Long ponderd about the virtues of the modern philosopher. Numerous science paths and professions has been founded since the ancient philosophers took the first step towards modern thinking and science.
What modern categories could we make up
Which outdated branches of philosophies should be axed
Mandatory virtues
I don’t think that this OP makes sense. You should look up the word ‘virtue’ in the dictionary.
he’s gonna need a lot more than a dictionary to get out of this mental mire.
Virtues of the Postmodern Philosopher:
What is good? Most philosophers talks aobut it, but it seems very illusive to nail it.
A philosophical virtue, in the Aristotelian sense of virtue, would be do philosophise excellently and nobly. How that is done is very much up to the one doing it. If metaphysics or existentialism is a consequence of that, so be it. Philosophy is about making sense of things and presenting clear ways of understanding them without misrepresentation. Thus, the virtuous philosopher – (post)modern or not – would be someone who made perfect sense of the inherently nonsensical. One who finds order in chaos not by imposing some order or other upon it, but by understanding and describing chaos on its own terms, by being true to its nature while still maintaining clarity. I.e., if chaos shows itself like this, it should also be described like this and not like that.
(The above does not necessarily imply phenomenology, even Heideggerian phenomenology, but it does help with certain questions. And, more directly apropos the OP, if for example existentialism is a failed attempt at the phenomenology of the human condition, good, then let’s see where Sartre went wrong. Maybe we can learn something. If metaphysics is outdated, why don’t we find out why before declaring it should be “axed”.)
All believers posit something, that’s the very act of believing.
Yes.
Yes. But I would also add: we must also learn to impose order, meaning, as well as to distill it naturally from the actual conditions themselves without distorting these. Ultimately this is because there is no order without “us” and so learning to both derive meaning without distortion AND impose meaning upon chaos “arbitrarily” leads us most authentically and truly back into ourselves. Philosophically speaking the coexistence of these two actions gives a better picture than either standing on its own.
Yes, and perhaps it is the old metaphysical constructions which have passed their usefulness. We might have care not to confuse the productions of metaphysics with metaphysics itself.
I disagree in the sense that often belief is only a parroting, a passive absorbion and re-transmission of a(unquestioned) given. Only one who questions is able to effectively posit anything.
True. Only we always already do that, that is why it is important to check one’s foreconceptions against the so conceived. Rather Aristotelian, speaking of him: we mustn’t go to extremes. But as always, you say exactly what I should have written. Uncanny …
Again, uncanny. Yes, you’re absolutely right, but then again – does that really imply belief? I’m not so sure. If indeed “belief” is a mental state, passive absorption and re-transmission would likely imply such a state, and thus be constitutive of belief, whereas mere parroting (I think) would not. For in the latter case it is mere mimicry repetition* – and arguably, an answering machine could easily do that. And I just don’t like functionalism.
By the way, trajicomic, I agree with you on metaphysics. Without the foundations, how do we fill in the blanks? We need this horizon. In fact, it’s always already there, we just have to elucidate it. But possibly hard core naturalists would disagree. Next question, dismissing metaphysics: does a world described wholly in scientific terms even make sense? I hardly think so. Even a grand, unifying theory would be inconsistent with reality. It could not make sense of everything, but only of that which is paradigmatically scientific concerns – i.e., that which is, in a sense, mechanizable.
I tend to have a very low view on belief, all too often I observe it functioning in others as simply a mechanism to prevent the need for thinking. When we question we examine, we create and conceive and destroy, we are ACTIVE, in other words. Where there is inactive belief, I see only stagnation and impotency. So we might distinguish active from inactive belief, parroting being a case of the latter. But certainly belief can be seen as a “mental state” regardless of its either active or passive status.
Actually I see it more as a relation, a possibility of consciousness along much the same lines as the Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body schema. Or, to state it differently: a general direction of the total neuronal transmissions of the brain, and possibly the whole body. Of course this concerns what you would call active belief. Passive belief, in the sense of parroting, would not even register unless it lead to some sort of variation of transmissions, such as active belief. Repetition, therefore, is not belief. Also, all mental states are, in the transmissional sense, active. But as much as I hate the expression, in this context, “mental state” is sufficiently clear and I think most wouldn’t have a problem with it.
Other than that, to paraphrase the virtue of positing belief: the (post-modern or otherwise) philosopher should be a thinker, positing the posited in new/different ways. Then we would do well to define ‘thinking’ as did Heidegger: “thinking is the struggle for insight in the essence of something”.
EDIT: This transmissional activity should also explain the being-in-the-world, etc., of the reader in a way that a staunch naturalist/scienceist [sic] could understand. It makes something sensitive to its environment, thus enworlding it.
You may dislike functionalism, but I have strong issue with reductivism that maps mental activity onto the behavior of “neurons”, or whatever. Repetition is not (active) belief not because repetition does not partake of a brain-transmission process of neuron activation or whatever but because repetition in itself refutes the very character of this belief, this being a character of both being active and being a creating which is also of course a seeking. Certainly we must make use of many repetitions in the course of our creative destructions, but repetition tends to participate in the manner of a passive “tool” in our “mental arsenal”. Anyway, there is a lot of implication here, the reason I being it up is that repetition/parroting can be seen as a defective form of thinking, or more accurately a regression to pre-thought in the sense that one small (relatively insignificant) part of the overall cognizing-conscious structure is mistaken for this structure itself. This such regression, to me, characterizes so called passive belief, what passes for belief and for thinking among most people, at least in my experience.
