It sounds like there certainly has to be something outside of language. Which I would agree with.
— Fire Ologist
That is obvious. Why would we need Godel to explain something so trivial? — Harry Hindu

Because I’m trying to understand statements like this:

If the world is always, and already, in a context and a language, then there is nothing "external" to the interpretation. — Banno

And this:

“truths become available within human discourse”
— Banno

But then there is this:

“truths become available…not arbitrarily, not as illusions, but as intelligible articulations of a world we are always already in relation with.”
— Banno

This implies a world we are separated from - you need there to be me and separately the world logically before there can be me “in relation with” the world. The “already” is the ontological pickle (the chicken and egg portion of the discussion), but recognizing this tension does not collapse the gap that maintains a separate world to be articulated.

And what about this:

Of course being is not contained in language. Being is not contained in anything, and neither is language a container. Hence any attempt to step outside of all language to describe being “as such” is suspect. — Banno

And there is what you say above, that the metaphysics of it all is only a trivial observation.

My sense is that there is the world, and there is the language about the world. Language is always from the outside looking back in, fashioning a window into being. I say looking back in, because it requires reflection, a move from the world, processed in mind, back onto the world. This “back in” move reflects Banno’s “already in relation with” but accounts for the distance between me and the world that must exist for me to have a relation to the world.

To say “being is not understood outside of language”, and “language is not a container”, and there is nothing external interpretation - together these statements isolate language from attempts to use language to speak about the world. Maybe that is the intent. But then language itself becomes suspect. Interpretation becomes interpretation of a prior interpretation (language always in a con-text), and never an interpretation (or better, a translation into language) of the world.

The study of being is not the study of the word “being.” Studying is closer to the words. Being is closer to the thing being studied.

We need not assume the dilemma that either there is one true narrative, or else all philosophical positions were equally wise.

I think we precisely must assume this. There must be one true narrative, or else, all narratives are equally born and equally soon to be gone.

Maybe there is not one true narrative. But then, in such case, never can there be error or accuracy in any narratives that may arise, if one remains the narrating type.




I am enjoying this. Wish Banno would finish his sandwich and teach me something. I feel like I’m on the usual precipice between everything and nothing. So few enjoy the view down here in the cave (or on the mountain, if you rather see Nietzsche in your company than Plato).

I too dislike "analytic and synthetic". I also agree that attempting to find a static set of rules that will apply correctly in all Real World situations is a fool's errand. To my eye the binary approach that I observe in the threads is between theoretical and practical. Myself being a follower of the latter.

Because I’m trying to understand statements like this:
And this:
But then there is this: — Fire Ologist

Let me guess, you haven't received a response? I would then refer you to my post just after the one you've quoted me on here in this thread (the last post on page 2).

This implies a world we are separated from - you need there to be me and separately the world logically before there can be me “in relation with” the world. The “already” is the ontological pickle (the chicken and egg portion of the discussion), but recognizing this tension does not collapse the gap that maintains a separate world to be articulated. — Fire Ologist

Not only that but that the very scribbles and sounds that we make that manifest as language is somehow not part of the world either. We can talk about words and sentences like we can talk about cars and traffic.

My sense is that there is the world, and there is the language about the world. Language is always from the outside looking back in, fashioning a window into being. I say looking back in, because it requires reflection, a move from the world, processed in mind, back onto the world. This “back in” move reflects Banno’s “already in relation with” but accounts for the distance between me and the world that must exist for me to have a relation to the world. — Fire Ologist

Exactly. This is what I mean by language is scribble and sound usage that follow some rules. You have to use things in the world (scribbles and sounds) to communicate your "internal" ideas. The mind is just another process in the world that interacts with the rest of world to produce novel outputs in the world.

I think we precisely must assume this. There must be one true narrative, or else, all narratives are equally born and equally soon to be gone.

Maybe there is not one true narrative. But then, in such case, never can there be error or accuracy in any narratives that may arise, if one remains the narrating type. — Fire Ologist

And oh, how the same ones that say there isn't a true narrative like to say that you are wrong in yours. I wish they'd just make up their mind. Are they talking about the world, or are they just making surreal scribble art?

