Ask a Philosopher!

[Plotinus]

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It seems to me that what's left in philosophy now is essentially the useless and outdated ballast that nobody else is interested in and which has no other uses in modern world.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

You might as well ask what the purpose of music or art or any other non-pragmatic activity is. Philosophy is just the pursuit of knowledge and the investigation into what the world is really all about. Whether that investigation yields anything useful is really neither here nor there. People are naturally curious about stuff no matter where that curiosity leads. Look at all the questions in this thread or indeed other threads on this site - even if they all get answered to the satisfaction of the askers, will that achieve anything? That's not why people have asked them.

It's not true that most of the "original main questions" were solved by science. Science still cannot tell us what mind and matter are (although it may study how they work), or what right and wrong are, or what knowledge actually is, or whether there is a God, or the other major questions that early philosophers asked and which philosophers still ask today.

But even if that were the case, it wouldn't mean that philosophy is defunct or that there is no cohesive method or set of conceptual tools common to the different areas of philosophy that exist today. The dismembering of philosophy and partition between other areas is really just a matter of words. For example, you may say that historical philosophy should just be considered a branch of history, but in order to do historical philosophy a scholar needs to be trained in philosophical methods or he won't be any good at it (any more than a historian of maths who doesn't know anything about maths would be any good at it). So you can call that history if you like, but it doesn't really matter. Again, there are many areas of philosophy that overlap with other subjects, but which aren't part of those subjects. Philosophy of science is an obvious example; to do that, someone needs to know a lot about science, but it isn't itself science, and someone who is only a scientist won't be any good at it because it involves philosophical methods and asks philosophical questions. The same with philosophy of religion (don't let theologians near that) and all the other sub-branches. They have more in common with each other than they do with the disciplines they study.

As for subsuming the rest under "humanities" - well, philosophy is a humanities subject. So what, precisely, would you change about that?

 

[holy king]

what does research in ethics actually look like?

can you describe an average day at work of someone researching in ethics?

 

[Winner]

You might as well ask what the purpose of music or art or any other non-pragmatic activity is. Philosophy is just the pursuit of knowledge and the investigation into what the world is really all about. Whether that investigation yields anything useful is really neither here nor there. People are naturally curious about stuff no matter where that curiosity leads. Look at all the questions in this thread or indeed other threads on this site - even if they all get answered to the satisfaction of the askers, will that achieve anything? That's not why people have asked them.

I was under the impression, or at least that's what they've told us, that philosophy cannot be mistaken with arts. Arts are supposed to be about communicating your impressions of the world, your feelings about it etc., whereas philosophy is supposed to answer questions about the world.

In my view, philosophy is not doing it. I've also been told that there is no overreaching definition of what philosophy is, no set of unique methods that are used, not even a consensus of what it is it is supposed to inquire into. That's pretty weak compared to other disciplines.

The matters which are "examined" by philosophy are (again from my perspective) vain and not really important for anything, since most of the questions it deals with can be better answered in others, more scientific ways. Which brings me back to the question "what is its purpose in the modern world?", this time with another question included - why is it considered so important compared to other less-useful human activities? I am not expected to understand the basics of painting or martial arts, so why should I bother with a discipline which exists just for the sake of itself?

It's not true that most of the "original main questions" were solved by science. Science still cannot tell us what mind and matter are (although it may study how they work), or what right and wrong are, or what knowledge actually is, or whether there is a God, or the other major questions that early philosophers asked and which philosophers still ask today.

Without giving any answers, any real output. Philosophy seems to endlessly debate few questions (with thousands of sub-variants), but it never gives any clear answer. So what's the point?

Science gives us tangible results, something we can work with. For example, it answered pretty well what's matter and how human mind works, but most importantly it has done so using objective methods. Philosophers use only one instrument - their mind, without any aid or help. No wonder there aren't any results.

But even if that were the case, it wouldn't mean that philosophy is defunct or that there is no cohesive method or set of conceptual tools common to the different areas of philosophy that exist today. The dismembering of philosophy and partition between other areas is really just a matter of words. For example, you may say that historical philosophy should just be considered a branch of history, but in order to do historical philosophy a scholar needs to be trained in philosophical methods or he won't be any good at it (any more than a historian of maths who doesn't know anything about maths would be any good at it). So you can call that history if you like, but it doesn't really matter. Again, there are many areas of philosophy that overlap with other subjects, but which aren't part of those subjects. Philosophy of science is an obvious example; to do that, someone needs to know a lot about science, but it isn't itself science, and someone who is only a scientist won't be any good at it because it involves philosophical methods and asks philosophical questions. The same with philosophy of religion (don't let theologians near that) and all the other sub-branches. They have more in common with each other than they do with the disciplines they study.

As for subsuming the rest under "humanities" - well, philosophy is a humanities subject. So what, precisely, would you change about that?

I don't have any concrete plan here I am simply saying that philosophy isn't very useful today. When I want to answer some question (except the one I asked in this thread - for nitpickers), I don't go to a philosopher and ask him. I don't do it, because he wouldn't give me any useful answer. Philosophy seems to be a mental exercise that appeals to certain people, who then act as if their hobby was of any significance, when in fact it isn't. In short, philosophy exists for sake of philosophy, which makes it less useful than art, which at least gives other people pleasure.

Yes, I am biased against philosophy.

 

[Plotinus]

I was under the impression, or at least that's what they've told us, that philosophy cannot be mistaken with arts. Arts are supposed to be about communicating your impressions of the world, your feelings about it etc., whereas philosophy is supposed to answer questions about the world.

