Owen,
I finally found your answer. Sorry! It was, in part, But from any direct experience, people appear to believe To Philosophize == To Argue Incessantly. I don't know which people you have in mind. I am sorry that you have met people like that who have claimed to be philosophers. Certainly none of the philosophers I have known or worked with have engaged in argument for argument sake. Whoever believed this about philosophers confused sophistry, or casuistry, or pure bloody mindedness, with philosophy. A philosophical argument is not a harangue. It is an attempt to rigorously connect premises with conclusions, to work out the implications of what one thinks or to discover from what premises one might come to think it. As I keep trying to say (sorry, everybody, for the repetition) , philosophy is a lot like mathematics. The good news is that it can talk about a lot more things than can mathematics; the bad news is that inevitably it talks about them with less rigor. Nick From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 4:42 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Grand Design, Philosophy is Dead, and Hubris On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 7:07 AM, Nicholas Thompson <nickthomp...@earthlink.net> wrote: Owen, Please. I am confused. What is it that you think philosophers do? Nick Well, to be frank, I don't think I can answer beyond they philosophize .. or do philosophy. And that it is broad enough to have sub-disciplines like Philosophy of Science, but in a sense, it is not a discipline at all! The reason I say this is that philosophers appear to avoid building on each other's past work .. they all start over so to speak. Thus the comment of toes vs shoulders and my questioning its being a discipline. This does make a bit of sense .. the world is changing all the time so that it should come as no surprise that philosophy must change. And they have done a good job of categorizing areas of thinking and being. That oughta be worth at least a C. So I find peace with philosophy by thinking about it as "sorting things out". Hence my liking Michael Sandel .. I like his pragmatic approach, and his ability to show the value of philosophy and its broader concepts. And I like how it drives me to quiet meditation on my own life and purpose. I also like how Noether, Weierstrass, Russell and many others used philosophic pondering to make gigantic steps forward in math and physics. But from any direct experience, people appear to believe To Philosophize == To Argue Incessantly. Forgive me, -- Owen From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2011 9:40 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Grand Design, Philosophy is Dead, and Hubris Personally, I think philosophy is on par with science. Good lord, how? Is it as empirical? Does it create as provably valid models? Or is it simply as worthy an area of study as science? I think the Par you are considering would not include your going to a philosopher for medical treatment, right? But they are in two different categories. Science is limited to negation, the demonstration that some sentence (or class of sentences) does not hold (here, now, anywhere, anywhen). Er, how does Newton deal with negation? Isn't a clear set of equations saying what *will* happen? I mean of course one can say, It Is Not The Case That F=ma Is Not True, but really, just how can we think of science limited to negation? Don't get me wrong, I have great respect for all the rich topics of investigation we pursue, philosophy included. However, I don't see that they are on par in any way other than you can study it. -- Owen
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