Contemporary Philosophy Studies:

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1

I’m always a little hesitant going into these studies because I’m afraid that they’ll fail to yield: that what I’m reading at the time, due to difficulty of the concepts, won’t give me enough to use in order to keep the discourse going. That is especially true with this one. The primary point of this is to create discourses over recent philosophical journals, videos, and podcasts. But what makes this exceptionally intimidating is that I’m starting with the Harvard Review of Philosophy (volume 18) which is taking me into a lot of unfamiliar territory –especially the analytic aspects of it. So if I seem to be fumbling around here, it would only be because I am.

On the upswing of it, though, is that I’m seeing a lot of issues come up that I don’t normally see on these boards.

One of the most significant, at this point, is brought up in Galen Strawson’s “We Live Beyond any Tale We Happen to Enact” in which she brings up the issue of Narrative and the extent to which it is necessary to identity. Her stand, which is pretty clear, is that it isn’t. However, before she makes that point, she does a survey of the different stances in favor of the position.

She starts with the Psychological Narrativity thesis in which it is argued that it is natural for humans to conceive their existence in terms of Narrative. It’s just how we are.

The Narrative Self Constitution thesis argues that it is through this process that we constitute our selves. Now one would assume that one must automatically follow the other. But they don’t. There is no reason to believe that because we naturally conceive our existence in terms of narrative, we automatically do so in order to constitute our selves.

This is the descriptive aspect of it.

The normative aspect starts with The Ethical Narrative thesis that proposes one OUGHT to have a Narrative outlook on life. This would be the kind of thing we might find in a self help book. But I’m sure it takes on more sophisticated forms.

And, finally, we turn to the Ethical Self Constitution Thesis which argues that one’s sense of self or identity OUGHT to be constituted through Narrative. This is the domain of many aspects of psychology and therapy.
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Now to anyone that does happen to read this, I realize this will seem a little uncomfortable (like slipping into wet clothes). I know it is for me. But relax. As I found out from my Deleuze study, sometimes you just have to let it flow through you, not worry about what the author actually means, and start from what you think they do. Even a misunderstanding can produce useful results.
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My intuitive response to Strawson’s anti-narrative stance is that such could lead to a fragmented nihilism: a kind postmodern one if you will. In fact, she quotes Bob Dylan as one who seemed to work without a narrative. And to that, I would respond with Cate Blanchet’s portrayal of him in the movie I’m Not There .

2

As anyone who has seen a rock concert knows:

A true rockstar is willing to dance by themselves in their own little world

-even when in front of an audience.

3

Deleuze tells us that philosophy abhors conversation(

runs from it even:

It has better things to do.

4

Once again:

I’m drawn to French concepts

while being equally drawn to the American form of exposition:

I want to twist the mind

while being very clear about what I’m doing.

I could give a shit about Truth.

5

I have not read these books, but it seems to me that you are talking about mental behavior. Identity and narration are mental behaviors. They are like personalities. They are structures. They are a type of machine.

Now, in religion it is common to have a problem-solution set forth.
Christians call it sins and mortality, Buddhists call it suffering and unskillful thinking.
Next we come to the solution : Submission to a moral ideal, or self control and insight within a certain paradigm.

I think it’s more helpful, once you can do it, to think about it all as a process. A real natural process. This way you can start to understand nature, instead of seeing it as right and wrong, proper and improper behavior of the self. We are nature, and nothing else. We have some choice, some control, but that is simply one of our natures. Now we must use the one nature to try to control and benifite from all the other natures. This is the conflicting wills to power.

You must choose, nature or religion. The two don’t co-exist.

6

Yeah. It seems to me, Dan, that religious belief could involve narrative. In fact, it might be narrative that fixes an individual into a choice to be religious.

But some of the stuff I’m getting out this study is interesting, even if it is a little uncomfortable since they’re not subjects we tend to deal with on the board. We’ll have to settle for fumbling around with them until we get our bearings.

