Does the study of philosophy ever lead to answers?

[beenherebeforeagain]

PLEASE NOTE: This post is a continuation of post #31, which can be found here:
Does the study of philosophy ever lead to answers?



@Deirdre,

I'm back like a bad case of morning breath!

As you might recall, I said in my first post in this thread that philosophy comes up with answers, only they are not the sort of answers we expect to find -- and hence, we tend to think philosophy does not actually come up with answers. But that raises two questions.

First, what kind of answers do we expect to find? That's an easy question. Here's a famous philosophical question, "Does God exist?" That question has been around a long time, probably much longer than we have any record of it. Our first record of anyone in the west asking that question only dates back roughly 2,400 years -- but I'm sure some people were asking it long before then.

So what is the philosophical answer to "Does God exist"? Shouldn't there be one by now?

Well, if by "answer", you mean "yes" or "no", then we're out of luck. The question has never been settled in that sense, not even in over 2,000 years. So, if we only look that far, and no further, then we are going to say, philosophy does not lead to answers.

But there is another way a question can be answered other than in such a straight-forward way as to demand a "yes" or a "no". However, this second way of answering questions is harder to see, harder to catch on to.

Try thinking of it this way. Imagine a beautiful woman or a handsome man. Most people are deeply interested in how beautiful they are. "We all want something beautiful", as the man sings in Mr. Jones. But fewer people are deeply interested in their personalities, their values, their tastes, their interests, their ambitions and dreams.

The second way to answer questions, the way philosophy answers questions, does not deeply interest everyone. But it is the second way of answering questions that philosophy excels at. Truly excels at. Kind of like a beautiful woman or man who is even a more beautiful person inside that she or he is outside.

So what is that second way of answering questions?

To put it somewhat metaphorically, "Philosophy excels at discovering the logical foundations of ideas." At least, that's the usual way things start, with an exploration of the foundations of an idea.

The answers it gives are along the lines of, 'Logically, this first idea assumes this second idea is true. If the second idea is not true, then the first idea cannot be true either." In other words, philosophy usually cannot answer the 'first idea', but it can usually answer the question of what must be true for the 'the first' idea to be true.

An analogy might be this: If you saw a baby, you could be certain that at some time in the past a sperm fertilized an egg. In more or less the same way, philosophers go around figuring out what ideas must be true for other ideas to be true.

Only they do that both backwards and forwards. They not only figure out what ideas had to come first (going backwards), but they also figure out what ideas must follow (going forwards). So philosophy isn't all that good at answering, "Does God exist?", but it can be very good at answering what you must first prove to be true if you are going to claim God exists. And it can be very good at answering what must also be true if God exists.

And all of that figuring -- both going backwards and going forwards -- crucially depends on reasoning logically.

If you were ever to study philosophy and the gods save you if you ever do, you would find that it has produced over the past 2,600 years, tens of thousands of hard, definitive answers of that kind. At least tens of thousands. Most likely more. And some of them have rocked the world. Some of them have gone off like novas in the history of western culture. Some of them have 'changed everything'.

Does any of that make sense, my friend?

There's more to it than that (There is always 'more to it than that', isn't there?), but my aim is not to offer you a complete book on the subject, but just to get you started on it.

By the way, I lied to you when I said I would tell you in this post about a philosophical answer that has had more influence on you -- and most everyone you know -- than has had the Theory of Relativity. That's coming up not in this post like I promised, but in the next post.

Because this post is already long enough.



PLEASE NOTE: This post is continued (and concluded) in post #43, which can be found here:
Does the study of philosophy ever lead to answers?

Very good...and so far, this actually does describe most of the discussions I recall over beer and pizza, under a starry sky, or tending a campfire, etc.

Maybe I'm just weird that way...

 

[PoetPhilosopher]

Philosophy mostly leads to confusion, but can also, sometimes, lead to truth.

