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Fair points. I think it's worth noting though that while bottom-up invention creates the horse-drawn plow, philosophy is what attempts to answer the question of

Fair points. I think it's worth noting though that while bottom-up invention creates the horse-drawn plow, philosophy is what attempts to answer the question of its rationality, morality, etc. I don't think the two have to be so divorced as you suggest. :-)

bonoboTP 6y ago
I think they are often divorced, as in the philosophers started out on a weird footing, a kind of twisted way of looking at things and in many cases they rediscovered principles that were already in use by common folk. For sure they also produced counterintuitive things, but in a sense the two have converged. The musings which started on what is the good life, what is moral etc lead to discussions of the inner nature of things, the heavens etc. And then I guess somewhat unexpectedly the two were sort of unified: heavens (sky stuff whose study started as a way to try and understand God and his goals with us) and mundane earthly things turned out to be governed by the same laws. The sky is not of fundamentally different nature than our everyday objects. Both consist of the same kinds of elementary particles and obey the same rules. But even today a lot of engineering, biology and medicine is extremely empirical. I mean philosophical medicine led people to derive that we need to do bloodletting etc. While I guess less educated common village folk or indigenous jungle inhabitants had various practices that helped but they didn't know why and weren't derived from ideas like the humors and four elements.
- GavinMcG 6y ago
  You seem to be talking about/dismissing philosophy as though it's stuck in its very earliest days, one step away intuition.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    No I'm just wondering how much philosophy has drawn from common practical low brow stuff to course-correct and grow in the right direction. What came first, empirical philosophers or the recognition that mundane experiential stuff is useful? I'm just arguing against a sort of waterfall model of philosophers sitting on top of the totem pole and passing down to us what to do. Perhaps that's a straw man though, but some people do seem to think that before Aristotle gave us logic we couldn't follow complex arguments. Indeed, I think it's rather that they formalized already existing argument structures they observed in the agora etc. For sure the abstract tools also turned out to be useful and abstraction is how we got to the moon, not through taller ladders etc. I think it's hard to deny there is a bitter elitist tinge to philosophers that they don't get enough credit, but it's definitely a larger topic than what fits in a comment.
    - tremon 6y ago
      What came first, empirical philosophers or the recognition that mundane experiential stuff is useful? What came first, empirical physicists or the recognition that mundane events could be predicted and controlled in a useful way? What came first, meteorologists or the recognition that paying heed to mundane weather patterns could be useful? In essence, yes, you're arguing against a strawman. Every improvement is incremental. How come you're belittling Aristotle and Plato and discarding their contributions, but not similarly discarding Newton, Leibniz or Turing?
AQXt 6y ago
The problem with philosophy is that you can't tell the difference between an honest effort to seek the truth and a frivolous attempt to display erudition to win the debate. Science is not perfect, but it provides evaluation mechanisms to reduce the doubt.
- vehemenz 6y ago
  > The problem with philosophy is that you can't tell the difference between an honest effort to seek the truth and a frivolous attempt to display erudition to win the debate. I'm not sure what you are including in "philosophy," but there are entire subfields dedicated to this very issue. However, unlike the sciences, you have to work for it. Nature doesn't give you the answers.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    It's an annoying game because by this tactic philosophy is always good and important and can never be useless, because when you argue that it's useless, a philosopher will say "Gotcha! Now you are doing philosophy! You just proved how important philosophy is! Thanks for your contributions to it!" But if I don't do philosophy you keep prodding me "Hey, hey, philosophy is important, do philosophy!". If I tell you to go away because I don't need it for this and this reason, then I've fallen into the trap because I'm now doing philosophy. But I guess science-denying people argue just like I did above when they dislike the idea that science admits that it may be wrong and will update itself with new evidence. But I can see how someone with a different epistemological footing would be annoyed with this. Something of this sort can never be "wrong", because it will just incorporate an update when it's proven wrong. But is that updated thing really the same? It's a cheap trick to try and get around of being ever truly wrong. If you turn out to be wrong you can just say "but I knew I may be wrong and would have to update" so you weren't really wrong in the deeper sense! Note that I adhere to this scientific ethos as well, but I can see it has a wobbly structure in this way.

