Ask a Philosopher!

[Fifty]

Is beauty objectively definable?

I would appreciate both your views/any philosophy resources like the ones you mention. Thanks, and good luck with the thread!

I have to ask something before I can really have a crack at this one. There are two senses of the question you are asking, and I'm wondering which one you are curious about (so that I don't accidentally answer the other one!)

1) Are there objective aesthetic truths? That is, is there some aesthetic standard to which judgments of aesthetic merit have to answer to, in the same way that there is an objective fact about 2+2 that claims of arithmetic have to answer to?

2) Are aesthetic judgments inherently subjective, in that it is based on feelings, attitudes, or dispositions of the person making the judgment.


Here is a big article with a good bibliography.

The 1st statement is a question about aesthetic value theory, the second is a question about (I suppose) philosophy of mind or something. So which one were you curious about?

What education have you completed to be a philosopher?

Formally I have just a BA in philosophy (from a very strong philosophy department). In terms of coursework I essentially have an MA (have collaborated with profs on original work, taken tons of atypically rigorous seminars, presented at professional conferences etc.) I'll be enrolling in a PhD program eventually.

Assuming God doesn't exist in any way, shape or form, where do absolute moral values come from?

Well I'm not quite sure what it would be for moral truths to come from somewhere. The best rephrasing of your question I can come up with is "In virtue of what, if not God, are moral truths true?". First, its worth noting that it isn't at all clear that this is a special problem for moral theory. I mean, we can perfectly well ask too "In virtue of what, if not God, are mathematical truths true?" But what kind of answer could possibly be had to this question? I mean that non-rhetorically. What would the conditions be under which a satisfactory answer to these questions could be given? I tend to regard them more as pseudo-questions, on par roughly with "Is this all a dream?" type stuff.

Or maybe you're asking what the criteria of evaluation are for moral judgments? Like how do we access the standard, or how do we determine the standard, for the truth or falsity of moral judgments if there is no God. Is that what you're asking?

My question is, what exactly is the lasting appeal of Bertrand Russell, when his whole notion of mathematics and logic got so badly crushed by Godel's work? (At least the book I'm reading makes it seem that way.)

Is it more because of his role in shaping modern philosophy than with any particular usefulness he has today? Was it sort of like Einstein laying the foundations but getting left behind later by other stars?

First, he did (along with other figures, most notably G.E. Moore and Frege) help to pioneer the major shift in philosophical methodology in the 20th century. He was one of the first people* to do philosophy as careful and rigorous analysis of small problems as opposed to major "system building".

*Plotinus will object here and point out the scholastics, but at any rate Russell made major methodological shifts in secular philosophy, and was surely more influential in terms of 20th century philosophical methodology.

Second, he did some very major work in the philosophy of language. He made major progress in questions about the relationship between the meaning of a word and a reference, created a big interesting theory to analyze puzzles about meaning. His contribution was considered decisive until Kripke came along (as a teenager!) and threw a wrench in the whole thing. Read On Denoting by Russell and Naming and Necessity by Kripke if interested in this stuff.

Third, his work in logic wasn't merely a wrong turn that got corrected by Goedel. Russell's work was crucial for Goedel. Lets not forget the full title of his famous Incompleteness Theorem papers, "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems".

What are examples of philosophical progress? Like positions that were once held that are no defunct?

Substance dualism, the view that there are two substances, mind and matter, has been pretty well debunked (there may be a few eccentrics out there but overwhelmingly people consider it defeated)

Any good books on history of philosophy, or introduction to philosophy? I'm especially thinking on books you can read from one end to the other in bed. So not big A4 sized school books, but you know, books the size of novels.

edit: if anyone else has ideas, just come with it

Russell's History is very well written (he won the nobel prize in lit for it). It isn't uber accurate but its accurate enough for a general history for the interested layman.

What is the nature of reality, anyway? What are the different school of thought and how do they stack up against eachother?

Like Bill suggested, you would have to get more specific about this. I'm not sure I understand the question.

Last semester, in my Political Philosophy class, my philosophy "professor" (grad student of continental philosophy specializing in Luce Irigaray) objected to John Rawls' definition of personhood and citizenship in Political Liberalism. Rawls defines a person as someone who is normal and fully cooperating member of society over a complete life. In order to be citizens, persons must have a capacity for a sense of justice and a capacity for a conception of the good. He then asks about what is owed to humans who do not meet these capacities, such as the temporarily or permanently ill, what is owed to the rest of animals and nature, et cetera. He then says that he doubts that it is possible to answer these questions within the scope of justice as fairness as a political conception.

