quote:Because there's not an experience it's possible to perceive which cannot be described or included in a sound argument.
I know the conversation has moved on, but this is an awfully big axiom to insert into the discussion unfounded.
I'm assuming by "included in a sound argument" you are rererring to some use of language. And whether or not language is adequate to express all experiences fully is certianly not something we can safely assume to be true.
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Dag, please tell me how you can insert into any sound argument something which cannot be perceived.
I know you believe that whole "the essence of an object is completely unknowable by man" -- but here's the deal: if it's completely unknowable by man, and we can't manifest its effects anywhere in any way to demonstrate that it exists, it DOESN'T MATTER because it doesn't actually have an effect. It may well exist -- but its existence has no bearing on the reality we perceive, which is the only reality which exists.
If it has an effect, that effect can be perceived; otherwise, it can be said to have no effect. At some point, somewhere down the line, it has to cause something perceptible in order to be said to matter.
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Katie, I wouldn't mind using your definition of "understanding," but I don't know what it is. What do YOU mean by the term? Can you explain why understanding that you feel pain is too broad a definition of "understanding" for your purposes?
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quote:Dag, please tell me how you can insert into any sound argument something which cannot be perceived.
You're asking the question backwards. I'm not claiming that something which cannot be perceived can be inserted into a sound argument. That's an entirely different discussion. I'm claiming not everything that can be perceived can be inserted into a sound argument.
quote:I know you believe that whole "the essence of an object is completely unknowable by man" -- but here's the deal: if it's completely unknowable by man, and we can't manifest its effects anywhere in any way to demonstrate that it exists, it DOESN'T MATTER because it doesn't actually have an effect. It may well exist -- but its existence has no bearing on the reality we perceive, which is the only reality which exists.
This is actually unrelated to my objection to your axiom.
quote:If it has an effect, that effect can be perceived; otherwise, it can be said to have no effect. At some point, somewhere down the line, it has to cause something perceptible in order to be said to matter.
Yes, but there are things that can be perceived that cannot be fully described in language.
You said:
quote:there's not an experience it's possible to perceive which cannot be described or included in a sound argument.
I'm saying:
quote:there's is at least one experience it's possible to perceive which cannot be described or included in a sound argument.
Draw a Venn diagram if you're still not getting it:
P is the set of all things that can be perceived. A is the set of all things that can be included in a sound argument.
My claim is that there exists at least one element p of set P such that p is not an element of A.
The reason I make this claim is that not everything that can be perceived can be fully expressed as language. And something that cannot be fully expressed as language cannot be described or included in a sound argument.
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quote: Yes, but there are things that can be perceived that cannot be fully described in language.
I dispute this, if by "fully described in language" you mean "included in an argument." Frankly, I'm not even sure what out there cannot be fully described in language.
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quote:I dispute this, if by "fully described in language" you mean "included in an argument." Frankly, I'm not even sure what out there cannot be fully described in language.
I bet you'd be hard pressed to fully describe your love for Christy and Sophie. And the parts not fully described could certainly be relevant to a given philosophical argument.
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Except that things which are not understood in part are not experienced. To experience something is to understand what you have experienced.
quote: I bet you'd be hard pressed to fully describe your love for Christy and Sophie.
I'd be hard-pressed, certainly, if by "fully" you mean "describe every aspect of the way you feel." The limitation there is not on the language, of course, nor my understanding of my feelings, but my ability to articulate those feelings in language. In other words, the tools haven't failed me; I've failed the tools.
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quote:That may seem callous, but the real reason for it is that sound arguments, and not emotional appeals, are what lead us to the truth.
This is really controversial. Martha Nussbaum's Poetic Justice does a decent job, in my esteem, of debunking the "sound argument," as the exhaustive-- or even sufficient-- route to truth.
Analytic philosophy, and I know you are going to disagree, has fetishized itself to an alarming degree and made itself into a hobby horse for the politically estranged, the result being that philosophy has as much relation to wisdom as chess has a relation to Truth. Analytic philosophy should have humbled itself after Quine and ceased castrating the good Universities of this nation.
