EPTPhilosophy and Why I Think It Matters - Page 8
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koreasilver
9109 Posts
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
![[image loading]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-NYJpIt1jqfI/TYlX_YroFPI/AAAAAAAAAKY/sMyWYFXTLhM/foucault+order+of+things+1.jpg) Foucault talks about a shift in the episteme beginning in the 17th century, what he deems the "Classical" age. In the Classical period, signs assume critical importance, as the means of knowing and the keys to knowledge. This is contrasted to the period preceding it, the Renaissance, in the 15th and 16th centuries, where modern science is typically said to have been born. Foucault says: [t]he empirical domain which sixteenth-century man saw as a complex of kinships, resemblances, and affinities, and in which language and things were endlessly interwoven - this whole vast field was to take on a new configuration. This new configuration may, I suppose, be called 'rationalism.' While the sixteenth-century episteme focused on what Foucault calls resemblances, wherein mental activity and thought consists in drawing things together, this changes during the Classical period. Rather than attempting to find some sort of kinship, attraction, or secretly shared nature between things, man in the Classical period discriminates between things, establishing identities and differences. This regime of identities and differences undergirds what he refers to as 'rationalism' above, and orders every field of knowledge, from grammar, to natural history, to political economy. So for example, Foucault points out that "life" or "production" as concepts that we understand today within our own episteme do not exist in the Classical period. Natural history and political economy, ancestors to biology and economics as we understand them now, were ordered by different parameters for knowledge formation and understanding. Natural history had no conception of "life." All that existed were living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history. People like Hume would never have been possible in the Renaissance era, and people like Dawkins would never have been possible in the Classical period. But more importantly, it is not science steadily chugging along that changes the episteme, because science is merely one category of knowledge in a constellation that fits into a larger ordering of thought and consciousness. | ||
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zulu_nation8
China26351 Posts
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deathly rat
United Kingdom911 Posts
On July 29 2014 04:54 puppykiller wrote: The reason philosophers are annoying is they know they lack relevance. To counter this they try to worm there way into conversations by questioning any shadow of a presumption that an individual makes. Usually they do this to an extreme degree almost as if it is nothing more than an excuse to listen to their mouths make words. They latch onto other diciplines that actually produce value and like a parasite try their best to toy with the framework and find some lack of conistency or contradiction in a process when framework isn't even relevant. Their dicipline sits from a standpoint where it grants itself the privilige to judge everything on nothing other than an assumption that practioners of philosphy are intrinsicly wiser than practioners of other subjects because they have read more philosophy or because they have surrendered to a soccratic approach at reasoning or because they are compensating for the fact that they are nothing more than an art critic assigning narrative and value to practitioners as he or she sees fit. There is absolutly nothing wrong with the socratic method or questioning the underlying framework of a pursuit or situation. Just recognize your role as secondary to the pursuit and situation as you depend on it and it does not depend on you unless you can some how convince it to. Also please become aware of how limited the abillity for a human to generate rational thoughts is and how small a part of the world it is relative to how significant it sees itself. Fantastical, eloquent and funny post. I'm not one who says philosophers have no role. I think there should be absolutely no battle between science and philosophy. Science is a way of finding out the nature of the world. How things work in reality. Philosophy should be a way of interpreting this knowledge into what it means for us. How we can or should use new technologies, and speculating about what the future might hold (speculative science). In ancient times philosophy was the way people believed you could derive truths about the nature of reality. For the same reason it doesn't matter how well I know the Bible, or how many ancient Islamic documents I have read, it doesn't matter how much ancient philosophy I may or may not have read. It is clearly not the way to discover the way the world works. If you think it is, then I suggest you are treating philosophy itself as a religion. | ||
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zulu_nation8
China26351 Posts
On July 31 2014 15:34 deathly rat wrote: Philosophy should be a way of interpreting this knowledge into what it means for us. That's still science. On July 31 2014 15:34 deathly rat wrote: How we can or should use new technologies, engineering i think On July 31 2014 15:34 deathly rat wrote: and speculating about what the future might hold (speculative science). social science or even futurology On July 31 2014 15:34 deathly rat wrote: In ancient times philosophy was the way people believed you could derive truths about the nature of reality. For the same reason it doesn't matter how well I know the Bible, or how many ancient Islamic documents I have read, it doesn't matter how much ancient philosophy I may or may not have read. It is clearly not the way to discover the way the world works. If you think it is, then I suggest you are treating philosophy itself as a religion. So do you thinking reading history is useless and tells us nothing about how the world works because it doesn't rely on empirical experiments | ||
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deathly rat
United Kingdom911 Posts
On July 31 2014 17:03 zulu_nation8 wrote: So do you thinking reading history is useless and tells us nothing about how the world works because it doesn't rely on empirical experiments Do you think if I became expert in the history of alchemy that I would be any more knowledgeable about how to turn lead into gold? | ||
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zulu_nation8
China26351 Posts
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