She whined about how he did not create a full system of political justice without answering the complicated sticky questions. ...even though all he said was that these questions just weren't part of political justice, and always needs to be compensated with other virtues, and that we shouldn't expect justice as fairness, or any account of justice, to cover all cases of right and wrong.

So, how wrong is she? Are disabled people incapable of achieving personhood and citizenship under Rawls' conception of them?

It seems to me that Rawls was offering a stipulative definition for the purposes of his theorizing, and not offering a full analysis of what it is to be a person. That's the core gripe I have with your professor. Its like if I said "for the purpose of this discussion, by "ice cream" I mean vanilla ice cream." and you objected that it wasn't a full account of ice cream. Well I never said it was! Rawls was merely pointing out what he meant by person for the purposes of his analysis, and then explaining that his analysis isn't equipped to answer questions about disabled, etc. He wasn't saying no such answers exist, just that his analysis did not include them, leaving it to another theorist or whatever to answer those questions. Its like a physicist refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of groundbreaking work on the nature of quarks because it didn't also include groundbreaking work on the nature of cosmic background radiation.

What's a good basic book to read to understand the basics of various schools of thought, relevant today and in the past? Say, a cocktail party level of understanding.

Historically, Russell's History.

Contemporary, it would have to be pinned down at least to broad areas of philosophy (like schools of thought in ethics, schools of thought in epistemology, etc.) in order to recommend one book.

Nice thread Fifty and I'm glad we approved it.

Is there a clear demarcation line between science and non-science?

We have pretty good conditions of adequacy that a science must meet to be called a science (e.g. make some predictions!) but most of those conditions come in degrees, such that the line is formally fuzzy (though for all practical purposes its usually pretty clear what is and isn't a science).

Why do you think people are more interested in the history of philosophy as opposed to looking at genuine philosophical questions? To mean that sounds like if someone was more interested in the history of science, looking at the various wrong turns that scientists went in order to discover more accurate theories.

Now I'm not saying that it's not a legitimate topic; how an academic field develops certainly can be interesting, but when it comes to fields such as linguistics, science, and math people tend to be more interested in the actual field! Take, for example, Physics: people don't really care about, say, the incorrect phlogiston theory; they care about thermodynamics! Even in the fields where they are not ultimately true, like classical mechanics, those fields are still correct approximations within a certain range - you don't really see people caring about Aristotelian mechanics! Why is philosophy different?

There are four main avenues by which one may come to be interested in the history of philosophy:

1) You think some philosophy is sufficiently right about what he says that he's worth reading carefully for that reason.

2) You think that history of philosophy has instrumental value for the analysis of contemporary questions because it allows us to see what might and might not work, what has been tried before, etc.

3) You are just interested in it intrinsically, in the same way someone may be interested in stamp collecting.

4) You are interested in how it affected other areas of human thought or life, like how some 18th century philosophy influenced 18th century literature.

None of these are illegitimate, and surely all are good reasons to read some historical philosophy. What isn't a good reason is thinking that a great figure will form a good first look at a problem.

It is often and obviously thought remarkable how the human mind makes associations between stimuli from the outside world and its own experiences with such rapidity, and of course much study and pondering is done into individual differences and development and detioration of such thinking processes throughout life. Current neurobiological research even suggests that certain gestalts, like images or sounds of people, may be coded in the brain's memory by single neurons! What philosophical take could you present on the cognitive theory of mind, for example in an individual's reading of the following sentences:

Spoiler mindblank :

"Number one, Geordi, marvelous work on this translator device to get people to read things in my voice, instead of Professor Farnsworth's."

Perhaps if it helps a complete answer, how would you relate this to the individual's perception of qualia and the philosophical view on such?

I really don't understand this question. Are you asking how mental states represent things in the world? This is actually a major question, perhaps the major question, of contemporary philosophy of mind. Contemporary philosophy of mind is said to have been taken "the representational turn". Before I go further, maybe clarify what you're asking?

 

[Fifty]

At what point in one's study does one become officially a "philosopher" (not meant to be snarky, just curious as in most other specialties their is a clear line at which a person becomes an official agent of their field)?

There is no official governing body of philosopher-hood, but I suppose when one starts doing work with other professionals in the field, trying to do original work on a philosophical problem.