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Dag,
You should check out Poetic Justice. It's a little book that came out about ten years ago by a philosopher who teaches in the law school at the University of Chicago. The book concerns how a judge imbued with a literary imagination understands political and legal problems with force and vivacity that's not displayed by judges who don't appreciate a good novel. She uses excerpts from differing Opinions to illustrate her point.
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What is this feeling, so sudden and new I felt the moment I laid eyes on you My pulse rushing My head is reeling My face is flushing What is this feeling? Fervid as a flame Does it have a name... Yes...
Things can be felt and experienced long before they are understood. That's why PTSD exists.
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I'll boldly say that sound arguments don't move to action, sound arguments laced with the appropriate emotion do.
The problem is that analytical philosophers don't believe that there is something as called the "appropriate emotion."
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I'll boldly say that sound arguments don't move to action-- nor should they-- sound arguments laced with the appropriate emotion do-- as it should be.
The problem is that analytical philosophers don't believe that there is something called the "appropriate emotion."
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quote:I'd be hard-pressed, certainly, if by "fully" you mean "describe every aspect of the way you feel." The limitation there is not on the language, of course, nor my understanding of my feelings, but my ability to articulate those feelings in language. In other words, the tools haven't failed me; I've failed the tools.
Well, we're just in stark disagreement then. I think it's an inherent limitation of language that many things cannot be fully articulated in it.
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quote:The limitation there is not on the language, of course, nor my understanding of my feelings, but my ability to articulate those feelings in language. In other words, the tools haven't failed me; I've failed the tools.
How do you know? Perhaps you are able to articulate to the maximum allowed by the language, but the language is not adequate to articulate the experience.
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quote:Nope, things can be felt and experienced long before they are understood.
Not according to the definition of understanding that Tom is using.(I think)
quote: ...but you understand what's happening enough to decide that something IS happening well before you know the details....You understand, but you do not understand completely.
Music, sports, and other things which provoke visceral reaction are ALSO tied to a form of "understanding:" a processing of inputs that cause a reaction of some kind, from emotion to reflex...since experience cannot HAPPEN without awareness of the experience, and that awareness constitutes sufficient understanding.
quote: Things can be felt and experienced long before they are understood.
See, we're using a different definition of "understanding."
When my face flushes, I immediately feel it; before I understand why it flushes, I understand that it has. No more than that.
I then consider -- very quickly -- why my face is flushing. Am I warm? Am I ill? Have I been embarrassed?
From there, I settle on a rationale for my flushing face. I now believe I "understand" why my face has flushed.
Perhaps I flush due to a strong attraction to someone else. I can now decide whether this attraction is physical or emotional, based on my history with this person, what I'm imagining, etc.
At no point, in other words, do I not understand what I'm feeling; I just don't necessarily understand it in DEPTH 'til I've done the required analysis.
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That definition of understanding seems to grow and contract depending on the need for it in the sentence.
Sometimes it means percieving anything, on any level. Sometimes it means clear enough to be articulated in language.
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I think I made it sufficiently clear that I've never used "understanding" to mean "articulated in language" on this thread. In fact, I've been very careful NOT to do so.
But, then, I don't even consider being able to fully articulate something in language to be a necessary prerequisite for using that experience in a sound argument. Neither, by the way, do I grant that it is possible for someone to have any experience which cannot be articulated in some language; that said, it is certainly possible for someone to have an experience which they cannot articulate in language, although I suspect the experience suffers for it.
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quote:I think I made it sufficiently clear that I've never used "understanding" to mean "articulated in language" on this thread. In fact, I've been very careful NOT to do so. [Smile]
I agree that full articulation is not necessary for understanding.
quote:But, then, I don't even consider being able to fully articulate something in language to be a necessary prerequisite for using that experience in a sound argument.
How so?
Sure, you can make lots of sound arguments that use the extent of your love for Christy and Sophie without articulating every last detail. But then you are really using a different experience, one that only includes the portions you can articulate.
