Thanks for the continuing responses!

2.3 LNC ... — 180 Proof

I don't understand this acronym.

Probably doesn't answer the question because I don't grok what you're asking. Maybe reformulate? — 180 Proof

Basically how should the social endeavor of finding and spreading knowledge be "governed" so to speak. E.g. should everyone pursue knowledge entirely on their own and keep their findings secret, or should some elite subset of the population do all the knowledge-finding and everyone else should just believe what they tell them to, or should some elite subset of the population do all the knowledge-finding and keep it to themselves and only selectively let some people in on it, or should everyone pursue knowledge on entirely their own and share their findings with everyone else, or something else?

I am not too sure what you mean by 'meaning' — A Seagull

Meaning in the sense of belonging, purpose, narrative, transcendence, and the like. I don't think anyone would claim that such things are in short supply in this day and age, but some apparently believe that we are somehow unable to synthesize meaning from these for ourselves. The claim is that we need to be chained to a being (ultimate authority), usually referred to as the great chain of being. The enlightenment freed us from these chains.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's mind without another's guidance. Sapere Aude! Dare to Know! Have the courage to use your own understanding is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.
~Kant

I notice that you skipped a few questions, the latter half of the Metaphilosophy section: Subjects, Institutes, and Importance of Philosophy. Were you planning on revisiting those later, or just don't feel like you have anything to say on them that wasn't covered already? — Pfhorrest

My replies tend to be rather improvisational but it wasn't a conscious decision to omit those topics. I will come back later, I'm on the clock at the moment, time is short, but it's a very interesting thread and I intend to continue with it when time permits.

Sounds great, I look forward to it. :-)

My philosophy is only a set of concerns I am pretty sure I should be having.
There is an arbitrary quality to philosophical problems. If a person doesn't invest in them, they have no value.
So, it is odd to argue about a lot of stuff because the only thing thing that would make a certain line of inquiry interesting is if you are interested by it. It seems to me that many arguments about what is true or not are also appeals to interest people in a a problem.
Putting it that way, it might sound like I am proposing something that avoids that confusion.
I haven't gotten that far.

The list of problems I have here were devised as the questions that are inevitably raised by any other kind of endeavor. As I frame it, every kind of work is using some tool to do some job, with technology and business being about the administration of such tools and jobs, engineering and entrepreneurship being about the creation of new tools and jobs, and the physical and (as I'd call them) ethical sciences being about discovering what tools and jobs there are naturally, from which / toward which engineers / entrepreneurs develop their new tools / jobs.

Knowing how to conduct those physical sciences requires understanding the nature of reality and knowledge, and how to conduct those ethical sciences requires understanding the nature of morality and justice. Investigating those topics ends up dredging up at least all of the topics I've listed under those headings here. And then similar questions can be asked about that act of inquiry into those topics -- philosophy -- itself, which are the topics I've listed under the heading of metaphilosophy.

So, I argue that whatever it is you're concerned with, if you dig deeply enough into it you're going to end up needing to concern yourself with these kinds of questions.

Fair enough.
One way to put it is how Hegel tried to frame how "people" were caught up in some kind of design regarding roles in a process.
The problem there is how to separate that kind of observation from others who would say how the world is.
Sure, my questions are concerned with those questions.
But taking a point of view that sees those things together is exactly what other people are not inclined to do.

Metaphilosophy

The Meaning of Philosophy
What defines philosophy and demarcates it from other fields? — Pfhorrest

Philosophy is the thing outside or on existing borders of "usefull" categories/views.

The Objects of Philosophy
What is philosophy aiming for, by what criteria would we judge success or at least progress in philosophical endeavors? — Pfhorrest

Philosophy tries to enable the expaning of borders or creating of new categories. This is mainly done by clarifing unclear concepts by creating models that aproximate roughly what is being talked about.

The Method of Philosophy
How is philosophy to be done? — Pfhorrest

Creative thinking that consists of a sufficient degree of critical thinking and rigor.

The Subjects of Philosophy
What are the faculties that enable someone to do philosophy, to be a philosopher? — Pfhorrest

Whatever faculties enable the creative and critical thinking. Further one could add containing a certain productive element that consists either of theory builiding or precise and usefull criticism.

The Institutes of Philosophy
Who is to do philosophy and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking? — Pfhorrest

Whoever wishs to do so. I don't think it's reasonable to suggest a specific way of relating to others. In general one might constrain it artificially by limiting based on max number due to philosophers being not short term productive for society and thus demanding a certain wealth of a society. However I think this is done rather automatically.

