EPTPhilosophy and Why I Think It Matters - Page 5
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zulu_nation8
China26351 Posts
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Sapphire.lux
Romania2620 Posts
On July 30 2014 05:02 zulu_nation8 wrote: well i think it's fair to say that the limits of empirical sciences are far narrower than the limits of philosophy. This is what every philosophy blog on TL turns into btw even if it starts off on a completely unrelated topic, that is into SCIENCE vs. PHILOSOPHY. Of course, and that's because making science is a lot harder then coming up with unverifiable ideas. + Show Spoiler + i hope my english didn't fail me again here. By limits i didn't mean as in "it can't go any further" but rather:"this is where we are now" | ||
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corumjhaelen
France6884 Posts
On July 30 2014 04:53 Sapphire.lux wrote: On the subject of "mind" i'd recommend Sam Harris, a philosopher that tackles subjects such as free will and death and many others. A PhD in cognitive neuroscience. Yeah I think him and Dawkins and co are among the most idiotic people who ever graced the world of their opinion. He doesn't tackle it, he mubo jumboes some stuff and tries to pass it as an explanation. And I'm an atheist. Edit : Dawkins is as far as i know okay as an evolutionnary biologist obviously. | ||
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Sox03
Germany55 Posts
I can always take people to the lab and show them what actually happens and that its a thing and i can show them the mathematical models that accurately predict what is happening. If you dont accept that thats ignorance. It seems to me that there is no such thing in most parts of philosophy because you can simply disagree without being wrong when you just disagree on a certain point where you "reason up" from. Then i hate it when philosophers use intuition because in my opinion everything that seems logical to us or reasonable just has no meaning at all because nature is not intuitive at all and human minds can barely grasp it. Now you may say math is such a thing and math is philosophy. Okay fair enough as a physics student i say yes then philosophy is probably the most useful thing there is but not every mathematical concept is "reasonable" and with reasonable i mean it is just nonsense when applied to the real world. But even if you have a mathematical theory that doesnt make it true in the sense of a physicist because if it disagrees with experiment it is just wrong. Everything that disagrees with the real world is just wrong. You cant argue with that and i think thats why scientists "dont like" philosophers because philosophy is seen as a subject where you can just argue about the theories without being wrong and there seems to be no ultimate conclusion you have to agree with. Keep in mind i am very biased and i didnt sleep for a while and just today i finished my exams for this semester so please forgive me (and tell me) if i said stuff that is just nonsense. Also i do not claim by any means to be an expert in philosophy i'm just a regular layman. Also i always keep thinking WWRFS: + Show Spoiler + What Would Richard Feynman Say: Sorry i can't help it ;D (not directly relevant to the discussion but still interesting) and a funny comment on philosophers: These videos obviously dont fully represent feynmans view on that because im cherry picking but whatever ;D Also there is this great video where Feynman mentions the guy doing experiments with mice it is really interesting but i couldnt find it TT Anyways have a nice day ;D | ||
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son1dow
Lithuania322 Posts
On July 30 2014 03:33 Jerubaal wrote: This is an astute point, but you also need to distinguish (something I didn't do very well) between the philosophy that makes sense of the universe versus the philosophy that occurs inside of our heads and cultures. If you limit it to the second case, that we simply need to be rigorous and aware of our influences and choices, then philosophy is descriptive and predictive of human activity, but doesn't give us any real knowledge. You could still claim that immanent sources inform these assessments. I'll try to be brief and argue a minimum to prove philosophy does provide knowledge, and when it doesn't it's still useful and important. Even in the case where it doesn't prove what actually is, it proves what isn't, quoting Russel: “Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possiblities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what the may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familar things in an unfamilar aspect” As for what isn't, if you're looking for making sense of the universe, metaphysics is perhaps more important than physics. If you mean scientific facts about the universe, then what philosophy says about the mind, for example, can be as relevant or irrelevant as medicine or psychology. If you mean real knowledge, then you should know that real knowledge includes more than scientifice - while philosophy doesn't have scientific falsifiability, as anything that comes up with it branches off as a new science (has happenned quite recently, too), mathematics, game theory, linguistics are real knowledge don't too, and in a more limited sense than philosophy, as it is much broader. | ||
2Pacalypse-
Croatia9498 Posts
On July 30 2014 05:28 corumjhaelen wrote: Yeah I think him and Dawkins and co are among the most idiotic people who ever graced the world of their opinion. He doesn't tackle it, he mubo jumboes some stuff and tries to pass it as an explanation. And I'm an atheist. Edit : Dawkins is as far as i know okay as an evolutionnary biologist obviously. Corum, you make me very sad  Calling Dawkins, who was voted the world's best thinker last year, an idiotic person seems very wrong. I'm especially saddened, or perhaps even angered, that you would dismiss Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins as speaking some mumbo jumbo, while in fact they go to great lengths to speak with extreme clarity which their impressive vocabulary and eloquence allows; and also, they spoke on numerous occasions on how they hate obscurantism and "word salads" that some people, like Deepak Chopra, like to do. Sam Harris in particular is known of presenting complicating ideas in a way that are easy to follow and comprehend. So I really don't understand how you formed such opinion on them. | ||
