Had it meant 'love of wisdom' shouldn't it have been called something like sophiophilia?

What about its Greek origins and the role of love in, for example, Plato?

There some old aphorism I heard once in my first philosophy class along the lines of "Before walking the path to enlightenment, tables are tables and tea is tea. Along the path to enlightenment, tables are not tables and tea is not tea. Upon reaching enlightenment, tables are again tables, and tea is again tea." — Pfhorrest

I've always like that quote, but note that it also deflates enlightenment. Illusions are our special friends.

I see progress in philosophy as consisting of, basically, tallying up all the broad kinds of confusion that people could find themselves getting trapped in, elucidating why those approaches are wrong, and then once people are securely shielded from that kind of insanity, letting them just go about life in a way much like they would have if they had never been tempted into that kind of confusion. — Pfhorrest

The place where we meet is the stuff I've posted in Bedrock Beliefs. Call it 'logical pragmatism' or whatever you like, but something like that seems right to me. The 'insanity' that Wittgenstein and others ward off, however, is only the relatively innocent game of bad philosophy.

I don't see a clean answer to the question of whether it's better to live a safe and respectable life of many years or a risky, intense life that ends quickly. Is it better to write philosophy or put that time into learning the piano or making a fortune? I don't know. Is it a good thing to be born? I don't know. Sometimes I pity the dead. Sometimes I envy them. Sometimes I wish I hustled after money more in my youth, if only to buy some more space from others now. I think, rightly or wrong, that this kind of reflection is common.

And surely others feel that they are caught up in the current of a world that is bigger than them. The 'species essence' expresses itself only the plurality of personalities. I can't contain that essence (general human potential) all on my own. I can't manifest conflicting possibilities. Life is short. We are shaped by a particular childhood, etc. I can make extending myself a project, but even then belief in God is not a live option for me, and that would be a decisive inaccessible difference. Is it better to believe in God? I don't know. I just know I can't and work within that cage. I guess the point is that we don't start from zero, and that the goal of perfect rationality seems to require that we do, that everything pass the test of some atemporal reason.
I don't think we can escape our animality. Philosophy is more like the forging of tools or the composition of jokes or the continuation of religion by other means. Maybe all at the same time.

I've always like that quote — path

Do you perchance know where it is from / the exact quote?

Do you perchance know where it is from / the exact quote? — Pfhorrest

Maybe I first saw it in Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching. Or maybe in a Krishnamurti interview. But I don't know the original source.

Here's a quote that adds to this thread, I think:

Philosophers are saddled with expectations which no one could possibly meet. They are supposed to respond helpfully to large questions posed by anguished laymen. (Am I more than a swarm of particles? What meaning does life have?) They are supposed to be paragons of argumentative rigour, strenuously criticising seemingly obvious premises, fearlessly pushing inferences to bitter ends. Finally, they are supposed to be learned and wise. They are expected to have read all that has been written in response to the layman’s large questions, and to rearrange it in novel and luminous dialectical patterns, sympathetically harmonising all the suggestions offered by all the great dead philosophers.

Since philosophy became self-consciously professional, the first task has usually been disdained as ‘mere’ edification. The analytic philosophers take on the second assignment, and congratulate themselves on their ‘scientific’ devotion to truth, hardness of nose, and sheer cleverness. The so-called ‘speculative’ and ‘Continental’ philosophers – those impressed by the examples of Hegel or Whitehead or Heidegger – take on the third. They weave webs of words which put their predecessors in their proper dialectico-historical places. The analysts despise the fuzziness of the speculators. The Continentals despise the illiteracy and gimmickry of the analysts. Both despise the cheerful, wealthy, unprofessional authors of best-selling paperbacks on how to live. A good time is had by all. — Rorty

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n09/richard-rorty/persuasive-philosophy


The review is worth reading in its entirety. Those best selling paperbacks are what I'd call 'deep' philosophy, even if we find this or that personality obnoxious. To practice one of the other kinds is to have already decided with respect to the 'existential' stuff.

