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I never read a book about philosophy but found an answer to most philosophical questions just by thinking, discussing and occasionally wikipedia. Took a philoso

• rhizome 9y ago
  The funny thing about philosophy is that it concerns itself with concepts that anybody can make for themselves. However, it also allows for unlimited nuance and detail, so the difference can be compared to a freeway vs. backroads through the same area. There's no requirement to adopt any of it as your own, but the same way programmers often learn new techniques and language features, there is a continually growing world of concepts and ways of thinking.
• foldr 9y ago
  It's how you see things on the basis of never having read any philosophy. It's difficult to see the value in a subject that you know nothing about.
  • RivieraKid 9y ago
    Whenever I looked into what most philosophers publish, I just saw vagueness, poor thinking and little value. What's a philosophical problem or question (understandable by someone who hasn't studied philosophy) I would need a philosophy book to answer?
    • foldr 9y ago
      Did "looking into" it involve reading it or not?
      • RivieraKid 9y ago
        It involved some reading.
    • vanderZwan 9y ago
      > Whenever I looked into what most philosophers publish Oh, most philosophers even? So you have taken a good look at the field and have a grasp of the philosophical community and their methods of inquiry and communication? > vagueness If there is one thing I have learned because I switched from studying physics to studying contemporary art, is that when I consider something "vague", it often boils down to my own assumptions and premises. By the standard of what is considered the right way to acquire knowledge in physics, most art is "vague". But the problem is me insisting on judging it by those terms. > poor thinking To elaborate on my previous point: you cannot apply the lines of thinking of one field to the other and judge it by that without also putting in the effort of understanding the lines of thinking of that other field. I have my doubts as to whether you are not mistaken an unfamiliar way of thinking for poor thinking. > little value Well given the two before it, there is indeed little value for you. Then again, I don't read or speak Chinese, so even the most beautiful poetry bundle written in simplified Chinese would hold little value for me too.
    • leephillips 9y ago
      Would it be wrong for someone to catch stray puppies and slowly torture them to death in his basement? Why or why not? Can you not only convince yourself with your answer, but others? And yes, ethics is a part of philosophy.
      • RivieraKid 9y ago
        Depends on how you define "wrong" exactly. It feels wrong to most people.
        • leephillips 9y ago
          Exactly. Good philosophers are careful with definitions. Do you think there's enough space on your one page to define your terms and reach a conclusion that would satisfy most reasonable people?
          • RivieraKid 9y ago
            Well, I wouldn't include ethics at all, I think it falls under biology, psychology, sociology. The core of philosophy is basically understanding consciousnes, not too much else to it. But I guess one page was an exaggeration, let's say five.
            • leephillips 9y ago
              Those sciences don't touch upon what ethics is about, which is what is good and bad, right and wrong. There is no "core of philosophy", and it's certainly not confined to "understanding consciousness". I'd have to agree with others here who have tried to admonish you that you're arguing from ignorance and being unserious, even if a great deal of what passes for philosophy is a waste of time. What about logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, ...?
              • RivieraKid 9y ago
                True, but this is where ethics logcally belongs to. It's just an aspect of human behavior and inner world. Asking what is good or bad is like asking what is the definition of these words. Well, the definition is whatever we agree on. IMost people call "bad" the behavior, that triggers specific emotion of "wrongness". I think that consciousness and closely related topics is the hard part, other things such as ethics or aesthetics have quite mundane explanations. Philosophy of mathematics nad language is somewhere in between.
    • marnett 9y ago
      What philosophers? What books?
• jonathanyc 9y ago
  It seemed to me that most writings in philosophy are so verbose that it is hard to see what core patterns there are. Philosophers can make whatever excuses they’d like, but the fact is that if your elegant theory needs a hundred pages of prose (without section titles!) to be expressed, it is not an elegant theory. And inevitably the theory will be reduced to a paragraph or less anyhow when it is cited as existing work by future scholars. If I were being cynical I would say that this verbosity creates a maze in which one can hide from criticism. I definitely saw some very interesting ideas while learning about philosophy, but I agree with you 100%. I think they’re holding themselves back through constant re-elaboration; you can’t build a tower out of dry sand.