And don’t worry about not reading the magazine. My poetic flights aside, the main point is that I’m reading it. Therefore, it’s up to me to provide the information I’m getting. All anyone else has to do is respond in whatever manner they’re comfortable with to whatever they happen to relate to. All that matters is that a discourse is generated.

And thanks for contributing to that, Dan.

7

Been mainly working to familiarize myself with Strawson’s essay. And I’m starting to realize that their main issue with narrative is the confinement it poses. In a way, it may be the same issue that postmodernism has with grand narratives. As the title says:

We live beyond any tale we happen to enact.

This, if you think about it, implies that any story we might tell about ourselves will, by nature, be incomplete. And given the discovery of post-structuralism, that there is something about reality that transcends the language we describe it, there is equally every reason to believe that the language we use to define why we are who we are, and the story we use to justify it, will always be incomplete.

Furthermore, to bring in issues brought up by Deleuze and Guattarri, such narratives will be vulnerable to certain transcendents: Truth, God, Reason, The Scientific Method, whatever higher principle one may find one’s self bowing to. The story may inherently be one of how the individual wandered away from and wandered back to the already established higher principle.

We might approach Narrative as an issue of framing.

Another article we should approach is David W. Shoemaker’s article, “Responsibility Without Identity”. He starts by making the distinction between platitude, or the notion that one can only be responsible for one’s own actions (must be attributable), then points out that it is popularly believed that platitude must entail slogan: the notion that moral responsibility entails that the person responsible must be the same person (psychically that is: accountability) that committed the act.

He then goes on to point out 3 manners in which this sense of continuity have been approached: The psychological approach in which our continuity as minds is cited, the biological in which our continuity as physical bodies is cited, and the narrative (Strawson?) in which our sense of having a continuing story. Shoemaker then goes on to offer what Dennett called “intuition pumps” to discredit all 3. And given the limited window I have here, I will offer only the most prominent:

The Psychological Criterion

For this he offers drunken Mel who is busted drunk-driving and recorded making anti-Semitic remarks. He remembers nothing of it in the morning. Now here we hold him attributable since it was him who made those remarks. But can we hold him accountable since sober Mel is a quite different person than drunken Mel?

The Biological Criterion

Say one robs a bank then has the cerebellum and memories of doing so implanted into another body that lacked a cerebellum. Now would that body and base of the brain still be responsible even though it had the memories of robbing a bank and even had the desire to spend the money even though the perceiving thing, that which emerges out of nothing into something is perfectly innocent?

The Narrative Criterion

Say one develops a tumor in the brain that acts by slowly changing one’s behavior. Say at the peak of that process, one engages in acts that are odious. Then the tumor miraculously begins to disappear and one begins to act normal again. Now given that there was a narrative involved, does that actually mean that the normal person was actually accountable for the acts engaged in when the tumor was at its peak?

Anyway, this was just a brief sketch within the window I had. I will try to get into more of it as I go along.

8

[size=120]How can a Will, be free when it will’s what it needs, and it needs what it lacks, and it lacks what it does not posses?
If we replace the word “free” with independent, then how is an independent-depedence possible, or how does it manifest itself?

Show us an example of an action not founded on a need.
How is your conception different from the Judeo-Christian notion of a God that Creates, just for the fuck of it, and does not need to Create, for this would contradict His essence, as it is defined by the very morons who propose it.[/size]

9

[size=150]“Truth is, there is no truth”…“There is absolutely no absolute”.

All that is left is the mockery.
Jew-Christians have this happy, animosity about them.
They scorn with such delight.

Trapped in linguistics, we are.
Danny, has had contact with something…with someone.
Is not language an art-form?
Does it not paint images, trying to refer to the sensual…and does it not take itself literally?
Such infantile minds, being seduced by the cleanliness of the paints on the canvas; preferring them to the real deal.
And how easy it is to scrap the picture and begin again.

[/size]

10

Actually kind of glad you’re joining in on the discourse, Lyssa. You always seem to have something to say about anything –which does generate energy- even if it doesn’t always warrant agreement.

