Nietzsche, for all his Classicism and lack of volume control, had a very idiosyncratic take on the value of suffering (beyond the glib “that which does not kill me…”) which, without altering any facts, can radically alter ones worldview and offer comfort and support in the acceptance of suffering.
Or if you want a concrete soundbite,
The value is not systematic or rigorous, but personally enriching. Or not; you find value on your own terms.
I’ll repeat the question in a more formal way how do we define wisdom?
I’m aware I’m talking to myself. 
What’s the difference between that and poetic (or, more generally, artistic) writing?
I would revise nietzsche’s quote to that which does not kill me makes me angry, it does take account of how pissed of you feel when you aint dead?
Ah nihilism it’s circular but ultimately an expression of being fed up with conformists. =D>
At its most general, it is artistic writing. Is philosophy closer to science than arts/humanities? Should it be?
If you get too hung up on how you know what you know, you risk forgetting that you know* and that that knowledge can be used effectively.
[size=85]* or you become reluctant to claim that your knowledge is good enough[/size]
Wikepedia, you’re a hero. 
That still doesn’t answer the question.
Your knowledge is never good enough, that’s what makes it perfectly imperfect. 
What I mean is the desired results need not be the same no matter the circumstances, wisdom needs to be probable based not definitive, the definition is simply that there is no definition, like common sense wisdom is nebulous, it depends only on knowledge and knowledge either changes to fit the objective facts or is dead.
Does that make sense? Should I care if it makes sense now or when I have better information?
I’ve no idea. What concerns me is if there’s already a field that covers the same ground. What’s the point in calling something ‘philosophy’ if it’s already called ‘literature’?
Having said that, I’m kind of warming to the idea of conceptual engineering for pragmatic rather than epistemic reasons: we change some part of our conceptual scheme not because the weight of evidence demands it, but because to do so has therapeutic value. Has the efficacy of this process been thoroughly tested?
Well, it’s more than just the form. If it deals with (or raises) philosophical questions in a non-fiction way, it’s philosophy.
In terms of clinical therapy, that’s pretty much what cognitive-behavioural therapy aims at. At least, the associations and values of concepts. It’s effective for some anxiety and depressive disorders, I believe. That’s not really aiming at insights so much as stopping you driving yourself mental, though.
On the other hand, the therapeutic value of reading Marcus Aurelius hasn’t been empirically quantified, as far as I know. Therapy implies removing problems, whereas what I’m talking about is more the offering of alternatives to otherwise healthy if slightly confused people.
What makes a question ‘philosophical’? I thought we were discussing what philosophy is or isn’t about. Saying it’s about anything philosophical doesn’t seem especially helpful.
Really? In my experience, CBT is about changing beliefs but not about changing concepts.
What’s an ‘insight’? Sounds a bit epistemic to me.
“Can it be an accident that the most adequate and probably the most lasting exposition of these three schools of philosophy should have been made by poets? Are poets, at heart, in search of a philosophy? Or is philosophy, in the end, nothing but poetry?” - George Santayana
It wasn’t that surprising to read, (in the first sentence), that philosophy isn’t the same as science. What was surprising to me, is that (Hacker) who had just finished saying that, then went on to compare scientific facts to philosophical facts—as if they were the same—and then claim that: “science has more”. Surely, if you demand that a philosophical ‘fact’ look and behave exactly the same as a scientific ‘fact’, then science will probably win.
But…
Why does Hacker not think that when philosophy “understands the conceptual scheme in terms of which we conceive……(etc)” that this doesn’t count as ‘knowledge about the world’? Was Hacker assuming that ‘knowledge’ had to mean “verifiable by sense-experience”? Because if that’s his definition, then I’ve caught him tipping the scales in favor of science.
I’m also wondering what Hacker thinks counts as a “well-established scientific fact”. If Hacker is implicitly referring just to something very minimal to do with sense-experience, I will want to take that province away from him as distinctly ‘scientific’. To count as a scientific ‘fact,’ I would want to see a hypothesis—i.e., an ‘ordering’ and ‘smoothing’ and ‘confirming’ of sense-experience—and then being overwhelmingly verified by that evidence, without the existence of different theories that can do the same. That’d be a ‘fact’! And in this sense, it’s not obvious to me that Science’s handbook of well-established ‘truths’ is going to be as large as he seems to think. (Scientists bicker no less in their journals than philosophers do, I would assume).
An aside:
I don’t disagree that in epistemology we conceive of what it means to have knowledge, and you can speak in terms of conceptual schemes and what-not. I don’t know why we would define this as the sole office of philosophy, though. It’s not like we define ‘science’ by what goes on in theoretical physics, as opposed to biology. So why do that for epistemology? What about the other areas of philosophy?
Final comments:
I’m a pluralist about understandings of what philosophy is. I have no objection to thinking of philosophy as an “ordering” and….well, “conceptual engineering”, basically. (Though I don’t exactly understand that). I have no objection except perhaps that it wouldn’t be the whole truth. For instance, we haven’t always had the notions like ‘conceptual scheme’ or ‘knowledge’ or ‘will’ or ‘consciousness’. Shall we say that we, as philosophers, “discovered” them? (……I know that science didn’t—zinnggg!).
I can’t speak for him, but I’d say that knowledge is expressed in concepts; the conceptual scheme is the way in which we express knowledge, not the knowledge itself, no?
What am I said to lack if I’m not very good at “understanding the conceptual scheme in terms of which…(etc)”? …A kind of knowledge, no?
