Poll: Philosophy: Important or a Waste of Time?

[funguy2121]

Might be more likely to prevent you from holding beliefs that are inconsistent with themselves. Those would be better.

Is that bad to be inconsistent? I am not sold on the idea. AFAIK this world seem to be inapprehensible by logic, so whether you are more or less self consistent is up to you.

I try not to because it annoys me, but has more to do with an aesthetic choice.

For the benefit of anyone who finds philosophy too high-minded and high-falutin' and high-whatever for their tastes, I'll answer this one using pop culture.

"Yeah, Melanie, my little blonde surfer girl...No, I can't trust her, but I can trust her to be Melanie." (Jackie Brown, paraphrased)

If someone else is inconsistent, they are untrustworthy, unpredictable, or both. Would you want to move in with such a person? Start a relationship? Buy high-dollar electronics off Craig's List from them? Then consistency matters.

Within your own head, inconsistency creates dichotomies that you may or may not be aware of that can unnerve you and cause serious psychological problems. Consistency matters.

 

[Tanakh]

Humm . . not really. The practice of medicine and healing may be quite old, but that doesn't mean it was practiced as a "science".

According to dictionary.com, science is: a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws.

Yeah... i guess writing a freaking treaty about anatomy, alinements and cures in papyrus isn't systematic enough (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imhotep#Medicine). Good thing medics now are soooo much more scientificy, no more papyrus!

Also, i rather use the Wikipedia definition of science if you may. When you put the word science with "truths" it makes an alarm sound in my head.

 

[Nerdstar]

We live in an ambiguous world, mate. Nothing is ever black or white, only what we want to be.

If you shoot me, I die. That's black-and-white. I either ate those gram crackers or I didn't a few minutes ago. Again, black-and-white. More fundamentally, things either exist or they don't. That's not really something you can disagree with--to disagree with it is a statement presupposing your own existence. In other words, you need to accept my argument in order to refute it.

OP, take a look at this guy's post. Without philosophy, you couldn't agree with him, or disagree with him in a rational manner.

Actually, without philosophy you'd have no way to determine whether you agreed or not to begin with, much less to do so rationally. Even an irrational philosophy is a philosophy.

not necercely even this falls under the purview of phioloshephey case in point "the brain in a jar thought experiment"

this can be demosntrated as such : Since the brain in a vat gives and receives exactly the same impulses as it would if it were in a skull, and since these are its only way of interacting with its environment, then it is not possible to tell, from the perspective of that brain, whether it is in a skull or a vat. Yet in the first case most of the person's beliefs may be true (if he believes, say, that he is walking down the street, or eating ice-cream); in the latter case they are false. Since the argument says one cannot know whether he or she is a brain in a vat, then he or she cannot know whether most of his or her beliefs might be completely false. therefore even your "death" and the crakers become ambuigus.

 

[Tanakh]

The Republic, by Plato. Not the easiest of reads, but relevant, nonetheless. Guess what it's about?

AFAI-Recall is about building good moral and ethical values in the soon to be Greek citizens. Now, good for whom? For the Republic actually, not necessarily for the individual. That's also why the whole Socratic school recommends start education with epic, for you to LOVE your country

 

[funguy2121]

My philosophy professor explained it best: philosophy is the grandmother of the sciences.

Then you check the timeline and see:

- Earliest philosopher Thales of Miletus 624 BC ? 546 BC
- Earliest medic Imhotep 2655 BC - 2600 BC

Philosophy, as most modern sciences, is the daughter of the sciences that humans needed NOT TO DIE, and to keep the stomach full.

...pretty important for survival. Also, nearly 3 millinea after Imhotep, "medics" were still using leeches to get "the bad blood" out of patients. Philosophy was way ahead of medicine for a long time, and medicine only really advanced whenever people like Joseph Lister used reasoning and said "shouldn't you wash your hands after you touch that corpse before you deliver the baby upstairs?"

 

[breadsammich]

" I?d rather live with a good question than a bad answer."
?Aryeh Frimer

I honestly think that anything that works our brain is beneficial. At least it's not rotting in front of the tv watching "Jersey Shore".

 

[Jake0fTrades]

No, that's what being a cynical opportunist is about.

And yet Cynicism is one of the biggest philosophical branches of the Greek school! For they realized we are on a rat race and decided to Areterize (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arete) the Jebus out of it!

Touche. Cynicism is a huge part of philosophy, I wasn't thinking of that at the time. But what I'm trying to get at is that the Cynic to Idealist ratio nowadays is a bit unbalanced in favor of the cynics. The only thing I hear nowadays is "mankind is evil." There's still so much for us to appreciate and no-one is even trying to.

 

[Move127]

I'm not sure which of the poll topics to pick. As a philosophy major and someone who intends to continue on to a phd in the field I feel obliged to say that it is useful. However, my recent feelings point towards it being completely pointless. Not because there aren't answers to the questions posed by philosophers, but that it is impossible for us to know those answers.

