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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 an

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.
  - camjohnson26 6y ago
    To add some nuance, the boundary between science and philosophy is always changing as we get more information about how the world works. Philosophical truths help us make better decisions about the future. DNA and quantum mechanics are 2 areas where the boundary between philosophy and science has shifted over time. All the modern talk about multiverses, universe simulations, and AGI seem philosophical, but might become scientific in the future. But people who believe in these concepts will take different actions than people who don’t, so you can’t say it just doesn’t matter because we can’t prove it yet. I wasn’t trying to lump math and science together and agree they’re very different, although both based on core propositional truths that are taken on faith.
    - qsort 6y ago
      At the cost of being extremely annoying for the second time today, what does "a truth we can't empirically prove" look like? > All the modern talk about multiverses, universe simulations, and AGI None of the things you mention are "philosophical truths". The first is one of many interpretations of QM, the second is a meme, the third is a vague, unclear teleological goal of computer science. I'm not objecting to the fact that you can speculate, I myself said that pointing to new things, as vague and undefined they may be, is generally useful and stimulating. I'm objecting to the idea that you can have "truths you can't prove". > I wasn’t trying to lump math and science together and agree they’re very different, although both based on core propositional truths that are taken on faith. Sorry, my fault. Tomato, tomato.
      - mac_was 6y ago
        Wasn't the black hole a truth you can't prove for a pretty long time? Scientists 'believed' that they are true and tried to prove their existence. See: https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/who-really-discovered-black-holes/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/who-really-discovered-bla...
        qsort 6y ago
        There's a difference between making a definite claim and pointing out that Newton's model allows the existence of such an object. I'm not going into "quid est veritas?" type of discussions because it's a bottomless pit that leads nowhere, but it seems to me like "black holes could exist" is a statement much like "an artificial general intelligence could exist". It's not ruled out by the model, but a-priori we have no idea.
- dschuessler 6y ago
  > Wouldn’t that imply that no philosophy is true? I am a strong proponent of distinguishing „truth“ from „certainty“. That is to say, a theory (philosophical or not) might be true in the sense that it corresponds to the things it says something about. But since all human beings are fallible we can never be certain not to have made mistakes. So a philosophy can be true. But we can not be certain about it. EDIT: If OP writes that "there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy" they might imply that no philosophy is true. Yet I would only agree that no philosophy is certain. > I think of it as the search for truths that we can’t empirically prove, contrasted to science and math which are purely logical. What (empirical) scientists usually mean when they call a theory or hypothesis „empirically proven“ is that there is evidence that meets some arbitrary criterion of strength. What mathematicians usually mean when they call a theorem proven is that it can be logically deduced from a set of axioms. So not only is the word "proof" used very differently in (empirical) science and mathematics, the way to obtain such proofs is usually very different as well. To lump these procedures together under the term "purely logical" seems to me to mix up important differences. > But math and science have their bases in philosophy through universal laws and propositions, which are unprovable but necessary. Neither the laws and propositions in math nor in the (empirical) sciences are necessary in the sense that practitioners are forced to assume them. Nothing prevents anyone from assuming something else whenever they wish to and important discoveries have been made that way (e.g. non-euclidean geometry, theory of relativity). Maybe you refer to some other kind of necessity though.
cardoni 6y ago
Stating "there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy" while then going on to do the same seems incongruent.
- qsort 6y ago
  Language vs. meta-language. I completely subscribe to parent's point of view: because concepts expressed in natural language are so massively overloaded, it's very hard to make precise statements. When disciplines acquire their own method and formal language, they tend to splinter off philosophy. Think about mathematics, physics, biology, economics...
  - eevilspock 6y ago
    https://xkcd.com/55/ https://xkcd.com/55/
  - bobthechef 6y ago
    > Language vs. meta-language. I do not understand what this is supposed to mean or demonstrate. > because concepts expressed in natural language are so massively overloaded, it's very hard to make precise statements. That's why philosophers clarify meanings and ask for clarification for terms when they think are vague. That something is "overloaded" (amphiboly) doesn't mean you can't determine which meaning is used or, right? When you read something, you're not grading papers. You're interpreting things in a sensible way. > When disciplines acquire their own method and formal language, they tend to splinter off philosophy. Think about mathematics, physics, biology, economics... Formalization isn't magic. To formalize something, you have to get to a place where you have a clear enough and correct enough understanding so that you can express it in that language. And in any case, philosophers do employ formalization when they think it useful. It isn't always. Frankly, even mathematicians, practitioners of the most formal of sciences, don't use formal methods to express their _reasoning_ in most cases.