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And yet they remain sound. At the point at which they become UNSOUND, presumably there is a difference that makes them no longer sound. If that difference can be perceived, it can be described. And once it can be described, the distinction can be verbalized for future use.
Note that I'm not trivializing this problem. I believe that most of the failures of early philosophy revolved around this issue. Philosophers didn't have the words yet to describe some of the concepts that ultimately made their broad generalizations obviously overbroad, so logical flaws through which we can drive a truck today couldn't have been sufficiently articulated at the time.
This does not mean, however, that it would be impossible to ever be sufficiently articulate enough to describe experience completely.
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quote:If that difference can be perceived, it can be described.
Again, that's where we differ.
I'm unwilling to say that experience is limited by language, and I think language's inherent capabilities are finite.
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quote:This is really controversial. Martha Nussbaum's Poetic Justice does a decent job, in my esteem, of debunking the "sound argument," as the exhaustive-- or even sufficient-- route to truth.
It's not controversial among mathematicians or scientists. Only among humanists who produce nothing of objectively* estimable worth.
*This is a really meaningful caveat, since I take great subjective literary fulfillment from much of the work being done in the other humanities.
quote:Analytic philosophy, and I know you are going to disagree, has fetishized itself to an alarming degree and made itself into a hobby horse for the politically estranged, the result being that philosophy has as much relation to wisdom as chess has a relation to Truth. Analytic philosophy should have humbled itself after Quine and ceased castrating the good Universities of this nation.
As Tres has pointed out, ad hominem attacks do nothing to promote your case. But I suppose I expect too much by suggesting you should argue for your position, don't I?
Not sure what "politically estranged" means in this context.
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Wow. I edited my post at roughly the same time Dag was making a similar point.
Unlike Dag, I don't think language is inherently finite in the way he suggests; it is limited only by the consensual boundaries of experience. The classic -- and mainly false -- example of an eskimo's 40 words for snow occurs to me here. Snow that is named is not DIFFERENT from snow which is unnamed; it is not even different to an eskimo. But the eskimo perceives finer distinctions, and has -- through a discovered need to articulate those distinctions -- evolved terminology to describe them. I see no reason why it should ever be impossible for human language to continue doing this.
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Kat, that's why I was clear in noting that the "objectively" caveat was important to what I was saying.
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I don't know if you expect too much, rather, I think you expect inappropriately.
Maybe some people are moved to act in important matters by the logically consistent argument. I just don't know too many of these people, and the ones I know, I don't find too morally attractive.
I mean, you could try to reduce questions like "Should John marry Stacy," "Should Kwame become a father," and "Should Han join the army," to logical principles, but I think that the decision in all of those cases is properly and partially emotional, and if we try to degrade the place of emotion in understanding the complexity of those questions then we aren't giving the questions-- and marriage, childbirth, and soldiering are big ones-- their due.
And when big questions such as marriage, childbirth, and soldiering stop being relevantly informed by philosophy, then I think that philosophy has made itself irrelevant.
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Objectively is still the wrong word to use. Perhaps "as measured by certain, incomplete criteria."
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quote:The snow is not DIFFERENT; it is not even different to an eskimo. But the eskimo perceives the differences, and has -- through a discovered need to articulate those differences -- evolved terminology to describe them. I see no reason why it should ever be impossible for human language to continue doing this.
The ten-second version of why I think this false: the expression of an idea in language must be finite. Experiences are not finite, even when finite in extent in space and time.
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You still need non-objective principles to get from observable facts to moral imperatives.
A list of the things that will likely happen if John marries Stacy only helps in deciding whether they should marry if there is some means of categorizing those likely consequences into something akin to "good" and "bad."
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quote: A list of the things that will likely happen if John marries Stacy only helps in deciding whether they should marry if there is some means of categorizing those likely consequences into something akin to "good" and "bad."
Which is of course something philosophy -- and religion -- have tried to do for aeons. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:I submit that we should attempt to understand emotion, thus making it logical.
