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

[brewer]

That environmental action is desirable or worthwhile, at all, demonstrates a held value system.  You make a good point, though, maybe you hadn't read any environmentalists manifestos - it just seemed to you to be the right thing to do.   You (likely) considered your own apprehensions, your environment, and the relationship between you and others, and your environment, in that environment.  You constructed a value system, and then acted on it.  I'm not sure what's objectionable about noticing that this is philosophy, and the practical application of it.  

Sure, you're not wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or whether or not some god cammands you to environmental justice..but why would you?  Not even the theologian I offered up does that.  That's the Bad Kind™ of philosophy, but also a historical footnote to philosophy.  That's not what they do anymore.

(I doubt I could find enough people who held the normative positions I hold to form a church, but it would be a hell of a racket if I could get into it, for sure.  In the meantime, I leave church-building to those so inclined.)

The thing is that I didn't define it as a philosophy. This was an individual behavior unique to me (as far as I was concerned in the moment) and repeated or not repeated as conditions changed.

Stop trying to justify that every action, thought, behavior.... has a valid philosophical explanation. I'm sure philosophers can make one but that does not make it valid, only arguable.

Unless you'd like philosophy to be skin to religion/god and argue it's necessity for all things into existence.

I've said before that philosophy has it's place, it's just not my cup of kool-aid and I don't find it all that worth while. Stop trying to justify that I drink it.

[The Grand Nudger]

You also didn't define the word define, but that's not really an issue is it?

Every action, as I've repeatedly acknowledged... and as was mentioned by others at the very beginning of the thread... isn't a philosophical action - but constructing a value system and acting on that value system - even if it's perpetually under construction and subject to revision, is doing philosophy. "I'm going to buy cheese" isn't philosophy, and isn't premised on any philosophy. "I'm going to buy sustainable, cruelty free, organic, locally sourced cheese" is..and explicitly so.

Would people come around to that if there were no movement, if there were no under-riding philosophy that they've been made aware of and find compelling? IDK, maybe, but we didn't. I don't think that you should take the suggestion that you do philosophy as some sort of insult or plot to get you to do or believe any particular thing - and I have no idea what god has to do with anything we've been discussing. I'm noticing that it is your cup of tea in the same way that it's all of our cups of tea and that you do have a philosophy, that you do actually apply that philosophy as a demonstration of it's practicality to you. May as well say that breathing isn't our cup of tea. Maybe not, but we do it all the same, and alot, and to/for noticeable effect.

[brewer]

You also didn't define the word define, but that's not really an issue is it?

Every action, as I've repeatedly acknowledged... and as was mentioned by others at the very beginning of the thread... isn't a philosophical action - but constructing a value system and acting on that value system - even if it's perpetually under construction and subject to revision, is doing philosophy.  "I'm going to buy cheese" isn't philosophy, and isn't premised on any philosophy.  "I'm going to buy sustainable, cruelty free, organic, locally sourced cheese" is..and explicitly so.

Would people come around to that if there were no movement, if there were no under-riding philosophy that they've been made aware of and find compelling?  IDK, maybe, but we didn't.  I don't think that you should take the suggestion that you do philosophy as some sort of insult or plot to get you to do or believe any particular thing - and I have no idea what god has to do with anything we've been discussing.  I'm noticing that it is your cup of tea in the same way that it's all of our cups of tea and that you do have a philosophy, that you do actually apply that philosophy as a demonstration of it's practicality to you.   May as well say that breathing isn't our cup of tea.  Maybe not, but we do it all the same, and alot, and to/for noticeable effect.

God is a religious philosophy,......... philosophy, get it? Every thing has philosophy behind it is bullshit. When an action changes or a motive changes then it's due to philosophy is crap. Philosophy comes in the back door and says 'this is the cause/justification' after the fact. Nothing like 20/20 hind site.

In my every day real life, philosophy at a conscious level rarely comes into play. It's more biology, genetics and environment, The philosophers (especially here) often behave like they are the end all be all. I'm telling you that they are not. Most of real life, thought, actions, behaviors continue on with no thought of philosophy. I don't recycle because some philosophy told me to, I don't eat fatty foods because some philosophy told me to, I don't kill people because some philosophy told me to, it genetics/environment/tribe-society. These drive behaviors not philosophy. But wait, here comes philosophy, has an idea/position and backs it up with an argument and claims 'here is the answer'.

Stop the bullshit justification.

Tell me the philosophy adhered to in Lord of the Flies. Did the author know that it would fail? I'm sure all those kids were exposed to it. Or how about the Stanford Experiment where the half given power turned ugly. I'm convinced the majority of them were exposed to philosophy you seem to champion. Why didn't it guide and influence them?

Show of hands forum peeps, how many live day to day and support all aspects of their life guided by philosophy alone?

