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Is Philosophy an Art?

85 points by diodorus 6y ago

beckingz 6y ago
Philosophy is not an Art. Deciding what to philosophize about is the real art.
ANarrativeApe 6y ago
Working on some inforgraphics tackling gender bias a while back, I was'accused' of producing data visualization art. I defended the intellectual rigor of my work, yet lost the argument - my 'accuser' turned out to be the curator of data visualization art at the Tate Modern. He won the argument by pointing out that the work, though based on hard data, was designed to evoke an emotional rather than an intellectual response. Ao much philosophy is taught as if it were a niche area of literary criticism, rather than as raw materials for the creation of algorithms for intentional living, it probably is fair to regard much philosophy as if art, or even art criticism.
- routerl 6y ago
  There's something to be said for the notion that, in the modern world, anyone who is a "professional philosopher" is just incapable of doing the kind of "here's how you should live" work that dominates early Western and Asian philosophy. Among modern professions, the only ones that can bear the legal liability of such a line of inquiry are in the health sciences. In this sense, philosophy professors cannot be doing what Socrates thought he was doing, except while teaching. But, as a rule, teaching is not considered the "productive work" of any professors. The "serious" work of academics is to produce tomes and articles, and to manage their citations like investments.
  - staticman2 6y ago
    I don't understand where you got the idea that people who tell others how to live have legal liability: if that were the case your local preacher would be in serious trouble.
    - routerl 6y ago
      There's a thin line between cult and religion, and a lot of it has to do with institutional age. Although, yeah, there are a lot of christian, and buddhist for that matter, cults. Often these do end up breaching legal boundaries, as I've described, but more often they merely offend common morality or decency, which also reveals the problem of trying to tell people how to live, outside of accepted avenues (i.e. health sciences and, as you've pointed out, established religions).
      - staticman2 6y ago
        I highly doubt that they are breaching legal boundries. Doctors only have a monopoly on formal medical advise- they do not have a monopoly on "telling people how to live". Nobody thinks their local preacher or philosopher is giving formal medical advise- so there is unlikely to be any liability at all outside of gratuitously bad behavior like telling people to drink bleach.
        routerl 6y ago
        There are mental health doctors as well.
        deleted 6y ago
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      - deleted 6y ago
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      - wombatmobile 6y ago
        “The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own” -- Frank Zappa
  - faeriechangling 6y ago
    Wouldn't this imply that doctors, perticularly those working in mental health, are practicing philosophy on their patients while not being experts in it?
    - smhost 6y ago
      the wording of your parent comment is ambiguous (maybe on purpose), but the early (western) philosophers weren't so concerned with telling people how to live than they were with raising the question of what it means to lead a good life, which are two different things. mental health professionals today are more concerned with the former than they are with the latter. the ones who do practice the latter are very marginalized in the united states (i heard it's less the case in europe), but they do really interesting political work that might or might not start a flame war if i talk about it here so i won't.
  - watwut 6y ago
    Socrates got executed. Socrates was framed as teacher anyway. You can give advice on how to live, many people do. There are whole booshelves of self-help advice which is literally giving advice on how to live.
  - prionassembly 6y ago
    But that's really a problem with academia, not philosophy per se? I'm not sure e.g. academic engineers working in materials science are ready to just take the place of an engineer in a construction site. (Then, people like Norvig are a counter-example to this claim. But positions created in MAGFA for top academics like Norvig, Varian, etc. will always have a tailor-made character and defer to celebrity status.)
- keenreed 6y ago
  Well, processing data correctly is a form of art. Raw data contain systemic biases and are not ethical. It takes an artist to cleanse data, and present them without bias in an ethical and moral way.
  - seneca 6y ago
    > Well, processing data correctly is a form of art. Raw data contain systemic biases and are not ethical. It takes an artist to cleanse data, and present them without bias in an ethical and moral way. This is one of the most dystopian things I've read in recent memory. Raw data is bias but it's art to "cleanse" the data and make them "ethical and moral"? The system is bias, but the artist is without and can bring purity. This is some truly Ministry of Truth level thinking and it's quite disturbing to know people genuinely believe this. No wonder we have a replication crisis.
idoubtit 6y ago
I think of philosophy of the art of words and ideas, just like literature is generally the art of words and stories. But, for historical reasons, many people and most philosophers claim philosophy is much more than this. Spinoza was convinced he was "engaged in the pursuit of truth", as the article writes, and he probably thought he had built a logical proof of the existence of god. But his concepts are fuzzy, so his reasoning is unprovable, and his apparent rigorousness is not at all scientific. Many philosophers disagree with his theories, and none of them are wrong or better or worse than Spinoza, since there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy. Apart from these points (proof, progress, consensus), there are many indices for classifying philosophy among the arts. No one would claim to be an expert of a philosopher without reading and studying his book and articles. But, if the substance was more important than the form, it should not matter. One can master Gauss' mathematics or Einstein's physics without reading the original works.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  Wouldn’t that imply that no philosophy is true? I think of it as the search for truths that we can’t empirically prove, contrasted to science and math which are purely logical. But math and science have their bases in philosophy through universal laws and propositions, which are unprovable but necessary. Art is more concerned with human experience and seems like a different thing.
  - qsort 6y ago