In my view, philosophy is not doing it. I've also been told that there is no overreaching definition of what philosophy is, no set of unique methods that are used, not even a consensus of what it is it is supposed to inquire into. That's pretty weak compared to other disciplines.

All of this is just the sort of thing that they tell undergraduates doing introductory philosophy courses, to try to make them sit up and pay attention. Of course philosophy has distinctive methods and techniques. Someone who does philosophy of religion is recognisably doing the same sort of thing as someone who does philosophy of language or philosophy of mathematics.

The matters which are "examined" by philosophy are (again from my perspective) vain and not really important for anything, since most of the questions it deals with can be better answered in others, more scientific ways.

I'd like to see some examples of this. How, for example, is there any more scientific way of investigating the nature of right and wrong than any that philosophers use? What answers has science produced that are unavailable to philosophers?

Which brings me back to the question "what is its purpose in the modern world?", this time with another question included - why is it considered so important compared to other less-useful human activities? I am not expected to understand the basics of painting or martial arts, so why should I bother with a discipline which exists just for the sake of itself?

Because philosophy trains the mind to think critically, rationally, and logically. The philosophical method underpins all rational activity, including science. Just read a few opinion pages in the newspaper or the comments people make about them online if you want to see the results of the inability to think critically, rationally, and logically.

Bertrand Russell had a nice summary of why philosophy is important, cast in the form of why it should be banned:

In schools and universities information of all sorts is ladled out, but no one is taught to reason, or to consider what is evidence for what. To any person with even the vaguest idea of the nature of scientific evidence, such beliefs as those of astrologers are of course impossible. But so are most of the beliefs upon which governments are based, such as the peculiar merit of persons living in a certain area, or of persons whose income exceeds a certain sum. It would not do to teach people to reason correctly, since the result would be to undermine these beliefs. If these beliefs were to fade, mankind might escape disaster, but politicians could not. At all costs, therefore, we must be kept stupid.

Without giving any answers, any real output. Philosophy seems to endlessly debate few questions (with thousands of sub-variants), but it never gives any clear answer. So what's the point?

Philosophers give clear answers to things all the time. Just because you don't know what they are doesn't mean they're not out there! More importantly, what's the point of anything? What's the point of arguing about stuff on an internet forum? What's the point of studying history, or literature, or anything? What, indeed, is the point of studying science? What's the point of doing anything? Questions like this are meaningless. People study philosophy because they are interested in trying to find out what's true.

Plus, of course, while philosophy may not always tell you what's true, it's pretty good at working out what's false, as Russell indicates in the quote above.

Science gives us tangible results, something we can work with. For example, it answered pretty well what's matter and how human mind works, but most importantly it has done so using objective methods. Philosophers use only one instrument - their mind, without any aid or help. No wonder there aren't any results.

Philosophers use any instrument they can lay their hands on, including the results of science. Incidentally, I don't think science has answered at all what matter is, only what matter does. The same, of course, with the mind, and even there science doesn't have any answers to key questions such as the nature of qualia (or indeed their existence) or the nature of intentionality. And, once again, there are plenty of results in philosophy, the aforementioned development of views on emotivism being an example. This idea that philosophers spend all their time arguing about silly things and never answering any question comes entirely from (a) first-year philosophy undergraduates who think that if they question everything their friends say with mind-numbing repetitiveness, and argue about whether tables exist, they will look like Sartre and possibly get to sleep with more girls, and (b) scientists who are so used to the industrial funding system that they measure the value of all endeavours solely in terms of financially measurable results. But I don't see why the attitudes of either of those groups should be considered definitive.

It seems to me that when people criticise philosophy and philosophers, what they are really criticising is the subject areas of philosophy. Why do philosophers not use the methods that scientists use? Because, by definition, philosophy is the study of those areas where scientific methods don't work! If you could perform experiments to find out the nature of right and wrong, then people would - but unfortunately it's not possible. So anyone who's interested in trying to work out what right and wrong are all about must use other methods. That's not their fault. It's the nature of the universe.

I don't have any concrete plan here I am simply saying that philosophy isn't very useful today. When I want to answer some question (except the one I asked in this thread - for nitpickers), I don't go to a philosopher and ask him. I don't do it, because he wouldn't give me any useful answer.

Then either you are never curious about the sorts of things that philosophers investigate, or you don't know any proper philosophers, or both. If you ask a professional philosopher about something within his field of expertise he'll give you a perfectly useful answer. It may not be a definitive one, but don't blame him for that. It's no different from other disciplines such as history. Ask ten historians about what happened in a certain historical period and you'll get ten answers - as you know perfectly well from the History forum. Does that mean that no historian can ever give a useful answer? No - it just means that the nature of history is such that often there is no definitive answer, and you must simply weigh the available evidence and draw your own conclusions with greater or lesser certainty. Does that make history pointless?

Philosophy seems to be a mental exercise that appeals to certain people, who then act as if their hobby was of any significance, when in fact it isn't. In short, philosophy exists for sake of philosophy, which makes it less useful than art, which at least gives other people pleasure.

Ah, so you think the value of a discipline is a matter of how much pleasure it gives, do you? That sounds to me dangerously like a philosophical opinion. Can you defend it?

Without wishing to sound rude, it seems that you've formed a negative impression of what philosophy is merely from an introductory course. That's not very fair. You can't just assert that (for example) philosophers have no answers to the problems they investigate just on the basis of a few lectures aimed at uninterested beginner students. Read some real philosophy done by real philosophers and see what sort of answers they actually come up with, and what sort of methods they use to come up with them. If you don't want to do that (and really there's no reason why you should!) then don't make such bold assertions on the basis of such little familiarity.