    - qsort 6y ago
      > I do not understand what this is supposed to mean or demonstrate. Parent said 'Stating "there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy" while then going on to do the same seems incongruent'. I was just refuting this. It's essentially the same argument as "everything is philosophy" or "everything is politics", technically true but only in a vacuous sense. > That something is "overloaded" (amphiboly) I don't mean this. If I say "automorphism", I mean one thing and one thing only, because formal languages allow us to have precise definitions. Natural language doesn't have that. Words like 'truth', 'beauty', 'justice' are vague, imprecise meshes of meaning, so much that making precise statements about them is extremely problematic even conceptually. > Formalization isn't magic. To formalize something, you have to get to a place where you have a clear enough and correct enough understanding so that you can express it in that language. I completely agree. One of the major contributions of philosophy is that it attempts to untangle the mess. I have already said that I find this useful and productive. I'm not bashing philosophers, here. > And in any case, philosophers do employ formalization when they think it useful. It isn't always. Frankly, even mathematicians, practitioners of the most formal of sciences, don't use formal methods to express their _reasoning_ in most cases. I don't think these two cases are even remotely comparable. Mathematicians certainly do write informally when they write proofs, but that's only a way of communicating the result to another human. Any proof could be, given enough time, be rewritten completely formally, for example in a way that could be checked by a machine. If it can't, then it's wrong. Formalization employed by philosophers is essentially just a writing device they are using in order to prove a point. The subtext "we could break this down to a deduction tree, but it's too boring to actually do that" that underlies a mathematical proof is completely missing. Many authors have written literature using mathematical notation. It doesn't make their books math, for the same reason.
routerl 6y ago
> his apparent rigorousness is not at all scientific. It is more scientific than Galileo, just less empirical. Spinoza's contributions to thought lie on the logic axis, not the empirical axis. That didn't really get going until the British empiricists, culminating with Newton, who absolutely saw himself as a philosopher, and saw his physics as part of his philosophical work[1]. But Spinoza's historical axis includes Leibniz, on whose work both Gottlieb Frege and Bertrand Russell saw themselves as building when they formalized mathematical logic as we now know it[2][3]. Turing is another few steps down this road, and knew it[4]. Further down Spinoza's road we also get Kant, who Einstein targeted when he was trying to understand what space actually is[5]. It's also worth mentioning that the whole logic thing starts with the Greek philosophers, who saw themselves as extending Euclid's geometry into other domains. Aristotle formalized several still accepted forms of logical inference and rigorously taxonomized fallacies, as well as inventing the notion of taxonomies (and biology) to begin with[6]. Incidentally, much later, Descartes finished the work of applying Euclid's work to other domains, by marrying algebra and geometry[7], while trying to prove that God exists[8]. > there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy. This is plainly false. Every philosopher in the Western canon saw themselves as refuting earlier philosophers and traditions. Sometimes, these refutations were so spectacular that they became sciences. I don't know man. To me, even when these guys fuck up, they still produce an awful lot of cool tools. --- [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton-philosophy/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton-philosophy/ [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/40693547?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40693547?seq=1 [3] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-4020-5243-9_13.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-4020-524... [4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/#TurMacCom https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/#TurMacCom [5] https://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/significance_GR_geometry/Einstein_on_Kant.html https://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/si... [6] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-biology/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-biology/ [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_geometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_geometry [8] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/#FirResNewMisMet https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/#FirResNewMisMe...
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>many people and most philosophers claim philosophy is much more than this. on the other hand many people and most artists claim art is much more than philosophy.
namero999 6y ago
There are plenty of ways to refute the validity of a philosophical stance: internal logical consistency, conceptual parsimony, empirical adequacy...