On that vein, how do you define a "philosopher"? Is a teenager who sits in his room contemplating philosophical issues a philosopher? Is it essential that he read particular past philosophers & have some understanding of it's history? What if he writes a paper on philosophy lauded by a philosophy professor? Conversely, if someone studies philosophy intently for many years but then moves on to other work &/or recreation can he still legitimately be called a philosopher?

I don't think there's really a good answer to this question. The conditions under which the ascription of philosopher-hood to a person is true varies on context (conversational and situational).

Do you believe philosophy is too abstract for the average person to be interested in it/engaged by it?

Not as a whole, though there are some areas of philosophy that are sufficiently technical that you can't really get at them in a major way without some serious grounding in, for example, formal semantic theory.

Do you believe philosophers can help us understand, and more importantly, act upon, environmental issues? If so, how?

I think they can and should. For one, there is an interesting question of to what extent we have an obligation to future people. This is a huge question, with obvious relevance to environmental issues.

That said, most issues of morality are relatively straightforward, including many environmental ones, and the real dispute is empirical and not moral. So it seems pretty obvious that if continuing our current rate of CO2 emissions will kill a billion people, then we shouldn't continue said trend. People argue (with varying degrees of sincerity) over whether it really is the case that CO2 emissions will kill a billion people.

One more : what do you think are some of the public's biggest misconceptions about philosophy?

Lets distinguish the public in general from the more or less educated and literate public.

The public in general has the misconception that philosophy is just empty speculation without any rigor or thought behind it. Think the image of a couple stoned teenagers discussing the meaning of life.

The more or less educated and literate public has the problem either that they think philosophy is "just about language games", or that it is useless since any question that can't be answered by science is unanswerable period, so our only mode of inquiry ought to be scientific.

To be serious, though, how do you make a living out of philosophy? It seems a bit hard to imagine that these modern days.

To make a living doing philosophy you pretty much have to be a professor. An undergraduate education in philosophy, suitably augmented by non-philosophy stuff (in my case I minored in math and economics) can lead to any sort of grad school, as well as careers in government (like FBI, etc.).

I think in general, though, one should go to undergrad to get an education, not a job. If what you want to get an education in happens to be job-friendly, then more power to ya, but one should never rule out an interesting major on the basis of job prospects. Appropriately smart and driven people can make success and their interests align (though usually not perfectly align) in almost every case.

 

[Gary Childress]

Substance dualism, the view that there are two substances, mind and matter, has been pretty well debunked (there may be a few eccentrics out there but overwhelmingly people consider it defeated)

Really? I took and aced my course on Philosophy of Mind and came away with the understanding that Frank Jackson and Thomas Nagel had pretty much debunked reductionism. What arguments have reductionists come up with to counter them. I admit that it has been some time since I studied the Mind/Body problem. Maybe things have changed?

 

[Fifty]

Really? I took and aced my course on Philosophy of Mind and came away with the understanding that Frank Jackson and Thomas Nagel had pretty much debunked reductionism. What arguments have reductionists come up with to counter them. I admit that it has been some time since I studied the Mind/Body problem. Maybe things have changed?

Contemporary anti-reductionists are generally property dualists, not substance dualists.

 

[dwaxe]

What do you think about Daniel C. Dennett's Consciousness Explained?

 

[Gary Childress]

Contemporary anti-reductionists are generally property dualists, not substance dualists.

Now do Frank Jackson and Thomas Nagel call THEMSELVES "property dualists" or is that what The reductionists call them? "Property dualism" sounds sort of like closet reductionism at first glance to me.

 

[West 36]

I.E. "Rigor in argument," I understand the use of being capable in argument, but why the focus on arguments? It doesn't seem, to me, a direct part of 'philosophy,' that is, understanding x, but rather simply a way to stand ground and convince others to your position.
What philosophers would you recommend to read from?
Over the summer I took an interest in existentialism. What are your views of it? What is today's general consensus of it?
How has philosophy affected you? I mean, your views of everyday life, other people, yourself? Existence in general? I'm trying to see how your mind has come to perceive things, I guess.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I often hear you speak of solving "philosophical problems." When I've asked you in the past about philosophy things and you've questioned the motives behind my interest, you've asked me if I was looking for an answer to a historic philosophical problem, or if it was merely interest because it happened, etc. What I want to know is, what are these "problems" you speak of? Are there specific questions we should be asking, with specific answers to be found? I don't understand.