 

[Mise]

I love reading your posts, Plotinus. You should write a book or something.

PS. This bears repeating:

The philosophical method underpins all rational activity, including science.

In fact a scientific experiment just is a philosophical argument of a certain very specialised kind.

 

[Winner]

I'd like to see some examples of this. How, for example, is there any more scientific way of investigating the nature of right and wrong than any that philosophers use? What answers has science produced that are unavailable to philosophers?

The right answers? Now I am talking broadly, of course. In this concrete example (right/wrong), I could turn to various other fields like sociology, history, psychology, cultural anthropology etc. and they'll give me some idea of what was considered right or wrong in various cultures, places and times and how human mind decides what's right and what's wrong. If I asked a philosopher, what useful information would he give me? (I'll get back to this later in the post).

Because philosophy trains the mind to think critically, rationally, and logically. The philosophical method underpins all rational activity, including science. Just read a few opinion pages in the newspaper or the comments people make about them online if you want to see the results of the inability to think critically, rationally, and logically.

Yes, the fields which have branched out of philosophy are based on rational thinking. However, they also produce tangible or practically useful results.

Philosophers give clear answers to things all the time. Just because you don't know what they are doesn't mean they're not out there!

I am perfectly willing to admit my ignorance here. Perhaps it would help if you gave me examples of clear and useful answers to important questions produced by modern (contemporary) philosophy.

More importantly, what's the point of anything? What's the point of arguing about stuff on an internet forum? What's the point of studying history, or literature, or anything? What, indeed, is the point of studying science? What's the point of doing anything? Questions like this are meaningless. People study philosophy because they are interested in trying to find out what's true.

The point of studying real science is that the results of this study have some concrete applications/can be used to predict natural phenomenons - there is some sort of benefit. Even some very borderline fields like political science have practical uses. What's the practical use of contemporary philosophy?

Philosophers use any instrument they can lay their hands on, including the results of science. Incidentally, I don't think science has answered at all what matter is, only what matter does.

Matter is a concentrated form of energy, as far as I understand the scientific consensus Unlike the answers given by philosophers, this simple understanding has enabled us to tap into nuclear energy and use it to our benefit (or destruction).

You can probably see by now that I am a practical person - when I do something, I want it to have some value. In my view, contemporary philosophy does not produce anything valuable - just more lengthy texts and treatises which only interest other philosophers.

The same, of course, with the mind, and even there science doesn't have any answers to key questions such as the nature of qualia (or indeed their existence) or the nature of intentionality. And, once again, there are plenty of results in philosophy, the aforementioned development of views on emotivism being an example. This idea that philosophers spend all their time arguing about silly things and never answering any question comes entirely from (a) first-year philosophy undergraduates who think that if they question everything their friends say with mind-numbing repetitiveness, and argue about whether tables exist, they will look like Sartre and possibly get to sleep with more girls, and (b) scientists who are so used to the industrial funding system that they measure the value of all endeavours solely in terms of financially measurable results. But I don't see why the attitudes of either of those groups should be considered definitive.

I don't think I belong to any of the two categories, yet the question still seems valid to me. But as I said, I don't believe in my own infallibility, so perhaps if you gave me something tangible, some product of contemporary philosophy that is considered important OUTSIDE the field of philosophy, I'd re-evaluate this view.

It seems to me that when people criticise philosophy and philosophers, what they are really criticising is the subject areas of philosophy. Why do philosophers not use the methods that scientists use? Because, by definition, philosophy is the study of those areas where scientific methods don't work!

That's actually the core of the problem - scientific method usually doesn't work in areas which aren't real or relevant to the physical world in any conceivable way. Philosophy seen from this perspective really looks like an interesting hobby, nothing else.

If you could perform experiments to find out the nature of right and wrong, then people would - but unfortunately it's not possible. So anyone who's interested in trying to work out what right and wrong are all about must use other methods. That's not their fault. It's the nature of the universe.

So, in this particular case, you establish that right and wrong exist and then go ahead trying to find out how to say one from the other, right? But this looks awfully unreasonable to me - what proof do you actually have that there is such a thing like right or wrong? I can ask a linguist and he'll explain the origins of these terms, I can ask a psychologist and he'll tell me how people learn what's right and wrong and I can ask a cultural anthropologist who'll explain to me that right/wrong is a concept which differs wildly in various human cultures. I could also go see an evolutionary biologist who might tell me that right/wrong is a product of human evolution and natural selection.

So - I'll have some set of answers given to me by scientific disciplines I find relevant. With these answers, I'll be able to conclude that right/wrong as a concrete concept independent on human thinking doesn't exist. So, why do I need philosophy to speculate about it, when all relevant information I need were given to me by fields OTHER THAN philosophy?

Then either you are never curious about the sorts of things that philosophers investigate, or you don't know any proper philosophers, or both. If you ask a professional philosopher about something within his field of expertise he'll give you a perfectly useful answer. It may not be a definitive one, but don't blame him for that. It's no different from other disciplines such as history. Ask ten historians about what happened in a certain historical period and you'll get ten answers - as you know perfectly well from the History forum. Does that mean that no historian can ever give a useful answer? No - it just means that the nature of history is such that often there is no definitive answer, and you must simply weigh the available evidence and draw your own conclusions with greater or lesser certainty. Does that make history pointless?

No, because history deals with questions I find relevant and often provides answers which are useful for human society. For example, by studying history we can identify the causes of contemporary events/problems which enables us to deal with them. How does that compare to philosophy? How is philosophy useful in this respect?

Ah, so you think the value of a discipline is a matter of how much pleasure it gives, do you? That sounds to me dangerously like a philosophical opinion. Can you defend it?