I think you’re oversimplifying here. For instance, why do we will to be intellectuals? It’s not like it’s some kind of natural need. You could, of course, argue that it is about power and that knowledge is merely a means to that power. But why take that route when it would be a lot easier to buy a gun?

Sure, we will. But it’s not always based on lack –that is unless we create the lack for ourselves.

As Lacan points out: the only real NEEDS we have are food, water, and protection against the elements. But what we are also talking about here are Demands and Desires. It is this confusion of the three that allows you to continue to act like an asshole because you can pass demands (that of being the ultimate intellectual) off as needs:

We must turn this into a pissing contest. It is the natural heritage of our evolutionary process.

Once again, we are dealing with the naturalistic fallacy that you can’t quite seem to pull yourself out of. You’re not just making the mistake of turning an “ought” into an “is”, as many people do. You’re taking it a step further by turning a “was” (back when we were all a bunch of knuckle dragging primates) into an “ought”. You claim to be to be “advancing knowledge” when all you really seem to be advancing is regression. This is what allowed you to post this nonsense to my question as to why you keep coming back at me (that is considering that you think I’m some kind of girlish idiot):

Right! Couldn’t agree with you more. But as always, Lyssa, you gotta go and piss on yourself:

I mean what about the move of creating another dogma (that of nature) to dismiss another ideology that is not always necessarily dogmatic?

When it comes to the nihilistic perspective, I’m right there with you, brother. But if we honestly follow it through, we recognize that no matter where we are, or what we’re thinking, we’re never on as solid ground as we think we are.

What you and your cheer squad have done is make the mistake of acting like nothingness should have a necessary trajectory: that it must necessarily lead to negativity. To bring this back to the point at hand, you’ve given it a narrative. But it gets even more pathetic when you consider that the narrative, you are succumbing to, is based on popular notions of what nihilism is. You apparently listened to too much punk music, as if it was the only expression of the nihilistic perspective, heard people reject it, and assumed that was what it was: that which makes you unfavorable in most people’s eyes. But what you have actually done is engage in a half-assed deconstruction. You took it as far as what suited your demands (not needs) then settled –thereby falling into the sociopathic pitfall of the nihilistic perspective. At the same time, you have created a fiction that makes you whole -like everyone else.

This I tend to agree with. And if I have issues with it, it will only be because you happen to be the one making the point. But I’ve reached the edge of my window and would prefer to die another day.

Anyway, been a pleasure jamming with you Lyssa.

Ya’all come back now!

11

To bring this back to the point at hand, given Strawsen’s reference to Bob Dylan (note Cate Blanchet’s portrayal in I’m Not There), what you have done, claiming to be the only true nihilist among us, is impose a narrative on your life: find the Truth (that which feels radical) and beat everyone else over the head with it until they accept it.

12

Highly doubt that all sees their life in a narrative way, but surely some does so.

13

Actually, Druzuz, that was exactly the point that Stawson was making. Ultimately, it was an anti-narrative stance in both the psychological/descriptive and the ethical/prescriptive sense. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a little deeper into that before this particular study ends.

14

Having read his interview, it seems I have found an unlikely ally in the far more scientific minded thinker of Hillary Putman –and on 2 fronts. On the Satyr/KTS front, I have his distinction between compassionate ethics and “macho ethics” which I have previously described as the neo-Nietzschian gospel filtered through Social Darwinism and Ayn Rand. He further associates this to Fascism rooted in a misreading of Nietzsche.

On the neuromaniac front I have Putman’s hope for the future of philosophy:

And one of the interesting things is that while he seems to express hesitation concerning more continental approaches (he got into to Derrida at one time, but abandoned him while still seeing some worth in him), unlike our own TlBs, he never gets sanctimonious about them. Even with Rorty, who he seems to hold a lot of reservations towards, he never uses him as an excuse to act like a critical diva. He simply points out that he doesn’t agree with him and moves on. Our own TlBs could learn from such sophistication and professionalism.
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What also came up was the issue of “warranted assertability” (something I thought Rorty associated with Dewey) and its connection to what it is rational to accept. And he uses this to underwrite the assertion that there can be objective assertions in ethics. And while I respect Putman more than I ever have, and can actually get his reasoning, I’m not sure that “what is rational to accept” and objectivity are the same thing. I came up against the same issue with my respected peer, Mo.