To this we can imagine the existentially intense layman replying: ‘I thought you were promising an explanation of how knowledge is possible – how I, a poor little animal on an insignificant planet, a mere swirl of quarks, can nevertheless grasp the nature of the universe, the depths of heaven and earth. I thought you might at least tell me what methods I should use to be sure of getting knowledge. What happened? All I got was a way of defining “knowledge” which splits the difference between me and some crazy sceptic.’ ... What to say to somebody who suggests you are a brain in a vat is a nice testing-ground for dialectical acuity, a paradigm of the sort of thing about which one can be precise and argumentative, but it is just not the kind of issue which ever ‘moved anybody to take up the study of philosophy’. It is the sort of issue you get into after you’ve shrugged off the existential, after you’ve dismissed the question of how you might be precious and valuable as jejune, and have settled for competitive, coercive technicalities. (This is the loss of Eden which makes hard-nosed professional philosophers out of eager adolescents.) — Rorty

I think 'loss of Eden' is a great phrase there. Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is one of my favorite texts, and he makes better arguments against the traditional 'referee' conception of philosophy than I am liable to manage. I also recommend Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.

This quote seems relevant:

…one consequence of antirepresentationalism is the recognition that no description of how things are from a God's-eye point of view, no skyhook provided by some contemporary or yet-to-be-developed science, is going to free us from the contingency of having been acculturated as we were. Our acculturation is what makes certain options live, or momentous, or forced, while leaving others dead, or trivial, or optional. — Rorty

This is why I think we can't have some perfect timeless rationality that can lift itself up by its own bootstraps. We are blinded by our eyes. The condition for the possibility of conversation is the condition of the impossibility of a conversation that presupposes nothing. The philosopher 'irrationally' decides what is worth addressing in the first place. Critical language as it is spoken is employed uncritically, with the 'assumption' that it intelligibly signifies and has value for others. Metaphors like 'falling' or 'immersion' point to what I mean.

A certain kind of philosophy wants to deny that we are along for the ride, tied to something that drags us along. We want to be autonomous, self-determined. There's an image of noble stasis at the center, I think. If the stoic has to die, he at least doesn't want to die like a lil' bitch. 'It's no use whimpering.' Transcendence is a fragile equilibrium that includes the sense of mastery of a situation. So 'existential philosophy' is a kind of half-rational poetry that functions quasi-religiously this way. Something like that.

↪180 Proof So you think that while a philosopher can make progress on themselves, philosophy as a field is no better today than it was thousands of years ago? — Pfhorrest

"As a field" it's a scholarly profession piggybacking Meta- that discourses on (i.e. critiques) other "fields" - scientific, technological or humanistic. Measured by its ever-voluminous annual output of publications, academic philosophy certainly "progresses" ... All useful stuff; however, almost all trivial - e.g. anglophone analytic-positivist scholasticism or fashionably francophone sophistry.

Not even better at leading people to clarity of thought in such a way?

Sophistry maybe "leads" some (e.g. Rorty, Derrida, Ayn Rand, William Lane Craig, et al) ... but philosophy spurs goads dares each of us to think for oneself, and provides discursive exercises (i.e. aporias, dialectics, gedankenexperiments, etc) with which to practice reflectively.

I don’t understand this seemingly pejorative use of the term “totalizing”. — Pfhorrest

De-fine precisely the totality of real numbers.

De-fine precisely the totality of the real.

De-fine precisely the totality of time.

[ ... ]

The conceit of "totalizing" is that the map = territory, which is useless nonsense. Maps are useful precisely because they are abstractions excluding every detail of the territory except those for which they are designed to track or depict. Most domains of knowledge are approximative - non-totalizable, or maps; thus, it's scientistic to assume a 'total science' (or final ToE) is achievable; and (too) many philosophers since Aristotle (or earlier) have been guilty of - IMO deluded by - this sort of science-envy (i.e. meta-scientism). NB: Btw, I'll remind you I'm, at heart, a spinozist nonetheless. :smirk:

In all fields, finding common principles that underlie many diverse phenomena is an admirable goal.

Philosophy concerns concepts and discursivity [reflecting] whereas nonformal sciences, broadly speaking, concern phenomena [explaining]. I don't understand why or how so many still conflate philosophy with science (Witty).

More on topic, is that not exactly what constitutes progress, at least for most fields? Explaining more and more with less and less?

No doubt. "Most fields", but not all - e.g. music, dance, history, mathematics, chess, etc, ... which, like philosophy, do not explain how 'things' are (transform), only at most describe (depict) or instruct (usage of) 'them'.

It pretty obviously doesn't. This is the straightforward answer, and denying it requires lots of cognitive dissonance and moving the goalposts, so I don't see what the appeal is.

"It's obvious" is a pretty lacking argument.

Well, provide any instance of philosophy ever figuring anything out, or doing anything interesting.

See the OP, last paragraph especially.