  • RivieraKid 9y ago
    The way I see it, the core of philosophy is the hard problem of consciousness. Once you understand that, there's not much left. Some people include aesthetics or ethics in philosophy, but that's really just psychology, biology, maybe sociology.
    • CuriouslyC 9y ago
      I can see how aesthetics can be reduced to biology, but I don't think ethics reduces so cleanly. The fields you mentioned are all about what "is" while ethics is about what "ought" to be, and there isn't a clear path from one to the other. You might not be inclined to explore philosophy, but David Hume pretty much took the field to its logical conclusion, so it's worth studying him. His philosophy was pure and rooted in first principles. Most of philosophy after Hume is tainted by the assumption of premises not derived from first principles.
• jmoss20 9y ago
  This line of thinking is similar to: "I never took an academic/theoretical computer science course, but I'm able to write code that solves most problems just by thinking, discussing, and occasionally StackOverflow." That might very well be true -- and of course you can (and plenty do) argue that academic CS isn't worthwhile either -- but in both cases it isn't obvious the nuance is useful/justified until you dive into the weeds yourself. I'm in no place to defend the whole field, but I do think it takes a special kind of cynicism to claim that one of the (if not, the) longest running academic projects on Earth "could be summarized on one page with little information loss."
  • RivieraKid2 9y ago
    I think that in philosophy, unlike other fields, one can get very far with little studying, possibly closer to truth than someone who did a lot of it. (Posting under a different username because I got "you're posting too fast" error.)
    • jmoss20 9y ago
      Comparing fields this way is a bit apples to oranges (getting "very far" in CS is quite different than in English Lit, which is quite different than Philosophy, etc.) -- these fields all have very different goals. That said, in philosophy I often have the feeling that some "common sense" view I hold is more accurate than the rigorous, less clear views that I'm studying. Almost always, there turn out to be problems with my common sense view that weren't obvious to me at the outset, and necessitate the extra rigor and abstraction. The unfortunate bit is that if you don't "study" (as you put it), you'll never notice these little flaws, and go on thinking that people are intentionally overcomplicating things. (Made worse by the fact that certain people actually are overcomplicating things -- but that's not evidence against the fact that many things are, in fact, complicated)
      • RivieraKid2 9y ago
        Honestly, I doubt that, the philosophy course I took convinced me that the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad. I've developed my philosophical view mostly independently and have always been able to defend it. I hoped I would get some hard philosophy questions here but nevermind :)
• truculation 9y ago
  Fine as long as you realise that this is taking a philosophical position. The grain of truth is that most published philosophy is bunk.
• VarFarYonder 9y ago
  > The core ideas in philosophy could be summarized on one page with little information loss. This probably seems horribly arrogant, but that's just how I honestly see things. I think academic philosphy aims to be more rigourous, so while such a summary might capture the broad points, it will miss the nuance. A comparison could be made with a game of Chess. On the surface, you could describe a game in terms of the moves played, but to understand why those moves were played, you need to know about the potential moves that weren't played. I can understand why some people criticise academic philosophy for exploring seemingly pointless details extensively, but such exploration always gives someone a richer understanding, and sometimes uncovers flaws in things that previously seemed unquestionable. I think this is what people don't appreciate: understanding the moves played doesn't mean you understand why those moves were played, the ocean of possiblities underneath. No one page summary will do that, for Chess or philosophy.
• Erlangolem 9y ago
  The following is all in my philistine opinion. The problem with philosophy is that science has crowded out most of the good stuff. Who cares about a philosophy of chemical reactions when we have chemistry? Philosophy is useful around issues which don’t admit to empirical study, or for which study yields inconclusive results. In the words of Feynman, “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” Unfortunately instead of sticking to ethics, morality, and other hazy constructs, too often philosophers think they have something useful to say about everything. The result is a lot of bloviation and self-satisfaction with very little substance. Hence the “boil it down to a single page” issue. Edit: My biggest problem with philosophy is that I can imagine a sufficiently advanced civilization which has testable answers to the questions posed by philosophy. I distrust a field of study which proposes to produce something which amounts to a placeholder until scientists do the real, hard work. To go back to my initial example, the philosophy of chemistry became a pointless endeavor with the death of alchemy, and the birth of chemistry.
