Slaughterhousefive42 said:
I am ignorant. There I said it. Now turn the mirror to yourself. What good is mental masturbating if NOTHING comes out of it anymore? Tell me how many people in America even know about philosophical ideas, much less understand them, even less follow them as guiding principles of their lives. People are guided by impulses and emotions, and if those fail, self-fulfilling reasons, just like most of philosophy.
Hijack as many ideas as you want, and you will remain puffing your chest out for people to see, without any result except for you coming across as arrogant, blinded, and as well ignorance. -notice the mispelling, does it matter, did you still get the meaning?
My beef with philosophy is twofold:
Like religion, it divides people with dogma and belief and language.
It is too damn afraid or weak to reach the masses, who are in desperate need of some out of the box thinking.
philosophy is NOT mental masturbation. you would be surprised at how much philosophical ideas influence our everyday lives. every thinking/questioning human being is a philosopher and has thought about philosophical questions in their life. many people unknowingly use the utilitarian model of judging the moral value of human actions(and perhaps this is one of the reasons why it's so important to understand utilitarianism and its strengths and weaknesses). much empirical science is based off of philosophical observations of logic and epistemological studies.
let me give you an example of how philosophy has contributed to the development of human societies and the human knowledge:
thales of miletos(580 BCE) is often attributed as the first ever philosopher recorded in human history. upon his visiting egypt thales attempted to explain why the Nile dried up in winter, and flood in the summer, unlike almost every other known river. his hypothesis was that desert winds were the cause of this phenomenon, and through various lines of deduction, he deduced that
everything was made of water. his hypothesis was based on the assumption that
if there is change, then there must be something behind change that itself does not change. thales also observed that the world was composed of different things, yet the world was somehow whole rather than being just a loose collection of different elements. his primary assumption in his hypothesis was that
if there are "many", then there must be a "one" behind the "many." in other words, his presupposition was that the concept of difference is logically dependent on the concept of sameness, which is more basic, and that difference must then be reducable to sameness. and by this supposition he came to the conclusion that
everything is water.
we all know now that his hypothesis was wrong, but what distinguished thales from his predecessors was that he relied on
logos rather than
mythos to explain things. before thales most people explained natural phenomenons with mythology and the supernatural. thales, however, explained natural phenomenons using
other natural phenomenon and logical deduction. the question he posed was based on the assumption that the human mind was capable of fathoming the
unchanging one behind the
many, and that once we fathom the
one we may begin to understand the
many. today physicists, chemists, and indeed modern philosophers are still concerned with this fundamental concern of what is the "unchanging" which lies behind the "many." and though it appears that thales was wrong in his assumption that water is the basic sameness behind all things, its is a very short ontological leap from "everything is water" to "everything is atoms."
some philosophers who have made great contributions to the hard sciences include pythagoras, who developed a school of philosophy devoted to mathematical contemplation, and sir isaac newton, who titled his main work
The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. much of the symbols and methodology used in formal logic were developed by philosophers long ago. this specialized form of philosophy has made possible the creation of modern computers and has a close relationship with mathematics. political and social philosophy are at the heart of human societies and the formation of states and governments. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, J.S. Mill, Marx are all names which not only come up in philosophy, but also in studies of government, politics, sociology, and history.
perhaps you think that philosophers are all idiots wasting their time studying a subject with no practical use, but that is only because you fail to realize what a tremendous impact philosophy has had on our society. To quote the preface to my intro to philosophy text(
Does the Center Hold by Donald Palmer--an excellent book if you aren't so closed minded as to dismiss philosophy as pure mindless drivel.):
To the uninitatiated, philosophy is hard. It's also intimidating. It's not clear what the point of philosophy is. Its uses are not easy to detect. Its arguments are often very abstract; it is difficult to see how they relate to "real life." Though its practitioners often seem out of touch with the world, they are obviously very smart, and it seems as though what they claim to be the most important points often depend on the subtlest of distinctions. Students are expected to read whole paragraphs--and sometimes, whole books--written by these philosophers in arcane or highly technical English, often in translation. Such reading assignments happen almost nowhere else in one's college career except in literature classes. But at least novelists write for a general audience, because nobody pays them if nobody understands them. For the most part, philosophers seem to write exclusively for each other.(Who pays them?) Worst of all, philosophers are contentious. They each seem to disagree with most other philosophers, so it's hard to know what's really true or whether any progress is every made.
[...]
[however, r]ather than being an odd and esoteric endeavor, philosophy hovers around all other activites and occasionally bursts through into them. I want students to recognize that we are all philosophers--that what Sartre says about freedom is true of philosophy--we are condemned to philosophize--and, in conjunction, that what their grandmother told them is true: anything worth doing is worth doing well. I hope students come to feel that the problems of philosophy have an existential import in their lives.
[...]
As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss says, just as some food is good to eat, some ideas are good to think.
^something to think about.
and aunty establishment:
there are a plethora of introductory philosophy courses and texts as i've mentioned before, people only need to look for them. the image of philosophy as a solemn and esoteric study is a cultural problem in my opinion. people just don't care about studying ethics or logic, and people like to bash on intellectuals.
most philosophy courses i've taken have been extremely accessible and i always enjoy taking them. we all have to start somewhere, and for some, it's discarding the assumption that philosophers are all pretentious and self-absorbed elitists who use inflated language compulsively, or that philosophy is a useless and inapplicable study. honestly, how many actual philosophy professors have you met who fit that description? i would say that most people dismiss philosophy before they are even exposed to it formally.
i understand your criticism of certain academic circles, but i was addressing slaughterhouse's blanket statements about the ENTIRE FIELD of philosophy when you interjected so i assumed that you were defending his position.
) and get some results, one set Quantum Mechanical, the other classical, based on these "hidden variables". They don't match. The only way there do exist hidden variables we have not learnt to measure yet is if information can travel faster than light (ie causality is broken). This is a fundamental pillar physics is built in, information doesn't move faster than light. Of course, we could be wrong, but it'd be a pretty massive "wrong". Hence either we're stuck with this uncertainty, no matter how fancy our technology gets or somewhere down the line someone is going to come up with a theory which kicks a lot of people's ideas in the nuts ![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
If you mean we'll just find sub-sub-atomic particles which will be the hidden variables but causality will be preversed, then that isn't the case, the theory shows that. 