As regards so called active belief, what I find more interesting than the “believed” content/s is the activity itself. One does not need to believe what one knows, as the saying goes - and we do not need to subscribe to a sort of epistemological certainty to derive strong implications of meaning and utility from this.
Yes. This has the danger of being oversimplified or reduced to a more superficial level, of effacing the different sort of thinkings taking place in the (actively thinking-conceiving) mind, but I do not think this is a danger we share in, so I probably don’t even need to comment on it further.
Actually, the full account is not reductivist at all but I do see your point. And as per usual, we are not really in disagreement either … funny how that works. Anyway: it is not the neurons, nor the totality of the neural network/the brain/what have you, that matter even in this case, but the transmission (or rather, the cloudlike complexity thereof) as such – not just any transmission will do. Consider the Internet. A bad analogy, as will be seen, but bear with me as there is a point to the badness: tracing the signal from my computer via several servers to your screen would be easy enough, if one reduced it to just this signal by separating it from the noise of all other, simultaneous signals. If we can’t do that, it is lost in the cloud. Now, consider this: the infrastructure/transmissional whole of the Internet at any given moment is, presumably, comparatively simple next to a normal, living (human) brain perceiving its environment. The reason would be that the Internet is incommensurable to a human being, even if only its brain is considered: whereas the reader relates existentially to its world, or is enworlded, the Internet does not and is not. Neither can it ever do or be: it’s infrastructure consists of hardware and software (and, increasingly, cloud computing), but these are all cartesian. They are not in-the-world, they do not relate meaningfully to anything. Instead, they have only the ontological possibilities of things or tools – even if, increasingly, they are tools we cannot really handle because we do not understand the essence of technology. Instead, technology technologises our conception of ourselves. (Who am I telling, you’ve read Question concerning …)
Now, in principle cyborgs would be possible if there was a way to replicate Dasein or being-in-the-world technologically. Heideggerian AI, that is (approximately as explained by H.L. Dreyfus). But we can’t, and unless we actually understand technology authentically, we never will.*
So, no. My thesis is not reductivist after all, even by analytic standards. It’s too … well, I suppose “emergent”, without being emergentist. Rather, it’s in the face of scientism and naturalism (even if I suppose they could misconstrue it as a “natural kind”) as it must be analysed as a whole – a Gestalt, as it were. Moreover, consciousness is not just transmissions with cloudlike complexity. On its own, cloudlike complexity is something of an inference to the best explanation, or half an explanation. As “the cloud behind your eyes” is equiprimordial with existence, or rather: since it is an existential, it has to be considered under the aspect of the body schema to make any ontological sense at all.** And that, at least to me, is the next round of fundamental-ontological analysis as prepared in SZ.
Agreed. Or, at any rate, I haven’t anything to object (except perhaps to the notion of mental tools … I’ve always seen it as more of a “disposition”, if not reaction). In Gestalt terms repetition is reproductive thinking, i.e. inauthentic learning.
Same here. Content is accidental, ontic, and matters little.
Yeah, I know. I edited it while you were posting, I think.
* By this I mean that if we do not understand technology and how it relates to existentiality, and, of course, first understand existentiality as such, engineers wouldn’t even know where to start. Heideggerian AI would not just come about vastly advanced technology.
** Actually, that’s wrong. The cloud is an ontic-ontological consequence (realised possibility) of the existence and this revised version of the body schema, i.e. it is consciousness that is an existential under the aspect of existence. My mistake.
EDIT: asterisks/footnotes.
I think existentialism is one of the most important if not the most important historical school of philosophy, in terms of discerning the truth of man’s condition and being in the world. So I think axing it would be a tremendous mistake.
Most classical existentialism seems outdated, not really understanding psychology and neurology. If existentialism still should be relevant to the modern human, the genre needs modernisation.
I think all pre-21st century philosophy probably needs some modernization. I wouldn’t pick on the existentialists for that. But most of the important existentialist contributions really fall outside the scope of neurology. Which claims are you specifically thinking of?
To find ones true self, you may not become an olympic athlete just because you dream of it, you may not become a chess master, nor a famous rock star.
One may ask why is my body acting like this, why am i thinking like that, the answer may be found in how the hypofyse, cerebrelum, hypothalamus and frontal lopes are developed.
Some may say a person is no good, just because their values doesn’t fit the persons qualifications. By understanding neurology, one should know that some intelligences can work together, or independantly, that the 1 intellect doesn’t nessesarily have anything to do with the other.
Claims such as “objective truth” and “ones true self” just to name some random ones, objective truth doesn’t really exist, as people will at most times see the world through compulsions, and the true self are heavily influenced by group think, only very few dare to be eccentrics and do excatly what they like to do.
Self defeating argument, if truth isn’t objective then why should I believe you when you say it isn’t?
Truth isn’t objective, but falsehood is.
Or, maybe we can just dispense with the silly logic games altogether… no… ?
Again