    At the cost of being extremely annoying, what does "a truth we can't empirically prove" look like? > Art is more concerned with human experience and seems like a different thing. Isn't the same true for philosophy? Part of the reason why philosophy is a meaningful field of study as opposed to complete charlatanry is that it "points" towards parts of human experience that aren't quite captured by math/science/models. Philosophers trying to be natural scientists would make terrible philosophy and terrible science. Minor nitpick: > science and math Science and math are very different beasts. Math is a meaningless game you play with symbols. I'm not serious, but I'm not joking either. There are zero assumptions of any kind mathematics makes (except primitive concepts and axioms, which are themselves mathematical objects), as the old joke goes: science talks about the universe, math talks about a universe. Math is kind of unique in this respect, no other discipline is quite like it.
zozbot234 6y ago
Relevant: http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
- ogurechny 6y ago
  What a dull essay by someone who studied lots of things about philosophy, but never practiced any. Which is, by the way, simply thinking about thinking. Complex terms and systems are strictly secondary, thinking is the thing. Questioning positions, wondering whether they are right or wrong for real — not because it's some logical exercise, what is true and what is false in principle, how do thoughts form and interact with each other, and so on. From this grow all big questions about the truth itself, and the world as a whole. And most often the ideas to doubt are your own, but self-criticism is all but absent from the essay. Even according to his own standard of “practical utility” (ugh), philosophy would help a lot. It would probably prevent relying on textbook stereotypes, like the one about “Dark Ages”, and looking condescendingly on all those “stupid ancient people”, help believe less in common propaganda, and generally hint that 19th century militant scientism is a bit dated position (in addition to being not that smart from the start). Of course, cork hats and cranium measurements fell out of fashion, but the rest looks quite familiar in people who are so loudly happy about “SCIENCE!!!”. Obviously, the description of “science” presented is as far from real science as this description of philosophy is far from real philosophy.
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    I don't think they have a different option as universalism falls out of fashion.
ironSkillet 6y ago
I'm reminded of a story from "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" where he asks a bunch of philosophy graduate students on what the definition of a certain phrase was, and everyone actually had a different idea. This ambiguity of language is why in my opinion philosophy is most certainly an art and not a science.
- karaterobot 6y ago
  "Ahh," he said, steepling his fingers, "but what, after all, is Art?"
  - goatlover 6y ago
    So, does that make the philosophy of art metaphilosophy?
notretarded 6y ago
Yes. Next question.
bookofjoe 6y ago
Is art a philosophy?
slibhb 6y ago
John Gray's NY Review articles are great. Reading him, it's interesting how often "new ideas" are actually old ideas that have been forgotten and are now being recycled.
- specialist 6y ago
  Ya. I started chewing thru History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast last year. It's been great. Learning that many of our current debates are millennia old helped me calm down. Regrettably, since I skipped college, my awareness of the classics and liberal arts is very deficient. Now I firmly believe K-12 curriculum should include (age appropriate) ethics, civics, classics, logics, epistemology, etc. In response to "fake news", some progressives are advocating "media literacy". That's not nearly ambitious enough.
nathias 6y ago
philosophy's questions and proposed answers can not be easily formalized, as such they appear as art to lesser minds
neonological 6y ago
Philosophy can be thought of as a field of study akin to psuedo science. Think about it. There is a philosophy of aesthetics and religion along with a philosophy of science and logic. Science and logic attempt to describe something central to the universe while religion and aesthetics are central to only the human experience. To place the two in the same box is a huge category error akin trying to scientifically derive creationism. Philosophy is essentially just a mish mash of deep thoughts and ponderings of unrelated topics. There is no deeper overarching connection here. Academia came to realize later that certain deep thoughts were “better” then others and formalized those deep thoughts into math and science. Historically things like science and math and logic comes from “philosophy” but ultimately philosophy is just an old way of thinking in the sense that we as humans now have enough information to understand that aesthetics, religion and science don’t belong in the same category. Philosophy is a outmoded concept that only is still around for the same reason technical debt in software is still around. The inevitable philosophers response to this is that all experience is technically human in nature. We cannot experience the universe without human bias injected into the observation thus it is not a category error to place Christianity in a field side by side with number theory because it’s all human made up stuff anyway. To which I respond that all of academia is structured around hypothetical axioms. We can’t prove anything is real but we assume it’s all real. We can’t prove that there is any other way to experience the universe outside of the human experience yet we still assume and structure our science such that the human experience is not central to the universe. Our observations of the universe lead us to believe that the human experience is just a random phenomena in the corner of some galaxy and that is the best available information we have. To discuss anything outside of what we know is like trying to ask someone who is born blind to describe color.
- Thursday24 6y ago
  That's perhaps a bit too harsh an assessment of the field. Betrand Russell, in his "A history of western philosophy" defines Philosophy as a no man's land or speculative region between religion/theology and science. It is a bucket of thought which is sceptical, probing, speculative of itself and the world. It can sometimes turn into science, and sometimes otherwise. Essentially it can be seen as an expression of human curiosity, which is the seed of definite knowledge.
13415 6y ago
Personally, I do "formal philosophy" at least to some extent/in some papers, i.e., lots of logic, decision theory, a bit of applied mathematics. This kind of analytic philosophy superficially looks like science, at least to people who don't know much about the STEM fields. However, in my opinion it is clearly not science. IMHO, it's best to take philosophy as a discipline on its own. If I am pressed to decide between art and science, I'd call it an art, if not to annoy those people who erroneously believe that philosophy is a science. I personally find it hard to accept any discipline that does not follow the scientific method a science. Many other parts of the humanities in my opinion do not really qualify as science either. Or, perhaps they could be called "soft sciences" or "intellectual studies." However, philosophy is in the same boat as mathematics in this respect, which is also traditionally not considered a science but rather a discipline of its own, pursued for its own sake and with its own evaluation criteria. Few would call mathematics an art, though, or would they? I'm not sure.
