I was just thinking about how the last time i learned any philosophy was 15+ years ago, so i wonder, what’s something y’all know about philosophy? Let’s talk about it!
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All philosophy is based on the two opposing views “Cogito Ergo Sum” vs. “Esse Est Percipi”.
I recognize the first (i think therefore i am, Descartes big innovation) but my Latin is not great, what is the 2nd? Something like "that is perceived?“
“To be, is to be perceived”.
Like all things, 90% of it is just idiots egotistically gazing into their own assholes insisting that every aspect of their subjective self-revelation is universal, and in between that there are some good things here and there. Treat any philosophical concept as a filter, not a sponge.
Some philosophers have written in intentionally hard to understand language.
True. I’ve also read an article recently that philosophers get taught now a day’s to write really boringly and get made fun of if they use fancy words when simple words would have worked.
I know the world suffers so today because not enough people understand philosophy.
philosophy was replaced by philanthropic endeavors by the grossly rich. recorded and streamed online for all to see how “good christans” treat the destitute and needy.
morals are obligations only the poor are required to pay.
the world as we know it is dying horrifically and there’s nothing any one person can do to stop it.
the call to the danger is drown out by the incessant shrill bells of subscriptions releasing hourly, 24 hours a day. nobody will hear it before it’s too late.
we are already dead.
I majored in PHIL and took significant personal interest in it before that. I also deconstructed my faith in the 5 years prior to that. Philosophy asks all the questions, not just the ones that have immediate practical meaning or application or serve the will of those in power. Beyond that, it helps us develop better question asking and reasoning skills that are applicable to many other topics and pursuits. In some ways, philosophy is what education should be. It encourages you to discover and try to understand rather than just flip open your noggin on a hinge for someone to shovel in a bunch of junk for you to mindlessly repeat. If every school aged kid was introduced to philosophy the world would be a better place.
The only thing I know is that I know nothing.
This is it.
Did a senior paper 20 years ago marrying the concepts of naturalistic and normative epistemology.
The takeaway was that it doesn’t matter if you can’t actually prove that you know or don’t know anything. You have to live and have always lived as if you can/do know things.
This is like, my favorite saying lol
Lo unico que se
es que no se nadaI’m not even there yet 😔
Moral philosophy can be broadly divided into a few categories
Consequentialism - the idea that the morality of an action is determined by its consequences. For example, utilitarianism suggests that moral actions are the ones which produce the most happiness.
Deontology - the idea that there are moral laws, and that moral actions are those that follow the laws.
Virtue ethics - the idea that virtuous actions help us flourish and vicious (from vices) actions hinder us. There is also the concept that virtues exist in the middle (“golden mean”) of a scale between two vices, for example bravery is a virtue between the vices of cowardice and recklessness.
Pragmatism - the idea that there can be a moral progression of society and knowledge via study and inquiry. This is not so much a category of its own, but it’s compatible with the the main ones mentioned above.
On a personal note, I do not like consequentialism as a moral theory. I lean more towards pragmatic deontology but virtue ethics is also compelling.
You’re making me remember a term exam I had in my only philo class, freshman world philosophy. The professor asked something like the following,
My neighbor told me he thinks me feeding the birds in my backyard isn’t good for the environment. What do you think? Is it right, wrong or something else? Use what you’ve learned this semester to answer.
I thought this was brilliant because he got to have a room full of undergrads think and write about a real moral conflict he was having with another human, and also, good for having us use our educatuon as applied to a real question.
I can vaguely remember my answer, but I don’t really remember any of the world philosophy…
It’s an interesting one! I haven’t taken any classes but would love to do at least an introductory one. The Great Courses has a good series on moral philosophy and I enjoyed the book How to be Perfect by Michael Schur (creator of The Good Place tv show).
That question in particular would be difficult for me to answer in a purely philosophical sense. I suppose we’d need to define what good/bad for the environment mean etc.
The birds are fed, is that good for the environment? The birds are part of the environment, so yes I guess so.
Are the birds being fed appropriate food? We’d have to ask the professor.
Are at least some of the birds invasive or causing some other trouble in the environment? Have to gather more information.
Perhaps by feeding the birds, they are not eating as much other food like insects, which can cause pest issues?
I like to think your professor would grade on both your questions and your answers. Do you remember many of the specifics in your answer or any feedback you got?
Kind of a sore memory. This might have been the exam that for years afterwards whenever I saw this professor at social gatherings. He would say, hey sem, I still have an exam to get back to you. And I’d say, okay, I’ll come by your office, but I never did. We were a fairly tight knit small program, and he prof had a tradition of inviting people to his house on friday evenings for discussion or special guests, just to show you what the vibe was.
He knew i struggled with procrastination, which he didn’t hold against me. He would tell me how he once turned in a paper a year past the deadline.