bonoboTP 6y ago

I think they are often divorced, as in the philosophers started out on a weird footing, a kind of twisted way of looking at things and in many cases they rediscovered principles that were already in use by common folk. For sure they also produced counterintuitive things, but in a sense the two have converged. The musings which started on what is the good life, what is moral etc lead to discussions of the inner nature of things, the heavens etc. And then I guess somewhat unexpectedly the two were sort of unified: heavens (sky stuff whose study started as a way to try and understand God and his goals with us) and mundane earthly things turned out to be governed by the same laws. The sky is not of fundamentally different nature than our everyday objects. Both consist of the same kinds of elementary particles and obey the same rules. But even today a lot of engineering, biology and medicine is extremely empirical. I mean philosophical medicine led people to derive that we need to do bloodletting etc. While I guess less educated common village folk or indigenous jungle inhabitants had various practices that helped but they didn't know why and weren't derived from ideas like the humors and four elements.

GavinMcG 6y ago
You seem to be talking about/dismissing philosophy as though it's stuck in its very earliest days, one step away intuition.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  No I'm just wondering how much philosophy has drawn from common practical low brow stuff to course-correct and grow in the right direction. What came first, empirical philosophers or the recognition that mundane experiential stuff is useful? I'm just arguing against a sort of waterfall model of philosophers sitting on top of the totem pole and passing down to us what to do. Perhaps that's a straw man though, but some people do seem to think that before Aristotle gave us logic we couldn't follow complex arguments. Indeed, I think it's rather that they formalized already existing argument structures they observed in the agora etc. For sure the abstract tools also turned out to be useful and abstraction is how we got to the moon, not through taller ladders etc. I think it's hard to deny there is a bitter elitist tinge to philosophers that they don't get enough credit, but it's definitely a larger topic than what fits in a comment.
  - tremon 6y ago
    What came first, empirical philosophers or the recognition that mundane experiential stuff is useful? What came first, empirical physicists or the recognition that mundane events could be predicted and controlled in a useful way? What came first, meteorologists or the recognition that paying heed to mundane weather patterns could be useful? In essence, yes, you're arguing against a strawman. Every improvement is incremental. How come you're belittling Aristotle and Plato and discarding their contributions, but not similarly discarding Newton, Leibniz or Turing?

AQXt 6y ago

The problem with philosophy is that you can't tell the difference between an honest effort to seek the truth and a frivolous attempt to display erudition to win the debate. Science is not perfect, but it provides evaluation mechanisms to reduce the doubt.

vehemenz 6y ago
> The problem with philosophy is that you can't tell the difference between an honest effort to seek the truth and a frivolous attempt to display erudition to win the debate. I'm not sure what you are including in "philosophy," but there are entire subfields dedicated to this very issue. However, unlike the sciences, you have to work for it. Nature doesn't give you the answers.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  It's an annoying game because by this tactic philosophy is always good and important and can never be useless, because when you argue that it's useless, a philosopher will say "Gotcha! Now you are doing philosophy! You just proved how important philosophy is! Thanks for your contributions to it!" But if I don't do philosophy you keep prodding me "Hey, hey, philosophy is important, do philosophy!". If I tell you to go away because I don't need it for this and this reason, then I've fallen into the trap because I'm now doing philosophy. But I guess science-denying people argue just like I did above when they dislike the idea that science admits that it may be wrong and will update itself with new evidence. But I can see how someone with a different epistemological footing would be annoyed with this. Something of this sort can never be "wrong", because it will just incorporate an update when it's proven wrong. But is that updated thing really the same? It's a cheap trick to try and get around of being ever truly wrong. If you turn out to be wrong you can just say "but I knew I may be wrong and would have to update" so you weren't really wrong in the deeper sense! Note that I adhere to this scientific ethos as well, but I can see it has a wobbly structure in this way.