 

[Greizer85]

Well I'm not quite sure what it would be for moral truths to come from somewhere. The best rephrasing of your question I can come up with is "In virtue of what, if not God, are moral truths true?". First, its worth noting that it isn't at all clear that this is a special problem for moral theory. I mean, we can perfectly well ask too "In virtue of what, if not God, are mathematical truths true?" But what kind of answer could possibly be had to this question? I mean that non-rhetorically. What would the conditions be under which a satisfactory answer to these questions could be given? I tend to regard them more as pseudo-questions, on par roughly with "Is this all a dream?" type stuff.

Or maybe you're asking what the criteria of evaluation are for moral judgments? Like how do we access the standard, or how do we determine the standard, for the truth or falsity of moral judgments if there is no God. Is that what you're asking?

The latter; I formed my question badly.

I do have some problems with God dictating morality, but if He doesn't exist, then I don't see where an objective standard of right and wrong could be derived from. Imo morality mostly derives from conscience (which is evolutionary) and convenience ("What would be the right values to keep social stability and make us prosper?" etc.). Then there's irrational stuff 'cause people disagree and some agree with nutcases for various reasons. Thus morality as a whole is relative; as humans and their societies evolve, it too changes shape, and already varies wildly between different groups. E.g. slavery was perfectly ok in ancient times and nowadays it's an abomination; extremist muslims consider stoning of adulterous women to be a righteous act, etc.

I argued with aelf about this at length and to no avail some time ago. He talked to me about virtue ethics, but I just don't see how virtues are objective; why is it set in stone that my virtue is this and not something else? He said that virtues didn't really come from anywhere, they just are what they are, a position I find baffling and 'not really trying very hard'. I argued then that for a psychotic killer, his virtue is to murder; to follow his natural instincts. Obviously this cannot be true, but as to why, he didn't answer; could you? Also may I ask what school of ethics do you subscribe to and how are moral acts defined therein, and more importantly why are they objective?

 

[Earthling]

I really don't understand this question. Are you asking how mental states represent things in the world? This is actually a major question, perhaps the major question, of contemporary philosophy of mind. Contemporary philosophy of mind is said to have been taken "the representational turn". Before I go further, maybe clarify what you're asking?

Love to clarify. I'm not exactly sure my question is along the lines of mental states but if that turns out to be useful theory to discuss then go right ahead. The example of course is not just of my own origin but demonstrates the ability of a person to immediately sense/recall other stimuli from memory from an innocuous source. I guess what I'm asking is how much any "philosophical" theories on the mind explain associations with memory and maybe what could be termed a change in state of mind when one remembers something - as different from just, say, theories in neurobiology. Is the mind presumed to recall anything/everything equally well - even though this isn't the case in reality? Again, if these lines of thought are too far apart from the fields you were thinking of discussion I don't mind, I was just putting an interesting example out there.

Also, I notice more about "reductionism" being discussed in response to another query - from what I heard this may be something that applies as a philosophical principle opposed to one grounded strictly in biology (though also, if you agree it's a poor theory I'd love to hear what better ones philosophy also has too).

At any rate, thanks for the responses, I'm sure all the posters in the thread appreciate it.

 

[Perfection]

Philosophers stereotypically have beards, how true is this stereotype?

Are there a lot of women philosophers out there? Are there any strong correlations between the views of a professional philosopher and their sex?

So what's the biggest rival to analytic philosophy?

 

[Lord Baal]

Fifty didn't answer my question!

 

[The Last Conformist]

How widespread among contemporary philosophers is the idea there are objective moral truths? Would you characterize it as an idea on the rise, decline, or more-or-less in equilibrium?

 

[Plotinus]

Let me butt in briefly here...

Philosophy, unlike theology, is well served on the Internet, especially by the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. This is an online-only encyclopaedia which gives very useful overviews of the various aspects of philosophy. It is written by leading experts and is extremely reliable. So if you want to know about the state of the field in some area of philosophy your best bet is probably to have a look there first.

I hope Fifty won't mind if I make a couple of extra points:

Second, he did some very major work in the philosophy of language. He made major progress in questions about the relationship between the meaning of a word and a reference, created a big interesting theory to analyze puzzles about meaning. His contribution was considered decisive until Kripke came along (as a teenager!) and threw a wrench in the whole thing. Read On Denoting by Russell and Naming and Necessity by Kripke if interested in this stuff.

Don't assume that Kripke has overturned Russell on this. In fact, here's an interesting exercise: read On denoting and try to identify the arguments that Kripke presents for his position. Surprisingly tricky. He presents very attractive ideas - but he doesn't really give you any reasons to suppose that they're true. Rather like Wittgenstein.

