After 2500 years, philosophy is still in its infancy

[KingOrfeo]

This recently occurred to me: It is possible to make a thorough and satisfactory study of mathematics without learning the names of any mathematicians, except for those few with mathematical concepts named after them, and even there, it is possible to learn everything mathematical that there is to know about the Pythagorean Theorem or the Fibonacci Sequence without learning anything at all about Pythagoras or Fibonacci. The laws of mathematics are eternal, impersonal and ahistorical.

Philosophy, being philosophy, should be all of that. And yet it remains impossible in practice to study philosophy without studying philosophers the way an English major studies authors. Every philosophical system is among other things a cultural artifact, rooted in the time and place and social background and individual personality of the philosopher who produced it, and cannot be fully appreciated in disregard of those things. Until that changes, philosophy is still in its infancy.

Thoughts?

 

[Conager]

No it isn't.

There is absolutely nothing new under the sun. People were philosophizing before recorded history. The fact that you might enjoy reading this particular philosopher or that in any of the various wide, well served disciplines doesn't change the fact that the underlying concepts are well-known and well represented.

 

[rocket_surgery]

This recently occurred to me: It is possible to make a thorough and satisfactory study of mathematics without learning the names of any mathematicians, except for those few with mathematical concepts named after them, and even there, it is possible to learn everything mathematical that there is to know about the Pythagorean Theorem or the Fibonacci Sequence without learning anything at all about Pythagoras or Fibonacci. The laws of mathematics are eternal, impersonal and ahistorical.

Philosophy, being philosophy, should be all of that. And yet it remains impossible in practice to study philosophy without studying philosophers the way an English major studies authors. Every philosophical system is among other things a cultural artifact, rooted in the time and place and social background and individual personality of the philosopher who produced it, and cannot be fully appreciated in disregard of those things. Until that changes, philosophy is still in its infancy.

Thoughts?

Because math isn't open to interpretation and philosophy depends entirely on who's saying it and whether or not you agree with them. It makes no difference what Newton believed but it does matter what Socrates or Plato did.

 

[KingOrfeo]

No it isn't.

There is absolutely nothing new under the sun. People were philosophizing before recorded history. The fact that you might enjoy reading this particular philosopher or that in any of the various wide, well served disciplines doesn't change the fact that the underlying concepts are well-known and well represented.

Some new concepts in philosophy do emerge from time to time -- what would "existentialism" have meant to Socrates? It would have been incomprehensible to anyone before the 19th Century. But more importantly, the timeless concepts of philosophy have yet to be systematically separated out from the time-bound and culture-bound concepts and organized into a complete and coherent system like math.

 

[hashtag46]

This recently occurred to me: It is possible to make a thorough and satisfactory study of mathematics without learning the names of any mathematicians, except for those few with mathematical concepts named after them, and even there, it is possible to learn everything mathematical that there is to know about the Pythagorean Theorem or the Fibonacci Sequence without learning anything at all about Pythagoras or Fibonacci. The laws of mathematics are eternal, impersonal and ahistorical.

Philosophy, being philosophy, should be all of that.

1.And yet it remains impossible in practice to study philosophy without studying philosophers the way an English major studies authors. Every philosophical system is among other things a cultural artifact, rooted in the time and place and social background and individual personality of the philosopher who produced it, and cannot be fully appreciated in disregard of those things.

2.Until that changes, philosophy is still in its infancy.

Thoughts?

Cool thread.
I wasn't entirely clear tho, what you meant in the last oaragraph. Because I definitely agree with 1 but not with 2, although it might just be a matter of semantics.


As I see it, contemporary western philosophy isn't in it's infancy; it has just been distorted since Enlightenment.
It became linear and more compartimentalised by bringing to the forefrong values such as rationality and elimination of doubt.

It started with Plato's later life anti- Socratic stance, but Enlightenment sealed the deal and made it universal across the Western world.
The trend was worsened by post '70's neoliberal technocratic approach with their cult of rationality and efficiency, of science and commodification of man and nature. Science and being productive and economics are a good thing, but not when they become an ideology or a cult that drive society, to the exclusion of right brain thinking and civic education.

I think it would do us a lot of good if we put aside for a while thinkers like Freud or so on or even Aristotle, and we started reading eastern philosophers, judaicism and Socrates.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Because math isn't open to interpretation and philosophy depends entirely on who's saying it and whether or not you agree with them. It makes no difference what Newton believed but it does matter what Socrates or Plato did.

Well, yes and no. The applicability of Aristotle's system of formal logic -- which is a lot like math and might even be considered a branch of it -- does not depend on what Aristotle thought, nor on the cultural environment where one might seek to apply it. Most philosophical systems probably contain some elements of that kind.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Cool thread.
I wasn't entirely clear tho, what you meant in the last oaragraph. Because I definitely agree with 1 but not with 2, although it might just be a matter of semantics.

