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

[Silver]

Dust in the Wind is a good song, man.

Don't think I know that song.

[The Grand Nudger]

[Belacqua]

How accurately do you think Aristotle rated people? How close was he to the bullseye?

Interesting question. I'm not sure. Naturally his standards were different from ours. 

You know, the Greeks were all about that agon. Comparisons and rankings were second nature. He does say at the beginning of the Ethics that we mustn't expect more exactitude than a given subject will allow, so I suspect that gold silver and bronze weren't as clearly awardable in "moral character" as they were in sports. 

He did assume that in general some people are better than others, that some people are natural slaves, and that we should accept our place in the order. High-level people have duties to low-level people, but the general hierarchy is a fact of nature. 

This sounds horrible to us, but it's also a kind of challenge to our honesty. I know that I am fairly good at some things and certainly bad at others. The goal is to be honest and clear about this, and have neither false modesty nor false pride. 

Nobody objected to snobbishness before Christianity? C'mon man. What's wrong with snobbishness in a godless world?

Sorry, I wasn't clear here. I should have used way more words.

Aristotle would say that overrating one's talents is a fault. Imagining oneself higher in the hierarchy than is really deserved is a fault. So maybe we wouldn't say "snobbishness," maybe "hubris." 

To our ears he sounds snobbish, because he is so willing to say that he and his level is higher than others.

What the Christians added, uniquely, is that socially low-level people have a kind of value in the eyes of God that's equal to the aristos. Or that God even loves them more. Aristotle would have said that some people are just obviously more valuable, to the polis, to the culture, etc.

[The Grand Nudger]

We still rank people. For some reason.... we think our ranking system is improved.

What do you think, Bel?

Anywho, off on a flight of fancy. Christians added nothing....uniquely. Theirs was a borrowed ideology from the start. Here we are talking about aristotle, but aristotle was before christianity was a twinkle in a con mans eye, so?

[vulcanlogician]

How accurately do you think Aristotle rated people? How close was he to the bullseye?

Interesting question. I'm not sure. Naturally his standards were different from ours. 

You know, the Greeks were all about that agon. Comparisons and rankings were second nature. He does say at the beginning of the Ethics that we mustn't expect more exactitude than a given subject will allow, so I suspect that gold silver and bronze weren't as clearly awardable in "moral character" as they were in sports. 

He did assume that in general some people are better than others, that some people are natural slaves, and that we should accept our place in the order. High-level people have duties to low-level people, but the general hierarchy is a fact of nature. 

Rejection of the general hierarchy is a fact of nature too. Resistance to being ruled is a fact of nature too.

[The Grand Nudger]

Meanwhile, we're just going along with fuckers doping a teen at the olympic level. Allow me to suggest that ideas of natural worth and rank and value have always been ambiguous and open to interpretation. We reject the rules, such as they are, and even the notion of a rule - on principle.

Odd for a hominid whose life is defined by those same rules, ritual in any form. But there we are, a creature of contrast in every context.

[Belacqua]

Rejection of the general hierarchy is a fact of nature too. Resistance to being ruled is a fact of nature too.

I don't recall if Aristotle addressed the idea of revolt anywhere. 

Dante, whose ethics are more Aristotle than Bible, certainly says that active resistance is justified when the not-naturally-best people get into power somehow. Of course he would call talk about God's will rather than nature's, but the idea is the same: good people should be on top and that's proper. 

For both of them, naturally low-level people revolting against naturally high-level people would be, simply, against the natural order. Whether the low-level people like it or not. However, if the high-level people truly are high-level, they will rule in such a way that the low-level people will have good lives -- by ancient standards, if not ours.

To be clear: I am reporting their opinions, not offering legal advice.

[vulcanlogician]

What goads us into regarding all philosophers with an equal measure of
mistrust and mockery is not that we are struck repeatedly by how innocent
they are – how often and easily they err and stray, in short, their childish
childlikeness – but rather that there is not enough genuine honesty about
them: even though they all make a huge, virtuous racket as soon as the
problem of truthfulness is even remotely touched upon. They all act as if
they had discovered and arrived at their genuine convictions through the
self-development of a cold, pure, divinely insouciant dialectic (in contrast
to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest than the philosophers
and also sillier...): while what essentiallyhappens is that they take
a conjecture, a whim, an “inspiration” or, more
typically, they take some fervent wish that they have sifted through and
made properly abstract – and they defend it with rationalizations after
the fact. They are all advocates who do not want to be seen as such; for
the most part, in fact, they are sly spokesmen for prejudices that they
christen as “truths” – and very far indeed from the courage of conscience
that confesses to this fact, this very fact; and very far from having the good
taste of courage that also lets this be known, perhaps to warn a friend or
foe, or out of a high-spirited attempt at self-satire.

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

[polymath257]

I would not call this knowledge. It is a refinement of her opinion.

Why not?

Isn't eliminating the false what leads to genuine progress in science? Isn't that why we want falsifiable hypotheses? Because, if we falsify it, we will have learned something? We will have gained knowledge... A lot of what Galileo did was disprove the old theory. And in doing so, he increased our knowledge. Doesn't disproving a widely accepted theory get you a Nobel Prize? THAT'S eliminating something.

The difference, as I see it, is that the ethicist simply doesn't like the consequences of DCT. it violates some intuition she has about morality and *that* is what makes it unacceptable.

In the sciences, the disproof is through actual observation showing the idea is wrong. It isn't just that we dislike it (and, in fact, it might well be a cherished idea). it is that the actual evidence shows it is wrong.

I know that the case for divine command theory is weak. Before I read Euthyphro, I thought, sure, maybe without God, there can be no actual morality. After having read it, I'm convinced that God's existence or nonexistence simply cannot have anything to do with objective morality. Have I not learned something in seeing that DCT can be ruled out? Don't I now know something that I didn't know before? Sure, I haven't solved all ethics, but by knowing that A isn't true, now I can say "It's either B,C,D or E."

[/quote]

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.

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Interesting version. I think I still prefer the Kansas version, though.

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What's funny to me, in Bill and Ted's surprising profundity, my interest in philosopy was born the first moment I heard "Dust in the Wind" by Kansas playing on the school bus radio. How can one bear the fact of one's own appartent insignificance?

To some people that question seems more salient. YMMV

I love that song.

I guess I have studied astronomy, cosmology, and paleontology for so long that my *complete* insignificance seems totally normal.

But I have also been very aware of my own mortality since I was a young child. I had very severe asthma and allergies and I knew that if I ate the wrong cookie or climbed the wrong tree I could die. And I had childhood experiences where I did, in fact, nearly die.

The concept of my own non-existence and insignificance has always been with me.