Is Philosophy a way of life or an armchair recreation.

Another oddity, Kara. I have a thread about Carlie...varied opinions there....

How about a link, Letty? Or the category...

Thanks.

ok, Hold on.

Here it is.

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=18665&highlight=

Sorry, Fresco. Didn't mean to hijack your thread, but it's a philosophical discussion of sorts

Fresco, I would love to, but I seriously have no time anymore. I just get a couple minutes to come on here every so often, usually after 2 AM.

truth
Excellent points. I agree that technical issues in philosophy are not always relevant to the issues of everyday life, just as particle physics is of no relevance to the engineer building a bridge. But I do feel that an individual's "worldview" (his most general presupositions and values) is ALWAYS relevant to his life, even to the tasks of washing dishes and shopping at the supermarket. Philosophy (including mystical insight/perspective) is in that general sense the foundation for living.

JLN, I agree with you here. We can debate the issues of philosophy endlessly, and this is a joy and a pasttime. But the issues that we have resolved as we debate and ponder and decide, as we confer with like minds, are the ones that inform our daily life. I could not act without knowing how I should act. If we act without knowing, or without having thought, we are cretins, reactionary only.

But can worldveiw really be a universal philosophy all the time? I agree that it can sometimes be - but other times you have to just accept that universal philosophies and narrow worldveiw don't coincide.

Rufio, that would really depend on what your definitions of worldview and universal are. Two big words with supposedly bigger meanings. The problem is is that no single philosophy has ever held up under the light of reason- been completely consistent with each of its maxims, derivatives, and a priori statements. They all fall apart at some point in time, whether the philosophy pertains to moral, epistemological, or metaphysical grounds. So anything all encompassing has thus far been doomed to breakdown. This of course begs the question is it "right" to assume that anything can or should hold up under any circumstance?
Our philosophies do impact our daily life. The choices we make- if indeed we can truly choose, the experiences we have, anything at all, is filtered through philosophy. We just aren't privy to that sort of information. Most of our actions take place through "unconscious" decisions. This doesn't make us all cretins, just a little Sphexish. (Daniel Dennett- Elbow Room)

What's really real will hold up under any circumstance, by definition. But there is more than one type of reality, I guess you could say. Universal philosophy governs something than emotional or subjective philosophy doesn't, and vice versa.

truth
Rufio, I gather from your comments that, by "universal philosophy" you are referring to systems of non-contingent ABSOLUTE truths or truth propositions. I don't subscribe, as you know to such notions. While I do not go so far as to say that it's ONLY as we see, or think, it, I definitely do not accept "absolute perspectivess". That is an oxymoron since by definition all perspectives--and all "truths" are perspectives--are relative. I DO agree with Frank Apiso that if "reality" means anything it is a general and vacuous reference to "whatever is the case." But that does not tell us much about the particulars of reality.

Yeah. I guess I'm sort of dividing it up. But I think even you can understand this without a universal non-contingent absolute philososphy. If you want, think of the universal philosophy as consisting of all perceptions had by all people about everything (which is close enough, I suppose). But if you're, say, analysing Hamlet, than you can't consider what all the different elements mean to all the different people, or in other words, derive the true meaning of the events and symbols based taking into account all other possible perspectives. To me, this means objectivity, to you, who knows. But the point is, you can't do that and still function as an individual human being. If you're an artist of any kind, you have to consciously ignore all the aspects of everything you encounter besides the first impressions you get, because those culture-specific first impressions are what drive appreciation of art - art being literature, theater, painting, sculpting, architecture, your wardrobe, how you decorate your room - anything whose sole purpose is to convey something. As soon as you start to convey something, you have an audience and you can't think about everyone else at the same time.

truth
Rufio, congratulations on a very rich and provocative post. I do think that if the words "objective" and "absolute" have any meaning at all, they would refer to the "mentality" of a God-Mind: that would be an OMNIperspective. But I'm afraid we humans are stuck with the Roshomon Effect. We can only have one perspective at a time. But consider the idea of ALL the perspectives existing subjectively but nevertheless being parts of a unity, not an inter-subjective unity in which every subjectivity includes a Borg-like awareness of every other, just the "objective" fact of their unity, like the many distinct notes making up a single symphonic work. The totality is what signifies most, even though it is composed of a plurality. It cannot exist without its "parts" and the parts derive their significance from their participation in the unity.

I would say that the existence of an objective reality does not neccessitate a mind that can fully comprehend it - in fact, it would be completely independant of any minds. It's a much more subjective perspective that would postulate that since a falling tree doesn't make a sound if no one is around to hear it, we need an omnipresent omniscient god-mind to hear it and make sure it does make a sound - to create reality through godly perception.

Perspectives definitely interact with each other though - because we can perceive others' perspectives and make judgements to change our perspectives based on that - as with anthropology. Or are you suggesting as above, that we all work together as a god-mind to create things? That would make an interesting episode of the twilight zone - sort of a democracy of reality, where majority groups define what everyone else sees. Creepy.