Philosophy is not intended to answer questions, but to ask them. The question enters the domain of science when it becomes testable, and it is here where we end up answering the question. I would just end with another quote from Confucius:
"The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones".

I don't agree with any strong distinction between science and philosophy, but let me ask: can we (ought we) ever ask questions about ethics or aesthetics? Would these fall under the category of "science?"

Second, it seems to me that the arts must answer at least some questions. For, if we did not have grounds to believe any particular historical narrative, or a grasp of historical facts (including recent events), we'd have no reason to have faith in science.

At the same time, it seems that there are at least questions about what makes science a good way to know things that must be prior to science, and which tend to fall into the common box of "philosophy."

Of course, the line between "philosophy of biology" and biology, or "philosophy of physics," and physics, is always quite blurry. So too the line between philosophy of science and epistemology and foundational questions of evidence and the role of mathematics and logic in scientific discourse and models. That's why I actually think the art/science distinction is more useful than philosophy/science.

Let's pretend for a moment that the OP is not another diatribe against your bogey of “monism.”

What I want to propose is that there are two different ways of doing philosophy. — Banno

Does your OP give any reason to believe that there are only two ways of doing philosophy, and that you have identified them? It doesn’t. There is no argumentation to this effect. You’ve simply pulled two things out of a hat and declared that they are the two approaches to philosophy. It’s as if I made a thread, “The two approaches to exercise” (biking and swimming).

So what if we amend this problem? Then we would be talking about, “Two ways of doing philosophy, among others.” Well now the question arises: Why are we looking at these two ways in particular, and not others?

The rationale for your unsupported claim about completeness in identifying the two ways was a disjunctive syllogism: <There are two ways to do philosophy: the good way (my way) and the bad way (other people’s way). Choose the good way!>. Once we fix the false completeness of the disjunction the conclusion must be weakened to something like, “The ‘dissecting’ way of doing philosophy is better than the ‘discourse’ way of doing philosophy. Or it is at least defensible and choice-worthy.” That’s fine, for at least we now have a clear and coherent thesis. You want to argue for one way and against the other, and that is why you picked those two ways out of the hat.

But the deeper problem here is that the “dissecting/disagreeing/critiquing” way of doing philosophy presupposes the “discourse” way of doing philosophy. This is because in order to disagree philosophically one must provide an argument, and arguments will require positive claims and at least some level of discourse to support those claims. The possible exception is to merely charge someone with self-contradiction, in which case one needs only commit to the PNC, and this is usually taken to be a minimal commitment.

Less technically, the problem is that disagreeing and naysaying are not self-supporting. One cannot run around constantly disagreeing with others while pretending that they have no positive and substantial positions of their own. They cannot pretend that they argue only against positions and never for positions. Even if they somehow managed to only presuppose the PNC and never to disagree with anything that is not self-contradictory, their choice of what to disagree with would still reflect their own positive positions and predilections. No one is a robot which only disagrees on the basis of self-contradiction, and does so completely randomly. Indeed, no one on TPF comes anywhere near the approach which disagrees only on the basis of self-contradiction.

---

In my defence, the aim of those who's engagement with philosophy is primarily a discourse is completeness, while whatever world view I accept is certainly incomplete. My aim, in writing on these forums, and in applying the analytic tools we have at hand, is to achieve some measure of coherence. Those of us who see philosophy less as a doctrine and more as a practice of clarification—of untangling the knots in our shared language—inevitably work with fragments, revisable insights, and partial alignments.

While some approach philosophy as a quest for a complete worldview, my interest is in the practice of philosophical inquiry itself—how our language reveals, limits, or reshapes the positions we take. In that sense, coherence—not completeness—is my measure of success. — Banno

What does it mean to say that you seek coherence and not completeness? I think "completeness" is a pejorative representing a kind of strawman. If I'm wrong, then feel free to clearly lay out what it means to seek coherence and not completeness. Does the "coherentist" not seek to know more than they already do? Do they limit themselves to making the things they already know cohere?

