Philosophical Quietism

[Pizza]

I'm growing more sympathetic to the following views:

"We sense that there is a heady metaphysical thesis at stake in these debates over realism—a question on a par with the issues Kant first raised about the status of nature. But after a point, when every attempt to say just what the issue is has come up empty, we have no real choice but to conclude that despite all the wonderful, suggestive imagery, there is ultimately nothing in the neighborhood to discuss (1994: 279)."

"Quietism is the view that significant metaphysical debate between realism and non-realism is impossible."

"Quietism about the ‘debate’ between realists and their opponents can take a number of forms. One form might claim that the idea of a significant debate is generated by unsupported or unsupportable philosophical theses about the relationship of the experiencing and minded subject to their world, and that once these theses are exorcised the ‘debate’ will gradually wither away."
-http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/#8

[Angrboda]

[robvalue]

That debate certainly would be impossible if it involved me because it all went over my head :p Is this all that stuff about things being a conscious construct and all that noise?

[Pizza]

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Not really. It's a non-idealism and non-realism thread.

[Pyrrho]

You might find this article in The New Yorker interesting:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/30/the-itch

Unfortunately, they follow the usual fashion these days by telling a story before telling you what the article is all about. So you will have to read a bit to get to what is most likely to interest you. Here is a quote from it:

• The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.

Or, you might instead prefer:

• Ah! that is clearly a metaphysical speculation, and like most metaphysical speculations has very little reference at all to the actual facts of real life, as we know them.

— Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/844/844-h/844-h.htm

[Neo-Scholastic]

For those of you curious about the historical context of the debate I offer the following:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11090c.htm

[bennyboy]

To be fair, it's not an issue that's hotly debated on street-corners or in pubs. In the context of a forum like this one, it's probably as much an ongoing mental workout as anything else: looking for logical errors, defining terms, digging up new fallacy names to throw at your opponents, etc.

[Faith No More]

Sounds like a lot of work that will acheive very little.

Remind me why I like philosophy again?

[bennyboy]

Sounds like a lot of work that will acheive very little.

Remind me why I like philosophy again?

Because there's nothing good on TV, and you need a couple hours' break before you masturbate again. Or maybe I'm just projecting.

[Pizza]

To be fair, it's not an issue that's hotly debated on street-corners or in pubs. In the context of a forum like this one, it's probably as much an ongoing mental workout as anything else: looking for logical errors, defining terms, digging up new fallacy names to throw at your opponents, etc.

That's mostly why I think about these kinds of things. The value for me is more extrinsic than intrinsic.

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Sounds like a lot of work that will acheive very little.

That's academia in general for ya.