  • VarFarYonder 9y ago
    > Unfortunately instead of sticking to ethics, morality, and other hazy constructs, too often philosophers think they have something useful to say about everything. They do have something useful to say about people who, due to not having studied philosophy of science, think science has something useful to say about everything. Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape is one notable recent example.
    • Erlangolem 9y ago
      Are you saying that you believe Richard Feynman didn’t have a working grasp of the issues at hand? Or are you saying that “philosophers of science” don’t know anything about the science they philosophize about? I’d guess that Feynman was more familiar with the philosophy of science, than the philosophers were with path integral formulations. As for science, it’s a method, and it can be applied to anything. What it says may often be, “don’t know” which imo is better than 100 pages saying “don’t know, but I’ll give it a go anyway, because no one can prove me wrong yet.”
• EtDybNuvCu 9y ago
  It's not just arrogant, it's disappointing. I could ask you to answer 'the big questions', to tell us what life means or what the teleological truth about our creators or why we seem to all broadly agree on quality of artwork but can't seem to write down the rules of agreement. But you only have those answers for yourself. Further, if the answers which make sense to you can fit on a single page, they likely don't make sense to anybody else. While you're not a solopsist, you haven't really advanced the state of the discussion.
  • RivieraKid2 9y ago
    > or why we seem to all broadly agree on quality of artwork That's really just a biology / neuroscience / psychology question.
    • EtDybNuvCu 9y ago
      You mentioned elsewhere that you haven't been asked any hard questions. So, here's the question: Does this 'quality' of art exist in the things which we observe? Or is it subjective, existing only in the observer? Please think hard on this. Take as much time as you need. When you're ready, first write down your answer in as much detail as you like, to your own confidence. Then, pop open Pirsig's Zen and the Art, starting on p228, and read his thoughts and see what you think.
      • RivieraKid 9y ago
        What exactly do you mean by quality of art? Beauty is just an emotion / feeling triggered when exposed to certain stimuli. It's to some extent encoded in our DNA. Anthropology / human biology / sociology problem.
• Scea91 9y ago
  Finding such an ignorant comment at the top of HN is quite disappointing. Obviously, you are still in the first stage of competence https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Four_stages_of_competence https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Four_stages_of_competence and you don't know what you don't know.
  • RivieraKid2 9y ago
    Possibly. But when defending my philosophical positions, I never had issues or felt that I'm missing out. Same with the philosophy course I took. Bad signal-to-noise ratio, too much nonsense.
  • placebo 9y ago
    When someone tells me they know how to fly, I first ask them to show me before claiming they are full of it. Of course philosophy has value but I too am quite disappointed how easily it enables very basic flawed assumptions to exist over eons even in what would be considered high academic levels. To me it feels like the equivalent of physicists today being divided on whether the earth revolves around the sun or vice versa. Personally I think both Searle and Dennet are essentially dualists (though they'd both vehemently deny it), but each practicing a different form of dualism: Searle promoting some mysterious consciousness as some ghost in the machine, and Dennet protecting physicalism which in my book negates any subject from existing, in complete contradiction to the reality that any object (physical or otherwise) will always be just a model in someone's experience. I see Dennet as trying to squash dualism by giving the model more validity than the very real experience from which it arises, where the better path to eliminate dualism would be to try and get to the source of this division.
• woodandsteel 9y ago
  If it weren't for Western philosophy, the modern world would not exist. Most of the present population would not be alive, and those who were would almost all be peasant farmers who were illiterate, got married as soon as they were biologically able to produce children, half their children would die in infancy or childhood, and they themselves would likely die around the age of 45, if not earlier from the regular epidemics and famines. And why are you not aware of all this?