I'll say it again, philosophy may be worth while for many but blathering online about it is not for me. I've got more constructive things to do.

Last post. (I'm positive TGN will respond {not directly to me} and claim the win)

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't think it's the case that environmentalism is bullshit because there's a philosophy behind it. I don't think that government (of any kind) is bullshit because there's a philosophy behind it. I don't think that human values (and human value, itself) are bullshit because there's a philosophy behind it. Those are big things though, removed from my day to day. There's a philosophy behind our business, and behind our customers, and understanding that relationship - and there's a philosophy behind any of the things my wife has organized to help low income people here in our region.

Golding used the narrative as a way to expound upon his beliefs about man, and where he disagreed with other philosophies. There's alot about it a click away, if you ever get interested.

It's clear that you have a very strong position about something - but whatever it is, it's not philosophy - though I suppose it could be some particular kind of philosophy (or philosopher). As I've suggested repeatedly. I'd hoped that by giving you examples of everyday people doing everyday philosophy, and examples of theologians, even, doing philosophy without doing any of the things objected to in thread, or above in those very remarks, might help you to clarify your own thoughts on the matter, if nothing else. As to why people still do bad things (I guess?), even if they've been made aware of a given philosophy - there are tons of answer to that...there we'd be doing philosophy again, but, ultimately, they all come down to - because it's not a magic wand. Not sure we'd really want it to be, either, as a philosophy can be (and many have been) pretty shitty - we might hope that The Good Ones had more power, but if they did, that would probably make the shitty ones more comprehensively effective as well.

[LadyForCamus]

-and I respect your disagreement, and that's us doing philosophy, right there.  


Coming up with a grocery list doesn't have to involve any philosophy, but it just as easily can and often does.  I might wonder what I should buy on account of environmental impact or socioeconomic consequences, for example.  I can think of alot of thought that isn't philosophy - I think you guys touched on that pretty early in thread, too.  That won't change the fact that a large amount of what people think about is doing philosophy, or the product of it having been done and calcified into a culture and/or law - which, itself, is a long running list of philosophical positions on a great many issues specific to a given region and time.

Only because you define it as philosophy. A grocery list motivated by environmental impact or economics is philosophy belief to you, not necessarily to me. I think you believe almost everything is or can be philosophy, I (and maybe others) don't. But to continue insisting that your belief is the only correct one sounds a lot like the religious.

It sounds like philosophy. 😛

[John 6IX Breezy]

The point is that not all organized thinking counts as philosophy. And not all organized thinking arises from philosophy.

I agree with this.

There's a famous paper in psychology by Tulving on episodic memory. And, in defining episodic memory, he said something simple that shaped my thinking ever since: That useful definitions not only make it very clear what a thing is but also what a thing is not.

A few members already gave definitions of philosophy. But perhaps it's more useful now to explain what philosophy isn't, and what it excludes.

[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.

[polymath257]

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.

---

Only because you define it as philosophy. A grocery list motivated by environmental impact or economics is philosophy belief to you, not necessarily to me. I think you believe almost everything is or can be philosophy, I (and maybe others) don't. But to continue insisting that your belief is the only correct one sounds a lot like the religious.

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.

[Belacqua]

Someone is making the claim that philosophy accomplishes nothing, and that only practical people bring about real change which philosophers later try to claim for themselves. In response, I can describe one well-documented case of a new philosophical concept which had widespread and lasting influence on life in Europe and America, which we continue to live with today.

TRIGGER WARNING: This post will be verbose, and name-drop several famous people. If you are a person who reacts badly to such things, best to sign off now.

In 1689, John Locke published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Famously, this book argued that when a person is born, his or her mind is completely free of ideas — the well-known tabula rasa. Prior to this book, it was generally accepted that babies are born with lots of concepts pre-loaded into the software. For example, it was assumed that morality is imprinted into every new mind by God. Also certain talents or dispositions were thought to be determined from birth, meaning that leaders or criminals or geniuses are born, not made. After Locke, it was quickly and widely accepted that what a person becomes is determined almost entirely by education and environment.

This had huge influence in a number of important areas:

1) Democracy, meritocracy, equality.

If what Locke says is true, then the child of a king and the child of a ditch-digger have identical minds at birth. There is nothing in the mind of a new-born prince to determine that he will necessarily become a good leader. Naturally, a new-born prince’s environment and education is more likely to teach him the skills of leadership (or of tyranny) but if he were switched at birth with ditch-digger baby then the ditch-digger could equally become a prince.

Conclusion: leaders are made, not born. There is nothing intrinsically natural about hereditary rule. Individuals fortunate enough to have been raised and educated wisely, in the proper fields, will almost certainly become better and more effective rulers than whoever the king’s consort happens to give birth to.