 

[Sunstone]

My view is that even the second type of philosophy is best when it poses questions and points out flaws in logic. I don't think it ever actually gets answers. but that isn't its job.

I guess a lot must depend on what one means by an "answer". To state that an issue depends on the definition of "answer" is (I think) a valid point, but not the sort of response most of us enjoy hearing.

Here's an illustration. When Hume came up with the is-ought distinction, was his distinction an "answer"?

Hume does not tell us any of the details of what prompted him to draw the distinction, but he does tell us enough to suspect the distinction was his response to several or more arguments he had heard or read made by various moral philosophers of his day.

So was his response an "answer" to those philosophers? If not, what was it?

Seems to me, it might likely come down to semantics in the end.

 

[Sunstone]

Very good...and so far, this actually does describe...

Cool! In my case the details of my conversations along those lines are lost to memory now.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

I think there are more questions that get stirred up by philosophy, than answers. But might it be that our answers, are the only ones that matter to us, because of that inner pull to to see the world through our own skewed lens?

Tons of them. But, 99% of the time, the answers aren't what you thought amd let you ask better questions as you learn of new considerations.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

PLEASE NOTE; This post is a continuation of post #34, which can be found here:
Does the study of philosophy ever lead to answers?


@Diedre,

I'm back like a tornado to a trailer park!

At last it has come time to delve into a true and actual example of a philosophical idea that has had a huge impact on the world. The idea I have in mind for the task is 280 years old. It's an invention of the Scottish philosopher, David Hume. And when it was first published in Book III of Hume's three volume work, A Treatise of Human Nature, it exploded in the skies above western thought like a super-nova it was almost wholly ignored.

Yeah, you might have guessed it, one of the most influential ideas in the history of western thought failed upon its publication to impress almost anyone. It was like that quiet, shy kid who, whenever you see him, always looks so lost and abandoned that he just makes you want to take his hand and gently lead him to the lost-and-found kiosk in order to turn him in.

Today, perhaps one out of every two people in the Western cultural sphere to one extent or another embraces Hume's idea. Most of those in the other half have in some form encountered it, but perhaps haven't understood it well enough to have adopted it. The idea has at least three names.

The name we'll use here is "the Guillotine".

The Guillotine gets its name not only from the fact that it separates something, but just as much from the fact that the separation is final and devastating. The idea did not even begin to be 'appreciated' until at least eight years after its original publication, but when people at last began to grasp the Guillotine's meaning and importance, many people found it profoundly disorienting. But why?

In essence, the Guillotine severed their morals from what they were in the habit of believing proved their morals were the right morals to have. It was a steel blade imposing itself between their morals and the justification for their morals, and it did so with a ruthless finality. To the people of the 1750s, the Guillotine seemed impossible to escape, impossible to defeat.

Even today, almost three centuries later, it is orders of magnitude more widely accepted than are the efforts to escape or defeat it.

As an idea, the Guillotine is deceptively simple. It hardly looks anything like the effect it has once it is properly understood. Put in it's simplest terms, "Is does not imply ought." Or, in one of the many ways it is stated today, "You cannot use a fact to prove a value."

"You cannot use a fact to prove a value." "All values are subjective." "There are no objective morals." "Morality is a matter of personal opinion or taste." "Your morals are just as subjective as mine, and vice versa." "There are no universal moral truths."

Those are just a handful of the dozens of ways the Guillotine is spoken of today -- most often by people who have never heard of David Hume. The other two names for the Guillotine are "the is-ought problem" and "Hume's Law".

Now, as a perhaps interesting thought-experiment, ask yourself -- on a day-to-day basis, which idea impacts me the most in shaping how I look at the world? The Guillotine? Or the Theory of Relativity?

To me, it's the Guillotine. I understand the Guillotine. I only barely understand Relativity. So how can something that I only barely understand have a greater impact on how I day-to-day see the world than something I do understand? Hands down, the Guillotine.