I don't know why you need to be told this, but the physical sciences are not philosophy.

But any argument about why to do things the scientific way instead of some other way is philosophy.

And the sciences spun off from natural philosophers investigating the kinds of things science investigates, and convincing each other as a discursive community (and enough of the rest of the world) that doing things the scientific way was the way to that kind of investigation.

But any argument about why to do things the scientific way instead of some other way is philosophy. — Pfhorrest

No it isn't. Philosophy has never succeeded in 'grounding' the sciences, and the sciences don't take seriously any attempts it's made to. Scientific method (to the extent there is such a thing) develops from cultural and economic pressures on the one hand, and methodological disputes internal to the sciences on the other.

And the sciences spun off from natural philosophers — Pfhorrest

No they didn't. The important physicists and chemists weren't important philosophers, and vice versa. The closest that ever came to happening was Descartes, maybe. Even if this were true, it would just be a historical quirk about the relation of two disciplines – still. philosophy would have made no progress with respect to what its methods and goals have always been (goal: figuring out broad truths, method: talking).

But any argument about why to do things the scientific way instead of some other way is philosophy.

And the sciences spun off from natural philosophers investigating the kinds of things science investigates, and convincing each other as a discursive community (and enough of the rest of the world) that doing things the scientific way was the way to that kind of investigation. — Pfhorrest

This makes sense to me. Then, even on a personal level, a non-expert (maybe a professional musician) can take a general stance toward science, such as whether it is trustworthy and in what way. Then on a personal level both scientists and philosophers can (optionally) wring their hands over their status. Does science give us truth in some grand sense or just reliable technology? Does science touch the real in a way that philosophy or even poetry does not? What the fuck is the real ? What are we even talking about?

I think these embarrassing and 'useless' questions even have an indirect practical utility, though I don't like justifying them that way. To do so concedes too much. What do we mean by practical utility? If we quantify it, we still have to choose and frame those quantities.

Then there's philosophy as an important part politics, which involves all kinds of contentious terms, all kinds of trying to solve things by just talking (including appeals to science.)

Scientific method (to the extent there is such a thing) develops from cultural and economic pressures on the one hand, and methodological disputes internal to the sciences on the other. — Snakes Alive

I enjoy your anti-philosophical posts, but to push the game along:

If you were to justify your origin story for science, would you do so by appealing to science?

Are these methodological disputes not philosophical simply because scientists are doing them? When do such disputes, if ever, become philosophy of science? Should we exclude the possibility of philosophy's influence on these methodological disputes?

If you were to justify your origin story for science, would you do so by appealing to science? — path

Probably not. You'd probably have to have a decent historian to answer the question in any interesting way. A philosopher would definitely NOT give you a good answer.

No it isn't. Philosophy has never succeeded in 'grounding' the sciences, and the sciences don't take seriously any attempts it's made to. Scientific method (to the extent there is such a thing) develops from cultural and economic pressures on the one hand, and methodological disputes internal to the sciences on the other. — Snakes Alive

I suspect you are, like many, thinking of the supposed scientific method as something much narrower than what I’m talking about in the OP. I just said a critical, empirical, realist approach. That’s something in common to all science, and what distinguishes it from non-science.

Try “doing science” without at least tacitly admitting that your claims are tentative and open to further question, which is what I mean by “critical”. Try “doing science” without at least tacitly admitting that there is some actual objective reality we’re investigating together, which is what I mean by “realist”. Try “doing science” without appeals to observation or regard for concordance with observation, which is obviously what “empirical” means.

Any real scientist will tell you you’re “doing science” wrong, not actually doing science at all; and if they give you the time of day further, may tell you some reasons why that is an inferior way to do things than the proper scientific way. At that point, they are doing philosophy, even though they’re not a professional philosopher.

No they didn't. The important physicists and chemists weren't important philosophers, and vice versa. The closest that ever came to happening was Descartes, maybe. — Snakes Alive

The most influential pre-modern physicist was Aristotle, whose status as also a philosopher I hope I don’t need to explain. The most influential physicist of the scientific revolution was Isaac Newton, who titled his seminal work as being about “natural philosophy”, and whose philosophical views about the nature of space and time were taught in my philosophy degree. Much more recent physicists like Mach and Einstein were taught in that same class, not their empirical findings, but their philosophical arguments. At the fringes, even today science and philosophy still bleed together.

In any case, you seem to be categorizing people by whether they are scientists or philosophers by reputation, not addressing whether particular things they did were science or philosophy.

still. philosophy would have made no progress with respect to what its methods and goals have always been (goal: figuring out broad truths, method: talking). — Snakes Alive

This is the real core of our disagreement. You define philosophy in a way that it is trying to do something impossible, and then decry that of course it fails at that. Look at the definition of philosophy the OP begins with: it’s about trying to figure out HOW to “figure out broad truths“, not necessarily figuring them out itself.

“By doing science” is a possible answer to at least part of that question, and that has proven a very successful answer to that part of the question, to the point that philosophers arguing against it today are on the back foot, as a philosophy that denies the soundness of science is seen as prima facie suspicious. Most of the people actually doing science don’t engage in the remaining arguments about its foundations because to their satisfaction the matter has already been settled.

That is a sign that progress has been made, a satisfactory answer had been found, and all that’s left are minor quibbles. When sufficient progress had been made on a construction project, the amount of construction going on there drops precipitously, besides a little ongoing maintenance.

If you think this is not an accurate definition of philosophy in the OP, maybe take it up over at the What is philosophy? thread that this thread spun off from.

:up:

Any real scientist will tell you you’re “doing science” wrong, not actually doing science at all; and if they give you the time of day further, may tell you some reasons why that is an inferior way to do things than the proper scientific way. At that point, they are doing philosophy, even though they’re not a professional philosopher. — Pfhorrest

No you're not. Philosophy is in no way responsible for any of these vague epistemic virtues. It has had both proponents and opponents of them, and continues to do so, and their adoption (to the extent they are adopted) is never done on philosophical grounds. At best, philosophy tries (and fails) to retroactively justify those virtues by 'grounding' them.

The most influential physicist of the scientific revolution was Isaac Newton, who titled his seminal work as being about “natural philosophy” — Pfhorrest

Newton was not a philosopher. You're just punning on the term "natural philosophy," which is what people used to call things like physics. Newton is not (nor Einstein, get real) seriously taught in philosophy curricula, nor can philosophy students or professors (unless they study physics on the side for professional reasons) understand his works with their training. You were taught his 'philosophical ideas about space and time,' by which is meant, you've done what philosophers do, talk about his work in superficial terms out of context after the fact. Philosophers' education does not equip them to understand any of these scientists.

Look at the definition of philosophy the OP begins with: it’s about trying to figure out HOW to “figure out broad truths“, not necessarily figuring them out itself. — Pfhorrest

Alright. It hasn't done that either, though.

That is a sign that progress has been made, a satisfactory answer had been found, and all that’s left are minor quibbles. — Pfhorrest

To the extent that 'an answer was found,' philosophers didn't do it.

If you think this is not an accurate definition of philosophy in the OP, maybe take it up over at the What is philosophy? thread that this thread spun off from. — Pfhorrest

I don't care. You're just going to keep moving the goalposts. The problem is, on no reasonable moving of the goalpost will philosophy have made any progress anyway. So move them wherever you want.

Try “doing science” without at least tacitly admitting that your claims are tentative and open to further question, which is what I mean by “critical”. Try “doing science” without at least tacitly admitting that there is some actual objective reality we’re investigating together, which is what I mean by “realist”. Try “doing science” without appeals to observation or regard for concordance with observation, which is obviously what “empirical” means. — Pfhorrest

6 month old babies employ these methods to establish predictable, useful models of their world. Is your claim that they're 'doing philosophy'? If so, I think most of it's been done by 6 or 7.

You were taught his 'philosophical ideas about space and time,' by which is meant, you've done what philosophers do, talk about his work in superficial terms out of context after the fact. Philosophers' education does not equip them to understand any of these scientists. — Snakes Alive

Exactly. I think there's a generalised failure among amateur (and some professional) philosophers to understand just how specific scientific theories are. They do not generalise to broad truths. Insofar as they are truths at all, they are truths about specific experimental set ups which inform predictive models of similar environmental setups. Broad truths neither inform them (in any practical sense), nor emerge from them (in any objective sense).

This is my analogy for whether philosophy progresses anything or not;


If I decide to go on a hike; I start at point A one day and walk for several hours, I see a lot of things from a lot of different places. Sometimes i see the same thing from a difference vantage point, perhaps the opposite side of the valley. Maybe I prefer the look of that tree from above on the cliffs or maybe i like it more up close or from the riverside. Perhaps I forget about what I saw because I am focused on newer things or other scenery. Maybe I stop looking altogether and simply focus on getting back to my starting point.

In the end, even if all walks lead back to starting point A, have I learned anything? Have I made progress? Is my sense of my location better now that I understand its relationship to everywhere else? Is that even useful? Do I feel more at ease now that I have explored other places that I could have stayed or ended the hike? Satisfied a curiosity? Or maybe became more rounded on my navigating ability, more stamina. Or was it not worth it at all?

Progress is determined by the destination you've defined. Philosophy spends a lot of it's time defining in the first place. Focusing on how to ask a question rather than what is the answer. It may not be useful to some people or incredibly insightful to another. It may provide an answer for you or just another question.

Ethics is probably the most practical side to philosophy so in that respect yes philopshy progresses many other disciplines such as law, medicine , scientific method and psychology. And the well trained arguments will certainly be used in future to tackle difficult questions about genetic modification AI etc. Because doing without thinking is dangerous. You must look before you leap, that is how you have a safe hike!

As an avid hiker I like your analogy :smile:

6 month old babies employ these methods to establish predictable, useful models of their world. Is your claim that they're 'doing philosophy'? If so, I think most of it's been done by 6 or 7. — Isaac

If I was to claim anything about them it would be that they’re “doing science”, but since they’re not knowingly using those methods, I wouldn’t even say that really. The “doing philosophy” part comes when those kinds of methods are questioned — even if the answer to that questioning is yes, keep doing that, don’t do something else instead.

I don’t want to respond to Snakes with his obvious hostility or your agreement with him at the end of your post, but I will say that in that philosophy class we were reading primary sources by the figures in question where they were talking about the philosophical implications of their own scientific theories. We weren’t just reading commentary by someone else who extrapolated philosophy from their scientific publications. These scientists knew that their work had implications on outstanding philosophical questions and directly commented on it themselves.

It's telling that when defending itself, philosophy is pulled in two directions.

On the one hand, it insists it has made progress. On the other, it asks, 'Well, what is progress, anyway? We can't even know!'

Well? Which is it?

What's interesting is that [1] when asked to defend itself from the discipline's apparent shortcomings, philosophers resort to the very same sophistical moves used in philosophy itself – increasing the level of abstraction, moving the goalposts, demanding unreasonable definitions, insisting on a continuum fallacy, and so on, and [2] this prevents us from asking the interesting question, which is why philosophy makes no progress: what is wrong with its methodology, and is there some way we might inquire into the questions we're interested in better (or is this fundamentally a confused or hopeless endeavor)? But we'll never do that, because philosophy is systematically structured so that it can always make use of one of the tiresome rhetorical tricks in its small box, and so will never seriously critique itself.

I wonder why Snakes is even here if he hates philosophy so much.

Is it like the old usenet trolls who would go into comp.sys.foo.advocacy and argue that Foo is the worst OS ever and everybody who uses it is stupid?

philosophy is systematically structured so that it can always make use of one of the tiresome rhetorical tricks in its small box, and so will never seriously critique itself. — Snakes Alive

That sounds like personality in general to me. That's us, foolish mortals talking shit. That's what philosophy struggles against being. 'I am the history from which I'm trying to awake.'

I'd enjoy seeing you argue against yourself, seriously critique yourself. I find your posts fascinating, and I'd genuinely enjoy seeing what you'd come up with.

I'm surprised you don't see the connection of the above with some kind of comforting narrative. If you think there are neutral answers to those questions above, then that to me is a highly comforting narrative. — path

:fire:

'Woah, woah! When I asked the question, I didn't mean I wanted an answer!'

Is it like the old usenet trolls who would go into comp.sys.foo.advocacy and argue that Foo is the worst OS ever and everybody who uses it is stupid? — Pfhorrest

I get what you're saying, but I think there's an important difference. In philosophy people are actually trying to use the authority their method provides to have some impact on society (be it ethics, religion, scientific methodology, political direction). It's not like advocating an OS where it doesn't matter at all to anyone not using it that it doesn't work. It more like (to continue your analogy) finding out that the world's missile control systems are run on Microsoft Windows. Then it would matter to users and non-users alike whether it works or not.

I agree that no one should really get involved in a discussion about the nature of, say, set theory if they don't actually agree with the whole premise. But if people are advocating a process whose outcomes supposedly include ethical board decisions, research methodology statements, political strategies etc., then I think it's fair game to get involved with that discussion at any level, even if it's to reject the whole premise.