How much of philosophy is merely Judeo-Christian heresy?

Get Email Updates Email this Topic Print this Page

Fido
 
Reply Thu 4 Dec, 2008 09:15 pm
@Whoever,
Whoever wrote:
Fido - It seems to me that you are not quite doing philosophy. If your view of knowledge is correct then Descartes was a fool for concluding that Cogito was even worth knowing let alone a secure axiom. You have to ask yourself who is likely to be right about this.

It is dangerous to make statements about knowledge, solipsism, Socrates and so forth in a philosophy forum, especially extremely idiosyncratic ones, and usually much safer to preface assertions with 'It seems to me...' or something similar if you think there is even the slightest chance that you might be wrong.

I don't know much about the sophists, but my dictionary tells me that it was Plato's aristocratic background that may have led him to dislike the sophists, partly because they were democtritising knowledge and political understanding.


My book says that after Socrates, most of the Sophists stuck to teaching Rhetoric, and many schools came out of Socrates... He must have been like Achilles having the Ants of Myrmos transformed into Mymidons. At what point do you guess he realized his students had exceeded his ability to teach???

Since I write a lot with increasingly arthritic fingers, which probably, actually helps my hands more than it hurts, why don't you just sort of mentally insert 'It seems to me' when you read what I write, and write out It seems to me when ever you write something I have to read; because absolute proof is lacking in either sense and we need only stand by our words and support them as we have learned... And I know I am strident; I wear size eleven redwings, and there is no pusyfoot to me..If you're wanting a dancing partner get a date. I have read a lot of philosophy, but, I have read a lot that would be considered as philosophy, branches of philosophy, while never written by a philosopher, or found in a philosophy section... Stuff like symbolism, ancient liturature and more modern, magic, and poetry have caught my eye, but I have spent a fair amount of my life on anthropology, sociology, economics, history, religion, and I find my conclusions about human behavior to be generally correct... You can qualify my thoughts as you wish, but I don't qualify them at all, except with this fact: there are a lot of philosphers I have not read much of, so I can't speak to the originality of my conclusions, but for me at least, they are original if not too numerous... For example: Marx called capital a relation, I would call it a form, and a form of relationship... I don't think some one like Socrates was bad because he could not see through his forms... Few people can... And something else... I am essentially uneducated, not a product of institutions or forms, so you can call me stupid, and no doubt I do some stupid things, but I don't think stupid thoughts because I can recall much of what I have read in my life if pressed, and it was worth remembering...
 
Aedes
 
Reply Fri 5 Dec, 2008 12:02 pm
@avatar6v7,
avatar6v7 wrote:
The enlightenment's peak is in the 18th century but it is in the 17th century that it begins. It is also then that the most major colonisations take place.
Don't give philosophy too much credit. The colonial era happened because technology allowed for better seafaring and navigation, and because it was economically lucrative. The seafaring and navigation were technological developments that, along with other scientific developments (esp from Newton), gave man a newfound sense of control over nature. Incidentally, medical science began to really explode at this same time.

The appearance of enlightenment philosophy owes itself to reflection on the new sciences, whose practical application affected everything (including colonization). In other words, enlightenment philosophy was a symptom of its era, not the cause.
 
avatar6v7
 
Reply Fri 5 Dec, 2008 12:11 pm
@Aedes,
Aedes wrote:
Don't give philosophy too much credit. The colonial era happened because technology allowed for better seafaring and navigation, and because it was economically lucrative. The seafaring and navigation were technological developments that, along with other scientific developments (esp from Newton), gave man a newfound sense of control over nature. Incidentally, medical science began to really explode at this same time.

The appearance of enlightenment philosophy owes itself to reflection on the new sciences, whose practical application affected everything (including colonization). In other words, enlightenment philosophy was a symptom of its era, not the cause.

You are seperating philosophy and scince, a thing actually during the enlightenment. At its beggining however natural philosophers made the world changing discoverys, and scince is in itself a philosophy, an empircal materialist philosophy.
 
Aedes
 
Reply Fri 5 Dec, 2008 02:03 pm
@avatar6v7,
avatar6v7 wrote:
scince is in itself a philosophy, an empircal materialist philosophy.
I completely disagree with this. There is philosophy of science, but science is not a philosophy. One can philosophize about science, and one can inform philosophical inquiries from science, but science itself is NOT a philosophy. It's a loose collection of methodologies.