But what it does bring me to accept is that a lot of the problems surrounding the issue of “objectivity” may well be a matter of how we define it. This, of course, brings us to the analytic emphasis on defining terms.
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But getting back to Strawson’s narrative: doesn’t seem as if I and Satyr have created a narrative for ourselves based on Putman’s distinction between compassionate and macho ethics? I mean it’s almost like something out of a comic book. And I suppose the same goes between me and Volchok.

But then aren’t all of us engaged in a similar narrative. It goes back to Lacan’s mirror phase and our desire to recreate the experience through personal fictions. Isn’t that what we do, how we give unity to our inner multiplicities, through the avatars and the statements we choose to represent us? As the intellectually and creatively curious, don’t we just take what everyone does to a level that most other people don’t?

PS: this got confirmed the other night jamming with KMFDM: Sascha the rebel leader standing behind his podium and Lucia: the cyberpunk pin-up banshee: she (they( were beautiful.
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Putman started off as a mathematician who actually made some important contributions to it. Therefore, it seems understandable that he would tend to downplay the more poetic side of the spectrum of philosophy. And it seems equally natural that he would hold a sort a blind spot to the general discourse that involves a lot of different people with a lot of different resources and experiences. At the same time, there was nothing about him that seemed exploitative of his particular position in that discourse. He never acted like he needed to own it.

15

Duncan Pritchard, in his article “On Meta-Epistemology”, quotes Terry Williamson:

He then goes on to say:

Now let’s take a moment out here from Pritchard’s analytic zeal. On one hand, his and Williamson’s interpretation of the data would seem perfectly reasonable. And to be honest, there is no way I could completely dismiss it. However, I would offer an alternative interpretation. Isn’t there also the possibility a kind of institutional operationalism at work here? Couldn’t it be that the reason students tend to arrive at similar conclusions is because they have developed under a common hierarchy?

Now, of course, this would open me to the charge of having a bias based on my being self taught. And maybe there is one. But if there is, it would be completely unknown to me. I am only self taught because I lack the resources to do otherwise. And while I think there are some advantages to being self taught, I equally think there are advantages to taking the academic route.

Nor does this come out of some prejudice against the analytic approach. Granted, I do criticize it a lot because I think it a little dry and restraining and because it can get a little intolerant towards the continental/poetic approach. But I also recognize the value in it. If I understand Pritchard right, I can easily understand how the discipline of it can affect our intuitional responses to the given data even if it doesn’t apply directly. I can see the same value in mathematics in the sense of how it must have affected Russell’s and Putman’s thinking. As Joseph Campbell once said: ritual is a way of focusing energy. In other words, by engaging in repetitions that we can control, we stand a chance of affecting things we can’t control like inspiration. For instance: when I was a musician, I use to just strum on my guitar until I found a rhythm I liked which eventually turned into a song; when I was a poet, I use to just run lines through my head until I found ones I liked until they turned into a poem; when I was an artist, I sat down in front of blank page and just filled in space in hopes of getting a good one; and, as a writer, I pretty much do the same thing as I did as an artist.

And even though I’m not as trained in them as I would like to be, I can still see mathematics and the analytic as useful rituals to the extent that they can influence the way one intuitively responds to anecdotal data –if in no other way, by establishing an intuitive bar. And I would give as much credit to the scientific method.
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To explain it in a different way: if you were to take an art class, one of the things you would have to go through are a lot of exercises (rituals) such as drawing hatch lines or circles freehand. And the main point would be to be ready do something similar when you are actually making a piece of art. I think the analytic and mathematics can have a similar affect on those who are forming concepts.
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Anyway, tonight finishes off my study of The Harvard Review of Philosophy. I’ve decided the next step will involve something we can all engage in. What I’ll be doing next is going through the Philosophy Now podcasts:

philosophynow.org/podcasts

But due to the way my routine works, I’ll also still be fishing in the Harvard Review and reading articles in the Philosophy Now magazine –many of which we can freely access:

philosophynow.org/

I’ll also be listening to PhilsophyTalk podcasts which you can sign up to get weekly:

philosophytalk.org/

16

Found the article in Philosophy Now that made me realize what a significantly good investment I made in subscribing the other night –even though I was perhaps a little too drunk to be making such decisions. I mean if anyone wanted a better articulated description of what I’ve been ranting about for some time, it would be Christopher Norris’ “Philosophy Inc.” which, I believe, you can access for free:

philosophynow.org/issues/92/Philosophy_Inc

In it, he goes into a far more informed explanation of why it is that philosophy needs to re-establish its autonomy from science. One of the most significant points he makes (for me at least) is how logical positivism failed its presumed agenda by always alienating common human experience while falling behind the discipline it presumed to emulate: science. Out of a kind inferiority complex in the face of science, it has abandoned its more Sisyphean role of bringing the significance of expert explorations to the people. It has forgotten that is as much literature as it is an enquiry into the truth. It has forgotten that philosophers are as much writers (people creating things of beauty) as they are Truth seekers. It tells us, as Deleuze did, that we should not feel ashamed of our creative/poetic side. Our creative/poetic sides involve instincts about how the world could work as well as how it does.

We shouldn’t be fooled by the benefactors of the trend. A trend can tell us no more about what the truth is than an emotional reaction. Let’s put a little more faith in our instincts as the intellectually and creatively curious. We shouldn’t worry only about being right, but being beautiful as well. If Keats is right, our beauty will be our Truth.
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In the podcast, In Defense of Wonder:

philosophynow.org/podcasts/In_Defence_of_Wonder

Raymond Tallis makes an interesting argument against materialism (or physicalism) in pointing out that only a mind could have a past since the brain, a physical thing, must always exist in the present.

Now, of course, there will be arguments against this -that is since the brain can act like a hard drive that stores past events. Still, I think it warrants some consideration. For instance: why would it have a past except for the pure pleasure of having existed? It might store information that would aid in future action. But why would it store memories for the pure pleasure of having them? One could argue that it creates a pleasure in order to encourage the mechanism to sustain a memory that might benefit it in the future. But then why would a mechanism need that?
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Anyway guys, I encourage you to check the magazine out. It seems to me that they are bringing philosophy down to the layman level we tend to work at here. They recognize, as Deleuze did, that there should be a philosophy for the people as well as a philosophy for experts. And I think it allows us to get back into our comfort zone as compared to The Harvard Review of Philosophy which tends towards the more expert/technical approach. While that does have value, we still have to give props to the more Sisyphean function philosophy can serve of bringing more complex concepts down to the layman. I mean why would we allow philosophy regress to an elitist dogma while claiming to be a bastion against dogma? Plus that, it seems to me that a healthy philosophical attitude requires a certain amount of humbleness before reality. And how could one such humbleness while claiming to have the means to describe it fully?

17

Hi d63: I looked through some forums and settled on this one, instead of trying to jump in any one that has been going on a long time, and veered for the thesis.

However in ref: to being apologetically toward the artistic side of man, I’d like to bring in the seeming confusion over the concepts, free will, determinism and how it relates to Your OP here.

An inductive reduction of appearant causation will come to rest in Kant a-priori synthetic, and I hope you don’t misunderstand me on this point::Kant tried to sew up the descartes’ cogito, as it were a real philosophical problem. In fact the two processes (hierarchical and linear) have never been but one process. The duality rests on mistaken assumptions.
The typical and the architypical process, can be seen in the so will vs. Deterministic duality.

What is the typical? It’s choices made optimally, and excluding all other choices. Where did this diversion occur? Certainly before the advent of rational philosophy! The positivism you talk of is the answer to the mistaken apologia in this false premise. It solves the symptom by applying the denied logical principles to interpretation(language) , rather than leaving logical principles where they always were, the very basic operations and structures of the mind, that excluded everything except the existential choice, the earliest choice of survival, where an either/or possibility were the only choices.