The Importance of Philosophy
Why do philosophy in the first place, what does it matter? — Pfhorrest

It improves the long term development of civilizations. Like science it does not produce instant results and instead shifts the results to the future. One can imagine it this way we need food now/being active harvesting ect but improve overall foodproduction by allowing one member to be passive and think about food harvesting.

Philosophy of Knowledge and Reality

The Meaning of Reality
What do descriptive claims, that attempt to say what is real, even mean? — Pfhorrest

Such claims try to express patterns or rather metapatterns that are sufficiently accurate and therefore applieable over a long time.

Bonus question:
What do mathematical claims, about numbers and geometric shapes and such, mean, and how do they relate to descriptive claims about reaity? — Pfhorrest

Mathematical claims are claims over a specific abstracted attribute of reality that uses at least some sets. In math itself they are relational statements over properties of the abstracted attribute. Due to math containing of general relational statements these statements can be used more or less fitting to "real" sets.
Note that real is here used as percieved reality amd not as groundtruth. This is important since we f.e. could argue that every human is an individual not equal to any other human. But since our brain can abstract this individuality away and form a set "humans" with more then one entity in it we f.e. can start counting humans.

The Objects of Reality
What are the criteria by which to judge descriptive claims, or what is it that makes something real? — Pfhorrest

Long term apropriate usability of the descriptiv claim. Therefore showing to be more or less apropriate. To make this a bit clearer compare it to science where a theory that lasts very long due to no one being able to find a better theory somehow shows a certain accuracy of the theory. Obviously it is not a purley time duration based (or only if you consider a new improved theory to be able to include all events explained by the previous theory + more). I excluded the range due to a theory or concept being possibly very stable locally. Not to overextend here but I think afterall the overall symbolsystem needs to fullfill this. There range matters but the issue is more complex.

The Methods of Knowledge
How are we to apply those criteria and decide on what to believe, what descriptive claims to agree with? — Pfhorrest

I am not convinced that we are able to applie those criteria at all. I rather hold the view that they playout over time. However I think that one can approximate it by considering consistency rigorosity, adaptivness, falsifieability and other simular estimators however they are highly dependant on the topic at hand.

The Subjects of Reality
What is the nature of the mind, inasmuch as that means the capacity for believing and making such judgements about what to believe? — Pfhorrest

I think there are two key ways to view minds in generall. First of they are based on computational machines which creates a necessity for computability in reasonable time (due to the brain being a highmaintance organe) to do that Mind simplifies a complex continuous ground truth into a discrete space which is the basis for believes aswell as judgments over beliefs(binary thinking). Secondly there exists in general the usefull concepts of creative/dynamic vs static/conserving principles. Humams in general are something that tries to conserve itself this can be seen in the simularity of dna that results in children being rather simular to their parents physically speaking(both have 2 legs and arms ect) the brain and with it the mind entails the creative part such that the brain might be simular to the parents but the thoughts not as much. Furthermore the mind itself consists iteslf of the same process attributes there exist conservative structures that want to maintain usefull believes (even if sometimes wrong) and other process that want to include new believes or improve on believes. In general this is also a function of age and other factors. Depending on the specific case one might be tilted into one direction.

The Institutes of Knowledge
What is the proper educational system, or who should be making those descriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking? — Pfhorrest

A proper educational system should be learning based and not knowledgebased (learn how to learn). How to best teach that should be left to experts. How they socially relate is not very important. However students should also get to know based on the learning what a proper authority is and what not and how to assign justified authority to people. F.e. someone who repeatedly shows to have deep knowledge in a field should therefore be justifieably be seen as authority in said field however not necessary in others. While someone just claiming authoritie should be questioned to investigate it properly.

Bonus question: How do we get people to care about education and knowledge and reality to begin with? — Pfhorrest

I think people are per default interessted in educating especially young people. As I mentioned before the brain and it's creativity is a function of age aswell. F.e. A new born child has very few believes that are not stable(pretty new) so it per default wants to enrich it's mind with believes (thats why children are curious) however old people maybe have believes that are not uptodate but served them well over their entire life and thus are not likley to just "throw them out" for new beliefs where they do not know the worth.
Simular this is true for knowledge and reality. The reason for the self intrest is that it improves the succesrate and increases the longterm gain. Once you get older this gets less relevant.