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zulu_nation8
China26351 Posts
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Prog
United Kingdom1470 Posts
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
On July 30 2014 08:15 2Pacalypse- wrote: I like the anecdote that Lawrence Krauss, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, says when asked about philosophy. He asks people from various fields to tell him what contribution did their field bring to the human knowledge in the last 500 years. And then the chemists say "oh, we did this and this and this...", biologists say "this and this etc.", physicists say "this and black holes and this etc." and the philosophers say "define what you mean by knowledge". Corum, you make me very sad Calling Dawkins, who was voted the world's best thinker last year, an idiotic person seems very wrong. I'm especially saddened, or perhaps even angered, that you would dismiss Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins as speaking some mumbo jumbo, while in fact they go to great lengths to speak with extreme clarity which their impressive vocabulary and eloquence allows; and also, they spoke on numerous occasions on how they hate obscurantism and "word salads" that some people, like Deepak Chopra, like to do. Sam Harris in particular is known of presenting complicating ideas in a way that are easy to follow and comprehend. So I really don't understand how you formed such opinion on them. Deepak Chopra is a charlatan. No one is bashing Sam Harris because they prefer Deepak. @ Jerubaal - my earlier posts were responding to sapphire's (in my view blatant) implicit scientism, not affirming anything about science themselves. I agree with the gist of most of your posts and was mostly just confused about what you thought I said. @ sapphire - Your total ignorance of not only philosophy, but most of the humanities is telling. As I said earlier, I don't think you really understand science. You are "scientifically literate" which amounts to understanding some useful facts that you can use to build things that work and you know some fables about how people "discovered" some scientific laws. It's hard to have a discussion about meaning and epistemology with someone who comes into this so close-mindedly that they are unwilling to investigate any philosophy, including the philosophy of science, and don't even have a background of actually doing science themselves. | ||
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son1dow
Lithuania322 Posts
Dawkins is great in his actual area of expertise, and he's also, in many cases, great in explaining in layman terms the roles in science in terms of how they relate to the roles of religions, and he's good at debating. For this, we can conclude he is a smart man. However, he, among other people who haven't studied philosophy extensively, hasn't exactly understood many of the ideas of philosophy of science and religion, or real philosophy at all, so many of his arguments fall flat in the area which he's so often debating in the public eye. It doesn't help that he's become an idol of probably millions of kids who don't realize this deficiency of his, or that he's not exactly a principle-of-charity-using polite-champion-of-discussions. Does that make him an idiot? No. Should we take pride in his role as the champion of atheists though? Probably not. | ||
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
On July 30 2014 09:30 son1dow wrote: I don't know much about Harris, but I'll assume he's in the same boat as Dawkins. Dawkins is great in his actual area of expertise, and he's also, in many cases, great in explaining in layman terms the roles in science in terms of how they relate to the roles of religions, and he's good at debating. For this, we can conclude he is a smart man. However, he, among other people who haven't studied philosophy extensively, hasn't exactly understood many of the ideas of philosophy of science and religion, or real philosophy at all, so many of his arguments fall flat in the area which he's so often debating in the public eye. It doesn't help that he's become an idol of probably millions of kids who don't realize this deficiency of his, or that he's not exactly a principle-of-charity-using polite-champion-of-discussions. Does that make him an idiot? No. Should we take pride in his role as the champion of atheists though? Probably not. I liked _The Selfish Gene_. His atheism books are less intelligent, and I think that's where most people are directing their criticism. | ||
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Jerubaal
United States7684 Posts
@son1dow- Hmm, I'm not quite sure you need philosophy to develop an expansive and critical worldview. Moreover, I'm not sure being an iconoclast follows being a philosopher. @IgnE, I think I was just elaborating when I thought I was touching on something connected to your posts. I don't really remember. :p I'm thinking about writing a blog about modernity. Might either be great or horrible. | ||
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koreasilver
9109 Posts
And on the point of "obscurantism", I think it's a valid concern but the way a lot of people fling that word around is basically as a self-justification for talking shit about people who they just can't understand because of their general ignorance. It's perfectly fine for anyone to be ignorant about something. I'm never going to be able to understand high level math or academic composition but that's fine. It's not my field, and I can't hardly expect to know everything. It's hard to even be relevant in one's own field. I can't possibly think that it would be a valid for me to complain about the incomprehensibility of a journal article on biochemistry, that it's all filled with jargon and therefore these scientists are being "obscurantists" simply because I can't understand it. But today we have popular "public intellectuals" like Dawkins, for example, calling certain thinkers "obscurantist" almost purely because he doesn't have the prerequisite