I feel that Kant put it best at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason when he said that Metaphysics is a pursuit wherein men are bound by the nature of their reason to ask questions for which their reason is insufficient to answer. This is a paraphrase because I don't remember the exact quote and don't have a copy of the book anywhere around. Anyway, I feel this quote sums up philosophy as a whole pretty well.

 

[martin's a madman]

As a method for actually understanding how the universe works physically, philosophy is outclassed.

However, in organising the state, social interaction, the structure of argument, morality, etc, Philosophy is great.

My current favourite part of philosophy is argument and fallacy.

 

[Tanakh]

Also, nearly 3 millinea after Imhotep, "medics" were still using leeches to get "the bad blood" out of patients. Philosophy was way ahead of medicine for a long time, and medicine only really advanced whenever people like Joseph Lister used reasoning and said "shouldn't you wash your hands after you touch that corpse before you deliver the baby upstairs?"

Hey! Don't diss the leech! http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=medicinal%20leech
It has lots of hippie medicinal uses.

And medicine was doing fine till people began to avoid playing with dead meat for fear of not getting sky cake.

 

[funguy2121]

Humm . . not really. The practice of medicine and healing may be quite old, but that doesn't mean it was practiced as a "science".

According to dictionary.com, science is: a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws.

Yeah... i guess writing a freaking treaty about anatomy, alinements and cures in papyrus isn't systematic enough (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imhotep#Medicine). Good thing medics now are soooo much more scientificy, no more papyrus!

Also, i rather use the Wikipedia definition of science if you may. When you put the word science with "truths" it makes an alarm sound in my head.

Sigh. As a surgical technologist I can tell you quite a bit about this. My profession exists because of two gentlemen chronicled in the Alan Rickman/Mos Def film Like Something the Lord Made, a perfect example (poor word choice, but we can argue ideal forms later) of a critical advancement in medicine that came from a rational (philosophical) choice. Because of my profession, we know how to perform a C section without leaving the mother with a lifelong case of MRSA or VRSA, more commonly known as super-staph, which by the way is sexually transmittable. I'd say my job is important. We know how to prevent CJD, a close cousin of Mad Cow's, from getting into a patient during eye surgery, making them psychotic and killing them within a couple of days. We know how to use laparoscopes and telesurgery to reduce potentially life-threatening complications and minimize healing time for surgeries so yeah, there's a few reasons we're more "scientificy" than our 3,000 year old counterparts, and for more reasons than parchment.

Also, my last 3 posts referenced movies and comics and still have more merit than a wikipedia page. Just for your edification, I can create/change a wikipedia page spouting total bullshit right now if I so choose. It's a good website and if you take into account turnaround time they're pretty good about policing it, but it's a very poor choice in a thread arguing science.

 

[honestdiscussioner]

Humm . . not really. The practice of medicine and healing may be quite old, but that doesn't mean it was practiced as a "science".

According to dictionary.com, science is: a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws.

Yeah... i guess writing a freaking treaty about anatomy, alinements and cures in papyrus isn't systematic enough (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imhotep#Medicine). Good thing medics now are soooo much more scientificy, no more papyrus!

Also, i rather use the Wikipedia definition of science if you may. When you put the word science with "truths" it makes an alarm sound in my head.

If you need to get technical, I merely have to amend my statement to say science as we know it wouldn't exist without philosophy. Testing, peer-review, double-blind studies, these things that we use to define science today would not be present without philosophy. If you want to say that classical Greek philosophy was not the beginning of people writing down observations, then so be it, but not everyone who writes down knowledge and observations is performing science.

However I don't have to go that route, I can cite wikipedia as you like and say science is "a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe." Your example does not fully satisfy this definition, as there was no testable explanations, merely descriptions of procedures.

If that isn't enough, why not play the xkcd Wikipedia game. Go to the medicine page, and click the first link that isn't in parenthesis, and then the first non-parenthesis link on that page, and so on. You eventually will get to philosophy.

Science is a philosophy. To say there can be science without philosophy is to say something can be a square without being a rectangle.

 

[funguy2121]

The Republic, by Plato. Not the easiest of reads, but relevant, nonetheless. Guess what it's about?

AFAI-Recall is about building good moral and ethical values in the soon to be Greek citizens. Now, good for whom? For the Republic actually, not necessarily for the individual. That's also why the whole Socratic school recommends start education with epic, for you to LOVE your country

You're right, the German's had it so much better in the first half of the 20th Century than we do now.

 

[blaqknoise]

It may not be important, but I find it to be very interesting.

I chose it as one of my courses for university and I'm really looking forward to it.

 

[pixiejedi]

I think one philosophy class should be mandatory in higher education (college or university). Not only does it help you think about thinking in a way that the other fields don't (I'm looking at you psychology with all your naming but no answering) but it actually can be beneficial on a personal standpoint and you won't know unless you try if it helps. If books like 'Plato not Prozac' are out there and help people then the class has to be more beneficial then most of the literature classes I took, regardless of liking them.

