wandeljw wrote:Chumly and JLN,
This is how Karl Popper explained the importance of philosophy for science:
Quote:....in almost every phase of the development of science we are under the sway of metaphysical - that is, untestable - ideas; ideas which not only determine what problems of explanation we shall choose to attack, but also what kinds of answers we shall consider as fitting or satisfactory or acceptable, and as improvements of, or advances on, earlier answers.
This claim presupposes the application of the body of techniques called the scientific method, but it's not so cut and dry.
Often enough a discovery happens quite by accident, or if not fully so, then to some fair degree. I speculate that these happy accidents are a lot more common than the final dry scientific rationalizations would have some believe.
Then there is the pure trial and error methodology, in which it would seem again that choice and preconceptions are exempted, at least to some fair degree. I speculate that these pure trial and error methodologies are a lot more common than the final dry scientific rationalizations would have some believe.
I could be dead wrong about all this but consider as but one honest example
Accidental Science
Chumly, no doubt (fortuitous) accident plays a role in the context of scientific DISCOVERY, but in the context of JUSTIFICATION, the systematic testing of hypotheses is very careful, formal and rigorous. I've been talking about Science as an ideal type, but in the actual course of knowledge acquisition--in it prehistorical and historical phases--trial and error and accidental discovery have been critical. It is truistic that the acquisition of knowledge did not begin with the invention of the scientific method, although the latter has made the process far more efficient and productive. The formative periods of Man's technological development were incredibly slow by today's standards.
I am not as sanguine as (perhaps?) you re: justification.
Witness magnetism - even after centuries of science, magnetism remains dimly seen, poorly understood and mostly unknown; however the applied effects of magnetism in our modern world are huge! Or am I on the wrong track here?
Chumly wrote:I am not as sanguine as (perhaps?) you re: justification.
Witness magnetism - even after centuries of science, magnetism remains dimly seen, poorly understood and mostly unknown; however the applied effects of magnetism in our modern world are huge! Or am I on the wrong track here?
Re magnetism.....I believe that the current evidence is that earth's magnetic poles regularly switch and that the science understanding of this can be summed up as ......WTF!
I'm sure some of you have already seen this interesting piece from the New York Times:
In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life Examined
By WINNIE HU
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. ?- When a fellow student at Rutgers University urged Didi Onejeme to try Philosophy 101 two years ago, Ms. Onejeme, who was a pre-med sophomore, dismissed it as "frou-frou."
"People sitting under trees and talking about stupid stuff ?- I mean, who cares?" Ms. Onejeme recalled thinking at the time.
But Ms. Onejeme, now a senior applying to law school, ended up changing her major to philosophy, which she thinks has armed her with the skills to be successful. "My mother was like, what are you going to do with that?" said Ms. Onejeme, 22. "She wanted me to be a pharmacy major, but I persuaded her with my argumentative skills."
Once scoffed at as a luxury major, philosophy is being embraced at Rutgers and other universities by a new generation of college students who are drawing modern-day lessons from the age-old discipline as they try to make sense of their world, from the morality of the war in Iraq to the latest political scandal. The economic downturn has done little, if anything, to dampen this enthusiasm among students, who say that what they learn in class can translate into practical skills and careers. On many campuses, debate over modern issues like war and technology is emphasized over the study of classic ancient texts.
Rutgers, which has long had a top-ranked philosophy department, is one of a number of universities where the number of undergraduate philosophy majors is ballooning; there are 100 in this year's graduating class, up from 50 in 2002, even as overall enrollment on the main campus has declined by 4 percent.
At the City University of New York, where enrollment is up 18 percent over the past six years, there are 322 philosophy majors, a 51 percent increase since 2002.
"If I were to start again as an undergraduate, I would major in philosophy," said Matthew Goldstein, the CUNY chancellor, who majored in mathematics and statistics. "I think that subject is really at the core of just about everything we do. If you study humanities or political systems or sciences in general, philosophy is really the mother ship from which all of these disciplines grow."
Nationwide, there are more colleges offering undergraduate philosophy programs today than a decade ago (817, up from 765), according to the College Board. Some schools with established programs like Texas A&M, Notre Dame, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, now have twice as many philosophy majors as they did in the 1990s.