The Importance of Knowledge
Why does is matter what is real or not, true or false, in the first place? — Pfhorrest

As mentioned above the succesrate is the important factor. However it is not as clear cut with truth as one might think. Imagine having poisones(eat=death) mushrooms and healthy mushrooms. In general the best case would be that we could distinguish exactly everytime we see a mushroom. F.e. All red mushrooms are poisones. However if this is not possible snd we accept that we make errord it might be beneficial to exclude healthy red mushrooms since the risk is not worth it. Furthermore lets assume we could always clearly find out how poisones a mushroom is but for red healthy ones we would have to invest a lot of time and brainpower into it. Both last mentioned cases illustrate that a less truthfull approach can be more beneficial due to minimizing risk or effort( where effort of finding out is higher the reward of eating the healthy mushroom and we could do other things in the same time) furthermore there might be addinional time constraints.
In general it isn't about truth and rather about best workable solution

Philosophy of Justice and Morality

The Meaning of Morality
What do prescriptive claims, that attempt to say what is moral, even mean? — Pfhorrest

They are largescale statements about the best set of relationships to optimize a society. F.e. A society that kills all of it's infants wont propagate.
Or more suttle s to close border society risks of becoming to static and getting outperformed by a more dynamic system. A to inclusive society might lead to the lack/inability of establishing an overall framework and thus bursting in different parts and possibly a chaotic state.

Bonus question: What do aesthetic claims, about beauty and comedy and tragedy and such, mean, and how do they relate to prescriptive claims about morality? — Pfhorrest

Aestetic claims can either be viewed to represent a simularity regarding the combinig structure of creative/conservative and therefore are pleasing. (take the image of humans having a frequency and aesthetic objects having an own frequencies simular to the human one or one that has a special relationship to our frequency)
Or that aestethics represent/contain a lot of metapatterns that we have learned to be usefull. F.e. Simple and deep.
(note this isn't something im to intrested in so my views are a bit on the fence hence i listed both possibilities that seem plausible to me)

The Objects of Morality
What are the criteria by which to judge prescriptive claims, or what makes something moral? — Pfhorrest

As I mentioned above the optimization of society. However this is a bit more to it. F.e. The subject at hand using morals is relevant to the appropriate framework based on the dimension it is looking at it. For example i consider the individual morality that is most beneficial to use a Kantian one. (Threat other humans as if they have inherent value) else one might up killing people for personal cain resulting in trauma. However if at a higher position f.e. as a military leader it quickly can become utilitarian if it is a given that people will die it is beneficial to minimize human cost and therefore giving orders that sactifice someone to save many (violating a kantian approach) however this applies only to non personal actions. In the daily interactions the military leader should still try to use a kantian view. Further the utilitarian domain should also be limited to a certain degree such that saving a individual or spending a large sum of money should always be decided in favor of the individual at that level. However at a higher level goverments would for example limit the ammount of money the miltary gets and thus enacting a broader utilitarian framework on said individuals life.

The Methods of Justice
How are we to apply those criteria and decide on what to intend, what prescriptive claims to agree with? — Pfhorrest

What specific claims to agree with should be up to society and it's configuration to determine. However in general it is a optimization problem where we want to maximize the overall well being while simulatinously maximizing the individual well being of worst cases.

The Subjects of Morality
What is the nature of the will, inasmuch as that means the capacity for intending and making such judgements about what to intend? — Pfhorrest

I think the result is a result of culture and it's influence on the individual as well as inherent factor in individulas that ranges over a certain distribution. This is relevant due to it influencing what one wills at the first place. The will and it's strength also depends on the specific case and how one vies oneself (on what side of the maximization problem do I see myself).

The Institutes of Justice
What is the proper governmental system, or who should be making those prescriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking? — Pfhorrest

A democracy, a combination of the public will and reflective processes in form of checks am balances that consider a broader framework then the voter might consider. They should relate to each other via discussion and a certain form of procedure to guarantee a safeguarding of both parts of the discussion (the active part/will of the people and the passive part/reflective mechanisms)

Bonus question: How do we get people to care about governance and justice and morality to begin with? — Pfhorrest

The caring about said points is given by default, since they are influences on each individuals life. Furthermore culture and education certainly influences these aspects. However simular to the case of the philosopher and scientist it shouldn't be viewed as every member of society needing to have a to strong intrest in governance. Else we get a to big overhead of passive elements in society. The handling of this is already build in to democracy where few people get chosen to focus on the passive aspects more strongly. Creating amore specialized and proper working system.

The Importance of Justice
Why does is matter what is moral or not, good or bad, in the first place? — Pfhorrest

The idea is that it is necessary for a certain ammount of trust/cooperation in a system wich overall increases the succesrate in a system if not overdone.
I like the example of teamsport. It is important for the players in a team to trust others which allows them to share responsibility (motivates passing the ball) this trust is to a certain degree given per default since the entire team wins and therefore each player and all get the price money. However if it is overdone and there is to few competition in a team this might lead to underperformace. Since there is also a necessity that people try to score and increase their individual value. Basically we also want people to try to score and in some instances refusing to pass further and take on individual risks and benefits. (Becoming man of the match ect) Societies can be viewed as teams where morals and laws function as trust building entities that allow to form better synergizing teams rather then just be a loosly connected group of individuals.