- routerl 6y ago
  > Few would call mathematics an art, though, or would they? I'm not sure. Many would, precisely because it is not empirical, as indicated by the fact that mathematics departments are often in Arts faculties. As Sir Michael Atiyah put it: "The art in good mathematics, and mathematics is an art, is to identify and tackle problems that are both interesting and solvable." Mathematicians will often wax philosophical when speaking about mathematical beauty and elegance, which is widely considered to be a central pursuit of mathematics, second only to correctness. The problem here is that too many people are trying to use the word "science" to mean "the only thing that produces knowledge", in which case "mathematics is not a science, but does produce knowledge" is a heretical statement, even though a sizable portion of mathematicians would agree with it.
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    Isn't induction empirical?
    - routerl 6y ago
dr_dshiv 6y ago
Classically, philosophy is not about establishing truth. It is about better living.
- bobthechef 6y ago
  Not true. Classically, philosophy was most certainly about the truth. How could you know what better living is without knowing the truth? What "better" or "living" really are? Ethics, which is about what a good life is, depends on an understanding of human nature. What do you think Socrates was doing when he attacked the sophists of Athens? Living better? I guess, if you like taking hemlock.
  - dr_dshiv 6y ago
    That is precisely why Socrates did what he did. And the truth is certainly important for living better—but there is knowledge in philosophy that goes beyond verbal truths.
- goatlover 6y ago
  Philosophers asked metaphysical and epistemological questions in ancient Greece, India and China as well as questions about how to live a good life. Philosophy has always been plenty diverse.
- garbagetime 6y ago
  I disagree. Classically, philosophy was about establishing truth (which is why it is called philosophy - literally love of knowledge). But establishing truth was seen as a subset of better living.
bobthechef 6y ago
Nonsense. Sure, if you want to spite the bullshit artists in the field by calling what they're doing "performance art", that's fine. But if you're a real philosopher, then you are ultimately interested in the truth by definition, while recognizing that it isn't always easy to get to, that it might take a lot of effort to even put together a sensible response or claim in the first place, and even more time refining the position in an engagement with other philosophers. So in that sense, the philosophical disciplines are sciences, and in fact, the highest and most general sciences. No other science can answer metaphysical questions, for example. Sure, other sciences can inform the discussion, but they cannot replace the philosophical science that draws from them. The article is behind a paywall, so I could not read beyond the first couple pages or so, but from the comments I sense that there is some strange conviction that philosophy is ultimately an obsolete kind of wankery that the empirical sciences have long since superseded. Of course, this is rather a sign of profound ignorance and philistinism rather than a statement about how things actually are.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Very hard to definite art as qm constructuinis quit an art. That is why I love the Popper Criteria can it be refuted. And may I add is that the theory is trying its best to be refuted. If it is, science. If it is not, arts. And any good effort is an art. Unless some has to add an element of empathy, demonstrating something extra.
ralusek 6y ago
This is sort of like the thing where Biology is applied Chemistry Chemistry is applied Physics Physics is applied Mathematics Not a perfect train of thought, but correct enough. If that is the hierarchy of the scientific world, I would argue that Philosophy is the "Mathematics" of art world. Every other art form is "applied Philosophy."
JenniferRM 6y ago
Philosophy is the (surprisingly fertile) dowager empress of the sciences. Physics may be the king, and Math the queen, but they always seem to be grinding their teeth and wishing that old biddy Philosophy would just finally die one day, and hand over the last her her powers, and she never really does.
- routerl 6y ago
  This is wonderful and I will steal it. Thank you :)
- redisman 6y ago
  It's like a layer between the sciences and the people these days. You almost certainly will always need something like that. Science can make discoveries but it doesn't amount to much until they get transposed to the human realm.
tus89 6y ago
A similar question could be asked -- is mathematics a science?
- Hitton 6y ago
  No. Mathematics is an elaborate game with surprising ability to model universe.
  - ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
    Or a language to describe reality. There’s a whole philosophy of mathematics. Fascinating stuff
swayvil 6y ago
Sure. We employ our aesthetic sense, for the navigation, and appreciation, of this field of ideas. Primarily.
bshepard 6y ago
"Everyone has to stand before a picture as before a prince, waiting to see whether it will speak and what it will say to him; and, as with the prince, so he himself must not address it, for then he would hear only himself. It follows from all this that all wisdom is certainly contained in the works of the pictorial or graphic arts, yet only virtually or implicitly. Philosophy, on the other hand, endeavors to furnish the same wisdom actuality, to make it explicit: in this sense, philosophy is related to the arts as wine is to grapes" (Schopenhauer)
nigit 6y ago
philosophy is a shart
max_ 6y ago
I studied art as an option back in high school, and in College I studied it in a more "scientific" context like gestalt theory, color science, principles (proportions, perspective). My opinion of art is that it is simply a computational resource that human beings use to store emotions.
- newswasboring 6y ago
  > My opinion of art is that it is simply a computational resource that human beings use to store emotions. With NFTs this is now more true than ever, on multiple levels
diegoperini 6y ago
Philosophy feels like a sport. Is sports art?
yottalove 6y ago
Anything mediated by a mind is an artifice: art. It may be art from an artisan or craft used in a trade. It may be intellectual such as a mathematical proof. It may arguably be non-human art or bad art--but it is art.
- s_m_t 6y ago
  Agreed, 'art' as something distinct from any other creative activity is a fairly recent western invention. If you take art at face value from it's basic definition it just means something like 'technique' and that meaning is good enough to make sense of it all imho.
johndoe42377 6y ago