There are four main avenues by which one may come to be interested in the history of philosophy:

1) You think some philosophy is sufficiently right about what he says that he's worth reading carefully for that reason.

2) You think that history of philosophy has instrumental value for the analysis of contemporary questions because it allows us to see what might and might not work, what has been tried before, etc.

3) You are just interested in it intrinsically, in the same way someone may be interested in stamp collecting.

4) You are interested in how it affected other areas of human thought or life, like how some 18th century philosophy influenced 18th century literature.

None of these are illegitimate, and surely all are good reasons to read some historical philosophy. What isn't a good reason is thinking that a great figure will form a good first look at a problem.

It's also worth pointing out that the contemporary pursuit of philosophy has a different relation to its past from the relation that the contemporary pursuit of science has to its past. Contrary to popular belief, there is progress in philosophy (for example, a few decades ago lots of people thought emotivism was true, but now it's been pretty comprehensively junked), but it is progress of an odd kind. It tends to be progress in analysing problems and setting out their structural form rather than in actually solving them. That means that the views of philosophers of the past, while they may sometimes be outdated, are often still perfectly reasonable and offer important insights into the problems in question. A field such as ethics is a perfect example. Ethics hasn't been "sorted out" like (some parts of) science. What Aristotle had to say about the nature of virtue hasn't been superseded by what later people have had to say about the same subject. This is why it's worth studying the history of philosophy not merely out of antiquarian interest but as part of the contribution to contemporary philosophical debate. In fact there's a trend at the moment to try to combine the two - to examine philosophers of the past not simply as history but as living philosophy, and to engage philosophically with their ideas whilst also clarifying them.

Now do Frank Jackson and Thomas Nagel call THEMSELVES "property dualists" or is that what The reductionists call them? "Property dualism" sounds sort of like closet reductionism at first glance to me.

There are lots of terms that float around this subject which help to muddy things rather than clarify them. I'd class "reductionism" as one of them, because I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean and I suspect it has many different meanings. In fact philosophers themselves are often rather loose when it comes to the meaning of "reduce" (my first published paper pointed this out to them, so maybe they'll be clearer from now on!).

"Property dualism" is basically the position that there are facts, principally about the mind, which are distinct from facts about physical properties alone and cannot be deduced wholly from them (even that is rather a loose definition). A neat way of putting it is to say that if property dualism is true, then it is possible (in theory) to know all the physical facts, but for there still to be more things to learn. This is the basis of the famous "knowledge argument" for property dualism which Frank Jackson formulated (actually C.D. Broad came up with something like it long before, but Jackson's version is the famous one). The most famous form of it concerns Mary, who lives in an entirely black-and-white world, never seeing colour. However, she is an expert on colour vision and knows everything there is to know about how we see colour - optics, what happens in the eye and in the brain, and so on. She knows every physical fact that there is to know. One day she sees a rainbow, and learns something new: what it is like to see colour. Before, she knew everything that happens physiologically when we see red, and when we see green, but she never really knew what it is like to see them, or how seeing these two colours is different. When she sees the rainbow, she learns this for the first time. But she already knew all the physical facts. So what she has learned must be non-physical.

That is quite distinct from property monism, which would say that mental properties either are physical properties or that they supervene upon physical properties in a way that allows you to deduce them wholly from physical properties.

An interesting part of the whole dualism/monism debate is that virtually all the arguments are actually for dualism - yet most philosophers are not dualists. The whole thing basically consists of dualists presenting arguments for their position and monists trying to show where they go wrong. Monism, it seems, is its own argument, rather like Kripkeism - it's just intrinsically attractive as a position.

I.E. "Rigor in argument," I understand the use of being capable in argument, but why the focus on arguments? It doesn't seem, to me, a direct part of 'philosophy,' that is, understanding x, but rather simply a way to stand ground and convince others to your position.

Arguments are important because they're not just for convincing others about your position, but for formulating that position in the first place. You can think of them as directly analogous to experiments in science. In fact a scientific experiment just is a philosophical argument of a certain very specialised kind.

The latter; I formed my question badly.

I do have some problems with God dictating morality, but if He doesn't exist, then I don't see where an objective standard of right and wrong could be derived from. Imo morality mostly derives from conscience (which is evolutionary) and convenience ("What would be the right values to keep social stability and make us prosper?" etc.). Then there's irrational stuff 'cause people disagree and some agree with nutcases for various reasons. Thus morality as a whole is relative; as humans and their societies evolve, it too changes shape, and already varies wildly between different groups. E.g. slavery was perfectly ok in ancient times and nowadays it's an abomination; extremist muslims consider stoning of adulterous women to be a righteous act, etc.

