Why are philosophers so convinced that unicorns don't exist?

[ArtMinded]

When I was in college I was a philosophy major for four semesters and I heard in multiple classes from multiple professors that unicorns supposedly do not exist. Unicorns also had their own section in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on "Non-Existent Objects." This was one of the reasons I switched to a different major. Humans have only a limited knowledge of the world around us so why do philosophers think they can know something like this? Saying that unicorns don't exist also seems to go against what I thought metaphysics was supposed to be. Shouldn't the philosopher practicing metaphysics start out with no assumptions about what does or doesn't exist? Why can't philosophers just admit that they don't know whether unicorns exist or not?

 

[Salvador]

When I was in college I was a philosophy major for four semesters and I heard in multiple classes from multiple professors that unicorns supposedly do not exist. Unicorns also had their own section in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on "Non-Existent Objects." This was one of the reasons I switched to a different major. Humans have only a limited knowledge of the world around us so why do philosophers think they can know something like this? Saying that unicorns don't exist also seems to go against what I thought metaphysics was supposed to be. Shouldn't the philosopher practicing metaphysics start out with no assumptions about what does or doesn't exist? Why can't philosophers just admit that they don't know whether unicorns exist or not?

"A 2018 study indicated that the extinction of E. sibiricum occurred about 39,000 years BP, prior to the last glacial maximum and much more recently than the 200,000 years BP date previously assumed. This timing is roughly coincident with a shift to a cooler climate, which resulted in replacement of grasses and herbs by lichens and mosses over a wide area from Eastern Europe to China, as well as with the replacement of Homo neanderthalensis by H. sapiens in the area."

Reference: Kosintsev, P.; Mitchell, K. J.; Devièse, T.; van der Plicht, J.; Kuitems, M.; Petrova, E.; Tikhonov, A.; Higham, T.; Comeskey, D.; Turney, C.; Cooper, A.; van Kolfschoten, T.; Stuart, A. J.; Lister, A. M. (2018). "Evolution and extinction of the giant rhinoceros Elasmotherium sibiricum sheds light on late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions". Nature Ecology & Evolution. 3 (1): 31–38. doi:10.1038/s41559-018-0722-0. PMID 30478308.

When philosophers claim unicorns don't really exist, they mean that they went extinct on Earth and no longer exist here. They don't claim to know that unicorns don't actually exist now on planets beyond our solar system. Right?

 

[Brickjectivity]

When I was in college I was a philosophy major for four semesters and I heard in multiple classes from multiple professors that unicorns supposedly do not exist. Unicorns also had their own section in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on "Non-Existent Objects." This was one of the reasons I switched to a different major. Humans have only a limited knowledge of the world around us so why do philosophers think they can know something like this? Saying that unicorns don't exist also seems to go against what I thought metaphysics was supposed to be. Shouldn't the philosopher practicing metaphysics start out with no assumptions about what does or doesn't exist? Why can't philosophers just admit that they don't know whether unicorns exist or not?

Philosophy deals with the known. That is where it begins, and then it tries to proceed from there to make the most of what is known. Its like cooking. You don't just dump all of the known ingredients in and come up with something tasty. Its rare that you accidentally invent a new kind of food. You have to develop it. Ideas are similar. They are developed with small changes. In Philosophy you have to discuss ideas, and you have to come up with arguments that people respect.

Anyways unicorns are tangential to a Philosophy degree. It sounds like you wanted your professor to stick up for unicorns, but you couldn't show them one or come up with an argument that they exist.

 

[SalixIncendium]

When I was in college I was a philosophy major for four semesters and I heard in multiple classes from multiple professors that unicorns supposedly do not exist. Unicorns also had their own section in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on "Non-Existent Objects." This was one of the reasons I switched to a different major. Humans have only a limited knowledge of the world around us so why do philosophers think they can know something like this? Saying that unicorns don't exist also seems to go against what I thought metaphysics was supposed to be. Shouldn't the philosopher practicing metaphysics start out with no assumptions about what does or doesn't exist? Why can't philosophers just admit that they don't know whether unicorns exist or not?

Because evidence of absence is a thing (not to be confused with absence of evidence).

Evidence of absence - Wikipedia

 

[dianaiad]

Philosophy deals with the known. That is where it begins, and then it tries to proceed from there to make the most of what is known. Its like cooking. You don't just dump all of the known ingredients in and come up with something tasty. Its rare that you accidentally invent a new kind of food. You have to develop it. Ideas are similar. They are developed with small changes. In Philosophy you have to discuss ideas, and you have to come up with arguments that people respect.

