As I look through the active topics, I realize how little I care about them. Philosophy is kinda dull now, idk why. Maybe it’s because I feel I’ve already figured it out, and I don’t really have any drive to learn more or to teach more, or maybe it’s because I just don’t get it at all, I can’t be quite sure.
Anyway, my loss of interest in philosophy happened simultaneously with a gain in interest in personal psychology, in order to hopefully make my own life and relationships better. I began reading a book called Self-Therapy by Jay Earley. It uses the Internal Family System model.
If anyone is interested in the book, it can be pirated here: mediafire.com/?9k1ud12yyz31odf (i uploaded it, i promise there’s no viruses, just a PDF)
If anybody else has experience with IFS, feel free to share in here. Most people I talk to about it find it to be quite helpful.
you sure? maybe it’s quite simple, and it’s the people that try to get all into it and dig deep who are misunderstanding what’s really going on here…
anyway, either i do have it figured out in which case i’m basically done, or i don’t have it figured out and likely never will in which case i’m basically done.
it’s like the tide. the energy and interest in all this stuff crashes on me all at once like a wave and eventually recedes. rinse and repeat. anyways, i definitely hope you don’t disappear permanently. i think it would be a loss for us if you did.
well i have found your contribution valuable. i don’t want to think of ILP like a published journal or magazine, where we are the content providers. i prefer to think that ILP is a thinking organism. (maybe we can tie in the IFS model here such that we are “relatively discrete subpersonalities” of ILP…did i go too far?) We are just bouncing ideas around and it is just as important to take in what someone else is saying as it is to respond.
It can only be the latter. If it were the former, you could write a book, acheive world fame, and top every philosopher who came before you. I’d get started if I were you . . .
The mistake you’re making is if you think the goal of philosophy is to “figure it out”. Philosophy primarily is not about knowledge. If you’re looking to figure something out, then such an inclination would lend itself better to the sciences and certainly to psychology. I may have had an expreience the reverse of yours. I thought I was interested in psychology but the more I learned the more I realized that I was interested really in philosophy. Philosophy and psychology certainly share a history of introversion or an “inward looking” which you don’t see in the natural sciences.
In my view, philosophy instead is about wisdom. An accumulation of wisdom does not lead to an accumulation of facts or “figuring outs”. It instead provides insight into how to figure things out better. Philosophical problems are not so much to be solved as they are to be elucidated, and in elucidating them you gain perspective that you can apply toward understanding facts and interpreting facts, but not necessarily acquiring facts. It trains the mind to understand better and to have a richer capacity to interpret facts clearer. It also opens the mind - something much needed today I think. Very few facts are black and white. They can be put together into many different ways and lead to different conclusions or models. With philosophical insight into how thinking happens, you can do such modeling and interpretation better.
In our one or two exchanges you seemed to me to demonstrate, if not a hostility, then an aversion to those things which philosophers do all the time. Observing the fact that evolutionists can’t seem to escape teleological explanations struck you as “nitpicky” and you had nothing else to say except your saying that language is imperfect or an ad hominem response about someone’s knowledge level. In posts I have read you head straight for an unvarnished presentation of facts. Philosophy is almost by definition nitpicky. It discusses things which most people take for granted in everyday existence. To many philosophers, the nits sometimes hold a lot of value and are sometimes worth picking.
Best of luck in your studies in psychology.
PS - don’t be surprised if in a few months you check back. I know many posters like myself who show up, post a ton, then disappear for eight months.
I always liked your habit of poking pins into others’ balloons with the utmost disregard for their feelings, it was refreshing, not to mention hilarious. But I understand how you feel, it took me longer however.
You are perhaps referring to the same topics coming up all the time, the endless arguments centered on the definition of terms, the topics sent to oblivion by random posts, the lengthy arguments which end with nothing resolved, and the topics challenging ideas which have worked for hundreds or thousands of years.
No, if it’s the former, i could not sell books because my philosophical view could be summed up in about 5 pages or less and nobody would really care. It’s too simple, I think it would be quite unsatisfying for most people. Also, it’s basically pretty similar to existentialism but a lot simpler, so I’d just be writing a shorter version of things Sartre has already wrote…so yeah, I can’t sell anything, even if I’m correct. Your logic is faulty sir.
Addictions dont just go away. Once you lose interest in something, you will become hooked on something else.
To a rational mind, psychology would seem like the next logical path to tread on after philosophy. Those who realize ascertainment of objective reality is futile, instead seek to comprehend their individual subjective experiences of their realities.
Justification for behavior then becomes pragmatic and introspective as opposed to conceptual. Psychology becomes just another word for existentialism.
So Humpty, when you say you may have “figured it out” it would be an answer sufficient for you personally, but not in the sense that you could convice everyone else that you have “answered” philosophy?
I miss you being indignant whilst still arguing and making sense.
There really is only so much you can learn in philosophy and still be actively interested. There is a lot to be fair, but it is also important to have an active interest in other things like physics or psychology or even sociology. Because you need to live your life and not just think all the time. But this forum also has places to discuss these things too, which is good.