On July 31 2014 17:15 deathly rat wrote: Do you think if I became expert in the history of alchemy that I would be any more knowledgeable about how to turn lead into gold? You know they have a term for the discipline where people spend their time reading and interpreting ancient books in their original languages. Classics. Have you heard of it? It's not really the same thing as philosophy. | ||
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deathly rat
United Kingdom911 Posts
On July 31 2014 17:26 IgnE wrote: You know they have a term for the discipline where people spend their time reading and interpreting ancient books in their original languages. Classics. Have you heard of it? It's not really the same thing as philosophy. Do they have a term for describing conceptually difficult ideas using other comparable examples? | ||
2Pacalypse-
Croatia9543 Posts
On July 31 2014 15:34 deathly rat wrote: Philosophy should be a way of interpreting this knowledge into what it means for us. Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/220/ | ||
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
On July 31 2014 15:34 deathly rat wrote: In ancient times philosophy was the way people believed you could derive truths about the nature of reality. For the same reason it doesn't matter how well I know the Bible, or how many ancient Islamic documents I have read, it doesn't matter how much ancient philosophy I may or may not have read. It is clearly not the way to discover the way the world works. If you think it is, then I suggest you are treating philosophy itself as a religion. Here you seem to be equating philosophy with reading the Bible, the Koran, or "ancient philosophy," while tilting at the strawman you've set up wherein someone is supposed to have said something like, "no no, science is bullshit, if you really want to know how the world works, you should only do philosophy (which has, coincidentally, been defined to reside in ancient holy texts)." I know you are trying to back peddle a bit on what you said, but that's not a "comparable concept" and I don't think the facile point you are attempting to make is very complicated anyway. | ||
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deathly rat
United Kingdom911 Posts
Yes, most philosophy that people quote does reside in ancient texts. Ideas which have long past their sell-by date. Said people then claim you can't be part of the discussion because you're not expert on these things. My comparison is to show that you don't have to be expert in nonsense to know that it is such. Modern philosophy has to accept that discovering things about how the world works is done empirically. Once this concept is accepted then there is nothing to talk about. Everyone will accept that both Science and Philosophy have their place in the world. | ||
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zulu_nation8
China26351 Posts
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son1dow
Lithuania322 Posts
 It's sad that this is the standard state of affairs nowadays, and I'm saying this as a person who probably knows more about science, from inside or outside, than 90% of people I know.2Pacalypse, that quote koreasilver quoted was dumb because he had no clue what philosophy is, and it showed in it. The fact, even if it was true, that science didn't need philosophy would have no relevance to it, it's just false period. It's ignorant to say it wasn't that dumb despite not having any idea what philosophy is. Firstly, philosophy is extremely broad. It could as well have nothing to do with science and be of incredible use to us. Philosophy of language, mind, logic, ethics, or value theory in general, political philosophy, epistemology or anything else are valuable far beyond science. It also deals with things below science (philosophy of science), it spawned the idea of modern science with falsifiability maybe three hundred years ago and continues to create new sciences, some quite recently. It helps scientists to do their work (I think neuroscientists work with philosophers of language to interpret what happens in the brain correctly). To think that philosophy has stopped it's influence on sciences, especially social sciences, is a joke considering how recently some of them have been spawned out of philosophy, or how connected they are with areas that will forever remain the domain of philosophy (ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language and mind, value theory). You just wouldn't do anything without an amateur understanding of these, and in many cases you'd do better with a better understanding of these, obviously. The idea that ethics is useless is just a product of refusing to think of it, period. It's perpetrated by the silly excuse that we haven't come up with perfect answers, but that's based on ignorance on what it has created. Having groups of carefully crafted and thoroughly cleaned ideas is of absurd value to our society. Any position you think yourself clever and more rational than your peers to hold is probably originating, at least in print and in good form, from a philosopher. The reason you hold it and society benefits it is because of the philosopher. Western liberalism so popular among netizens around here wasn't there 150 years ago, and it was met with opposition. You could say that it's all subjective, how there's no difference between caring for babies and eating them. Well, go ahead and do it then if that's your idea of morality. Chances are, you're never doing that, and once somebody does you'll be able to come up with logical reasons for why it's wrong. Any butchered reasoning the baby eater will have will be a worse than yours. Philosophers will do that better than you though. And they're advanced so that any ideas our descendants will hold 150 years from now will most likely have come from philosophy, only again it will be in butchered form. Any kind of argument between these will be an amateur philosophy hour, there's no way of escaping it but embracing it and becoming better at it... Via philosophy. Political science has transformed the world quite recently, too. The advances in society everybody now agrees were great are there because of philosophers were there to come up with them when everybody was like fuck yeah we have slaves and dominate the lower classes, or damnit my life sucks but I can't do anything about it. Any advancements in our societies will have to come from philosophers' ideas permeating the society. They have to be freed of philosophical jargon, of course, but the less butchered they are the more clearly everybody will get them, and the more chances we have of advancing with them, or improving upon them later. I don't see any way to argue this social, ethical and societal value of philosophy in any other way than what would be, methaphorically speaking, eating babies. Not that philosophers wouldn't perfect the eating babies ethos better than you would, any kind anti-ethics thing you can