Bonus question:
What is the meaning of life? — Pfhorrest

The meaning of life is taking local process oriented actions. Like the saying that the way is the goal.
However there is no real "the meaning of live". This can be shown by following thoughtexperiment:
Imagine god exists and you get to talk to him and you ask him this question and he says something like "to have children" or the famous "42" or any other final goal. The answer at least to me always seems unstatisfactory no matter what answer you come up with.
Furthermore any final goal (that is reachable) would implie that after reaching the goal you have per definiton nothing left to do. You did it now what?
However if it is a goal that is not reachable it basically is a description of a process you ought to be undertaking. Meaning you have local challenges, aspirations and orienting yourself based on them. This doesn't mean that the orocess should be unguided. This somehow implies that there is no real meaning of life and rather an insentive to taking meaningfull local steps that are directed in a beneficial direction.
I think imagining children might be usefull if you have a child that is drawing something it has a local goal creating a picture(which compared to pictures of professional artists isn't good) however it is learning while doing so improving it skills (long term benefits/rough direction) and the result has a lot of meaning to them or their parents.
If you want to view it evolutionary I would say creating a future that still consists of living entities furthering the overall succestory of life in general.

Ps. Obviously the answers are a) Personal views and b) drastically reduced in length and simplified to fit to your questions c) Sorry in advance for the spelling mistakes

If something is unclear or if you have disagreements feel free to respond.

Ps2 To what comes to my mind when you say "what is your philosphy" i was anticipating a question of roughly the form "how do you think reality is fundamentaly working and how would you describe it" that I spend a lot of time on felt like it was missing.

Congratulations on being the first person to answer all questions! I hope you enjoyed writing that and it generates some interesting discussion.

I did enjoy writing it. What are you having in mind when you say:

it generates some interesting discussion. — Pfhorrest

?

I was saying that I hope that it generates some interesting discussion. The point of this thread is for people to share their philosophies and discuss them. I'm trying not to judge / critique them all too much myself. I might have further comments on your later but it's bedtime now.

I don't think anyone would claim that such things are in short supply in this day and age, but some apparently believe that we are somehow unable to synthesize meaning from these for ourselves. The claim is that we need to be chained to a being (ultimate authority), usually referred to as the great chain of being. The enlightenment freed us from these chains. — praxis

I sometimes see a craving for homogeneous culture, perhaps with more tradition and even with less social mobility. I chalk this up to some degree to status anxiety (as Alain De Botton describes it.) While ultimate authorities are often a part of this desire, maybe they aren't its essence.

The Subjects of Philosophy
What are the faculties that enable someone to do philosophy, to be a philosopher? — Pfhorrest

I think, independence, intuition, reason, compassion, and a degree of innate intelligence.

The Institutes of Philosophy
Who is to do philosophy and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking? — Pfhorrest

First and foremost, those drawn to it, and also who have received some form of endorsement from those already practicing. That would include, for example, lecturers and teachers in the subject.

The Importance of Philosophy
Why do philosophy in the first place, what does it matter? — Pfhorrest

Again, it's the contemplation of 'what really matters'. There's any number of subjects, a practically uncountable number of facts to be discovered. But we are born human, we live our three score years and ten (hopefully), and then we die. Philosophers wonder about the meaning of that. I'm a believer in the principle that 'philosophy requires no apparatus'. Certainly today's technology and science can provide innumerable benefits and I never want to be thought of as being against them, for what they can do. But they can't solve the deepest questions of human life, as only humans can do that, in human form. (But, for example, medical science can help countless people to be physically cured to enable them to live to explore such questions which in times past wasn't possible. But I'm highly sceptical of trans-humanism or VR.) But philosophically, I think humans are in some basic sense the form that the Universe takes to discover itself or to fully realise its own reality. 'A physicist', said Bohr, 'is just an atom's way of looking at itself'; one of Bohr's apparently tongue-in-cheek remarks, but containing a profound insight. I regard many religious myths and metaphors as ways of expressing this idea, although unfortunately the meaning is often forgotten while the outward forms are clung to.

So I suppose one contemporary expression of that is Maslow's idea of 'self-actualisation', although it finds expression in many forms of the idea of 'self-realisation'. That is often associated with Indian spirituality, about which I will have more to say later.

Thank you for your continued responses!