Philosophy used to be a systematic attempt to answer just one question - What Is? (or what is real?) Science emerged as a standard methodology much later. Abstract bullshitting, which is mistakenly called philosophy too, may be considered as an art, like storytelling. To clarify - fancy philosophical systems have nothing to do with philosophy. They are just piles of abstractions.
brbrodude 6y ago
Since it seems everyone is giving their opinion, I'll leave mine before reading the article: The concept of philosophy predates the concept of art, it also predates science. So, if one is more fundamental than the other(and fundamental TO the other emergence), doesn't this make the question pointless?
lbblack 6y ago
Woah, philosophy and art are two massive subjects. Historically, both have been treated as separate subjects for good reasons. However there is some overlap, such as something which is beautiful to the senses. But the distinction between the two is that philosophy is usually a set of distinct thought-experiment(s) and art is an observer's perspective into the mind of an artist(s). Largely, scientists scoff at philosophy due to the intrinsic nature that most of it relies in the realm of "thought experiments." Which may be hard for some people, but I've never had an issue with wild imaginations. Yet, I would argue the Philosopher's Stone is one of the most mythological thing known to human history. And I'm sure 99.999% of people couldn't distinguish the Philosopher's Stone from a generic looking lake rock. Right?
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  > Largely, scientists scoff at philosophy the types that scoff usually are pseudo scientists who had gone through just enough academic brainwashing that makes them believe everything can be modeled as a system. it's the mindset that dominates Tech/STEM sadly. those who scream the loudest (usually those who read Sokal) are also the most clueless about what framework to use when. "A city is not a tree"[1], by Christopher Alexander is a fantastic example of how a "science above everything" mindset keeps us from having good things. Another example of fools (we have many) would be the idea that smart-contracts, blockchains can be used to model very complex social "systems of systems" (or anyone who peddles silver bullets). [1] http://www.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexander-A-city-is-not-a-tree.pdf http://www.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexa...
  - lbblack 6y ago
    I believe ya!
  - anyonecancode 6y ago
    I get deep satisfaction from modeling business processes into software and seeing the system up and running. And, the more I do this and the better I get at it, the gap between my models and the actual thing become ever more apparent. I think getting good at software can lead you down a couple of paths -- either coming to think that everything can truly be modeled in software given enough time and resources, or growing in humility and realizing the limits of software and the unbridgeable gap between models (however useful and impressive) and larger reality.
PeterWhittaker 6y ago
I'd say no. But then when I think "philosophy", I think of a specific intellectual discipline, one that embraces two distinct modes of thought and exploration. But first, some history. Once upon a time, the 3 pillars of philosophy were metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology. Starting with Kant and ending sometime in the late 19th or early 20th C, with the work of philosopher-mathematicians, if you will (Godel, Russell, etc.), metaphysics went by the wayside. While philosophy was once about exploring how the world might be and what might be beyond the material, prudent philosophers realized that science was now the realm of knowing the world and anything based not on science was basically religion, and not subject to knowability, sharability, falsifiability, etc. Ethics was next: Lacking metaphysics, lacking a baseline of truth, what was the point in postulating ethics? It does sneak back in, though, more in a moment. That leaves epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge and knowability. Modern philosophers of science work rigorously with mathematicians and physicists, among others, to explore epistemological questions, especially those that arise from Godel's incomplete theorem, from various interpretations of quantum mechanics, and from computational complexity. That's the first of modern philosophy's two areas of expertise: Embracing what is happening in other fields and exploring what those fields have to say about what we can usefully say about what is and is not knowable. The second area is taking well founded ideas and exploring them fully. My favourite example is Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", which takes the basic notion of reproduction with variation to its logical and sometimes illogical extremes. What about people who style themselves or are styled as philosophers and who write about art or sociology or religion? And explore those things in ways similar to what I describe above? If they are doing philosophy, it is pre-20thC, maybe even pre-19thC philosophy, but I see it as critique, essayism, but not as philosophy, not in the modern sense. Occasionally, you'll encounter someone who writes with the same clarity and discipline as those modern philosophers who continue to work the hard problem (epistemology), but those writers are rare. One of the last great ethics writers was one such: Mackey's Ethics explored the question of how to be ethical, what that meant, taken to its intellectual and living extreme, but he did not explore of the question of why: One's reason for being ethical is personal, metaphysical, subjective. Mackey provides tools and techniques for acting on a decision to live ethically, for exploring that decision. (You could say that I fall in the old "analytic" camp, and I'd accept that. The "synthetic" camp, IMHO, was mostly emptied in the early 20th C and is now populated with people in love with their own words, with opacity and obscurity, and who have yet to admit that they really wish their science fiction and fantasy writing was taken more seriously or more popularly, or both.)
LudwigNagasena 6y ago
I always find such discussions unsatisfying and unproductive. People take a vague and ill-defined concept that changed its meaning over time and treat it as something homogenous, bonus points if they do it twice in the same question (it talks about philosophy and art). “What if we treat philosophy as art”? Well, what if we treat it as a corpus of thoughts related only through immediate relevancy and no strict boundaries otherwise? Funny that they mention Wittgenstein but don’t bring up his idea of family resemblance ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance ).
scotty79 6y ago
Yes. Art is every human product that doesn't have to function in any way, and despite that it still has potential to be appreciated by some people. Philosophy fits.
jenkstom 6y ago
It's certainly not a science.
ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
There’s a philosophy of science and a philosophy of art, like there’s philosophy of physics and math. I think it’s more about the practice of asking the hard questions, in whatever field they may be. I think they’re equating philosophy and psychology

