Pretty sure @jamalrob outranks him and he’s the one who okayed everything.

Your username does not accurately reflect your content.

What is that a warning sign of from whom?

The use of that phrase that I’m familiar with is in contrast to “minimum wage”, i.e. not just the least pay legally allowed, but enough to actually get by on.

Fourth post that was going to be in that series: Philosophy is not just Ethics

Given the previous account of how philosophy is neither religion, sophistry, nor science, one may be tempted to conclude that this means philosophy is entirely about prescriptive matters, rather than descriptive ones; that philosophy is all about using reason alone, without appeals to faith, to reach conclusions not about what is or isn't real, but about what one ought or ought not do, or broadly speaking, about morality. In other words, that philosophy is equivalent to the field of ethics. But philosophy does treat other topics concerning not just morality but also reality, at least the topics of how to go about an investigation of what is real. And while ethics is currently considered soundly within the field of philosophy, I contend that it properly should not be, for I hold that there are analogues to the physical sciences, what we might call the ethical sciences, that I consider to be outside the domain of philosophy, in that they appeal to specific, contingent hedonic experiences in the same way the physical sciences appeal to specific, contingent empirical experiences. I hold that philosophy bears the same kind of relation to both the physical and the ethical sciences, providing the justification for each to appeal to their respective kinds of a posteriori experiences, while never itself appealing to either of them, instead dealing entirely with a priori reasoning.

If we define “supernatural” differently like that, then that all works out as you describe, sure.

That has the consequence, however, that “supernatural” is only relative, and that relative to virtual worlds we create, we ourselves are supernatural.

That also has the consequence that “natural” means something different (and relative) too, and we’d need to come up with new words to mean the things that I meant by “supernatural” and “natural” in the OP.

Every philosophical idea I’ve ever had, I have incorporated into my book, so every original thought I have to talk about is related to it in some way. Neither this nor the other thread are explicitly about the book though, but about things related to writing philosophy in general or to the structure of philosophy in general. At least until people like you insist on making it about the book, and derail the thread, and then point at your derailment as evidence to justify itself.

FWIW I checked with the admins before and they explicitly suggested doing threads like this (and I actually ran the writing thread in entirety past them first and got an enthusiastic go-ahead).

What if the factory owner hires a bunch of goons to guard the factory before the workers come in the next day to take ownership? Now the state has to step in and apply force. — Marchesk

Only to stop the goons from committing assault.

Philosophy doesn't appeal to empirical observation? What would be considered "evidence" in that case? — Xtrix

A priori argument.

I just don't think it's this straightforward. If we decide we want to define philosophy in his way, I fail to see the motivation for it. You're quite right that science was natural philosophy, with "nature" as physics, and physics as a variation of the res extensa- substance that's extended in space. I don't see much reason for so rigidly separating the two, despite claims of a special method. It betrays a reaction to Christianity and has hints of scientism. — Xtrix

I am firmly against scientism.

In the context of the meaning of being (which I argue is what philosophy thinks). But in that case the nature of ἐπιστήμη is not being used in the sense you're using it, nor is "truth." — Xtrix

No, in the context of whether all philosophy starts with assumed axioms.

Whether or not there's an afterlife isn't relevant. — Xtrix

We’re not talking about an afterlife, but about continuing in more of the same kind of life again. If all of one’s conscious existence ceased permanently at death, that would guarantee an end to dukkha. It’s only against the prospect of that going on indefinitely that any special escape is needed.

I didn't say anything about shooting striking workers. I said defending my property in the hypothetical scenario if the community organizes to come take it for the common good, like has happened during certain Marxist revolutions in the past. — Marchesk

Say you own a factory under the current regime. Then a revolution happens and the law says you don't anymore, that whoever works there owns it now. The law continues to make it illegal for people to shoot people and take their property.

So the morning that law goes into effect, the workers of the factory come in to work as usual, then have some meetings about how to divide up the proceeds of their labor in the factory, now that they're in charge of that, not you. You "fire" them for plotting to "steal" from you, and tell them to get out, but nobody complies. So you call the police, as you usually would, to have them stop the employees from stealing your profits, but they say sorry, they can't help you, the factory belongs to the people who work there, they can divvy up the profits however they like. So you... come in with a gun, and tell them to give you the money they owe you or get the fuck out?

Who is "coming to take" anything from anyone in this scenario?

I don't understand what you mean.

Foundationalism concerns knowledge, yes, which has a long history in epistemology. I'm not concerned with epistemology. — Xtrix

You're taking epistemological positions for granted, though.

So whether you start inductively or deductively doesn't much matter to me. — Xtrix

I'm not talking about induction at all. I'm talking about critical rationalism vs justificationism.

In my tentative semantics, "faith" is belief without evidence (or reason), whether personal opinions or universal prescriptions. Hence a little more general, and in that case, having "faith" in the airplane pilot or a belief that human beings are essentially "good" are matters of faith. — Xtrix

That then leaves no specificity to distinguish between faith in the sense I mean it and non-faith, unless you want to invent a word for the narrower thing I'm talking about. In my terminology I call the broader position you're talking about "liberalism" (as in feel free to hold an opinion without justification from the ground up, at least until it can be shown wrong, in a critical-rationalist way), and the narrower position I'm talking about "fideism" (hold some opinions beyond question).

That's not what Buddhists argue at all -- if they ever do argue. — Xtrix

That's my point. The principles are not argued for. They're just asserted. No reason to adopt them is given.

Not "any kind of self." Buddhists don't believe your individual personality survives after death. They do believe in continuation and transformation, as a cloud to rain or a dead leaf into soil, etc. At least in the variations I'm familiar with. I know in parts of Thailand they practically worship Buddha as a god, his statues are everywhere, and so maybe you can find beliefs in an afterlife there -- but from what I've read in the Sutras, Buddha himself never discusses the 'self' surviving or anything spooky like that. In fact, non-self is a basic tenant (anatta). — Xtrix

Anatta is the cure to samsara. If there was no samsara to worry about, there would be no need for a special path to anatta: everyone would get there inevitably when they died. If it were not thought possible to maintain some (however false) sense of self through the cycle of death and rebirth, and so to continue suffering beyond death, then the way to end suffering would be simple: just die. It's only against that background presumption of samsara that Buddhism makes any sense.

(I find it kind of tragically humorous, actually, that what was surely originally an assuaging religious belief, that life continues even after death, then became a source of further anxiety -- not even death offers release from suffering -- that further religious innovation needed to assuage. It reminds me of people who are afraid to live forever, because the boredom and existential ennui would be hell, and the consequent supposition that to people who've spent too long in heaven, actual death in the cease-to-exist sense would be a welcome release).

Since we have gotten on to the relationship of philosophy to science, I may as well go ahead and post what was going to be the OP of the third thread in that series I was going to do: Philosophy is not Science:

What we today call "science" was once considered a sub-field of philosophy, "natural philosophy". This had been the case for thousands of years since at least the time of Aristotle, such that even Issac Newton's seminal work on physics, often considered the capstone of the Scientific Revolution, was titled "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy". But increasingly since then, what was once considered a sub-field of philosophy is now considered separate from it. What remains still as philosophy is demarcated from science in that while philosophy relies only upon reason or evidence to reach its conclusions, rather than appeals to faith, as an activity it does not appeal to empirical observation either, even though within philosophy one may conclude that empirical observation is the correct way to reach conclusions about reality. It is precisely when one transitions from using empirical observation to support some conclusion, to reasoning about why or whether something like empirical observation (or faith, or so on) is the correct thing to appeal to at all, that one transitions from doing science to doing philosophy.

The thrust of this thread is just the general categories of philosophical questions and the relationships between them.

This thread is not about my book, but my book is guided by the observation of those relationships. I went into more detail on how in the OP, but for one quick example: looking at the parallels between the descriptive questions about reality and knowledge and the prescriptive questions about morality and justice reveals that there really ought to be two fields on the right side of the chart where "ethics" would normally go: one that corresponds to ontology, and the other that corresponds to epistemology; one that's about the objects, as in aims, goals, or ends, of morality, and another that's about the methods, as in the means, of morality. This suggests that consequentialist or teleological ethics shouldn't be at odds with deontological ethics, because they are not different answers to the same question, they are answers to different questions.

Also an example from the OP: looking for the descriptive parallel of political philosophy suggests that it is something to do with education and its relationship to religion, which then turns around and suggests ways that stateless governance (anarchy) can be structured in a way mirroring irreligious education. In this thread I'm not advancing ideas like that, but pointing out the parallels between fields, and how thoughts about one may have implications on another.

There is no way around it -- you have to start somewhere. Any proposition in philosophy presupposes something, and in the end it does in fact come down to matters of belief. These core beliefs I call "axioms," but call it whatever you want. It's not that they're unquestionable -- it's that you have to accept them only in order to proceed. Take Euclid's axioms in geometry, for example. Of course we can still question these, maybe even reject them -- it's not a dogma. Yet if you don't accept them, at least temporarily, the rest won't be very interesting or even coherent. — Xtrix

That's foundationalism, which is far from uncontroversial. As I said, you can instead -- as critical rationalism would have it -- start with a survey of possibilities, reduce to absurdity some of them, and then proceed from whatever is left. You're not starting out just supposing that something or other is true, you're starting out with no idea what is or isn't true, just a spread of possible truths. Then you find inherent problems with some of the options, and get rid of them. Then you build off of what's left. But you didn't just start off supposing that what's left was the truth. You only fell back on it because all the other options proved unworkable.

If we choose to define "religion" as anything that appeals to faith, then we should discuss exactly what we mean by faith. I say it's belief without evidence. But in that case, many things we do on a daily basis involves a good deal of faith as well, yet I wouldn't call it religion. — Xtrix

Just believing something yourself without adequate reason isn’t faith. To quote myself elsewhere:

I also don't mean just holding some opinion "on faith", as in without sufficient reason; I don't think you need reasons simply to hold an opinion yourself. I am only against appeals to faith, by which I mean I am against assertions — statements not merely to the effect that one is of some opinion oneself, but that it is the correct opinion, that everyone should adopt — that are made arbitrarily; not for any reason, not "because of..." anything, but "just because"; assertions that some claim is true because it just is, with no further justification to back that claim up. I am against assertions put forth as beyond question, for if they needed no justification to stand then there could be no room to doubt them.

As for Buddhism -- no Buddhist, that I'm aware of, asks you to accept the "wisdom of Siddhartha" on faith. Quite the opposite. — Xtrix

I am not aware of any Buddhist arguing for Buddhist principles in a way meant to convince someone who doesn’t already believe them. It’s all meant to be taken as self-evident wisdom that just needed someone wise enough to point it out, and now that it’s been pointed out, you’ve just got to either accept it and find peace or go on suffering in your miserable unenlightened life.

The Buddhist ideas (in some traditions) of reincarnation really have nothing to do with the supernatural, any more than a cloud becoming rain is supernatural. — Xtrix

The idea of any kind of self surviving death to live another miserable life of suffering is sort of a key motivating factor in Buddhism. If it weren’t for reincarnation, you could easily escape from suffering via suicide. Without samsara, nirvana and mundane death are the same thing.

The OP of the second thread in that series on the demarcation of philosophy I was planning: "Philosophy is not Sophistry". (The first one was to be titled "Philosophy is not Religion"; forgot to mention that before).

Despite turning to argumentation to establish its answers, philosophy is not some relativistic endeavor wherein there are held to be no actually correct answers, only winning and losing arguments. While there are those within philosophy who contentiously advocate for relativism about various topics, philosophy as an activity is characteristically conducted in a manner seeking out answers that are genuinely correct, not merely seeking to win an argument. Though the historical accuracy is disputed, a founding story of the classical era of philosophy ushered in by Socrates, at least as recounted by his student Plato, is that philosophers like them were to be distinguished from the prevailing practitioners of reasoned argumentation of their time, the Sophists, who on Plato's account were precisely such relativists uninterested in genuine truth, only in winning. It is from that account that the contemporary use of the word "sophistry" derives, meaning wise-sounding but secretly manipulative or deceptive argumentation, aimed more at winning than at finding the truth. And whether or not the historical Sophists actually practiced such argumentation, philosophy since the time of Socrates has defined itself in opposition to that.

I think you're misunderstanding the whole general thrust of this thread.

I'm not putting forward any ideas about particular philosophical questions. I'm noting my observations of the relationships between different philosophical questions.

Language and Action are on opposite sides of the vertical axis because they are the most distantly related topics in that respect: one is abstract, the other is practical. Logic, mathematics, rhetoric, and the arts are all abstract too, so they're closer to that side. But e.g. political philosophy is more practical, so it's closer to the other side.

The left half is all things to do with reality and knowledge, and the right half is all things to do with morality and justice. Fields to the left or right of each other are the descriptive or prescriptive analogues of each other.

And so on, as described in more detail already in the OP.

The question of consequentialism or not is whether the ends justify the means. “No” is obviously a possible answer to that. The means of course are still judged on some basis or another, but non-consequential reasoning judges the means themselves on that basis, and not just some end that those means cause.

E.g. harvesting one healthy person’s organs to save five dying people is good according to consequentialism, but not otherwise.

On the other hand, even "formal" philosophy starts with axioms of some kind. — Xtrix

Not necessarily. It can start with a survey of possibilities, reduce to absurdity some of them, and then proceed from whatever is left. I’d argue that to just put forth some unquestionable axioms simply is religion.

But the problem then becomes: what is "religion"? Is religion simply beliefs held on faith and not reason? In that case, I'd argue Buddhism really isn't a religion at all. There are no gods, no supernaturalism, no accepting anything on faith. — Xtrix

Yes, religion is anything that appeals to faith. And it’s not only claims about the supernatural that appeal to faith. Buddhism just stipulates its principles and asks you to accept them. Even if those principles make no appeal to the supernatural (which, inasmuch as they talk about reincarnation and escaping the cycle thereof, they actually do), just asking us to accept them on faith in the wisdom of Siddhartha makes it a religion still.

That's interesting. Let's say that's true, that phenomenologically, there is a sharp distinction between dichromatic and trichromatic experience. And let's also assume that these phenomenologies are closely correlated with biological systems. I don't really know the biology of sight at all, but can we find a similarly sharp distinction in the biology with which to correlate the phenomenology? Or can we find borderline cases of the physical biology? — bert1

Yes, there is a sharp division in the biology, to do with how many kinds of cones and how many channels there are in the optic nerve.

Particular instances of people acting in moral ways and holding moral opinions are part of reality or course, but the question “what is moral?” is separate from the question “what is real?”. That’s the is-ought or fact-value divide there.

Maybe instead of my planned series of threads on the demarcation of philosophy from other things, I should just do a series of posts in this thread since we’re already touching on all the same issues.

Something like this was going to be my first post in that thread series:

As regards the definition of philosophy, a quick and general answer would be that philosophy is about the fundamental topics that lie at the core of all other fields of inquiry, broad topics like reality, morality, knowledge, justice, reason, beauty, the mind and the will, social institutions of education and governance, and perhaps above all meaning, both in the abstract linguistic sense, and in the practical sense of what is important in life and why. But philosophy is far from the only field that inquires into any of those topics, and no definition of philosophy would be complete without demarcating it from those other fields, showing where the line lies between philosophy and something else.

The first line of demarcation is between philosophy and religion, which also claims to hold answers to all of those big questions. I would draw the demarcation between them along the line dividing faith and reason, with religions appealing to faith for their answers to these questions, and philosophies attempting to argue for them with reasons. While it is a contentious position within the field of philosophy to conclude that it is never warranted to appeal to faith, it is nevertheless generally accepted that philosophy as an activity characteristically differs from religion as an activity by not appealing to faith to support philosophical positions themselves, even if one of those positions should turn out to be that appeals to faith are sometimes acceptable. The very first philosopher recognized in western history, Thales, is noted for breaking from the use of mythology to explain the world, instead practicing a primitive precursor to what would eventually become science, appealing to observable phenomena as evidence for his attempted explanations.

Missing half the picture. Philosophy isn’t just about being and ontology, i.e. reality. It’s also about morality.

It’s not of an ideology, but of the topical structure of philosophy itself, how the different subfields relate to each other. There’s no specific views of any of those fields embedded in this structure.

But, I need some arrows or links between boxes to indicate functional interrelationships, and a logical (or value or causal) hierarchy. — Gnomon

Their relations to each other in space depicts their relationships (which are explained more in words earlier). And there isn’t a hierarchy, it’s not like one is prior to another; you could approach it all from multiple angles and order them accordingly for each.

The first law does not hold on a cosmological scale. Even right now new energy is being created everywhere, which drives the accelerating expansion of space.

See, here it's tricky in my view. On the one hand, of course philosophy isn't science or religion -- they differ in many ways. But on the other hand, they deal with very similar questions. — Xtrix

True, but it is the ways that they approach those questions that differentiates them.

