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Can philosophy ever produce useful results?

Can philosophy produce useful results

  • Yes

    Votes: 6 60.0%

  • No

    Votes: 1 10.0%

  • Lemme explain

    Votes: 3 30.0%
  • Total voters
    10
Trick question (not really). The answer is no ;)

Philosophy is useful but I wouldn't say that it answers questions
 
December Flower said:
The question "why" has made us what we are today. Philosophy is the one absolute science that made us thrive for the unknown and discover our world, and everything beyond.

I find it rather disgraceful that our science today is often expressed by pure data, and our scientists today are often just motivated by tasks or money, not so much curiosity. A person that would make it upon themselves to discover things about the world first-hand, explore it, instead of learning it, would in my eyes be much more of a scientist, than anyone that just goes through the pre-programmed education to do pre-programmed things with their minds later on.

Maybe that's why I love particle- & astrophysics so much, so many questions to ask. The questioning is a big part of what makes science science.

Also: I would counter your argument by saying that Philosophy is governed by logic, where Spirituality is governed by "gut feeling", for lack of a better word.
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Meh, well it's not really an argument. Just my perspective. Whereas I understand and agree with your perspective, logic can also be applied to spirituality. That's why the ancient east had so many spiritual sciences, and from that we know about things like chakras
 
thegreenhand said:
Title basically. Don’t get me wrong I love discussing philosophy but has it ever produced any useful answer that has tangible results in our world? it seems like academic philosophers talk themsleves into circles yet they insist that their work is critical. I’m starting to think that it may not be so
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Just on this, I’ve never personally gone in for that idealistic strive to achieve full ego dissolution.

I’m a heavy longtime psychedelic user myself but I’ve always personally seen it as a mythological or illusory concept, and for many, egocentric ironically in the way it’s aspired for.

Now, I’m not saying I’m right at all. It could well just be a cop out.

But to my own philosophical mind, and it’s always been by nature a very philosophical one at that, I see our “ego” not as a demon or weakness or anchorweight to be exorcised, but as a useful if not vital part of our current mortal selves, and which can serve us very well with a bit of tempered balanace and just the right amount of humbleness.

But I was only about to say actually, I’ve been thinking 2 days ago about the legendary Socrates.

And how I reckon, on this, that man pretty much had the whole ego dissolution thing nailed back then, and I was honestly curious- did they even have a spelling for Psilocybin back then lol? Honest curiosity.

But Socrates passionately founded his philosophy on the concept/principal “All I know, is that I know nothing.”
 
December Flower said:
I find it rather disgraceful that our science today is often expressed by pure data, and our scientists today are often just motivated by tasks or money, not so much curiosity. A person that would make it upon themselves to discover things about the world first-hand, explore it, instead of learning it, would in my eyes be much more of a scientist, than anyone that just goes through the pre-programmed education to do pre-programmed things with their minds later on.
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i respectfully disagree but i am going to qualify this with essentially an agreement. to me you are kinda making the distinction between a technician- someone without research skills who does basic lab stuff, and a researcher. whether the former is classed as a scientist is probably down to personal taste.

so, i started out my life in science driven by pure curiosity and utterly inspired by my chosen subject area. i would be earning significantly more money now had i got a job straight out of undergrad- phd stipends and post doc salaries are a joke. so, its really not about money. every scientist in academia could be earning way more outside of academia. i left academia but for a research job in industry because i can't imagine doing anything else and being happy.

most scientists i know are motivated by curiosity, and are excptionally bright and hard working. but, we exist in a shitty system where funding is not necessarily allocated based on who has the best ideas. case in point, my last lab in academia. the university it was based at discovered a material that looked like it might do great things, and they wanted to make sure that if any such applications were discovered, they were discovered there. so, basically a lot of money was being spent to study medical applications of this material with no real motivation or justification. and guess what, mostly it sucks, for one potential cancer treatment, it turned out to promote a key step in metastasis. then politics gets involved, there was one potential cancer treatment that worked amazingly, but my ex boss is an arsehole, he sacked the post doc who designed that pilot study and gave it to a 1st year PhD student, essentially robbing people with glioblastoma ('the terminator') a chance at life. so you end up with a whole lab of decent people working on things almost certainly doomed to fail for reasons beyond their control.

sorry to go off topic i guess i wanted to rant about how frustrating it is to be supposedly working on cancer diagnostics and treatment when really you're just diverting money and time away from things that have a chance of actually working.
 
Not any more. There used to be a time when most well-educated people had a grounding in classical philosophy as well as the philosophy of the day. People could see the connections between philosophical ideas and the way society organised itself and they organised their own behaviour. Political discourse then had a philosophical grounding and was somewhat more idealistic. But if you read great debates over major social issues in the past you see philosophers being invoked all the time.