85 points by diodorus 6y ago

Philosophy is not an Art. Deciding what to philosophize about is the real art.

Working on some inforgraphics tackling gender bias a while back, I was'accused' of producing data visualization art. I defended the intellectual rigor of my work, yet lost the argument - my 'accuser' turned out to be the curator of data visualization art at the Tate Modern. He won the argument by pointing out that the work, though based on hard data, was designed to evoke an emotional rather than an intellectual response. Ao much philosophy is taught as if it were a niche area of literary criticism, rather than as raw materials for the creation of algorithms for intentional living, it probably is fair to regard much philosophy as if art, or even art criticism.

routerl 6y ago
There's something to be said for the notion that, in the modern world, anyone who is a "professional philosopher" is just incapable of doing the kind of "here's how you should live" work that dominates early Western and Asian philosophy. Among modern professions, the only ones that can bear the legal liability of such a line of inquiry are in the health sciences. In this sense, philosophy professors cannot be doing what Socrates thought he was doing, except while teaching. But, as a rule, teaching is not considered the "productive work" of any professors. The "serious" work of academics is to produce tomes and articles, and to manage their citations like investments.
- staticman2 6y ago
  I don't understand where you got the idea that people who tell others how to live have legal liability: if that were the case your local preacher would be in serious trouble.
  - routerl 6y ago
    There's a thin line between cult and religion, and a lot of it has to do with institutional age. Although, yeah, there are a lot of christian, and buddhist for that matter, cults. Often these do end up breaching legal boundaries, as I've described, but more often they merely offend common morality or decency, which also reveals the problem of trying to tell people how to live, outside of accepted avenues (i.e. health sciences and, as you've pointed out, established religions).
    - staticman2 6y ago
      I highly doubt that they are breaching legal boundries. Doctors only have a monopoly on formal medical advise- they do not have a monopoly on "telling people how to live". Nobody thinks their local preacher or philosopher is giving formal medical advise- so there is unlikely to be any liability at all outside of gratuitously bad behavior like telling people to drink bleach.
      - routerl 6y ago
        There are mental health doctors as well.
        deleted 6y ago
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    - deleted 6y ago
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    - wombatmobile 6y ago
      “The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own” -- Frank Zappa
- faeriechangling 6y ago
  Wouldn't this imply that doctors, perticularly those working in mental health, are practicing philosophy on their patients while not being experts in it?
  - smhost 6y ago
    the wording of your parent comment is ambiguous (maybe on purpose), but the early (western) philosophers weren't so concerned with telling people how to live than they were with raising the question of what it means to lead a good life, which are two different things. mental health professionals today are more concerned with the former than they are with the latter. the ones who do practice the latter are very marginalized in the united states (i heard it's less the case in europe), but they do really interesting political work that might or might not start a flame war if i talk about it here so i won't.
- watwut 6y ago
  Socrates got executed. Socrates was framed as teacher anyway. You can give advice on how to live, many people do. There are whole booshelves of self-help advice which is literally giving advice on how to live.
- prionassembly 6y ago
  But that's really a problem with academia, not philosophy per se? I'm not sure e.g. academic engineers working in materials science are ready to just take the place of an engineer in a construction site. (Then, people like Norvig are a counter-example to this claim. But positions created in MAGFA for top academics like Norvig, Varian, etc. will always have a tailor-made character and defer to celebrity status.)
keenreed 6y ago
Well, processing data correctly is a form of art. Raw data contain systemic biases and are not ethical. It takes an artist to cleanse data, and present them without bias in an ethical and moral way.
- seneca 6y ago
  > Well, processing data correctly is a form of art. Raw data contain systemic biases and are not ethical. It takes an artist to cleanse data, and present them without bias in an ethical and moral way. This is one of the most dystopian things I've read in recent memory. Raw data is bias but it's art to "cleanse" the data and make them "ethical and moral"? The system is bias, but the artist is without and can bring purity. This is some truly Ministry of Truth level thinking and it's quite disturbing to know people genuinely believe this. No wonder we have a replication crisis.

idoubtit 6y ago

I think of philosophy of the art of words and ideas, just like literature is generally the art of words and stories. But, for historical reasons, many people and most philosophers claim philosophy is much more than this. Spinoza was convinced he was "engaged in the pursuit of truth", as the article writes, and he probably thought he had built a logical proof of the existence of god. But his concepts are fuzzy, so his reasoning is unprovable, and his apparent rigorousness is not at all scientific. Many philosophers disagree with his theories, and none of them are wrong or better or worse than Spinoza, since there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy. Apart from these points (proof, progress, consensus), there are many indices for classifying philosophy among the arts. No one would claim to be an expert of a philosopher without reading and studying his book and articles. But, if the substance was more important than the form, it should not matter. One can master Gauss' mathematics or Einstein's physics without reading the original works.

camjohnson26 6y ago
Wouldn’t that imply that no philosophy is true? I think of it as the search for truths that we can’t empirically prove, contrasted to science and math which are purely logical. But math and science have their bases in philosophy through universal laws and propositions, which are unprovable but necessary. Art is more concerned with human experience and seems like a different thing.
- qsort 6y ago
  At the cost of being extremely annoying, what does "a truth we can't empirically prove" look like? > Art is more concerned with human experience and seems like a different thing. Isn't the same true for philosophy? Part of the reason why philosophy is a meaningful field of study as opposed to complete charlatanry is that it "points" towards parts of human experience that aren't quite captured by math/science/models. Philosophers trying to be natural scientists would make terrible philosophy and terrible science. Minor nitpick: > science and math Science and math are very different beasts. Math is a meaningless game you play with symbols. I'm not serious, but I'm not joking either. There are zero assumptions of any kind mathematics makes (except primitive concepts and axioms, which are themselves mathematical objects), as the old joke goes: science talks about the universe, math talks about a universe. Math is kind of unique in this respect, no other discipline is quite like it.