I meant that philosophy ideally should be, and potentially could be, as systematic and coherent and complete and impersonal and acultural and ahistorical as math.

As I see it, contemporary western philosophy isn't in it's infancy; it has just been distorted since Enlightenment.
It became linear and more compartimentalised by bringing to the forefrong values such as rationality and elimination of doubt.

But, those are exactly the things that distinguish (mostly) disciplined and rigorous Western philosophy from (most) Eastern "philosophy," from mystical speculation and groping in the dark. Setting them aside would take philosophy in exactly the wrong direction.

 

[hashtag46]

1.I meant that philosophy ideally should be, and potentially could be, as impersonal and ahistorical as math.

2. But, those are exactly the things that distinguish disciplined and rigorous Western philosophy from most Eastern "philosophy," from mystical speculation and groping in the dark. Setting them aside would take philosophy in exactly the wrong direction.

1.Gotcha

2. You're right, we should be driven by reasoning and common sense rather than the mystical speculation that was also part of the other ones.

What I was trying to say was that our mistake was to elevate rationality and efficiency (science and economics) from being at the forefront, to the level of an ideology.

And this lack of tolerance for doubt or for inclusion of other views when necessary, is a hallmark of a radical philosophy of reason.


_____________________________
Ideologies are good, but only on paper not when they are the main drivers of societies.

And there have been some nefarious consequences and contamination on a more practical societal level too, because ethics and civic duty have often become subordonated to rationality.
--- See the austerity measures imposed by IMF. According to their technocrati mentality and primacy of rationality, it was ok to drop the standard of living of so many people, because "5 years from now" they'll reap benefits.
But they forgot that real life doesn't work that way, and not only that those people's standard of living dropped for 5 years, but things got even worse after that.
--- Or Margaret Thatcher's comments: "Yes, those children suffered but sacrifice a few for the wellbeing of many". That makes sense from a rational pov, but that's what ultimately leads to monstruosities.

Rationality is good, as long as it's constantly being monitored by ethics and civic duty,

 

[Rightguide]

It's astounding to me that after a couple of hundred thousand years of evolution examples of Neandertal brain activity are still present in Democrat thought process.

 

[hashtag46]

It's astounding to me that after a couple of hundred thousand years of evolution examples of Neandertal brain activity are still present in Democrat thought process.

I laughed.
Thanks for taking this topic so seriously.

 

[hashtag46]

No it isn't.

There is absolutely nothing new under the sun. People were philosophizing before recorded history. The fact that you might enjoy reading this particular philosopher or that in any of the various wide, well served disciplines doesn't change the fact that the underlying concepts are well-known and well represented.

^^^^ This too

 

[Lancecastor]

philosophy is still in its infancy.

Thoughts?

I think you're a sick fuck, therefore I am.

 

[KingOrfeo]

1.Gotcha

2. You're right, we should be driven by reasoning and common sense rather than the mystical speculation that was also part of the other ones.

What I was trying to say was that our mistake was to elevate rationality and efficiency (science and economics) from being at the forefront, to the level of an ideology.

And this lack of tolerance for doubt or for inclusion of other views when necessary, is a hallmark of a radical philosophy of reason.

That might have been a mistake in political terms -- there is a direct line of descent leading from Voltaire to Stalin, from Continental rationalism to 20th-Century Communism (and another line of descent from Rousseau to Hitler, from Counter-Enlightenment romanticism to fascism and Nazism) -- but not in purely philosophical terms. In philosophy, what could possibly be more important than rationality?

A third philosophical tradition is British empiricism, based on reason as opposed to rationality. Thinkers like Karl Marx and Ayn Rand are in the rationalist tradition -- they assume a few basic premises to begin with, work out their logical implications, and then find themselves obliged to accept, as for the best in the long run, any moral atrocity that process leads to. The British empirical way is to begin with observations of the real world and from that starting point reason inductively rather than inductively -- the scientific method. But British empiricism is not based on mystic speculation, it is in its own way at leasts as rigorous as rationalism.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I think you're a sick fuck, therefore I am.

I'm pink, therefore I'm Spam.

 

[KingOrfeo]

It's astounding to me that after a couple of hundred thousand years of evolution examples of Neandertal brain activity are still present in Democrat thought process.

This is a discussion of philosophy, almost certainly something unknown to Neanderthals, and has nothing to do with Democrats.

 

[hashtag46]

That might have been a mistake in political terms -- there is a direct line of descent leading from Voltaire to Stalin, from Continental rationalism to 20th-Century Communism (and another line of descent from Rousseau to Hitler, from Counter-Enlightenment romanticism to fascism and Nazism) -- but not in purely philosophical terms. In philosophy, what could possibly be more important than rationality?

