Moving philosophy forward

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1

I have suggested that philosophy is/ought to be
a ‘‘way of life’’… that we live our philosophy… the
Anarchist who lives the anarchistic life… no checking account,
no car, no paying taxes, totally living off the grid… turning
belief into actions… that is what philosophy should be doing…
taking beliefs and values and living within those values
and beliefs…

the problem with modern day philosophy is it hasn’t kept
up with the reality of the world today…the modern world
is the theory of relativity, the atomic bomb, technology
unimaginable 100 years ago…of technology replacing
some human functions… such as pacemakers (heart)
Cochlear Implants (hearing) titanium Knee’s, mechanical
arms and hands, bionic eyes, artificial pancreas,
mind-operated wheelchairs… to give some examples…

virtually instantaneous communication around the world…
on a wide variety of devices…

or we can travel to distant lands in a matter of hours…
that we can/have traveled to the moon and are actively
engaged in trying to travel to Mars…

What does philosophy have to say to any of this?
Can modern philosophy say anything to this?
and then next brick in the wall will be the question
of aliens from space… is philosophy ready or
even capable of dealing with this coming crisis?
Within my lifetime, we will have some sort of answer to
the question of ''is there life elsewhere?" and my
lifetime will be roughly 15 years… (80 years old)

Can age old philosophical questions deal with this
new reality of ours? If we understand philosophy
as a ‘‘way of life’’, plus the new questions of technology
and the impact of life being elsewhere… leaves us where,
exactly?

the question of alien life will impact as greatly as the
discovery of tribes in both North and South America,
along with new discoveries in Asia and the Pacific…
for the first time, we could compare and contrast,
our values, institutions, forms of government with other
people and we could see where we stood in terms
of where we stood in terms of other civilizations and people…

That for example, China was ahead of the west technologically
during the Middle ages… It wasn’t until the 15th century
that we tied and then went ahead of Chinese technology…
much of the western growth came as we began to understand
where exactly we fit into the world technically…

and when we discover how far behind the aliens we really
are, in terms of technology…what will that do to the ego
of modern man? and in terms of how far behind we are, not
only in technology, but in biology, medicine, math, physics,
science in general and this includes philosophy…

so, let us think about what type of society/state/civilization
that can travel billions of miles through space, what type
of society and state, might they have?

It would be hard to imagine that such a society/state, would
have individualist that we have… the question of how an
individual being integrated into society would work out,
wouldn’t be the question that it is in our society/state…
I can’t image a society/state being able to travel about
outer space in ways we can’t even comprehend, as being
anything other than an integrated, collective society/state…
everyone working together to make a better, stronger
society/state, around here, we call that a utopia,
there, it is business as usual…

I do not believe that a connected hive mind would be
very successful in conquering outer space…
but a society/state where everyone was involved
and valued, would be able to travel through space…
where the individual goal is just as respected as the
collective goal… a society/state where toleration
and justice thrives would be an ideal state/society to
reach for the stars…where freedom is the carving out
of space to find oneself exploring what it was that makes
one happy… to find fulfillment…and there is no clash
between finding personal fulfillment and working toward
the betterment of the state/society… these two ideals
are harmoniously balanced between one’s own freedom
and the rights and privileges of the state/society…

but Kropotkin, that is not possible… yes, yes it is…
all we have to do is make that balance between the
individual and the state, a priority that we all work at…

but the harmony also comes from us choosing to reach/achieve
personal goals that achieve balance within the state/society…
so, we can right from the start, would out some basics of
this new society/state… that we must overcome addictions
of every kind… all addictions are about me, me, me…
the ego driven addiction where we put ourselves first,
ahead of the state/society needs and choices…
that is the first step… to heal ourselves…

having watched human beings for over 60 years,
I can say with some certainty, that human beings
are seriously messed up…the path into a future
that is far better than today begins by us becoming
away of and then trying to overcome our own selves…
our ego… we can no longer afford to have human beings
before and ahead of all other people… we cannot allow
ego to put oneself first…and any attempt to put
ourselves before our state/society is doomed to failure…
and it will be a long time before we can reach a balanced
state between us individually/ego wise and the collective/
the state…

but that is the goal… something to reach for, to achieve…
to have balanced between the one, the individual
and the whole, the state/society… but our new found
friends, they found the correct mixture of individualism
and collectivism… and we should seek it to…

Philosophy as a way of life and what does that mean in
our modern age of technology and science?