But the deeper problem here is that the “dissecting/disagreeing/critiquing” way of doing philosophy presupposes the “discourse” way of doing philosophy. — Leontiskos

Exactly. That is why I pointed out the underdevelopment of Banno’s admission in passing:

Perhaps you can't have one without the other… — Banno

That is a huge indictment against presuming one of the two ways of philosophizing is “better” than the other. Which Banno obviously presumes.

their choice of what to disagree with would still reflect their own positive positions and predilections — Leontiskos

Exactly. Which is why I keep saying if you want to point out error in another, you have to be upholding something objective between you both, such as the truth, as it can be found in the world both of you stand in relation to. Which contradicts the position that there is no such truth in the first place, and violates the PNC.

And further, I’ve noticed when two people who seem to agree on the fundamentals of the Wittgensteinian type of philosophic game are discussing “the world” they make metaphysical claims all of the time and sometimes agree about distinctions between essentially different things in the world without harassing each other for wandering back into theoretical metaphysics.

So it is not even a consistently analytic robot that ever comes across.

I’ll admit, I may just not be getting it. I do respect the conversation.

- I agree. Good points and good posts. :up:

The OP made me think of Isaiah Berlin's idea of, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," although it doesn't fit quite right. Berlin is separating the "forest from the trees," not discourse from dissection.

What I want to propose is that there are two different ways of doing philosophy. There are those who do philosophy through discourse. These folk set the scene, offer a perspective, frame a world, and explain how things are. Their tools are exposition and eulogistics. Their aim is completeness and coherence, and the broader the topics they encompass the better. Then there are those who dissect. These folk take things apart, worry at the joints, asks what grounds the system. Their tool is nitpicking and detail. Their aim is truth and clarity, they delight in the minutia.

The discourse sets up a perspective, a world, a game, an activity, whatever we call it. The dissection pulls it apart, exposing its assumptions, underpinnings and other entrails. Perhaps you can't have one without the other, however a theory that explains any eventuality ends up explaining nothing, and for a theory to be useful it has to rule some things out. — Banno

Thanks for the perspicacious post. I have noticed the different philosophy "styles" on this forum, but hadn't distilled it down to a polarity : Dissecting vs Doing.

Since I am an amateur philosopher, who as a retirement hobby discourses on a Philosophy Forum, I dabble in both sides of this pursuit of Truth . . . and clarity. The Analytic side may consist of “prising apart the various bits and pieces of each text and examining them for their beauty, utility and faults”. But, you could spend a lifetime “dissecting” other people's ideas, and end-up with a pile of disconnected notions.

Yet my analytically examined life is almost over. So I spend most of my time on the Application (doing) side : putting together the best bits of historical science & philosophy into a complete GPS system for steering a life through the natural & cultural labyrinth. Philosophy is both a Study and a Practice.

One way to describe a holistic philosophy is as a Worldview. Some people inherit a complete belief system --- where the "grounds" must be taken on Faith --- from their traditional social religion. But I long-ago rejected the groundless Faith of my fathers. Since then, I have been privately constructing a personalized Belief System of my own, from whatever scraps of Truth I can find by dissection of other's views, or by personal observation.

Since the cosmos itself is dynamic and ever-evolving, my emerging belief system may never be finalized. And there is always room for improvement, including both positive & negative contributions from forum posters. So, my fallible personalized worldview seems close-enough to ultimate Truth that it will help me to steer a safe course between Scylla & Charibdis, and to avoid such personal pitfalls as snarling dogmatism and supercilious dissection.

Since I am somewhat analytical by nature, I encourage others to "dissect" my own rambling reasoning, in order to reveal its weak points. And, I agree that, for the pursuit of truth, "you can't have one without the other". Yet, when critical "dissection" becomes nothing but nasty "nitpicking", "fault-finding", or political put-downs, with no alternatives offered, I call it "trolling", and end the one-sided dialog. :nerd:

If philosophy is the love of wisdom, it is presumably the love of something in particular, and it would seem that not all philosophical positions are wise. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think the key recognition that should be made is that philosophy is the love of wisdom, not the love of knowledge or the love of truth. One might believe the pursuit of truth or knowledge is the wisest path of all, but to believe that is a particular philosophy that can be challenged. What this might mean is that the acceptance of beliefs that are untrue might be wiser to hold.

