To Vote, simply *favorite* one of the *Three* posts below:
.
POLL: What is Philosophy?
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
.
A kind of scientific knowledge
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
.
A kind of knowledge outside of science
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
.
Unscientific and therefore not knowledge of any kind
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
.
================ END OF CHOICES ====================
.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
INB4 BNW get all up ons.
But seriously, none of the above.
Philosophy is probably best described as the study and practice of rational thought. Though not necessarily in realms that can be defined empirically.
|
Given string theory invalidates religion and evolution even science is provably fraudulent. In the end it is all just a guess with a degree of consensus as to the most acceptable solution - or
SCIENCE: THE ABILITY TO BACK A BELIEF, NO MATTER HOW INCORRECT, WITH ENOUGH WORDS, SUPPORTERS AND SOCIAL PERSECUTION THAT THOSE WHO ARE UNABLE TO PROVE OTHERWISE WITHOUT ISOLATION FROM THE GROUP WILL NOT CHALLENGE YOUR VERSION OF REALITY.
This is backwards. Science stands on the shoulders of philosophy. Causality and empiricism (the idea that there is a neutral reality that is independent of the observer) are philosophical concepts without which science cannot exist. So no, philosophy as a whole is not scientific or unscientific. The scientific method is itself a philosophy!
Also
Unscientific and therefore not knowledge of any kindWTF? Are you seriously saying that anything that isn't scientific isn't knowledge?
Read choice 2.
.
I prefer "Philosophy = justified* belief" personally.
I dont think all philosophy counts as knowledge. Nonetheless, I chose the second as 'the best' option.
.
*
|
|
Philosophy consists of our views - our beliefs and attitudes towards ourselves and the world.
"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates
Doing philosophy is the activity of stating as clearly and convincingly as possible, what we believe and what we believe in. Without announcing your allegiance to some grand sounding ideas or buzz words.
"Know thyself!" - Oracle at Delphi
It is development of these ideas and the attempt to work them out with all their implications and complications.
"This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man." - William Shakespeare's Hamlet
Therefore philosophy is not a science, but can be done in a scientific manner to better help us understand ourselves and our place in the world around us.
"This is because it has not been established in ones mind beforehand. From this, one's unmindfulness of the way can be known.
Negligence is an extreme thing." Hagakure's Hidden by the leaves
Critical thinking is essential to what you will be doing all your life, to keep your priorities strait, knowing who you are and what you believe.
"There is therefore a path which the human being may choose to take, a path which begins with reason's capacity to rise beyond what is contingent and set out toward the infinite." Pope John Paul II - Fides et Ratio
This is backwards. Science stands on the shoulders of philosophy. Causality and empiricism (the idea that there is a neutral reality that is independent of the observer) are philosophical concepts without which science cannot exist. So no, philosophy as a whole is not scientific or unscientific. The scientific method is itself a philosophy!
Also
Unscientific and therefore not knowledge of any kindWTF? Are you seriously saying that anything that isn't scientific isn't knowledge?
It's good to remember that what we call science was long known as natural philosophy. The terms we use in talking about the enterprise and those who prosecute it became widespread in the 19th century.
*covers the philosophers in BBQ sauce*
It's good to remember that what we call science was long known as natural philosophy. The terms we use in talking about the enterprise and those who prosecute it became widespread in the 19th century.This is backwards. Science stands on the shoulders of philosophy. Causality and empiricism (the idea that there is a neutral reality that is independent of the observer) are philosophical concepts without which science cannot exist. So no, philosophy as a whole is not scientific or unscientific. The scientific method is itself a philosophy!
Also
Unscientific and therefore not knowledge of any kindWTF? Are you seriously saying that anything that isn't scientific isn't knowledge?
We also used to call chemistry alchemy, and went to the barber to have surgery done. (the striped pole used to be bandages drying)
There is kwnoledge outside science, but sadly philosophy is not a kind of kwnoledge.
Neither is science. Science is a methodology by which we discern things that are empirically true from things that are not by hypothesis and repeated experimentation.
In deference to BNW, I believe in empiricism. I think there are large swaths of philosophical thought that we can basically chuck in the garbage. There are, nonetheless, branches of philosophy that continue to be useful to society despite having no basis in empiricism. Logic, for example, and ethics.
Meat,
I think there's a big difference between
1)Ethics (ethical behavior) and
2)Ethics: the study of the rational behind what is right and wrong.
People almost invariably just feel their way to the answer 1 and then use whatever logical chicanery of 2 they want to get there.
"The philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."
--Darl Jubannich, "Theses on Hosseter"
Vive le Galt!!
Read choice 2.It's not choice two. Science is a kind of philosophy. That doesn't make philosophy a kind of knowledge independent of science; science is itself a philosophy for understanding and making sense of phenomena.