I hope all of that has been interesting, and also illustrates the kind of answers that philosophy arrives at. Every now and then you come across someone who both understands the Guillotine and does not accept it as true. But no one like that has ever come up with something accepted as true by anywhere nearly as many people as the Guillotine. There are actually people in this world who do not accept that the earth is a sphere. But that doesn't make them right.

In my opinion, someday the Guillotine will be escaped or defeated (In fact, it might already have been) -- but most likely only in part. Kind of like how Darwinian evolution was to some degree replaced by the synthesis of the 1930s. The core idea of evolution has endured. The Guillotine will most likely hang around in one form or another for a very long time.

I've been reading...and honestly struggling...with some counter-ideas of late.
Harris I guess you are familiar with, but I don't read too much of his work at all.
But there were some other much lesser known writers self publishing things on Hume and in trying to develop his ideas. I guess that's what happens when you're a giant. People stand on your shoulders.

I've never felt entirely comfortable with Hume's identification of passion as a first cause of everything, which he'd probably find both ironic and somewhat laughable.

And as an atheist, there are limits to external factors I could consider. But some of what I've been reading is arguing along the lines of suggesting that Hume's arguments on passions motivating action apply to everything, and not just morality. That because they apply as much to turning on a light as they do to deciding if Nazism is good, they a therefore be excluded from moral discussion.

It's confusing to me as I lack formal training in philosophy. I am reasonably well read, but find the concepts kind of dense. Or perhaps it's just me that's kind of dense. In any case, it takes more effort than I commonly can afford.

Perhaps simplistically, it still seems to boil down to using rationality to determine a good definition of morality (eg reduce suffering) and that always strikes me as horribly optimistic and kind of begging the question.

Bah.

I think I'll stick to Pratchett and 'philosophy' rather than actual philosophy...

You had to choose. You might be right, you might be wrong but you had to choose. Knowing that the rightness or wrongness might never be clear or even that you were deciding between two sorts of wrong, that there was no right anywhere. And always, always you did it by yourself. You were the one there, on the edge, watching and listening.

 

[Samael_Khan]

I imagine it's a two way street.

he doesn't come across as a white nationalist.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Including his doubting of climate change?

Not come across his views on this. Is he a true doubter or just complaining about some aspect?

 

[Deidre]

I need to catch up on this thread. Some good points to think on. Sleep and errands get in the way of forum life!

 

[Sunstone]

Very good...and so far, this actually does describe most of the discussions I recall over beer and pizza, under a starry sky, or tending a campfire, etc.

While thinking about your campfire discussions, I just now remembered a time I got drunk and discussed Descartes' causal argument for the existence of God with two friends of mine who were both engineering students. It was a start to finish strange night, and the least of the strangeness was that my friends actually asked me out of true curiosity to tell them something "about philosophy".

But I only recall now what we were talking about because of our waitress.

We were not around a campfire, but in a campus town bar. When she dropped by our table to ask for more rounds, she overheard our conversation and was bizarrely impressed. "I've worked here three years and this is the first time I've heard anyone talking about philosophy in this bar." Or words to that effect. From that moment on, she almost hovered over our table. She must have wiped it a dozen times that night, glanced our way to check our drinks four dozen times. And she kept making eye contact, then holding it a little too long. All three of us were like, "What's going on?"

Weirdly, I had for four or more months previously been trying to get her to flirt with me -- no luck! Brushed off every time.

Alas! The night ended with me getting so drunk I gave her a $100 tip when I meant to give her a $10 tip. She tried to return it to me. Asked me three or four times if I was sure I wanted to tip her that much. But by then, I was way too drunk not to think she deserved it. Probably the only night that whole year I actually had a hundred on me, too.

To cap the total strangeness, the night ended in a genuine tragedy, which was just so sad I'm not going to mention the details here -- but the odds were maybe a 1000 to 1 against anything like it happening. An incredibly strange night.

