Stanley Fish (a critic I am no real fan of) has a routine he calls 'philosophy doesn't matter'. His argument is while it is true that people hold views about things (derived from philosophical positions in a haphazard way), essentially no one makes any serious decisions in their life - who to live with, what house to buy, where to work, where to shop, who to vote for, etc - based on the problem of induction, whether math is discovered or invented, or if physicalism is false, etc. — Tom Storm
Apes together strong. Ape sitting a room ruminating on air, almost certianly utterly moronic. — StreetlightX
As such it can't be given ruling power. Which it clearly has in the modern world! And look at the consequences... The world has never been in a more deplorable state! Speaking of an analysis of the shadows.... — GraveItty
cosmology of the creation of the heavens, schools (to which you are forced to go) and universities as the seminaries, etc. etc. — GraveItty
You say religion is irrelevant, confusing, self-deceiving, and biased, and science is a refind common sense stripped away of all this. But that's your personal opinion. And that's indeed all it is. An opinion. So not a common sense. What would this common sense be? How do you know the gods don't exist? Science can't explain why the universe is there! — GraveItty
It's more a matter of only including what can be quantified, preferably in line with the paradigmatic model provided by physics. — Wayfarer
I've been trying to show that just because religious tenets are verbalized in a language one grammatically and lexically understands, this doesn't yet mean that one is qualified to understand them as intended. I emphasize the emic-etic distinction. — baker
Where I and several other posters disagree is that I put forward the view that religion/spirituality is something far stricter, less open, less democratic, less accessible, far better delineated than they present it as. — baker
Through science? Then you ignore non-scientific cultures. Science is just one culture amidst of many and should as such not be intertwined with democratic politics. Just as Christianity should be excluded from politics (as you suggest), so should science, unless all those involved agree to make it part of politics. There simply is not one reality that constitutes truth. Scientific reality is just one amongst many. Objective as it may sound. — GraveItty
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/Materialism is as old as philosophy, but not older.
There seem to be many other ways of thinking about the "big questions", but no other way but science that seems to have any chance of delivering any definitive answers. I agree with Popper that sometimes those other metaphysical ways of thinking, apart from their poetic rewards, may also be inspirational to the abductive thought processes of scientists. — Janus
A subcategory I am very amused by is the person who has read a great philosopher and assumes that they are now a philosopher too, with all the abundant creative powers of that famous writer. — Tom Storm
And in any Discourse whatsoever, if the defect of Discretion be apparent, how extravagant soever the Fancy be, the whole discourse will be taken for a signe of want of wit; and so will it never when the Discretion is manifest, though the Fancy be never so ordinary.
The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, prophane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame; which verball discourse cannot do, farther than the Judgement shall approve of the Time, Place, and Persons.
And who are those "others"? Toddlers? Senile old men? Teenagers? Bored housewives? Poles? Argentinians? Jews? Stamp collectors? Chemistry teachers? Who?
Who is your epistemic community?
The whole of the human race? Probably not. — baker
Tantalizing. Can you expand briefly? — Tom Storm
But when it comes to religion/spirituality, they drop this distinction, and treat religion/spirituality as something that should be readily, easily accessible to just anyone, from toddlers to senile old men, from bored housewives to academics with multiple advanced degrees. As if religion/spirituality would require no qualification. People admit that even talking about haircuts or how to fold socks isn't something that just any Joe Average can do, no, even for things like that, they grant that one must know this and that. But religion/spirituality is supposed to be fair game, for everyone. Now that's strange! — baker
think that's too strong. Pinker defends the Enlightenment tradition (which is unfashionable in many parts and provokes anger) and certainly privileges science and rationality. This does not necessitate scientism. Philosopher Susan Haack, who disparages scientism, is also a fulsome defender of the Enlightenment tradition and defends science as one of the most useful methods for acquiring reliable knowledge to meet goals. — Tom Storm
That's an interesting possibility! You make some good points; I'm no fan of scientism. but I haven't read Pinker so I can't comment on whether his arguments are scientistic. — Janus
What I've been saying all along is that Western philosophy is handling religion/spirituality on terms that are extraneous to religion/spirituality, and as such, necessarily misleading at the very least. And just because Western philosophy has been doing this for centuries doesn't make it right.
Western philosophy is acting outside of its competence when it talks on the topic of God, but thereby means Jehovah or Vishnu or Allah.