I guess enough people have said enough about their philosophies that I can start offering my own answers to my questions (in shorter form than my entire book of course) here. I didn't want to do that right at the start because I didn't want this thread to be all about me; I'm more interested in seeing everyone share their diverse views and compare and critique each other.

I think I'll just start doing one question per post, and wait for someone else to post before I do the next one.

The Meaning of Philosophy
What defines philosophy and demarcates it from other fields? — Pfhorrest

Philosophy is the love of wisdom, where by "love of" I mean attraction toward, or pursuit of; and by "wisdom" I mean the ability to discern truth from falsehood and good from bad, or at least the ability to discern superior from inferior answers to questions about either reality or morality. It differs from the sciences in that it is not concerned with contingent, a posteriori facets of the experiential world, but more about how to process and react to those, the necessari, a priori, foundational questions about how to do those sciences; those sciences apply wisdom thus defined, and philosophy is the pursuit of that ability to do so. It also differs from more abstract fields like the arts and mathematics in that is is not entirely disconnected from practical applications and concerned just with structure for structure's sake (like math) or presentation for presentation's sake (like the arts), but rather uses those things, like logic and rhetoric, as tools to do its job of facilitating the sciences, both the well-known physical sciences and what I would call the ethical sciences, that I may elaborate on later. It's the glue between the abstract and the practical.

And lastly I'd argue that, properly speaking, it differs from religion in that it is critical, anti-fideistic, taking nothing as unquestionable. But it's also properly speaking anti-nihilistic, allowing free investigation of things with uncertain grounding rather than shutting all such discourse down as groundless and impossible from the outset. I would argue that both fideism and nihilism are rather "phobosophy", the fear of wisdom. But I recognize of course that fideistic and nihilistic elements are often included in what are commonly considered philosophical endeavors; I just argue that, to that extent, those endeavors are failing to really do philosophy per se.

Whatever you find harmful, do not do to anyone.

3.0

Philosophy of Justice and Morality

The Meaning of Morality
What do prescriptive claims, that attempt to say what is moral, even mean? — Pfhorrest

3.1 At the very least, they are instructions for how and when to avoid, minimize or relieve harm.

3.11 To be afflicted by harmful conduct, via either action or inaction, tends to narrow - incapacitate - the Agency (i.e. capacity for judging whether or not to do harm, and consequently whether or not 'flourishing' happens) of the afflicted. (See 3.22)

Bonus question: What do aesthetic claims, about beauty and comedy and tragedy and such, mean, and how do they relate to prescriptive claims about morality? — Pfhorrest

3.2 They are images of ordeals (of/about) avoiding, minimizing or relieving harm.

3.21 Like Zen koans which provoke a suspension of conceptual thinking, works of art in particular (and aesthetic experiences in general) prompt suspension of ego - what Iris Murdoch referred to as unselfing - by presenting sensationally or emotionally heightened encounters with the nonself which make it more likely than not for one to forget oneself for the moment (or longer).

3.22 Altruism - judging, by action or inaction, not to do harm to another - begins with learning and practicing techniques for forgetting oneself: unselfing: suspending ego. (Ecstatic techniques (e.g. making art.)) This is the moral benefit of art, but not its function.

3.23 The function of making art (along with morality & rationality (see 2.5)) is to help expand - develop - Agency, or to inversely limit its shadow: Foolery (see 1.1)

The Objects of Morality
What are the criteria by which to judge prescriptive claims, or what makes something moral? — Pfhorrest

3.3 Whether or not, or the degree to which, they are, ceteris paribus, effective as instructions for avoiding, minimizing or relieving harm.

The Methods of Justice
How are we to apply those criteria and decide on what to intend, what prescriptive claims to agree with? — Pfhorrest

3.4 Apply criteria - any mode of judging - reflectively.
(See 1.32)

3.5 Pragmatic coherence* (for want of better phrase) and not consensus, or conformity (to custom/dogma/authority), seems more robust with respect to edge cases, etc.

The Subjects of Morality
What is the nature of the will, inasmuch as that means the capacity for intending and making such judgements about what to intend? — Pfhorrest

3.6 The "will" is weak (re: akrasia, cognitive biases), so habit seems key to reliable judgment. (See. 2.61)

3.61 Cultivating (a) intellectual habits via pedagogy & discipline* and (b) moral habits via social experience & civic/political engagé, I think, expands Agency, or the capacity for judgment (i.e. adaptive conduct (see 2.62)).

The Institutes of Justice
What is the proper governmental system, or who should be making those prescriptive judgements and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking? — Pfhorrest

3.7 'Any social arrangement, or governing system, which makes it manifestly easier (safer, even compulsory) than more difficult (dangerous or prohibited) for non-shareholding stakeholders to fully participate in governing themselves and their communities  (e.g. economic democracy) ...' is a political-economic circumstance I'd call "proper".