Post modern philosophy, as in the phenominalogical reduction SHOULD be enough proof of the necessity of reduction.

But what science fails to see, is that this reduction is not only a linear(descriptive) reduction, but a reduction of the inductive propositions themselves.

Science excludes all but the optimal, consistent value!

18

As usual, Obe, I start with the reservation of not knowing if I’m on the same page as you. Nevertheless, I’ll do the best I can to come close.

Are you saying here that you are a materialist?

If I understand you right in that you are referring to Kant’s categories, I would agree that logic is about describing the underlying structures of the brain as attempted by Kant, attached to language by Chomsky, and articulated by Pinker in The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. It seems to me that what Logic primarily does is study, via language, the ways in which the mind and brain access reality. To give a simple example: most of our statements tend to consist of a subject (the object we are discussing) and the predicate (what we have to say about it). And despite its simplicity, it does give us a window into the way our mind/brain complexes process our experiences. But as you point out, if I get you right, and despite the value of such an exploration, this does not necessitate a true representation of reality.

Exactly! What science must do is work with isolated systems. And this, by its very nature (as Deleuze points out) must fail to see how such a system works in conjunction with the infinite number of systems it does in reality.

But even worse, as Norris points out, via such scientific theories and functions (as Deleuze would put it) as Quantum Physics and Chaotics, science has become so dependent on mathematics (because they describe what cannot be directly observed) that it alienates basic human experience. And any philosophy that chooses to follow in its footsteps, while having some value in the esoteric halls of academia, can only make its self irrelevant to the day to day activities and concerns of the general population. And this would seem a futile sacrifice since, as Norris points out, while alienating itself from general human activity, the analytic must deal with the double fuck of failing to have any use to the scientific community.

Now this is not to say that it lacks value. Once again, by studying the ways in which we structure language and how we arrive at understanding, by simplifying and pulling the target closer, we learn a lot about the basic physiological infrastructures of the mind. But at the same time, I think the analytic needs to humble its self and recognize the import of more continental approaches. It needs to take on a more live and let live attitude and recognize that it is only part of a discourse and not the top rung of some supposed hierarchal ladder of knowledge.

Mikhail Epstein brings up an interesting point in the Philosophy Now article The Art of World-Making. He points out that virtual reality could very well lead to a revival of metaphysics. As he puts it:

He follows this with:

One can only hope this leads to more work for philosophers. But more important is the irony of the very analytic trend that played lip service to science, because of its ability to create concrete results (technology), see its self undermined by the metaphysics it rejected brought to acceptance by those concrete results.

Anyway, hope to get into this further in the study.

Thanks for joining me, Obe.

Love ya, man!

19

First all, Obe, as far as that last point: try not to be too unsettled by it. The only proper response would be:

Forget it, d63! You’re not getting my last Bud-Lite.

That said, in Philosophy Now’s Carol Nicholson article, “Philosophy and the Two-Sided Brain”, I find myself drawn into an issue brought up by Bill Wiltrack in another string: the relationship between the analytic/continental spectrum in philosophy and the left/right brain dynamic.

Nicholson starts by pointing out an article in the New York Times that questions whether philosophy mattered or not. The conclusion of the article was that it didn’t matter since it had little to do with basic human experience. Nicholson then goes on to point out that this conclusion is falsely based on a focus on the left brain approach that dominated the last part of the twentieth century but (and I cannot emphasize this enough –if my triumphant glee is not as obvious as it feels like it should be) HAS FALLEN OUT FAVOR IN RECENT YEARS.