zozbot234 6y ago

Relevant: http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

ogurechny 6y ago
What a dull essay by someone who studied lots of things about philosophy, but never practiced any. Which is, by the way, simply thinking about thinking. Complex terms and systems are strictly secondary, thinking is the thing. Questioning positions, wondering whether they are right or wrong for real — not because it's some logical exercise, what is true and what is false in principle, how do thoughts form and interact with each other, and so on. From this grow all big questions about the truth itself, and the world as a whole. And most often the ideas to doubt are your own, but self-criticism is all but absent from the essay. Even according to his own standard of “practical utility” (ugh), philosophy would help a lot. It would probably prevent relying on textbook stereotypes, like the one about “Dark Ages”, and looking condescendingly on all those “stupid ancient people”, help believe less in common propaganda, and generally hint that 19th century militant scientism is a bit dated position (in addition to being not that smart from the start). Of course, cork hats and cranium measurements fell out of fashion, but the rest looks quite familiar in people who are so loudly happy about “SCIENCE!!!”. Obviously, the description of “science” presented is as far from real science as this description of philosophy is far from real philosophy.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  I don't think they have a different option as universalism falls out of fashion.

ironSkillet 6y ago

I'm reminded of a story from "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" where he asks a bunch of philosophy graduate students on what the definition of a certain phrase was, and everyone actually had a different idea. This ambiguity of language is why in my opinion philosophy is most certainly an art and not a science.

karaterobot 6y ago
"Ahh," he said, steepling his fingers, "but what, after all, is Art?"
- goatlover 6y ago
  So, does that make the philosophy of art metaphilosophy?

notretarded 6y ago

Yes. Next question.

bookofjoe 6y ago

Is art a philosophy?

slibhb 6y ago

John Gray's NY Review articles are great. Reading him, it's interesting how often "new ideas" are actually old ideas that have been forgotten and are now being recycled.

specialist 6y ago
Ya. I started chewing thru History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast last year. It's been great. Learning that many of our current debates are millennia old helped me calm down. Regrettably, since I skipped college, my awareness of the classics and liberal arts is very deficient. Now I firmly believe K-12 curriculum should include (age appropriate) ethics, civics, classics, logics, epistemology, etc. In response to "fake news", some progressives are advocating "media literacy". That's not nearly ambitious enough.

nathias 6y ago

philosophy's questions and proposed answers can not be easily formalized, as such they appear as art to lesser minds

neonological 6y ago

Philosophy can be thought of as a field of study akin to psuedo science. Think about it. There is a philosophy of aesthetics and religion along with a philosophy of science and logic. Science and logic attempt to describe something central to the universe while religion and aesthetics are central to only the human experience. To place the two in the same box is a huge category error akin trying to scientifically derive creationism. Philosophy is essentially just a mish mash of deep thoughts and ponderings of unrelated topics. There is no deeper overarching connection here. Academia came to realize later that certain deep thoughts were “better” then others and formalized those deep thoughts into math and science. Historically things like science and math and logic comes from “philosophy” but ultimately philosophy is just an old way of thinking in the sense that we as humans now have enough information to understand that aesthetics, religion and science don’t belong in the same category. Philosophy is a outmoded concept that only is still around for the same reason technical debt in software is still around. The inevitable philosophers response to this is that all experience is technically human in nature. We cannot experience the universe without human bias injected into the observation thus it is not a category error to place Christianity in a field side by side with number theory because it’s all human made up stuff anyway. To which I respond that all of academia is structured around hypothetical axioms. We can’t prove anything is real but we assume it’s all real. We can’t prove that there is any other way to experience the universe outside of the human experience yet we still assume and structure our science such that the human experience is not central to the universe. Our observations of the universe lead us to believe that the human experience is just a random phenomena in the corner of some galaxy and that is the best available information we have. To discuss anything outside of what we know is like trying to ask someone who is born blind to describe color.

Thursday24 6y ago
That's perhaps a bit too harsh an assessment of the field. Betrand Russell, in his "A history of western philosophy" defines Philosophy as a no man's land or speculative region between religion/theology and science. It is a bucket of thought which is sceptical, probing, speculative of itself and the world. It can sometimes turn into science, and sometimes otherwise. Essentially it can be seen as an expression of human curiosity, which is the seed of definite knowledge.

13415 6y ago

Personally, I do "formal philosophy" at least to some extent/in some papers, i.e., lots of logic, decision theory, a bit of applied mathematics. This kind of analytic philosophy superficially looks like science, at least to people who don't know much about the STEM fields. However, in my opinion it is clearly not science. IMHO, it's best to take philosophy as a discipline on its own. If I am pressed to decide between art and science, I'd call it an art, if not to annoy those people who erroneously believe that philosophy is a science. I personally find it hard to accept any discipline that does not follow the scientific method a science. Many other parts of the humanities in my opinion do not really qualify as science either. Or, perhaps they could be called "soft sciences" or "intellectual studies." However, philosophy is in the same boat as mathematics in this respect, which is also traditionally not considered a science but rather a discipline of its own, pursued for its own sake and with its own evaluation criteria. Few would call mathematics an art, though, or would they? I'm not sure.

