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Funny you say that.. I've recently read a book about child psychology and it was constantly praising the progress of science (specifically neuroscience).. yet I

Funny you say that.. I've recently read a book about child psychology and it was constantly praising the progress of science (specifically neuroscience).. yet I've read all this stuff before, for example in Jung or even in the Stoics. Ok maybe they didn't know. Or maybe it's science's job to methodically confirm knowledge, that has so far been rather anecdotal, and scientists can pat themselves on the back for it, why not. But it somewhat annoyed me to read that book anyway. They just made it sound like some breakthrough research, which I think it wasn't.

shadowgovt 6y ago
The thing to remember about philosophy is that philosophy is more akin to mathematics than to science. It's the exercise of taking some postulates and forming a theory atop the assumption the postulates are true. Whether the philosophy you end up with actually reflects reality is a function of whether those postulates map to real things... The philosophy can (and, in history, many times, has) live independently of the postulates, describing an interesting, self-consistent world that just isn't real. Aristotle described matter as being made up of atoms, and he's first-order-approximation correct, but his mechanistic details of how they worked were extremely wrong. Descartes' famous "I think, therefore I am" proof rests extremely heavily on an assertion he makes earlier in the Discourse where he combats the hypothesis that he's just a brain in a jar being fed lies by an evil demon by asserting that the God that would allow that reality would be a really shitty god, so he dismisses it out of hand. It's through scientific investigation that we came to discover which parts of Aristotle's philosophy matched reality and which can be discarded (and we lack the scientific insight, as of yet, to have strong evidence for or against that evil-demon brain-in-a-jar hypothesis. ;) ). There are a thousand, thousand algebras that are internally-consistent but ultimately uninteresting because they map to nothing we observe in the universe, and then there's linear algebra. There are a thousand, thousand philosophies that are internally-consistent hot garbage, and then there's Jung. To say "Jung described this, why did it take science so long to discover it?" is like saying "Complex wave functions already describe quantum mechanics; why did it take physicists so long to realize that?" Now, what philosophy does gift us with (if it's grounded in strong logical consistency) is a roadmap of where to look next if we notice that things in reality do align to the postulates, because the philosopher has already imagined, in vivid detail, the consequences of those assertions. And that is extremely cool.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  >Whether the philosophy you end up with actually reflects reality is a function of whether those postulates map to real things. Science works in the same way. Rather the whole theory must correlate with reality.

shadowgovt 6y ago

The thing to remember about philosophy is that philosophy is more akin to mathematics than to science. It's the exercise of taking some postulates and forming a theory atop the assumption the postulates are true. Whether the philosophy you end up with actually reflects reality is a function of whether those postulates map to real things... The philosophy can (and, in history, many times, has) live independently of the postulates, describing an interesting, self-consistent world that just isn't real. Aristotle described matter as being made up of atoms, and he's first-order-approximation correct, but his mechanistic details of how they worked were extremely wrong. Descartes' famous "I think, therefore I am" proof rests extremely heavily on an assertion he makes earlier in the Discourse where he combats the hypothesis that he's just a brain in a jar being fed lies by an evil demon by asserting that the God that would allow that reality would be a really shitty god, so he dismisses it out of hand. It's through scientific investigation that we came to discover which parts of Aristotle's philosophy matched reality and which can be discarded (and we lack the scientific insight, as of yet, to have strong evidence for or against that evil-demon brain-in-a-jar hypothesis. ;) ). There are a thousand, thousand algebras that are internally-consistent but ultimately uninteresting because they map to nothing we observe in the universe, and then there's linear algebra. There are a thousand, thousand philosophies that are internally-consistent hot garbage, and then there's Jung. To say "Jung described this, why did it take science so long to discover it?" is like saying "Complex wave functions already describe quantum mechanics; why did it take physicists so long to realize that?" Now, what philosophy does gift us with (if it's grounded in strong logical consistency) is a roadmap of where to look next if we notice that things in reality do align to the postulates, because the philosopher has already imagined, in vivid detail, the consequences of those assertions. And that is extremely cool.

GoblinSlayer 6y ago
>Whether the philosophy you end up with actually reflects reality is a function of whether those postulates map to real things. Science works in the same way. Rather the whole theory must correlate with reality.