Anyways unicorns are tangential to a Philosophy degree. It sounds like you wanted your professor to stick up for unicorns, but you couldn't show them one or come up with an argument that they exist.

Frankly, I think that a philosophy degree is about as useful as...as my grandmother used to say...tits on a boar. Not that I have a problem with philosophy majors, as long as they remember to NOT put cheese on my potato wedges when I ask them not to do so. Mind you, I have been told that "English" is also a useless major, but given that all other majors seem to need us to proofread all their papers and even to write them in the first place, I have to argue with that one.

That aside, the problem with unicorns is that 'unicorn' is a metaphor for 'mythical things that simply do not exist." that there may well have been animals around that people CALLED 'unicorns,' is irrelevant to that idea--except of course that if there ever was an animal that people around called "Unicorn,' then of course a unicorn is not a 'mythical thing that simply does not exist,' and thus is useless as a metaphor for this concept.

Which causes problems.

Which is an illustration of why a philosophy degree is pretty much useless. Unless someone can actually 'make a living' doing something other than teaching philosophy to students whose entire ambition in life is to teach philosophy to students whose entire ambition in life is to teach philosophy to students whose...well, never mind.

I've done my own share of navel gazing and contemplating the whichness of the why, but I figure that those who absolutely discount mythology as worth a look, or that unicorns, no matter what they might have 'really' looked like (rhinoceros, anybody?) are to be dismissed as impossible, or that any decent philosophy major would go entirely with empirical scientific evidence for the vagaries of human thought...

'scuse me. I have a doctoral candidate coming to see me in a few minutes. He needs me to edit his dissertation. The man is a genius, really, but he CANNOT spell, and has a real problem with periods. He doesn't use any.

Never mind philosophy. How about some required reading and composition classes for physics majors?

 

[Salvador]

I use the pink unicorn as analogy figure, for, once you find a pink unicorn, you cannot 'go back', to the idea of there not being pink unicorns.

The reason why this means something, religiously, is evidenced belief.

In other words, nothing logical about saying that pink unicorns dont exist, if you found one.

A pink or rainbow colored Siberian unicorns might have been cute and pretty, but this would have made them easier to spot and get hunted down by Neanderthals or other predators of theirs; a pink or rainbow colored unicorn would not have been well-camouflaged with their surroundings, this would have resulted in them becoming quickly extinct.

 

[Jumi]

They do exist, but people kill them for their horns. Thus activists need to remove those horns so they survive extinction.

The Bible talked about Unicorns, for example Numbers 23:22 which made European readers who had never seen one think they must be like horses. But why would the unicorns be so strong if they were just horses with a horn?

 

[Twilight Hue]

When I was in college I was a philosophy major for four semesters and I heard in multiple classes from multiple professors that unicorns supposedly do not exist. Unicorns also had their own section in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on "Non-Existent Objects." This was one of the reasons I switched to a different major. Humans have only a limited knowledge of the world around us so why do philosophers think they can know something like this? Saying that unicorns don't exist also seems to go against what I thought metaphysics was supposed to be. Shouldn't the philosopher practicing metaphysics start out with no assumptions about what does or doesn't exist? Why can't philosophers just admit that they don't know whether unicorns exist or not?

Why bother saying something existed when there is no evidence? It's pretty straightforward and simple.

 

[icehorse]

Because evidence of absence is a thing (not to be confused with absence of evidence).

Evidence of absence - Wikipedia

man, that gets pretty deep, pretty fast!

 

[Brickjectivity]

Frankly, I think that a philosophy degree is about as useful as...as my grandmother used to say...tits on a boar. Not that I have a problem with philosophy majors, as long as they remember to NOT put cheese on my potato wedges when I ask them not to do so. Mind you, I have been told that "English" is also a useless major, but given that all other majors seem to need us to proofread all their papers and even to write them in the first place, I have to argue with that one.

That aside, the problem with unicorns is that 'unicorn' is a metaphor for 'mythical things that simply do not exist." that there may well have been animals around that people CALLED 'unicorns,' is irrelevant to that idea--except of course that if there ever was an animal that people around called "Unicorn,' then of course a unicorn is not a 'mythical thing that simply does not exist,' and thus is useless as a metaphor for this concept.

Which causes problems.

Which is an illustration of why a philosophy degree is pretty much useless. Unless someone can actually 'make a living' doing something other than teaching philosophy to students whose entire ambition in life is to teach philosophy to students whose entire ambition in life is to teach philosophy to students whose...well, never mind.