Oh no, that's not what I meant. I meant that arts at least give us pleasure (sometimes), while philosophy gives us nothing we can't get elsewhere.

Without wishing to sound rude, it seems that you've formed a negative impression of what philosophy is merely from an introductory course.

Plural, actually I've encountered philosophy before and each time I was finished with it, I hit the "erase" button in my head hoping I'll never have to go back to the tons of completely useless information I've been given. I know it sounds like childish complaining, but I really never had to use anything I learned in these courses. Even in political science, I only used parts of the works of philosophers which were relevant to the concrete issue.

That's not very fair. You can't just assert that (for example) philosophers have no answers to the problems they investigate just on the basis of a few lectures aimed at uninterested beginner students. Read some real philosophy done by real philosophers and see what sort of answers they actually come up with, and what sort of methods they use to come up with them. If you don't want to do that (and really there's no reason why you should!) then don't make such bold assertions on the basis of such little familiarity.

This sounds pretty much like the argument "you can't disprove religion without first reading tons of books about it".

As I said before, I admit my knowledge is limited. But since I am a layman, it should be pretty easy to prove me wrong with some concrete examples (see the question about the concrete tangible and useful products of contemporary philosophy).

 

[Gary Childress]

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.

Must be nice not having to support their position. Heaven forbid if monists were actually required to come up with an argument supporting their position.

 

[Greizer85]

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

Unchanging (with respect to person(s), time, or place) moral rules for particular types of situations = objective moral rules. Or if what is right and wrong does change with time, place and/or person(s), then it must change in a way that is predictable and describable and most importantly internally consistent; some sort of unchanging, eternal (verbal) 'formula' of how to determine right and wrong in any given situation, if you will. (I understand that this is what the different schools of ethics try to be, but philosophers still argue which one is definitive.) Thus what is right and wrong in a given situation may indeed change, but the way in which they're found out will not, and that brings us the needed objectivity.

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.)

This is one of the reasons why I don't believe in a personal God. As far as I can see, most theists believe that God has some 'ultimate plan' which justifies the horrendous atrocities in the Bible or Koran or wherever, in some mysterious way that we mere mortals cannot begin to fathom. To see the light of faith, one must shut the eye of reason.

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.

Tables are made from materials that exist in the physical world though. One can craft a set of moral rules out of thin air (or nothing, to be more precise) if one so wishes. The preferring of some sets over others is due to their inherent intuitiveness ("It just feels that to kill someone is always wrong on some level") and/or general usefulness ("If property rights shouldn't be protected, we'd have sheer anarchy! Sheesh, where would that lead us?"). Or the whims of crazy and influential people.

Even if there indeed is one set of moral rules that can be proven correct and is just waiting to be 'excavated' in the moral jungle ruins, so to speak - why should it be followed unless it also conformed to people's standards of feeling (to a reasonable extent) and to utilitarian values? Utility (i.e. general good of humanity) must come first imo. I guess that makes me an utilitarianist, then. And a little bit of emotivist smacked on the side of the plate.

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.

But why is unhealthiness, delusion or craziness bad? Because of their effects to the person's own perceived well-being and to their social utility. Emotion and utility; conscience and convenience. Two sides of the same coin. One is nothing without the other.

One might argue that if one enjoys to murder ('end useless lives' is a better expression; I doubt that many such psychos think they 'murder' since that is by definition bad) and feels a boost of health from it, then however wrong such system of 'internal wires' may be from our perspective, it is the right thing from their point of view to do, according to virtue ethics. This makes murder the psycho's virtue, which to me is unacceptable. It undermines the whole concept to think that a murderer could in any way, shape or form be considered virtuous. Imo one must consider external factors, 'health of society' (which again brings us to utilitarianism) if you will, not just the health of the person in question.

What about killing infant Hitler in his crib? Healthy for humanity, unhealthy for you and decidedly so for Mr. A. Right or wrong? I'd say more right than wrong. Murder? That word has a really bad ring to it; by definition there can be no good murders. But what do you call strangling a baby in his crib to save millions of lives then? I will admit that this is a problem with my utilitarian/emotivist approach (I use these terms lightly, I realize it; I'm a layman in philosophy and my use of terms may seem out of place to you in some ways).


In conclusion I still maintain my previous position that general human progress and collective and personal emotions dictate morality for the most part, and that it should be so.

Questions of morality then become those of balancing the emotional side of things with their utilitarian side. This leads to a constant state of moral flux, which can not be said to be objective, since both what is considered expedient and what 'just feels wrong' change over time and vary from person to person, even among healthy individuals. And the method in which these types of moral decisions are made is often inconsistent and not really reducible to formulas. (How do you formulate the way someone's personal feelings, their considerations for other people, affect their rational decisions?) It would help to get rid of outdated moral systems such as religions that stir the soup further, but then that could have unforeseen and undesirable consequences. And it still wouldn't bring us to objectivity.

Not that I think it's needed, mind you. If most people thought more about morality (yet not that much more), it might become a problem in the future, but right now it'd just be something nice to sleep on ("thank God (pun intended) I at least can surely tell what's right and wrong!"), not something that is ultimately necessary.

@Fifty: Sorry but I think Plotinus' answer was more interesting than yours. On the surface yours seems like some of those infamous language games.

 

[Nylan]

Fifty,

While I don't have any specific questions I'd like to ask at the moment, I'd like to thank you for starting this thread. It's been a very informative read so far and when I do narrow down the things I'm curious about, I'll be sure to post.

 

[Plotinus]

I love reading your posts, Plotinus. You should write a book or something.

No more for the time being! The last one almost killed me.