That's besides the point. You're playing semantic games to avoid responding to my point that enlightenment philosophy was a symptom of enlightenment science and NOT the other way around. Hume's philosophy would have never ever been possible if it weren't for science.

What did the science require of philosophy? Only freedom from it.
 
Fido
 
Reply Fri 5 Dec, 2008 09:52 pm
@Aedes,
Aedes wrote:
Don't give philosophy too much credit. The colonial era happened because technology allowed for better seafaring and navigation, and because it was economically lucrative. The seafaring and navigation were technological developments that, along with other scientific developments (esp from Newton), gave man a newfound sense of control over nature. Incidentally, medical science began to really explode at this same time.

The appearance of enlightenment philosophy owes itself to reflection on the new sciences, whose practical application affected everything (including colonization). In other words, enlightenment philosophy was a symptom of its era, not the cause.

I give the rat more credit than the scientists and philosophers... Capital grows slowly because the people grow with it and eat it up, and the black plague killed off such a great portion of the population that it freed up great masses of capital that was soon collected in private hands with the great masses of people living on no more than they had possessed before the plague... I can't speak for else where, but in England labor was slightly better off because of the want of labor, but laws were enacted fineing workers for demanding higher wages, and they often got the wages and paid the fine... But that wealth in private hands fueled a lot of science, art, luxury, and even a little revolution, as in the protestant revolution which was the moral justification of capitalism... I have not connected all the dots, and not even looked for it very hard; but I suspect that if I look, that is what I will find. That hit the English in France early in the Hundred years war, and around 1349 killed off a third of the population of England...I can say this event led to the decline of feudalism which was a stabile, but also static form of economy, and society...
 
Fido
 
Reply Fri 5 Dec, 2008 10:02 pm
@Aedes,
Aedes wrote:
I completely disagree with this. There is philosophy of science, but science is not a philosophy. One can philosophize about science, and one can inform philosophical inquiries from science, but science itself is NOT a philosophy. It's a loose collection of methodologies.

That's besides the point. You're playing semantic games to avoid responding to my point that enlightenment philosophy was a symptom of enlightenment science and NOT the other way around. Hume's philosophy would have never ever been possible if it weren't for science.

What did the science require of philosophy? Only freedom from it.

There is no differences between science and philosophy, no difference between philosophy and mathematics, or between philosophy and reason... A moment in measure is as much philosophy as a life in observation...Does the activity demonstrate a love of knowledge???
 
Aedes
 
Reply Sat 6 Dec, 2008 12:19 pm
@Fido,
Fido wrote:
There is no differences between science and philosophy, no difference between philosophy and mathematics, or between philosophy and reason...
So you're saying that the words science, philosophy, mathematics, and reason are 100% interchangeable and synonymous, right? And it's a complete ruse for us to make any kind of distinction between them, right? Which is why the skill set, methodology, and vocabulary of everything from atomic logic to integral calculus to lipid biophysics are completely interchangeable.

We make distinctions between these academic, intellectual, and professional disciplines because they are different. And as the word philosophy is used in our language, the discipline science cannot fall under its umbrella. There can be a philosophical discourse about science, and there can be a scientific examination of philosophy, but that is a different matter.

Quote:
A moment in measure is as much philosophy as a life in observation...Does the activity demonstrate a love of knowledge???
The etymologic source "love of knowledge" has nothing specific to do with the functional use of the word "philosophy" in either speech or in academia. It's meaningless.
 
Fido
 
Reply Sat 6 Dec, 2008 07:24 pm
@Aedes,
Aedes wrote:
So you're saying that the words science, philosophy, mathematics, and reason are 100% interchangeable and synonymous, right? And it's a complete ruse for us to make any kind of distinction between them, right? Which is why the skill set, methodology, and vocabulary of everything from atomic logic to integral calculus to lipid biophysics are completely interchangeable.

We make distinctions between these academic, intellectual, and professional disciplines because they are different. And as the word philosophy is used in our language, the discipline science cannot fall under its umbrella. There can be a philosophical discourse about science, and there can be a scientific examination of philosophy, but that is a different matter.