(Which definition of understand is being used here? )
I agree, but I submit that the emotion exists whether we could explain why we are feeling a certain way or not.
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Maybe, but in doing so, there is a huge danger of killing it. Was it Audobon who killed and stuffed the birds so that he could paint them as lifelike? There is a price when we do that to emotion, force it into a dress where it may not belong. My ideas are incomplete on this subject, it's one of the reasons I moved to Chicago.
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quote: I agree, but I submit that the emotion exists whether we could explain why we are feeling a certain way or not.
Certainly. And the way I'm using "understand," merely recognizing that we're feeling it grants us understanding of that impulse. And we can then choose to consciously act on that feeling WITHOUT consciously understanding its cause, or we can choose to delay action until we better understand the cause.
quote: Maybe, but in doing so, there is a huge danger of killing it.
Very true. I often find myself second-guessing what I feel as I feel it, for precisely this reason: "I'm angry. WHY am I angry? Is it constructive for me to react in this way, or is there a better way for me to express my anger that addresses the root causes of that anger?"
There is a value to gut instinct and emotion; we do a very good job of processing the "big picture" very quickly, thanks to biological and psychological designs, and it can be difficult to pick out all the other variables in a conscious way in order to make the best choice in the same amount of time. Often, our "instinct" does a better job at doing this by zeroing in on the truly relevant parts of any experience, and second-guessing that instinct can cripple its functionality.
But that's like saying that researching nuclear physics is dangerous; it IS, but only if you use it incorrectly.
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BTW, Katie, I'm still using my definition of "understand," although again I'm willing to start using yours if you'll tell me what it is.
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Tom, I think the problem with the definition of understand as it is being used is that the word understand seems to be standing for all the different degrees of perceiving and dissemination, from unconcious perception of pain to the ability to create a timeline of causes and accompanying reactions.
quote:And the way I'm using "understand," merely recognizing that we're feeling it grants us understanding of that impulse.
quote:I submit that we should attempt to understand emotion, thus making it logical.
What I am saying is that some things can be felt or percieved before we can explain the wherefores to ourselves. Another way to find truth is to trust it however it comes, even if we can't connect the dots completely.
That's certainly fraught with peril, but all paths to truth are.
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quote:A list of the things that will likely happen if John marries Stacy only helps in deciding whether they should marry if there is some means of categorizing those likely consequences into something akin to "good" and "bad."
We went from marriage to consequences, and I'm sure that we skipped a step. "I'm sorry. I love you, but I've generated a list of consequences, and well, we cannot get married. But I'll strike a deal, I'll marry you if you sign this pre-nup because I have to limit my liability."
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This is why I think such decisions cannot be made based solely on "objective" grounds, Irami. Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong: I'll boldly say that sound arguments don't move to action-- nor should they-- sound arguments laced with the appropriate emotion do-- as it should be.
Looks like we have a Humean.
You know, I'll agree with you, Irami. I think Kant's wrong when he purports that the only real moral action is the one done against the will and out of duty.
I do think rational analysis is necessary, but Irami's right and the appropriate emotion is requred to propel one to action.
John would be stupid to marry Stacy if he knew that she was cheating on him constantly and if he required fidelity in a spouse. Stacy would be stupid to marry John if he knew he never wanted kids and she thought children were essential to a happy life. On the other side of it, to marry someone you need to actually care for them; it doesn't matter how perfectly you should get along, if you irrationally hate the other person.
(Yes, yes, I see the flaws in this argument. I was just trying to go off the example already being used.)
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As for philosophers being unclear, I completely agree with whoever said earlier that it's all about being precise. I think a good example is Moore. Moore is tedious to read because he doesn't want to leave any room for misinterpretation.
A few months ago I read an article in the Economist (I think) that questioned the sense in expecting philosophical texts to be accessible to laypeople, when any texts in other fields were not. No ordinary person would expect to comprehend a paper circulating among chemists. Chemists are not required to make their work clear for everyone else. Sure, eventually the ideas are translated down to the rest of us, but the papers themselves are not. Chemists don't make chemistry available to us; journalists do.