I am perfectly willing to admit my ignorance here. Perhaps it would help if you gave me examples of clear and useful answers to important questions produced by modern (contemporary) philosophy.

Take an ethical theory such as utilitarianism, then. (In fact there are many versions of utilitarianism, so it's not a single theory but a cluster of related ones.) Utilitarianism tells you what makes an action right or wrong and it tells you how to live your life to maximise the good. Now of course not everyone thinks that utilitarianism is true - there are rival theories. But they are all perfectly clear and perfectly useful too.

The point of studying real science is that the results of this study have some concrete applications/can be used to predict natural phenomenons - there is some sort of benefit. Even some very borderline fields like political science have practical uses. What's the practical use of contemporary philosophy?

I'd say that the ability to think clearly and critically is of great practical use. Just look at things like the MMR scare a few years ago (the media reported, in an uncritical fashion, dodgy studies "showing" that the MMR vaccination gave children autism - as a result, morons throughout Britain stopped their children having vaccinations, and measles cases rocketed - something that wouldn't have happened if any of those people had been able to think critically and clearly about it). But that's not the important thing. The important thing is that you seem only interested in its practical use. My point is that an endeavour can have value even without practical use. I hope you don't think, for example, that early scientists did science just because they wanted to get something of practical use out of it. It was only after science had been going for quite a while that people found practical uses for its discoveries. Science - pure science at least - is done because people are curious about the world and want to know how it works. The same is true of philosophy. If you really don't think that pure curiosity and enquiry has any value then I don't know how to convince you otherwise.

Matter is a concentrated form of energy, as far as I understand the scientific consensus Unlike the answers given by philosophers, this simple understanding has enabled us to tap into nuclear energy and use it to our benefit (or destruction).

And what's energy, then? To say matter is energy is just to say another thing about how it behaves. It doesn't tell us what it is.

You can probably see by now that I am a practical person - when I do something, I want it to have some value. In my view, contemporary philosophy does not produce anything valuable - just more lengthy texts and treatises which only interest other philosophers.

Then you won't see value in philosophy. I'm not going to try to present philosophy in such a way that it acquires value according to your value system; I'll just try to point out to you that alternative value systems exist under which it has great value. You may not share those value systems but I hope you can at least comprehend them. That, incidentally, is a great benefit of the study of philosophy, in that it teaches you to appreciate many different ways of approaching the world, and forces you to engage sympathetically with views that you don't agree with.

I don't think I belong to any of the two categories, yet the question still seems valid to me. But as I said, I don't believe in my own infallibility, so perhaps if you gave me something tangible, some product of contemporary philosophy that is considered important OUTSIDE the field of philosophy, I'd re-evaluate this view.

I probably can't - but then one probably can't in most fields. How many people who aren't interested in astronomy care about the discoveries of astronomers? Or geologists? Or military historians? Or any specialised field that doesn't have obvious practical value?

So, in this particular case, you establish that right and wrong exist and then go ahead trying to find out how to say one from the other, right? But this looks awfully unreasonable to me - what proof do you actually have that there is such a thing like right or wrong? I can ask a linguist and he'll explain the origins of these terms, I can ask a psychologist and he'll tell me how people learn what's right and wrong and I can ask a cultural anthropologist who'll explain to me that right/wrong is a concept which differs wildly in various human cultures. I could also go see an evolutionary biologist who might tell me that right/wrong is a product of human evolution and natural selection.

So - I'll have some set of answers given to me by scientific disciplines I find relevant. With these answers, I'll be able to conclude that right/wrong as a concrete concept independent on human thinking doesn't exist. So, why do I need philosophy to speculate about it, when all relevant information I need were given to me by fields OTHER THAN philosophy?

But why do any of those answers tell you that right/wrong doesn't exist? The disciplines you mention tell you various things about people's beliefs about right and wrong or explanations about the way that people act. But in order to conclude from these that right/wrong doesn't exist, you must be going beyond those things and drawing an extra conclusion. For example:

(1) If people's belief in right and wrong can be explained in terms of the evolution of human biology and society, then people's belief in right and wrong is false.
(2) But belief in right and wrong can be explained in terms of biological and social evolution.
(3) Therefore, people's belief in right and wrong is false.

All that the scientific disciplines you mentioned can give you is (2). But in order to conclude (3), you need (1) as well. And where do you get (1) from? Is that something that science can tell you? No, it's not. It's a philosophical claim, and if it's going to be anything other than pure prejudice, it needs to be defended philosophically.

I've noticed that people who think that science has all the answers for philosophical problems often argue like this. They point to some established scientific claim, and they they infer from it something that goes beyond the mere scientific claim itself - not noticing that that very process of inference is philosophical, not scientific.

Now in the case of right and wrong, the question whether right and wrong exist at all is a philosophical question. It is not one that can be settled scientifically. In addressing it, philosophers will certainly consider evidence from science, linguistics, and all the other things you mentioned. They will try to draw conclusions from this evidence. But that process of drawing the conclusions is philosophy.

No, because history deals with questions I find relevant and often provides answers which are useful for human society. For example, by studying history we can identify the causes of contemporary events/problems which enables us to deal with them. How does that compare to philosophy? How is philosophy useful in this respect?

That is surely not the main reason people study history, though, is it? They study it because they find it interesting and because they think there is intrinsic worth in knowing about the past. If that knowledge has some kind of practical benefit, then that's a nice bonus, but it's not what it's all about. In any case I'm not convinced that the study of history very often yields practical results of the kind you mention.

Oh no, that's not what I meant. I meant that arts at least give us pleasure (sometimes), while philosophy gives us nothing we can't get elsewhere.

