@deusidex There is no particular order in which you should read the philosophers...or rather, the order should be determined in this way...

When you, inquisitive soul that you are, frequenting libraries and bookstores, have found a certain one that has impressed upon you that he holds the key to understanding life and the world you live in, then of course you will dwell with him a while and absorb his wisdom and attempt to live according to his (or her) precepts. Invariably, he will reveal in his writings those who have influenced him, and, should you sense that his ideas are lacking, or spurred on to investigate the origins of his thought, you will read those and, perhaps, supplant his thought with one of them...

This typically continues through a couple of iterations until you find the soul that you will trust in for the rest of your life.

@synthesis This is an interesting topic.

I was once, in my youth, a tournament-level tennis player. During my career I witnessed just how, in other players and in myself, the ambition to win a match can cloud your judgement: you start calling all close line calls your way, interpret uncertainty of the score in your own favor, even start actually SEEING, with your eyes, your opponents balls that fell on the line as though they were out, begin IMAGINING the score different from what it actually is. What could be the source of such partisanship and selfishness and corruption in ppl ordinarily fair minded?

I think ppl become this way when they believe that their self-worth depends on their success or failure in the contest. In aristocracies there were gentlemanly contests in athletics, but because the gentlemen who participated in them had a higher standard on which to base their worth, they tended to be fairer, even more conciliatory in their judgement. If they had an argument, it would more likely be that their opponent, not themselves, should receive the point or the victory.

In democracies, however, it is every man for himself, “dog-eat-dog” as Mr. baker describes it...

...I must mention however that in my career as a competitive athlete I did witness one or two examples of the opposite: players who were deferential, self-effacing and tended to give me, their opponent, the benefit of the doubt...I was beaten by both in close contests.

@Possibility Thanks for the explanation of the “Bannings” thread.

When I think of an acute angle, assuming I and you both correctly conceive what an acute angle is, is that angle the same one you are thinking of whenever you think of an acute angle?

“This discussion is closed to new comments”...???

Just tried to post something on “Bannings”, and was told no more posts allowed on that thread...what’s up with that?

Just remember, however, when suspecting someone of plagiarism, quod verum est, meum est.

@TheMadFool I was offended by Merkwurdichliebe not long ago in the Coronavirus thread when he responded to one of my posts with extremely scurrilous language. He did not direct this language at me, but at a fictional old lady in my post that was attempting to protect her health by wearing a mask, and whom he knew I was sympathetic to. My views of how we should think and act in the pandemic were offensive to him, and I realized that in calling my fictional old dame the names he did, he was really fulminating against ME... but was just too timid to direct his rage at its real object.

Until then his clever brash confrontational style had charmed me, but when I suddenly realized it was nothing more than a veil for pure vileness and vulgarity, I wanted to have nothing more to do with him. I never thought to “report” him, just told him what I thought of him and left it at that.

I am sympathetic, however with your feelings about forum censorship. A few years ago I was a member of one in which a certain other member was banned for expressing ideas contrary to those of the moderator. I took offense at this and began a campaign of protest, using what rhetorical skill I possessed in thinly veiled diatribe to attack the establishment. The outcome may be summed up in the old rock & roll hit, “I fought the law and the law won”.

As far as chat-bots are concerned, if I remember the Turing test correctly, he postulated that AI could be considered to be “conscious” whenever it’s conversation could not be distinguished between that of a human being. But I wonder now, many years since Turing, whether AI will not someday turn the tables on us, and itself design a test to determine whether some certain speech was produced by one of us rather than one of them!

When I was a young man AI was not even in its infancy: it was scarcely a fetus, imitating logic in board games like chess or checkers, yet I, avidly perusing computer programming, knew even then that THAT was where it was at: designing computers to mimic the human mind...

Finally (and all this is an aside from our topic, what wisdom is, to which I hope soon to return), it seems to me that, as god created man in his own image, man is creating AI in his...weren’t the first efforts at creating a computer meant to imitate the soul of man, if only initially according to his ability to “crunch numbers”, ie, merely calculate? But now the higher intellectual faculties of man are being artificially reproduced too, and I see no reason why they won’t, some soon day, be exactly imitated.

@eduardo “what would be the motivation to harm someone?”...Eduardo! What planet do you live on? (I would like to move there). I won’t wear my thumb out giving all the examples, for I’m sure you can do this for yourself, as anyone could.

