Those college boys took one course in philosophy (maybe). I don't think we were talking about them. How will people with passion know what to read, and how understand it with no background? They may spend their time reading Kahil Gibran and think that is philosophy. Or worse, read Nietzsche and think that is philosophy. As Talleyrand advised to his aides, "Above all, no zeal". Zeal gets into the way of thought.

No man holding a strong belief on one side of a question, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate it with such fairness and completeness as if he were really in doubt and unbiassed; so that the existence of a belief not founded on fair inquiry unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty.

Zeal does indeed get in the way of thought.

Those college boys took one course in philosophy (maybe). I don't think we were talking about them. How will people with passion know what to read, and how understand it with no background? They may spend their time reading Kahil Gibran and think that is philosophy. Or worse, read Nietzsche and think that is philosophy. As Talleyrand advised to his aides, "Above all, no zeal". Zeal gets into the way of thought.

I disagree. I think this separates the inseparable. Thought and feeling may be abstracted and considered separately, but the living human being is a unity of such. All the greats had a love for knowledge that drove them on. Yes, passion and bias are connect. Of course. But to regard all passion as bias is itself quite a bias, I think. Perhaps by "zeal" you are aiming at the negative side of the issue, but for me zeal is a value-neutral word.

In my experience, those who know have always been those who care. It's the bored who are the boring.

No one should waste love on knowledge, or on aanything else that will not love them back... Philosophers are the worlds biggest losers since they lose the satisfaction of loving relationships to have the frustrations of an endless quest for knowledge.... You only need enough knowledge to survive, but no happiness is possible without love...

Didn't Napoleon describe Tallyrand as shet in stockings??? Children should not learn philosophy... Without knowledge they cannot verify in the least the ideas philosophy will present them with...

Would a self taught philosopher ever be so wise to be watchful of his own bias, and his own ideals, in his questioning, or answering?

I would think so, but maybe that is only because of the internet, and that I can tap into other minds besides my own.

I get the impression that most of us who read philosophy on our own have a few select questions that we're interested in. To go for a formal education you'd have to be more into the subject as a whole I think. And I definitely think it would make you a better philosopher. I don't know if it would do better at answering those few select questions than self study would though.

Really, no one is "self-taught." We depend on the words of dead men, preserved in books. Can a good teacher speed comprehension? Certainly. But there is something also to be gained from a solitary wrestling. Newton co-invented the calculus. He was "self-taught" by a few books during the plague years, when Cambridge was closed. And this is Newton, a figure as important, if not more important, than Einstein.

I get the impression that most of us who read philosophy on our own have a few select questions that we're interested in. To go for a formal education you'd have to be more into the subject as a whole I think. And I definitely think it would make you a better philosopher. I don't know if it would do better at answering those few select questions than self study would though.

Didn't Napoleon describe Tallyrand as shet in stockings??? .

Recon, great thread my friend. Keep reading. You do it so well. Should it be study? No, What we need to know will come easily as reading does to you. Many cannot comprehend all they read because they are forced to read it. There is a big difference my friend and what you express from what you read, you do well. That means you read like I and most never could and I personally would like to thank you for that. You interpret well what you read.

Many who read can't remember what they read simply because it was unfamiliar to them and they had to CRAM it in. No one likes "cramped conditions" and when they effort to rid their minds, which they will do unconsciously, what they offer is too nonsensical/confusing/esoteric for any one to understand. So much of what they do say falls on deaf ears. Those whose minds are also so cramped will hear and indulge in a conversation among themselves in defense of each other. What the hell good does that do anyone, especially a student whom many are paid to teach?

If you will think about it what is a professor? A person who says the same thing over and over and over again. It impossible, or virtually so, for him to rid his mind of that and he has credentials for that too. If one is teaching philosophy it is by rote only. If he thinks philosophically is another matter. For one to philosophize is to naturally ask questions. How many have been successful at questioning what a professor thinks? Ha! I contacted Norman Swartz in an e-mail once rather anonymously and expressed my views on a particular subject. He did return my email rather curtly. Because I not of "his" peer group and failed to introduce my self or my "credentials" he demanded I not contact him again. Ha!

Pyrrho mentioned costs for others to read what they want. Perhaps that is the problem. COSTS? I am just being polite her; I know it is exactly that. It's a shame so many have to pay a price in order to learn that they don't need or want to know. Especially coming from one no one can understand. That forces a student to cram too. Hello academia as it is. Damn!

Perhaps that's what obligation is, huh? We feel obligated in that we have spent so much that we make ourselves learn to validate those costs unduly imposed. Unduly imposed, you might say? Anyone who knows me here, knows how I feel about that. For anyone to impose a cost on another to live on this planet is wrong. No one has the deed and it was never ours to begin with. To go into all that again is just becoming too redundant and I am tired of reiterating it. My only hope is that others will catch on too as to just how catastrophic that is. From a small harming word to the annihilation of many human beings.