Kropotkin

2

As I mentioned, modern philosophy has failed
to catch up to modern theories, especially
scientific theories… a point in case, the theory
of relativity…

it is basically a theory about moving objects…
and the relationship between these moving objects…
in the case of two moving objects, which object can we
think of as being the ‘‘primary’’ object? which we
can translate into thinking about being on the plains…
(I grew up in the Midwest, where one could see for miles
because it is so flat) as there are no other objects to be
seen, where is the ‘‘center’’ of the plains? Where would I
stand to be at the ‘‘center’’ of the plain states? Not based on
a map, but based on where I am standing? There is no ‘‘center’’,
no one place I can deem to be primary point of my existence,
outside of my own existence… my own center of existence
is where I stand, and nowhere else…

and what does this mean to us? No matter where we stand,
be it physically or within a point of view or a metaphysical idea,
we have no sense of where the ‘‘center’’ is…
Up is a direction that is just as relative as down or left or right,
to say that life, human or otherwise is hierarchy based, is
to proclaim a ‘‘center’’ that is not visible… to proclaim human
life as the ‘‘center’’ of existence is to make a claim that has no
basis in fact… it is based on our own viewpoint that has
nothing to compare itself to… we say we are superior to
animals, based on what criteria? How would we ‘‘know’’ that?..
because based on an animal’s viewpoint, it is the ‘‘center’’
of the universe… every single viewpoint, be it human or
animal, thinks itself as being the ‘‘center’’ of the universe…
which means there is no ‘‘center’’ viewpoint on which
we can judge existence on… one viewpoint
has just as much validity as another viewpoint…
I can’t judge which viewpoint is more ‘‘valid’’ than another
viewpoint because I can only judge from my own viewpoint,
and any viewpoint is just as valid as another viewpoint…
I can’t make one viewpoint more valid than another…
or more right…

But what does this mean in practical terms? As a philosophy
to be lived, and not used as a representation of another
philosophy… There is no practical means to determine
right or wrong… they are viewpoint that exists from their own
location, with nothing to suggests that they are any more
right or wrong than my own viewpoint…as there is no
sense of a hierarchal viewpoint, top to bottom, from
god to the ants, viewpoints… we cannot stand on
any one viewpoint and proclaim it the ‘‘right viewpoint’’…
we have no way of knowing what is the ‘‘right viewpoint’’…
if all viewpoints have the same validity, then what is
''right or wrong?"

as any one viewpoint has no way of determining what viewpoint
is the right or wrong one, we must expand our understanding…

so, in practical terms, we have no use for any one method
of a viewpoint… thus we cannot use the viewpoint of god,
a monarchy, a dictatorship, or even a wider theory, an
autocracy, oligarchy, a republic, parliament… because
each one of these presumes a viewpoint from which
decisions are made… with no assurances that any one
given viewpoint is made from the ‘‘right’’ place to see or know
all the facts… this leaves us with the principle that the
best way to ‘‘know’’ all the viewpoints is to have as
the primary political system, a democracy…
and the more people that are included into the democracy,
the greater possibility that all viewpoints are included into
our understanding of what is to be done…

As there is no hierarchical principle that will allow us to overcome
the primary political problem of which viewpoint is the correct one,
we need to include all viewpoints into the mix… the best way
to think of this is that in a hierarchy, viewpoints are up and down,
top to bottom…but a better way to think of decision making
as in the shape of a circle… where everyone is equidistant,
from the center… and no one viewpoint is considered to be
the ‘‘right’’ one, the ‘‘center’’ one… and where exactly does that leave us?

Kropotkin

3

as I have mentioned before, one of the primary questions
facing us, is this question of the relationship between
the individual and the collective/society…
who, if anyone has priority, the state/collective or the one/individual?

As happens, the pendulum has swung toward the one/the individual
today, which is the Romantic viewpoint…the Enlightenment
viewpoint was that the individual, should and must, have a
evaluation of values… the state/the church/the society, holds
to certain values… and through indoctrinations of the child,
attempt to impress those values on the children…as every society/
state ever, has done… What the Enlightenment has done,
was said, that we should examine our values, our beliefs
and see if they are actually the values/beliefs we really hold,
or are they simply the society’s indoctrinations…
this emphasis on the individual own examination of values,
outside of the state values, is one that is carried on in the next
phase of intellectual history, which is the Romantic era…