As far as infallibility is concerned, that’s exactly what the criminal strives for, his greatest honor: he wants to commit the perfect crime. If wisdom is a pan-discipline called in when knowledge fails, how does this notion exclude him who, e.g, wants to kill someone whose life insurance money he will collect, and then go on living unsuspected and wealthy, and peacefully in his community?

@TheMadFool Didn’t the OP get deleted from this entire site because of the very un-peaceful language he used in anger to address a fellow poster? I don’t know the details, but it seems we may move here beyond that theoretical position he was unable to honor in practice.

@Possibility When you conceive of an acute geometrical angle in your mind, is that angle temporal or atemporal?

@TheMadFool So wisdom appears to be a certain higher ineffable faculty that anyone might possess to be used when his particular knowledge fails. Would you agree that by this definition it applies to the following examples?

When a thief seems to have been caught red-handed, he wisely concocts a fabulous story to make it seem his behavior is explained by innocent motives?

When a liar wishes to commit perjury, he chooses his words wisely in a way that their meaning is so unclear that prosecutors drop the case against him, unsure they would be able to establish wrongdoing “beyond a reasonable doubt”?

Finally, aren’t the wise assassins those who best know how to cover their tracks? how to leave no trace linking them to the crime?

Are these not to be included among the wise and knowledgeable ppl we’re considering here?

@Possibility Given that you think wisdom is simultaneously both possible and impossible, are there other things about which you hold the same opinion? Are there other things that are both possible and impossible? Are there any things that you think are only one or the other, but not both at the same time?

@Possibility Would you agree that wisdom is either possible or impossible, but that it cannot be both?

@TheMadFool Your latest post seems to suggest that you believe that the wise man is not a particular sort of human being, but rather an inherent persona of all those who possess knowledge of a more restricted sort; there is the wise historian or doctor or mathematician, etc. Are we all then wise men of one sort or another, and is wisdom a sort of pan-discipline, unlike the specialized ones, which everyone possesses to a degree more or less?

Let me offer some examples for you consideration...

We all sleep, so aren’t we all sleepers? Yet some sleep better than others, in a way that refreshes them for the next day’s wakeful activities, while the unwise sleepers sleep poorly, and are therefore unrefreshed...

Likewise, aren’t we all eaters? Yet some eat poorly and do not nourish their bodies well, while the wise eaters eat good food and thereby nourish their bodies well and can justly be called wise as regards nutrition...

Finally, aren’t we all “dental hygienists” in that we know to brush and floss daily and the manner in which to do those things?

Is this then your idea of the wise man, as a persona applicable to all the different sorts of particular knowledge, rather than a man of exalted nature, who seeks to know the foundation of knowledge in a general sense, like did a Socrates or Machiavelli or Rousseau or Kant or Nietzsche?

@Brett Thank you Mr. Brett! You prove yourself to be both a scholar AND a gentleman.

@Brett I apologize for having led the discussion away from the OP. I was mislead by the comments of a couple of the interlocutors and wished to press them further, being uncertain and curious as to what they actually believed about wisdom and the wise man.

Judging by their most recent posts, I have still more questions to put to them, but I suspect by posing those questions I will only lead the OP farther away from it’s intention.

Therefore I leave it up to you, the moderator of this thread, to either give me permission to ask these questions, or silence me.

@TheMadFool Well, first of all, my question to you did not imply that there is absolute and perfect knowledge in any field. It rather assumed that, when there is uncertainty, the person we seek to give us clarity is not “the wise man”, whoever he is, but rather the wise doctor or judge or whoever specializes; do you not avow this is true?

Let me ask you personally: who would you go to, having been diagnosed with cancer, for a second opinion—the wise man, or another oncologist?

@Possibility are you saying that wisdom is both possible and impossible?

@Possibility. Let me help you out here, Mr. Possible: what you are trying to say is that wisdom and the wise man truly exist—as ideals: true wisdom can be conceived of, but its ideal or perfection is never encountered in the “real” world—is that what you are saying?

@TheMadFool If you were diagnosed by a doctor as having cancer, and wished to get a second opinion, perhaps suspecting that that doctor’s opinion might be in error, who would you go to—another doctor, or a wise man?

When a judge is unsure how he ought to rule in some case does he consult a wise man, or rather the rulings of other judges in such cases?

