on the street took DMT and is reading Plato now - it's not that unusual. Plato et al aren't usually seen with contempt - they're treated like the way people treat the Founding Fathers. Wisdom of the Ancients etc. Likely misguided, sure, but if you're actually trying to gauge how people outside the inner ring think of this stuff, that's closer to how it is.

Contempt is more commonly directed at present institutions. No one really hates plato on the 'outside.' They hate harvard, or something.

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

Right, that's what I'm saying! It feels a little like we're taking a long walk from philosophy as a folk tradition to philosophy as something only understood adequately by experts, who reflect in the right way on it. Which makes the whole detour needless.

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.

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. — Snakes Alive

The process of actually doing the inquiry involves a lot of stuff that is not just conversation, yes, but the process of setting up that process is very much like talking about talking. To get something like science underway, the people involved need to have broad agreement on some general things, like:

What do the questions we're asking even mean? What exactly are we asking, in this inquiry? An answer to this could be something like the verificationist theory of meaning. Analytic philosophy leans very heavily on this kind of question, and arguably even the Socratic dialogues are basically quests for adequate definitions of the terms used in other, more substantive inquiries.

What criteria do we judge answers to those questions by? What counts as evidence that a proposed answer to a question is true? An answer to this could be something like empiricism.

What method do we use to apply those criteria? An answer to this could be something like critical rationalism. This is the part most like the "litigation" you're emphasizing, having to do with burdens of proof and such. Is some account of the world to be presumed right by default until we find some reason to think otherwise, or are no accounts acceptable until one has been conclusively proven, or are all accounts equally possible until we find some reason to judge one over another...?

What should we take to be the relationship between the objects of our inquiry and we, the subjects doing the inquiring? Are we to think ourselves objective judges of something wholly independent of us? Or that the objects of our inquiry are dependent upon we subjects, created by us or by the very act of inquiry? Or that we subjects and the objects of our inquiry are interdependent parts of one system and what we're actually investigating is the relationship between ourselves and other things no different than us?

Who gets to do this inquiring? Is this to be a decentralized democratic process, or do some people have privileged or authoritative positions and their judgements carry more weight than those of others? Does it matter how many people make the same judgement? How, generally, should the social endeavor of inquiry be organized, for its findings to be reliably legitimate?

What are we asking for? Why are we inquiring into the things we're inquiring into? What is our objective or purpose? What use are answers?

These are the kinds of questions that philosophy purports (and I argue, genuinely endeavors) to answer.

Right, but think of what we're talking about. The guy on the street doesn't know philosophy. The guy who does - Azner Baez - is sketching how to go beyond it. Which person is more in the tradition? Now, maybe being in the tradition is necessary to go beyond it, I'm not saying it's not, but I can't shake the feeling that you're trying to do two things at once. It's just a folk tradition, but you have to master it and exit in the right way. I don't know how to understand your posts otherwise.

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).

Most people don't though. I mean that literally. They just don't scratch much, because of what else is on their mind. They have responsibilities (or desires.) There are few truly mindless people, if that's what you're getting at.

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.