Science and philosophy are not opposed principles. They are not even independent from each other.
.
Then you are leaning towards Choice 1.
.
Meat,
I think there's a big difference between
1)Ethics (ethical behavior) and
2)Ethics: the study of the rational behind what is right and wrong.People almost invariably just feel their way to the answer 1 and then use whatever logical chicanery of 2 they want to get there.
I think I see what you're saying, and I don't necessarily disagree. HOWEVER most people aren't ethicists. I'm not sure how the actions of people not versed in a school of thought (philosophy of ethics) have any bearing on the relevance of said school of thought.
Most people don't go around thinking what makes gravity work, or even questioning it in the slightest, but I'm for damn sure glad we have people at CERN trying to figure that s%+& out.
Well, the difference is that when someone at cern says that the Higgs Boson partical exists, we've learned an objective fact about the universe. Those eggheads are objectively better at finding out what reality is, how it works, and (hopefully) how we can finagle that understanding to get us antigravity teleporters and jetpacks. (its the year 2000 dammit.. WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR!) If they get something wrong, an experiment somewhere down the line will catch their mistake.
When an ethicist says X is right or X is wrong... they haven't proven anything, or even given evidence for anything. Chances are a different ethicist could say the opposite, and there's no objective way of ever settling the dispute.
The only thing they're doing is putting a patina of philosophy on an already held idea: the idea will be held with or without them. They've simply come up with a way to put it in their own words, which is kind of pointless.
Philosophy that disagrees with science is ignorance.
Philosophy that agrees with science is superfluous.
Philosophy that doesn't meet with science at all is extraneous.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'll put it to you like this then, BNW.
Why is it illegal to clone a human being? Why don't we have body part banks yet?
Whatever side of it you're on, the reason they're illegal is because some ethicist (you know, that extraneous philosophy) had to make a rational argument about it being wrong because of X, Y, and Z. What is and what isn't wrong can't be determined by science. It is, nonetheless, important as a backbone of our civilized society.
This doesn't mean that Joe Six-Pack doesn't have views about right and wrong, and that those views are equally correct based on reasoning. No more than he needs to have a degree in physics to know that "things fall down".
But as the edifice of civilization is built ever higher, and more and more disparate people interact in new ways, there will be more and more persnickity corner cases, questions about right and wrong that can't be answered by observance. Which in the end is all that science does, observe something, hypothesize an answer, and test it until they're sure what they hypothesized was in/correct. It doesn't create new ideas, it defines what is already present in the natural world.
I'll leave you with this question, to be answered using only the scientific method:
Is it wrong to kill another human being?
Why is it illegal to clone a human being?
small picture answer: Because a bunch of lawmakers decided to make it illegal.
big picture answer: people feel that its wrong and creepy.
Why don't we have body part banks yet?
Because we can't just grow part of a person yet, we have to grow the whole thing, and at the moment that means growing a brain, which makes the clone a person.
Whatever side of it you're on, the reason they're illegal is because some ethicist (you know, that extraneous philosophy) had to make a rational argument about it being wrong because of X, Y, and Z.
But is an ethicist that made a rational argument to the contrary wrong?
What is and what isn't wrong can't be determined by science. It is, nonetheless, important as a backbone of our civilized society.
I don't object to arguing right and wrong, what I object to is the idea that the formalized study is adding anything, much less objectivity, to the discussion.
This doesn't mean that Joe Six-Pack doesn't have views about right and wrong, and that those views are equally correct based on reasoning. No more than he needs to have a degree in physics to know that "things fall down".
But the physicist can calculate exactly how fast that thing is falling, and even launch things from one planet and hit another. What can the ethicist do besides add layers of fancy language ?
I'll leave you with this question, to be answered using only the scientific method:
Is it wrong to kill another human being?
Not a scientific answer, but "Usually"
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
So your overall objection to philosophy seems to be it doesn't result in something that is incontrovertibly true. Is that approximately correct? And that it doesn't contribute something to a knowledge base, as science does, but boils down to being opinions (however rationally couched)?
Do you then think that nothing that contributes such a thing is likewise "extraneous"? Film? Literature? Role-playing games?
As for the two ethicists conundrum, I'd put it to you that there are many scientists who disagree with one another on the very foundations of science. They are still considered learned and rational individuals, and indeed this disagreement is what propels scientific discovery forward rather than it being an echo-chamber of ideas.
At the moment the physics community seems to be split on the whole string theory thing. People swing either way, based on their own conclusions, based on evidence presented (or lack thereof) etc etc. Now, it may come to pass that we are able to be certain one way or another. Which is what makes science awesome, and why I won't quibble with your first two statements.