In the same way, big philosophical ideas are translated to the masses through literature. Changes in philosophical movements can be seen in the popular novel. And like the example of chemistry, philosophers don't make philosophy available to everyone; writers do.
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I completely agree with Celaeno; I have a friend who constantly attacks philosophers for being unclear. He hates Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida with a passion. (he hasn't actually read anything by these people, beyond a few lines)
Why should Heidegger's Being and Time be immediately accessible to everyone? Why shouldn't it take a little work to understand and appreciate?
"There is no philosophy without the history of philosophy" - basically why a knowledge of past "canon" writers is important. Philosophers reference and build upon past writers constantly; if you don't know who they are building on, you won't always be able to grasp what they are saying now.
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quote:And when big questions such as marriage, childbirth, and soldiering stop being relevantly informed by philosophy, then I think that philosophy has made itself irrelevant.
So the only questions of relevance, the only three subjects that should concern scholars, are marriage, childbirth and soldiering?
I think you take a narrow view. For someone like Descartes or Hume, the precursors of the analytics you deride, these practical questions were never of utmost importance. They wanted to investigate what knowledge is and how we come to have it, what objects are and how we perceive them. The point has always been to clarify and justify the sciences.
But you're making me into a strawman. Neither I nor any analytic philosopher think that emotions are unimportant in decision-making. Far from it! If something will affect you emotionally in a certain way, that should help to dictate your actions. Absolutely. It should tell you how to behave.
What it won't tell you is what the physical world outside your mind is like. That's what I'm saying.
When I criticized "emotional appeals" as a mistaken alternative to valid arguments, I meant the rhetorical technique of 'ornamentation,' trying to arouse anger or passion in your audience in order to subvert their reason.
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quote:The problem is that analytical philosophers don't believe that there is something as called the "appropriate emotion."
That couldn't be more false. Every analytic ethicist I've ever met or read thinks that there is such a thing as appropriate or inappropriate emotion.
By the way, you seem to think that ethics and the theory of value are all there is to philosophy. Why? What happened to metaphysics and epistemology?
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quote: What I am saying is that some things can be felt or percieved before we can explain the wherefores to ourselves. Another way to find truth is to trust it however it comes, even if we can't connect the dots completely.
Truth can be stumbled upon that way, I agree. And in some cases, it may even be easier to understand that you're having a gut feeling and to act immediately on that feeling (which is pretty much the definition of "trusting" a feeling) than to understand what's causing that feeling, which -- provided that feeling is accurate and correct -- may bring someone to the truth faster. But this way lies danger.
Let's say you're looking for your favorite hot dog stand, which opened around eight months ago. You head downtown, but it's busy and you get turned around. You have a vague feeling that the stand is to your left, based on your memories, but you can strongly smell hot dogs somewhere to the right. You have a map in your pocket, but you aren't even sure where you are; you'd have to figure that out somehow. There are multiple ways to get to where you want to go: you could head left and hope, you could follow your nose, you could stop somebody to ask directions, you could stop somebody to ask where you are before consulting the map, or you could walk to the corner and read the street signs, then consult the map -- and hope in both those latter cases that your map is up to date. You could head home, then retrace your steps. You could build a scale model of your home town out of pigeon droppings, then ask someone to indicate the location of the hot dog stand on it.
ANY of these methods could bring you past your hot dog stand. Some of them would take longer. Some are more likely to be successful. And if you want the best one, you're going to have to spend some time defining what "best" means.
There are some things -- like dogfighting, day trading, catching a baseball, and first impressions of employees -- which studies have shown are best approached through gut instinct, because the mental processes involved in trying to do these things well are too difficult to do consciously. That's not to say that you can't train to be a day trader or baseball player, but that a TRULY great day trader or baseball player has internalized that training so much that he's able to instinctually understand what he needs to do without having to consciously think about it. That day trader may not be able to articulate why he picked one stock over another one -- it might have just "felt right" -- but it's because his training and experience have over time made him aware of principles and values that indicate a good stock. In theory, the day trader himself doesn't really need to know this, but someone wanting to TEACH day traders would.
