I greatly admire Dorothy Day, and find her writings of great value, particularly: The Long Loneliness (autobiography), Loaves and Fishes (about the Catholic Worker Movement), The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, and All the Way to Heaven is Heaven: selected letters of Dorothy Day. She was a pretty tough woman. She will probably be sainted someday--over her dead body! "Don't make me a saint -- I don't want to be dismissed that easily."
She modeled what following Christ means in the 20th (21st) century. — BC
Studies of extant hunter gatherers and forensic anthropology converge on incredibly high homicide rates for humans in a "state of nature," at around 2,000 per 100,000. This is 44.5 times higher than the highest nations today, higher than the total death tolls of many major wars. However, a homicide rate of 1.8-2% isn't particularly at odds with what we see for the species from which we descended, so perhaps it isn't that surprising. Slavery, rape, and cannibalism are ubiquitous in human history and only slowly became anathema.https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758 — Count Timothy von Icarus
Biology also suggests this progress may be taking place. Modern humans retain far more juvenile features into adulthood than their pre-agricultural ancestors. Human beings appear to have undergone a process akin to domestication over time. — Count Timothy von Icarus
In a video asking the question What is Philosophy Good For, philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller gives an answer: questioning religion. He even suggests that it’s part of a good definition of philosophy, but at the very least he’s saying that questioning religion is historically one of the things that philosophy has done well, and is one of the most valuable things it does. — Jamal
Still, there’s something about it that makes me suspicious. The idea that philosophy is an independent ever-expanding toolbox, ready to apply to whatever exists—this is surely a fantasy. Philosophy is itself always historically situated, and part of what it does is to apply its tools to itself, even to its own tools, depending on the social conditions. — Jamal
But an interesting point that avoids this set of questions is the claim that, over time, culture became more important to human evolution than genes. Culture represents a way to encode information about the enviornment that is able to shift with enviornmental changes much more rapidly than genetic evolution. — Count Timothy von Icarus
It would be nice to do more reforms BEFORE things go to shit... — Count Timothy von Icarus
I agree. But I might suggest that we broaden Moeller's definition from just formal "religions" to more general "dogmas". Dogmas -- authoritarian convictions -- arise in all phases of human belief, including Politics and Science. Ironically, some TPF posters are inclined to make dogmatic scientific assertions (e.g. Scientism) in cases where uncertainty is inherent (e.g. quantum physics). The role of modern Philosophy is indeed to shine light on dogmatic beliefs, but not to counter one dogma with another. :smile:Generalizing even further, philosophy is—or is part of—enlightenment, a means by which humans are freed from domination, whether by nature, myth, religion, governments, whatever it happens to be:
I don’t have a specific question except: what do you think? — Jamal
In living memory there were genocides and famines, and despite having a really cool philosophical toolbox, humanity is as stupid as ever (QAnon, white supremacy, nationalism, and so on and on). — Jamal
If philosophy is such a great mental technology, as you imply, wouldn’t we expect society to have become more rational over time, just as it has become more technological? Why hasn’t that happened?
The view I'm sympathetic to, from Adorno & Horkheimer, is that societies have become more rational, but only instrumentally so; the very concept of reason has been impoverished. You echo this state of affairs in describing philosophy as an instrument. — Jamal
So we have the instrumental reason in science and technology that leads to vaccines, dentistry, washing machines, Zyklon B and weapons of mass descruction. This is based on the use of tools from out of the philosophical toolbox that you describe. So philosophy is there to "guide thoughts and ideas through a forest of confusion" towards ... genocide? — Jamal
To me it follows that philosophy, as eminently critical, has to step in and say wait a minute, do we really want to be doing that? Philosophy often doesn't do that, I realize. I guess I'm emphasizing and celebrating the times when it does, thereby saying it ought to do more of it. This amounts to an attempt to form a richer notion of rationality than the one we have.
