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 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
Do you perchance know where it is from / the exact quote? — Pfhorrest
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n09/richard-rorty/persuasive-philosophyPhilosophers 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
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
…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
"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.↪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
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.Not even better at leading people to clarity of thought in such a way?
De-fine precisely the totality of real numbers.I don’t understand this seemingly pejorative use of the term “totalizing”. — Pfhorrest
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).In all fields, finding common principles that underlie many diverse phenomena is an admirable goal.
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'.More on topic, is that not exactly what constitutes progress, at least for most fields? Explaining more and more with less and less?
But any argument about why to do things the scientific way instead of some other way is philosophy. — Pfhorrest
And the sciences spun off from natural philosophers — Pfhorrest
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
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
If you were to justify your origin story for science, would you do so by appealing to science? — path
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
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
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
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
The most influential physicist of the scientific revolution was Isaac Newton, who titled his seminal work as being about “natural philosophy” — Pfhorrest
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
That is a sign that progress has been made, a satisfactory answer had been found, and all that’s left are minor quibbles. — Pfhorrest
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
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
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
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
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
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
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