In fact, I was going to enter the recent essay contest with a thesis along these lines, but I was given too much time and never got around to it. Yes, too much time results in a lack of urgency and lack of effort ultimately for some.

But my point would be that religion and I'm sure all sorts of beliefs fall into the category of not being valid upon a purely logical analysis, but I wonder what comfort one has upon their death bed for having had a firm committment to miserable truth as opposed to having chosen a more joyous path, filled with magical wonder and profound meaning and purpose in every leaf fluttering in the wind. Which sort of person is more wise is the question.

I believe that philosophy is fundamentally the study of psychotechnologies/narratives/frameworks/worldviews/conceptions, whatever semantics you prefer. Regardless of whatever "philosophy" you hold, you can understand, analyse, and critique all ideas and their relations.

I believe that narratives can be both coherent and complete, given basic assumptions. While there will be multiple coherent frameworks given different assumptions as their basis, the more complex an assumption is, the less likely it is to be both complete and coherent. An assumption also requires its own expansion within itself, otherwise people would disagree about the conclusions and another assumption would be required. It seems entirely possible that given enough time, philosophy will eventually converge on one simple assumption, from which all else follows. Although I dont think this will ever happen even if technically possible.

The issue I have experienced is that in trying to understand the other's position you find that the person doesn't appear to understand it themselves because they haven't bothered questioning it themselves (reflection). — Harry Hindu

Sure, and that's why a charitable reading can be important. You can help make the position clearer and more compelling! (And maybe start by discarding the assumption that the person "hasn't bothered questioning it themselves." Perhaps they've done so to the best of their ability.)

When I show the discrepancies it is ignored — Harry Hindu

Well, showing discrepancies, that's step two, which requires a whole new mindset, I've found. Quite often, if I start by indicating that I do have some understanding of the position, and can see some value or importance, and then describe the discrepancies I also see, it's received more openly. Or not, of course! -- people get defensive.

I'm asking a question you should be asking yourself about your own position if you reflect honestly upon your own position. — Harry Hindu

Is the "you" here the "British 'one'" -- that is, "one should be asking oneself . . ." etc. -- or do you mean "you" as in me, specifically the position about understanding another's position that I was sketching?

If the conclusion you have reached is aporetic then you've made a wrong turn somewhere in your thinking and would need to reflect. — Harry Hindu

Say more about this? I'm not understanding yet why aporia wouldn't be a possible outcome for a philosophical inquiry.

But this is a philosophy forum, not a Vanity Press. If you present your thoughts here you must expect them to be critiqued. In a very central and important sense, this is what we do. — Banno

I have a friend with twins. One loves to build things and the other loves to destroy things. The second is parasitic, and is out of luck if no one is building.

I mostly think that a philosophy forum should require users to make new threads occasionally, and not just dissect and criticize the threads of others. That practice seems important both individually and communally.

I am not saying that you never build anything or that you never make new threads. But the tendency towards criticism rather than construction is pretty easy to understand on a number of different levels. In fact that tendency seems more intelligible than any connection between discourse/construction and foolhardy comprehensiveness or completeness. I am not convinced that such a connection holds.

Dissecting vs. comprehensive seems like a false dichotomy. True dichotomies would include things like analytic/synthetic, hedgehog/fox, forest/trees, cased-based*/systematic, or critical/constructive.

What I find is that many users on TPF aren't capable of close readings of texts, and this means that they lack a capacity for dissection. They focus on big themes ("forest-thinking") and are not really able to respond to more precise points or critiques ("tree-analysis"). The first thing I would want to teach them is how to "table" an objection; how to say, "I see and understand your tree-based objection; I don't know how to answer it; I will have to think more about it and get back to you." Or else something like, "I see that you have a valid objection, but I don't currently have the energy to try to address it." Once they can do that then the fear of countenancing such objections dissipates, and they can begin to contemplate them more seriously.