I argued with aelf about this at length and to no avail some time ago. He talked to me about virtue ethics, but I just don't see how virtues are objective; why is it set in stone that my virtue is this and not something else? He said that virtues didn't really come from anywhere, they just are what they are, a position I find baffling and 'not really trying very hard'. I argued then that for a psychotic killer, his virtue is to murder; to follow his natural instincts. Obviously this cannot be true, but as to why, he didn't answer; could you? Also may I ask what school of ethics do you subscribe to and how are moral acts defined therein, and more importantly why are they objective?

You need to define what you mean by "objective" here. Harder than it sounds.

The problem with God is that it's no easier to derive moral standards from him than it is from anything else. A divine command theorist (someone who thinks that actions are right or wrong because God says so) has to face the problem of why God says that murder is bad or generosity good. If it's just an arbitrary whim on his part, then God is a mad tyrant. If he has some reason for saying that murder is bad or generosity good, then that reason is the real explanation for why the one is wrong and the other is right, and God doesn't really have any explanatory role. (This is the famous Euthyphro problem that Plato formulated two and a half millennia ago, but which still hasn't percolated through to most religious people.)

You're right to say that people's perceptions of what is right and wrong are very historically determined, and vary as societies change, but that in itself does not mean that morality itself varies; it could be that some societies are right and some are wrong. After all, people's beliefs about the universe have changed over history too, but there is still objective truth in the matter; people used to think that the sun revolves around the earth, and they were wrong - we know better now. Similarly, perhaps when people thought slavery was OK (and even then I don't think they all did - at least not the slaves themselves) they were just mistaken, and we now know better. Again, even if morality is a purely human construct, that in itself does not make it unreal or unobjective. This table was made by human beings but it's perfectly real and objective.

The problem is that no-one can explain where morality comes from or whether it's "objective" or even what that means until they have a theory of what morality even is. You mention virtue ethics. That is actually quite a good theory for explaining the objectivity of morality, because it makes it very analogous to health. We can all understand the difference between a healthy person and an unhealthy person, and we can also understand that the standard is the same across all cultures and periods of history. (Of course, people might have different ideas about what's healthy in different societies, but there is an objective fact of the matter - a society where everyone thinks it's healthy to be size 0 is a society where people are deluded.) Given this, we can also understand that certain activities or behaviours are intrinsically healthy or unhealthy in the sense of producing a healthy or an unhealthy state. For example, getting exercise is healthy and eating nothing but ice cream is unhealthy. These facts are so simply because of the way that human beings are put together. So virtue ethics says exactly the same thing about morality. A virtuous person is like a healthy person, but it's psychological health rather than physical health. Moral virtues are those ways of behaving which tend to produce this healthy state. For example, behaving in a generous way will tend to make you a generous sort of person, and generous people are psychologically healthier and happier than non-generous people. Why? That's just how human beings are put together; it is as objective as human biology. And so on for the other virtues. Now you may say that for the psychopath, his "virtue" is to murder, but to the extent that this is his instinct, to that extent he is literally broken. The psychopath has something wrong with him which causes to behave in this way, and the more he behaves like that, the more he has something wrong with him, just like a car with a dodgy engine that becomes more and more broken the more it is driven.

So what's the biggest rival to analytic philosophy?

Continental philosophy, Indian philosophy, and Chinese philosophy.

 

[The Last Conformist]

for example, a few decades ago lots of people thought emotivism was true, but now it's been pretty comprehensively junked

The SEP* doesn't have an article on emotivism, but juding from the Moral Anti-Realism article it's the view that apparently indicative moral statements ("spamming CFC OT is wrong") are actually nonindicative statements expressing (dis)approval. Correct? That seems obviously wrong on sociolinguistic grounds - we presumably all have plenty experience of people who think their moral statements are indications of an objective state of affairs, and indeed many of us are regularly making such statements with the intent to make indicative statements - so how come it ever attracted credence? What I am I missing/misunderstanding.



* No, I'm not talking about the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

 

[crabapple]

Why has philosophy so such low status in todays modern world?

or if you disagree if it has low status, how do it have high status?

 

[RedRalph]

Do you think that generally being well up on philosophy makes a person on the whole happier or sadder (please, no discussion on what happiness is, the common definition will do)?

