[Serious] Generally speaking, is philosophy a worthwhile subject of study?

[emjay]

So pretty much the only way I think I can make things more concise is either to find that elusive perfect sentence that covers all its bases in the shortest/simplest possible form, which granted is always very satisfying if you do find one, or just to be less anticipatory in the first place... which is difficult if you're one, like me, with a tendency to overthink/dwell on things.

That's an interesting observation. I do think the solution is to shift your thinking from an anticipatory position to a conversational one.

By anticipating a question you end up having a conversation alone instead of allowing others to be inserted into it. (Which really only happens in writing; it's harder to anticipate a face-to-face conversation.)

This also means you run the risk of biasing your questions, answering ones that serve your position, and avoiding ones that don't. So perhaps realizing that your best thinking can only emerge in response to other minds, can reduce the need for anticipation, and welcome objections more.

Hey there, just wanted to clarify something a little further if I may?, since reading this again I realised there may have been a slight misunderstanding regarding the 'scope' of what I meant by anticipating questions/objections. I meant it mainly at the level of sentence structure, as opposed to at the level of whole arguments/posts. Ie my posts usually contain very long run-on sentences, with a lot of commas, lot of clauses, lot of qualifiers etc... basically a lot like legalese, and it's that that I wish was more concise, but it gets like that because of neurotically anticipating grammar nazis, nitpicking, general definitional misunderstandings etc and wanting to pre-empt that.

So just trying to clarify here that it's not so much the case that I'm anticipating whole arguments/questions/objections at the post level, and thus essentially conversing alone as your post states, and with all the attendant bias that would/could imply, ...but instead that anticipation mainly operating at the level of sentences, (because like I said before, I have a tendency to obsess over little details, and that is one example of it) so it's not the case that with this I'm having a one way conversation... ie I don't think conversation is impeded here, nor am I averse to receiving questions or objections at that higher level, it's just that, at the very least, this aims at/results in reducing the back and forth of just clarifying my own position. In other words I'd rather my own position be as clear as possible from the outset, rather than wasting time down the line trying to clarify it with lots of back and forth. It works both ways; I also like it when other people are clear with their definitions, and I don't have to spend forever questioning them, to understand their position. Once positions are clear, then in theory at least, useful conversation can flow much more freely, with less talking past each other and/or misunderstandings.

[The Grand Nudger]

That can get interesting.  Certain ideas about what philosophy is and isn't would exclude a bunch of eastern philosophy... on account of how there's no application of an identical formal system between them.  Philosophy is not, whatever zhuang zhou was doing with his butterfly dream, for example.

Not that I agree with that statement - but it's something people have given some thought to.

And I think that the term 'philosophy' should exclude physics, chemistry, mathematics, geology, and other sciences.

But I *would* include much of eastern philosophy.

That's the general consensus of contemporary philosophy, too.  Still, contemporary philosophy has been strongly affected by scientific enterprise and found it to be very useful, and vv.  

And that is why philosophy has a bad rep.

If it limited itself to asking good questions (which it can and often does do), and pointing out assumptions that may be wrong, then it would be doing a fair amount of good.

But as it is, too many philosophers seem to want to create philosophical systems that they claim to be 'true and correct'. At that point, philosophy becomes useless. Answers are things you don't tend to get out of philosophy.

I've been trying to quantify that for a bit.  Too many philosophers?  How many? Which philosophers? What are the good questions? Daniel Dennet, philosopher of mind. Also a cognitive scientist. He in that set? How about Crosby, theologian, metaphysicist, but also a linguist (that was his door into the philosophy he now holds and advocates for - it's a theory of religion - historically, and perhaps for the present). Shelley Kagan, ethicist, professor? Where do these people fall on the split between good and not good questions - between trying to explain or inform or understand, and trying to assert some correct and true™ thing for it's own sake?

[vulcanlogician]

@brewer

I posted this specifically for you, btw. To show you that even philosophers don't like philosophy for certain reasons. I like Nietzsche's argument for the same reasons he likes it. (He sees his own argument as having an "honest" quality.) 

What could be said in criticism of it? For one, it appeals to emotion. But even so, I like it. It's nice a gut punch. And let nobody say that Nietzsche pulls his punches. Because he doesn't.

PS: I'm having fun discussing this with you. I think you present a good challenge to philosophy. But I also think I can argue against your position.

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Neither aristotle nor dante have any purchase in contemporary philosophy.   If some peoples revulsion towards the subject amounts to how cretins are put forward as the great minds...well...they're not.  Those cretins are a historic oddity and curio, but no longer relevant to the enterprise itself.

People used to wonder about right and wrong as it relates to some great spirit..but..today, they wonder if peoples rights and wrongs might be predicted and graphed mathematically as an observation we could draw some worthwhile conclusion from.

