I am 8 years old. Now name one philosopher for me, and tell me why (s)he is very important to our understanding. Let me give an example.
Here we have Socrates.
Long long ago people believed that you could explain how everything happened because you had this god or that god that made it that way for us. But Socrates went around the city constantly asking people about it, and he’d keep asking questions until he could tell them why they said something that doesn’t fit with what they said before. A lot of people followed the ideas of Socrates, and they wanted to explain things just by figuring out what doesn’t go against what they said before. They had to find more reasons than a god making it that way for us. After that, we started building lots of smarter things and explaining things better. Another guy named Plato learned from him, and Plato taught a man named Aristotle. Aristotle learned about things like the parts in an animal and what they were for. It helped us fix them if they were injured. That’s why Socrates made a big difference.
(I’m hoping I have this at least slightly accurate).
Why don’t you decide for yourself what is valuable? In the end do you really want other peoples opinions, what is the purpose of you asking others what you can teach yourself? You already show that you have an inquisitive mind and that already shows are quite capable. Many things that seem hard to understand can only be understood by experience (having a frame of reference), the older I’ve gotten, the more you realize you don’t know. Realize that knowledge is infinite and life is short. Decide what you want to know and what you want to value and pursue it.
Socrates has lead the way already, in fact check out the wikipedia artcle and see what we know about him and ask yourself if you agree or disagree. All you need to do is follow the logic, what philosophers do really is explore informational geometry, and look for congruence between statements whether they be statements on nature or of some other variety.
Well, young lady (I’m assuming the 8 year old is a girl)… There was once this very smart man named Arthur Schopenhauer - and no I don’t know how to spell that - who told everyone that they shouldn’t read what everyone else has to say about philosophy. Instead, everyone should see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the world for themselves to best figure out what it’s all about.
What else did he do, you ask?
He spent a lot of time reading and writing about a guy named Kant.
Dr. Seuss is the gateway Philospher for kids. If you can understand why Horton needed to protect the Whos and why the Cat in the Hat was not a real friend but, a bully and a materialist user, then you can begin to understand how to think for yourself and make decisions based upon how you want the people around you to think about you. Dr. Seuss Not only teaches you to think in abstract thoughts he teaches you to understand who you really are. So go read all the Dr. Seuss you can, understand the multiple meanings behind each story, then you will be ready for Socrates. For Dr. Seuss used child versions of Socrates , plus Nieztche plus a few other’s philosophies to help his storylines.
Thanks, Philipus, for the perfect example of what I’m looking for. And now I know to point to Schopenhauer when I explain why I don’t think reading lots of philosophers makes you a good one.
Thanks, Kriswest, as I’d never considered Dr. Seuss for a role in philosophy and now do.\
Thanks, Xunzian, but I’m lost. I took your quote here. Please don’t cut my bed.
Superculture, thanks for the comment and points taken.
Nietzsche on morality:
(not quite answering the question, I know, but fun anyway)
‘A long time ago a few wise men came up with some strange rules that they thought everyone should follow. They thought that if you didn’t follow these rules, you were a bad person. But it turned out that these rules were silly. That’s why good people don’t follow them any more.’
‘Nietzsche wrote a lot of books explaining how and why everyone else was wrong. His best book sounds like the Bible but is much better. He was a German but he hated other Germans - he thought they were all stupid. On the other hand, he thought the ancient Greeks and Romans were really cool.’
Nietzsche wasn’t German, he was Polish, although he grew up in Germany society.
Nietzsche didn’t hate Germans, although he criticized some German philosophers. When he wrote “What the Germans Lack”, he was “constructively criticizing Germans” not just throwing inane insults at them.
Buddha: Relax. You’ll be happier and more effective in the world. See the good in people. Don’t be so opinionated. Relax. You won’t disappear in the process. You may discover a source of energy and inspiration and compassion and wisdom and all kinds of other things to be treasured. It’s quite natural.
For thousands of years, people took language and words very seriously. So seriously, that they argued about them all day long. They thought that if they could understand language, they could understand everything else too. Then a man named Ludwig Wittgenstein told everyone that words are not so important. He said that language was a kind of a game we play all the time, like tag or go fish, just much more complicated.
It is a curt version of a children’s story where Mencius’s mother moved to be nearer to a very good school so Mencius could get a good education. After a while, Mencius decided he had learned enough and grew sick of school. He wanted to wander off and play with the other boys/get a job/insert-questionable-activity-you-want-the-listener-to-stop-doing-here. So, his mother grabbed a kitchen knife and cut his bed (a silk hammock) in half and said that a half-completed education/task is as useful as half a bed (that is to say, not at all).
helped us understand how complex ‘design’ could come about by blind forces, or any force at all natural selection.
“Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring… I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man’s power of selection” - darwin
Recently I read David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind, which was quite enjoyable. So, according to him…
Hello, I’m David! Do you have thoughts and feelings? Of course you do! These are your mental experiences. But it’s not easy to explain how such experiences can happen. I called this “the hard problem of consciousness”, and believe me, it’s harder even than your long division homework. Some people think this problem is solved by “physicalism”, the idea that your mind’s experiences are really just your brain working, so that to know how the brain works is to understand the mind. But this idea isn’t true, because it’s like saying that knowing how to read a story is the same thing as understanding the story. Silly, huh?
Anyway, my better idea is called “naturalistic dualism”, which means your mind is in fact different from your brain. I believe that the world consists of both physical stuff like the brain, as well as mental stuff like the mind, and neither can be totally explained by the other. In the same way that the brain is made up of more basic things like cells, the mind is made up of more basic types of mental features. And the simplest of these mental features are a fundamental part of the world, like space-time, mass-energy, and ice-cream.
Thank you, I learned that as a kid while being made to read Richard Bach, Socrates and Dr. Seuss and then relearned it around 2 decades later when I picked him up again in order to read to our infant son. It was kind of a wierd flash back. poor kid got an unfathomable lecture instead of enjoying the story
And now I know to point to Schopenhauer when I explain why I don’t think reading lots of philosophers makes you a good one.
Please don’t cut my bed.