I get most of mine from fortune cookies, its also a great source for lottery numbers.

Fido, we can all dream can't we, and act to fulfill that dream?

Self actualizers find wisdom easily. It may not be worded wisdom, but who cares. The poet writes poetry, the painter paints, the sensualist travels, the writer writes, the dancer dances.

What does the self actualizer in philosophers do? Philosophize?! Surely there is something greater which is more timeless. When finally philosophy is met with challengers with a different empirical method, having a causal basis required to be understood to emerge knowledges and, indirectly, wisdoms, suddenly there's this retreat to bioethics, psychology, and politics. Or there is this (too) critical evaluation of the linguistics and the history of philosophy. It becomes so formalized, and to euphemistically put it, 'redundant'. All the themes of life and living, is there not enough private truth in an individual to emerge a new stanza for philosophy?

Or is it that philosophy had a feeling to it that could only emerge through the absence of too much empirical data. And in society today such information is required in order to be original?

I don't know as I even agree with what I just said.

I wonder what wisdom is in the first place, and if we're actually talking about the same thing when we use the word?

I dropped out of grad school in Philosophy (starting anew next Spring at a Korean univ.) for a coulple of reasons, but one of them was that I wasn't learning what I considered to be wisdom. I was learning fine details about what philosophers have said, and subsequent responses to them, but nothing that I found applicable to 'real' life.

Wisdom is for me deep insight into the way things are, with an eye to understanding how best to live. Instead, what I found in grad school was a contest, of sorts, of finding the most obscure vocabulary to present one's ideas in the most impenetrable way. IOW, buttloads of academic, intellectual and linguistic one-upsmanship, but not much of anything that showed any insight or depth wrt how to best understand and deal with this world of experience. Not much that lead to peace of mind, either, for that matter.

As a result, I've turned to Eastern Philosophy, as the core of much of it seems to match my own motivations for pursuing philosophy in the first place. Yes, they have their journals (in a publish-or-perish environment, they're inevitable) and whatnot, but there does seem to be a general understanding that all of this is supposed to give you deep insight and tranquility in the end.

Sorry if that doesn't address the OP...

What one finds in philosophy journals today is generally understandable as a working-through of positions in view of the fast-changing modern and very complex world. For example, the recent discoveries in the area of genomes may have major significance to philosophy, and what we see are attempts (perhaps premature) to grasp and to understand the recent (tentative) scientific data as it relates to the important questions of philosophy.
One also finds articles, often following the "philosophically correct" paradigm for writing, that seem caused by the economic and professional necessity for academic philosophers to publish. The telling phrase "philosophical workers" used by Nietzsche seems an apt description of these writers.

It may be that philosophy today is in a similar position seen during the Scholastic Period, which was a refinement in tools of thought (logic and definitions) and an elaboration of what had become the dominant world view (religious dogma) while the world was undergoing tremendous change in an axial period in history.This refinement and elaboration was a precondition of later philosophical perspectives.

Insofar as philosophy reacts to changes in the world and attempts to integrate them into a more or less total view (or views), when these changes occur rapidly and over so many horizons, they become unclear (e.g. the phenomenon of the world-wide-web, the apparatus of computers, and the colonization by both in ever-new areas) in their direction and effects, and it takes perhaps generations to fully understand them as they emerge from confusion and chaos.

Eastern philosophy has done nothing for the East...

Consider the theory of forms... Most of it is hogwash, and metaphysical hogwash...

FBM;103605 wrote:

Hi, and thanks for replying.



Could you expain this, please?

Other that making it psychologicallyy easier for people to accept misery, what has been the gain of Eastern Philosophy???...Even Ho Chi Minh recognized that he was working with a western philosophy, Marxism while the U.S. was guided by more spiritiual concerns, like liberty, and relgion...

Quote:

The Platonic Theory of Forms? I was speaking of Oriental (Asian) philosophy. If there's an Asian version of the Theory of Forms, please link me to a source, as I haven't run across it yet, and I'm sure I'll need to know about it eventually. Thanks![/[/QUOTE]QUOTE]
Whether one is talking about the thing: Wisdom, or all of the vocabulary people bring to bear upon it one is talking about forms... Can you show an independent existence for forms???For Wisdom??? Up until the writing of the Declaration of Independence, and even up to the present moment there is found the notion of a first cause, or a prime mover... We are equal because we were created so...Social Equality is a moral form... Moral forms do not exist because God exists, or because God made them, but because we need them, and find we cannot live without them...If God created forms using a perfect template from which all imperfect examples are created, then we must only find the perfect to correct the real... That was the beginning, with Plato, of our gummed up vocabulary of philosophy which results in much gummed up thinking... Cut the Gordian Knot... If you reject the metaphysical you have philosophy for the masses that has the same advantage of physics in western philosophy, of finding what is true, in order to improve what is useful...Truth too is a moral form; not created by God, but arrived at by mankind from many examples, none of which are perfect, from which is derived a perfect mental form, a form perfect only in the mind...To think of any object we must first strip it of its reality... It does us no good to encumber it with a lot of unreality, or jargon to confuse the uninitiated... Such philosophers as you mention are only talking to them selves...

Sure; a dictionary knows everything and does nothing, and a wiseman knows less and does less according to his knowledge...Wisdom is found in inverse proportion to activity, and the more people know the less they do...

Suppose that philosophers never become simply wise. But suppose that in the quest toward wisdom (philosophy as love of wisdom) they do indeed pick up some wisdom along the way - in other words, they become partly wise. The question seems to be whether this would serve to lessen their philosophic drive, philosophic activity, or whether it would serve to spur them on ever more. I throw my lot in with latter.

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Nick Pappas, pappasnick.typepad.com

BrightNoon:

I strongly agree. My favorite philosophers are the sort that Rorty calls world disclosers. They conceptual-interpretative poets. If man lives in language (and I think he does), every potent new metaphor is an extension of his world.

I say we can leave refutations to the uncreative. Philosophy should be a thrill, the view from a mountaintop -- the view (simultaneously) from seven (or seven times seven) mountain-tops.