Regarding principal and interest and principle and interest, I find it amazing how words that are so similar can be so different. If our principles were intact the interest we have in others would make some kind of sense. Unfortunately those who occupy them selves with principal and interest do exactly the opposite and could care less of others as they are interested in themselves and how they along can prosper at the "expense" of others making cents themselves, ha! Exceptions understood.

William

Wouldn't it depend on the questions? If the question were whether to get a divorce, probably not. But, since philosophy, properly understood, is critical thinking as applied to philosophical questions, it might even there, since formal philosophical study bolsters the ability to think critically. But self-study can be a powerful aid, if you know what to study, and if you understand what it is you are studying. Studying The Prophet by Kahil Gibran will make you only more confused than you already are, for instance, and the same would go for studying Hegel (as we already know from example on this forum). But it would be a good thing to read the Socratic dialogues of Plato, and read The Web of Belief by Quine and Ullian.

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But what would Talleyrand's reputation with Napoleon have to do with what Talleyrand said? I was not citing Talleyrand as an authority. I used what he said to express my point about the place of zeal in an interesting way. Talleyrand's reputation with Napoleon, or even his reputation, has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of what he said. I am not arguing that zeal interferes with thought because Talleyrand said it does. You see what I mean by critical thinking? How important it is? And how zeal interfered with your thought? (By the way, the name is spelled, "Talleyrand").

Education is a social experience, and the social person should be the result, but the price, and the consequential debt breeds people who are anti social and immoral...

The great advantage to a formal education is the speed, that what has taken me a lifetime of over fifty years to acquire but poorly one may learn well in a matter of a few years....

The great disadvantage of a formal education is the form, that one comes to support the system that produces that one, and supports that one, and begins to look at all others as amateurs, which they are...

Having the same pieces, but without the destructions, the amateurs may have the advantage since the object is not haste, nor to endlessly recreate the forms that have failed us; but is to find a new way of seeing through new paradigms to a new world within the old...Old forms eat their children, and exhaust their energy in the support of the old form... If philosophy will be alive, and dynamic it must be shared in the marketplace of ideas...Formal philosophy is dead philosophy...

[...] I also agree that a social person should indeed be the result, and this is something it took me time to learn, as philosophy was once for me akin to a radical self-liberation...a sort of caustic to use on superstition. Of course the danger is the taking of this caustic as an idol...

Can you say more about what taking the caustic as an idol results in, looks like? Thanks.

Sure. A person gets to like Doubt so much that he forgets to doubt Doubt. A person can romanticize themselves as beyond illusions until this itself becomes the most ironic illusion imaginable.

"I don't fall for anything, except for this crazy idea that I don't fall for anything."

"I doubt everything, except for notion that I doubt everything."

"All is vanity! The world is meaningless....except for the thrill I get as the hero who endures such meaningless valiantly. "

I don't think there's an escape from the hero-myth or the "spiritual" instinct. Even the suicide is making a value of death.

I speak from my own angsty youth, and all the twisted self-consciousness I wrestled with. To drop God, and to open one's mind to the possibility that we are just noisy sh*t-tossing, dying apes..this seemed like more of an accomplishment at the time. (One gets used to mortality without afterlife, and realizes how common it is to live w/ such a notion comfortably. But the young are full of unrealized desire. We all hate dead babies. Let the plant grow before it rots. And the young are their own concerned mothers? Mothers of their own potential? Sensed but not expressed?)

As status seeking animals, we are motivated to negate whatever makes claims on us. A young man doesn't want to believe in his mental inferiority to older more developed men, or I didn't. Easier to pretend that the truth is simple. That the truth is that there is no truth. That all so-called truth is old man's vanity. Or flaky mumbo-jumbo. And much of it is, perhaps, but certainly (for me) not all of it. (I'm between young and old?) Therefore the allure of reductive philosophies, that present it all as vanity, as confusion, as mysticism. We can pretend all the smiling older people are either shallow or lying to themselves. This puts us on the cross for the crime (read heroic virtue) of being nobody's fool, except we are our own fools. But maybe this sort of angst and negation is necessary? Lucifer means light-bringer. It's hard for me to click with those without a certain instinctual self-regard/confidence. And yet the young man of this type is always an a-hole. Nietzsche, despite or because of his faults ("errors are the portals of discovery") was a genius on this issue. He questions the will to Truth. Truth is another religion, another God to suffer for. Better perhaps, for awhile, to cross out Truth and write in Self. And perhaps from here the Self can expand to include the rest. I ramble. Forgive.