Bonus question: How do we get people to care about governance and justice and morality to begin with? — Pfhorrest

3.8 People are animals, and governing is not as easy as being governed. Nature - entropy - biases (less pathological) animals to prefer paths of least resistance / effort, both in conduct & thinking; therefore, most prefer (consent) to be governed rather than take up the added time-consuming chore of governing themselves. Millennia ago Athenians had incisively tagged this 'human, all too human' trait: idiōtēs ...

The Importance of Justice
Why does is matter what is moral or not, good or bad, in the first place? — Pfhorrest

3.9 It matters because we depend on the latter for labeling which conduct is or isn't harmful - bad or good - for us, each other and our shared prospects (i.e. commons, community), and ignoring the former tends to make it more difficult to live generously with each other and to resolve social or political conflicts without violence.


Next: 4.0

Bonus question:
What is the meaning of life? — Pfhorrest

Thanks for the continuing replies! I'm surprised to find myself continuing to agree with you as much as I do; I expected our views to have diverged a lot more by this point.

I guess I can answer another of my own questions now...

The Objects of Philosophy
What is philosophy aiming for, by what criteria would we judge success or at least progress in philosophical endeavors? — Pfhorrest

Philosophy aims for wisdom, in other words to discover or create a means of discerning truth from falsehood and good from bad, and it progresses in that endeavor by clarifying confused concepts about those scales of evaluation. The emergence of, loosely speaking, "the scientific method" is the greatest bit of philosophical progress in the history of the field, in my view, and though progress in moral investigations has been much slower, we're still slowly crawling there with increased emphasis on liberty, democracy, and material well-being, and less on things like ritual purity and obedience.

You're obviously being brief and concise in your responses to the OP, as well as expressing your own values and beliefs to some extent. In this section of moral philosophy, you focus on harm, and neglect other moral dimensions such as fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. I was wondering if they were not mentioned for the sake of brevity or perhaps because you reason that care/harm trumps all other dimensions. If the latter is the case, would you share that reasoning?

Hurray, discussion is being generated. :-)

The Method of Philosophy
How is philosophy to be done? — Pfhorrest

Philosophy is done not so much by solving problems, but by dissolving them: showing apparent paradoxes and dilemmas that would seem to stand in the way of any route toward wisdom to actually be the result of confused thinking, conflated terms or ideas, etc. By teasing apart that confusion, differentiating conflated terms and ideas from each other, and so on, philosophy can progress toward wisdom by showing those apparent roadblocks to have actually been illusory all along. More generally, philosophy makes headway best when it analyzes concepts in light of the practical use we want to put them to, asking why do we need to know the answer to some question, in order to get at what we really want from an answer to that question, and so what an answer to it should look like, and how to go about identifying one.

In analyzing concepts and teasing them apart from each other, philosophy makes extensive use of the tools of mathematical logic. But in exhorting its audience to care to use one of those teased-apart concepts for some practical purpose, instead of endlessly seeking answers to the uselessly confused and so perpetually unanswerable question that they may be irrationally attached to as some kind of important cosmic enigma, philosophy must instead use the tools of the rhetorical arts. Thus philosophy uses the tools of the abstract disciplines, mathematics and the arts, to make progress in its job of enabling the more practical sciences to in turn do their jobs of expounding on the details of what is real and moral.

@Pfhorrest & @praxis

Glad for your interest. Thanks for reading. More to come soon. :smirk:

I meant I liked the way the contents of the link are laid out. I doubt I could answer the questions you posed with any kind of precision because they beg more questions than answers and I’d have to offer several different answers for most of the questions because I don’t really know what exactly many/most/all of then are asking.

That should give you some idea of my regard for ‘philosophy’ ;)

And lastly I'd argue that, properly speaking, [philosophy] differs from religion in that it is critical, anti-fideistic, taking nothing as unquestionable. But it's also properly speaking anti-nihilistic, allowing free investigation of things with uncertain grounding rather than shutting all such discourse down as groundless and impossible from the outset. I would argue that both fideism and nihilism are rather "phobosophy", the fear of wisdom — Pfhorrest

Fair enough, but this grows out of the cultural dynamics of the West, in particular, due to the emphasis in Western culture on 'belief' as the defining element of religion. Consider that the term 'orthodoxy' is derived from ' ortho doxa', right belief or right worship.