 

[Winner]

As someone who has been forced to take a course in philosophy (basics) by the college rules, I have one question to ask:

WHAT is the purpose of philosophy in the modern world? It seems to me it is, and don't take it as an insult or an attempt at trolling, effectively a defunct field, a leftover from the past 2500 years of human progress.

Philosophy started as the first non-religious, non-mythical way of explaining the universe, nature, human behavior, etc. As the sum of human knowledge grew, many branches of what used to be philosophy became independent. Sciences eventually became totally separated when the scientific method was introduced. But even then, more branches of philosophy were falling off - psychology, political science, sociology and so on.

It seems to me that what's left in philosophy now is essentially the useless and outdated ballast that nobody else is interested in and which has no other uses in modern world. I am talking about things like metaphysics. Now I realize that philosophy still has other branches and some of them, like logic or ethics, surely do have some uses. I do not understand why philosophy insist on calling itself a philosophy - it used to be a general term for rational inquiry, but since today most of the original main questions were solved by real science, there is no reason to keep philosophy as an independent discipline. History could take care of the ancient philosophers and their ideas, sciences can take care of its early contributions to the progress of knowledge and humanities/social sciences can take care of the rest. Then we can finally declare philosophy dead and stop terrorizing students with it

 

[Fifty]

What do you think about Daniel C. Dennett's Consciousness Explained?

Haven't read it I'm afraid. Is that the one where Dennett just kinda gives full expression to his view that qualia are in some sense not real?

Now do Frank Jackson and Thomas Nagel call THEMSELVES "property dualists" or is that what The reductionists call them? "Property dualism" sounds sort of like closet reductionism at first glance to me.

I don't have much to add to this beyond what Plotinus said. They certainly aren't substance dualists!

I.E. "Rigor in argument," I understand the use of being capable in argument, but why the focus on arguments? It doesn't seem, to me, a direct part of 'philosophy,' that is, understanding x, but rather simply a way to stand ground and convince others to your position.

When I say "arguments" I don't mean arguments in the sense of people arguign back and forth, but people adjudicating between various alternative positions by formulating reasons for and against belief in those positions. I can't think of any better way to go about understanding x. Philosophers also spend a lot of time clarifying positions and trying to get things straight about just what x is, but that also involves arguments.

What philosophers would you recommend to read from?

I'd recommend reading on the basis of philosophical problems rather than philosophers. So I'd be more able to recommend something if you said "I'm interested in ethics" or whatever.

Over the summer I took an interest in existentialism. What are your views of it? What is today's general consensus of it?

I don't must study it, and neither do many people in mainstream anglophone philosophy. Analytic readings (i.e. serious readings!) of continental figures are on the rise, though.

How has philosophy affected you? I mean, your views of everyday life, other people, yourself? Existence in general? I'm trying to see how your mind has come to perceive things, I guess.

Its helped me very much learn how to think. I think philosophy, math, and the hard sciences (which strongly excludes economics!) help one to think more than any other disciplines.

I often hear you speak of solving "philosophical problems." When I've asked you in the past about philosophy things and you've questioned the motives behind my interest, you've asked me if I was looking for an answer to a historic philosophical problem, or if it was merely interest because it happened, etc. What I want to know is, what are these "problems" you speak of? Are there specific questions we should be asking, with specific answers to be found? I don't understand.

They are just questions that are philosophically interesting, and hard to answer. Like "are there objective moral truths?", "what is consciousness?" "what is the relationship between a meaning of a word and its reference", etc.

The latter; I formed my question badly.

I do have some problems with God dictating morality, but if He doesn't exist, then I don't see where an objective standard of right and wrong could be derived from. Imo morality mostly derives from conscience (which is evolutionary) and convenience ("What would be the right values to keep social stability and make us prosper?" etc.). Then there's irrational stuff 'cause people disagree and some agree with nutcases for various reasons. Thus morality as a whole is relative; as humans and their societies evolve, it too changes shape, and already varies wildly between different groups. E.g. slavery was perfectly ok in ancient times and nowadays it's an abomination; extremist muslims consider stoning of adulterous women to be a righteous act, etc.

I argued with aelf about this at length and to no avail some time ago. He talked to me about virtue ethics, but I just don't see how virtues are objective; why is it set in stone that my virtue is this and not something else? He said that virtues didn't really come from anywhere, they just are what they are, a position I find baffling and 'not really trying very hard'. I argued then that for a psychotic killer, his virtue is to murder; to follow his natural instincts. Obviously this cannot be true, but as to why, he didn't answer; could you? Also may I ask what school of ethics do you subscribe to and how are moral acts defined therein, and more importantly why are they objective?