David E. Schrader, executive director of the American Philosophical Association, a professional organization with 11,000 members, said that in an era in which people change careers frequently, philosophy makes sense. "It's a major that helps them become quick learners and gives them strong skills in writing, analysis and critical thinking," he said.
Mr. Schrader, an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware, said that the demand for philosophy courses had outpaced the resources at some colleges, where students are often turned away. Some are enrolling in online courses instead, he said, describing it as "really very strange."
"The discipline as we see it from the time of Socrates starts with people face to face, putting their positions on the table," he said.
The Rutgers philosophy department is relatively large, with 27 professors, 60 graduate students, and more than 30 undergraduate offerings each semester. For those who cannot get enough of their Descartes in class, there is the Wednesday night philosophy club, where, last week, 11 students debated the metaphysics behind the movie "The Matrix" for more than an hour.
An undergraduate philosophy journal started this semester has drawn 36 submissions ?- about half from Rutgers students ?- on musings like "Is the extinction of a species always a bad thing?"
Barry Loewer, the department chairman, said that Rutgers started building its philosophy program in the late 1980s, when the field was branching into new research areas like cognitive science and becoming more interdisciplinary. He said that many students have double-majored in philosophy and, say, psychology or economics, in recent years, and go on to become doctors, lawyers, writers, investment bankers and even commodities traders.
As the approach has changed, philosophy has attracted students with little interest in contemplating the classical texts, or what is known as armchair philosophy. Some, like Ms. Onejeme, the pre-med-student-turned-philosopher, who is double majoring in political science, see it as a pre-law track because it emphasizes the verbal and logic skills prized by law schools ?- something the Rutgers department encourages by pointing out that their majors score high on the LSAT.
Other students said that studying philosophy, with its emphasis on the big questions and alternative points of view, provided good training for looking at larger societal questions, like globalization and technology.
"All of these things make the world a smaller place and force us to look beyond the bubble we grow up in," said Christine Bullman, 20, a junior, who said art majors and others routinely took philosophy classes. "I think philosophy is a good base to look at a lot of issues."
Frances Egan, a Rutgers philosophy professor who advises undergraduates, said that as it has become harder for students to predict what specialties might be in demand in an uncertain economy, some may be more apt to choose their major based simply on what they find interesting. "Philosophy is a lot of fun," said Professor Egan, who graduated with a philosophy degree in the tough economic times of the 1970s. "A lot of students are in it because they find it intellectually rewarding."
Max Bialek, 22, was majoring in math until his senior year, when he discovered philosophy. He decided to stay an extra year to complete the major (his parents needed reassurance, he said, but were supportive).
"I thought: Why weren't all my other classes like that one?" he said, explaining that philosophy had taught him a way of studying that could be applied to any subject and enriched his life in unexpected ways. "You can talk about almost anything as long as you do it well."
Jenna Schaal-O'Connor, a 20-year-old sophomore who is majoring in cognitive science and linguistics, said philosophy had other perks. She said she found many male philosophy majors interesting and sensitive.
"That whole deep existential torment," she said. "It's good for getting girlfriends."
Thanks for the interesting article, Shapeless. Recently on a train, I heard two college students discussing trends in cognitive science.
Excerpt from
Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions (Glenn Tinder, University of Massachusetts)
Quote:How does a person go about thinking? I shall offer a few suggestions in this introduction. Help of this kind, however, is necessarily of limited value. Much of the trying nature of thoughts results from the impossibility of thinking according to teachable techniques. Although much is said about "teaching students to think," a teacher can do little more than offer encouragement and criticism. The appearance of an idea is a mysterious occurrence, and it is doubtful that anyone does, or ever will, understand just how it happens.
But a student can learn to think. My reason for saying that no one can be taught to think is to focus at the outset on the dependence of the entire process on the student's own solitary efforts. It is both the glory and the burden of thought that it is an exceedingly personal undertaking. The solitude of the mature thinker must be entered into immediately by the beginner. As the mature thinker thinks all alone, the beginner must learn to think all alone. Occasionally one may receive a gift of encouragement or useful criticism, but nothing is decided by these gifts. Everything depends on the capacity for solitary effort.