Nowadays people have no idea where the ideas they are using or rejecting actually originate. Most everything we think of as a social problem today has been addressed from a philosophical standpoint in the past. I guess that means that the answer to the original question is ‘not really’. The philosophy being deployed today is now ‘anonymous’ in the sense that few people know the intellectual history of the ideas being chucked about in social and political discourse.
 
For what it's worth here's my take. And not sure if it fits into the arguments already made here. But it is indeed something I have found myself questioning a lot particularly over the past two years or so.

I've watched quite a few lectures (I mean like proper, hours and hours, of shit from Yale and wherever else) on philosophy. And the one thing that concerns me and that seems to be the norm when this stuff is taught is that it's always based on a predecessor. Along the lines of "Socrates said..." or "Aristotle said..." or "in the words of Socrates..." or "in the words of Aristotle..." (as but two examples of course). Well what if they were wrong? I honestly do no recall hearing a single somebody saying "well Socrates was high and talking shit when he said..."! 🤣

I find the same thing with science papers (although I know I've had this argument or, rather, this debate before). I've seen a good number of supposed new science papers where the content of the supposed new science being presented is a page long, peppered with hundreds of references to the work of predecessors and listed below the paper, and the list of references and credits is longer than the new paper itself and by a huge margin. And the obvious danger of this: what if those predecessors were wrong or made a mistake (maybe multiple of them over, say, a 100 year span)? And there's actually a term for this, which another member noted somewhere on another thread, but that doesn't readily come to mind right now. But for sure I've seen it happen i.e. a simple regurgitation of old theory but with a new (if you're lucky) and less than noteworthy twist. Or worse still: a reinforcement of previously flawed research simply because it's been republished at a more current point in time and is therefore deemed as gospel.
 
dalpat077 said:
I've watched quite a few lectures (I mean like proper, hours and hours, of shit from Yale and wherever else) on philosophy. And the one thing that concerns me and that seems to be the norm when this stuff is taught is that it's always based on a predecessor. Along the lines of "Socrates said..." or "Aristotle said..." or "in the words of Socrates..." or "in the words of Aristotle..." (as but two examples of course). Well what if they were wrong? I honestly do no recall hearing a single somebody saying "well Socrates was high and talking shit when he said..."! 🤣
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i think you might be misunderstanding. they are not referencing these people to suggest they are right, they are referencing them as the originators of the concept or argument they are presenting. if you've been watching philosophy lectures where they claim to give you answers, those are poor lectures. i don't care where the lecturers are. most of the stuff i studied in philosophy started out by referencing the greeks because those guys started debates that ongoing to this day, so it is important to mention them to place things in context.

even where it doesn't seem relevant.... i watched Carlo Rovelli talking about loop quantum gravity at a philosophy of physics summer school, and he started his lecture with Anaximander.


dalpat077 said:
Or worse still: a reinforcement of previously flawed research simply because it's been republished at a more current point in time and is therefore deemed as gospel.
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this does happen, but science is to a large extent self correcting. what you are describing sounds like 'pessimistic meta induction' - it is important to look to falsify things at all times, but if many many references have confirmed the same results in different ways, then it is fair to assume that those results are valid. the prevailing interpretation might be wrong but that's a different thing entirely.

if we had to do everything from scratch without referencing previous work, we would have an even larger chance of being wrong. i personally doubt i could invent calculus myself so i'd be fucked if i wanted to reason about things that ever vary.
 
chinup said:
i think you might be misunderstanding. they are not referencing these people to suggest they are right, they are referencing them as the originators of the concept or argument they are presenting. if you've been watching philosophy lectures where they claim to give you answers, those are poor lectures. i don't care where the lecturers are. most of the stuff i studied in philosophy started out by referencing the greeks because those guys started debates that ongoing to this day, so it is important to mention them to place things in context.

even where it doesn't seem relevant.... i watched Carlo Rovelli talking about loop quantum gravity at a philosophy of physics summer school, and he started his lecture with Anaximander.



this does happen, but science is to a large extent self correcting. what you are describing sounds like 'pessimistic meta induction' - it is important to look to falsify things at all times, but if many many references have confirmed the same results in different ways, then it is fair to assume that those results are valid. the prevailing interpretation might be wrong but that's a different thing entirely.

if we had to do everything from scratch without referencing previous work, we would have an even larger chance of being wrong. i personally doubt i could invent calculus myself so i'd be fucked if i wanted to reason about things that ever vary.
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Fair enough. You make good points. That I obviously didn't think about. Not something I've actually studied but have put in some hours for what it's worth. I'm pretty much talking about these lecture series that are put out by a lot of the universities (mainly in the USA and the UK). And as you say: maybe looking at it from the wrong perspective. To my credit: staying awake and concentrating for seven hours of a philosophy lecture on the topic of life after death (as an example) is an accomplishment in and of itself! :unsure:

Anyway. Maybe I came out of the gate guns blazing a bit fast on this one. It would have been more accurate to mention that post going through all of those types of lectures and then watching the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris (and the rest): that's more accurate i.e. it wasn't the lectures themselves but rather such individuals that refer to such philosophers in order to make their arguments on occasion. It's no secret that I'm a Christopher Hitchens disciple. But I guess that's when I've asked the question(s). So I may have wasted your time on this one. Sorry.

