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SEP updates + Philosophy: It's only just getting started?

#1
C C Offline
SEP updates

Color --revised: April 13, 2018

Géraud de Cordemoy --revised: April 11, 2018

Donald Cary Williams --revised: April 11, 2018

Al-Kindi --revised: April 11, 2018

Stoicism --revised: April 10, 2018

- - -

Why philosophy is taking its time to answer the big questions
https://aeon.co/essays/why-philosophy-is...-questions

EXCERPT: . . . Such solutions to the problem of philosophy’s progress are well worth considering. But all of them – mine will be another – face fundamental criticisms. Some propose that the whole idea of making progress toward the truth gets philosophy wrong. Rather, philosophy’s job is to help us respond effectively to social and political issues, such as those involving race, gender or inequality, or to deepen the gravitas of our culture, or to help us achieve the examined life. Consider the latter time-honoured goal, for example. If this is what philosophy is for, then it makes progress one person at a time, and can do so even if people successively grapple with much the same questions and answers, with no answers ever designated as the ‘right’ ones.

But can’t philosophy do all of these jobs and be a search for the truth about the Big Questions, as many philosophers – myself included – suppose it to be? Whole ways of doing philosophy would have to be sent packing or provided with a new identity if that were not so. Here it’s good to remember how wide and deep is the curiosity that churns beneath our skulls. As Aristotle says in the first sentence of his Metaphysics, all human beings by nature desire to understand. And it appears that not everything we want to understand is addressed by science. Questions rather different from those of science fill philosophy’s textbooks.

[...]

As David Chalmers points out in a paper that has generated considerable internet discussion, the Big Questions of philosophy tend to stay behind when the sciences leave home. ‘Psychology has not done much to settle the mind-body problem, for example,’ he writes. And plenty of other questions remain for today’s philosophers to try to answer, even after – and indeed because of – the advent of science. Philosophy wants to know if nature, which science explores, is the whole of reality, or whether there’s something more. Tracing, with science, the innumerable causal pathways associated with our behaviours, philosophy wants to know whether these leave room for me to really be free and deserve praise or blame for my behaviour. And if there are truths about how things ought to be as well as scientific truths about how things are, what are they and how are they discovered? Might there be no truths of the former kind at all? In that case, what should we say about morality? Philosophy wants to know.

[...] Distress about philosophy’s progress on the part of its practitioners seems to stem from the assumption that if we were going to crack the Big Questions assigned to us, we’d have done so by now or be getting close. The Big Answers would loom visibly before us like the great rocks of Stonehenge. Here, the old views about our place in time, which after James Hutton, Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin should indeed be history, are still making themselves felt. Reflection on deep time would instead prod us to think more deeply about whether our very early stage of intellectual development might not also exhibit radical developmental immaturity – and to notice the distinctive and accessible sort of progress that is appropriate to such immaturity.

How should we understand such immaturity? Everyday examples suggest that the notion can be made precise in either or both of two ways....

MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/why-philosophy-is...-questions
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#2
Yazata Offline
(Apr 13, 2018 06:45 PM)C C Wrote: Why philosophy is taking its time to answer the big questions

EXCERPT: . . . Such solutions to the problem of philosophy’s progress are well worth considering. But all of them – mine will be another – face fundamental criticisms. Some propose that the whole idea of making progress toward the truth gets philosophy wrong. Rather, philosophy’s job is to help us respond effectively to social and political issues, such as those involving race, gender or inequality

That kind of idea doesn't even appear to be intellectually coherent, since presumably these kind of neo-puritan academic moralists do believe that there's some truth regarding, right and wrong, good and evil, regarding "social justice" and "race, gender and inequality" that they want to promote and defend, whenever they set out to morally condemn anyone who disagrees with them (which is all the time).

Quote:or to deepen the gravitas of our culture, or to help us achieve the examined life.

Many of the Hellenistic Greeks (Stoics, Cynics, Epicureans, Skeptics...) did seem to conceive of philosophy that way, as kind of a spiritual psychology, intended to guide people towards being the best people that they could possibly be.  

Quote:Consider the latter time-honoured goal, for example. If this is what philosophy is for, then it makes progress one person at a time, and can do so even if people successively grapple with much the same questions and answers, with no answers ever designated as the ‘right’ ones.

