“How is a man that went mad a good philosopher? A good example to follow?”
Why does Truth have to be fun and agreeable? What if the Truth is that everything sux?
Dragging this ol’ nugget into yet another thread? Prove it. You must have some quote of his where he claimed that.
Lol, that’s what cognitively biased atheists do, FJ. Haven’t you learned that yet? Then you must be psychotic.
I struggled with the Critique for a long time before I read Schopenhauer and was able to put it in context. Another tough one was Being and Time by Martin Heidegger which took me years to get through.
Why Schopenhauer and not Hume or Descartes or anyone else? What concept was missing?
It’s not a matter of either or. Those guys are important too. The others either build on or react to the preceding ones or some combination there of. Another one who I think is important is Berkeley whose radical empiricism precedes the phenomenologists. But, in philosophy your path is your own. We don’t all start with the same presuppositions so its not going to unfold for us the same way.
Hold on a second… Schopenhauer was writing after Kant. So he was reacting to Kant. And that helped you understand Kant. Haha
Actually, he accepts Kant’s epistemology and places it in his own metaphysical context.
I might go straight to the Critique, and see how lost I get.
I’m familiar with Berkeley’s Three Dialogues and Descartes’ Meditations. But not Hume’s Treatise.
I would suggest you to study them chronologically.
The most intricate parts can be easily understood with the help of Wikipedia or AI.
One leads to another, generally what a new “big name” in philosophy tries to do is to pick up where the other left off. In order to make things easier, concentrate solely on the really essential names- Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc.
I’m not sure doing it exactly chronologically suits me. I like to stay on a particular topic exploring particular questions. I’ve read a few books about the history of philosophy too, so I have some superficial familiarity with basically all the big names.
But yeah, let’s use Wikipedia, YouTube, even AI. If we’ve got it why not.
I cannot, nor anybody else, ‘enter’ somebody else’s brain and do their thinking for them. They have to do it themselves. Doubt is a deeply personal matter, representing peoples’ innate and automatic Fears. It is a psychological process to doubt beliefs that one grows up on. In a sense, it is a betrayal, against your parents, your teachers, your peers, your friends, your entire society.
If you ‘Doubt’ your society’s institutions, then you are being treasonous, traitorous.
If a person cannot accept other peoples’ or other subjects’ realities, then they are Solipsistic, stuck in their own mind, “autistic”.
Denying other peoples’ reality is the same as denying that anybody else has merit to Truth-claims.
I agree with you (well, I wouldn’t call it autistic, but it’s definitely solipsistic).
But I’m not sure you really answered the question.
If someone comes to you and says, “I doubt you have a mind, how can you show me that I should believe you do”, what can you say to them?
This scenario does come up sometimes in philosophy circles. Some poor soul will be convinced by solipsism and try to get people to talk them out of it. Only problem is, almost nobody knows how to.
I’d demand they define “mind” in their own words. They likely would define it as Solipsistic. If that were the case, not much could be done to “convince” them that I have a mind. It largely depends on how ‘open-minded’ somebody is about other peoples’ Reality. You have to be willing to listen, and accept, a foreign “Reality” from the start. If you’re not, then you won’t be convinced.
Then it would be futile to try to “convince”, no matter how reasonable, a Solipsist of the existence of “other realities” or “other minds”.
I believe some mindsets cannot be logically or rationally “argued out of”. It’s like this forum’s schizophrenic user. You cannot “reason” to him his schizophrenia. Nobody can “reason” their way out of schizophrenia and many other mental illnesses. They are “beyond logic”, in a way.
Rationality has limits.
Well… My worry with this is, if you cannot really answer the skeptic, then on what grounds can you yourself say that you know there are other minds? Do you know simply because you define “mind” in a certain way, and you make a choice to listen to others? I would like to have more solid epistemological grounds than that.
Kant has an answer to this and it might be a good one. It will just take me a little while to understand Kant’s worldview.
I do not require the level of certainty you imply here. I believe other people have minds, because of how they act, because of what they say, because of their comparisons to me, because of the ‘Human’ specie, because IQ and intelligence exists, etc. But I cannot “know” it, in the way that I know myself, my own body, my own mind. Thus, it is a matter of Faith, a leap of faith.
Inevitably we have to presume that other minds (and realities) exist. Again, logic and rationality only go so far. In this case, I can only presume that another “mind” thinks, acts, and operates logic in similar or the same fashion as my mind. Therefore, I believe intelligence is the best evidence and “proof” (NOT certainty though) we all have for the existence of other minds and realities.
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When I first got into philosophy, as a teenager, I did exactly Descartes’ method of “hyperbolic doubt”. If I could doubt something, I threw it away. This led to solipsism pretty fast. It also led to madness when I questioned the meaning of language itself.
A priori truths, which are built on self-evident logical axioms, and truths that directly describe our sense experience, are the most certain things we have. I accept a foundationalist view in epistemology, which says that everything we know is built on a foundation of these basic truths.
Which means according to my understanding of epistemology, it should be possible to build a coherent worldview where every reason is supported by a chain of reasons that goes all the way down to the principles of knowledge, experience, and what is self-evident.
But ultimately I agree, knowledge of other minds must be built on some kind of analogy with ourselves.
Philosophers seem to have a consensus that being conscious has something to do with having a nervous system. It is very unpopular for a philosopher to say plants are conscious, and panpsychism is also very unpopular.
The best argument I can come up with would go like this:
I am certain of my own existence, because of my conscious awareness and experience.
My conscious awareness and experience is the product of my mind / brain / nervous system.
Other animals, especially humans, have similar or the same brain type.
Therefore other animals, especially humans, have similar consciousness and experience.
However, as you outline in your OP and this thread, everybody has varying level of ‘Certainity’, doubt, and logical scrutiny. Perhaps that is never equal. Perhaps it is “never enough”. That is an epistemological and existential challenge of life, and demonstrates the need for Philosophy.
This is a good argument that anyone with common sense should probably accept. But the extreme skeptic is not compelled to accept it with the force of a logical proof. They can ask questions like “What is this “I”? Maybe there is no “I”.”
Or “How do we know we have a brain? Just because we have sense-data of a brain doesn’t mean there really is one. I’ve never even seen my own brain.”
And “What is an animal anyway? Isn’t that just a category scientists made up? What if there are no ‘animals’”?
My philosophical project is to eventually have some kind of consistent answer to all of these questions.
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I’m taking a structuralist approach that assumes we can understand the world through understanding relationships between concepts and objects in the world. I’m not entirely sure how you can coherently do otherwise. I don’t understand post-structuralism right now, it’s over my head and I don’t have the education level for it. I will have to study other thinkers like Kant and Nietzsche before I can comprehend Foucault.
As far as making assumptions, I am trying really hard not to do that unless I have reasons to do so. That’s exactly why I’m not taking the anthropological and biological context approach. Not until I’ve AT LEAST done some philosophy of science.