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Pretty much everything pre-enlightenment is really smart sounding nonsense. Understanding pre-enlightenment philosophy is mostly just useful as historical or cu

Pretty much everything pre-enlightenment is really smart sounding nonsense. Understanding pre-enlightenment philosophy is mostly just useful as historical or cultural context for how intellectual people thought at the time, or for understanding the path human civilization took to knowing what we know today. Everything after the enlightenment, but before modern biology / neuroscience / physics, is also really smart sounding nonsense, but is getting closer to something approximating "reality". Once we get to the naturalist philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries (many of whom are biologists, physicists, or neuroscientists by training), we start getting some real meat.

pell 4y ago
> Pretty much everything pre-englightenment is really smart sounding nonsense. Understanding it is mostly just useful as historical or anthropological context for how intellectual people thought at the time. Plato's critique of democracy was written long before the period of enlightenment. It stands on its own to this day. There are countless other examples of philosophical works that hold up to scrutiny even when viewed through an analytical lens.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
3pt14159 4y ago
Real meat, with a philosophical hole right at the base of it that cannot be waived away. At some point somewhere something has to be taken by faith. Ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning is one that most modern people take. The existence of God is a different option. Brains in vats and all that.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  > At some point somewhere something has to be taken by faith. Ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning is one that most modern people take. Which, if you're building your philosophy in view of modern biological and neurological knowledge, is not a particularly defensible position.
  - 3pt14159 4y ago
    > in view of modern biological and neurological knowledge How do we know that our mind is interpreting what this knowledge is in a coherent manner? The researchers themselves are already making a philosophical claim that truth is knowable to get to any meaningful conclusions about what can be learned about the mind. Note that I'm saying this assuming your premise is true, then using it to undermine your own claim so using this logic against me is not coherent. > is not a particularly defensible position. Defensibility is defined outside itself. For example: "Is the city defensible?" Is a reasonable question, but without defining the threat vector (comets, horsemen, etc) the statement on its own is meaningless. So please understand that from your own vantage point this claim may seem indefensible, but you are again assuming the premise; and this is, essentially, the number one problem I see in modern thought. Thinkers in our era have taken a leap of faith to defend rationality and science then proceed to deny that faith had anything to do with it, or, even worse in the case of Sam Harris, deride faith as "surely the devil's masterpiece" beating out ignorance, hatred, greed. I find this especially rich in light of the damage that greed and hatred have done to the modern world built upon our technological societies. I'm not anti-technology, in fact I am pro-technology, but without the underpinnings that come with faith that is acknowledged and serviced, I believe we'll end up damaging the world more than we aid it over time.
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      Let me try this again. If you missed that I'm agreeing with you, then others probably did also. "Modern biological and neurological knowledge" (wording adopted from spicyusername's post) says that our minds evolved over mega-years, to be good enough fast enough to give us a survival edge. They didn't evolve to be pure logic engines, and they show that in all kinds of ways. Within that view, it is a contradiction to believe "ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning" (your wording). Within the current framework, you can't trust your mind to reach correct conclusions. I'm not assuming the premise. I'm pointing out that those who do put themselves in a contradictory position.
      - 3pt14159 4y ago
sdf4j 4y ago
That's a pretty narrow conception of philosophy. Also a narrow conception of what "reality" entails. From ethics to politics, and pretty much every social phenomena, doesn't require a petri dish to be studied.
- spicyusername 4y ago
  > doesn't require a petri dish to be studied. True, that it doesn't require a petri dish, but it does require the scientific method.
Bakary 4y ago
This is just absurdly simplistic. The enlightenment did not appear in a vaccuum either. It is predicated on specific philosophical arguments. This becomes immediately apparent when you consider non-Western industrialized nations. The scientific method is one thing, but it is not something that can be used to prescribe a way to live. Plenty of aspects of our society aren't predicated on post-enlightenment thinking.
- spicyusername 4y ago
  > The scientific method is one thing, but it is not something that can be used to prescribe a way to live. I understand what you're getting at. I agree that much of what is considered "philosophy" isn't just "what is", but "what should we do about it". I would argue that the answer "what we should do about it" is either: - So relative that there isn't an answer (or are infinite answers), at which point everyone is welcome to substitute any answer they like. - Dependent on as-yet-undiscovered information in the physical sciences (biology, cosmology, physics, neuroscience, etc), which is why we're still reliant on incomplete (or incorrect) proxies
  - Bakary 4y ago