* I.e. casuistry in the true sense

And these may be ‘beyond discursive thought’ and so ‘philosophizing’ in the sense of verbal formulation. But it is still part of the broader territory of philosophy (or at least used to be.) — Wayfarer

Trouble is of course that if something is beyond discursive thought then it cannot be said. We could not have an argument that reached such a conclusion. And indeed the ending of elenchus is often aporia - the method of dissection ends without resolution.

This relates to the other dialectic mentioned in the OP, parallel to that between dissection and discourse – the tension between coherence and completeness.

Mysticism presents as a desire to leap from the aporia to a conclusion, to complete the dialogue.

But it does so at the risk of losing coherence.

I've said this previously in relation to the path you follow. The leap from aporia to closure cannot be justified. Of course that does not make it wrong, or the conclusion false – if such terms even apply here.

There are two paths here. One is silence, were we grant that there is nothing more to be said. The other is showing, were the value of one's beliefs is seen in what one does.

I can't see why you allow the "perhaps". Socrates would not get started without Laches and Euthyphro and Alcibiades. Equally, Plato needed Socrates to get started on his journey. — Ludwig V

That's fair. If I recall, at the time I wrote "Perhaps you can't have one without the other" I was puzzling about whether it really is dissection that marks the emergence of doing philosophy, as opposed to just making shit up. It's so tempting to supose that elenchus that marks the beginning of something new and different, and to say that philosophy consists in exposing ideas to criticism. Hence the "perhaps", guarding against this perhaps too extreme view. But that's more rhetorical posturing than a philosophical commitment.

The leap from aporia to closure cannot be justified. — Banno

But this is just your recitation of your ideosyncratic worldview.

Consider:

"Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds."

William James, Will to Believe

Or, to add another quote, from Plato's seventh letter: "There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject [of metaphysics]. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself... Again, if they had appeared to me to admit adequately of writing and exposition, what task in life could I have performed nobler than this, to write what is of great service to mankind and to bring the nature of things into the light for all to see? But I do not think it a good thing for men that there should be a disquisition, as it is called, on this topic-except for some few, who are able with a little teaching to find it out for themselves. As for the rest, it would fill some of them quite illogically with a mistaken feeling of contempt, and others with lofty and vain-glorious expectations, as though they had learnt something high and mighty."

Or, as Saint John of Damascus puts it: "neither are all things unutterable nor all utterable; neither all unknowable nor all knowable. But the knowable belongs to one order, and the utterable to another; just as it is one thing to speak and another thing to know. Many of the things relating to God, therefore, that are dimly understood cannot be put into fitting terms, but on things above us we cannot do else than express ourselves according to our limited capacity."

Difficulty arises when the order of being is reduced to the order of knowing, or the order of knowing reduced to the order of speaking, or the order of speaking to the order of justification. For, in the order of justification alone, understanding of what is being justified is excluded.

Which is making me realize a fourth way might be seen as naive common sense. Non- analytic, non-metaphysical, immediate like mystical, but the opposite of transcendent. — Fire Ologist

Why limit ourselves to a scheme of four possible ways to philosophize? :D

It's how I see things.

Close to:

There is also philosophy as the study of the history of ideas, not necessarily as a tendentious attempt to find authoritative confirmation for the enquirer's own beliefs, but just for its own sake. — Janus

It is a pleasure unto itself, and this is enough to justify one's activity in doing philosophy.

But then I think when we do that -- read philosophy for its own sake (and here I only mean the sorts of names that frequently come up within a particular culture's practice of philosophy) -- we see there's more than just two ways to do philosophy.

Naturally I want to progress by way of example, so something that comes to mind is Spinoza's Ethics where we have a logic derivation of. . . everything? And on the other hand we have Hume as the nitpicker.

In more modern times I might contrast David Chalmers with Daniel Dennett.

So I don't think the point of the distinction is to be wide-reaching as:

Dissecting vs. comprehensive seems like a false dichotomy. True dichotomies would include things like analytic/synthetic, hedgehog/fox, forest/trees, cased-based*/systematic, or critical/constructive. — Leontiskos

Rather it seems to me best thought of as aesthetic categories. There is a drive in philosophy to build big stories of the world as it is. The Timaeus, for example, which is surely philosophy but not exactly nitpicky or even skeptical. So surely this is a good part of philosophy, and I'd say you can't have one without the other, really.

