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Here's my take on your questions. Anecdotes [1] generally aren't the focus of academic philosophy. Modern philosophy focuses on arguments from Axiom [2] where a

• feralimal 6y ago
  "You are right that you don't have to be a trained philosopher to think for yourself. In the same way that training in martial arts helps with punching, or training in coding helps you write better software, training in thinking helps you think." Thank you. But are these comparable? Is thinking competitive and there's a winner? What is it to be trained to think? If that training hadn't happened, would the un-trained person not be thinking? Or, would you be thinking along a more natural way? Is it more akin to building one or other type of sandcastle, rather than to be a better fighter? The way I view it, the only thing an individual can do is try to be the winner for themselves - they need to progress their understanding of themselves as much as possible. In nature there's no competition - there are needs that might or might not be met. But, if you want to harness or direct individuals into a collectivised state, yes, you need to train them, and they will produce what you call 'original works of philosophy' on the basis of all the thought that has preceded them. As if 'a body of original works' is important to an individual. They may be renumerated for their trained thinking. As if renumeration is something the individual would ever want.
  • a_crc 6y ago
    Let me ask you some questions to zero in on your issue here. Is coding competitive? Is cooking? Is reading? Do you think that training does not help you become a better cook or coder or reader? Were you able to read without training? Do you think the fact that you had to be taught to read poisoned the well and you cannot trust anything you have read since?
    • feralimal 6y ago
      The questions about fundamentals - cooking, reading. I would of course agree that these are useful to the individual. Now coding - again the skill is neutral. But what you code might not be. Why do you code what you code? Should you code in a bank, a facebook algorithm, etc? Are you actually undertaking your life in a positive way, or are you making gains at another's expense? Do you think training is a neutral act? Is it possible that training can be subversive to the trainee? Perhaps you will see my position as a political, anti-statist one. I see it as an individualistic perspective. If an individual is trained in academic philosophy, in order to provide 'production of well argued original works of academic philosophy' why is that valuable? To me, there is no value there at all. As an individual, I want to uncover the innate understanding we all already have. Have you ever heard about people who go through half their life, having trained to be doctors, or solicitors, only to then realise that they didn't want to do that? I would say that these are the lucky ones - they have wasted only half their lives, and though they have much to undo, they at least they are honest enough to change their position and try to find something authentic and innate to them. Most people do not do that. That is the power of training and education, IMO. In it for the money, sell your granny. In my view, this is what training at a higher level is to train people NOT to look inside themselves for answers, but to refer to an external authority. This applies to academic philosophy as much as any other area. Love of wisdom, becoming oneself, makes way for the production of 'original works of academic philosophy'. Beyond the basics, education seems to me about disempowering the individual, for the benefit of some imagined 'collective'. In fact, that collective is so individual who has their hands on the levers of governance, but let's not think too closely about that.
      • 6y ago
• mannykannot 6y ago
  > Modern philosophy focuses on arguments from Axiom where a statement is taken to be true as a starting point for an argument. What this means is that philosophy ultimately becomes an extended argument over which propositions to take as axiomatic. One commonly-used technique in this is the thought experiment, and some well-known, much-debated examples, such as Frank Jackson's "Mary's Room", are not even anecdotal evidence. While, I suppose, analytical philosophy could always be presented in the form an analysis of what follows from a given set of axioms, what almost invariably happens in practice is that individual philosophers act as advocates for the particular axioms that they believe actually hold. There also seems to be a pervasive shared assumption in current analytical philosophy that analysis of the use of language can be the ultimate arbiter on questions of how the world actually is - a questionable belief that is not questioned as much as it should be, or so it seems from my very limited perspective.
  • a_crc 6y ago
    >What this means is that philosophy ultimately becomes an extended argument over which propositions to take as axiomatic. I agree. It also involves extended arguments over the statements that follow from these axioms even amongst philosophers who agree the axioms are true. >[W]hat almost invariably happens in practice is that individual philosophers act as advocates for the particular axioms that they believe actually hold. I agree with this as well. My main point was about the structure of the arguments. I don't think arguing from an axiom you hold to be true turns the argument anecdotal.
    • mannykannot 6y ago
      > It also involves extended arguments over the statements that follow from these axioms even amongst philosophers who agree the axioms are true. It is certainly not that uncommon for people to publish claims arising from mistakes in logic, but it is rare for any dispute over them to become extended, as they can be resolved by reason. While it is possible to disagree over the meaning of words, or even of which axioms of logic to accept (such as over axiom B in modal logic), these are still issues of what to take as axiomatic. Edit - On reflection, I can think of cases, such as Searle's non-sequitur of a response to the 'systems reply' to his 'Chinese Room' argument, that have not been promptly eliminated. In the cases I can think of, however, there are unstated assumptions being made - and any such assumption is implicitly axiomatic, as, being unstated, it could not have been derived from other axioms. > I don't think arguing from an axiom you hold to be true turns the argument anecdotal. Indeed - nominally, one is merely presenting a deduction of what a set of propositions imply - but no-one persues philosophy just to do that. When reading papers, I have learned to make note of the points where the language turns to what is likely, plausible or conceivable, as this is often close to the crux of the matter. It is here that one might find what Daniel Dennett has called the Philosopher's Syndrome: "mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity."
• bonoboTP 6y ago
  I find it very often that these types of "numbered premises and consequences as natural language statements" analyses become "not even wrong", moot and missing the point. The actual meat of the problem gets stashed away in what you exactly mean with your natural language sentences and "suitcase words". You may pronounce that Statement A is in contradiction to Statement B but it my be only true in some sense and the whole thing collapses because you made a hidden implicit assumption that turns out to ruin the whole nice house of cards. Its easy to come up with those logical games, see proofs of God's existence. If you can make those statements precise enough you get mathematics. If you cannot, you're better off doing empirical work and leaving the possibility open that you're wrong in some fundamental way. You my proclaim that either A or B is true and in 20 years it turns out that "hmm, things don't really work like that, neither A nor B is really true or it depends on how we look at it but generally this just wasn't a productive way to approach the issue in hindsight". Its a bit like presenting a measurement result with too many decimal places, giving the impression of high precision when it's unwarranted. In the same way the principled structure of philosophical musings makes them look more definite than they actually are.