I’m all for drawing distinctions betwixt the sciences and philosophy, but not when the distinction is: “science gives us truth, facts, and knowledge—and philosophy doesn’t”.
OH, if you’re still participating in this thread, can you respond to my last post please?
There’s knowing-how and knowing-that; abilities and facts. The knowledge about the world (as I read it, given what he says about facts) is the knowing-that kind of knowledge. It’s hard to make strong distinctions, since one generally knows that one knows how to do something, and knows how one came to know that something is the case… but certainly for someone influenced by Wittgenstein (and presumably Ryle too) this would be an important distinction. It’s maybe clearer to say that the conceptual scheme is intersubjective, while science (at least ‘hard’ science) deals in the objective.
Remster, sorry - I could have sworn I’d already answered your last post, but it seems not.
True enough. To go back to “what concerns me is if there’s already a field that covers the same ground. What’s the point in calling something ‘philosophy’ if it’s already called ‘literature’?” - literature (in this sense) is a fictional form, not a study. Eng Lit is the study of literature, not the creation of it. Similarly, poetry is a form; it’s hard to confuse historical fiction for history, or Beowulf for Anglo-Saxon studies. But insofar as a work of poetry or fiction advances and defends a philosophical thesis well or poorly, it’s good or bad philosophy, just as Principia Mathematica is, or a game-theory treatment of Rawls, or the Critique of Pure Reason. Some forms are better suited to some purposes.
The origin of the question was whether philosophy had any business in ‘wisdom’ as I defined it - the arrangement of concepts in new and potentially personally-enriching ways. I don’t think that it’s exclusively something for philosophy, nor that it’s philosophy’s exclusive goal, but given philosophy’s task in clarifying difficult concepts and misunderstandings, it’s well-suited to do so. It has the right staff using the right tools.
I don’t have first-hand experience of CBT, although I understood it to be tracing the connections of concepts, how thought-processes led you from certain thoughts, experiences and so on, through associations, to negative thoughts and feelings. If a belief is a relation of concepts, then maybe that’s what is changed. It’s not really my field. However, a question I’d like to ask Sam Harris (if you didn’t know, a New Atheist moral objectivist who wants to combine brain scans with utilitarianism) is whether he’d back educating everyone as a Christian if it were scientifically proven to make them happier than atheism. Is that more what you had in mind?
An insight is putting things into context, making sense, I suppose. It may be an epistemic term, but it’s not something you can cultivate by studying epistemology; linguistics will teach you what an idiom is, but you need to learn a language to understand its idioms.
The question still stands: What makes a question ‘philosophical’?
But that’s not the sort of relation between concepts that’s involved in category mistakes (for example), is it? The falsity of a belief is caused by a mismatch between the set of concepts that constitutes the belief and the world. A category mistake is caused by a mismatch within the set of concepts.
I meant (and said!) ‘epistemic’, not ‘epistemological’. What I was driving at is that to say philosophy ‘aims at insights’ sounds like saying philosophy aims at a sort of knowledge after all.
You’re right; it’s hard to make that distinction. And I have a feeling that you won’t make very many friends among either scientists or philosphers by using that distinction here, in this way. But, for clarification: Are you saying that philosophers are the ones who ‘know how’ to do science, but leave the fact-collecting to scientists? And are you saying that when Hume wrote, “Reason is the slave of the passions”, that he was not telling us ‘that’ this was the case?
I’m trying to think of what theoretical standpoint someone might come from to defend this use of the distinction. Maybe you would have some backup from the Vienna Circle badasses…? (I’m not sure).
I would agree that science tends to seem more ‘objective’ than philosophy. I don’t know why, or whether that’s right. But I also tend to think it seems that way only because science gives us some abilities we can’t ignore. Like for my running nose. If science did nothing else than catalogue objects, we wouldn’t be so hesitant to redescribe anything about science.
Perhaps he means that doing philosophy correctly doesn’t produce insight, or wisdom, just as doing math correctly will not produce mathematical knowledge? But, then, isn’t philosophy in this view simply a synonym for logic? I’m a bit confused about it myself.
“Would I move it to Mundane Babble or let it stay in this forum?”
I’m losing track of what you’re actually arguing here, sorry… CBT doesn’t deal with falsity of beliefs. It doesn’t treat delusion. If someone were finding psychological difficulties dealing with some aspect of their life caused by associations arising from a category error, I think CBT would treat this by looking at the assumptions of the associations. Although category errors aren’t always easy to pick up, in practice.
Correction noted, thank you. Almost any mental practice aims at something that can be described as knowledge. I gain knowledge of the answer to a sudoku by completing the sudoku. I gain the knowledge that I can whistle a tune by whistling a tune.
Perhaps to clarify the OP, the knowledge in the subject line could be more productively read as the sort of corpus of first-generation facts about the world that most academic disciplines aim at, with the implication that philosophy (also … of history, … of law,… etc) is concerned with the second-generation facts about the facts. Does that finally answer the question at the start of this post?
Who has most influenced the scientific method in living memory? I’d argue Popper and Kuhn. So in that case, yes. As for Hume, he was writing in a time that what is now science was an unsystematic subsection of philosophy, and long before psychology as a discipline had been conceived. It’s an empirical psychological question, no?
Ryle came from Ordinary language philosophy and made the distinction explicitly.
Only if the analogy is so strong as to be a synonym I think that’s actually a reasonable statement, though; doing lots of maths correctly won’t necessarily give you mathematical insight, but you’re unlikely to get any without doing lots of maths. It lays the groundwork, gives you the tools and sets you to thinking about problems and puzzles in the field.