Since Locke’s books were well known to Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, etc., it’s no exaggeration to say that Locke had a huge affect on the government of the United States (as it was supposed to work).

2) Universal education.

If the minds of poor babies and the minds of rich babies are the same at birth, educating the former group can bring every bit as good results as the latter.

The movement for universal free education at first explicitly cited Locke, and wouldn’t have happened then and there without his ideas. It took a while to persuade conservatives, as it always does, but if you went to free public elementary school in the US that’s indirectly thanks to Locke.

3) Literature

The idea that our characters are shaped entirely by our experiences, not in-born talents, had a huge affect on novels throughout Europe. The bildungsroman, for example, is based on this idea. Stories like Stendhal’s The Red and the Black trace out how a character’s earliest background forms the basis for the successes and failures of his later career.


4) Cultural education

In 1748, Montesquieu published De l'esprit des lois, an influential early Enlightenment text. One of its themes argued that the character of a people in any given nation is determined by that nation’s climate. He argued that the best visual artists come from Italy because the Italian climate enables them. (This is true to some extent — the weather conditions necessary for large fresco painting mean that wetter colder climates are unsuitable.) So Italy had Michelangelo, etc., but England, as a rainy country, could never produce a Michelangelo or a Raphael. England’s genius was limited to literature, because poets in candle-lit garretts could write well enough.

Naturally, as a Frenchman, Montesquieu concluded that the best climate of all was in France. (The word chauvinist is French, after all.)

Now we have a conflation of big names guaranteed to trigger the people who don’t like name-dropping. Please go to your safe space now.

Isaac Newton had discovered that planets and other things move according to laws which can be described by math. Things which had previously been a mystery, or attributed to the grace of God, were now considered to operate according to knowable, quantifiable, teachable laws.

Early Enlightenment thinkers in many fields were thrilled by this. If planetary motion has its laws, and we can know them, then why can’t we identify the laws that govern beauty? Instead of just relying on random geniuses inspired by God, the laws will turn out to be knowable, teachable, and learnable. Given the right education, schools can create a new class of Michelangelos every semester.

So here the inspiration of Newton’s abstract laws and Locke’s educational theory conspired. The result was that Joshua Reynolds in London and Claude leBrun in France founded the very first Academies of Art. These were dedicated to researching, identifying, teaching, and learning the immutable natural laws governing beauty. (Rameau attempted the same thing with music.)

This was the first time art was thought to be something teachable. Before that artists served apprenticeships to learn the materials and craft, and if they got to be genius expressive artists in addition that was just up to God. The Locke-inspired Academies changed this.

The founders and sponsors of the academies wrote up manifestos explicitly challenging Montesquieu’s judgment, and saying that thanks to Locke’s discoveries, once the proper training was in place, London could be every bit as artistic as Rome or Florence.

5) Travel and experience

For non-artists, Locke’s ideas, in conjunction with Montesquieu’s, suggested that anyone wanting a well-rounded education needed to travel — to get out of the classroom in Oxford and go to breathe the real air of Rome and Athens. The Renaissance or the Classical Ages can’t be fully appreciated until one has walked the streets of Florence or climbed the Acropolis.

And we can always steal the Elgin Marbles and take them back to show people not fortunate enough to make the trip. Public Art and History museums were opened for the common people with the specific Lockean aim of raising their cultural level through direct experience of great works.

Locke’s theory also gave rise to the Grand Tour which became customary among the wealthy, and later to culture-centered trips by the middle class, and study-abroad programs by ambitious college kids.


6) Architecture

If architectural beauty works according to eternal, immutable laws, as physics appears to, then where do we learn those laws? For Enlightenment-era people, the answer was obvious: in the surviving buildings of ancient Greece and Rome.

Not only are these buildings (according to the taste of the time) the ideal examples of beauty, by embodying eternal principles they are also intrinsically tied into permanence, reliability, and honesty. That’s why government buildings and banks and post offices, until recently, were built in neo-Classical style. To express (or perhaps propagandize) the fact that our government, financial system, and post office, are reliable, honest, eternal institutions on whom we can rely.

No doubt there are architectural critics who map Americans’ loss of faith in government with the waning of Neoclassicism as the required style.

Having said all that, I will back off just a little bit, because I know I’m guilty of the “Great Man Theory.” The way I’ve described it, it sounds as if Locke, single-handedly, changed the world. It’s not so simple. The ideas were “in the air,” and the ground was prepared for their reception. I’m using “Locke” as a kind of synecdoche to refer to a number of related people, movements, and results.

Even with that caveat, however, there’s no doubt that the ideas I cite here changed the world — A LOT.

[vulcanlogician]

I know that the case for divine command theory is weak.

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.