As for the actual topic (which I was going to add in another post anyway): I think it produces useful results. If for no other reason than that it makes us postulate and debate and think about things and maybe now and then results in a light bulb moment (obviously I'm not an academic i.e. that's my rudimentary interpretation of course). Right or wrong (if such can be judged in such binary terms): these were wise men (in reference to old philosophers above). Again in layman's terms: more able to see the wood for the trees than your average Joe Soap type of thing. George Orwell comes to mind as I type this (Christopher Hitchens has an entire lecture on "Why Orwell Matters").

Science? Well. Cannot argue with that one either I guess. Truth be told: I'm talking really about an extremely narrow field of interest. I guess there's only so many ways you can skin a cat really. But it does piss me off when I come across some new paper only to find I've read the exact same shit as was published 100 years ago type of thing and/or have already downloaded and read the 200 references contained in, but that preceded, the new paper! 🤣

Alright. This way above my pay grade I reckon. Carry on as you were! 🤣
 
dalpat077 said:
Fair enough. You make good points. That I obviously didn't think about. Not something I've actually studied but have put in some hours for what it's worth. I'm pretty much talking about these lecture series that are put out by a lot of the universities (mainly in the USA and the UK). And as you say: maybe looking at it from the wrong perspective. To my credit: staying awake and concentrating for seven hours of a philosophy lecture on the topic of life after death (as an example) is an accomplishment in and of itself! :unsure:

Anyway. Maybe I came out of the gate guns blazing a bit fast on this one. It would have been more accurate to mention that post going through all of those types of lectures and then watching the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris (and the rest): that's more accurate i.e. it wasn't the lectures themselves but rather such individuals that refer to such philosophers in order to make their arguments on occasion. It's no secret that I'm a Christopher Hitchens disciple. But I guess that's when I've asked the question(s). So I may have wasted your time on this one. Sorry.

As for the actual topic (which I was going to add in another post anyway): I think it produces useful results. If for no other reason than that it makes us postulate and debate and think about things and maybe now and then results in a light bulb moment (obviously I'm not an academic i.e. that's my rudimentary interpretation of course). Right or wrong (if such can be judged in such binary terms): these were wise men (in reference to old philosophers above). Again in layman's terms: more able to see the wood for the trees than your average Joe Soap type of thing. George Orwell comes to mind as I type this (Christopher Hitchens has an entire lecture on "Why Orwell Matters").

Science? Well. Cannot argue with that one either I guess. Truth be told: I'm talking really about an extremely narrow field of interest. I guess there's only so many ways you can skin a cat really. But it does piss me off when I come across some new paper only to find I've read the exact same shit as was published 100 years ago type of thing and/or have already downloaded and read the 200 references contained in, but that preceded, the new paper! 🤣

Alright. This way above my pay grade I reckon. Carry on as you were! 🤣
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The problem you might be having stems from the fact that with philosophy you always have to start with taking at least something as a given. So in a sense every school of philosophy is a house of cards if you attack its initial precepts rather than it’s internal coherence (and in contemporary European philosophy internal coherence is not necessarily a given to begin with). The historical development of philosophy has generally been been one of trying to find the most basic precepts (which I think is our capacity to reason) from which to develop what the Greeks called Eudamonia (the Good Life). Lately though it’s forgotten about that and had it’s head up it’s arse and adds nothing to human happiness.
 
thegreenhand said:
Title basically. Don’t get me wrong I love discussing philosophy but has it ever produced any useful answer that has tangible results in our world? it seems like academic philosophers talk themsleves into circles yet they insist that their work is critical. I’m starting to think that it may not be so
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Have you noticed how secular law and philosophy is better than what the various theologies have come up with?

Would you like to live with stoning fornicators and unruly children?

Would you like to be in a world where, if you are not a homophobe or misogynous, your own people will turn against you?

Regards
DL
 
TripSitterNZ said:
I mainly enjoy the philosophy of non-duality to achieve awakening.
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How does that work when all that may have has a dualistic nature?

I say that because I know of no objective moral tenet other than the good of the many outweighs the good of the few.

Do you have an example for me that has awakened you?

Regards
DL
 
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