ethical motivation for arguing properly — J
there is a certain experience we must be careful to avoid.
What is that? I asked.
That we should not become misologues, as people become misanthropes. [d] There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse. Misology and misanthropy arise in the same way. Misanthropy comes when a man without knowledge or skill has placed great trust in someone and believes him to be altogether truthful, sound and trustworthy; then, a short time afterwards he finds him to be wicked and unreliable, and then this happens in another case; when one has frequently had that experience, especially with those whom one believed to be one’s closest [e] friends, then, in the end, after many such blows, one comes to hate all men and to believe that no one is sound in any way at all. Have you not seen this happen?
I surely have, I said.
This is a shameful state of affairs, he said, and obviously due to an attempt to have human relations without any skill in human affairs, for such skill would lead one to believe, what is in fact true, that the very [90] good and the very wicked are both quite rare, and that most men are between those extremes.
How do you mean? said I.
The same as with the very tall and the very short, he said. Do you think anything is rarer than to find an extremely tall man or an extremely short one? Or a dog or anything else whatever? Or again, one extremely swift or extremely slow, ugly or beautiful, white or black? Are you not aware that in all those cases the most extreme at either end are rare and few, but those in between are many and plentiful?
Certainly, I said.
[ b ] Therefore, he said, if a contest of wickedness were established, there too the winners, you think, would be very few?
That is likely, said I.
Likely indeed, he said, but arguments are not like men in this particular. I was merely following your lead just now. The similarity lies rather in this: it is as when one who lacks skill in arguments puts his trust in an argument as being true, then shortly afterwards believes it to be false—as sometimes it is and sometimes it is not—and so with another argument and then another. You know how those in particular who spend their time [c] studying contradiction in the end believe themselves to have become very wise and that they alone have understood that there is no soundness or reliability in any object or in any argument, but that all that exists simply fluctuates up and down as if it were in the Euripus and does not remain in the same place for any time at all.
What you say, I said, is certainly true.
It would be pitiable, Phaedo, he said, when there is a true and reliable argument and one that can be understood, if a man who has dealt with [d] such arguments as appear at one time true, at another time untrue, should not blame himself or his own lack of skill but, because of his distress, in the end gladly shift the blame away from himself to the arguments, and spend the rest of his life hating and reviling reasonable discussion and so be deprived of truth and knowledge of reality.
Yes, by Zeus, I said, that would be pitiable indeed.
[e] This then is the first thing we should guard against, he said. We should not allow into our minds the conviction that argumentation has nothing sound about it; much rather we should believe that it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take courage and be eager to attain soundness, [91] you and the others for the sake of your whole life still to come, and I for the sake of death itself. I am in danger at this moment of not having a philosophical attitude about this, but like those who are quite uneducated, I am eager to get the better of you in argument, for the uneducated, when they engage in argument about anything, give no thought to the truth about the subject of discussion but are only eager that those present will accept the position they have set forth. I differ from them only to this extent: I shall not be eager to get the agreement of those present that what I say is true, except incidentally, but I shall be very eager that I should myself be thoroughly convinced that things are so. — Phaedo 89c-91a
Insinuating what? That I'm not really a player but a spectator? — Janus
Because it is interesting? — Janus
Only once you have your preferred premise can rationality definitively enter the fray and it consists simply in being consistent with your premise in the elaboration of your thinking. — Janus
a monopoly over violence — ssu
stop worrying about whether and how phil. and rationality overlap — J
demonstrating, in the very act of obtaining this result, that this is the only way philosophy can proceed. — J
phil. gives itself the (rational) law — J
we have the result that "philosophy is rational." — J
If an experiment demonstrated a theory conclusively, you might end up saying "The experiment demonstrated the theory" - which may be the final relevant word on the matter of justifying the claim if "The experiment demonstrated the theory" is justified by the standards of the discipline. — fdrake
We're not on different pages, we're in different books. — Leontiskos
I think a lot of people were more interested in shooting down other planes than trying to fly their own. — Leontiskos
But can you think of anyone other than the OL philosophers whose ideas are not nuanced and subtle? — J
if he did intend it to be a justificaiton for a state, then it is a rubbish one. — Clearbury
But it doesn't do anything to show the state to be justified. — Clearbury
Lots here. I'll have to do this piecemeal — J
But there is a question of fact about whether the Freudian psychologist is making use of what J would call "philosophical" thinking on order to deflate the philosopher's claim. I think it should be recognized that what the Freudian psychologist sees himself as refuting and what @J sees as "philosophy" are probably two different things. — Leontiskos
What I was imagining, and trying to describe, was a refereed situation, so to speak, where each of the interlocutors agrees to the rules of rational philosophical discourse. Playing by these rules, the philosopher always trumps, and always wins. — J
If the bearded Viennese tries his "Interesting. Do you always . . . " response, the referee steps in and says, "Out of bounds. Please answer the question." — J
we know what the rules are for rationality — J
Does the Freudian get to claim that his path is rational, that we are wrong about knowing the rules? — J
In short, the Freudian may be right, but what he can't do is justify a claim to being right, without engaging in more philosophy — J
And what is your justification for asserting that such an explanation is true? — J
Arthur Koestler's definition of philosophy: "the systematic abuse of a terminology specially invented for that purpose." — Fooloso4
One might almost say that over-generalization is the occupational hazard of philosophy, if it were not the occupation. — Austin
if chemistry had this ability, it would be able to respond to a physicist's attempt at reduction using only the arguments available to it qua chemistry — J
Look, if you think the Jews had no moral rights under the Nazis then it follows that the Nazis did nothing wrong in exterminating them. I can't argue with someone who thinks that way. — Clearbury
SIEGEL: You write in "Black Earth" - and I'm quoting now - Jews who were German citizens were more likely to survive than Jews who were citizens of states that the Germans destroyed.
SNYDER: Yeah. Our image is of a progressive destruction of Jews inside Germany. But in fact, Germany, like most states that weren't destroyed, was a relatively safer place for Jews than the places where German power actually destroyed other regimes. Once we see this basic contrast that Jews in stateless zones had about a 1-in-20 chance of surviving whereas Jews in states had about a 1-in-2 chance of surviving, we have to ask the question about the causes of the Holocaust a little differently.
SIEGEL: And Hitler's attitude toward Poland or toward Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine was quite different from his view of France or the Netherlands or Denmark.
SNYDER: That's an extremely important point. It turns out that in order to carry out something like a final solution, you have to first destroy state institutions. So the order is very important. When Germany invades Poland in 1939, it does so with the intention of wiping out not just the Polish state but the Polish political elite, that is, physically exterminate the people who could support a state. — NPR interview with Timothy Snyder
Suppose some surly neo-Freudian interrupts me at the point where I assert that “there’s nowhere else to go.” Nonsense, he says. “I’ll give you a psychological-slash-reductive explanation of why philosophers do what they do, and this explanation will have nothing to do with ‛ideas’ or ‛reasoning,’ and everything to do with culturally determined modes of expression mixed with individual depth psychology.” Ah, but I can reply, “Indeed? And what is your justification for asserting that such an explanation is true?” We see where this has to go: We’re back to doing philosophy. My surly interlocutor has been trumped. — J
the desire to find something better, more interesting, than what I called "an argumentative gotcha!" Maybe it can't be found, but that's not yet clear. I repeat that, if that's all there is, it's not much of a result. — J
How would chemistry, for instance, defend itself strictly within the discourse of chemistry from the challenge that it is really a form of physics? — J
Oh for Gödel's sake. — J