A third philosophical tradition is British empiricism, based on reason as opposed to rationality. Thinkers like Karl Marx and Ayn Rand are in the rationalist tradition -- they assume a few basic premises to begin with, work out their logical implications, and then find themselves obliged to accept, as for the best in the long run, any moral atrocity that process leads to. The British empirical way is to begin with observations of the real world and from that starting point reason inductively rather than inductively -- the scientific method. But British empiricism is not based on mystic speculation, it is in its own way at leasts as rigorous as rationalism.

Such an interesting discussion. Pitty that I don't have time now but I'll read it thoroughly tonight.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Such an interesting discussion. Pitty that I don't have time now but I'll read it thoroughly tonight.

See also "Which Civilisation?" by Michael Lind (2001):

The most influential attempts to define the post-cold war world have been those of Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and Samuel P Huntington, in his essay “The Clash of Civilisations” (1993). Fukuyama famously argued that liberal democracy is the final stage of human political evolution. Huntington emphasises the persistence of pre-modern linguistic, cultural and religious divisions, like those between western and eastern Christendom and Confucian and Hindu Asia.

Each of these schemas captures aspects of reality. But an alternative that deserves consideration is one that defines “civilisations” in terms, not of technological development or culture, but of world view. This approach gives us fewer civilisations than those listed by Huntington-but more than the single end-stage civilisation proposed by Fukuyama.

From this perspective, the most important civilisational divide-one that seems even more important after the events of 11th September-may be the one between supernatural civilisations and secular civilisations. The divide is roughly, but not completely, correlated with the divide between pre-modern agrarian societies and industrial societies. Of the supernatural civilisations, the most significant have been the Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and the Indic (Hinduism and Buddhism). The two major Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Islam, conquered most of the world’s territory and people, including south Asia and the Americas. Only China and Japan, among the major non-western nations, escaped Muslim or Christian rule. Today Muslim theocracies like Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia are the most extreme examples of societies based on supernatural religion.

On the secular side of the civilisational divide, there have been three major traditions: humanism, rationalism and romanticism. These three traditions originated in Europe but now have adherents around the world. All three are essentially secular worldviews which do not need to invoke the authority of divine revelation or mystical gnosis (though some romantics are mystics or pantheists and some humanists have been religious believers). In respects other than their common secularism, the three traditions are fundamentally different from one another.

Humanist civilisation crystallised in Renaissance Italy, before spreading to the Netherlands, Britain, and the US. This liberal, commercial, increasingly democratic civilisation has spread to other nations by emulation (Lafayette’s France, Atat?rk’s Turkey, Yeltsin’s Russia) and by conquest and conversion (post-1945 Germany and Japan). Humanists seek to ameliorate the problems of social life with the guidance of practical wisdom, derived chiefly from history, literature and custom, with little or no reference to supernatural religion or natural science, with the possible exception of the emergent sociobiology. Humanists tend to be modest as philosophers and cautious as reformers. Examples of great humanist thinkers and statesmen are Petrarch, Erasmus, Bacon, Montaigne, Voltaire, Franklin, Hume, Burke, Smith, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison.

Rationalism, a world view underlying a number of secular creeds, first crystallised in 17th and 18th-century France. Rationalists reject the humanist distinction between practical wisdom and natural science. The goal of rationalists of all kinds is to devise a science of society, modelled on natural science, which can serve as the basis for the construction of a “rational” social order. Stephen Toulmin makes a useful distinction between the “reasonableness” of Renaissance humanists and the “rationality” of Enlightenment philosophes. The rationalist pantheon includes social engineers like Condorcet, St Simon, Comte, Fourier, Bentham, Marx, Lenin and Ayn Rand. (The “secular humanists” who support world federalism and utopian social reform are really rationalists).

Romanticism, the third major secular world view, has spread widely from its original homeland, late 18th and early 19th-century Germany. Romantics reject both reasonableness and rationality, they exalt the inspired unreason of the artistic genius, the child, the primitive uncorrupted by civilisation. Rousseau, Emerson, Wagner, Nietszche and Frantz Fanon should be on a list of romantic prophets, and idealist philosophers like Kant and Hegel arguably are closer to romanticism than to humanism or rationalism.

The American revolution, and the French revolution in its constitutional phases, were humanist. The French terror and the Bolshevik terror were rationalist. The second world war was a struggle of three secular civilisations: humanism (Roosevelt and Churchill), rationalism (Stalin) and romanticism (Hitler). The war by Islamic radicals against the US, Europe and Israel is, among other things, a conflict between religious and humanist civilisation.