If philosophers want to talk about the "god of philosophers", that's their thing, their prerogative. But they should stop fooling themselves, and others, that this way, they are making any relevant claims about Jehovah or Vishnu or Allah. — baker
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Essay_Concerning_Human_Understanding/Book_IV/Chapter_XIX8. ... Reason is lost upon them, they are above it : they see the light infused into their understandings, and cannot be mistaken ; it is clear and visible there, like the light of bright sunshine ; shows itself, and needs no other proof but its own evidence : they feel the hand of God moving them within, and the impulses of the Spirit, and cannot be mistaken in what they feel. Thus they support themselves, and are sure reasoning hath nothing to do with what they see and feel in themselves : what they have a sensible experience of admits no doubt, needs no probation. Would he not be ridiculous, who should require to have it proved to him that the light shines, and that he sees it ? It is its own proof, and can have no other. When the Spirit brings light into our minds, it dispels darkness. We see it as we do that of the sun at noon, and need not the twilight of reason to show it us. This light from heaven is strong, clear, and pure ; carries its own demonstration with it : and we may as naturally take a glow-worm to assist us to discover the sun, as to examine the celestial ray by our dim candle, reason. — Locke
I would argue that sensation is somewhat radically private, in that we never fully know what it's like to be someone else. Only what their behavior and words tell us, and to the extent that our projection or simulation of their minds is accurate. Which often enough, it's not. — Marchesk
I haven't read that, but I get what you mean by "sterility or humorlessness about the enterprise". Some, like Dawkins and the so-called "Four Horsemen" seem to want to dismiss, even eliminate from human life, all religion, and that is in my view a ridiculous, not to mention arrogant, aim. — Janus
Skepticism always wins. It can't be killed. We just tend to move on from it (or ride past it unmolested as Schopenhauer put it). — frank
Well, that's your problem then. And what are you doing about it? — baker
Yes. This is just standard skepticism. How do you know the words you just said to me don't translate as "Fire at will" to me? — frank
What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?" — frank
but do you really want to valorize a wickedness that may not merely be "wicked" — Janus
:up:Our education remains an education in images. It is not merely an education by means of images, but what Plato provides is an education about images. — Fooloso4
And just for the record; I'm not saying there is anything wrong with having religious or spiritual faith, provided you are intelligent and honest enough to realize that that is what it is, and not to conflate it with knowledge. Such a conflation is dangerous; it is the first step towards fundamentalism. — Janus
Knowing God through holy scriptures is a form of direct knowledge of God. Holy scriptures are a direct revelation from God, so when you read or hear them, you are directly knowing God. — baker
Our abject ignorance is duly compensated for by the richness of our hypotheticals. — TheMadFool
at the point when a decision is contemplated, all the beliefs and attitudes that will inform that decision are usually already in place. And just as with non-moral beliefs and attitides, that is possible because we have been developing those beliefs and attitudes all throughout our lives, long before this particular action opportunity presented itself. — SophistiCat
If every thread on the principles of mathematics is allowed to degenerate into a thread about 0.999...<>1 it would become impossible to do any philosophy of maths. — Banno
Another way to make this point, one which is phenomenological, but also resonates with William James's thought (see Taylor, 1996), is to assert the primacy of the personalistic perspective over the naturalistic perspective. By this I mean that our relating to the world, including when we do science, always takes place within a matrix whose fundamental structure is I-You-It (this is reflected in linguistic communication: I am speaking to You about It) (Patocka, 1998, pp. 9–10). The hard problem gives epistemological and ontological precedence to the impersonal, seeing it as the foundation, but this puts an excessive emphasis on the third-person in the primordial structure of I–You–It in human understanding. What this extreme emphasis fails to take into account is that the mind as a scientific object has to be constituted as such from the personalistic perspective in the empathic co-determination of self and other. — Joshs
We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about (Stroud 2000, 27). This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either (Putnam 1978, 1). — Joshs
The answer is that an event doesn’t occur into a vacuum , but into an exquisitely organized referential totality. That is precisely what an event is, a way that this totality of relevance changes itself moment to moment. So there is a tremendously intricate and intimate overall coherence from one event to the next. Each event is a subtle variation on an ongoing theme, and it’s very appearance shifts the sense of this theme without rending its pragmatic consistency. — Joshs
Every event is a carrying forward and a transformation of a prior world of referential relations. if you start with such a premise , and take a look at the modern empirical notion of objects as presently occurring entities with duration it should strike you that at some point someone decided to ‘pretend’ that this constantly flowing, changing pragmatic unfolding of world froze itself into ‘objects’ with duration and extension. — Joshs
having done so , what can we conclude about the status of ‘truth’? Can we save some sense of it that doesn’t get sucked down into the relativity of use? Is ‘true’ just another thing we say in certain contexts for certain purposes? — Joshs
materiality is already ‘conceptual’ through and through in that the very notion of an empirical object is a complex perceptual construction , an idealization. Furthermore , it is this idealizing abstraction at the heart of our ideas of the spatial object that makes the mathematical
possible. They are parasitic on and presuppose each other. — Joshs
:up:Math is too serious a matter to be left to philosophers. — Olivier5