The Romantics followed Rousseau in their emphasis of the
individual… but only Rousseau rejected the modern society
as being corrupting… the members of the Enlightenment thought
that aspects of the state/society were corrupting, the Church
for example… very few members of the Enlightenment thought
that the state/society itself was corrupt and demanded an end
to the state… this form of anarchy didn’t come to fruition until
the Age of the Romantics… the next century…in which the
ism of the individual came into being… the belief that
the state itself was corrupting, was not present during
the age of Enlightenment…thus we can ‘‘dare to know’’
Sapere aude… the motto of the Enlightenment, was not
directed to the people politically, but it was epistemological
directed… as we are the children of the Romantic Era,
we still live by the individualism that was the heart of
the Romantic era… but we have pushed that individualism
into politics, but also into economics… and that is important to
understand…that we seek out ‘‘happiness’’ in terms of
individual goals, both politically and economically…
but we do not seek out collective goals that unite us
politically or economically… if the family next door
is doing better, that politically and economically helps me…
if the family down the block or across town is doing better,
then that helps me personally…my fate is tied up with
your fate… that is a collective/social belief that we
are connected together in what happens to us…
we are not isolated being who operate independently of
each other… if the state/society is corrupt, that
impacts my life, as it does your life… we are connected
by the status of the state/society… but that doesn’t impact
my ability to undergo a ‘‘reevaluation of values’’… I can still
attempt to work out what are my values and what values
are the indoctrinations of the state/society…
We can practice the goals of the Enlightenment…
and not impact the state/society ability to operate effectively…
but practicing individualism, putting our goals and needs first,
before anyone else, does impact us negatively…and it impacts
us collectively…

so, what does this all mean?
It means that if we think collectively, that we think about
the state/society needs before our own needs, we can improve
the overall health and welfare of the state/society…

that our actions are directed toward improving the collective
before we think about ourselves… to think about ourselves
collectively instead of individually…instead of thinking, how
does this benefit me personally, how about, how does this
benefit us collectively? collective improvements helps us
improve personally, individually…

so, philosophy as a ‘‘way of life’’ begins with, what can I do
personally, that will benefit us collectively?

that a democracy will allow us to engage in our attempt to
‘‘dare to know’’ and allow us to engage as a member of the
collective…that an economic system that allow us to
engage in achieving maximum wealth without any thought
to how do we achieve collective improvement, is not doing
us much good… so, we reject capitalism, as an economic
system, as it is not engaged enough in our collective
understanding of what it means to be human…
it is too involved in the question, what is in it for me?
Instead of, what is in it for us?

every single ism, action or belief, has a individual perspective
and a collective perspective… and we must engage in both for
us to successfully engage in life… what is the relationship
between the individual and the collective?
Indeed, that is the question…

Kropotkin

4

What makes you think this is true? What research did you do to find this out?

If I use the search function in Philpapers, there are all sorts of articles and books that focus on this topic, in philosophy, that is.

There are a number of physicist philosophers out there now and or have been writing on such things for a long time:
David Bohm
John Bell
Carlo Rovelli
Sean Carroll
Frank Wilczek .
Lee Smolin
Niels Bohr
David Deutsch
Tim Maudlin
Alain Aspect

If I search in Philpapers for social media, all sorts of philosophical works come up. Likewise extraterrestrials. I didn’t bother with titanium knees, or whatever it was, but I will bet that advances in medical technologies and other topics that look broadly the philosophical issues that might come up around titanium knees will be present. I really doubt that philosophy in any time period had such specific focus on medical treatments of the their time, or tech in their time, to a greater degree than is done now.

How did you draw this conclusion?

5

having studied philosophy for over 40 years…
within philosophy itself, say from Nietzsche to A.J. Ayer,
who has written about the effects of say, Transhumanism
on what it means to be human? The names you brought up,
only two are philosophers, the rest are scientists with
a philosophical bent… the two are Sean Carroll and Tim
Mauldlin… and to approach philosophical problems from
a scientific standpoint is to distort the philosophy…

Try this, read some general intro to philosophy book, say,
Copleston "History of Philosophy’’ or perhaps Russell’s history,
and how little mentioned of science or what specific
scientific problems impact people’s lives…
or perhaps, tell me, (and this is a very modest list)
tell me what Wittgenstein or perhaps Heidegger, Sartre,
Quine, Rorty or Berlin wrote about the impact of science on
people’s lives… Perhaps a better list of philosophers from
you should have been Daniel Dennett, or Russell… or perhaps
Thomas Kuhn… but even he doesn’t get into what the
philosophical impact of technology has on people’s lives…
perhaps, what does it mean to have a cochlear implant
in being human? does the Cochlear implant improve,
negates, or is just even, in terms of our being human?

Now most of the names you provided are physicists,
which impacts how they view the world and humans
presence in this world… how does our technology,
computers for example, impact us as human beings?
Or smart phones? or the knowledge that we are
actively trying to get to Mars?