The etymologic source "love of knowledge" has nothing specific to do with the functional use of the word "philosophy" in either speech or in academia. It's meaningless.

I would normally agree with you that different names denote different concepts, but they, science, math, reason, and even history, medicine and many other disciplines are philosophy... So you cannot say medicine is philosophy and then say philosophy is not medicine, though it would be possible to say medicine is not all philosophy... The same might be said of horses, that they are all ungulates, and ungulates are horses, but in addition ungulates are other species as well... The difference is between the species and not between the genus and the species... So, many things are philosophy is many things even if the many things differ in some significant fashion...

You should note how many studies offer a PHD, as they are all philosophy... and I trust that is what I said...
 
paulhanke
 
Reply Sat 6 Dec, 2008 08:46 pm
@Fido,
... yet even more along the language theme:

Quote:
... animism was never, in truth, left behind. The participatory proclivity of the (visual and auditory) senses was simply transferred from the depths of the surrounding life-world to the visible letters of the alphabet. Only by concentrating the synaesthetic magic of the senses upon the written letters could these letters begin to come alive and to speak. "Written words," says Socrates, "seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent ..." Indeed, today it is virtually impossible for us to look at a printed word without seeing, or rather hearing, what "it says." For our senses are now coupled, synaesthetically, to these printed shapes as profoundly as they were once wedded to cedar trees, ravens, and the moon. As the hills and the bending grasses once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so these written letters and words now speak to us.

We have seen as well that iconic writing systems - those that employ pictographic, ideographic, and/or rebuslike characters - necessarily rely, to some extent, upon our original sensory participation with the enveloping natural field. Only with the emergence of the phonetic alphabet (by the Hebrews), and its appropriation by the ancient Greeks, did the written images lose all evident ties to the larger field of expressive beings. Each image now came to have a strictly human referent: each letter was now associated purely with a gesture or sound of the human mouth. Such images could no longer function as windows opening on a more-than-human field of powers, but solely as mirrors reflecting the human form back upon itself. The senses that engaged or participated with this new writing found themselves locked in a discourse that had become exclusively human. Only thus, with the advent and spread of phonetic writing, did the rest of nature begin to lose its voice.

The highly anthropocentric mode of experience endemic to alphabetic culture spread through Europe in the course of two millennia, receiving a great boost from the calligraphic innovations introduced in the monastic scriptoria by the English monk Alcuin (732-804) during the reign of Charlemagne, and a major thrust from the innovation of movable type by Johan Gutenberg (c. 1394-1468), in the fifteenth century. The printing press, and the dissemination of uniformly printed texts that it made possible, ushered in the Enlightenment and the profoundly detached view of "nature" that was to prevail in the modern period. In recent centuries the industrial and technological practices made possible by this new distance from the natural world have carried alphabetic awareness throughout the globe, infiltrating even those cultures that had retained iconic, ideographic writing systems.
(David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous)

... do you get the pun in the title yet? Wink

So in Abram's estimation, "alphabetic awareness" was simultaneously an awakening to human interiority and an unawakening to human ties to nature ... a swing of the pendulum, if you will ... my guess is that he sees phenomonology as a component of another mode of human awareness that can swing us back to a middle ground - one that reconnects us with nature without disconnecting us from our (newfound) selves ... (I get this feeling based upon all of the quotes thus far taken from the unfinished works of Merleau-Ponty).

Anyhoo, a short poem that opens the latest chapter:

Quote:
Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I come across the marks of roe-deer's hooves in the snow.
Language, but no words.
(Tomas Transtromer)
 
Fido
 
Reply Sun 7 Dec, 2008 09:00 am
@paulhanke,
paulhanke wrote:
... yet even more along the language theme:

(David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous)

... do you get the pun in the title yet? Wink

So in Abram's estimation, "alphabetic awareness" was simultaneously an awakening to human interiority and an unawakening to human ties to nature ... a swing of the pendulum, if you will ... my guess is that he sees phenomonology as a component of another mode of human awareness that can swing us back to a middle ground - one that reconnects us with nature without disconnecting us from our (newfound) selves ... (I get this feeling based upon all of the quotes thus far taken from the unfinished works of Merleau-Ponty).