 

[Tanakh]

If you need to get technical, I merely have to amend my statement to say science as we know it wouldn't exist without philosophy. Testing, peer-review, double-blind studies, these things that we use to define science today would not be present without philosophy. If you want to say that classical Greek philosophy was not the beginning of people writing down observations, then so be it, but not everyone who writes down knowledge and observations is performing science.

However I don't have to go that route, I can cite wikipedia as you like and say science is "a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe." Your example does not fully satisfy this definition, as there was no testable explanations, merely descriptions of procedures.

If that isn't enough, why not play the xkcd Wikipedia game. Go to the medicine page, and click the first link that isn't in parenthesis, and then the first non-parenthesis link on that page, and so on. You eventually will get to philosophy.

Science is a philosophy. To say there can be science without philosophy is to say something can be a square without being a rectangle.

Going in paragraph order:

- That is quite the unscientific thing to say! Wouldn't exist? Why? Faith in that? But yeah, only recording observations is not science, however that book didn't did that.

- Got me there, however continuing the discussion about if philosophy was the first field of human knowledge or whether it predates the seminal works of other sciences seem sterile. (Spoiler, it does not)

- What for?

- Ohh... really? Wow, i will need to inform the real world about that. It's like saying you can't build Notre Dame without calculus, it certainly helps, but crap, its not required.

 

[Korolev]

It's certainly not a waste of time - there's some usefulness to be found in understanding the evolution of our thinking and the way it has changed in response to science. I am quite a fan of philosophy (even if I don't take it very seriously) as they have pondered some interesting questions and created some interesting "answers".

But yes, as a person of science, I prefer science. Philosophy, valuable as it is, is just.... thought. That's all it is. And it's valuable - but at the end of the day, what matters is whether or not it is REAL, and you can only determine what is real by mathematics and experimentation. You can create all the nicest ideas in the world, but they don't mean jack all if the experiments don't support them. I'm a pragmatic person - I want to KNOW more about this world, rather than just THINK all day. Don't get me wrong - thinking is of course, absolutely important. Scientists first have to come up with ideas in order to test them. But philosophers are content to ONLY think, whereas scientists BOTH Think AND Test.

Philosophy is illuminating in some ways - certainly I've enjoyed Professor Grayling's books immensely, as well as the books written by Hofstadter. They certainly make you think, and what is wrong with that? But I do not TRUST philosophy to reveal deeper truths or facts about the universe. Philosophy did not uncover the periodic table, nor did it shed light on the nucleus of the atom. True, some philosophers developed theories concerning atoms, but if it wasn't for science providing the proof, those nice theories would have just remained theories. It was science that finally showed that atoms existed and that they could be manipulated.

So while I'm all in favour of having and teaching philosophy (if only as an exercise in logic and an insight into the development of human thinking), I think we should place far more emphasis on Science. Philosophy never cured a disease, whereas science has cured Polio and Smallpox and invented dozens of treatments for cancer.

 

[Tanakh]

Sigh. As a surgical technologist I can tell you quite a bit about this. My profession exists because of two gentlemen chronicled in the Alan Rickman/Mos Def film Like Something the Lord Made, a perfect example (poor word choice, but we can argue ideal forms later) of a critical advancement in medicine that came from a rational (philosophical) choice. Because of my profession, we know how to perform a C section without leaving the mother with a lifelong case of MRSA or VRSA, more commonly known as super-staph, which by the way is sexually transmittable. I'd say my job is important. We know how to prevent CJD, a close cousin of Mad Cow's, from getting into a patient during eye surgery, making them psychotic and killing them within a couple of days. We know how to use laparoscopes and telesurgery to reduce potentially life-threatening complications and minimize healing time for surgeries so yeah, there's a few reasons we're more "scientificy" than our 3,000 year old counterparts, and for more reasons than parchment.

Also, my last 3 posts referenced movies and comics and still have more merit than a wikipedia page. Just for your edification, I can create/change a wikipedia page spouting total bullshit right now if I so choose. It's a good website and if you take into account turnaround time they're pretty good about policing it, but it's a very poor choice in a thread arguing science.

So... i don't get your point... your profession seem like a compendium of techniques and knowledge about alignments and their possible cures according to present knowledge; not unlike the info i have about that Imhotep paper. Are you saying both are rather technical and so non "pure sciences"... or that the ancient lore isn't science because it is ultimately flawed? (Spoiler, our science is also flawed).

I would imagine that is actually easier for you, being familiar with the field, to see how huge and ground breaking is a book containing anatomical info, along with illnesses and there respective cures, written 4500 years ago when we were barely getting out of the stone age.

Lastly, pfff, i don't care about the source of the info, i told you why i didnt liked that def.

 

[default]

Well first off you're a fucking SCIENTIST. Of COURSE you aren't gonna understand the deeper emotional and psychological concepts linked with Zen, Shinto, Confucius and Greek philosophies. It's not intended for people like you, as you look for proof and measurable results WHICH IS NOT WHAT PHILOSOPHY IS ABOUT.

I put philosophy in the same basket as art and music. It seeks to alter your mind set and give you new views on concepts. It stimulates the mind and encourages you to view things in a different light.

THAT is the point of philosophy, NOT to 'prove' something.