I might be mixing up memories. I do remember him sharing by name his favorite answer and which student wrote it, which I disagreed with. That kid was very religious and studious, and had a scripture-informed answer, but he supported with other techniques from the class, that much I remember.
How you answer the question depends on you you frame right and wrong, moral and immoral, and thinking through those decisions and questions like you were doing is what he was looking for.
Wouldn’t deontology and virtue ethics be same in your description? Like virtues are those moral laws? (I never took a philosophy course btw)
Virtues are human traits, like bravery, honesty, kindness etc
Moral laws tend to be more about specific actions, like “lying is wrong”, “it is good to give to charity”.
They might arrive in the same place, but take different routes. In addition, with the golden mean aspect of virtue ethics, applying moral laws too much can be bad.
For instance, deontology might feel is it is wrong to lie and good to tell the truth and those will be absolutely, categorically true. Golden mean would suggest that it is possible to tell the truth too much, perhaps if we are too forthcoming with it, or too blatant/tactless with it, or needlessly offensive. I’m not a scholar on this stuff, but that’s my best explanation!
That makes a lot of sense, thanks!
I got as far as foucault, and the main thing i took away was that even with wildly differing moral philosophies, two people can always come to understand each other’s position if they can talk to each other long enough, though they won’t always agree in the end. There is no universal truth that is true for all of us.
Is that post-modernist philosophy?
Yeah, modernity was about things to be discovered and post-modernity was all about “everything is relative to social context”
Almost everything I know I learned from existential comics. This is one of my favorites https://existentialcomics.com/comic/540
Wow thanks for introducing me to this comics. They are amazing!!
You are very welcome. Here is another favorite https://existentialcomics.com/comic/582
Rofl i don’t think I’ve ever seen this spin on it before!
God damn nerd dragon
I love this one especially the discourse on the luddites!
I know that Ayn Rand is an charlatan posing as philosopher
The philosopher Schopenhauer absolutely HATED noisy people. He once threw a cleaning lady down a set of stairs because she was making too much noise.
Later he wrote a treatise where he posed that a persons tolerance towards noise is inversely related to their intelligence.
Also, one should not remove the anal beads as if one is attempting to start a lawnmower.
That’s deep.
Depends on the number of beads.
Yay that makes me a very intelligent person.
And I am allowed to throw people down the stairs!
(/s)
That last one is kind of a natural philosophy
Cars have windows and can move.
Houses have windows and cannot move.
Therefore it’s not the windows that make the car move, but something else entirely.
- PJ Evans
Profound.
Logical and correct!
Not quite. It just follows that windows are not a sufficient condition to make something move.
Consider this:
A person has legs and can walk. A dead body has legs and cannot walk. Therefore legs are not necessary in order to walk?
No, legs are just not sufficient you also need to be alive and some other things.
There’s something about all Crows are black and everything that is not black isn’t a crow
Modern formal logic is still considered part of philosophy, and is the basis of most programming languages. Ethics is very practical and specialized versions get taught in a lot of professional educations (medicine, law, economics, teaching, et.c.) - and it sure would be nice if people paid more attention to political philosophy.
I knew someone who took an engineering ethics course in college that completely changed his career and i think made him a better person.
In this spirit, all of science used to be part of philosophy, under the umbrella of “natural philosophy”.
I watched The Good Place like 5 times, so I know just about everything about moral philosophy. I also took computer science, so I know to always give lots of chopsticks when serving a group of philosophers.
Have you read How to Be Perfect yet? The Audiobook is so much fun.
Thanks for the recommendation. I just downloaded it from my library.
Did we watch the same show? I thought it was mostly about how Jacksonville, Florida was a weird place with weird people.
And something about whether Good Janet had free will, and if a Judge could be an alcoholic or something
Identifying an arguments fallacy by name usually doesn’t resolve an argument
Most of the time when you see this, the person being accused straight-up doesn’t seem to know their fallacies, so it doesn’t work.
If they do know, and try to explain why they’re not doing whatever fallacy, the conversation descends into a weird semantic debate, and the original point tends to be forgotten.
Explaining the problem with the argument in plain terms has a far better track record.
The fallacy fallacy!
A philosophy major explained to me that studying philosophy isn’t really as useless as it seems. That’s because whenever philosophers start to understand what they’re doing, they stop calling it philosophy and branch into real scientists. He said it’s unfair to judge the value of philosophy by the useless proto-sciences currently under study, but to consider the whole history of philosophy which includes every other field of study one can get a PhD in.
It’s true. They haven’t done that in a few hundred years, though.
I always get a kick out of the overlap between philosophy and math when it comes to formal logic/ proofs. Like, the underpinnings for dissecting an argument are exactly the same regardless of whether the discussion is about number theory or what it means to have consciousness.
Stoicism helps massively in a chaotic world like today