routerl 6y ago
> Few would call mathematics an art, though, or would they? I'm not sure. Many would, precisely because it is not empirical, as indicated by the fact that mathematics departments are often in Arts faculties. As Sir Michael Atiyah put it: "The art in good mathematics, and mathematics is an art, is to identify and tackle problems that are both interesting and solvable." Mathematicians will often wax philosophical when speaking about mathematical beauty and elegance, which is widely considered to be a central pursuit of mathematics, second only to correctness. The problem here is that too many people are trying to use the word "science" to mean "the only thing that produces knowledge", in which case "mathematics is not a science, but does produce knowledge" is a heretical statement, even though a sizable portion of mathematicians would agree with it.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  Isn't induction empirical?
  - routerl 6y ago

dr_dshiv 6y ago

Classically, philosophy is not about establishing truth. It is about better living.

bobthechef 6y ago
Not true. Classically, philosophy was most certainly about the truth. How could you know what better living is without knowing the truth? What "better" or "living" really are? Ethics, which is about what a good life is, depends on an understanding of human nature. What do you think Socrates was doing when he attacked the sophists of Athens? Living better? I guess, if you like taking hemlock.
- dr_dshiv 6y ago
  That is precisely why Socrates did what he did. And the truth is certainly important for living better—but there is knowledge in philosophy that goes beyond verbal truths.
goatlover 6y ago
Philosophers asked metaphysical and epistemological questions in ancient Greece, India and China as well as questions about how to live a good life. Philosophy has always been plenty diverse.
garbagetime 6y ago
I disagree. Classically, philosophy was about establishing truth (which is why it is called philosophy - literally love of knowledge). But establishing truth was seen as a subset of better living.

bobthechef 6y ago

Nonsense. Sure, if you want to spite the bullshit artists in the field by calling what they're doing "performance art", that's fine. But if you're a real philosopher, then you are ultimately interested in the truth by definition, while recognizing that it isn't always easy to get to, that it might take a lot of effort to even put together a sensible response or claim in the first place, and even more time refining the position in an engagement with other philosophers. So in that sense, the philosophical disciplines are sciences, and in fact, the highest and most general sciences. No other science can answer metaphysical questions, for example. Sure, other sciences can inform the discussion, but they cannot replace the philosophical science that draws from them. The article is behind a paywall, so I could not read beyond the first couple pages or so, but from the comments I sense that there is some strange conviction that philosophy is ultimately an obsolete kind of wankery that the empirical sciences have long since superseded. Of course, this is rather a sign of profound ignorance and philistinism rather than a statement about how things actually are.

ngcc_hk 6y ago

Very hard to definite art as qm constructuinis quit an art. That is why I love the Popper Criteria can it be refuted. And may I add is that the theory is trying its best to be refuted. If it is, science. If it is not, arts. And any good effort is an art. Unless some has to add an element of empathy, demonstrating something extra.

ralusek 6y ago

This is sort of like the thing where Biology is applied Chemistry Chemistry is applied Physics Physics is applied Mathematics Not a perfect train of thought, but correct enough. If that is the hierarchy of the scientific world, I would argue that Philosophy is the "Mathematics" of art world. Every other art form is "applied Philosophy."

JenniferRM 6y ago

Philosophy is the (surprisingly fertile) dowager empress of the sciences. Physics may be the king, and Math the queen, but they always seem to be grinding their teeth and wishing that old biddy Philosophy would just finally die one day, and hand over the last her her powers, and she never really does.

routerl 6y ago
This is wonderful and I will steal it. Thank you :)
redisman 6y ago
It's like a layer between the sciences and the people these days. You almost certainly will always need something like that. Science can make discoveries but it doesn't amount to much until they get transposed to the human realm.

tus89 6y ago

A similar question could be asked -- is mathematics a science?

Hitton 6y ago
No. Mathematics is an elaborate game with surprising ability to model universe.
- ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
  Or a language to describe reality. There’s a whole philosophy of mathematics. Fascinating stuff

swayvil 6y ago

Sure. We employ our aesthetic sense, for the navigation, and appreciation, of this field of ideas. Primarily.

bshepard 6y ago

"Everyone has to stand before a picture as before a prince, waiting to see whether it will speak and what it will say to him; and, as with the prince, so he himself must not address it, for then he would hear only himself. It follows from all this that all wisdom is certainly contained in the works of the pictorial or graphic arts, yet only virtually or implicitly. Philosophy, on the other hand, endeavors to furnish the same wisdom actuality, to make it explicit: in this sense, philosophy is related to the arts as wine is to grapes" (Schopenhauer)

nigit 6y ago

philosophy is a shart

max_ 6y ago

I studied art as an option back in high school, and in College I studied it in a more "scientific" context like gestalt theory, color science, principles (proportions, perspective). My opinion of art is that it is simply a computational resource that human beings use to store emotions.

newswasboring 6y ago
> My opinion of art is that it is simply a computational resource that human beings use to store emotions. With NFTs this is now more true than ever, on multiple levels

diegoperini 6y ago

Philosophy feels like a sport. Is sports art?

yottalove 6y ago

Anything mediated by a mind is an artifice: art. It may be art from an artisan or craft used in a trade. It may be intellectual such as a mathematical proof. It may arguably be non-human art or bad art--but it is art.

s_m_t 6y ago
Agreed, 'art' as something distinct from any other creative activity is a fairly recent western invention. If you take art at face value from it's basic definition it just means something like 'technique' and that meaning is good enough to make sense of it all imho.