However, on issues that the methodology of science can't be brought to bear on, such as ethics, such an argument rages in perpetuity. But, as with ethics, new information, new paradigms are incorporated into the arguments one way or another, which sway minds, and indeed change the course of history easily as much science or technology does.
In the end I just want you to do what you always tell others to do. There are vasts swaths of philosophy which, for perfectly valid reasons, you think are a load of hooey. You can say THAT philosophy is bunk, but don't dismiss the rest of it out of hand, because different schools of thought are different as night as day. You wouldn't walk into a bookstore, see that it's all Twilight clones these days, and denounce reading as a bunch of hogwash would you? Even if 99.999% of books don't interest you in the slightest.
Because we can't just grow part of a person yet, we have to grow the whole thing, and at the moment that means growing a brain, which makes the clone a person.
Eh, it wouldn't be hard to use the same tools we've had to work on embryos for a century to cripple the developing brain. There's very little brain tissue one actually needs just to keep the vitals running long enough for a harvest. Sure it might seem like a lot to do, but considering the whole rest of the body would be good parts I think it would probably be worth it.
The difficult part would be having some kind of artificial womb setup so we're not risking some poor woman's life all the time to grow our spare parts. Though I suppose if we had human cloning we'd only need to do it once and then we could just lobotomize a developing clone and clone that sucker again and again for all the wombs we'll need. It's a hard thing to ask, but I imagine there are some female scientists or just generally philanthropic types who might be willing to do it. It's not that different from surrogate arrangements we already have.
...but they don't invite me to the bioethics panels. You'd think what with how often they end up inviting priests they'd be than willing to pull random people off the street.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Eh, it wouldn't be hard to use the same tools we've had to work on embryos for a century to cripple the developing brain. There's very little brain tissue one actually needs just to keep the vitals running long enough for a harvest. Sure it might seem like a lot to do, but considering the whole rest of the body would be good parts I think it would probably be worth it.
The difficult part would be having some kind of artificial womb setup so we're not risking some poor woman's life all the time to grow our spare parts. Though I suppose if we had human cloning we'd only need to do it once and then we could just lobotomize a developing clone and clone that sucker again and again for all the wombs we'll need. It's a hard thing to ask, but I imagine there are some female scientists or just generally philanthropic types who might be willing to do it. It's not that different from surrogate arrangements we already have...
No offense, Samnell (you know I respect your opinion)--this entire post is why we need philosophy.
|
|
I gather from many of the comments in this thread and numerous others, that some of you very sincerely see no use for philosophy in life; and that some of the more science-focused of you see no use for philosophy in science.
Take a look at these dissertations from MIT.
It's not all Plato, Hume, and Existentialism.
Zoot alors!!
Philosophy gets you laid, BNW. That's what it's good for.
Seriously, put on a black turtleneck, a beret and go hang out where the "deep" girls are, smoke a clove cigarette, talk about the absurdity of life and, voila!! you shall be making the beast with two backs in un, deux, trois...
By "philosophy" I mean: hanging out in cafes with beautiful girls, listening to hot jazz music, shooting up on the Left Bank and being snooty to people.
What do you all mean?
Yes, and that illusion of fancy words is what gets you laid, Nicos.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Without philosophy to give us a framework for deriving conclusions from observations, science would be meaningless.
Hardly. But before I gave my opionon on why, i would like to hear your opinion on
What is philosophy? - Please no links. I have found that the definition of that word is enough vague to represent whatever the speaker wants. So i want to know what do you mena by "philosophy".
Nice.
I have no desire to give an opinion, only to pick apart someone else's!
To help you out with this one:
Philo- = loving
Sophis = wise
Philosophia = the love of knowledge/wisdom
translates into English as Philosophy.
I have no idea why these science vs philosophy threads exist but every single one seems to go to hell very quickly. Is there something in US education which creates this weird false dichotomy?
Next week on preposterous-false-dichotomies.com: Is rugby an art form? Is brewing beer a form of domestic violence? Is Google a medicine?
Well, considering that modern Science is fundamented in the Scientific Method, which is in turn fundamented in the philosophical school of Empiricism, I really don't see how can we separate the two. Much on the contrary, Science is part of Philosophy.
Next week on preposterous-false-dichotomies.com: Is rugby an art form? Is brewing beer a form of domestic violence? Is Google a medicine?
No, no, and yes (against dictionaries).
To help you out with this one:
Philo- = loving
Sophis = wise
I love to love the wise. Non, not now, Simone, ooh la la, okay, now! Pardon moi...
Please. You can say almost anything about philosophy but systematic? there is not system along history. Rational arguments? really? I do not know much aobut contemporary autors (XX century), but rational argumentation is far from what you get in (most)philosophy books, Just the ilusion of fancy words.
You have never read ANY philosophy have you? You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.