I've done my own share of navel gazing and contemplating the whichness of the why, but I figure that those who absolutely discount mythology as worth a look, or that unicorns, no matter what they might have 'really' looked like (rhinoceros, anybody?) are to be dismissed as impossible, or that any decent philosophy major would go entirely with empirical scientific evidence for the vagaries of human thought...

'scuse me. I have a doctoral candidate coming to see me in a few minutes. He needs me to edit his dissertation. The man is a genius, really, but he CANNOT spell, and has a real problem with periods. He doesn't use any.

Never mind philosophy. How about some required reading and composition classes for physics majors?

Lets go further and say the real problem is that schools behave like the I Love Lucy chocolate factory -- and that includes universities. Its because the law says we have to go to school for twelve years instead of saying we have to master certain information. That is no longer a good school solution. Students don't have to master the subjects in grammar or high school in each 'Grade', yet we get passed on like chocolates on the I Love Lucy assembly line. Then our reward is a letter grade that exists only to remind us that we never really mastered anything, or if we got an A that we somehow did. Meanwhile the genius kids are falling asleep, talent poorly utilized except for the few that get into special schools.

You don't have to learn much as long as you survive 12 years of school. Its the law, and the education reflects it. Even if you get a (useless) 'C' you are pushed on to the next grade or even a 'D'. No one can help you if the material progresses in the next year, because you already passed the previous grade. I was a pretty good student, but I never knew what Trigonometry was until 11th grade? I had not a clue even what a square root was until 8th grade. That was the school system holding me back. Do you know that for about 10 out of 12 years of my schooling, every year our English teachers would teach us the parts of speech -- again ? Ten times I learned the 8 parts of speech. There's something wrong about that, and its because of what I said. The law requires years of education rather than educational excellence.

Thus what high school does is create a high demand for university education, driving the prices up and regulations down. The universities are like mice with no cats, buying land, building with stone, sprawling out like cemetaries and milking the graduate students and sports players for free labor, gradually working student fees up, tuitions up, food prices up, rents up in a scheme that projects growth for the next 100 years. That is the system you are teaching in, so yes its going to have some very strange properties. It does need Philosophy teachers and English teachers, too. In fact it needs an entire set of high school faculty to make up for whatever the high school system didn't do.

 

[Salvador]

No idea what youre trying to say.

I'm saying pink or rainbow colored unicorns, as opposed to a more natural colored unicorns, would be unfit for survival in Siberia

 

[dianaiad]

I'm saying pink or rainbow colored unicorns, as opposed to a more natural colored unicorns, would be unfit for survival in Siberia

I dunno.

Have you ever been above the 'tundra' line, where there are glaciers and such? Where the ice is blue, and the northern lights are 'all colors?" Seems to me that a pink or rainbow colored unicorn would do just fine.

Until a polar bear eats it.

But that's just me. I've never been above the 'tundra' line...just really, really close to it.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

When I was in college I was a philosophy major for four semesters and I heard in multiple classes from multiple professors that unicorns supposedly do not exist. Unicorns also had their own section in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on "Non-Existent Objects." This was one of the reasons I switched to a different major. Humans have only a limited knowledge of the world around us so why do philosophers think they can know something like this? Saying that unicorns don't exist also seems to go against what I thought metaphysics was supposed to be. Shouldn't the philosopher practicing metaphysics start out with no assumptions about what does or doesn't exist? Why can't philosophers just admit that they don't know whether unicorns exist or not?

They might as well claim dragons, leprechauns, Nessy, big foot, and the chupacabra all exist. They don't, and we have a very staggering lack of evidence to suggest they never existed anywhere outside of our own imaginations.

When philosophers claim unicorns don't really exist, they mean that they went extinct on Earth and no longer exist here. They don't claim to know that unicorns don't actually exist now on planets beyond our solar system. Right?

Cutesy wording and turn of phrases do not turn a rhinoceros into a unicorn.

The Bible talked about Unicorns, for example Numbers 23:22 which made European readers who had never seen one think they must be like horses. But why would the unicorns be so strong if they were just horses with a horn?

The original Hebrew word, re'em, actually refers to a wild ox (or aurochs bull). "Unicorn" is really nothing more than one of the many examples of how the English Bible is a very poor quality translation.

 

[dianaiad]

They might as well claim dragons, leprechauns, Nessy, big foot, and the chupacabra all exist. They don't, and we have a very staggering lack of evidence to suggest they never existed anywhere outside of our own imaginations.

Cutesy wording and turn of phrases do not turn a rhinoceros into a unicorn.

They do if the folks around the rhinoceros called it a unicorn...and it does fit the bill, right? "One horned" critter?