There's no such thing as "pleasure" understood univocally. The pleasure I derive from eating chocolate is different in kind (not just intensity) from the pleasure I derive from watching Ugly Betty (I can't deny it any longer). That's because there's no such thing as "pleasure" at all - all there is is activities that we enjoy. To say I derive pleasure from eating chocolate is really just to say that I enjoy eating chocolate. So if people derive pleasure from doing philosophy, that just means they enjoy doing philosophy. And clearly, they couldn't get that without doing philosophy. So it isn't true that philosophy gives us nothing that we can't get elsewhere.

That, incidentally, is the analysis of pleasure that Aristotle gives in the Nicomachean ethics, and it is both a correct analysis of pleasure (in my opinion) and something that it is useful to know.

This sounds pretty much like the argument "you can't disprove religion without first reading tons of books about it".

Does that make it wrong?

As I said before, I admit my knowledge is limited. But since I am a layman, it should be pretty easy to prove me wrong with some concrete examples (see the question about the concrete tangible and useful products of contemporary philosophy).

Functionalism is a good example: a theory of the mind and its relation to the body that most philosophers today accept (including both monists and dualists, at least property dualists). Or in meta-ethics, the conviction that ethical claims are neither purely cognitive (analogous to scientific claims) nor purely non-cognitive (analogous to exclamations), but combine elements of both. More commonly, generally agreed answers to philosophical problems are not in the form of "This is the answer" but in the form of "The possible answers to this problem are this, this, and this, and here are the main advantages and disadvantages to all of them". For example, do we have free will? What is free will anyway? There are clear and generally accepted philosophical answers to these questions, in the sense of clear and generally accepted alternative definitions of "free will", and clear and generally accepted advantages and disadvantages to them. Thus:

(1) To have free will means to be able to do what you want. It is a matter of self-determination.

(2) To have free will means being completely undetermined.

Of these, (1) is called "compatibilist" free will, because it is compatible with determinism. Someone who accepts this definition can answer the question "do we have free will?" quite empirically: if we are not prevented by external agents from doing what we wish to do, then we have free will - and this is the case whether or not determinism is true. Problem solved. However, many people find this an unintuitive definition of free will.

And (2) is known as "incompatibilist" free will, because on this view we can have free will only if determinism is false. The problem here is establishing how this would differ from sheer randomness. Also, of course, no-one knows whether determinism is true or not.

That is just a sketch, but it should at least indicate that there are clear answers available to that question which, through the history of philosophy, have become extremely detailed and refined. There is no consensus on which answer is right, but there is consensus regarding the structure of the possible answers and how one would go about evaluating them and forming your own opinion regarding the question itself. That is a result, even if it is not the kind of result you might get in science.

Anyway, I'm sure that Fifty can come up with more detailed examples of this sort of thing, since he's the analytic philosopher. I'm just an early modernist - by your definition, a historian.

 

[Winner]

I'll take some time to chew through this, thanks for your replies nonetheless

 

[Plotinus]

This is one of the reasons why I don't believe in a personal God. As far as I can see, most theists believe that God has some 'ultimate plan' which justifies the horrendous atrocities in the Bible or Koran or wherever, in some mysterious way that we mere mortals cannot begin to fathom. To see the light of faith, one must shut the eye of reason.

It's probably going a bit off-topic, but I wouldn't entirely agree with that. If one has very good reasons for thinking that God exists, then one has (in virtue of this) very good reasons for thinking that the existence of God is compatible with the existence of all the suffering that we see in history. That isn't necessarily just a refusal to accept what reason shows us - it may, on the contrary, be a rational weighing of one set of evidence (reasons to believe in God) against a rival set of evidence (reasons to suppose that God's existence is incompatible with the existence of suffering). Certainly there are plenty of people who have considered this very rationally indeed and concluded that God probably does exist and therefore probably does have some plan of the kind you mention. That's not to say that these people are right to think this, of course - just that to think this isn't necessarily irrational.

Tables are made from materials that exist in the physical world though. One can craft a set of moral rules out of thin air (or nothing, to be more precise) if one so wishes. The preferring of some sets over others is due to their inherent intuitiveness ("It just feels that to kill someone is always wrong on some level") and/or general usefulness ("If property rights shouldn't be protected, we'd have sheer anarchy! Sheesh, where would that lead us?"). Or the whims of crazy and influential people.

Right. But one could then say that as long as those rules exist (in whatever sense of "exist" applies to rules) then that moral system exists. One might even say it has some kind of objectivity. Although presumably not the kind you're looking for.

Even if there indeed is one set of moral rules that can be proven correct and is just waiting to be 'excavated' in the moral jungle ruins, so to speak - why should it be followed unless it also conformed to people's standards of feeling (to a reasonable extent) and to utilitarian values?

I think that if a "true" set of moral rules exists, then there's no question why it should be followed. An objective morality, if it exists, is by definition normative. Say, for example, that it is an objective truth that it is wrong to murder. That fact, of and by itself, is a reason not to murder.

Utility (i.e. general good of humanity) must come first imo. I guess that makes me an utilitarianist, then. And a little bit of emotivist smacked on the side of the plate.

Ah! So you think that there does exist a true and objective morality, then - namely utilitarianism, or some form thereof. You think that an act is right inasmuch as it maximises utility and wrong inasmuch as it minimises it (or something like that). But why's that?

But why is unhealthiness, delusion or craziness bad? Because of their effects to the person's own perceived well-being and to their social utility. Emotion and utility; conscience and convenience. Two sides of the same coin. One is nothing without the other.