contextual education required to understand them. The fact that people say things like Dawkins so much in relation to a field like philosophy but never raises the same rhetoric to the natural sciences is just astounding to me. Have they even tried to read an academic science journal before? Probably not, since most of these scientism touting New Atheist types aren't science graduate students anyway. On July 30 2014 05:02 zulu_nation8 wrote: well i think it's fair to say that the limits of empirical sciences are far narrower than the limits of philosophy. This is what every philosophy blog on TL turns into btw even if it starts off on a completely unrelated topic, that is into SCIENCE vs. PHILOSOPHY. Still better than religion and economics blogs, imo. edit: holy fuck is this real life? On July 29 2014 17:58 Sapphire.lux wrote: I'd add that some form of philosophy is integral to the pursuit of knowledge. The problem is, you have to have extensive knowledge on the subject matter first. So in essence, the "new" philosophers are the top, top scientific minds that are operating at the limit of our understanding of reality. So philosophy is awesome, when done by Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Brian Greene, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Brian Cox, etc. is this for real? fuck me senseless I can't tell which is worse. the Muslim preachers on my university campus that seriously tried to tell me that evolution as understood by contemporary science was already laid out in the Quran, or this post. I'm going to bed. | ||
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son1dow
Lithuania322 Posts
On July 30 2014 10:33 Jerubaal wrote: @son1dow- Hmm, I'm not quite sure you need philosophy to develop an expansive and critical worldview. Moreover, I'm not sure being an iconoclast follows being a philosopher. Being a top public intellectual discussing atheism and religion he should have a understanding of some philosophical arguments about those subjects. Being extremely uncharitable towards arguments from the religious is just anti-intellectual, and he should be shamed for that. I'm not speaking of his works or discussions that aren't related to this. Koreasilver, yup, that quote is pretty impressive. | ||
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2Pacalypse-
Croatia9498 Posts
On July 30 2014 14:35 koreasilver wrote: is this for real? fuck me senseless I can't tell which is worse. the Muslim preachers on my university campus that seriously tried to tell me that evolution as understood by contemporary science was already laid out in the Quran, or this post. I'm going to bed. Say what you will about that quote, but the fact is that scientists don't need philosophy to do science; while philosophers absolutely rely on science to do philosophy. | ||
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son1dow
Lithuania322 Posts
On July 30 2014 18:38 2Pacalypse- wrote: Say what you will about that quote, but the fact is that scientists don't need philosophy to do science; while philosophers absolutely rely on science to do philosophy. That wouldn't be relevant to proving his quote was any less dumb, or that philosophy was not a worthy discipline, even if it was true. I was going to write up some arguments, but considering that you didn't really respond to much and just incited discussion, I have to ask first: Are you, by any chance, trolling? | ||
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subtlerevolution
France37 Posts
The notion of philosophy is a n essential thing in life.. as important as History (with a capital H) is. To forego any introspection (which derives from philosophical considerations) for instance, leads people to a rather dim place. | ||
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trias_e
United States520 Posts
On July 30 2014 18:38 2Pacalypse- wrote: Say what you will about that quote, but the fact is that scientists don't need philosophy to do science; while philosophers absolutely rely on science to do philosophy. I would say that almost the opposite is true. While the philosophy scientists by necessity have to use may be unexamined or held tacitly, it most certainly exists as the foundation for science itself. Whereas quite a bit of philosophy does not rely whatsoever on science, in particular the continental tradition and phenomenology. | ||
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Prog
United Kingdom1470 Posts
On July 30 2014 20:56 trias_e wrote: I would say that almost the opposite is true. While the philosophy scientists by necessity have to use may be unexamined or held tacitly, it most certainly exists as the foundation for science itself. Whereas quite a bit of philosophy does not rely whatsoever on science, in particular the continental tradition and phenomenology. That is not quite true. In fact the primary phenomenologist Husserl was very close to mathematics and the natural sciences. The idea of perviecing an object in its invariance has a background in thoughts about mathematical objects that were present in Göttingen (where Husserl and, for example, also David Hilbert were). Take another example: Some of the main ideas in Kant's critique of pure reason are related to scientific ideas. It's not an accident that he is attributed with a copernican revolution. Pretty much on the first pages of his preface he even refers to ideas of Copernicus. | ||
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MoonfireSpam
United Kingdom1153 Posts
I'm not really sure exactly how much philosophy goes into stuff like evidenced based medicine (feels like most stats) or medical ethics (also feels like stats + clinical experience), although can get how the ideas behind them are founded in philosophy I do wonder how much it's philosophy and how much was arbitary. That said it's really hard to shake the idea of a lot of this stuff being "intellectual"(i.e. loads of waffle, no useful ideas, no impact of life, over complication of simple notions, pretentious crap) partly since thats what they (those philosphy students) thought about some of their course, and that's sortof what the definition of it in the OP lends itself towards. Kinda mirrors art in that way. | ||
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