I agree with that. I don't think of philosophy as being something that can tell individuals how to live their lives or what moral choices to make in particular circumstances. Individuals have to make those decisions for themselves and can't hand them off to a university professor somewhere. (Didn't John Paul Sartre make a similar point?)

Quote:As David Chalmers points out in a paper that has generated considerable internet discussion, the Big Questions of philosophy tend to stay behind when the sciences leave home.

I typically disagree with David Chalmers about most things, but I agree with that sentence.

That's because I conceive of philosophy as being a meta- discipline. Regarding ethics or natural science, philosophy's proper task isn't to make moral judgements or to explain the physical universe. Philosophy is more at home when it inquires into how morality and science do whatever it is that they are doing.

What are 'good' and 'evil', and 'right' and 'wrong', and how do human beings distinguish between them? (By intuition, seemingly.) So what happens when moral disagreements arise?

Philosophical aesthetics isn't about producing works of art, it's about defining what 'art' (and 'beauty' and 'ugliness' and 'the sublime') mean and about and how artistic judgments are made.

The philosophy of science isn't about explaining the physical universe, it's about examining how scientists go about explaining the physical universe, and about casting light on the many metaphysical concepts and methodological assumptions (typically supplied by the history of the subject) that scientists bring to their chosen tasks without much thought or justification.
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#3
Ostronomos Offline
(Apr 30, 2018 04:33 PM)Yazata Wrote:
(Apr 13, 2018 06:45 PM)C C Wrote: Why philosophy is taking its time to answer the big questions

EXCERPT: . . . Such solutions to the problem of philosophy’s progress are well worth considering. But all of them – mine will be another – face fundamental criticisms. Some propose that the whole idea of making progress toward the truth gets philosophy wrong. Rather, philosophy’s job is to help us respond effectively to social and political issues, such as those involving race, gender or inequality

That kind of idea doesn't even appear to be intellectually coherent, since presumably these kind of neo-puritan academic moralists do believe that there's some truth regarding, right and wrong, good and evil, regarding "social justice" and "race, gender and inequality" that they want to promote and defend, whenever they set out to morally condemn anyone who disagrees with them (which is all the time).

Quote:or to deepen the gravitas of our culture, or to help us achieve the examined life.

Many of the Hellenistic Greeks (Stoics, Cynics, Epicureans, Skeptics...) did seem to conceive of philosophy that way, as kind of a spiritual psychology, intended to guide people towards being the best people that they could possibly be.  

Quote:Consider the latter time-honoured goal, for example. If this is what philosophy is for, then it makes progress one person at a time, and can do so even if people successively grapple with much the same questions and answers, with no answers ever designated as the ‘right’ ones.

I agree with that. I don't think of philosophy as being something that can tell individuals how to live their lives or what moral choices to make in particular circumstances. Individuals have to make those decisions for themselves and can't hand them off to a university professor somewhere. (Didn't John Paul Sartre make a similar point?)

Quote:As David Chalmers points out in a paper that has generated considerable internet discussion, the Big Questions of philosophy tend to stay behind when the sciences leave home.

I typically disagree with David Chalmers about most things, but I agree with that sentence.

That's because I conceive of philosophy as being a meta- discipline. Regarding ethics or natural science, philosophy's proper task isn't to make moral judgements or to explain the physical universe. Philosophy is more at home when it inquires into how morality and science do whatever it is that they are doing.

What are 'good' and 'evil', and 'right' and 'wrong', and how do human beings distinguish between them? (By intuition, seemingly.) So what happens when moral disagreements arise?

Philosophical aesthetics isn't about producing works of art, it's about defining what 'art' (and 'beauty' and 'ugliness' and 'the sublime') mean and about and how artistic judgments are made.  

The philosophy of science isn't about explaining the physical universe, it's about examining how scientists go about explaining the physical universe, and about casting light on the many metaphysical concepts and methodological assumptions (typically supplied by the history of the subject) that scientists bring to their chosen tasks without much thought or justification.

Are you a metaphysical idealist? You seem not to argue from the perspective of humanism with regards to good and evil, right and wrong. Human beings may choose to take the perspective of absolutism and from there create a standard by which they can judge good and evil, right and wrong. Assuming such things are not mere concepts but actual tangible realities. The mainstream view might agree with you and say that good and evil, right and wrong are beyond human judgement and leave it to a metaphysical authority. However, proof of such a divine judge would come from an absolute, separate objectively valid criteria.
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