I've been meaning to read Dante. A close friend of mine, who is very intelligent and also not religious at all, is infatuated with The Divine Comedy. 

That's not to say I'll necessarily share her enthusiasm for the work. But if she likes it, it can't be horrible. I need to find a reputable translation. Hopefully in the public domain. But I'll bust out my wallet if the public domain translations suck.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm sure you'll find something to enjoy about it. But if we were to look at the publications list of the philosophical review out of duke, for example, we'd find that they aren't trying to mine dante for answers to questions facing us today. Just as science has moved well beyond it's many early theories. It was a relationship between the two that characterized the move in both regards. There are specialists that deal with historic positions..but that's what they are, specialists in the history of philosophy.

That isn't to say that there aren't the odd folks who pick something up and say "lets revisit this, I think there's something here". There are. I get the impression that people imagine that to be the entirety of contemporary philosophy when it's very much not - or, perhaps, that's the set of Bad Questions. If so, though, then at least some of the objections to and criticisms of philosophy in thread are better directed at whatever sliver of philosophy and philosophers they properly refer to.

But fuck me, there I am doing philosophy again, amiright?

[LadyForCamus]

That can get interesting.  Certain ideas about what philosophy is and isn't would exclude a bunch of eastern philosophy... on account of how there's no application of an identical formal system between them.  Philosophy is not, whatever zhuang zhou was doing with his butterfly dream, for example.

Not that I agree with that statement - but it's something people have given some thought to.

And I think that the term 'philosophy' should exclude physics, chemistry, mathematics, geology, and other sciences.

But I *would* include much of eastern philosophy.

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It sounds like philosophy. 😛

And that is why philosophy has a bad rep.

If it limited itself to asking good questions (which it can and often does do), and pointing out assumptions that may be wrong, then it would be doing a fair amount of good.

But as it is, too many philosophers seem to want to create philosophical systems that they claim to be 'true and correct'. At that point, philosophy becomes useless. Answers are things you don't tend to get out of philosophy.

Maybe I’m way off here, but can we not measure the usefulness of philosophical assumptions and foundations based on the real-world outcomes they produce? Now bear with me, because to say I am not well-read on the subject is a gross understatement. But, can we not look at something like The Five Ways and recognize that modern science is in conflict with many of its philosophical assumptions about reality, and then discard those assumptions as less than useful if truth is our goal? Can we not objectively assess the usefulness of caring about truth in the first place? Can we not measure the value of philosophical ideas like truth and well-being to the health of a society via measurable outcomes related to acting in accordance with those ideas? I get that metaphysics can come across as a bit of navel gazing when you consider the likelihood that we’ll ever arrive at a position that is publishable by a peer-reviewed journal, but I don’t think that necessarily means none of the products of specific philosophical ideas can be testable with respect to a goal.

Hopefully at least some of that makes some sense, lol.

[The Grand Nudger]

Those positions and explorations are and have been published by peer reviewed journals, though. As poly mentioned before...alot of the time, scientists are doing philosophy, and why not, scientific data better helps them to understand and assess their propositions.

Our inferences are only as good as the things we plug into them. No amount of decent things to plug in will lead us to a credible solution, answer, or conclusion, in the absence of productive and reliable forms of inference. Philosophy without science is blind, science without philosophy is mute.

[Belacqua]

I've been meaning to read Dante. A close friend of mine, who is very intelligent and also not religious at all, is infatuated with The Divine Comedy. 

That's not to say I'll necessarily share her enthusiasm for the work. But if she likes it, it can't be horrible. I need to find a reputable translation. Hopefully in the public domain. But I'll bust out my wallet if the public domain translations suck.

John Ciardi's translation is very readable. He was a poet before he was a translator, so the language is nicely lyrical. It has a fair balance between poetic sound and meaning, and nothing unreasonable added or changed to fit the translator's language. Also the notes, while not voluminous, are solidly helpful. 

This is what we used in my undergrad days.



The Durling translation is quite good, too, with good notes that are maybe more up to date than Ciardi's. This is what I assigned when my group read it.




Singleton's dual-language editions with commentaries in separate volumes are the scholarly gold standard. Necessary for anything puzzling in less academic versions, or if you're going to write a paper. The language aims for strict literal accuracy, rather than beauty.




Harold Bloom, literature professor at Yale (and a Gnostic Jew) said "Take Dante for your textbook," and "Shakespeare and Dante divide the world between them. There is no third."

Doré's engraved illustrations are helpful in understanding what's going on, but are not artistically brilliant. 



Botticelli had a crisis of faith in middle age and devoted most of the last half of his life to illustrating Dante, a project he didn't live long enough to finish. What he did accomplish is artistically wonderful, as well as accurate to the text in every way. There are books of the full set, but these are pricey.