Anyhoo, a short poem that opens the latest chapter:

(Tomas Transtromer)

Words are individual ideas, forms...We can know no more than we can form judgements on.
 
paulhanke
 
Reply Sun 7 Dec, 2008 12:02 pm
@Fido,
Fido wrote:
Words are individual ideas, forms...We can know no more than we can form judgements on.


... and I think that is one of the points that Abram is trying to make - that in "alphabetic awareness" words have become disconnected from the natural world and float free within an antiseptic vacuum ... much like the Western sense of self ...
 
Fido
 
Reply Sun 7 Dec, 2008 12:07 pm
@paulhanke,
paulhanke wrote:
... and I think that is one of the points that Abram is trying to make - that in "alphabetic awareness" words have become disconnected from the natural world and float free within an antiseptic vacuum ... much like the Western sense of self ...

I am not so sure I was disagreeing with him as pointing out that it is across the board for all forms...When we can reproduce reality in some sense, we can recreate a desired reality at our will, and that is human power, that it follows human understanding.
 
paulhanke
 
Reply Sun 7 Dec, 2008 12:41 pm
@Fido,
Fido wrote:
I am not so sure I was disagreeing with him as pointing out that it is across the board for all forms...


... my apologies Smile
 
Aedes
 
Reply Sun 7 Dec, 2008 01:21 pm
@Fido,
Fido wrote:
I would normally agree with you that different names denote different concepts, but they, science, math, reason, and even history, medicine and many other disciplines are philosophy...
I didn't say that. Science is not philosophy and philosophy is not science.

Quote:
So you cannot say medicine is philosophy and then say philosophy is not medicine
Medicine is not philosophy. Medicine is medicine.

Quote:
many things are philosophy is many things even if the many things differ in some significant fashion...

You should note how many studies offer a PHD, as they are all philosophy... and I trust that is what I said...
Yes, that's the name of the degree, and this has persisted since the first universities adopted it in medieval europe when some of these other disciplines were less distinct from philosophy. And it's actually an anachronistic carryover unique to German universities that the doctor of philosophy is the name of the highest degree in MOST fields. But the fields have changed in the last few centuries. I'm perfectly happy calling Aristotle's physics philosophy. But I'm not going to accept that a modern physicist is a philosopher. It's a different discipline.

By the way -- I have a doctoral degree in medicine, and it is NOT a PhD. Does that mean that people in medicine are not philosophers?
 
avatar6v7
 
Reply Sun 7 Dec, 2008 01:49 pm
@Aedes,
Aedes wrote:
I completely disagree with this. There is philosophy of science, but science is not a philosophy. One can philosophize about science, and one can inform philosophical inquiries from science, but science itself is NOT a philosophy. It's a loose collection of methodologies.

That's besides the point. You're playing semantic games to avoid responding to my point that enlightenment philosophy was a symptom of enlightenment science and NOT the other way around. Hume's philosophy would have never ever been possible if it weren't for science.

What did the science require of philosophy? Only freedom from it.

Scince is a particular system of thought, devoloped from earliar ones such as logic, reasoning, Arsistotle etc... and applied to the physical universe. It is a form of philosophy and grows out of it. I am saying that enlightenment scince and philosophy are one movement.
You seem to imagine that there is somthing different or special about scince as a system of thought. It is one applied quite purely to the physical universe, an empircal one, and in that sense it is different from alot of other systems. However this almoslt religous conception of Scince as the ultimate form of knowlage seems very odd to me.
 
Aedes
 
Reply Sun 7 Dec, 2008 02:36 pm
@avatar6v7,
avatar6v7 wrote:
Scince is a particular system of thought, devoloped from earliar ones such as logic, reasoning, Arsistotle etc... and applied to the physical universe.
And I again insist that the mere fact that something has an origin in one discipline does NOT make it inescapably and always part of this discipline. So what if western science grew out of western philosophy? It is no longer a form of philosophy!!

I mean our most distant ancestors were single-celled organisms, but that doesn't make us protozoa. If your ancestors came to America on the Mayflower, that doesn't make you a Pilgrim.

Quote:
It is a form of philosophy and grows out of it.
The questions that are asked are completely different. The methodology is completely different. The vocabulary is completely different. The training is completely different. And the reasoning process is completely different.

