Which is First?

‘Being’ that ontology’s definition is…

Ontology (from the Greek ὄν, genitive ὄντος: “of that which is”, and -λογία, -logia: science, study, theory) is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.

that says and includes all of the others in a nutshell…ontology goes first.
Aside from which, without “Being” itself…nothing comes after.

By most accounts of ‘knowing’ we don’t know. We rise up in our culture and also with the gestalts our senses make. We have a kind of realism and then we either start examining that, noticing exceptions, noticing contradictions, exploring, etc., and this base changes.

We find ourselves with some given philosophy or really philosophies - some partially contradictory set of beliefs and move from there.

I still think the question: why should we know? comes before that one. I had a discussion with Ucci a while back and his basic position was that it all comes back down to values. We could count all the grains of sand in the Sahara, but what does such an approach accomplish?

But doesn’t what is it to know come prior to why? Defining what it is to question come before the question? If we ask why should we value questioning, this would lead to what does it mean to value questioning, no?

Epistemology gets my vote.

Ethics, for almost the same reasons Xunzian has already enumerated. I’m not so much concerned with notions of the Good, as I am with how one ought to live – that is, why one ought to pursue knowledge, if one is to pursue it at all. However, my ideal First would be an encompassing of most of the approaches: an onto-ethico-phenomenological epistemology. Ideally.

Based on my experience, i know that is cheating.

You’re right. Of course, my ethic does not prohibit cheating.

Of these five, logic seems to be the one enabling the most general statements.

I do not really understand the difference between epistemology, ontology and phenomenology. Knowledge is knowledge of what is; What is said to be is what is known; Both are dependent on our conception of phenomena as reality. There seems to be no real difference between the three.

Ethics is the only one on the list with a clearly outlined purpose, it aims to improve life. But I happen to think that a good ethics relies on logic, or at least that any “god-given” realizations or spontaneously arising values have to be justified by a logical drawing of consequences in order to be an ethics in the philosophical sense.

For me then ethics is the most important, but it relies on logic, so logic would be the first philosophy. This unfortunately places me in the same corner as Bertrand Russell.

But of course there has always been room for illogical philosophies, or pre-logical philosophies that describe phenomena without logical analysis and/or without any strict logic to tie together any subject matter.

Unfortunately the problem of induction plagues philosophy, assuming realms of ontology that aren’t yet part of our knowledge - and this has been taken a step further on the introduction of areas of existence that can never be subject to epistemology. Herein lies the birth of faith in the unworldly etc.

Logic and phenomenology can save us from this - but only if one has ears for it.

I would regard it as perverse to cover any or all of these 5 areas of philosophy for the sake of refining logic for logic’s sake as an end point, or for the sake of studying being, knowing or how we experience as one’s end point. I think ethics is quite clearly the “last” of the 5 - and one would be remissed to neglect any of the other 4 in arriving at ethical conclusions. As such, solid, consistent ethics would rely on logic - though also the study of what the “raw materials” were that logic must be applied to, how you can go about experiencing these things, and how that translates into knowledge.


But then it might be questions of ethics that lead you through all these areas to finally arrive at a more complete ethics.
Logic needs application, requiring the other areas to precede it, but then one can only do the other areas justice by using logic.
Ontology is dependent on phenomenology, but phenomenology can only apply to “what is”.
And to say anything at all about anything, one has to have knowledge of it.

Basically this thread is a wild goose chase.

It posits a false question that presupposes there is an order at all.
Quite clearly they are all interlinked and interdependent.

Wouldn’t we however have no way of answering the question ‘why should we know’ if we do not know ‘how do we know’? How do we know what we should know? It seems like most people came up with an implicit epistemology - often ‘the gods tell some people and knowledge comes from listening to them’ - before the why should we know which these experts answered. Though some it seems said that we shouldn’t know a lot of stuff.

Thats pretty much valid except that logic needed to be put first beforehand so as to be able to speak about Ethics. Socrates never advocated poetry or free association, he seems, with Pato, to have abhorred all mytserion.

This is essentially what he did, Plato - take away the occult politics of Athens and replace it with universalism - a focus on logic that would be exacerbated under Aristotle, who caused the axiomatization of metaphysical identities.

Logic/epistemology, which is the study of reasoning, is the most fundamental philosophy.
Betrand Russell sounds like a really cool guy.
I think that these Anglo-Saxon philosophers are underrated by their continental friends.