Have you tried writing a post on the topic yourself? (I tend to follow a very narrow range of threads so I may well have missed it). — Isaac

I did now, here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/8303/the-structure-of-philosophy

Since we're talking about demarcation, I would add a short list:

Philosophy is not religion
Philosophy is not sophistry
Philosophy is not science
Philosophy is not just ethics
Philosophy is not math
Philosophy is not just a form of literature

I plan on doing a series of threads on each of these demarcation problems soon.

A mule is an equine, but it can’t reproduce.

Some humans can’t reproduce either. Are they not alive?

Are mules not alive?

The characteristic activity of philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, not the possession or exercise thereof. Wisdom, in turn, is not merely some set of correct opinions, but rather the ability to discern the true from the false, the good from the bad; or at least the more true from the less true, the better from the worse; the ability, in short, to discern superior answers from inferior answers to any given question.

I took a stab at it, not super easy to read because it's a 3D structure that's not animated like the one you linked, but I tried to compensate with transparency, so it's something maybe:

Because some senses of those words have been used in a way that is completely divorced from any physical behavior or functionality that we might use to distinguish humans or other living things from rocks or quarks, instead being used for some mysterious metaphysical thing. And as it turns out, there’s nothing metaphysically special about humans or other living things, which means whatever’s metaphysically going on with us is also going on with everything else. Not that that really means much, since it’s such a trivial thing.

E.g. if free will is just the absence of determination then every electron has free will. That makes it clear that that is a pretty useless sense of “free will”, but it’s nevertheless a sense to that lots of people use, and it’s true that in that sense of the phrase, electrons “have free will”, not that that really means much.

That sounds like something you might like to peruse my philosophy for then. From what I’ve read our takes on reality and knowledge are very similar, and my take on morality and justice is modeled analogously off my take on reality and knowledge, so you might find some food for thought on developing that half of your own philosophy in there.

I will try to draw a diagram to help better illustrate soon.

An incompletely structured diagram showing at least all of the fields is this:



I just need to arrange those middle eight into a cube.

The economic and political science interests are what lead me to ethics and political philosophy etc. Does your system have an account of that prescriptive side of things, morality and justice, or is it all about reality and knowledge?

Another bit I forgot last night was to explain the connection between epistemology and deontology and the fields “below” them in the third axis. The top two are both fields about methods, about how to go about something; the fields below them are about who is to execute those methods, who are epistemic and deontic authorities, the institutions of knowledge and justice respectively.

Combined with the fields of mind and will being about the subjects of reality and morality, this makes that entire bottom layer of that main cube all about questions of “who” in some sense.

I don't see how the statement implies that the wet grass occurred before the rain, so I'm failing to see the problem you are posing. — Harry Hindu

The apparent problem is that “the grass being wet is a necessary condition for it to be raining”, which is supposed to mean the same thing as “if it is raining then the grass is wet”, sounds superficially like the grass has to be wet first.

I guess it depends on where we drawn the boundary between raining and not raining. Is it raining when the water drops are condensing and falling from the sky before the water drops hit the ground, and how much water on the grass qualifies it as being wet? This isn't an instantaneous process. — Harry Hindu

That’s why I said “IF it can’t be true...”. For the reasons you mention, it could be true that it is raining and the grass is not wet, so the grass being wet is not in fact a necessary condition of it being raining. But IF it were...

Time is not a factor in logical necessity. If it can't both be the case that "it is raining" and the "ground is not wet", then the ground being wet is a necessary condition for it to be raining. That doesn't mean the ground has to be wet first; just that it can't be raining without the ground also being wet.

Oh a bit I forgot to add about that third axis, the practical-abstract one: it seems like that's the axis around which competing broad trends in philosophy seem to align. Ionians vs Italiotes, Platonists vs Aristotelians, Rationalists vs Empiricists, Analytic vs Continental. Each period has its own take on it, but there always seems to be one side that's more about the abstract, ideal, mathematical, linguistic stuff, and another that's about the experiential, embodied, practical life.

It isn’t through lack of effort that people become nihilists, etc. It’s through reasonable examination of the facts, or supposed facts, of any particular field of discourse. — Pinprick

...leading to the conclusion that there are no answers to be found there, and then giving up on the pursuit of them. It was doing philosophy unsuccessfully that lead them to that conclusion, sure, but the conclusion itself that they reach is that success there is not possible and striving for it is hopeless, rather than merely that it hasn't been attained yet.