    The key takeaway is that what you are currently evaluating as a neutral, logical, science-based way of looking at the world is actually based on very specific philosophical and epistemological ideas that are ironically not themselves based on any kind of scientific approach per se. There's only a small portion of our lives that is actually lived on the basis of the scientific method and rigorous experiments, and this is not due to lacking as-of-yet-undiscovered material, so rejecting anything that does not employ the method as a source of knowledge or claiming that it's all relative is already a very curious position. The STEM-bro/SWE/HN/LessWrong/Sam Harris mindset is hyperspecific in its cultural conclusions and it doesn't come to those through experiments but by making prescriptive claims just like any philosopher. This isn't just an academic problem, but something that has real practical consequences when it comes to living in a society dominated by FAANGs and other such structures.
omeze 4y ago
You realize that in 200 years people will be saying the same thing about us, right? We have no unified theory of physics and many metaphysical debates on the interpretations of our physics. We have no working theory of intelligence and are random-walking to one as gamers subsidize the hardware needed. We still think neoliberal economics and representative democracy are kind of the best governing systems, but we’re one military leapfrog away from a new authoritarian world order. I think we’re not so different from our predecessors!
- spicyusername 4y ago
  > You realize that in 200 years people will be saying the same thing about us, right? Very good point. I 100% agree. What I'm arguing is that hard sciences are the only pathway to real understanding, and the hard sciences only got started during the enlightenment. Anything before then was just somebody grasping at straws really convincingly.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    > What I'm arguing is that hard sciences are the only pathway to real understanding... Aristotle said that women had fewer teeth than men. To him, this was logically necessary. He was married twice, but he never bothered to open his wife's mouth and count. So, yeah. A little actual data can cut short a lot of philosophical nonsense. But I think you go too far the other direction. Determining morals from science seems to me like either nonsense or the path to disaster, maybe both. Determining aesthetics from science is unlikely to produce anything beautiful. Determining politics from science... well, Marx and those who followed him claimed to be doing exactly that, and it worked out very badly. Determining epistemology from science is putting things exactly backwards. And even the things that can be determined from science, you have to be careful to not let everything become science. There's a great quote from Hemingway, which I tried and failed to find, where he says that you can count the spines on the dorsal fins of a certain kind of fish simply by getting a specimen and counting. But when that kind of fish hits the end of your fishing line, you get a whole different kind of truth. Then he says that the scientist who counts the spines in the fin has recorded one truth, and experienced many lies. The fish is not that cold, that color, that dead, nor does it smell that way. Science can tell us useful things. Philosophy that ignores science is likely to wander off into unreality and therefore uselessness. But no, the hard sciences are not the only pathway to real understanding, and trying to make it so will neuter philosophy.
becquerel 4y ago
Sam Harris alt detected.
- spicyusername 4y ago
  Hah!
arolihas 4y ago
Philosophy is more than just metaphysics. Is stoicism nonsense?
- spicyusername 4y ago
  > Philosophy is more than just metaphysics Very true. > Is stoicism nonsense? As a way to help you feel more in control in your personal life, no. As a pathway to understand what is, humankind's place in what is, and what we should do about what is, yes.
retrac 4y ago
On some of the most fundamental questions (e.g. "What is of value?" and "What does it mean to live a good life?") many of the credible answers, were probably first posited, before history even started being written. Consider the Confucians, Mohists and Taoists of China. Or the Epicurians and the Stoics of Western antiquity. They all had attempts to answer such questions. Some of which would sound very similar to what you might hear people say today and some of which would sound very alien. We are still having many of the same debates they did.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > We are still having many of the same debates they did. You can wander into almost any HN politics thread and find at least one alarmingly-confident and probably-acrimonious post that can act as a prompt to let you walk someone through Plato's dialog on justice from the first few pages of The Republic. They'll have no idea what you're doing. I'm pretty sure most of them are adults, not kids.
jhanschoo 4y ago
> Pretty much everything pre-enlightenment is really smart sounding nonsense. This is like saying that Newtonian physics is really smart sounding nonsense because it makes mispredictions in places and assumes that time behaves like a continuum. Among Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle alone, Aristotle developed syllogisms (a fragment of predicate logic), Aristotle developed the notion of scientific disciplines, Socrates made many realize that it's not as easy to refute seemingly obvious nonsense in a watertight manner, Aristotle developed the notion of infinitely divisible time trying to refute Zeno's infinitely divisible distances traveled. It's important to note that where these people are wrong and have developed insufficiently powerful explanations, it's because they lack the instruments and infrastructure (physical and intellectual) to reliably observe contradictions and deficiencies) to these frameworks that they have developed. To the person living then, it makes little difference, and likely the same to much of our lived experience (consider that religion is still very popular). Once you note this, you should then begin to realize just how little we know (as a society, in your community, yourself) considering the limits of what we can measure (as a society, in your community, yourself), and how measuring something unexpected can completely upend the framework that you had developed.
Der_Einzige 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ogurechny 4y ago
One thing to notice is that “Enlightenment” would not be called “Enlightenment” until much later. Simply said, you are sharing some pretty specific ideologized historical view point without knowing it. Analyzing it critically would help.

pell 4y ago

> Pretty much everything pre-englightenment is really smart sounding nonsense. Understanding it is mostly just useful as historical or anthropological context for how intellectual people thought at the time. Plato's critique of democracy was written long before the period of enlightenment. It stands on its own to this day. There are countless other examples of philosophical works that hold up to scrutiny even when viewed through an analytical lens.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

3pt14159 4y ago

Real meat, with a philosophical hole right at the base of it that cannot be waived away. At some point somewhere something has to be taken by faith. Ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning is one that most modern people take. The existence of God is a different option. Brains in vats and all that.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> At some point somewhere something has to be taken by faith. Ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning is one that most modern people take. Which, if you're building your philosophy in view of modern biological and neurological knowledge, is not a particularly defensible position.
- 3pt14159 4y ago
  > in view of modern biological and neurological knowledge How do we know that our mind is interpreting what this knowledge is in a coherent manner? The researchers themselves are already making a philosophical claim that truth is knowable to get to any meaningful conclusions about what can be learned about the mind. Note that I'm saying this assuming your premise is true, then using it to undermine your own claim so using this logic against me is not coherent. > is not a particularly defensible position. Defensibility is defined outside itself. For example: "Is the city defensible?" Is a reasonable question, but without defining the threat vector (comets, horsemen, etc) the statement on its own is meaningless. So please understand that from your own vantage point this claim may seem indefensible, but you are again assuming the premise; and this is, essentially, the number one problem I see in modern thought. Thinkers in our era have taken a leap of faith to defend rationality and science then proceed to deny that faith had anything to do with it, or, even worse in the case of Sam Harris, deride faith as "surely the devil's masterpiece" beating out ignorance, hatred, greed. I find this especially rich in light of the damage that greed and hatred have done to the modern world built upon our technological societies. I'm not anti-technology, in fact I am pro-technology, but without the underpinnings that come with faith that is acknowledged and serviced, I believe we'll end up damaging the world more than we aid it over time.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Let me try this again. If you missed that I'm agreeing with you, then others probably did also. "Modern biological and neurological knowledge" (wording adopted from spicyusername's post) says that our minds evolved over mega-years, to be good enough fast enough to give us a survival edge. They didn't evolve to be pure logic engines, and they show that in all kinds of ways. Within that view, it is a contradiction to believe "ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning" (your wording). Within the current framework, you can't trust your mind to reach correct conclusions. I'm not assuming the premise. I'm pointing out that those who do put themselves in a contradictory position.
    - 3pt14159 4y ago

sdf4j 4y ago

That's a pretty narrow conception of philosophy. Also a narrow conception of what "reality" entails. From ethics to politics, and pretty much every social phenomena, doesn't require a petri dish to be studied.

spicyusername 4y ago
> doesn't require a petri dish to be studied. True, that it doesn't require a petri dish, but it does require the scientific method.

Bakary 4y ago

This is just absurdly simplistic. The enlightenment did not appear in a vaccuum either. It is predicated on specific philosophical arguments. This becomes immediately apparent when you consider non-Western industrialized nations. The scientific method is one thing, but it is not something that can be used to prescribe a way to live. Plenty of aspects of our society aren't predicated on post-enlightenment thinking.

spicyusername 4y ago
> The scientific method is one thing, but it is not something that can be used to prescribe a way to live. I understand what you're getting at. I agree that much of what is considered "philosophy" isn't just "what is", but "what should we do about it". I would argue that the answer "what we should do about it" is either: - So relative that there isn't an answer (or are infinite answers), at which point everyone is welcome to substitute any answer they like. - Dependent on as-yet-undiscovered information in the physical sciences (biology, cosmology, physics, neuroscience, etc), which is why we're still reliant on incomplete (or incorrect) proxies
- Bakary 4y ago
  The key takeaway is that what you are currently evaluating as a neutral, logical, science-based way of looking at the world is actually based on very specific philosophical and epistemological ideas that are ironically not themselves based on any kind of scientific approach per se. There's only a small portion of our lives that is actually lived on the basis of the scientific method and rigorous experiments, and this is not due to lacking as-of-yet-undiscovered material, so rejecting anything that does not employ the method as a source of knowledge or claiming that it's all relative is already a very curious position. The STEM-bro/SWE/HN/LessWrong/Sam Harris mindset is hyperspecific in its cultural conclusions and it doesn't come to those through experiments but by making prescriptive claims just like any philosopher. This isn't just an academic problem, but something that has real practical consequences when it comes to living in a society dominated by FAANGs and other such structures.

