4 ms·

It's a grave injustice to the vast field of philosophy to judge it by one undergraduate's impression of Plato, Aristotle, Bertrand Russell, and Wittgenstein. B

• pjscott 14y ago
  That argument applies to more than just philosophy. And yet, if you accept that not all religions can be true, and that most of the major ones have long scholastic traditions, then there must be at least one field of study which is vast, majestic, and wrong. So, what method would you propose for determining which academic fields are worthwhile, in their current state? (I think I just did some philosophy. Oops.)
  • opminion 14y ago
    Answers to your question would be given by criteria which discriminate between science an theology.
  • gnosis 14y ago
    For a method for determining "which academic fields are worthwhile", perhaps it might be wise to start by becoming well familiar with the fields in question -- something that the author of the above essay did not seem to have taken the trouble of doing. And how much less familiar with philosophy are most of the readers of this essay? I would venture to guess that they are not even philosophy majors, but rather computer science majors or self-taught computer programmers. What a shame it would be if they thought the essay's author knew what he was talking about and dismissed all of philosophy out of hand. All of philosophy might be "wrong", but if that's so, it's going to take a lot more than a vague, ill-informed five page essay by a disaffected undergraduate to convince me.
  • unalone 14y ago
    > if you accept that not all religions can be true I think, actually, that once you accept that no one religion contains Ultimate Truth, it is much easier to see that every religion is a facet of something true and powerful. Dogma is what insists that only one religion, only one way of doing things, can be the correct way; dogma is always false. But beneath the dogma lies fascinating insights. Personally, I find that the simplest religion, and therefore the "truest", is Taoism. The Tao Te Ching is goddamn gold: short, succinct, and brilliant. Buddhism is similarly philosophically inclined; Hinduism is fantastic, and quite explicit in telling you that its gods are metaphors for the world, characters that turn insights about life into stories. Christianity's God-as-man metaphor is a fascinating one that can lead to some very interesting thoughts about our relationship to everything around us. So on and so forth. Those long scholastic traditions are part of why people who don't utterly hate religion argue that anti-theists are missing something important in their insistence that religion be razed to the ground. For all the horrors of dogma, and those horrors are many, the religious tradition has collected millennia of collected human experience and wisdom – it's a treasure trove for anybody seeking to discover those parts of themselves. Let's get rid of the dogma and blind faith, but acknowledge that religion has been a monumental accomplishment for the species that should be respected for what it's done for our race. > So, what method would you propose for determining which academic fields are worthwhile, in their current state? The less dogma, the better. Luckily for us philophiles, philosophy is more obsessed with ending dogma than just about anything, so I guess we'll have to keep it around forever!
  • cicero 14y ago
    I don't see how philosophy, as a field of study, could be wrong. Even if every philosopher who ever lived was wrong, we still need to do something like philosophy to address questions like the one you just raised. Philosophy is not a single methodology or approach. Indeed, most of the great philosophers are considered great because they introduced new approaches. Wikipedia says, "Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument." The attacks I've seen on philosophy are either glib statements that such questions don't matter, reductions of philosophical problems to those that can be answered by science, or anti-intellectual attacks on the validity of systematic rational argument to answer such questions. Those who say such questions don't matter have just made a philosophical statement, yet I never have heard them give a rational argument for their philosophy. They seem to rely on the force of their personality and credentials in their field and act like the statement is obvious and anyone who thinks otherwise is silly. Similarly, there are those who say that neuroscience or some other science answers the question, but what they have done is reduced the larger question into a smaller one that science can answer, and then declare that the rest of the question is not important. Those who doubt the power of human rational argument to answer fundamental questions might be right ultimately, but we don't know the limits of human rationality until we get there. If rational argument has any value at all for determining truth, then we should press it as far as we can. If a person thinks it doesn't, then they shouldn't be arguing about it. One cannot argue the truth of the statement that argument cannot lead to truth. By the way, I agree that all religions cannot be true in every respect since they contradict each other at various points, but they still could be true in certain respects, and some may be more true than others, or offer a better way to the truth than others.
• petegrif 14y ago
  I think the point he would make is that Java works.