What if someone just decided to do all the intellectual work in the world, so people only had answers and not questions… is philosophy interested in maintaining itself like a virus, so people will just disagree with that person to keep itself replicating?
Philosophy isn’t about persuasion and forcing one side of a debate to be right and the other to be wrong so that a winner can be declared.
It’s about understanding the best possible answers to a given inquiry from both sides of a debate, and determining which bits of each extreme actually represent the reality in front of us and which are just oughts that people are pushing as is’s.
Yes and no.
There is a balance between learning from others and thinking for yourself. Both talents must be maintained despite the insistence from both camps that the other is pointless. In a sense, philosophizing is like doing homework problems. It is like the teacher didn’t already know that answers. The difference is that people don’t know who the “teacher” is and thus argue over who had the right answers.
You ought not contradict yourself because you exist. If you do contradict yourself as a male, you’ll get lots of sex and social status, because that’s what females select for, but it destroys the species, and if there’s some type of atonement that needs to take place for self destructive or contradictory behavior, ought is an is, because nobody wants to go to hell. Hell by definition is the place you don’t want to be.
Look at my debate with John Bannon about god where I finally checkmated his paradoxes… philosophy is absolutely about winning debates. It’s about REALITY, and the bullshit always loses.
Logical theorems James. No other options. Doesn’t matter who the teacher is or isn’t.
Philosophy is the specialization and proficiency through which people ask and answer the most difficult problems, ideas, contradictions, and questions in human history.
Philosophers are the ones who participate in this. And if philosophers should solve great questions with great answers, then will continue to ask new, even more difficult questions.
Philosophers perpetuate our craft. Philosophers make ourselves necessary. If all the previous questions are answered, and settled, then philosophers will provide new questions.
Philosophers don’t just solve puzzles, we create them too.
So long as people are living and covering new territory, there will always be questions. Intellectual work is never done. To add to that, many questions have multiple answers, and we have found new answers before by revisiting old questions. Paradigms shift and we extend into new dimensions.
Anyway, viruses are pretty cool, and if philosophy were a virus it would be one that replicates and mutates ideas with abandon.
I think you’re using the term “contradict” in some loose, non-technical sense here. I’m not even going to explain what I mean by that. Just try harder.
Philosophy isn’t about winning debates. Bullshitting or politics or some this-or-that some the sociology department might be about winning debates. Philosophy is about inquiring about and understanding the world as it’s available to you.