Philosophers want to teach day traders. They want to teach everybody. When you look at somebody and go, "Hm. He looks guilty of something. I bet he just shoplifted something from that store," whether you're right or wrong, a philosopher wants to know why you had that gut feeling, and what things influenced it.
In this way, philosophy and theology neatly overlap with psychology and sociology. In the long run, they're all part of the same discipline of Why.
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quote:"There is no philosophy without the history of philosophy" - basically why a knowledge of past "canon" writers is important. Philosophers reference and build upon past writers constantly; if you don't know who they are building on, you won't always be able to grasp what they are saying now.
As I suggested in my first post, I disagree completely. Many philosophers do reference past philosophers, but this is a shortcut, so they can expand on old ideas rather than build an entire philosophy from scratch. I don't believe a good philosophy should ever need to rely on this, however - a good philosophy should depend only on the observations and assumptions we make about life ourselves, not a canon of established dogma. One should be able to start from scratch and explain why it is true, using sound argument, without relying on "go read Hume" or anything like that.
quote:Truth can be stumbled upon that way, I agree. And in some cases, it may even be easier to understand that you're having a gut feeling and to act immediately on that feeling (which is pretty much the definition of "trusting" a feeling) than to understand what's causing that feeling, which -- provided that feeling is accurate and correct -- may bring someone to the truth faster. But this way lies danger.
It is more than just stumbling. I think gut feelings are a sort of observation, where you see somethign to be true. It is a valid method of determining truth, but like sound argument, it has a flaw. Observation can be incomplete, meaning you observe (or feel) some of the truth, but fail to see other parts of the truth that would alter the observation as a whole. This is unreliable, but then again logic is unreliable too, since it is so easy to accept premises that aren't true or make inferences that don't completely follow. All in all, I think both are needed to live and act rationally. Sound argument refines and adjusts our instincts and intuition, whereas instincts and intuition act as a quick litmus test for the soundness of our arguments.
I think an "emotional appeal" is something altogether different though. It is an attempt to refine and adjust our observations and instincts without using sound argument - which typically means tricking our senses. It is a matter of figuring out the shortcuts our mind takes and exploiting those shortcuts to make a conclusion "taste good" to us. It requires no truthfulness on the part of the conclusion to make the conclusion seem true. For this reason, it cannot be considered a path to truth - instead this is what should truly be considered stumbling around.
Gut instincts are an important part of acting reasonably. Manipulating gut instinct is not, unless that manipulation is through sound argument.
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quote: I think gut feelings are a sort of observation, where you see somethign to be true. It is a valid method of determining truth, but like sound argument, it has a flaw.
See, I look at it completely differently. I think gut feelings ARE a form of argument (albeit not necessarily sound ones), but think that you're not consciously aware of the argument happening. Your brain still does a "stimulus ===> logical reaction" thing, but you don't necessarily understand at a conscious level why you're doing it. Which makes it less useful than conscious argument in most situations except those which a) demand speed or b) are so complex that attempting to remain consciously aware of all variables might only confound the topic.
You even concede this to some degree; you note that "observation can be incomplete, meaning you...fail to see other parts of the truth that would alter the observation." But if you grant that observation is occurring, and that a reaction occurs as a consequence of the observation, you essentially grant that a LOGICAL ARGUMENT is occurring. The only question is whether or not enough information is available to make that argument a sound one.
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quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "There is no philosophy without the history of philosophy" - basically why a knowledge of past "canon" writers is important. Philosophers reference and build upon past writers constantly; if you don't know who they are building on, you won't always be able to grasp what they are saying now. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As I suggested in my first post, I disagree completely. Many philosophers do reference past philosophers, but this is a shortcut, so they can expand on old ideas rather than build an entire philosophy from scratch. I don't believe a good philosophy should ever need to rely on this, however - a good philosophy should depend only on the observations and assumptions we make about life ourselves, not a canon of established dogma. One should be able to start from scratch and explain why it is true, using sound argument, without relying on "go read Hume" or anything like that.