But Kropotkin, none of that impacts people… which is
just flat out wrong… our environment impacts us
as human beings… that is part of the human condition…
what does the impact of having 8 billion people have
on us as human beings? an earth that cannot support
that many people, is an earth that is going to have
a very bad time in the near future… or perhaps
the effects of having 8 billion people polluting or
using up resources… the coming problem of
resources such as water and food and land
becoming scarce… the next set of wars will
be war’s of resources… countries invading other
countries for their resources… water and the like…
there is a strong scientific aspect to this problem…
or what about the massive extinction event
that human beings are engaging with…
destroying the Amazon for example, killing millions
of animals/species for their resources… there will be a toll
for that and our children and grandchildren will be paying
that toll… for our foolhardy actions…

and we cannot depend on religions or belief in god will
save us… we cannot as Heidegger thought,
‘‘only a god can save us now’’… as a measure to save us
or protect us… there are plenty of questions that we,
as philosophers, must engage with in order to work them
out… or to even decide on what problems/questions we
must engage with first… scientists maybe able to
work out what questions need a response to first,
but the philosopher in me suggests that the place
to being is in philosophy, not science…

Kropotkin

6

That was just to show that there a physicists who are also philosophers or have published works of philosophy. And some of those go back decades.

I also mentioned what one can easily find at Philpapers.

Why would Nietszche write about transhumanism? or any of the other ideas you mentioned, much of it too early for Ayer also. But contemporary philosophers certainly are.

AGain, huh. Much of that covers what happens long before the issues you mentioned.

But otherwise 20th and 21st century authors are covering your issues, either directly or as part of more general categories.

He wrote a LOT about the impact of science and technology on human existence, particularly in his works The Question Concerning Technology”(1954) and Being and Time (1927). Heidegger was concerned with how technology alters the way humans perceive and interact with the world.

He wrote about how the dominance of science and technological thinking affects the way people think about themselves.

We can add on Herbert Marcuse One-Dimensional Man (1964), Andrew Feenberg: Transforming Technology (1995) Jaques Ellul The Technological Society (1954), Jurgen Habermans The Theory of Communicative Action - which focuses on how science/tech had begun dominating discourse and pushing away other kinds of knowledge, both for experts and people on the ground., Jean-François Lyotard The Postmodern Condition (1979) which goes directly into the topic you mention, Foucault Discipline and Punish (1975), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), Bruno Latour We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition (1958)) her focus is on how science and tech affect the political life of everyone.

No, it should have come from you, since you are making the strange assertion.

Prior to Rousseau, the philosophers, like Locke say and Hobbes, they were primarily pro, seeing the positive side and it wasn’t their main focus. But Rousseau was the first philosopher who began to raise issues critical of the potential effects of S and T on people.

Hegel went into S and T as possible sources of alienation, and then Marx ran with this.

JS Mill went into it with a kind of mixed reaction.

But sure, it has mostly been in the recent modern period that it became more of a focus, but it has become a focus. I’ll toss out a couple of philosophers working right now on issues in this area: Peter-Paul Verbeek and Helen Nissenbaum.

did not focus on it directly for the most part, but he did engage with technology added the modern alienation and how mass media, industrialization and scientific progress were creating passivity and conformity to social norms.

Why you would bring up Quine is mysterious.

It seems to me what you did was think of the people who end up in pre 20th century philosophy, the very famous ones, and 1) decided they didn’t focus on these issues 2) missing that some of them did, especially Heidigger (sp) where it was central to his work. And then you missed a lot of people in the later 20th and now 21st century who did focus on these issues. And then you didn’t really look to see what is happening now in the world of philosophy.

You do understand how recent these phenomena are, right? So to find out if people in the field of philosophy are actually looking at such things, we can’t just search our memory of Copelston, right? We’d need to look at philosophers working now. And if you do that you will see, as I mentioned in my first post and for reasons known only to you did not respond to, that contemporary philosophers are looking into issues on your list.

You really think philosophers have not been addressing science and tech as part our enrvironment? You really think philosophers are not addressing overpopulation and pollution. If this was 30 years ago or more I could understand how it’s not easy for someone who doesn’t have time to go to a university library to find out what philosophers are writing about, but now, with the internet, and the resources to search scholarly publications, I can’t understand why you didn’t use and effective process close to your hands.

I won’t do any more work for you. If you are curious about whether philosophers are tackling the changes in the environment, you have the tools to actually get an answer, rather than thinking back to history of philosophy books written before many of the issues you mention were current. Yes, none of the greatest hits philosophers wrote about going to Mars, as far as I know.