specialist 6y ago
> philosophy of the art of words and ideas Nice. Art is short for artifact, meaning human created. So of course philosophy is an art. The "what is art" debate gets turgid when it drifts into "fine art" vs "pop art". Whatever. It's all art. Making distinctions is sophistry.
- harperlee 6y ago
  It is the converse: an artifact is made (factum) by art (arte).
  - specialist 6y ago
    Heh. Ya, that's better. Like saying universities (collections of scholars) produce scholarship. I love the idea of philosophers producing philosophy.
bobthechef 6y ago
> many people and most philosophers claim philosophy is much more than this. Yes, philosophy is ultimately motivated by the search for truth. (Art, too, if we are talking about something like literature, is motivated by expressing the truth, otherwise it is worthless.) > 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 [sic]. But his concepts are fuzzy, so his reasoning is unprovable, and his apparent rigorousness is not at all scientific. Putting aside the question of whether this is true, let us assume it is. So what? This is what philosophical discourse will involve: clarifying what needs clarifying, arguing, counterarguing, etc. Second, you've fallen prey to the mystique surrounding the word "scientific" as if science were somehow more definitive or competent or whatever, or that none of these problems afflict science. And of course, that in itself is a philosophical assertion! > 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. They aren't? That, again, is a philosophical assertion. And the very act of defending it would tacitly presuppose that _your_ philosophical argument is better than Spinoza's, which would make it self-refuting. Because if it's all the same, then so your argument. > Apart from these points (proof, progress, consensus), What is a proof? An argument. People disagree over those. What is progress? You assume there isn't contentious. How does consensus make something true? (It doesn't.) > 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. This is neither here no there. The reason an expert on Spinoza should have read Spinoza is because everything that is about Spinoza's work is commentary and all commentary involves interpretation. So, yeah, if you're a scholar of Spinoza, and we have surviving works by Spinoza, it would seem rather odd if you didn't know what Spinoza said and only what others have said about Spinoza. You might disagree. The same would hold if you were a scholar of Einstein. A physicist, however, is not a scholar of Einstein, and as such, is not so interested in what he thought per se, however illuminating the original texts might be.
ilaksh 6y ago
Because philosophy is the precursor to science. The idea that one needed hypotheses which were then verified with rigorous experiments was not yet popular. It's the paradigm that came before science. They were trying to do the same thing as scientists but did not have as strong of an approach.
jamesrcole 6y ago
> there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy. That is not true at all. Much philosophy throughout history has been shown to be incorrect by later science, for example.
- hackinthebochs 6y ago
  Is there a way to contact you? Do you have a blog?
  - jamesrcole 6y ago
    Sure. james followed by a full stop, then cole. At Gmail.
- claudiawerner 6y ago
  Exactly; I can't see how someone can say you can't refute philosophy, as though it's not based on argumentation and premises that lead to a conclusion. When you demonstrate that a premise is wrong (e.g. philosophically, mathematically, empirically, etc.) then the philosophy (or rather, that argument for the philosophy) is 'refuted'.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> 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. I don't think that's fair. I'd generally expect an expert (a professor, say) to be familiar with the original work regardless of whether it's philosophy or physics. You don't need to be fluent in Ancient Greek to get a philosophy degree. It's not as if there's an unwavering insistence on reading the original work in its original form.
- jvvw 6y ago
  I doubt there are many professors of mathematics who have read the original Gauss! Certainly in my field of mathematics, nobody ever talked about reading older work in its original. It feels like something only of interest for historians. Mathematical notation has improved immensely and the important ideas have been clarified and refined.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Interesting, so even mathematics isn't immune from 'translations' from the original work, as in philosophy.
    - stevegalla 6y ago
      Broadly speaking, math is made up of theorems. The goal is to prove the theorem by establishing a proof, or disprove the theorem using a counterexample. In math textbooks and courses I’ve had, there tends to be footnotes on who produced some foundational result (statement of the theorem, proof, or counterexample). So you study or learn about the original work, but you’re not doing so from the primary source (original work). This could be because the proof of original work was: - in a different language, - required advanced knowledge the learner doesn’t have, - a more simplified proof was found, - a more enlightening proof was found, - an informal proof suffices, - the statement of the theorem is all that’s needed, - the proof is left as an exercise to the reader, - the proof is a special case of a more general proof, - or any number of other reasons
GoblinSlayer 6y ago
Spinoza's logical proof of the existence of god is that "man can't invent ideas, therefore all ideas are true including the idea of god"?