It follows that little instruction in the art of thinking can be offered beyond suggestions such as the following.
1. Do not try to arrive at ideas no one has ever thought of before. Even the greatest thinkers have rarely done that. The aim of thinking is to discover ideas that pull together one's world, and thus one's being, not to give birth to unprecedented conceptions. An idea is your own if it has grown by your own efforts and is rooted in your own emotions and experience, even though you may have received the seeds from someone else and even though the idea may be very much like ideas held by many others.
2. Be open. Ideas cannot be deliberately produced like industrial products. They appear uncommanded, they occur, as we recognize when we say, "It occurred to me that..." You place yourself in a fundamentally wrong relationship with ideas if you assume you can control their appearance. You can only be open to them.
3. Do not hurry. Initial efforts to think about a problem are often completely frustrating. They may best be regarded as a tilling of the ground; time is required before anything can be expected to grow.
4. Make plenty of notes. It is easier to work with your mind if you are doing some corresponding work with your hands. It is often helpful to make notes on large pads where there is room for sketching out patterns of ideas. It can also be helpful to make notes on cards and then to cut up the cards so that each idea is on a small piece of card. These can then be laid out on a desk and rearranged. Often this process suggests new connections among your thoughts.
5. Beware of substituting reading for thinking. Reading about the thoughts of others is not the same as having thoughts of your own. To be sure, to engage in thinking you need some acquaintance with the thoughts of others. The great thinkers inspire, provoke, confirm, and in other ways help you do your own thinking. But to think you must at some point lay down the book and strike out on your own.
Sorry but the author is a real airhead! He says: "The appearance of an idea is a mysterious occurrence, and it is doubtful that anyone does, or ever will, understand just how it happens."
That is one muddy piece of thinking!
How can the author presuppose to have knowledge of the future limits of knowledge? Talk about circular silliness!
And the duty of society, is to bind people to the mores of the day; arguably the antithesis of free thinking.
Quote:The duty of a philosopher is
to free people to think for themselves.
Well, in that sense, the philosophy of any given person is as helpful to me as the jogging trip that person took before sitting down with his thoughts.
My point is that we fool ourselves. No one can think for you, and that goes for philosophers as well as politicians and religious authorities.
Had you said "the duty of philosophy"... it would have been a different matter.
I know some philosophers that cannot think for themselves. They are philosophers because they've studied what we call philosophy, and can't really think for themselves beyond recalling what this or that dead guy said about this or that subject.
Philosophy is a tricky slope...
Cyracuz wrote:No one can think for you.....
Sadly, I must entirely disagree. The reliance on others to make decisions on one's behalf is a foundation of society.
I agree with you on that.
What I mean is that if you have a sense of something inexplicable, something you think could tie together many lose ends and settle many questions about your own existence and your perception of it, there is no way to come to an understanding of what it is other than to think about it with your own power of mind.
Some questions do not have answers. The true philosophical questions cannot even be properly fitted into words.
Those questions we live, and we become the answers, and this is what philosophy is really about, as I see it.
Re: What Makes Philosophy Worthwhile?
wandeljw wrote:Debates on issues of philosophy are often protracted and often fail to reach a decisive resolution. What is it, then, that makes philosophy worthwhile?
For me, it's been the ability to manipulate woman into having sex with me.
Quote:Philosophy is fun: it makes life a theoretical problem, and, as such, a source of joy and object of wonder.
No wonder I have problems with philosophy - the only two reasons I indulge in it is for curiosity, but also as a way to improve my interaction with life - and from that perspective I'm only interested in the practical applications of philosophy.
Put another way, I have a beef with philosophy when it makes people indecisive/inactive, but enjoy it when it can be put to use in peoples lives (to be acted on).
Being indecisive/inactive is not the same as being 'calmer' (which is a good thing), but rather that it should work both ways - to bring calmness, and also bring clarity/passion/meaning to action.
Vikorr, it sounds like what you want is an ideology, an dogma that smacks of certitude--a securely closed rather than an insecurly open mind.