Philosophy is a relatively insular, focused field that is FAR smaller than the variety of academic disciplines that MAYBE at one point in history regarded themselves as part of philosophy. And in fact only in philosophy, a field that paradoxically prides itself on extracting "truth" from unanswerable questions (which is a tad bit of hubris), is it even remotely a question whether science is a form of philosophy.

Quote:
You seem to imagine that there is somthing different or special about scince as a system of thought.
There is. Go to Public Library of Science, pick a journal, and read the Methods section of any article -- and then ask yourself where in philosophy a problem is ever approached that way.

Quote:
However this almoslt religous conception of Scince as the ultimate form of knowlage seems very odd to me.
You seem to be having a conversation with somebody else now. I'm not talking about ultimate forms of knowledge. I'm not even talking about knowledge. I'm only talking about which questions are being asked and how they're being answered. And in this regard, there is almost no commonality between philosophy and science.
 
avatar6v7
 
Reply Sun 7 Dec, 2008 02:58 pm
@Aedes,
A utilitarian aproach to ethics is very different from a Kantian one which is very different from a Catholic one. A platonic approach to philosophy is utterly different from a nietzschian one. So what? They are all sytems for understanding the world, using logic. So is scince. It does so in an empirical manner. So WHAT? What is that supposed to prove to me? That it is different? Dah. That it is not a philosophy? Nonsense.


 
Aedes
 
Reply Sun 7 Dec, 2008 05:00 pm
@paulhanke,
Ok, you clearly want to apply the word philosophy so generically that it ceases to have any specificity. That's fine, but how are we going to have a conversation when you choose to have an idiosyncratic lexicon?
 
Fido
 
Reply Sun 7 Dec, 2008 05:28 pm
@Aedes,
Aedes wrote:
I didn't say that. Science is not philosophy and philosophy is not science.

Medicine is not philosophy. Medicine is medicine.

Yes, that's the name of the degree, and this has persisted since the first universities adopted it in medieval europe when some of these other disciplines were less distinct from philosophy. And it's actually an anachronistic carryover unique to German universities that the doctor of philosophy is the name of the highest degree in MOST fields. But the fields have changed in the last few centuries. I'm perfectly happy calling Aristotle's physics philosophy. But I'm not going to accept that a modern physicist is a philosopher. It's a different discipline.

By the way -- I have a doctoral degree in medicine, and it is NOT a PhD. Does that mean that people in medicine are not philosophers?

Surely??? Science is not motivated by the love of knowledge??? Get thee real old timer... Just because we have come to think of philosophy as dialectical, and dealing primarily with moral reality does not mean philosophy is not a generic, that is, a genus for whole classes, species of behavior...

By the way; My first father in law had MD in medicine and a PHD, which he got before entry into medical school to become a doctor, and actually it was by way of a trick, as getting a PHD in anatomy let him get to know all the staff and take pictures for the year book, and pass out extra 8x10 glossies, of the staff portraits. And I know anatomy is only a branch of medicine, but I have no doubt that their are plenty of of M.D.s also PHDs... My kid, that guy's grandson is like his grandfather, a genius level IQ, but an attorney...And no PHD. But there are PHDs in Law...

I don't buy your argument, since you reject mine, then a PHD in philosophy is not worth much... Who wants to know to know though it is not worth a dime in wages and worth a million in self respect, and for that eureka moment is a philosopher, and while I will grant that there may be many people with pHDs who ride it, and do no more than maintainence on it, there are plenty of folks out there who never take a moment of rest without asking whatzitall4.
 
Fido
 
Reply Sun 7 Dec, 2008 05:30 pm
@avatar6v7,
avatar6v7 wrote:
Scince is a particular system of thought, devoloped from earliar ones such as logic, reasoning, Arsistotle etc... and applied to the physical universe. It is a form of philosophy and grows out of it. I am saying that enlightenment scince and philosophy are one movement.
You seem to imagine that there is somthing different or special about scince as a system of thought. It is one applied quite purely to the physical universe, an empircal one, and in that sense it is different from alot of other systems. However this almoslt religous conception of Scince as the ultimate form of knowlage seems very odd to me.

Agreed... And it is odd...
 
 

 
Copyright © 2024 MadLab, LLC :: Terms of Service :: Privacy Policy :: Page generated in 0.03 seconds on 11/01/2024 at 04:38:36