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.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  To add some nuance, the boundary between science and philosophy is always changing as we get more information about how the world works. Philosophical truths help us make better decisions about the future. DNA and quantum mechanics are 2 areas where the boundary between philosophy and science has shifted over time. All the modern talk about multiverses, universe simulations, and AGI seem philosophical, but might become scientific in the future. But people who believe in these concepts will take different actions than people who don’t, so you can’t say it just doesn’t matter because we can’t prove it yet. I wasn’t trying to lump math and science together and agree they’re very different, although both based on core propositional truths that are taken on faith.
  - qsort 6y ago
    At the cost of being extremely annoying for the second time today, what does "a truth we can't empirically prove" look like? > All the modern talk about multiverses, universe simulations, and AGI None of the things you mention are "philosophical truths". The first is one of many interpretations of QM, the second is a meme, the third is a vague, unclear teleological goal of computer science. I'm not objecting to the fact that you can speculate, I myself said that pointing to new things, as vague and undefined they may be, is generally useful and stimulating. I'm objecting to the idea that you can have "truths you can't prove". > I wasn’t trying to lump math and science together and agree they’re very different, although both based on core propositional truths that are taken on faith. Sorry, my fault. Tomato, tomato.
    - mac_was 6y ago
      Wasn't the black hole a truth you can't prove for a pretty long time? Scientists 'believed' that they are true and tried to prove their existence. See: https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/who-really-discovered-black-holes/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/who-really-discovered-bla...
      - qsort 6y ago
        There's a difference between making a definite claim and pointing out that Newton's model allows the existence of such an object. I'm not going into "quid est veritas?" type of discussions because it's a bottomless pit that leads nowhere, but it seems to me like "black holes could exist" is a statement much like "an artificial general intelligence could exist". It's not ruled out by the model, but a-priori we have no idea.
dschuessler 6y ago
> Wouldn’t that imply that no philosophy is true? I am a strong proponent of distinguishing „truth“ from „certainty“. That is to say, a theory (philosophical or not) might be true in the sense that it corresponds to the things it says something about. But since all human beings are fallible we can never be certain not to have made mistakes. So a philosophy can be true. But we can not be certain about it. EDIT: If OP writes that "there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy" they might imply that no philosophy is true. Yet I would only agree that no philosophy is certain. > I think of it as the search for truths that we can’t empirically prove, contrasted to science and math which are purely logical. What (empirical) scientists usually mean when they call a theory or hypothesis „empirically proven“ is that there is evidence that meets some arbitrary criterion of strength. What mathematicians usually mean when they call a theorem proven is that it can be logically deduced from a set of axioms. So not only is the word "proof" used very differently in (empirical) science and mathematics, the way to obtain such proofs is usually very different as well. To lump these procedures together under the term "purely logical" seems to me to mix up important differences. > But math and science have their bases in philosophy through universal laws and propositions, which are unprovable but necessary. Neither the laws and propositions in math nor in the (empirical) sciences are necessary in the sense that practitioners are forced to assume them. Nothing prevents anyone from assuming something else whenever they wish to and important discoveries have been made that way (e.g. non-euclidean geometry, theory of relativity). Maybe you refer to some other kind of necessity though.