But Plato himself constantly pointed to the reality of the 'invisible, intelligible realm' which he contrasted with the 'sensory domain'. In Platonic epistemology, knowledge of the intelligible realm was superior to sensory knowledge, in that the objects of reason - geometric, arithmetic and logical truths and the like - were directly grasped by nous rather than by the senses 'liable to error'; they were apodictic and immediately known. But dianoia, knowledge of arithmetical and geometric principles, though high, was not as high as noesis, knowledge of the forms. And these forms of 'higher knowledge' were distinguished from 'doxa' and 'pistis', which are translated as belief and (mere) opinion. This is spelled out in the analogy of the divided line, in the Republic.

As is well known, Christian theology was to absorb a great deal of Platonic philosophy, which provided the intellectual framework of Christian metaphysics (preserved in for example Thomas Aquinas as in many other great works of Christian Platonism). Subsequently the rejection of scholastic metaphysics resulted also in the abandonment of these elements of Greek thought which were in many other respects foundational to Western culture (for example, the whole notion of scientific taxonomy was basically derived from Aristotelianism, and Galileo's mathematization of physics owed a great deal to the neo-platonism of Italian renaissance humanism.)

So through these transformations, metaphysics itself became subordinated to, or identified with, belief or 'doxa’. And because of the association of metaphysics with religion, and also because of the rejection of metaphysics by many of the seminal figures of Protestantism, then the rejection of metaphysics along with religion is one of the main origins of modern naturalism. And that is also a phobia, which manifests as 'fear and hatred of the supernatural' - something like 'theophobia', which is strongly evidenced by many posters on this forum, most often for reasons that they themselves are not fully conscious of. (I'm looking at you, 180 ;-) )

I would argue that both fideism and nihilism are rather "phobosophy", the fear of wisdom. — Pfhorrest

:clap: :cool:

[ ... ] 'fear and hatred of the supernatural' - something like 'theophobia', which is strongly evidenced by many posters on this forum, most often for reasons that they themselves are not fully conscious of. (I'm looking at you, 180 ;-) ) — Wayfarer

Moi?! Please elaborate on my 'subconscious', Herr Doktor Wayf. (More sciencey, of course; less to no woo.)

You might need to look at some ink blots or something to help Wayfarer substantiate his claim.

I meant I liked the way the contents of the link are laid out. — I like sushi

Oh okay, thanks then.

Your historical account sounds accurate enough to me, but doesn't really say anything against what I was saying before, except inasmuch as you might want "religion" to mean something different than I mean by it. But inasmuch as religion is not fideistic as I've defined it, it doesn't really differ from any irreligious practices, and to that extent I have nothing against it, and don't consider it unphilosophical. Natural theology, for instance, is perfectly philosophical in my book, at least in the project it tries to undertake. But inasmuch as God is supposed to be a supernatural thing, I think it can't help but fail in that undertaking, because supernatural things by their very nature have no effect on the world that we experience (if they did, they would be natural), so we cannot tell anything about whether or not they are real, and so can only appeal to faith for claims about them.

That is different from my take on abstract objects, which I will get to later. For now...

The Subjects of Philosophy
What are the faculties that enable someone to do philosophy, to be a philosopher? — Pfhorrest

I hold that all that is needed, strictly speaking, is personhood. Rather, I hold personhood to be defined as the possession of the faculty needed to conduct philosophy, which is sapience. "Sapience" literally means just "wisdom" in Latin, but I mean it in a more technical sense as a reflexivity of the mind and will; as self-awareness and self-control, the ability to have opinions about your opinions, to be aware of what you are thinking, to assess whether you are thinking the correct things, and if you deem that you are not, to cause yourself to think differently. This reflexivity allows you to look upon your thoughts in the third person as though they were someone else's thoughts that you were judging, allowing you to assess the validity of the inferences you make, and so to do logic, to tease apart the relations between your various ideas. That reflexivity also allows you to put yourself in the place of another person and imagine what influence it would have on them if you were to make an argument in one way or another, and so to do rhetoric, to package and deliver your ideas in a way to make them easy to accept.

I’m enjoying this thread - I have used the questions to try and order my own thoughts, but my answers are perhaps too lengthy and disjointed at this stage, so I’m going to try and offer some discussion instead.

Philosophy is the love of wisdom, where by "love of" I mean attraction toward, or pursuit of; and by "wisdom" I mean the ability to discern truth from falsehood and good from bad, or at least the ability to discern superior from inferior answers to questions about either reality or morality. — Pfhorrest

I think this definition invites a limited view of wisdom. What we discern as ‘falsehood’ or ‘bad’, ‘unreal’ or ‘immoral’ is as much a part of wisdom as what is ‘good’ or ‘real’. Determining how to effectively integrate predictions, imagination and ‘immoral’ thoughts or intentions as useful information is, in my view, as important to the pursuit of wisdom as reality or morality. I don’t think it’s as dichotomous as discerning truth from falsehood or ‘good’ from ‘bad’, but rather the capacity to structure and restructure our conceptual systems to integrate ALL information about the world, not just in relation to reality or morality, but in order to more completely understand ourselves and the universe.