 

[beenherebeforeagain]

Cool! In my case the details of my conversations along those lines are lost to memory now.

details are generally lost, but the typical discussion started with some aspect of actual philosophy and our experiences, and went from there...

Maybe me and my friends are just weird that way...

 

[Secret Chief]

Not come across his views on this. Is he a true doubter or just complaining about some aspect?

He believes there's an ideological agenda driving it. I don't know if that makes him a true doubter or not. Personally I think he tries to align himself with various anti-modernist strands of opinion and give them "academic" legitimacy. Bottom line is he's a psychologist by trade, the rest is just his personal opinion.

 

[Sunstone]

It's confusing to me as I lack formal training in philosophy. I am reasonably well read, but find the concepts kind of dense. Or perhaps it's just me that's kind of dense. In any case, it takes more effort than I commonly can afford.

It's not you, Dave. You've got a good head on you. But the further you go back in the history of philosophy, the harder it becomes to understand the philosophy.

I guess the analogy would be trying to read, understand, and appreciate Shakespeare or Chaucer. Changes in the language make that harder than reading, understanding, and appreciating Hemingway or Faulkner. In the same way, changes in ideas (and especially, changes in the ways that ideas are associated with each other) make reading someone like Hume quite a challenge. The pity is, he wrote in 'plain English' for his time.

Incidentally, Hume was also the kind of guy you yourself would have liked to meet. Pleasant, easy to get along with, agreeable, loyal to his friends, few hard words for anyone, etc.

 

[beenherebeforeagain]

It's not you, Dave. You've got a good head on you. But the further you go back in the history of philosophy, the harder it becomes to understand the philosophy.

I guess the analogy would be trying to read, understand, and appreciate Shakespeare or Chaucer. Changes in the language make that harder than reading, understanding, and appreciating Hemingway or Faulkner. In the same way, changes in ideas (and especially, changes in the ways that ideas are associated with each other) make reading someone like Hume quite a challenge. The pity is, he wrote in 'plain English' for his time.

Incidentally, Hume was also the kind of guy you yourself would have liked to meet. Pleasant, easy to get along with, agreeable, loyal to his friends, few hard words for anyone, etc.

"David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel"

 

[Mock Turtle]

He believes there's an ideological agenda driving it. I don't know if that makes him a true doubter or not. Personally I think he tries to align himself with various anti-modernist strands of opinion and give them "academic" legitimacy. Bottom line is he's a psychologist by trade, the rest is just his personal opinion.

Well it is true about the latter, but he is very knowledgeable, and I've not seen him deliberately lying or trying to present falsehoods. And perhaps it is more down to his views on hierarchies (and lobsters) that seems to put him in the right-wing camp - he usually tries to distance himself from such though. If he does believe there is an ideological agenda driving the climate change issue, and that alone, then of course he is wrong. I would be a bit surprised if this was the case though.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

When people don't find what they expected to find, they usually stop there, and declare that philosophy provides no answers, or only subjective, personal answers, etc. That's an understandable response. A very human thing to do. If you don't see what you expect, you stop there.

I'm surprised that you stopped so short! There is a corollary, just as important to how we humans think.

Remember the old saw: "you always find what you're looking for in the last place you look!"

Well, of course you do! Because when you've found it, you stop looking! So that was the last place you looked.

Okay, fun over -- I personally think that we do find answers, but still hold doubts, and that makes us continue to circle around, sniffing every bit to make sure it's what we expect. But sometimes, we also find that our philosophical insight seems to answer us in a rather more complete way.

My most simplistic example is this, and it's the one that very nearly every religion, and every philosophy, has seemed to discover: the Golden Rule, which I translate as "do not to to others what you would not have done to yourself."

Why does it work? It works because we conflate several things we intuit: we are all human; we are social beings, that depend upon one another; we can win over some, but probably not all; that cooperation might therefore be a better strategy.

And that was the last place I looked, for that particular item.