Without understanding the problems of philosophy as historical, you aren't even going to begin to delve at the issues.
Look, some people think that you can understand America by reading today's newspapers, and start from there, but I don't think you can understand America except by understanding Western moderity, Protestantism, British Empiricism and Utilitarianism, the various wars and famines, and how all of these contingent factors inform the way in which the vast majority of Americans, myself included, view the political questions, conciously and unconciously, of our day.
You can't start from scratch. You are always already informed by historical baggage and this shows itself most brilliantly in language. The best we can do, and I say this with a deep respect, is to clarify and sort the baggage we understand as becoming to the country we want to be, the Marshall Plan for example, from the baggage that is not so morally attractive, the KKK for example.
Philosophy, understood historically, does this at a deep level.
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I appreciate Hume in a special way, for not only is his writing style delightful, I find him a clear thinker. I do believe that his philosophical project has been misunderstood by many people. Every philosophy student is taught the distinction between Matters of Facts and Relations of Ideas and the problem with predicting the future based on empirical knowledge--just because the sun rose yesterday, how is that a ground for believing that it will rise tomorrow-- but there is a section in the Essay where Hume ends by saying that even an infant knows fire will burn and food will nourish after the first experience, so the problem isn't with empirical uncertainty, the problem is with the inappropriate expectation of certainty in any empirical endeavor, it's a silly expectation that persists to this day in philosophy and in political life.
With respect to Hume's moral philosophy-- which compliments his metaphysics-- his understanding that we can't derive an "ought" from an "is," is a fine starting place for moral thinking, even if that means rejiggering that amoral, efficiency laden crap that's done in economics and political science classes.
quote:See, I look at it completely differently. I think gut feelings ARE a form of argument (albeit not necessarily sound ones), but think that you're not consciously aware of the argument happening.
I wouldn't call that completely differently... in fact, I might agree.
quote:Without understanding the problems of philosophy as historical, you aren't even going to begin to delve at the issues.
Look, some people think that you can understand America by reading today's newspapers, and start from there, but I don't think you can understand America except by understanding Western moderity, Protestantism, British Empiricism and Utilitarianism, the various wars and famines, and how all of these contingent factors inform the way in which the vast majority of Americans, myself included, view the political questions, conciously and unconciously, of our day.
Understanding America is not one of the most "essential" questions of philosophy. There are certainly branches of philosophy that require historical evidence, because that is the only place certain evidence can be found. There is not really any other place to observe what lies under the surface of American current events, so Understanding America is going to fall under the category of philosophical branches that entail historical background. I'm not disputing that such branches exist.
I'm disputing the idea that there is NO philosophy without the history of philosophy - the idea that without reading Locke or Hume or Descartes, you can't be doing philosophy at all. When it comes to more fundamental questions of human nature or metaphysics or epistemology or some ethical issues, you CAN and should be able to start from the scratch because the evidence is right there in front of you. These questions are hard to answer, but are also very basic, in that everybody has everyday experience dealing with them during their lives. All it takes to be a philosopher is to take that everyday experience and to examine it rationally, with the aim of finding the truth about them. Look at Eastern Philosophy, which managed to develop for a long time without the benefit of reading Plato or Aristotle. Look at Western Philosophy, which developed without reading traditional eastern works. Or look at the earliest philosophers of EVERY culture, who did philosophy without any reference to work from the past. Someone must have first done philosophy without having to build on past philosophers, thus you can do philosophy without knowledge of the history of philosophy.
A person could be dropped on a deserted island armed with only an understanding of how to reason, having never read any philosopher at all, and yet could still do philosophy. No, he couldn't study every branch of philosophy - the nature of America would be beyond his reach. But he could come up with excellent answers regarding his own nature and the nature of the things he would encounter there, among other philosophical issues. It would be slower and far more difficult without the guidance of past philosophers, but it would certainly be possible.
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