cardoni 6y ago

Stating "there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy" while then going on to do the same seems incongruent.

qsort 6y ago
Language vs. meta-language. I completely subscribe to parent's point of view: because concepts expressed in natural language are so massively overloaded, it's very hard to make precise statements. When disciplines acquire their own method and formal language, they tend to splinter off philosophy. Think about mathematics, physics, biology, economics...
- eevilspock 6y ago
  https://xkcd.com/55/ https://xkcd.com/55/
- bobthechef 6y ago
  > Language vs. meta-language. I do not understand what this is supposed to mean or demonstrate. > because concepts expressed in natural language are so massively overloaded, it's very hard to make precise statements. That's why philosophers clarify meanings and ask for clarification for terms when they think are vague. That something is "overloaded" (amphiboly) doesn't mean you can't determine which meaning is used or, right? When you read something, you're not grading papers. You're interpreting things in a sensible way. > When disciplines acquire their own method and formal language, they tend to splinter off philosophy. Think about mathematics, physics, biology, economics... Formalization isn't magic. To formalize something, you have to get to a place where you have a clear enough and correct enough understanding so that you can express it in that language. And in any case, philosophers do employ formalization when they think it useful. It isn't always. Frankly, even mathematicians, practitioners of the most formal of sciences, don't use formal methods to express their _reasoning_ in most cases.
  - qsort 6y ago
    > I do not understand what this is supposed to mean or demonstrate. Parent said 'Stating "there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy" while then going on to do the same seems incongruent'. I was just refuting this. It's essentially the same argument as "everything is philosophy" or "everything is politics", technically true but only in a vacuous sense. > That something is "overloaded" (amphiboly) I don't mean this. If I say "automorphism", I mean one thing and one thing only, because formal languages allow us to have precise definitions. Natural language doesn't have that. Words like 'truth', 'beauty', 'justice' are vague, imprecise meshes of meaning, so much that making precise statements about them is extremely problematic even conceptually. > Formalization isn't magic. To formalize something, you have to get to a place where you have a clear enough and correct enough understanding so that you can express it in that language. I completely agree. One of the major contributions of philosophy is that it attempts to untangle the mess. I have already said that I find this useful and productive. I'm not bashing philosophers, here. > And in any case, philosophers do employ formalization when they think it useful. It isn't always. Frankly, even mathematicians, practitioners of the most formal of sciences, don't use formal methods to express their _reasoning_ in most cases. I don't think these two cases are even remotely comparable. Mathematicians certainly do write informally when they write proofs, but that's only a way of communicating the result to another human. Any proof could be, given enough time, be rewritten completely formally, for example in a way that could be checked by a machine. If it can't, then it's wrong. Formalization employed by philosophers is essentially just a writing device they are using in order to prove a point. The subtext "we could break this down to a deduction tree, but it's too boring to actually do that" that underlies a mathematical proof is completely missing. Many authors have written literature using mathematical notation. It doesn't make their books math, for the same reason.

routerl 6y ago

> his apparent rigorousness is not at all scientific. It is more scientific than Galileo, just less empirical. Spinoza's contributions to thought lie on the logic axis, not the empirical axis. That didn't really get going until the British empiricists, culminating with Newton, who absolutely saw himself as a philosopher, and saw his physics as part of his philosophical work[1]. But Spinoza's historical axis includes Leibniz, on whose work both Gottlieb Frege and Bertrand Russell saw themselves as building when they formalized mathematical logic as we now know it[2][3]. Turing is another few steps down this road, and knew it[4]. Further down Spinoza's road we also get Kant, who Einstein targeted when he was trying to understand what space actually is[5]. It's also worth mentioning that the whole logic thing starts with the Greek philosophers, who saw themselves as extending Euclid's geometry into other domains. Aristotle formalized several still accepted forms of logical inference and rigorously taxonomized fallacies, as well as inventing the notion of taxonomies (and biology) to begin with[6]. Incidentally, much later, Descartes finished the work of applying Euclid's work to other domains, by marrying algebra and geometry[7], while trying to prove that God exists[8]. > there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy. This is plainly false. Every philosopher in the Western canon saw themselves as refuting earlier philosophers and traditions. Sometimes, these refutations were so spectacular that they became sciences. I don't know man. To me, even when these guys fuck up, they still produce an awful lot of cool tools. --- [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton-philosophy/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton-philosophy/ [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/40693547?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40693547?seq=1 [3] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-4020-5243-9_13.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-1-4020-524... [4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/#TurMacCom https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/#TurMacCom [5] https://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/significance_GR_geometry/Einstein_on_Kant.html https://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/si... [6] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-biology/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-biology/ [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_geometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_geometry [8] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/#FirResNewMisMet https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/#FirResNewMisMe...