Likewise, if a man is unsure of the status or quality of his own soul, who does he consult? The wise man? Doesn’t he rather go to the therapist or priest?...

I’m just wondering, O Mad One,...where is the place for your wise man in a world that seems to be sufficiently peopled by human beings already skilled enough in all the arts and sciences?

@Possibility but you didn’t address the other half, Mr. Possible, of my question: is the wise man a fiction?

@Possibility We’ll, it seems you DID answer for Gilly, Mr. Possible, to judge by his approval of your statement about wisdom and the wise man.

From what you said about it, it looks like you believe wisdom does indeed exist, but that the wise man is a fiction, as Gilly asserted...

Is this your position?

@jgill I can only assume, by your repetition of what you just said, that you believe wisdom not to exist at all, which is really quite remarkable given the longstanding traditions down through the centuries of wise men and their wisdom...

I’m really curious why you believe this, and how you might defend your opinion.

@jgill Are you suggesting, Gilly, that the wise man doesn’t exist, or that The Mad One’s description of him is false? How would you describe the wise man?

@TheMadFool Let me see if I understand what you are saying about wisdom and the wise man. He is needed when our knowledge fails, when we are uncertain as to what is true and false; for example, when the doctors don’t agree on a diagnosis? Is that the sort of situation you are referring to? or the medical researchers are unsure how to interpret their findings? then they ought to call in the wise man to interpret them for them?

Likewise, when the trainers and dietitians disagree as to how to properly exercise or feed a body, the wise man ought to be called in to set them straight?

Similarly, concerning the things of the soul, when the judges disagree how they ought to judge and punish or reform the citizenry, the wise man is called in, just as he is when the teachers are not certain what or how to teach, and the politicians are not sure what laws to legislate? Is this the idea of the wise man you are promoting, or something else?

@TheMadFool You say that “a wise person isn’t confined to specific disciplines but has a fair if not complete grasp of all that can be known...” Would you say then that a good analogy to him would be the decathlete, who, performing “fairly” well in several track and field endeavors, by combining his ability in each comes out superior in the skill of the total endeavor we call “track and field” to all those specialists in it, the sprinters and long-distance runners; the putters of the shot and discus throwers; the long- and high-jumpers? Would you say the decathlete comes off superior to all these specialists by being, as it were, second-best to them in their specialties?—but by combining his inferior skill in each into a sort of comprehensiveness, embracing all particular athletic endeavors under one head, proves superior in the overall category “athletics”?

Likewise the wise man, knowing a lot about a lot of different things, though not as much as the specialists in their particular fields, comes off superior to them: he knows less about medicine than the doctor, less about farming than the farmer; but because he knows so much about so many things he proves superior to all the others because of the BREADTH of his knowledge...

Is the wise man the “decathlete” of knowledge?

@TheMadFool how does your response to my last post follow from what I said? The question was whether knowledge conduces to the good, and I gave examples of how it could lead to good or evil, identifying three examples of ppl with certain sorts of knowledge, and pointing out how they could use their particular knowledge for either good or evil.

I will give another example: knowledge of nuclear fission can be used to deliver electricity to the masses, or blow them to smitherines.

Assume I am unacquainted with Kant or “the decalog” or deontics, am just an ordinary inquisitive soul offering what comes most naturally from his ordinary experience to the question: do you deny that the man knowledgeable in a particular sphere is the one who is able to do evil as well as good in it? Can you think of any field of knowledge in which this is not true? If you cannot, how can you believe that knowledge conduces to the good?

@TheMadFool Excellent question! Does knowledge necessarily conduce to what is good (and I admit I have paraphrased what you actually said)?

And the obvious answer is no, it doesn’t, and a multitude of examples appear before my mind...

Who knows best how to forge strong works of iron or steel? Is it not the blacksmith? Yet he is also the one who knows best how to compromise the integrity of his product, and cause seemingly sturdy rails or tresses or cables to collapse...

Who knows best how to cut the meat of a pig or cow? Is it not the butcher? But he is also the one, because of his knowledge, who knows just how to deliver the inferior parts of the carcass as though they were “high on the hog” to unsuspecting customers...

Finally (to cut short a series of examples that might stretch to eternity), who best knows how to heal a sickly body? Is it not the physician? But he is also the one most adept at poisoning me, for who knows more about poison than a doctor?