come up with is a thing in ethics, but if want to act within the society, in any case your brain will latch one to some semblence of philosophical ideas, and where you argue with your friends or foes will be where they either fall within a separate philosophical camp OR have worse of better philosophical grasp of the topic. The only way to get better at them is to study, once again, philosophy. Finally, knowledge. Any kind of idea that there's only knowledge from science is denied by the very functioning of you and your brain. Humans rely on vast amounts of non-scientific knowledge to decide anything they need to. Look up the progress of neural networks (equivalent of the structure of our brain) in comp. sci., they've accomplished things thought not possible before by gathering a bunch of indicators and deciding via enough-consensus based educated guesses. That is knowledge that would be absurd to think is scientific, allowing you to do anything you do, ever, in your life. Hell, history, classics or even literature are ways of acquiring knowledge, just to poke you there's-only-scientific-knowledge guys with no understanding of what knowledge actually is. The difference with philosophy from these arts is that while it's much harder to understand, because you have to understand the logical structure, it also is much more useful in any case where you have to communicate with other humans why your knowledge (or the closes thing you have to it in that area) is better than their fumblings towards it. Or to learn that their fumblings are actually better. PS. I should add this great interview that explains a lot of what I said about the value of philosophy a hundred times better than I ever will. http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=6854 Somewhat less important, here's just a brief list of what philsoophy has progressed in the last 50 years. I alone could add a lot, but we're just going for any proof it's valuable here, right.  http://www.quora.com/What-has-philosophy-contributed-to-society-in-the-past-50-years Finally, here's a quote I've already quoted before that quite well explains how a lot of philosophy works, especially in the more murky areas, to give us knowledge and value without giving very definite answers. Not understanding this idea specifically seems to me like one of the main reasons why Philosophy is misunderstood. Said by Bertrand 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” Have you ever met an ignorant person who has never considered your arguments, seemingly unable to even do it, but only went with biases learned through his life? Or a smart person who has seemingly considered all you have said and has good reasons for what he believes? It's merely a taste of what philosophy can give in rigorous academic form to such an absurd breadth of topics. | ||
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TheGloob
97 Posts
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bookwyrm
United States722 Posts
Don't be dense. There's no scientific method for interpreting something for human meaning. If you think there could be i'd love to see a proposal for an experiment. Come one. he said "should." engineering can't answer "should" questions. You know this. one of those isn't a science, the other isn't even real. On July 31 2014 20:33 son1dow wrote: 2Pacalypse, that quote koreasilver quoted was dumb because he had no clue what philosophy is, and it showed in it. koreasilver knows a thing or two about philosophy I can assure you On July 31 2014 18:39 deathly rat wrote: Modern philosophy has to accept that discovering things about how the world works is done empirically. Once this concept is accepted then there is nothing to talk about. Everyone will accept that both Science and Philosophy have their place in the world. your claim undermines itself. If there were nothing to talk about, there wouldn't be philosophy. So your claim is that "if philosophy would realize that it has no place in the world, then science and philosophy would have their place in the world." this is leaving aside your weird unstated assumption that modern philosophy is somehow naive to the idea of empirical investigation into reality, which is cute | ||
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son1dow
Lithuania322 Posts
On August 01 2014 01:46 bookwyrm wrote: koreasilver knows a thing or two about philosophy I can assure you I'm well aware, I was speaking of a quote that koreasilver quoted and basically mocked. Not of anything koreasilver wrote Thanks TheGloob, by the way. It's full of typos or 'accidentally a word's, messy, not very to the point, structured or full from a top-down view, but maybe I'll be able to write better next time. But if it shakes the idea of philosophy being worthless or extremely limited for a single person, I'll be happy. Which I think your OP and the discussion following must have done in higher numbers. | ||
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deathly rat
United Kingdom911 Posts
If I'm contemplating the relative merits of barely-legal vs milf, is that philosophy? How about the "mayonnaise philosophy" I have been considering, is it ok to eat with fried potato edibles? While science was born out of philosophy, it is now clearly defined as a separate discipline. Both make theories about the nature of the universe. One makes it on the basis of observations, the other on a house of cards style theory upon theory style system. Actually I like philosophy. It is indeed important to broaden horizons and take our reasoning to a higher level. It's just all the pompous self-satisfied rabid groupies of philosophy that have read half a dozen books, or have taken a course in university who have never themselves had an interesting thought in their lives, quoting this and that without being able to (and refusing to) have any kind of discussion in a coherent manner. | ||
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bookwyrm
United States722 Posts
On August 01 2014 09:44 deathly rat wrote: pompous self-satisfied rabid groupies of philosophy that have read half a dozen books how many have YOU read?  edit: But yes, sure, most people don't know what they're talking about, about anything. What you say about philosophy follows a fortiori | ||
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deathly rat
United Kingdom911 Posts
On August 01 2014 01:46 bookwyrm wrote: your claim undermines itself. If there were nothing to talk about, there wouldn't be philosophy. So your claim is that "if philosophy would realize that it has no place in the world, then science and philosophy would have their place in the world." By "there would be nothing to talk about" I mean that nobody would argue the relative importance of philosophy. Everyone would agree etc... | ||
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