My claim is that the civilisation shared by most Prospect readers is humanist, a relatively young global civilisation based on the post-medieval, Italian-Dutch-Anglo-American tradition of the constitutional, commercial society. Needless to say, this definition of humanist civilisation differs dramatically from conventional catechisms about the “rise of the west.”

For example, the familiar idea that there is a unitary liberal “west” that is defined by the RRE tradition-Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment-is untrue. Renaissance humanism is incompatible with Reformation Protestantism, while Enlightenment rationalism is alien to both. The fact that these three traditions have coexisted in Britain, the US and other countries does not mean that they are three phases of the same tradition.

Another version of the “rise of the west” story, more sympathetic to Catholicism than the RRE approach, holds that the “west” is a synthesis of the “Greco-Roman” and “Judaeo-Christian” traditions. In fact, the “Judaeo-Christian” tradition has little to do with the tolerant, individualist, commercial society.

Consider the claim that Christianity is responsible for the liberal ideal of political equality. In reality, early-modern liberal republican theorists derived this from Cicero and the Stoics. Christians and Muslims believe in the equality of believers before God, a conception which was not interpreted until recently to mandate equality. Indeed, Paul admonished slaves to return to their spiritually-equal masters. The Christian churches only turned against chattel slavery after secular philosophers like David Hume had begun denouncing it. Southern Protestants in the US defended slavery throughout the civil war, and the Catholic church defended it until it was abolished decades later in Catholic Cuba and Brazil.

"World view" is of course a broader and looser concept than "philosophy" (but still narrower than "culture"), but the above obviously is relevant to this discussion.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

This is a discussion of philosophy, almost certainly something unknown to Neanderthals, and has nothing to do with Democrats.

Pretty suspicious coincidence though, don't ya think?

 

[RubiDia]

This recently occurred to me: It is possible to make a thorough and satisfactory study of mathematics without learning the names of any mathematicians, except for those few with mathematical concepts named after them, and even there, it is possible to learn everything mathematical that there is to know about the Pythagorean Theorem or the Fibonacci Sequence without learning anything at all about Pythagoras or Fibonacci. The laws of mathematics are eternal, impersonal and ahistorical.

Philosophy, being philosophy, should be all of that. And yet it remains impossible in practice to study philosophy without studying philosophers the way an English major studies authors. Every philosophical system is among other things a cultural artifact, rooted in the time and place and social background and individual personality of the philosopher who produced it, and cannot be fully appreciated in disregard of those things. Until that changes, philosophy is still in its infancy.

Thoughts?

If you make me bacon and eggs, you don't have to read Atlas Shrugged. Deal?

 

[KingOrfeo]

Pretty suspicious coincidence though, don't ya think?

Well, philosophy has nothing to do with Republicans either. Maybe something to do with Communists and Libertarians . . .

 

[Conager]

I meant that philosophy ideally should be, and potentially could be, as systematic and coherent and complete and impersonal and acultural and ahistorical as math.



But, those are exactly the things that distinguish (mostly) disciplined and rigorous Western philosophy from (most) Eastern "philosophy," from mystical speculation and groping in the dark. Setting them aside would take philosophy in exactly the wrong direction.

You only say that because you don't understand the language and stucture of mathematics. Mathematics is about as pure as you can get. It is simply objective; something simply is or it is not. Philosophy is subjective and largely dependant on ideas, feelings, and values that have no objective measure.

 

[RubiDia]

Panic Button

"Imago is a game that heats up your phone and drains your battery."

 

[KingOrfeo]

You only say that because you don't understand the language and stucture of mathematics. Mathematics is about as pure as you can get. It is simply objective; something simply is or it is not.

I know all of that, and began this thread by assuming it.

Philosophy is subjective and largely dependant on ideas, feelings, and values that have no objective measure.

Not entirely. See post #6. A sound logical argument or chain of reasoning -- both things philosophers have been doing, or trying to do, since before Socrates -- depends on no feelings or values.

 

[Conager]

I know all of that, and began this thread by assuming it.



Not entirely. See post #6. A sound logical argument or chain of reasoning -- both things philosophers have been doing, or trying to do, since before Socrates -- depends on no feelings or values.

Mathematics, at times, employs logic to arrive at the one and only correct solution.

Employing logic after starting with a subjective, moral, underpinning is not even a distant cousin of mathematics. Just because something logically follows the previous doesn't mean that you're underlying assumption had any basis in objective reality.

There is no formula for the questions that philosophy asks.

It is like trying to "prove" (or worse, disprove) religion with scientific method. The one has nothing to do with the other. You also cannot meditate or believe your way to a scienticfic solution.

 

[OldJourno]

The philosophy is settled.