johndoe42377 6y ago

Philosophy used to be a systematic attempt to answer just one question - What Is? (or what is real?) Science emerged as a standard methodology much later. Abstract bullshitting, which is mistakenly called philosophy too, may be considered as an art, like storytelling. To clarify - fancy philosophical systems have nothing to do with philosophy. They are just piles of abstractions.

brbrodude 6y ago

Since it seems everyone is giving their opinion, I'll leave mine before reading the article: The concept of philosophy predates the concept of art, it also predates science. So, if one is more fundamental than the other(and fundamental TO the other emergence), doesn't this make the question pointless?

lbblack 6y ago

Woah, philosophy and art are two massive subjects. Historically, both have been treated as separate subjects for good reasons. However there is some overlap, such as something which is beautiful to the senses. But the distinction between the two is that philosophy is usually a set of distinct thought-experiment(s) and art is an observer's perspective into the mind of an artist(s). Largely, scientists scoff at philosophy due to the intrinsic nature that most of it relies in the realm of "thought experiments." Which may be hard for some people, but I've never had an issue with wild imaginations. Yet, I would argue the Philosopher's Stone is one of the most mythological thing known to human history. And I'm sure 99.999% of people couldn't distinguish the Philosopher's Stone from a generic looking lake rock. Right?

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
> Largely, scientists scoff at philosophy the types that scoff usually are pseudo scientists who had gone through just enough academic brainwashing that makes them believe everything can be modeled as a system. it's the mindset that dominates Tech/STEM sadly. those who scream the loudest (usually those who read Sokal) are also the most clueless about what framework to use when. "A city is not a tree"[1], by Christopher Alexander is a fantastic example of how a "science above everything" mindset keeps us from having good things. Another example of fools (we have many) would be the idea that smart-contracts, blockchains can be used to model very complex social "systems of systems" (or anyone who peddles silver bullets). [1] http://www.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexander-A-city-is-not-a-tree.pdf http://www.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexa...
- lbblack 6y ago
  I believe ya!
- anyonecancode 6y ago
  I get deep satisfaction from modeling business processes into software and seeing the system up and running. And, the more I do this and the better I get at it, the gap between my models and the actual thing become ever more apparent. I think getting good at software can lead you down a couple of paths -- either coming to think that everything can truly be modeled in software given enough time and resources, or growing in humility and realizing the limits of software and the unbridgeable gap between models (however useful and impressive) and larger reality.

PeterWhittaker 6y ago

I'd say no. But then when I think "philosophy", I think of a specific intellectual discipline, one that embraces two distinct modes of thought and exploration. But first, some history. Once upon a time, the 3 pillars of philosophy were metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology. Starting with Kant and ending sometime in the late 19th or early 20th C, with the work of philosopher-mathematicians, if you will (Godel, Russell, etc.), metaphysics went by the wayside. While philosophy was once about exploring how the world might be and what might be beyond the material, prudent philosophers realized that science was now the realm of knowing the world and anything based not on science was basically religion, and not subject to knowability, sharability, falsifiability, etc. Ethics was next: Lacking metaphysics, lacking a baseline of truth, what was the point in postulating ethics? It does sneak back in, though, more in a moment. That leaves epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge and knowability. Modern philosophers of science work rigorously with mathematicians and physicists, among others, to explore epistemological questions, especially those that arise from Godel's incomplete theorem, from various interpretations of quantum mechanics, and from computational complexity. That's the first of modern philosophy's two areas of expertise: Embracing what is happening in other fields and exploring what those fields have to say about what we can usefully say about what is and is not knowable. The second area is taking well founded ideas and exploring them fully. My favourite example is Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", which takes the basic notion of reproduction with variation to its logical and sometimes illogical extremes. What about people who style themselves or are styled as philosophers and who write about art or sociology or religion? And explore those things in ways similar to what I describe above? If they are doing philosophy, it is pre-20thC, maybe even pre-19thC philosophy, but I see it as critique, essayism, but not as philosophy, not in the modern sense. Occasionally, you'll encounter someone who writes with the same clarity and discipline as those modern philosophers who continue to work the hard problem (epistemology), but those writers are rare. One of the last great ethics writers was one such: Mackey's Ethics explored the question of how to be ethical, what that meant, taken to its intellectual and living extreme, but he did not explore of the question of why: One's reason for being ethical is personal, metaphysical, subjective. Mackey provides tools and techniques for acting on a decision to live ethically, for exploring that decision. (You could say that I fall in the old "analytic" camp, and I'd accept that. The "synthetic" camp, IMHO, was mostly emptied in the early 20th C and is now populated with people in love with their own words, with opacity and obscurity, and who have yet to admit that they really wish their science fiction and fantasy writing was taken more seriously or more popularly, or both.)

LudwigNagasena 6y ago

I always find such discussions unsatisfying and unproductive. People take a vague and ill-defined concept that changed its meaning over time and treat it as something homogenous, bonus points if they do it twice in the same question (it talks about philosophy and art). “What if we treat philosophy as art”? Well, what if we treat it as a corpus of thoughts related only through immediate relevancy and no strict boundaries otherwise? Funny that they mention Wittgenstein but don’t bring up his idea of family resemblance ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance ).

scotty79 6y ago

Yes. Art is every human product that doesn't have to function in any way, and despite that it still has potential to be appreciated by some people. Philosophy fits.

jenkstom 6y ago

It's certainly not a science.

ulisesrmzroche 6y ago

There’s a philosophy of science and a philosophy of art, like there’s philosophy of physics and math. I think it’s more about the practice of asking the hard questions, in whatever field they may be. I think they’re equating philosophy and psychology