Thanks for recycling this thread, I’m really pleased with my original reply. However, I don’t think I could understand the implications thereof as well as I can now. Before philosophy arises, epistemology’s basic question has already been answered, though not necessarily with the right, correct, true answer. There is already a kind of knowledge, something that is considered knowledge: common sense. Logic (the study) is really the analysis and purification of common sense. It seeks to establish the principles of what makes sense to us: to us, plural, because the logos is the word, and the word is common, communal.

As for phenomenology:

“When I was still almost a boy, Husserl explained to me who was at that time a doubting and dubious adherent of the Marlburg school of neo-Kantianism, the characteristic of his own work in about these terms: ‘the Marburg school begins with the roof, while I begin with the foundation.’ This meant that for the school of Marburg the sole task of the fundamental part of philosophy was the theory of scientific experience, the analysis of scientific thought. Husserl however had realized more profoundly than anybody else that the scientific understanding of the world, far from being the perfection of our natural understanding, is derivative from the latter in such as way as to make us oblivious of the very foundations of the scientific understanding: all philosophic understanding must start from our common understanding of the world, from our understanding of the world as sensibly perceived prior to all theorizing.” (Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy”.)

Note that the theory of relativity renders the notion that the sun turns around the earth equally valid to the notion that the earth turns around the sun.

There is much, much more here, but I’ll leave it at this, for now. I think our projected debate on whether Value Ontology is a mystification should probably start from these considerations. Heidegger said something like, those who disregard the Nothing thereby annihilate Being (as they do not contrast Being with the Nothing). Strauss said:

“[Kojève and I] both apparently turned away from Being to Tyranny because we have seen that those who lacked the courage to face the issue of Tyranny, who therefore et humiliter serviebant et superbe dominabantur [“themselves obsequiously subservient while arrogantly lording it over others”] were forced to evade the issue of Being as well, precisely because they did nothing but talk of Being.” (“Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero”, restored final sentence.)

Compare:

“I think Strauss’s preoccupation with the problem of Socrates [who preceded the codification of scientific language by Aristotle] in his later years reflects the conviction that the reconstruction of classical political philosophy requires a reliance upon the moral distinctions as the key to the metaphysical distinctions. Political philosophy–meaning thereby first of all moral philosophy–must become the key to philosophy itself. We have access to theoretical wisdom only by taking the moral distinctions with full seriousness. This is very clear in Strauss’ marvelous eulogy of Churchill:
‘We have no higher duty, and no more pressing duty than to remind ourselves and our students, of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence. For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness…’
‘Seeing things as they are’ refers to the being of things, their metaphysical reality. Yet that being is seen as goodness (‘The Primacy of the Good’). The spectacle of political greatness, human greatness becomes then the ground of philosophy itself, because the philosopher himself looks to this spectacle to contemplate the being of things which become manifest in the spectacle. The great statesman thus brings to light the distinctions which are the ground of theoretical as well as practical philosophy. In Strauss, the moral distinctions become the heart of philosophy. And statesmanship thus itself becomes part of philosophic activity, seen in its wholeness. This is Strauss’s answer to Heidegger as well (as Churchill was the answer to Hitler)–in whom political philosophy finally disappears. If then we see in Heidegger the death of political philosophy (and the death of God, for they are one and the same), in Strauss we may see their resurrection!” (Harry Jaffa, Letter to Professor S.B. Drury, Political Theory, 15 (August, 1987) p. 324, as quoted in Harry Neumann, Liberalism, Introduction.)

I would put ethics first, it is philosophy after all, love of wisdom, wisdom = ethics/axiology.
I guess the other fields got lumped in with ethics/axiology because they’re equally abstract, as opposed to the natural and to a lesser extent social sciences, which’re more concrete, with the exception of psychology perhaps, which’s equally abstract.
Values, and how to attain what we value, is really the most important question, by definition.
What we should be studying is what has value and value itself, everything else is secondary, or instrumental.

2017

In 2017 - and beyond - I vote for ethics . . .

=D>

I go for logic myself. Logic is the very skill of thinking. With that, all other branches of philosophy become a breeze.

Ethics is about how to live. Logic is about how to think.
But living comes before thinking.

But how does one know how to live?

By thinking.

:laughing: