Maybe you better stick to comedy, because you are a disaster to serious matters. I can guarantee you that you will be comical if you don't try so hard to be a comical intellectual. LOLOriginally Posted by The Comedian
Maybe you better stick to comedy, because you are a disaster to serious matters. I can guarantee you that you will be comical if you don't try so hard to be a comical intellectual. LOL
What parts of my post did you "lol" the most?
Would I sound more intellectual if I said something like this: "philosophy sux; its just babbling BS"?
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Haha, motorcycle-ish, nice. Yeah I must say as well I'm surprised at the common theme I saw most posters here get to: philosophy is intriguing but not practical. I have to disagree with this. After all, aren't we using philosophy every day when determining any action or choice, based upon our reason?
However, that's not to imply we can't act in such a manner unless we've learned about it. For example, I've always been big on acting by means and duty, over what end gain I might achieve. I've never believed the end justifies the means. But when I took an ethics class, I found I probably act then more in accordance to a Kantian ethic for those reasons.
Also, I feel philosophical beliefs can be related all the time. Aristotle's Gold Mean seems strikingly similar to the Middle Way in Buddhism, just with different labels.
Perhaps the thread was too broad in its scope? I mean, there's countless theories and specific aspects of philosophy. Like, I could ask: do you lean more in the opinion on Absolutism or Moral Relativism? Do you think Feminism has been effective in creating equal rights for the sexes, or is their approach too aggressive? Etc.
"We sat around, scratching the earth with our feet, half looking up for a sign of the end. And all the while it had long since come and gone." Alexi Murdoch
One problem with most philosophical systems is that they are just that: systems, not easily applicable to an individual's life. For instance, we may read about "transcendentalism" as espoused by Emerson and Thoreau, but the only emulation we are able to try to is to hang out in the woods for a while, following the example of Walden. Not that it wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Another thorny problem is-- let's face it-- so much of it is so damned hard to read and understand. The reason for this is that our colleges, especially in recent decades haven't bothered requiring students to read and understand philosophy; the United States, for instance, has never been party to an intellectual tradition that values education for its own sake, only as a springboard into a lucrative career. At the lower level, very few children are given the basics of logic and critical thinking -- both crucial in the understanding of the obtuse thought processes involved in philosophical theory.
Apart from an individual's life, the macrocosm has occasionally attempted through the millennia to adapt philosphical systems to the political and economic society at large. Look around you -- do you see any extant examples of More's Utopia? How about Nietzsche, Hegel, and Soviet-style Marxism--how did all that turn out?
Show me somebody who lives his life according to Kant or can actually put Russell's logical positivism into actual practice. Like practicing one's religion to the point of sainthood, I'm not sure it can be done.
Last edited by AuntShecky; 04-11-2013 at 11:46 PM.
Philosophy can burden the mind with obviouses that are evident but are interfered with in a stance manner of questions and impossibilities that the norms becomes the complex. Is the mind mystified simply because it refuses to see the ultimate proof or it is not receiving confirmation and instead seeks to outer the norms?
Everydayness in sameness can be a deterrent to what is clearly natural to the naked eye.
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
Ethics and political philosophy will always be important, but they are necessarily informed by metaphysics and epistemology, which I think of as being the true business of philosophy. It seems to me as though epistemology and metaphysics can't really progress beyond Hume and Kant respectively. Everything since can only be speculative or an elaboration on what has already been said. So how can we have any certainty about our everyday reasoning when it has such shaky foundations? Science didn't kill philosophy, it killed itself by undermining any confidence we could have in it. Its greatest achievement was to show us the limits of what can know.
I still keep reading philosophy but no longer to the point where it gives me a headache. It feels very much like turning a threaded screw.
Last edited by ladderandbucket; 04-12-2013 at 01:47 PM.
Science cannot kill philosophy because it doesn't deal with stupidity. Science cannot kill religion because it will never have enough knowledge to do it. Religion can kill philosophy because it is an only possible conclusion of maturity in the acceptance of the mystery of His Grace.
This is an interesting argument. Can you demonstrate how religion (a monotheistic one, specifically) is the only possible conclusion one can reach?
I think it's pretty obvious and simple, which I think is also the motive some people don't get it. Any human concept posed as religion would defy the omnipotence of a God. The God would most certainly be enslaved by it.
Religion is not the belief that denominates a congregation. That's a mere framework that brings people together under some inescapable label for the purpose of identity. But a God that can be understood is no longer a God. The majority of people realize this and don't preach salvation but by His Grace.
It is a broad, very broad thought that cannot be broader than broad. It goes infinitely beyond evolution or creation. Another invalid thought regarding God with which people get con-fused is the idea of nothing or no thing. Thus some will postulate that there cannot be creation out of nothing, etc. We simply don't know and will never know. That's the beginning of mature thought.
Gods in a pagan, Epicurian sense do not transact with the flesh or human concepts. So they are neither a solution to the mystery.
Last edited by cafolini; 04-12-2013 at 04:15 PM.
I'm using this quote as an example, and I do not mean to address its author specifically, BUT...philosophy is dead, and now science reigns.
If people do not consider science a philosophical matter, we have a BIG problem on our hands.
Philosophy of science is a matter studied in its own right and ought to be. I fail to understand why it is so frowned upon for individuals to have "blind faith", as religion is often termed, and yet, it's perfectly respectable to take science as truth without posing a single existential question. I am formally trained in the sciences and am devoting my life to their practice, but only having taken a good hard look at what I think science IS and DOES, and how I am served by it.
So to answer your question, Comedian, philosophy has given me a broader perspective on the existential premises upon which I plan to base my life's work and has taught me many ways to ask ethical questions that I had never conceptualized.
I'm weary with right-angles, abbreviated daylight,
Waiting for a winter to be done.
Why do I still see you in every mirrored window,
In all that I could never overcome?
Perhaps we misunderstood each other; I'm not sure how religion is the only path one can reach without starting with the assumption of the existence of a deity.
This is well said, but to be fair most of the individuals I've met that criticize blind faith in religion have posed existential questions related to science.
Last edited by Dark Star; 04-12-2013 at 06:36 PM.
I'll close my case by saying that a deity to be such must be far beyond being and existence. If you don't see it as a realization that needs no assumption a-priori, then we misunderstood each other. Have fun. Live well. Pray for His Grace.
Religion is just a branch of study just like science. One sets out to say without proof and the other to proof without say. They are ultimately dependable. They are also not without decline.
Blind faith is because of how people are raised and so it is not so much religion as much the way one sees feels about things.This is well said, but to be fair most of the individuals I've met that criticize blind faith in religion have posed existential questions related to science.
Religion is diasporate because it can leads to disbelief the same with science. They both have their differences and similarities but they both drive people away from them too.
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
Look up one post, Shaman Raman says he does. Maybe not all of his life, but Kant appears to have had an impact. The original poster was asking if some kind of philosophy had an impact on people's lives, not if it had taken over peoples lives completely.
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