omeze 4y ago

You realize that in 200 years people will be saying the same thing about us, right? We have no unified theory of physics and many metaphysical debates on the interpretations of our physics. We have no working theory of intelligence and are random-walking to one as gamers subsidize the hardware needed. We still think neoliberal economics and representative democracy are kind of the best governing systems, but we’re one military leapfrog away from a new authoritarian world order. I think we’re not so different from our predecessors!

spicyusername 4y ago
> You realize that in 200 years people will be saying the same thing about us, right? Very good point. I 100% agree. What I'm arguing is that hard sciences are the only pathway to real understanding, and the hard sciences only got started during the enlightenment. Anything before then was just somebody grasping at straws really convincingly.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  > What I'm arguing is that hard sciences are the only pathway to real understanding... Aristotle said that women had fewer teeth than men. To him, this was logically necessary. He was married twice, but he never bothered to open his wife's mouth and count. So, yeah. A little actual data can cut short a lot of philosophical nonsense. But I think you go too far the other direction. Determining morals from science seems to me like either nonsense or the path to disaster, maybe both. Determining aesthetics from science is unlikely to produce anything beautiful. Determining politics from science... well, Marx and those who followed him claimed to be doing exactly that, and it worked out very badly. Determining epistemology from science is putting things exactly backwards. And even the things that can be determined from science, you have to be careful to not let everything become science. There's a great quote from Hemingway, which I tried and failed to find, where he says that you can count the spines on the dorsal fins of a certain kind of fish simply by getting a specimen and counting. But when that kind of fish hits the end of your fishing line, you get a whole different kind of truth. Then he says that the scientist who counts the spines in the fin has recorded one truth, and experienced many lies. The fish is not that cold, that color, that dead, nor does it smell that way. Science can tell us useful things. Philosophy that ignores science is likely to wander off into unreality and therefore uselessness. But no, the hard sciences are not the only pathway to real understanding, and trying to make it so will neuter philosophy.

becquerel 4y ago

Sam Harris alt detected.

spicyusername 4y ago
Hah!

arolihas 4y ago

Philosophy is more than just metaphysics. Is stoicism nonsense?

spicyusername 4y ago
> Philosophy is more than just metaphysics Very true. > Is stoicism nonsense? As a way to help you feel more in control in your personal life, no. As a pathway to understand what is, humankind's place in what is, and what we should do about what is, yes.

retrac 4y ago

On some of the most fundamental questions (e.g. "What is of value?" and "What does it mean to live a good life?") many of the credible answers, were probably first posited, before history even started being written. Consider the Confucians, Mohists and Taoists of China. Or the Epicurians and the Stoics of Western antiquity. They all had attempts to answer such questions. Some of which would sound very similar to what you might hear people say today and some of which would sound very alien. We are still having many of the same debates they did.

yamtaddle 4y ago
> We are still having many of the same debates they did. You can wander into almost any HN politics thread and find at least one alarmingly-confident and probably-acrimonious post that can act as a prompt to let you walk someone through Plato's dialog on justice from the first few pages of The Republic. They'll have no idea what you're doing. I'm pretty sure most of them are adults, not kids.

jhanschoo 4y ago

> Pretty much everything pre-enlightenment is really smart sounding nonsense. This is like saying that Newtonian physics is really smart sounding nonsense because it makes mispredictions in places and assumes that time behaves like a continuum. Among Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle alone, Aristotle developed syllogisms (a fragment of predicate logic), Aristotle developed the notion of scientific disciplines, Socrates made many realize that it's not as easy to refute seemingly obvious nonsense in a watertight manner, Aristotle developed the notion of infinitely divisible time trying to refute Zeno's infinitely divisible distances traveled. It's important to note that where these people are wrong and have developed insufficiently powerful explanations, it's because they lack the instruments and infrastructure (physical and intellectual) to reliably observe contradictions and deficiencies) to these frameworks that they have developed. To the person living then, it makes little difference, and likely the same to much of our lived experience (consider that religion is still very popular). Once you note this, you should then begin to realize just how little we know (as a society, in your community, yourself) considering the limits of what we can measure (as a society, in your community, yourself), and how measuring something unexpected can completely upend the framework that you had developed.

Der_Einzige 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ogurechny 4y ago

One thing to notice is that “Enlightenment” would not be called “Enlightenment” until much later. Simply said, you are sharing some pretty specific ideologized historical view point without knowing it. Analyzing it critically would help.