Administrator Notice
Multiple links removed.

William Blake made a set of illustrations as well, but these were intentionally changed and adjusted by Blake in order to "correct" Dante's theology.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categ...ine_Comedy

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can we not measure the usefulness of philosophical assumptions and foundations based on the real-world outcomes they produce?

I think we can. But I wouldn't want simply to assume that a thing is good if it's useful and bad if it's not. 

Unless we are willing to allow such statements as "it was useful because it made me happy to learn it." or "It was useful to me in understanding how much bigger the world is than I had previously known."

Just as there are paintings that are good simply because they're good to look at, and music that's good just because it's good to listen to, there may be ideas or arguments that are good simply because it's good to think them.

[polymath257]

Except that you probably haven't actually ruled out DCT. You have simply come to a place where your intuitions conflict with it.

And that is a bit of self-knowledge: that your intuitions don't agree with the consequences of DCT. But that alone isn't a reason to reject DCT. It may mean you simply have to change your intuitions about morality.

For example, the results of quantum theory are very counter-intuitive to most people (especially at the start). But that does not make them wrong. It simply means our intuitions are wrong.

The question is whether there is a standard from which we can test ethical theories and determine that they are wrong in some objective way. I am open to that as a possibility. But I have yet to see such. And that is why they don't form 'knowledge' and are still in the realm of 'educated opinion'.

No astronomer currently uses Ptolemy's system for understanding the solar system. It has been shown wrong. it isn't even a good approximation (unlike, say, Newtonian mechanics). Galileo made observations that show it to be wrong. But there are still people today who subscribe to DCT, even among educated ethicists.

Great point. And you saying that about QM really helps me see where you're coming from. QM is counterintuitive. But it's demonstrably true. In ethics, we can't really "demonstrate" that a counterintuitive thing is true. And, so, who's to say an ethicist's conclusions count as knowledge? We can only say that it conflicts with our intuitions.

Again, very good point and very good criticism. But you should realize how careful most philosophers are when parsing the arguments. No good ethicist says, "It conflicts with our intuitions and is therefore false." They rather say: "It conflicts with our intuitions, so there's that problem with X theory." Even scientists recognize that our intuitions can be useful in showing us what kind of observations and that counterintuitive claims require extra investigation. And, I did say Divine Command Theory is "weak"-- not "false." So hopefully I'm being a careful ethicist in that regard.

But we can say that DCT is false is some situations. If we know that God is a rational being with his own intentions, and we (somehow) know that God would never decree ethics arbitrarily, then we know divine command theory is false. That is enough to put it in front of the theists as a genuine challenge if they want to argue DCT. Because the theists claim to know those things about God. And if those things are true, it is a priori deducible that DCT is false.

I guess what I'm getting at is that people have all sorts of erroneous and illogical ideas about God, ethics, and the like. Even if philosophy can't produce knowledge that meets your (empiricist) criteria for knowledge, it still does a good job at eliminating shit that many people consider knowledge because they haven't thought things through properly. The philosopher doesn't snap off the judgment: "DCT is nonsense" because the philosopher, instead, wants to think about why DCT is nonsense.

It's a different field from physics. Because we aren't all staunch empiricists, we have different (but defensible) definitions of knowledge. Your categorizing of knowledge as "empirically demonstrable" or else "self knowledge" doesn't quite cut it with me. I think you are focusing too much on empirical confirmation as a criterion for knowledge. What about justified true belief? We can discuss the merits of justified true belief vs empirically confirmed data if you wish.

I kinda wished I hadn't used ethics as an example. Ethics has the problem of possibly needing to be rooted in our intuitions. I actually prefer an ethical theory that suggests precisely that. Although, like you, I'm suspicious of human intuitions enough to make me suspicious of the theory. Not all moral realism suffers from this problem, however, and some heavily principled theories say that "when our intuitions conflict with the principle, our intuitions are probably wrong." But (in either case) just like scientists, ethicists are more prone to see conflict with intuitions as provocation to examine the issue more closely, not as a reason to dismiss it entirely.

Another point I want to make is that consistency is a weak filter for truth. But it seems to be the primary filter for philosophy.

For example, it seems that Newtonian physics is *internally consistent*. It even has intuitive appeal. But, we now know that it is *wrong* (although a good approximation). For that matter, even the Ptolemaic system is *internally consistent*.

So, yes, finding an inconsistency is certainly *one* filter that needs to be passed for a theory to be taken seriously. And yes, it is a form of knowledge to determine there is a contradiction for certain combinations of assumptions. One issue I see with philosophy is that consistency seems to be the *only* filter used.

One filter I have on the term 'knowledge' is by asking whether I believe an intelligent extraterrestrial race with radically different biology and history would also agree that a certain proposition is true, potentially after some convincing (observations, proofs,etc).

For the sciences, I think that the answer is that such a race *would* be convinced of the results of science (although potentially the learning could be on our side). The same is true for math *given the axioms*. However, I do NOT think that alien races would necessarily come to an equivalent set of axioms for mathematics.

When it comes to ethics, I see it as incredibly unlikely that *our* system of ethics will correspond *at all* with the ethics of another race with very different biology. As a trivial example, a race of intelligent spiders might consider it ethically required to eat a mate.  At the very least it may well be ethically allowed.

And that means that ethics is limited to our species and our biology. It isn't universal in the way a scientific theory should be. Our ethics is that of an intelligent great ape. An intelligent cephalopod might well disagree.

I would say the same about aesthetics. I see no reason to think that an intelligent race of extraterrestrials would consider any of our music, art, literature, etc to be meaningful at all. Again, it is the response of an intelligent species of great ape. it says more about *us* than it does about anything external to us.

[The Grand Nudger]

That's an interesting idea. That other alien species would have to be absolutely incapable of understanding human beings in that they couldn't logically deduce the same ethical positions as humanity, regardless of whether or not it agreed with them.

You really don't need aliens for this thought exercise, though. People from different cultures satisfy the setup and..fwiw, we have a somewhat spotty track record in that regard - not necessarily in understanding, but in agreement, at least.

This is something that philosophers and social scientists are actively researching. As I mentioned before, it turns out that our ethical statements can be mapped and predicted. If the aliens (or any other people) can do math, they can figure out our ethics. I'd also like to point out that you've casually dropped a pregnant assumption about there being no universal ethics. We think that's untrue, obviously by reference to our very different groups since we have no aliens to refer to - but also by looking at proto-ethics in non human species. Any living creature is going to have at least some of the same interests and concerns. Hominid or cephalopod. Earth or Planet Blip. Biologicial relativism is, itself, something we understand, and it's not beyond the pale to think that some other creature similarly possessed of the ability to think about these things might understand the same. Biological relativism is, itself, a suggestion that a certain range of ethics are universal across living creatures.

Mind you, you may be right, but you might want to tighten up the delivery, as it stands you've suggested directly contradictory things to explain why you think what you do. If biological relativism is true, then ethics is not limited to our species or our biology. It certainly doesn't seem to be limited to us even between the species on this planet. So that's a rough spot. Incoherent, and counterfactual.

[polymath257]

That's an interesting idea.  That other alien species would have to be absolutely incapable of understanding human beings in that they couldn't logically deduce the same ethical positions as humanity, regardless of whether or not it agreed with them.

You really don't need aliens for this thought exercise, though.  People from different cultures satisfy the setup and..fwiw, we have a somewhat spotty track record in that regard - not necessarily in understanding, but in agreement, at least.  

This is something that philosophers and social scientists are actively researching.  As I mentioned before, it turns out that our ethical statements can be mapped and predicted.  If the aliens (or any other people) can do math, they can figure out our ethics.  I'd also like to point out that you've casually dropped a pregnant assumption about there being no universal ethics.  We think that's untrue, obviously by reference to our very different groups since we have no aliens to refer to - but also by looking at proto-ethics in non human species.  Any living creature is going to have at least some of the same interests and concerns.  Hominid or cephalopod.  Earth or Planet Blip.  Biologicial relativism is, itself, something we understand, and it's not beyond the pale to think that some other creature similarly possessed of the ability to think about these things might understand the same.  Biological relativism is, itself, a suggestion that a certain range of ethics are universal across living creatures.

Mind you, you may be right, but you might want to tighten up the delivery, as it stands you've suggested directly contradictory things to explain why you think what you do.  If biological relativism is true, then ethics is not limited to our species or our biology.  It certainly doesn't seem to be limited to us even between the species on this planet.  So that's a rough spot.  Incoherent, and counterfactual.

It isn't necessarily that they wouldn't be able to understand *why* we have the ethics we do. it may just be that they consider our ethics to be incompatible with theirs. Which assumptions would they deduce our ethics from?

Biological relativism is part of the point. Why would we expect to have universal answers to ethical questions? Is killing innocent children always unethical, no matter the biology? I am skeptical.

I'm curious what you consider to be the interests and concerns that would be universal. Self-preservation might not be universal in species with high degrees of common genetics (like bees). It may well be that killing an otherwise healthy and 'ethical' member of a society would be justified in some species.

I'm not saying that *ethics* is limited to our species. But the basic ethical principles may well be limited to species similar to us. I'm not surprised when other primates have proto-ethics similar to ours. I would be less sure about insects, for example.