I do believe in objective moral truths, and I'm an atheist. I think we arrive at understanding at objective moral truths just as we arrive at, say, objective truths about human psychology, or truths about physics, or whatever. We take our considered moral beliefs, test them against thought experiments, try to find counterexamples, search for unifying theories that explain our beliefs, test those against more counterexamples, etc.

I like virtue ethics and more or less subscribe to it, and it also informs my meta-ethical beliefs. So I think moral truths are fundamentally grounded in truths about our nature as moral agents. Plus I think many objective moral truths are analytic truths that just come out of the definition of the terms we use (e.g. "murder")

Love to clarify. I'm not exactly sure my question is along the lines of mental states but if that turns out to be useful theory to discuss then go right ahead. The example of course is not just of my own origin but demonstrates the ability of a person to immediately sense/recall other stimuli from memory from an innocuous source. I guess what I'm asking is how much any "philosophical" theories on the mind explain associations with memory and maybe what could be termed a change in state of mind when one remembers something - as different from just, say, theories in neurobiology. Is the mind presumed to recall anything/everything equally well - even though this isn't the case in reality? Again, if these lines of thought are too far apart from the fields you were thinking of discussion I don't mind, I was just putting an interesting example out there.

I'm not sure if philosophy has anything to say about this really. I think its just an empirical question. A very interesting one, but one that is best left to the neuroscientists.

Also, I notice more about "reductionism" being discussed in response to another query - from what I heard this may be something that applies as a philosophical principle opposed to one grounded strictly in biology (though also, if you agree it's a poor theory I'd love to hear what better ones philosophy also has too).

Basically, people argue a lot over whether qualia--the qualitative feel of consciousness, like the redness of an apple--can be reduced to something physical. Pretty much everyone believes that consciousness comes from the brain, but there are serious arguments out there that you can't make sense of qualia in strictly physical terms.

Philosophers stereotypically have beards, how true is this stereotype?

Not very, I'm afraid. Many do I'm sure, but I haven't noted more bearded philosophers than non-bearded, especially in conteporary philosophy.

Are there a lot of women philosophers out there? Are there any strong correlations between the views of a professional philosopher and their sex?

There are many, but it is still a male dominated field. I'd put it maybe on par with biology or something in terms of male dominance. I haven't noticed any such correlation, though there seems to be a correlation in terms of interest (women more interested in ethics, for example).

So what's the biggest rival to analytic philosophy?

There really isn't any distinction between analytic and continental philosophy anymore. Analytic philosophy of today is just a catch all term for "all good philosophy" it seems like, so there is no real rival.

How widespread among contemporary philosophers is the idea there are objective moral truths? Would you characterize it as an idea on the rise, decline, or more-or-less in equilibrium?

Many philosohphers seem to believe in them. I feel like its in relative equilibrium. My vague impression is that everyone believed in them, then when it became obvious how awesome science was, everyone kinda dismissed them as unscientific, but now they are back as people are realizing that we don't really have any great arguments that objective moral truths are in some sense unscientific or depend on god or whatever. Neither side is clearly dominant, though. Among professional researchers in ethics, though, I'd say most seem like they believe in objective moral truths.

The SEP* doesn't have an article on emotivism, but juding from the Moral Anti-Realism article it's the view that apparently indicative moral statements ("spamming CFC OT is wrong") are actually nonindicative statements expressing (dis)approval. Correct? That seems obviously wrong on sociolinguistic grounds - we presumably all have plenty experience of people who think their moral statements are indications of an objective state of affairs, and indeed many of us are regularly making such statements with the intent to make indicative statements - so how come it ever attracted credence? What I am I missing/misunderstanding.

Serious versions of emotivism come with an "error theory" that tries to explain why people could be so systematically mistaken. It was taken to be an attractive theory because 1) its obvious that many ethical pronouncements come with emotional baggage as well as a sort of approval or disapproval, 2) if you thought you had independent reasons to be an anti-realist, and you wanted to further claim that moral statements have no truth value, it seems like emotivism is one of the only (perhaps THE only) plausible alternative.

NOTE: I may not be able to answer much over the weekend as I'll be away. I'll get to everyone when I get back, and perhaps earlier (including the people I just crossposted with (Winner, RRW, crab)

 

[The Last Conformist]

Serious versions of emotivism come with an "error theory" that tries to explain why people could be so systematically mistaken.

Thanks for the replies. Could you give an example of what such an error theory might amount to?