But I'd focus here:

But this is a philosophy forum, not a Vanity Press. If you present your thoughts here you must expect them to be critiqued. In a very central and important sense, this is what we do. — Banno

While world-building is part of philosophy, so is the skeptics. Pyrrho comes to mind here for me as a kind of arch-nitpick, with a moral cause to justify it even so it fits within that ancient mold of philosophy as a life well lived, even. Picking-nits is very much part of philosophy, and one need not have a replacement answer -- "I don't know" is one of those pretty standardly acceptable answers in philosophy. Aporetic dialogues having been part of philosophy as well.

Why should we limit wisdom to being either a particular, or a thing?

"Something in particular," not "some particular thing." Which is just to say, the term wisdom has to have some determinant content or else philosophy, the love of wisdom, would be the "love of nothing in particular." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why must wisdom "have some determinate content"? There's the idea again that if it has no "determinate content" then it is nothing, but that doesn't follow. The assumption is that without determinacy—without clear, specifiable content—“wisdom” is vacuous. But this is not a necessary conclusion. The leap from indeterminacy to meaninglessness is unwarranted.

Tim's argument reveals again a tendency toward conceptual authoritarianism: the idea that unless a term can be decisively bounded—defined, categorized, and agreed upon—it cannot function in serious discourse. But this is not how language works, especially moral and philosophical language. Terms like “wisdom,” “justice,” or “goodness” do not operate by being strictly defined; rather, they are thick concepts, entangled with practices, forms of life, and modes of evaluation. Their meanings are enacted rather than fixed. Philosophy consists not in flattening the knot but in understanding how the knot was tied.

Tim's view betrays a kind of metaphysical anxiety—a need for fixity. But philosophy, at its best, is precisely the space where such anxiety is exposed and undone. The refusal to accept a concept unless it can be nailed down is a refusal to stay with the concept. It’s not a philosophical strength; it’s a failure of nerve. The world is uncertain. Deal with it.

Isn't it entirely possible that wisdom could be seen in what one does rather than in what one believes? We need not assume that there is one true account of what is wise. Indeed, if one reflects on the many and varied situations in which wisdom might be displayed, that seems quite unlikely.

Apparently it cannot be truth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why not? We don't need to embrace dialetheism (that something can be both true and false) to admit that sometimes we don't know if something is true, or if it is false.

So again, we might prefer coherence to completeness.

Trouble is of course that if something is beyond discursive thought then it cannot be said. — Banno

Why?

Does poetry exist? Film? Music?

The leap from aporia to closure cannot be justified. — Banno

The irony is that you are a highly "mystical" thinker. Analytic philosophy allows so little to be said that analytic philosophers often "leap" to saying things that their own approach does not support. The claim here is an example of that. According to your own criteria, there is no justification for your claim that such a leap can never be justified. Russell's performative self-contradiction was not incidental, nor are the performative self-contradictions of those who follow his tradition. If one were to limit themselves to what can be said according to the analytic approach, then there would be precious little that they could to say.

The "cost," when it comes to a philosophical Theory of Everything, may be something very much like this. Not every sentence can be given a truth-value, though such sentences may be needed for consistency. — J

Yep.

Sometimes opening a meta-discourse such as your OP will draw people into a frame of reference that's fresher than their usual ones -- or at least that's how I experience it. — J

Cool. It's kinda what I had in mind. It seems to me there is a lot of very bad philosophy being done in the forums, and this thread is by way of articulating the problem, mostly to test if I'm mistaken.

, as I've said before, it seems to me that for you language is all names, that you think each word stands for something. And I think this is mistaken. I think that what counts is not what the word stands for - if anything - but what we do with our words in context.

And i think this difference prevents us seeing eye to eye.

Such arrogance. — J

It's the same "arrogance" at play when you decide not to read or respond.

also agree that attempting to find a static set of rules that will apply correctly in all Real World situations is a fool's errand. — LuckyR

Yep.

