Which is First?

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:

And what does thought require? (drum roll please :smiley: )

Living . . .

?

Possibly?

:-k

Laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_thought

Do the laws work when you are dead?

#-o

People, people… I was going for logic.

Why don’t we say this: the most important branch of philosophy is ethics (by definition). But the first philosophy is logic. It’s like if you want to cure cancer. What do you study first: advanced medicine or grade school mathematics?

I was getting confused . . .

:laughing:

Kidding . . . I knew what you were going for that is why I returned to living.

Teach you Yoda-speak. I will . . . OOYL . . . Only Once You Live . . . Logic first, must study you . . . OOYL . . .

I was basically saying logic. The laws of thought are the axioms of logic.

Medicine is more different from ethics than mathematics is from logic. And who’s telling you you have to go to grade school? The Law. Ethics.

But ethics and Ethics are not the same. The study of ethics is not required to have ethics. Same for Logic and logic.

Yoda speak is awesome for writing poetry. Try writing any poem. Even if you think you suck, write a poem, and then switch it to Yoda speak… it will sound ten times better.

Ah, I thought you meant legal laws–like we have to bring in the thought police. But yes, laws of logic is what I was getting at.

I think you’re focusing more on the analogy than the point. I’m just saying one has to learn to think properly before thinking of anything important.

I agree with your point about the difference between ethics vs. Ethics, and logic vs. Logic, but the question the OP is asking is: what is first philosophy?

But can one learn to think properly without thinking about anything important?

Right. But philosophy, or thinking, can exist before thinking about thinking (Logic). The latter is only of instrumental, albeit indispensable, importance. What will cause philosophy to arise is the mystery surrounding the most important things. And you’ve affirmed that Ethics is the most important branch of philosophy. Even Aristotle’s (as distinct from Socrates’ and Plato’s) “first philosophy”, Metaphysics, followed from that:

“Philosophy is the quest for the ‘principles’ of all things, and this means primarily the quest for the ‘beginnings’ of all things or for ‘the first things.’ […] Prephilosophic life is characterized by the primeval identification of the good with the ancestral. Therefore, the right way [or custom: ethos] necessarily implies thoughts about the ancestors and hence about the first things simply.” (Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp. 82-83.)

Absolutely not. Of course.
Its just like with any other skill. The more seriously you take it, the better you’ll be able to get at it.

A lot of people think without weight, without putting themselves on the line.
But world-shaping thought is very risky for the thinker.

Lightweights like Gib (sorry man, you are the archetypical lightweight) do not know what it means to think. But very, very few people do. Perhaps on this site it is truly only we, the Pentad members, that understand what thinking is.