Rather than philosophy being thought of as only speculation on the nature of reality or the logic of being, it could also be something else. — Moliere

Do you mean philosophy or metaphysics?

Both, if I think about it. But I'm ok with just saying metaphysics, since I suspect that's what you'd object to.

This is going well.

↪Pantagruel and all, for better or worse, philosophy includes the philosopher improving. That's the part of the nature of philosophy that is lost if philosophy is just speculative physics. — Banno

I consider myself a natural meliorist - make of that what you will. ;)

Eh, all I can claim is sincerity on my part. I'm making attempts, but sometimes those are mis-fires, mistakes, confusions -- probably about where we're at at the moment.

The consensus seems to be that, whatever the philosophical project is, it ranges from informed speculation on the nature of external reality to the cultivated awareness of the nature of consciousness, and the communication (and communicability) of the information thereof.

It seems to me personally that ingesting scientific and philosophical writings is like self-programming for an open-ended task. So I'm abstractly conceptualizing this as something like the self-programming of an emergent AI, i.e. consciousness programming itself as it self-instantiates objectively (materializes). Probably not coincidentally, this aligns conceptually with the Fichte I'm reading now.

Or something along those lines....

The consensus seems to be that, whatever the philosophical project is, it ranges from informed speculation on the nature of external reality to the cultivated awareness of the nature of consciousness, and the communication (and communicability) of the information thereof. — Pantagruel

If you really want to boil it down, I would say that it ingrains the habit of counterfactual thinking. It forces us to arrive at truth by way of discounting all other possible alternatives.

Greek rhetoric and forensic speech pioneered this as social habit. You had the four steps of the prologue to set out a claim, the narration to provide the atomic facts, the proof which weighed the claim against all other alternative interpretation of these facts, then the epilogue to show the claim now stood substantiated.

So this was how you argued in a democratic and legalistic civic setting. Opinion was replaced by forensic argument. The facts of the matter were broken down into the simplest atomic certainties. The theory that made holistic sense of a set of named facts was then shown to beat out rival interpretations.

The same structure of thought was applied to mathematical proof, scientific method, logical argument. It boiled down to the certainty of being able to say "this, because not that".

So this was how you argued in a democratic and legalistic civic setting. — apokrisis

This is similar to the modern concept of deliberative democracy which looks at the origins and types of legitimation, public reason, the duty of civility, principles of justice, etc. I do think the role of philosophy in the social or public good is essential.

essential — Pantagruel

:cool: