Truth is the best humor of all.
Name something more humorous than ourselves. And if it is true that we are the funniest things in the Universe than the joke is that we take ourselves seriously at all.

Name something more humorous than ourselves. — MJA

A donkey playing the piano with one of those little cone-shaped party hats! :D

Well then, perhaps we're dreaming, perhaps there is no "external world," perhaps there are no "other minds," and perhaps there is no free will. And now, back to living. — Ciceronianus the White

But philosophers are still unable to determine whether life is worth living or not.

But philosophers are still unable to determine whether life is worth living or not. — lambda

Well, as I have proven to you that philosophers have actually answered definitely your skeptical problems, I am now skeptical of your skepticism on other matters ;)

Let's go back to the future of the new romantic movement! Don your cosplay and engage the public.

You're being evicted from the armchair and the cybernetic prison that is this forum.

That's a funny sense of humor! =

But philosophers are still unable to determine whether life is worth living or not. — lambda

In what sense, and to whom? This isn't a question to which there is no one, absolute and universally applicable answer. You require too much from philosophy if you seek such an answer; too much from most things I think, including science, which in many cases can't determine things absolutely. There are circumstances where life isn't worth living or where one's death will be of more benefit than one's life.

We do not need a reason to believe that we are not dreaming, that our cognitive faculties are reliable, that we are truly morally responsible for our actions, that the people around us are conscious, and that the walls of our rooms continue to exist when we are not experiencing them. Our common-sense instincts justify these beliefs, such that we would need a compelling reason in order to doubt any of them. — aletheist

So true. Somehow the assumption crept into various skulls that everything should and could be justified from scratch. Presuppositionless self-evolved absolute and final truth. It sounds a little like God. Hegel tackles this too. We are so afraid of error that we forget to consider that this fear of error may be the error itself.

But philosophers are still unable to determine whether life is worth living or not. — lambda

I'd say that we all as at least implicit philosophers demonstrate our varying answers to that question every day. If some crusty professor assured me that after a life of research he had determined that my life was or was not worth living, I'd feel embarrassed for him. I'd say that the reading of philosophy tends to the dispel the myth or prejudice that experts have genuine authority on questions of value.

isn't that really your estimation? I'm sure many people disagree with this assessment, so I guess that's why they continue to study it. In any case, if you reject the whole thing, are you some kind of radical nihilist on every question? :)

Philosophy has failed, miserably. Skepticism has won; by a rather large margin. — lambda

Skepticism is a philosophy. See Popkin's Skepticism anthology and his History of Skepticism, for instance. Or The Outlines of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus. Or the full-grown Hume's Enquiry.

Accordingly, I suppose when you say "skepticism has won", you mean to assert that skepticism is more correct or useful than other philosophies -- perhaps, more specifically, that it reigns supreme among epistemological attitudes.


I agree that skepticism is powerful philosophy, and I call myself a sort of skeptic.

Accordingly, it doesn't sound quite right to me, to say "philosophers can't offer any reasons to believe in" free will, or other minds, or a mind-independent world. Philosophers can and do offer such reasons, and also offer reasons for the contrary beliefs. Skeptics most of all, if they follow Sextus, pile justifications on either side of a controversy, aiming to surpass even the partisans, in an exercise aimed at the suspension of judgment by a sort of exhaustion of the power of belief.

More recent efforts in philosophical "diagnosis" and "therapy" aim to persuade us that enduring traditional problems like those you've cited are vestiges of philosophical confusion and anxiety rooted in outmoded prejudice. Such therapeutic philosophy may have a skeptical character or tendency.


What's left when such therapy has worked its cure? The aim of training is not merely to avoid or remove ills, but to promote a state of wholesome fitness and optimal performance.

The miserable noise of our public discourse is a symptom of maladies that would be cured by more of the right kind of philosophical activity, not less. The “crisis of humanities” is political and fiscal, not methodological.

I agree with you, that cure should mean more inculcation of the habits and attitudes associated with wholehearted skepticism.

The absolute failure of philosophy is a great example of how unaided human reasoning leads to nothing but absurdity. — lambda

Skeptical philosophy is a sort of human reasoning. What is it aided by? The same thing that all philosophy and human reasoning is aided by, human experience.

I'm biased as a skeptic, and it's hard for me to resist the thought that skepticism (properly understood) shows the tracks of human rationality, traces the form of reason, marks the outlines of a discipline of reasonableness, and is that very discipline.

Why does anyone still continue to study this nonsense? — lambda

I've asked myself this question many times.

When I started reading philosophy, in my youth, I had some vague, untutored notions about theological agnosticism and moral absolutism, and I was attracted to the art of Socrates. Within a few years, partly under the influence of confusing encounters with Hegel and Nagarjuna, I was drawn to a sort of metaphysical idealism. Increasingly dissatisfied with the seeming arbitrariness of that position, I drifted toward a sort of Kantian-inflected phenomenology, influenced especially by Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. I kicked aside the last vestiges of idealism somewhere between Bergson and Fichte, chewing on a "problem of matter" that set me on the road to what I'd eventually call "a sort of naturalism". I got a nice kickstart down that way when I stumbled into McDowell, and Anscombe, and Wittgenstein, and began to get acquainted with the analytic tradition we trace through Russell to Frege. And I suppose that sent me back to Hume.

In retrospect, the trip suggests one good reason for the social practice of philosophy: Some of us start out lighting candles in our parents' basements, inventing prayers and meditations and wandering the bookcases. We all start out in different places, exposed to who knows what customs and prejudices in the media, in the schools, in libraries and religious institutions, among strangers and friends and family, mixing like marbles in an urn, crowing like birds around a tower of Babel. The social practice of philosophy is inevitable and essential, not only as the expression of the great diversity of views sure to crop up in culture like ours, but also, more tendentiously, for the integration of all that dissonant activity into a more or less unified, harmonious, and organized conversation. Along these lines, I suppose there's some analogy between the philosophical fitness of an individual, and the philosophical fitness of communities and civilizations.