And while I’m sure most of you are smart enough to recognize the equivalence involved, I think I should at least summarize it for those who are unclear. Left brain philosophy would be that aspect of it drawn to precision and perfect accuracy –much like mathematics. It is, by nature, reductive and is the domain of the analytic and such philosophical greats as Russell in his Mathematica Principia period as well as Wittgenstein when he wrote his Tractatus Logico -Philosophicus. I think their use of Latinate terms says a lot. Right brain philosophy is that which goes for the bigger picture even at the risk of imprecision and ambiguity. And their use of Germanic titles such as Being and Nothingness, The Anti-Oedipus, etc. tells us a lot in comparison to the titles earlier left brain philosophers used. However, we must qualify this in that recent analytics tend to use more Germanic titles such as Dennett’s Consciousness Explained or Searle’s Consciousness. But then I suspect that Dennett and Searle are a little more right brain than their disciples and advocates would admit.

However, my summary would lead one to believe that I’m thinking of this in terms of a left/right brain dichotomy. But this is simply not true. I have many times, on this board, posted my revision of Russell’s point: that philosophy lies in that no-man’s land between Science and Art (Russell said “Science and Theology). And I believe we have to look at this as a spectrum with multiple points at which any philosopher, thinker, or artist can lie. And I could not agree with Nicholson more that all intellectual and creative inquiry (except, perhaps, that of science) should commit itself to that no-man’s land. Either extreme can turn into a form of dogma. The left brain can get so fixed on concision that it abandons basic human experience while claiming dominance over it while the right brain can succumb to its own creativity with nothing to ground it to the point of fundamentalism such as that of religious fanatics and conspiracy theorists.

And at the risk of courting a naturalistic fallacy, we should consider the import of both sides of the brain in nature. As Nicholson points out: a bird that was purely left brain would focus only on the seed that it needed to eat; however, without the bigger right brain picture (the imagination) it might fail to recognize the risk of being preyed upon while going for that seed.

Anyway, I’m stepping outside my window here. I really hope to go into this more.

20

In the Philosophy Now podcast, Philosophy and Education(

philosophynow.org/podcasts/Philo … _Education

(they note that children tend to take off with philosophy when it is done in a group situation. Now what does that say about the board?
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I have a confession to make. In the podcast, The Limits of Science (

philosophynow.org/podcasts#The_Limits_of_Science

(one of the guests makes the point that Kuhn tends to appeal to those that have a hard on with science. And I must confess to being such a person. However, this is not due to science itself or those that practice it, but rather to the use the analytics among us have made of it. The intent was never to invalidate the role of science. Only the ignorant and religious fanatics would do that. It was, rather, to get science to recognize its place in the general discourse. If philosophy has an important role, it is that of making sure that science does not dominate the general discourse.

And it’s not like science didn’t provoke the conflict. As Hawkings said: metaphysics is for those who don’t understand physics. Sounds like fighting words to me.

The point is that there are a lot of highly intelligent people using all kinds of different methods out there in order to add something to the discourse. We, for perfectly natural reasons, tend to respond to such things as religious fanaticism with the reductionism of seeking a one size fits all scheme.

Take Marx, for instance. One of his biggest faults was seeking a final solution to the failures of Capitalism. But if you think about it, there is nothing new about Capitalism. It is the same thing we have had to deal with since the beginning of society: no matter what ideological system we have worked under, there have always been a handful of people who felt they deserved a little more than everyone else. This was the very factor that undermined the eastern experiment with communism.

And we’re seeing the same oversight at work in Capitalism.
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Isn’t the idea that the aristocrats that have emerged under Capitalism have done so through their hard work the same as the divine right notion that justified monarchies?
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You have to wonder if the reason that Relativity and Quantum Physics cannot be consolidated is that they are too remote from basic human experience. It’s like basic human experience, the domain of philosophy, is caught in the middle.
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New term: Instrumentalism. It’s anti-ontological in that it asserts that science, in its insistence on mathematical proof, doesn’t have to worry about reality. It tends to work with things that have a low ontological status.
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One interesting point that came up in The Limits of Science was that the scientific method, while involving a lot of different approaches, always seemed to involve a common element: the combination of theorizing and testing through experience. Doesn’t the armchair discipline of philosophy do as much?
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Meteorology makes a lot of predictions that don’t necessarily come true. Does that mean it is any less of a science?