I beleive we can know other people's perspectives, because all possible perspectives are possible to be experienced by all humans, not because we are part of one nondual entity. Not only that, but perspective can be taught, as with culture. We may not ever be able to directly perceive objective reality, but it helps to be able to see what we can from whatever angles are available. The closest we can get to objective reality is to fully explore all possible ways to understand something. Naturally, ever one of those has a little of humanity in it as well as whatever is perceived, but there are common threads in all of them.

truth
Another good one, Rufio. My comments are not to be taken as disagreements only as qualifications, i.e., to apply as different perspective.
Your notion of an objective reality independent of a subjective mentality does, if I am not taking an excessively grammatical view of reality, make the illogical suggestion of an object sans subject. Similarly, as I've said in another thread, I cannot imagine a SOUND (e.g., sensory report of a falling tree) without an EAR.
I do agree with your interactionist model of social behavior, i.e., that we take (what we imagine, or calculate, to be) the likely responses of others to our action plans before we carry them out. This is the assumption of sociology's "symbolic interactionists" (Herbert Blumer and G.H. Mead) as well as social cultural anthropology's more mentalistic theorists (Clifford Geertz and many others). As cultures, human societies (at least the more homogenous ones) do enjoy a great degree of formal sharing of constructs and models of reality, but the locus of experience is subjective not inter-subjective. Nevertheless, we are all facets of a unitary reality. This is not the same as an inter-subjective great mind. Cultures are internally diverse and sharing is always problematic. So do understand me: sharing within cultures is not at all the same as the more fundamental unitary reality of which even unsharing subjectivities are a part. One is an intellectually dualistic epistemological issue within the philosophy of social science; the other a non-dualistic ontological intuition within mystical or philosophical cosmology.

The unitary reality here is frank's "reality is everything that is"?

I mention sharing cultural veiws as a way to approaching understanding objective reality, not as a reality itself. I don't think there's a way to see everything in all ways simultaneously, but if you try you can see it in culturally defined bits. And of course for my purposes here, each person is effectively a culture (funny, I think it was actually Sapir who said that first, wasn't it?). Frankly, I rather detest Geertz's style from what I read of him, but admittedly, that wasn't much.

On sound and perception and so forth - the world was not made for human senses - that is, sound is not defined by how it is picked up by the human ear, and light is not determined by how our eyes react to it. If that was so, than radio would be a type of sound, and there would be none of this issue about light being particles and waves. The proccess that creates sound is the moving of air molucles - this still happens, whether there is an ear there or not. How we interpret this is irrelevant to why or whether it happens. However, all we have to interpret the sound with is our senses - so we should exploit them as much as possible to learn its nature.

JL Nobody wrote:

Now, this I can agree with. And perhaps it is the statement that resolves the original issue on this thread which was whether one's philosophy affects his daily decisions and actions.

Rufio is discussing cultural exchange and its effect. This is interesting in light of the habits of thought and action that people form, consciously or unconsciously, that save them from reinventing the wheel with every moral decision to be made. These habits, however, also keep them from thinking about what they are doing and from considering the possibility of arguments against their habit of thought or action. Such habits of thought in a culture can account for the way people respond to any need for a decision; and their thoughts, collectively as a culture, may be the opposite of another culture's habitual responses. Such habits can also explain (partially) why a born-again preacher can urge fundamentalist and conservative views on his listeners -- views that he believes in completely -- and yet go 'round the corner with a hooker in the dark of night. There is a disconnect between his beliefs and his actions.

Habits don't preclude understanding. They just describe how one habitually acts, they don't act as blinders so that he can't see other things. If that were the case, there would be no cross-cultural communication at all.

truth
Kara, I do think that the "disconnect" you describe reflects the complexity of cultural systems and ways this complexity (with all its contradictions) affect the individual. Your emphasis on the habit side of culture is, I think, similar to the French sociologist, Bourdiex' concept of "habitus." I don't recall most of that culture theory literature, but I do think that Rufio's comment that culture qua habit does not serve as blinders because of the occurence of cross-cultural communication should take into account that such communication is often marred or just made difficult by the habitual nature of culture, the fact that most of it is less than conscious means that its effects are not easily by-passed because we are most often not even aware of the tacit presuppositions and values they reflect.
Rufio, yes Sapir, as I recall, focused (as a psychological and linguistic anthropologist) on the locus of culture in the human individual as opposed to society. But don't you think he also recogonized the shared and interactive aspect of culture--i.e., its inter-subjective aspect--when it came to language? I hope we are not going to review the discussion we've already had on the objectivity versus subjectivity of sound and color. I think I've made it clear in the past that I do not think it possible for the sensation of sound to occur without BOTH the so-called "objective" events of waves/air disturbance and the operations of ears, brains and eyes, as well as consciousness, etc. It's not an either-or matter but one of interactionism, a fundamentally non-dualistic process which is only describeable dualistically.

Oh, sure, and that's why I thought it was funny. My first impression of him was that he took sort of a mead./benedict-like perspective on the individual in culture, but reading about him as an anthropologist as opposed to a linguist, he has some ideas that you don't really talk about in linguistics in conjuction with the S-W hypothesis. As for perception and so forth, I agree that there has to be both an objective thing perceived and a more or less subjective way of perceiving it. I don't see how that process can be nondual though.