Ah, well this is where fundamental intuitions clash. To the virtue ethicist, it's just a basic fact that certain states are good or bad, because the goodness or badness of moral states is a function of whether they enable the person to flourish or not. And to the virtue ethicist, it is just fundamentally clear that someone who enjoys going around killing people has something wrong with them: that person is not flourishing, no matter how happy he or she may seem to be, just as a person with a chronic illness is not flourishing compared to a healthy person, no matter how well he or she copes with the illness or even likes having it in some perverse way. And the virtue ethicist will think that the enabling of human flourishing is the only way of "cashing out" moral claims that really makes any sense.

But you, it seems, think that utility is the only sensible way of "cashing out" moral claims, so you evaluate virtue ethics by that criterion and find it wanting. It looks like there's just a fundamental disagreement there.

One might argue that if one enjoys to murder ('end useless lives' is a better expression; I doubt that many such psychos think they 'murder' since that is by definition bad) and feels a boost of health from it, then however wrong such system of 'internal wires' may be from our perspective, it is the right thing from their point of view to do, according to virtue ethics. This makes murder the psycho's virtue, which to me is unacceptable. It undermines the whole concept to think that a murderer could in any way, shape or form be considered virtuous.

No, the virtue ethicist won't suppose that virtues are individually tailored in that way. If something's a virtue, it's a virtue for everyone, and the same for vices. That's because we're all human and have all evolved to function in the same basic way. Something can't be a virtue for one person but a vice for another any more than an activity can be healthy for one person but unhealthy for another.

Now of course you'll say, ah, some activities can be healthy for one person but unhealthy for another. Eating high-calorie foods might be healthy for someone who is dangerously underweight, but unhealthy for someone who is dangerously overweight. But that is because those two people have different kinds of health problems, for which different treatments are appropriate: the end goal is the same, because health itself is the same for everyone. A virtue ethicist might say something similar about virtue. Say that generosity is a virtue. Someone who is very stingy should therefore perhaps make an effort to give more money away. But someone who is very profligate, and too free with his or her money, should perhaps make an effort to give away less. The end result - a "correct" amount of generosity, the amount that maximises flourishing - is the same for everyone. Thus Aristotle, the grand-daddy of virtue ethics, says that every virtue is actually a mean between two extremes, and the best life is the one that displays each kind of behaviour to the appropriate degree and in the appropriate ways.

What about killing infant Hitler in his crib? Healthy for humanity, unhealthy for you and decidedly so for Mr. A. Right or wrong? I'd say more right than wrong. Murder? That word has a really bad ring to it; by definition there can be no good murders. But what do you call strangling a baby in his crib to save millions of lives then? I will admit that this is a problem with my utilitarian/emotivist approach (I use these terms lightly, I realize it; I'm a layman in philosophy and my use of terms may seem out of place to you in some ways).

(Emotivism doesn't mean doing the things that you feel are right - it means the view that ethical statements are just expressions of emotions. So if you say "Murder is wrong" that is exactly the same as "Murder - ugh!" or something - you are not ascribing a property of wrongness to murder at all. So emotivism is a theory about the nature of moral language - a meta-ethical theory - not a theory about which actions are right or wrong.)

This sort of thing is of course the bread and butter of ethical philosophers, and it's supposed to help work out what our basic intuitions are. Most people would say that killing the infant Hitler would be the right thing to do. That suggests that most people think that an act that is in itself wrong may be the right thing to do if it brings about sufficient good, which supports utilitarianism. However, change the example a little, so that by killing one baby you save not millions of lives but only two lives. Would it then be the right thing to do? I think most people would hesitate to say that. And that supports a non-utilitarian position.

However, utilitarianism has the resources to combat this sort of thing. For example, a utilitarian may say that although killing one person to save the lives of two people would, in itself, be the right thing to do, the consequences of adopting that rule would be bad overall, because it would make people too ready to go around killing people. A society in which people are prepared to kill one person to save the lives of two would be a society where people would just be too blase about killing in general, and the result of that would be more bad, overall, than good. So a utilitarian, even an act utilitarian, can accommodate this sort of thing and consistently say that a certain act which might seem to maximise utility actually wouldn't, and so should not be done after all.

In conclusion I still maintain my previous position that general human progress and collective and personal emotions dictate morality for the most part, and that it should be so.

That's an interesting claim which suggests that you're using the word "morality" to refer to the moral codes which are actually in place, rather than objective morality in the sense you gave before. Because if you think one can talk about what moral codes "should" be in place, then you evidently think that there is an objective morality of some kind, but it is distinct from the morality that people actually follow. So it seems to me anyway.

I'll take some time to chew through this, thanks for your replies nonetheless

No problem. As I said, I think thinking about and trying to understand other people's point of view, and why they hold it, is a valuable thing to do whether you come to agree with them or not. So is trying to explain your own.

 

[Unholy Cow]

This is a wonderful thread.

What objections would you level against St. Anselm's version of the Ontological Argument other than the (discredited) Perfect Island objection?

I am currently studying a course in Greek Philosophy and I've just done a tute presentation on Aristotle's objections to Plato's theory of Forms. I think, as most people do that Plato's separated Forms are a bit rubbish and Aristotle's theory of universals is much more acceptable (comparatively).

However, do hypothesised entities pose a problem for Aristotle?
I'm thinking particularly of God. Could not God be a Platonic form? (Let us assume for argument's sake that God exists) If we are supposedly made in his likeness and he is wholly perfect, doesn't he fit the defintion of "fully F and in virtue of which all Fs are F"? And this Form of human (God) is non-sensible and exists separately of all particular instances of it.

I may have that completely wrong in which case please do correct me!