You might also want to consider works in anthropology and ethnology, where many of these issues are taken up by people working in those fields. Also sociology. And the boundaries between philosophy and those fields are very porous and the distinction arbritrary. But there’s a reason I mention them since you seem upset that philosophers have taken up certain issues that are often focused on in other fields, and these lead to works that are philosophical. Further those fields often have the kind of focus you seem to be yearning for, philosophy tends not to get into specific technological devices, for example. They deal, generally, but absolutely not exclusively at a more general level. But philosophers are certainly taking on population, pollution, the environment in general and other broad issues like that.

I’ll throw out two Sherry Turkle and Nicholas Rose, but there are many others.

I notice also that you opted to go for condescension, rather than to look into the issue. I notice that you went dismissive, instead of considering the frame I put forward the physicist/philosophers in. I notice that you ignored the idea of actually looking to see what current philosophers were doing in the areas you think they are not. I notice you spent a lot of time focusing on the problems, say of pollution/environment, rather than actually trying to see if there were philosophers working on these issues.

Unfortunately my expectation is that you will focus on anything in my posts that you can find some way to frame and dismiss, rather than admitting that there were a lot of people and ways of investigating whether your assertions were correct that you didn’t even consider. Do you expect people to simply accept your assertions when there are so many counterexamples and when it is clear you didn’t really look but worked from memory of philosophers who couldn’t possibly have addressed many of the issues you raise - while philosophers who can, since they are alive now, are addressing. And then of course the philosophers who did address such issues in the 20th century, and yes, physicis who addressed some such issues in works of philosophy.

Do you really think philosophers have not been fascinated by and writing about the theory of relativity?

7

I vaguely remember both Kant & Descartes did.

8

Oh, yes. Kant said…

“The augmentation of human faculties through mechanical artifice, though promising in the advancement of empirical knowledge, must be subjected to the moral law within. For if humanity seeks to transcend its natural limits through technological means alone, without regard to the dignity of rational beings, such a pursuit risks reducing the human person to mere machinery, and thus violates the categorical imperative. The proper end of reason is not found in infinite enhancement of physical capacity, but in the fulfillment of moral duty.”
-The Metaphysics of Technological Augmentation and the Limits of Human Reason

9

Some links to searches in Philpapers, a site with connections to many philosophy articles and books but certainly not all. Other places to search are JSTOR and Project MUSE, which also contain vast archives of philosophical journals and academic publications. One can also explore the Philosophy Documentation Center.

and just using transhumanism as an example, there are journals that regularly focus on transhumanism issue, such as Bioethics and Philosophy & Technology

You can also search for books, journals with certain focii there. You can also delve into their archives. From what I can see they don’t go back into the 20th century, so I am sure one can find more articles via library searches and using JSTOR that go back further.

And to be more specific on a point I made earlier, one could also look for articles and books within the following three fields, if one wants to understand modern thinking about the effects of technology on ordinary humans:
Science and Technology Studies
Athropology of Technology
Sociology of Technology

There has been no intellectual silence on the effects of technology (nor environmental changes. medicine, social media, etc.) in philosophy or closely related fields, and of course interdisciplinary works.

1 Like
10

I had to use “ descartes kant people who looked and acted like humans but were mechanical “ to find:

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I remember reading a passage where one of them described hypothetically looking down from a distance at people on the street … something about … how would you know they weren’t … automatons, or whatever. Can’t remember the context. Doh.

11

There you go, even the impossible exists. Let alone all the easy to find possible and real.

12

Why do you consider “early” impossible?

13

Because of myths about fire being stolen from the gods? :stuck_out_tongue:

14

If it exists, how can it be impossible? There’s the rub. Anyway, these are all things Peter K. needs to deal with. Even the impossible focus on his issues exists, let alone the plethora of possibles that do also.

15

or because of Plato cautionedabout how writing (and other technologies) might well weaken our abilities? No philosophers haven’t stopped thinking about this stuff. Just not enough for PK.

16

Plato wasn’t against writing (hence all the writing). He was against using it as deception about the gods (The God), especially in order to use people.

17

I didn’t think he was against writing, period, nor said I that. But he was concerned that it would interfere with memory as people came to depend on it. A modern issue if there every was one. Technologically enhanced atrophy is all around us.

18

I read something… or heard on the news… that couples share memory tasks. So. No. It is nothing new.

19

According to the developmental psychology of Erik Erikson, the dominant antithesis in old age and the theme of the last crisis is integrity versus despair. That dialectic as much as whatever is objectively going on between science and philosophy, may be what colors Kropotkin’s thinking.

20

I think he missed a real opportunity to learn how to type posts that aren’t all chopped up.

I definitely think he needs to put that on his bucket list.

Like 5,000 years ago.