I’m enjoying this thread - I have used the questions to try and order my own thoughts, — Possibility

I'm happy to hear that, that's exactly what I hoped for. :-)

but my answers are perhaps too lengthy and disjointed at this stage, so I’m going to try and offer some discussion instead. — Possibility

I look forward to seeing them when you feel they're worth sharing; meanwhile, discussion is great too.

I think this definition invites a limited view of wisdom. What we discern as ‘falsehood’ or ‘bad’, ‘unreal’ or ‘immoral’ is as much a part of wisdom as what is ‘good’ or ‘real’. Determining how to effectively integrate predictions, imagination and ‘immoral’ thoughts or intentions as useful information is, in my view, as important to the pursuit of wisdom as reality or morality. I don’t think it’s as dichotomous as discerning truth from falsehood or ‘good’ from ‘bad’, but rather the capacity to structure and restructure our conceptual systems to integrate ALL information about the world, not just in relation to reality or morality, but in order to more completely understand ourselves and the universe. — Possibility

I'm not sure I understand you, and that makes me wonder if perhaps you misunderstood me. I was trying to say that wisdom is basically being able to evaluate both descriptive and prescriptive claims: where descriptive claims are those about what is or isn't, what's true or false, what's real or unreal; and prescriptive claims are those about what ought or oughtn't be, what's good or bad, what's moral or immoral. It sounds like you're saying that figuring out what's false, bad, unreal, or immoral is just as important as figuring out what's true, good, real, and moral; and I meant that to be implied by what I said before. Wisdom is the ability to discern one from the other (in both dimensions), or at least to place ideas somewhere in relation to each other on each of those scales. For the purposes (as will be elaborated later) of telling both where we are and where to go, figuratively speaking, and thus how to get there from here.

2.3 LNC ...
— 180 Proof
I don't understand this acronym. — Pfhorrest

Law of Non-Contradiction. :wink:

↪180 Proof

You're obviously being brief and concise in your responses to the OP, as well as expressing your own values and beliefs to some extent. In this section of moral philosophy, you focus on harm, and neglect other moral dimensions such as fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. I was wondering if they were not mentioned for the sake of brevity ... — praxis

Mostly brevity. Those "other moral dimensions", I think, belong to normative or applied ethics; the questions in the OP seem to have a more metaethical focus or I took them that way.

... or perhaps because you reason that care/harm trumps all other dimensions. If the latter is the case, would you share that reasoning? — praxis

For me care/harm grounds (i.e. roots = radix) "all other" normative questions (as per propositions 3.23, 3.5 & 3.61), but I wouldn't say "trumps" them. 

Law of Non-Contradiction. :wink: — 180 Proof

Thanks. So your only criteria for judging the truth is a description proposition is that it's not self-contradictory? Every self-consistent descriptive proposition is true?

the questions in the OP seem to have a more metaethical focus or I took them that way. — 180 Proof

I mean them to span both metaethics and normative ethics, but to have a generally metaethical framing, because I hold that normative ethics should be dissolved into metaethics on the one hand (which is all philosophy should be concerned with) and applied ethics on the other (which should be developed into a whole suite of contingent, a posteriori ethical sciences). But questions like the criteria for judging moral claims and the methods for applying that judgement are meant to yield what is effectively a normative ethical theory (e.g. if your criterion is maximizing pleasure and your method is just do whatever's descriptively most likely to do that, you end up a utilitarian; if your criterion is universalizability consistent with will and your method is always treating everyone as a means rather than an ends or something along those lines, you're a Kantian deontologist).

I’m just interested in hearing what other individual people’s complete philosophical systems are, phrased as answers to the same set of questions for comparison. — Pfhorrest

Does one's philosophy have the burden of following all of the conventional distinctions?

:brow:

Philosophy of justice and morality.

It’s interesting for me to find that I didn’t chose to focus on this, but that it’s more often than not the underlying theme behind most of my thoughts and discussions with people. I’ve always had an interest in anthropology and sociology and so my theories and ideas are generally based on these fields. Consequently one philosopher I’ve enjoyed reading and find to be very persuasive is Mary Midgley.

Edit: Consequently I have been involved in heated discussions where I have argued that morality is not subjective or relative.