 

[Lone Wolf]

What objections would you level against St. Anselm's version of the Ontological Argument other than the (discredited) Perfect Island objection?

The Perfect Island analogy is flawed because an island can't reach "the ideal level of perfection", from what I've read in the subject. But does it mean that the perfect sphere (and all other geometrical figures) exist? They do have the ideal level of perfection.

Also, Kant objects to that proof by pointing out that existence is not a predicate.

 

[Hsinchu]

Regarding rigor in argument:

If argument can be served appropriately by any side for any structural thought that bears integrity, assuming empirical assumptions, then what does this imply for morality?

I'm not a philosopher, but I've had it put to me that there is a strong argument for moral relativism with a basis in rigorous defense of the self being more important than the perception. I disagree with this.

What would be the best way to describe the basis for objective moral truths, atheist or otherwise, for laymen to understand and not be subverted by snubbing intellectual philosophical jargon?

 

[El_Machinae]

Assume that the budgets for philosophical departments is doubled, and we're given a thousand years.
How different would a BA in Philosophy look from one nowadays? What progress is expected in the field, such that it can concretely be called 'progress'?

 

[ParadigmShifter]

Assume that the budgets for philosophical departments is doubled, and we're given a thousand years.

Chronic marijuana shortages I'm guessing.

 

[Imperialmajesty]

Why is the old distinction between Analytic and Continental philosophy mostly defunct? From what I have seen, it seems to be alive and well.

 

[Plotinus]

The Perfect Island analogy is flawed because an island can't reach "the ideal level of perfection", from what I've read in the subject. But does it mean that the perfect sphere (and all other geometrical figures) exist? They do have the ideal level of perfection.

It's not the kind of perfection that Anselm talks about - in fact he doesn't talk about "perfection" at all, just greatness. He says that God is the greatest thing you can imagine, and that this property has the peculiar property of entailing that he exists. There's no appeal to "perfection" in there, let alone the kind of "perfection" that a perfect sphere has. The perfect sphere isn't the greatest thing you can imagine, it's just very, very spherical. But that doesn't entail that it exists, at least not by Anselm's reasoning.

Also, Kant objects to that proof by pointing out that existence is not a predicate.

Actually, Kant presents that as an objection to Descartes' ontological argument, not to Anselm's (I suppose in fact he was actually thinking of Wolff's version rather than Descartes', but it's basically the same). Kant's objection is an effective answer to that argument - provided you accept that existence isn't a predicate - and I have to say I don't think I've seen a convincing argument for that. People always say "existence isn't a predicate" as if it's a proven fact, but I'm not convinced.

At any rate, it's irrelevant to Anselm, because his argument does not rely on the assumption that existence is a predicate. He doesn't say that the property of being the greatest thing you can imagine contains or otherwise entails the property of existence. He only says that if something is the greatest thing you can imagine, that thing must exist. That does not presuppose that existence is a predicate.

Aquinas rejected Anselm's argument on the grounds that it assumes that we know what God is like, when in fact we don't. This seems a poor objection to me, since Anselm assumes only that God is the greatest thing that one can imagine - and whatever else God may be, I think that's a pretty reasonable thing to suppose.

In my view, the main flaws with Anselm's argument are the assumption that a thing can be said to "exist" in the mind of someone who is thinking about it, and (most of all) the assumption that it is greater to exist in both the mind and reality than in the mind alone. I don't see why an existing thing is greater than a non-existing thing at all.

However, do hypothesised entities pose a problem for Aristotle?
I'm thinking particularly of God. Could not God be a Platonic form? (Let us assume for argument's sake that God exists) If we are supposedly made in his likeness and he is wholly perfect, doesn't he fit the defintion of "fully F and in virtue of which all Fs are F"? And this Form of human (God) is non-sensible and exists separately of all particular instances of it.

I would say not, because if God is that in virtue of which all Fs are F, it is in a different sense of "in virtue of which". In the case of a universal, whether a Platonic one or not, we say it is "that in virtue of which" things are F in the sense that things that are F instantiate the universal. To whit:

Everything that is red instantiates redness. That is, there is redness everywhere there is a red thing - each red thing is an example of redness.

So we can say that "redness" is that in virtue of which red things are red. A Platonist would say that the red thing is red because redness is present there, because a Platonist thinks that the formal properties of a thing are explanatorily prior to its individuality (or something like that).

In the case of God, it may be true that human beings are good (or whatever) in virtue of him, but this is in the sense that God created them that way. He is, in Aristotelian terminology, the efficient cause of human beings' goodness, not the formal cause of it. If I am good (or resemble God in some other way) it is not because I instantiate God! God is not here where I am (at least, not in that sense). So it is not the case that God is that in virtue of which F things are F in the required sense of "in virtue of". That is how it seems to me at any rate.

Of course this is complicated by the fact that later Platonism did identify the Platonic Forms with God in some sense; the Middle Platonists generally agreed that the Platonic Forms exist as ideas in God's mind. Augustine repeated this and it became an important element of medieval metaphysics and epistemology. However, none of these people would have thought that God himself actually is a Form.

 

[illram]

1) What do you think of Alan Watts? I.e., how "respected" is he, where is he coming from (he is a Zen Buddhist no?), how would you sum up his views in one sentence, etc.

2) Who are two of the most prominent American born philosophers? On that same vein is there a philosophical style/school/whatever you call it particular to the US or that was "born" here? (Is Thoreau a "philosopher?")

3) What school of philosophy or philosopher's teachings would you say serves as the largest foundation for the American legal system and/or our form of government?

Thanks!


edit: one more question! What is the definition of a philosopher? Serious question.