The original Hebrew word, re'em, actually refers to a wild ox (or aurochs bull). "Unicorn" is really nothing more than one of the many examples of how the English Bible is a very poor quality translation.

Well, if the original Hebrew word refered to a wild ox, (or aurochs bull), then a unicorn existed. It was an aurochs, a species of ox that is now extinct, I believe. Since when you you get to define a word so that it excluded any possibility of existence?

....and which English Bible are you calling a 'very poor quality translation?" There are, oh...about 350 of them. Perhaps we should follow the example of the Muslims and insist that our scriptures only be authoritative when read in the original language. Except of course that we can't do that, not having any of the original manuscripts, and not really knowing what the 'original language' actually is/was.

My only objection here is to the equivocation being used here. "Unicorn" as a metaphor for 'mythical, imaginative animal that has not, does not, and can never exist and is thus an example of illogical human imagination" is fine....as long as one realizes that the word CAME from somewhere, from an animal or critter that did exist; like the wild aurochs (or rhinoceros). They just never laid their heads in the laps of virgins, purified water and all poisonous liquids, or pooped rainbows.

Because what is happening..do you see this? Is that by claiming that unicorns cannot exist and never have, then nothing that could have prompted the word could have, either. No aurochs or rhinoceroses (rhinocerai?whatever) could have existed, either. Neither could the goats or other animals that some have referred to as 'unicorns.'

Figure out which 'unicorn' one is referring to, and address that without going bonkers about denying that any other sort could exist....or just as bad, decide that since an aurochs could have been a unicorn, then the virgin loving rainbow pooping sort must exist, as well.

Sheesh. You guys keep doing stuff like this and I'm going to start insisting that 'gay" means ONLY 'brightly dressed" or "Happy." ....and can't mean anything else.

 

[PureX]

So much nonsense.

Exist how, where, and to whom? Without specificity, the whole discussion is just people talking past each other, and understanding nothing. Your professors should have immediately brought this to light. I think you were in the wrong philosophy school.

 

[Salvador]

They might as well claim dragons, leprechauns, Nessy, big foot, and the chupacabra all exist. They don't, and we have a very staggering lack of evidence to suggest they never existed anywhere outside of our own imaginations.

Cutesy wording and turn of phrases do not turn a rhinoceros into a unicorn.

The original Hebrew word, re'em, actually refers to a wild ox (or aurochs bull). "Unicorn" is really nothing more than one of the many examples of how the English Bible is a very poor quality translation.

Rhinoceros do have a strong resemblance to unicorns; rhinoceros may indeed be the source of inspiration for the mythological tales of unicorns. The Siberian rhino in particular would have looked very much like a unicorn; they are very similar with each other in shape and size.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

They do if the folks around the rhinoceros called it a unicorn...and it does fit the bill, right? "One horned" critter?

Except they didn't call it a unicorn.

Rhinoceros do have a strong resemblance to unicorns;

The two have nothing in common, and literally the original Hebrew word does not imply or mean either creature.

The Siberian rhino in particular would have looked very much like a unicorn; they are very similar with each other in shape and size.

Rhinoceros:

Unicorn:

Re'em (auroch bull) (the original Hebrew word used by those next to the creature in question)

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Well, if the original Hebrew word refered to a wild ox, (or aurochs bull), then a unicorn existed. It was an aurochs, a species of ox that is now extinct, I believe. Since when you you get to define a word so that it excluded any possibility of existence?

They WERE NOT unicorns. The word unicorn shouldn't even appear in the English Bible, and indeed many contemporary translations have replaced unicorn with wild ox, which is far more accurate than unicorn.

 

[Salvador]

Except they didn't call it a unicorn.

The two have nothing in common, and literally the original Hebrew word does not imply or mean either creature.

Rhinoceros:

Unicorn:

Re'em (auroch bull) (the original Hebrew word used by those next to the creature in question)

"What’s four metres long, 2.5 metres high, weighs 3.5 tonnes and has a preposterously large horn in the middle of its face? A really massive unicorn, that’s what.

Research published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution has now uncovered the details of the life, history and extinction of a spectacular species dubbed the “Siberian Unicorn”. .."

Unicorns did exist – until they didn’t | Cosmos

 

[Willamena]

…This was one of the reasons I switched to a different major. Humans have only a limited knowledge of the world around us so why do philosophers think they can know something like this?

That's very philosophical of you.

Shame you switched majors.

Shouldn't the philosopher practicing metaphysics start out with no assumptions about what does or doesn't exist? Why can't philosophers just admit that they don't know whether unicorns exist or not?

If they did, they wouldn't be philosophers.