It's a philosopher's job to tell people how to live

Re: It's a philosopher's job to tell people how to live


"you" know all this? please do the rest of "us" a favor & pass along this knowledge to us.

That's outrageous.

It is no more a philosopher's job to tell people anything about life than it is a priest's or a carpenter.

That philosopher sounds full of herself.

Re: It's a philosopher's job to tell people how to live


Is it the people's job to listen? This seems at odds with the aspects of "Critical Thinking" you enumerated a few posts ago...



...unless, of course, you believe (as I would hope you do) that even philosophers should be held to the same standards of criticism as anyone else, in which case the Philosopher doesn't really hold any more of an exalted position than anyone else.

Re: It's a philosopher's job to tell people how to live


I am constantly trying to destroy ignorance, one post at a time.

Shapless

As Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living". The philosopher who examines life might be expected to know more about life than the rest of us and s/he would be selfish not to share that knowledge.

Re: It's a philosopher's job to tell people how to live


great, let's start with "how the mind works." there are quite a few people at a2k, not to mention the world at large, whose thought processes are inscrutable to me.

yitwail says--"great, let's start with "how the mind works."

I will give you my idea about such matters. This is just the begining I can go on for many more if you wish because cognitive science is a winner, in my opinion.


We have in our Western philosophy a traditional theory of faculty psychology wherein our reasoning is a faculty completely separate from the body. "Reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement." It is this capacity of autonomous reason that makes us different in kind from all other animals. I suspect that many fundamental aspects of philosophy and psychology are focused upon declaring, whenever possible, the separateness of our species from all other animals.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy and psychology regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

"These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting [for traditional thinking] in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real."

All living creatures categorize. All creatures, as a minimum, separate eat from no eat and friend from foe. As neural creatures tadpole and wo/man categorize. There are trillions of synaptic connections taking place in the least sophisticated of creatures and this multiple synapses must be organized in some way to facilitate passage through a small number of interconnections and thus categorization takes place. Great numbers of different synapses take place in an experience and these are subsumed in some fashion to provide the category eat or foe perhaps.

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

Quotes from "Philosophy in the Flesh".

P.S If we take a big bite out of reality we will, I think, find that it is multilayered like the onion. There are many domains of knowledge available to us for penetrating those layers of reality. Cognitive science is one that I find to be very interesting.

I guess my response to her would have been

"oh yeah? huh."

Why is it so important to distinguish ourselves from other animals?




Have you seen fresco's thread called non-locality. Can't remeber if I saw you in there..

If not, check it out, he posted a really cool link to an article that I think you might find interesting.

My question was more about us than about the philosopher. I'm curious how you reconcile "Critical Thinking" with receiving the widsom of the ancients. Your summary of Critical Thinking suggests that we not accept things blindly--that much I agree with--but this post suggests that we can trust philosophers to tell us how to lead our lives. Is it consistent with Critical Thinking to answer a question by saying, as you did here, "Because Socrates said so"?

coberst, hope you don't mind my editing your comments to include only the parts i want to comment on. by the way, i'm also impressed by cognitive science in general, and evolutionary psychology in particular.



i'd like an explanation, or at least an example, of the metaphorical character of a particular abstract concept.



"some way" and "some fashion" sounds a bit too tentative to support a claim of "knowledge" of how the mind works. a promising theory might be a more apt description.

Shapless

Why place confidence in the conclusions of philosophers? As a general situation I would expect that a philosopher has better judgment about such matters as philosophy deals with than does a baker. However, if I was interested in buying bread I would be inclined to trust the baker. I think good judgment, which is what CT is about, dictates that I take into consideration all the facts available.

A Purposeful Life Is A Journey Metaphor
A purposeful life is a journey.
A person living a life is a traveler.
Life goals are destinations
A life plan is an itinerary.

If two philosophers have opposite views on a subject, and the baker agrees with one of them, how does it follow that the philosopher's judgement on the matter is s?uperior to the baker's

flyboy wrote:


Good question.

What determines the success of a philosopher?

Is it the truth of his words?
Or how many people believe in him?

I suspect it's the latter, and it will be decided by how much "coherency" he can sustain in explaining his view.

A philosopher is no better suited to understand the world than a baker or a florist. He may be better at talking about it, because he's trained his vocabulary, but does that have anything to do with philosophy?

Well, of course it depends on the baker. Basically I have confidence in learning over ignorance any time. If the baker is learned in philosophy then I might give her thought some weight.

It depends on what is being learned, of course, and how it is applied--in short, it depends on how ideas are put into practice. You seem not to be concerned with specificity, Coberst.

For a compelling demonstration of what can happen when life is considered a philosophical endeavor, I recommend reading Mark Lilla's The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics and, afterward, asking yourself if you would trust these philosophers to tell you how to live your life.

coberst wrote:


That's just it. When I started studying it I discovered that it was really nothing more than putting great names to things that were already familiar to me. I am a philosopher, because I love to ponder the riddles that we know commonly as metaphysics.

It is similar to something this also: I started playing music when I was three years old. To this day, 24 years later, I still haven't learned to write music; I am what you might call a musical analphabet. Still I am seen as a good player in my local community. The only thing is that I am not able to communicate music through anything but the actual experience. I cannot write it down to clarify it for those who do not posess the knowledge to understand the experience.

This I claim holds true for philosophy as well. The sole difference between those who proclaim themselves philosophers and then proceed to analyze the world through their experience, and those who just experience it, is that the former has accuired the skill to convey something without the actual experience of it.

Every time I meet a student of philosophy (myself, I didn't endure the full course), I ask him if he thinks he will be a philosopher when he is done with his studies.
Most of them answer yes to this question.
Wich is, of course ridiculous.
They will be historians with an emphasis on ideas through history. Their capacity for critical thought is not honed.
Thing is that we are philosophers by virtue of wanting to know the answers, not by virtue of knowing them.