@JLNobody,
JLNobody wrote:
Regarding your principles:
I do not feel comfortable with philosophical SYSTEMS, since each part is so "logically/artificially dependent on all others--one fails and the entire pizza goes. I simply prefer ad hoc insights, or "glimpses" of reality. Contradiction is no problem since each intuitive insight stands by itself at particular moments.
Firstly, I do not care about what you "feel" about philosophical systems; I care about what you "know" about them.
Secondly, I sense that you really don't want to get your feet wet when it comes to systematizing. You argue, and correctly, that systems are apt to disintegration if, and when, an axiom, definition, or assumption is false or rejected. This is always true for deductive systems, but not always the case for dynamic systems. Depdends on the part in which that piece plays within the overall context of the system.
Now, I can sympathize with your aversion towards systematizing; but on the other hand I don't. Why? Because humans have to commit themselves to a certain set of beliefs and knowledge claims. We can't be constantly open to mere possibilities. In other words, we oftentimes need to stick our necks out.
And this whole "glimpse" of reality talk is nonsense. A human doing that wouldn't get very far. Even if "glimpses" of reality are relative to a place and time, they are not separate from the indivdual experiencing it, and we know that an indvidual always has a web of beliefs and knowledge claims that they are committed to. So, even if an isolated "glimpse" is non-contradictory, it doesn't matter. Why? Because contradictions arise when something is taken in conjunction with something else. That's what a contradiction is (~A&A). If this is the case, which it is, then you're mistaken about contradictions, and hence about "glimpses" of reality.
JLNobody wrote:
At the same time I do sense that Reality is unitary, the principle of holism--all is interdependent (a contradiction?). This pertains more to your notion of items in a dynamic FIELD than than it does to parts of a static SYSTEM.
I accept the principle of Revision in the sense that all ideas and "truths" are provisional--i.e., subject to change--because of the acquisition of new information and because the world is a field of changing processes.
I agree that (by definition) "systems" do not tolerate contradictions--that's their fundamental limitation--but Reality is the process of often contradicting processes.
Philosophy may be, as you say, more than therapeudic but it is at least that (same for art)
If you're a correlationist (being is inseparable from thought, thought is inseparable from being), then the last remark about reality is nonsense. Reality is the process of often contradicting what we think about those processes. Here we have a correlation between our experiences, systems, and reality, which are correlated.
Can you make an argument supporting the claim that philosophy is "at least" therapeudic?