I think it might be better to ask first why we might think the interaction of philosophy and other discipline might be particularly revelatory. What do we expect an examination of those interactions to show? — Srap Tasmaner
Saying you are "criticized for suggesting" your ideas makes it sound like you're being persecuted, is that how it feels to you? — goremand
what do you mean by "highest"? Most comprehensive or overarching. most critical, most meta-cognitive? Or most spiritual, most enlightening, wisest? — Janus
To start, could you run "Q recursion" by me again? — T Clark
the attempt to separate philosophy from other disciplines on the basis of any formal properties or logics is ill-conceived. I think this attempt to fix a sovereign standpoint for philosophy is the flip-side of the equally ill-conceived attempt to locate a sovereign ground for empirical truth in the ‘facts of nature’. In fact, the two tend to imply each other. — Joshs
I don’t believe there is any domain philosophy tackles that science can’t venture into. I think we agree it’s just a matter of style of expression.
— Joshs
Really? Unless you include both math and metaphysics within science, I don't see how this could be true
— J
What do you mean by metaphysics? You dont consider a scientific paradigm to be a metaphysical stance? And given that logic and mathematics have been developed by both philosophers and scientists, I would say that their status can’t easily be placed with respect to the latter disciplines. — Joshs
We don’t first concoct linguistic concepts and then impose them on the world. . . etc. — Joshs
I don't want to be seen as naively endorsing the idea of "highest" as "best" or "most perspicuous" that is often associated with philosophy. But also it was an attempt to capture the ambiguity of "highest," which I discuss in the OP. "Highest" can mean what I just wrote -- "best," more or less -- or it can mean "up a level, beyond which there are no more levels," without comment on value. I raised the possibility that phil. discourse is only highest in this sense. — J
If there is an air of insubstantiality about this thread, it is because it is concerned with the philosophy of philosophy. This makes it particularly liable to disappear up its own fundament.
Accordingly, I propose, firstly, that philosophy is always parasitic; one might try a 'philosophy of nothing', but it wouldn't get very far. Rather, one first starts to talk or write about something and at some later stage, one starts to examine the verbiage philosophically. as philosophy of religion, or knowledge, or psychology or whatever. — unenlightened
If possible, (ideally sic) the best foundation is bedrock, If one has reached bedrock, as Wittgenstein would have it, one has reached the end of that portion of philosophy, the questions are resolved or dissolved, and the superstructure is as sound as it can be.
By contrast, spiritual talk is untethered, lighter than air and floats higher and higher until it reaches such height that it attains outer space, where there is no longer any up or down, and no one can hear you pontificate. — unenlightened
:roll:Modern philosophy is philosophy developed in the modern era and associated with modernity
If there is an air of insubstantiality about this thread, it is because it is concerned with the philosophy of philosophy. — unenlightened
one of the best definitions of phil. that I know: "inquiry about inquiry" — J
one of the best definitions of phil. that I know: "inquiry about inquiry" — J
Metaphilosophy is the self-reflective inquiry into the nature, aims, and methods of the activity that makes these kinds of inquiries. — Wikipedia
At first he who invented any art whatever that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to recreation, the inventors of the latter were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility. Hence when all such inventions were already established, the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of life were discovered, and first in the places where men first began to have leisure. This is why the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt; for there the priestly caste was allowed to be at leisure. (981b)
[W]e do not seek it for the sake of any other advantage; but as the man is free, we say, who exists for his own sake and not for another's, so we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake. (982b) — Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Alpha
Given the way scientific specialization has occurred, philosophy probably represents "science" conceived as an undifferentiated totality. — Leontiskos
Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.
Well, on one view critiques of philosophy along the lines that it is "useless," might be taken as a complement. It is among the few pursuits that is rightfully "pursued for its own sake, making it "higher" in another sense. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Science typically provides no such axis, as it is generally assumes that the universe is devoid of intrinsic meaning and/or value, so a claim to 'higher knowledge' is often challenged on the grounds that there is no objective justification for it.
For example:
what do you mean by "highest"? Most comprehensive or overarching. most critical, most meta-cognitive? Or most spiritual, most enlightening, wisest?
— Janus — Wayfarer
I don’t find philosophy useless at all. I use it all the time. — T Clark
1 ) Take a philosophical claim X which does not have relevance to a claim in any discipline.
2 ) Take the collection of statements of which X has relevance to and call it Q.
3 ) Relevance is transitive, if X is relevant to Y, and Y is relevant to Z, then X is relevant to Z.
4 ) Relevance is symmetric, that is if X is relevant to Y, then Y is relevant to X.
5 ) Relevance is reflexive, X is relevant to X.
6 ) Relevance is an equivalence relation.
7 ) Then anything relevant to X cannot be relevant to any philosophical claim.
8 ) Then all of Q is not relevant to philosophy. — fdrake
I don't think it follows that one discipline is more primordial/foundational than another based on the "what is your justification for this?" question's recursive nature. I will spell out why.
Asking the question "What's your justification for this?" is recursive. Call asking that question of an assertion X the function Q( X ), which I'll just assume maps to another assertion X'. Every assertion occurs in a context, and call the mapping from an assertion of X to its context C( X ). I'm going to leave 'context' undefined for now, and just assume that every assertion has a context of utterance that makes it understandable, and some rules that characterise that context.
Some contexts will have properties that make their rules philosophical. If a context is characterised by rules of philosophy - again stipulate that such rules are comprehensible and recognisable -, say that that context has the property Phil.
The quote says that for every statement X, there exists a number of recursions of Q^n ( X ), mapping an assertion to its justification, such that Q^n( X ) has a context C characterised by Phil. You can grant that, but you might wonder why such a thing would render philosophy the "top level". Roughly what this claim states is that asking for justification eventually terminates in philosophy, but there's no particular argument for the uniqueness of the termination. The statement in the quote construes Phil as the demarcation between a fixed set of Q and other sets. There's a question about the uniqueness of the fixed set - why does asking that question eventually lead to philosophy? — fdrake
A Zen Koan
The Zen master Mu-nan had only one successor. His name was Shoju. — unenlightened
one of the best definitions of phil. that I know: "inquiry about inquiry". — J
I want to return to this loose end. Am I right that we can avoid the conclusion in (8) by denying (4), the symmetry of relevance? Apart from it being a good thing not to have to conclude (8), I think there are independent reasons for denying (4). Consider this example: The natural acoustic properties of tones are relevant to Western music theory, but the reverse isn't true. An acoustician can conduct their research in complete independence of what theory may do with it. The only way I see that we can get "relevance" to be symmetric here is to define it as such, so it means something like "possibility of making eventual connections." But that seems much too broad, and misses the interesting questions about why we care about relevance in the first place.
But philosophy, as also zen, is a practiced discipline, a way of looking, more than a theory in a book. Burn all the books and start again fresh. That's what we do here at pf, apart from burning all the books. — unenlightened
Hey carful there, we are in danger of reaching an understanding if not Gob forbid, agreement! — unenlightened
In this case a more innocent framing would perhaps be that Janus is asking questions because he doesn't understand what you mean? The way I see it, what you're saying is that you shouldn't have to explain yourself because we would automatically understand you if only we hadn't grown up in scientistic western society. — goremand
Quality represents a basis of values that we recognize intuitively but cannot fully capture within language or logic. But as it challenges 'subject-object duality' then it can't be characterised in objective terms - which generally means it is often regarded as being religious. Hence, a matter of faith - and subjective! — Wayfarer
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