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

>many people and most philosophers claim philosophy is much more than this. on the other hand many people and most artists claim art is much more than philosophy.

namero999 6y ago

There are plenty of ways to refute the validity of a philosophical stance: internal logical consistency, conceptual parsimony, empirical adequacy...

specialist 6y ago

> philosophy of the art of words and ideas Nice. Art is short for artifact, meaning human created. So of course philosophy is an art. The "what is art" debate gets turgid when it drifts into "fine art" vs "pop art". Whatever. It's all art. Making distinctions is sophistry.

harperlee 6y ago
It is the converse: an artifact is made (factum) by art (arte).
- specialist 6y ago
  Heh. Ya, that's better. Like saying universities (collections of scholars) produce scholarship. I love the idea of philosophers producing philosophy.

bobthechef 6y ago

> many people and most philosophers claim philosophy is much more than this. Yes, philosophy is ultimately motivated by the search for truth. (Art, too, if we are talking about something like literature, is motivated by expressing the truth, otherwise it is worthless.) > 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 [sic]. But his concepts are fuzzy, so his reasoning is unprovable, and his apparent rigorousness is not at all scientific. Putting aside the question of whether this is true, let us assume it is. So what? This is what philosophical discourse will involve: clarifying what needs clarifying, arguing, counterarguing, etc. Second, you've fallen prey to the mystique surrounding the word "scientific" as if science were somehow more definitive or competent or whatever, or that none of these problems afflict science. And of course, that in itself is a philosophical assertion! > 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. They aren't? That, again, is a philosophical assertion. And the very act of defending it would tacitly presuppose that _your_ philosophical argument is better than Spinoza's, which would make it self-refuting. Because if it's all the same, then so your argument. > Apart from these points (proof, progress, consensus), What is a proof? An argument. People disagree over those. What is progress? You assume there isn't contentious. How does consensus make something true? (It doesn't.) > 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. This is neither here no there. The reason an expert on Spinoza should have read Spinoza is because everything that is about Spinoza's work is commentary and all commentary involves interpretation. So, yeah, if you're a scholar of Spinoza, and we have surviving works by Spinoza, it would seem rather odd if you didn't know what Spinoza said and only what others have said about Spinoza. You might disagree. The same would hold if you were a scholar of Einstein. A physicist, however, is not a scholar of Einstein, and as such, is not so interested in what he thought per se, however illuminating the original texts might be.

ilaksh 6y ago

Because philosophy is the precursor to science. The idea that one needed hypotheses which were then verified with rigorous experiments was not yet popular. It's the paradigm that came before science. They were trying to do the same thing as scientists but did not have as strong of an approach.

jamesrcole 6y ago

> there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy. That is not true at all. Much philosophy throughout history has been shown to be incorrect by later science, for example.

hackinthebochs 6y ago
Is there a way to contact you? Do you have a blog?
- jamesrcole 6y ago
  Sure. james followed by a full stop, then cole. At Gmail.
claudiawerner 6y ago
Exactly; I can't see how someone can say you can't refute philosophy, as though it's not based on argumentation and premises that lead to a conclusion. When you demonstrate that a premise is wrong (e.g. philosophically, mathematically, empirically, etc.) then the philosophy (or rather, that argument for the philosophy) is 'refuted'.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

> 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. I don't think that's fair. I'd generally expect an expert (a professor, say) to be familiar with the original work regardless of whether it's philosophy or physics. You don't need to be fluent in Ancient Greek to get a philosophy degree. It's not as if there's an unwavering insistence on reading the original work in its original form.

jvvw 6y ago
I doubt there are many professors of mathematics who have read the original Gauss! Certainly in my field of mathematics, nobody ever talked about reading older work in its original. It feels like something only of interest for historians. Mathematical notation has improved immensely and the important ideas have been clarified and refined.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Interesting, so even mathematics isn't immune from 'translations' from the original work, as in philosophy.
  - stevegalla 6y ago
    Broadly speaking, math is made up of theorems. The goal is to prove the theorem by establishing a proof, or disprove the theorem using a counterexample. In math textbooks and courses I’ve had, there tends to be footnotes on who produced some foundational result (statement of the theorem, proof, or counterexample). So you study or learn about the original work, but you’re not doing so from the primary source (original work). This could be because the proof of original work was: - in a different language, - required advanced knowledge the learner doesn’t have, - a more simplified proof was found, - a more enlightening proof was found, - an informal proof suffices, - the statement of the theorem is all that’s needed, - the proof is left as an exercise to the reader, - the proof is a special case of a more general proof, - or any number of other reasons

GoblinSlayer 6y ago

Spinoza's logical proof of the existence of god is that "man can't invent ideas, therefore all ideas are true including the idea of god"?