Of course this doesn't mean that we can't make use of rules at all in our explanations, only that we be willing to revise them.

Thanks for the perspicacious post. — Gnomon

Cheers. Hope the OP is helpful.

...you could spend a lifetime “dissecting” other people's ideas, and end-up with a pile of disconnected notions. — Gnomon

Oh, to be so lucky!

But as you so eloquently say, we do find ourselves putting the pieces of our history together in a narrative. This is an inevitable consequence of living a reflective life. This may be a sort of mythologising, a sense-making that to a large extent sits outside critical appraisal, at least by it's author.

Tolkien cannot be wrong about what happens in Lord of the Rings.

But this is just your recitation of your ideosyncratic worldview. — Hanover

:smile: Of course it is. Who else's would you have me recite? :wink:

Why must wisdom "have some determinate content"? There's the idea again that if it has no "determinate content" then it is nothing, but that doesn't follow. The assumption is that without determinacy—without clear, specifiable content—“wisdom” is vacuous. But this is not a necessary conclusion. The leap from indeterminacy to meaninglessness is unwarranted.

Yes, it absolutely does follow. At least, as I intended "some determinant content."

How are you reading that? Are you advancing the claim that a term can lack all determinant content (i.e. possessing not even "some" content), and thus refer to nothing more than anything else," and not be vacuous? "Lacking any (i.e. not even 'some') determinant content" sounds to me like a definition of a vacuous term Banno.

But this is not a necessary conclusion. The leap from indeterminacy to meaninglessness is unwarranted.

"Possessing at least some determinacy" doesn't suggest "it must lack all indeterminacy," rather it suggests "it must have at least some determinacy," i.e. not none at all.

So, I won't respond to the rest, because it's all based on this misreading. I was hoping you would reply to the substantive points and not make the entire reply about reading "must have some determinant content" as being equivalent with "must be absent of all indeterminancy."

[miserable truth-seeker as opposed to having chosen a more joyous path] Which sort of person is more wise is the question. — Hanover

And a very good one. Now suppose I ask, "What kind of question is that?" I'm genuinely interested in your answer; for what it's worth, mine is, "It's a philosophical question" -- that is, one that falls within philosophy to answer if it can.

So, I won't respond to the rest, because it's all based on this misreading. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Love this. On this, at least, we might agree!

So where else might we find agreement?

How am I reading "determinate content"? I presume you mean something along the lines of a sequence of sentences such that their conjunct sets out all and only what is wise and excludes all that is not wise. Such a sequent, when applied, provides an algorithm that systematically ascribes "wise" or "not wise" to every posited example.

Is that not so?

I understand your view to be that unless such a sequent can be set out, then wisdom is vacuous.

And I think that approach misguided.

and quite another to get the barest glimpse of Kant or Aristotle or Wittgenstein and then believe you're in a position to refute some key point. This is especially egregious when the refutation is scornful, implying that K or A or W must have been really unintelligent because you have shown them to be wrong! Such arrogance.

There is an irony here in that many of the "great names" do this to each other. Nietzsche is obviously offender #1, because he calls out people by name or obvious reference, and is quite scornful, although he is, in at least some of the cases, not very well informed. Russell's history is a standout example as well (Grayling's is as bad on medieval thought and suggests people were involved in councils while dead/not yet born). But it happens to everyone. Kant thought the new critical philosophy cut deep enough to brand the bulk of what came before "twaddle" (although I think that's in a personal letter), and the idea that all (or most) of the problems philosophers have spent their lives on are just a failure to use language correctly requires at least a bit of hubris (particularly if one has not studied them). Hume recommending consigning the bulk of all prior thought to the flames.

I think that's just a trade-off for swinging for the fences. You're more likely to hit a home run, but your batting average goes down. Sometimes you also need the courage to say something stupid.

I'll just add that charity is tricky. Sometimes people's idea of charity seems extremely uncharitable, like when religious claims are reinterpreted as "not truth-apt." I would rather say we should try to interpret people as they themselves do, but trying to save their ideas from their own interpretation is also a great philosophical art. That's how we got Hegel and Fichte.