All of that's not so much a rejection of your position as an addition to it. — Jamal
Quick one-liner, or so…..what did you get out of The Eclipse of Reason? What is it the author wants to say, bottom line kinda thing? — Mww
In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to one’s surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirit’s antagonism to nature–even as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including man–frequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of man’s continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature. Regarding reason as a natural organ does not divest it of the trend to domination or invest it with greater potentialities for reconciliation. On the contrary, the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the ‘useless spiritual,’ and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity. The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy. — Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 10-11
I think that these are the result of either not listening to philosophers, misinterpreting them, or outright ignoring them in combination with enforcing the very problems that philosophy is a tool against. I.e these things emerges out of the chaos of non-philosophical approaches to questions that arrises in history. — Christoffer
The forest of confusion is what leads to genocide, meaning, failure at philosophy leads to genocide. We can invent anything, but only philosophy as a tool can keep our biases and destructive emotions at bay and make us more morally capable of understanding the practical use of technology without it leading to genocide. — Christoffer
Ok, I’ll go along with that. In the video, Moeller actually identifies three things that philosophy is for: questioning religion, coining concepts, and giving jobs to failed poets (continental philosophers) and failed mathematicians (analytic philosophers). — Jamal
Yes, a study for a curmudgeon...but it’s ranty, dated, and often shallow — Jamal
Yeah, that's the misanthropic aspect of critical thinking. It might easily become a source of alienation, hence not for children.I'm worse than that. If I see people queuing for something, I'm immediately suspicious of it. — Tom Storm
The idea that philosophy is an independent ever-expanding toolbox, — Jamal
Against the common view that philosophy is a two-thousand-year-old failing enterprise, a body of thought that has produced no knowledge, couldn’t we say that philosophy has in fact done pretty well in bringing dominant beliefs into question, revealing their incoherence or baselessness, or just submitting them to rational enquiry? — Jamal
Interesting...I'd broaden the 'questioning' part to questioning tradition and established values — Janus
I'm familiar with the 'creating new concepts' idea from Deleuze (see What is Philosophy co-authored with Guattari). — Janus
Did you notice The Philosophical Toolkit? There was a bit of discussion around it. Several tools are listed.
I suspect that the (self-conscious?) use of such heuristics is more common amongst the failed mathematicians than amongst the failed writers. That might just be my bias, which is towards critique rather than making shit up. — Banno
Part I: Sets and Numbers
1. Naive Sets and Russell's Paradox
2. Infinite Sets
3. Orders of Infinity
Part II: Analyticity, a prioricity, and necessity
4. Kinds of Truths
5. Possible Worlds
6. Naming and Necessity
Part III: The Nature and Uses of Probability
7. Kinds of Probability
8. Constraints on Credence
9. Correlations and Causes
Part IV: Logics and Theories
10. Syntax and Semantics
11. Soundness and Completeness
12. Theories and Godel's Theorem — Table of Contents
We could easily find examples of the use of those heuristics hereabouts. It was their misapplication that was more widely discussed, see for example How (And When) To Think Like A Philosopher. it's short, you might be able to stay awake.Fell asleep. — Jamal
In part. Thinking in terms of Bernard Gert's "I'm a philosopher, so I don't know anything you don't know", a good rule of thumb might be that notions that are peculiar to philosophies must be treated as dubious. If doing philosophy is like plumbing, then it probably should avoid any pretensions of making discoveries.“coining of concepts” — Jamal
If doing philosophy is like plumbing, then it probably should avoid any pretensions of making discoveries. — Banno
Quick one-liner, or so…..what did you get out of The Eclipse of Reason? What is it the author wants to say, bottom line kinda thing? — Mww
The critical aspect of philosophy in regard to religion, and in general, has been helpful but to what end? I think ancient philosophies had a more general purpose- to live well. I'm reminded of Hadot's What Is Ancient Philosophy? The idea that the primary function of philosophy is its function to critique is an anemic one. But I do think much contemporary philosophy works under that assumption. At least, critique is part and parcel of the refining of arguments that is so much of the literature (in the analytic branch, at any rate). If the primary function of philosophy is not to help us live well, then it should be. Critics are a dime a dozen. How many of them know how to live? — public hermit
I might point out here that the widespread positivist notion of a neutral form of thought, in contrast to one supposedly based on more or less arbitrary value systems and particular standpoints, is itself an illusion, that there is no such thing as so-called neutral thought, that generally speaking this alleged neutrality of thought with regard to its subject matter tends to perform an apologetic function for the existent precisely through its mere formality, through the form of its unified, methodological and systematic nature, and thus possesses an intrinsically apologetic or - if you like - an inherently conservative character. It is therefore just as necessary, I would say, to submit the concept of the absolute neutrality of thought to thorough critical reflection […] — Adorno, Introduction to Dialectics
Yes, that’s what I did in the OP and have been doing in the discussion since. The video made me think, and the resulting thoughts diverged from anything in the video. — Jamal
I thought about that too, but in the video Moeller mentions Hegel rather than Deleuze. — Jamal
Right. I probably haven't read the thread thoroughly enough. — Janus
I've since watched the video — Janus
I have to say I'm a bit skeptical about Hegel's notion of thinking one's time, as though historical moments are monolithic and pure. In any case it needn't be a self-conscious thinking of the times if it is true that our thinking is inevitably constrained by the historical "moment" we find ourselves in. — Janus
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