@Brett “why would wisdom hurt others?” Had you known what Hitler or Stalin was going to do, would it not have been wise to put a bullet in his head?

“Why would wisdom go to war?” To defend its country in a just cause?

And what is this assumption of yours that a perfect morality or wisdom or higher power would necessarily result in a “better future”? You have given some hints as to what your idea of this better future is, but that is all—just bare bones with no flesh. What flesh you have put to the bones is just contemporary liberal propaganda: a cleaner environment or immunity to natural disaster—how can a higher power or a perfect morality insure that we avoid natural disaster? It would seem rather that that higher power either allowed disaster to occur or was impotent to prevent it...

Maybe your idea of god and morality are incomplete and limited, or prejudiced, because it certainly doesn’t correspond to the world I am familiar with.

@kideceudan You might want also to check out Xenophon: it might be in his “Memorabilia”; for, besides Plato, Xenophon was the earliest and foremost authority on Socrates.

@kideceudan it is reminiscent of the tale, at Luke 16:19, of the rich man and Lazarus, though many of your particulars not align with that story.

@BitconnectCarlos As a final note concerning the elimination of societal ills I ask, who would deny that homelessness and war rank among them?

Yet the hobo was a persistent feature of early American culture in the last century, and I’m sure many of them would have never traded their box-cars and tents or guitars for a comfortable apartment...

As for war, though it cause much death and suffering, it also offers the soldier, ordinarily an obscure or even dishonorable citizen, a chance to gain glory and honor.

@BitconnectCarlos I don’t see any difference in our views about suffering. When I criticized the various wars against societal ills that are constantly waged in liberal democracies, that criticism was not directed at them for their effort— I too believe the world is a better place with less poverty or homelessness or hunger, etc—but for their goal: they seek to completely eradicate these evils, remove them permanently and forever from the world, rather than adopt the more reasonable and realizable goal of simply diminishing their presence.

@Brett what is to be learned from suffering? Endurance. If suffering is a necessary element of life, then what better than that morality offer us a virtue to combat it? Someone who has never suffered adversity, once he at last encounters it—and he will—is like a pugilist who has never had his teeth knocked out. When at last he does, he will stumble tearfully out of the arena, holding his bloody mouth, and concede victory to his opponent.

On the other hand, the fighter who has lost many teeth through many battles, having learned that there is no great evil in that, when he gets knocked down to the canvass shakes it off and jumps right back up and swings his fist to deliver the very next blow.

As for your notion that a perfect god would insure a perfect morality, let me offer an analogy: the perfect falling body would have an acceleration, according to Newton’s formula, of 32 ft/sec squared. Now, this holds true, of course, only under certain “perfect” conditions, namely, either if it occurs in a vacuum, or if the body is a mathematical point—neither of which ordinarily occurs in the “real” world—for the effect on the body of the medium (ordinarily, air) through which it falls corrupts the formula. This is not to say that the mathematical equation describing the perfect situation is therefore useless; all to the contrary: it is only by means of contemplating the “perfect” falling bodies that we have come to understand the nature of the imperfect “real” ones.

I suggest that the study of morality is much like that of falling bodies: one may investigate the various virtues using reason, attempting to purify them and gain an understanding of them, as did Plato’s Socrates, in their perfection, and therefore best understand the ones we actually encounter; but their perfection, though it exist in theory, will never be found in the “real” world.

The reason I have often included the words “perfect” and “real” in quotation marks is because they are ambiguous: though it never be found in nature, the perfect (or, better yet, “ideal”) falling body is, nevertheless, somehow more real, in that it is the best, or really only, representative of its various manifestations, while the “real” ones are subject to its law and are imperfect, being therefore somehow less real.

It seems to me a student of the human condition, far from assuming that it be an axiom that suffering be eliminated, would take suffering as a postulate, and reason therefrom: what does it mean that human beings must suffer? should be the question he asks.

@Brett I tend to agree with Mr. Carlos, that suffering and tragedy are simply part of life, and that having to endure them can be beneficial; but it seems liberal democracy has no taste for this, as there are always public awareness campaigns being waged in them against one or another of the societal ills that exist and will always exist despite our most strenuous efforts to eliminate them, for example, “the war against poverty”, or against homelessness, or hunger or racism, the call for world peace, etc, etc, each of which hopes to put an absolute end to the evil it strives against, rather than simply diminish it.

