Who destroyed philosophy?

Apparently, then, you believe that as long as someone says that a religious belief is true, it is true? And if there are conflicting religious beliefs, and long as both are believed, both are true?

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Apparently, then, you believe that as long as someone says that a religious belief is true, it is true? And if there are conflicting religious beliefs, and long as both are believed, both are true?

No. You have to find out what you think is true, and declare it. You need to make a stand, and say 'this is what I believe to be true'. In such questions, what someone else believes to be true is valuable only if it is meaningful to you, if you can validate it and verify it in your own experience.

In the case of Philosophy, there are key values which are held in esteem, for example sobriety, detachment, self-discipline, wisdom and reason. I think what has happened in Western religious and philosophical thinking is that many of these traditional virtues have been neglected due to dogmatic religion, which absorbs everything into 'believe and be saved'. The kind of philosophical spirituality which was typical of the Greek tradition has been absorbed into religious dogma and we are conditioned to think of it a certain way. If you can imaginatively go back to an earlier time and understand the tradition in the spirit in which it was intended, it is quite a different attitude to that which we now associate with 'religious views'. So when I say that Plato was a religious philosopher, he was religious in quite a different way, or spirit, to how the word is commonly interpreted in popular culture today.

ordinarily designated as "truth"

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ordinarily designated as "truth"

If you rely on that, and all your posts suggest that you do, you fail as a "philosopher".

Was it kant, wittgenstein, heidegger, or nietzsche?

I wonder what it means for some statement to me true if in order for it to be true it is necessary only to declare that it is true. In that case, whatever you think is true is, ipso facto true simply in virtue of the fact that you think it is true, so there is, in effect, no distinction between thinking some statement is true and its being true

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I wonder what it means for some statement to me true if in order for it to be true it is necessary only to declare that it is true. In that case, whatever you think is true is, ipso facto true simply in virtue of the fact that you think it is true, so there is, in effect, no distinction between thinking some statement is true and its being true

Pascal's wager: there are some types of issues for which there is no adjudication possible, no 'court of appeal'. With a scientific hypothesis, we can try and find something which falsifies the hypothesis. But for many questions which philosophy poses, however, no such method might be available. We have to make a judgement about it, and I would hope that if we weigh up all the evidence we are aware of, seek to educate ourselves about the issue, then the decision we make is at least the best one we can make, even recognising that it might never be possible to know all there is to know about the matter. Many of the questions of philosophy are like that. There are very cogent arguments made by persons with similar levels of education and background which draw opposite conclusions. As by their nature many of them are really beyond empirical demonsration, there is no judge we can go to and say 'settle this matter for us'. The only judge is our own conscience. We basically have to decide an attitude.

In some sense, in regards to the ultimate questions of life, there is an unavoidable sense of uncertainty, of really not being able to say what the case is. Many are unable to tolerate this sense of not really knowing. We are impatient about it. 'Let's not deal with all of this kind of business. We're sensible people.' But the fact is, the unknown is at the centre of existence. 'Things we cannot know' don't just concern the ultimate nature of the universe. They impinge on us day to day. Generally the modern person will actually repress this sense, but like anything repressed, it turns up in other ways. According to philosopher David Loy, it turns up as a sense of lack which we are constantly trying to fill. I am sure this is the case for many people.

Why should Plato be the standard for all philosophy? Well, you could do worse...of course, we know much more now, much of his thinking is archaic, he should not be worshipped, but at least he should be remembered correctly, and I think appreciating the spiritual aspect of Plato's thought is very important for Western culture. And I agree that philosophy must change, but there are some questions that need to be re-discovered by each generation also. Some would say that this sense of the massive disjunction between the modern world and classical civilization is not a matter of progress but degeneration

As to the general question of the nature of the reality of an Absolute, this is indeed something beyond the scope of thought and the laws of the excluded middle. This is because of the limits of human thought and logic itself. It has a certain range, but some things are beyond it. Perhaps the best we can do is to see where the limits lie.

But Pascal's wager does not tell us that we can make the proposition "God exists" true simply by believing it is true. His isn't a kind of proof of God at all. It is merely at attempt to argue that if a person believes in God, he is better off that a person who does not. It has nothing whatever to do with truth. It has to do with the pragmatic virtues of belief. To think it has anything to do with truth is a woeful misunderstanding. Even William James who, in his Will to Believe took Pascal's ball and ran into a wall with it, did not go so far as to argue that mere belief in God somehow created the truth of theism.

Khet: no one aside from Ken even Implied that belief makes something true. Ken erroneously, as usual, extrapolated something way out of context. I was expressing that there are areas within philosophy in which materialism does not play a part, and he said 'apparently you think that believing in God makes it so.' Some of us were speaking about the inability to not see one's self as an object during introspection. At which point Ken jumped the rails. Thus the pascal's wager post by jeeprs was trying politely to reign someone into the actual conversation.

So its down to spelling and whining now. When you can up your reading comprehension game, I'll take the time to up my spelling game. You can't follow 1) because you cannot accept certain premises from which I argue as valid, which is fine, and 2) you seem not to be able to respond to a thread/conversation as a whole, maybe if you could respond to a conversation concerning many posts instead of sentence by sentence in one post as seperate and isolated arguments you might find more success. Feel free not to follow me at your leisure. And since we are being petty, please feel free to read my signature as referring to you.

Actually, I think we all of us, deep in our hearts, know the answer to the ultimate questions of life. But we fear acknowledging that we know them. As Houseman wrote, "We live alone and afraid in a world we never made".

- "Truth" as a generalized concept has no meaning, no substance (such as "Ultimate Truth" - which cutsie and flowery as it sounds, has no reference for another mind on which to grab - and therefore has no worth, value or reference on its own).

My reference to Pascal's Wager was not an attempt to 'prove the existence of God' or even justify a viewpoint. It was a comment about the kinds of questions for which there are no logical or empirical proofs. We can't say 'OK, let's go and see Professor Blogs, he knows the answer'. Nobody knows the answer. And yet you have to decide. This decision is your basic stance, and it is generally pre-rational. It comes from your heart, not your conscious mind.

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Actually, I think we all of us, deep in our hearts, know the answer to the ultimate questions of life. But we fear acknowledging that we know them. As Houseman wrote, "We live alone and afraid in a world we never made".

Very poignant quote. But that is exactly the predicament from which the pilgrim seeks escape via the Divine Union; which is, of course, out-of-scope for philosophy, as such. All the various faiths, and all that is spiritual in the traditional philosophies, start at this point; it is that from which we are to be delivered. And that is why questions of this nature are existential rather than propositional. You have to really give yourself to the question and have a stake in the answer, as I said previously. This is not the way philosophy is done any more, which is why (in my view) it is no longer a very meaningful discipline. But it is the original impulse behind philosophy.

Maybe the existence of God is one of those undecidable issues, but that there is still disagreement is no proof (or even much of an argument) that it is.