In one of his letters to Lucilius, a friend who aspired to philosophy, Seneca exhorts him to neglect all his affairs for her sake, to which he responded that he first needed to put his affairs in order so that he not end up a pauper; to which the philosopher replied, “and how do you know that poverty is not more beneficial to the philosopher than wealth?” and he goes on to list several such benefits.

Consider Socrates: everyone knows he had well-placed powerful young aristocratic friends whom he might have enlisted to usher him secretly into exile, but he chose to die at the hands of Athens’ court instead. Why? Because he was old; because adherence to the laws of his political community were part of his moral (not intellectual) teaching, but, most importantly, because it might just prove beneficial to philosophy herself for her to have a champion martyr in her legacy...which hope, thanks to the writings and remembrances of men like Plato and Xenophon, held true for many hundreds of years after his “timely” death.

It appears to me that a necessary quality of the truth you seek, Brett, is that it be beneficial to the future of mankind, but that may be rather the essential question: is truth beneficial to mankind? It is undeniably beneficial to the philosopher, who, more than anything else, wishes to understand how the world works, and is sometimes willing to endure hardship or even death to achieve it; but some of the healthiest and happiest communities have prospered by believing in the most outrageous myths.

@Brett Your two questions, is there a higher power and is there an objective morality: are they inexplicably linked? In other words, is the existence of a higher power necessary for there to be objective morality, or is it possible for such morality to exist without there being a higher power to insure its existence? On the other hand, do you believe it possible for there to exist a higher power that, however, cannot insure that morality be objective?

Seneca, somewhere as I remember, implied that god was limited in his creation by the imperfect nature of the material with which he worked.

@frank yes, mr. frank, I’m inclined to agree with you.

I actually felt bad about calling Merky subhuman, so much so that, milling it over this morning, I forgot to put a slice of tomato on my egg sandwich, which I always do...

If I had it to say over again, I would call him rather “insufferably vulgar”, and I think his preceptor, who wished for a rejuvenation of civilization like a phoenix from beneath the debris of the Enlightenment would have considered him to be as repulsive as I do...

...but we are justly prohibited from upbraiding others’ children.

@tim wood Being well-off physically is not necessarily being so in a broader or more grand sense. It is said that Lincoln, when he wished, as a boy, to educate himself, read Euclid, the Bible and Shakespeare...by dim firelight, sitting on the hearth, unellumined by incandescent or fluorescent light...

I say this not to give fodder to those with whom you currently spar in this debate, for one of them is irrational, the other sub-human. I only wish to broaden your notion of well-being, for your own benefit if indeed what I have to offer is of benefit.

@jgill I investigated Mr. Gabriel on-line, and I find that his abstruse investigations into the nature of ontology, etc, scarcely qualify him to comment on dictatorship (would he argue that it exists or is part of the world?) or health apps or technical or (especially) moral progress; it seems to me he is in the position Sakharov was many years earlier, who, though only a nuclear scientist, promoted the humane reformation of the Soviet Union: his position on social issues was not derived from his science.

But I thank you for the lead, because it directed me to YouTube philosophical forums where a panel of decorated and published members of current academia debated things like whether the soul exists, the difference between it and the self or consciousness, all of which gave me, who is so unacquainted with the goings-on of current academic philosophy, an idea of their concerns.

One thing that struck me is how finely they seek to split hairs: one is reminded of the famous debate among medieval Christian philosophers about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I suppose the oldest follies are repeated down through the ages...in theory and in practice.

@jgill I disagree with you Gilly. I think the “ability to reason and write well about past generations of philosophers” is most needed in our day when we have forgotten the original examples of the tension between the thinker and society, and the accommodations that were made down through the centuries in an attempt to reconcile them.

For example, whence the term “social psychology”? Modern psychology had its origins in Freud, who was influenced in his idea of the Id by Nietzsche, who in turn was influenced by Rousseau and his break with the Enlightenment philosophers. Whence “creativity”, “charisma”, “life-style”, “values” (as opposed to morals), etc? All these terms are translations from Nietzsche or Weber, from that powerful efflorescence of German philosophy not 200 years old. If we remain ignorant of the origins of the very words we use to describe our world, and which shape our understanding of it, then we become pawns to the merely current, the ephemeral, what passes for wisdom but only in the forum of public opinion.