If skepticism is sound and valuable philosophy; if, as some of us are tempted to suppose, it belongs somehow to the form of human rationality; then another reason for the practice of philosophy is to educate the people and train them in a skill as useful and universal as algebra, physics, medicine, athletics, and meditation.


I've only lately come to that whole way of thinking. I rode my naturalism over a decade, sometimes casually and at a distance, other times in fits of energy. Through most those years, I thought it a waste of time, even regretting the Socratic enchantment that overtook me in youth and sent me on that strange distracted journey, even wondering at what seemed an irresponsible dissembling by the professors who promote this useless art as if there were something to it.

What's the point of practicing philosophy, I used to ask, once you've already got your bearings? You've lived on Earth a few years already, got a pretty good idea what to expect, what sort of actions, what way of life, those expectations most firmly recommend. You might be a naturalist, a Christian, an atheist, an idealist, a fan of Castaneda... what's the point of talking about it once you're sure enough that talk won't change your mind? In those years I treated philosophy like something between a filthy habit I'd inherited from my youth and ought to quit, and a pleasant pastime like music, or basketball, or dancing.


Since I never did kick the habit, my naturalism continued to take shape, pressed on all sides in conversations with friends, and strangers, and texts, and in solitary dialogues. On the one hand, I came to recognize the deeply skeptical character of the phenomenological foundations of my naturalism, and the close connection of the skeptical and phenomenological tendencies in our tradition, too hidden in the discourse of our times.

Why should anyone be introduced to philosophy by way of Descartes, without a glance at Bacon or Gassendi; or by way of Plato and Aristotle without a tour through the stoics, and skeptics, and cynics, and epicureans, the great schools of Hellenic philosophy in its most developed ages, in its most reasonable, social, and pragmatic forms? So you've read Chrissypus....

One reason might be, it's the more metaphysically encumbered texts that catch all the flies. Metaphysical controversy is the gateway to epistemology; epistemology is the threshold of skepticism. Surely there's room for that sort of branding without tilting the whole enterprise off kilter.


On the other hand, all those conversations informed me of the great diversity of views among the people. By sincere and earnest reflection on themes raised, and claims persistently asserted, by others -- so many of which are ruled out of court in the schools by no more than a well-placed snicker -- I became persuaded there are no "proofs" or facts or calculus by which the most fundamental disagreements may be definitely resolved. That realization coincided with my new appreciation of the power of skepticism, and these new insights reinforced each other. For where disagreements are most stubborn, it's skepticism that clears the way to common ground, no matter whether every party in a conversation adopts a skeptical attitude, or only one.

It takes a knucklehead like me a quarter century to get from lighting candles to the sort of skeptical naturalism I’ve come to practice. My views keep shifting while I’m at it, though I follow the same thread the whole time. I’ll bet most old philosophers agree it can take forty years of life or more before a body reaches what we might call philosophical maturity. How much of this time do we spend just figuring out what all this talk’s about, to say nothing of what’s at stake in it and what it’s for?

The philosophical activity we take up more or less responsibly in conversations like this, is ceaselessly at work in all hearts and minds, whether or not it’s noted, however it’s construed, however misdirected, ever shaping us through time.


Skepticism is not a matter of fact that one discovers by observation. It's an outlook and a custom that must be achieved and preserved and cultivated, or left to rot in the back alley of tradition. The cultivation of such customs is the work of philosophical activity. The personal and social value of such customs is the justification for the allocation of resources to that work.

If you’re so sure that skepticism is the true philosophy, misunderstood and undervalued in our time, and that we’d all be better off if the custom were more firmly rooted in our culture, then you might recognize an obligation to promote the cure yourself, or at least pay it lip service on the right occasions, as each of us has here by speaking his own mind.

Philosophy proves that humans shape the reality that they live in. Humans have made tremendous discoveries over the course of our existence and will continue to do so even after we become an inferior species. We have evolved from animals who have virtually no ability to discern "why" things happen. We can choose to feel emotions. We can choose to shape our own reality. It's the only reason why we use technology and science as a species. We would never have invented the tools or made scientific discovery without humans having will power and discipline to create those things.

It's why 1 + 1 equals 2 but the Fibonacci sequence (which seems like a insignificant sequence of numbers) applies to many things in our universe. Mathematical constants define the universe we live in, but we only have access to those mathematical constants if someone has the will power to bring them into existence.

The only reason why we even know of names like Jesus, Plato, Picasso, Tesla, Hitler, etc. is because they willed themselves into history, and the universe allowed it. Think about it. The (debatable) incident with Henry Tandey. The world would have been a very different place if Hitler never rose to power and you would have never known his name. He would cease to exist apart from the memory of his friends and family. Hitler would have never rose to power if he did not will it himself. No one could have put him in power just by choice. He would have had to work for it. You cannot be something if you do nothing. But being able to choose is what makes us inherently human. Dogs never cared about their ancestors or math or why they exist. They live to survive and then die - nothing more. We live to survive beyond life itself.

We're creating tools to evolve. You see it in the technology industry, pharmaceutical industry, industry itself. All human creation seeks to benefit mankind as a species. We're moving towards evolution at an alarming rate.

Just because a few of the tougher questions have stuck around doesn't mean it has no accomplishments. Philosophy is the basis of every problem we've ever solved as a species. "Hm.. I wonder what the world is made of." Thus atoms were first conceived. "I wonder why I can't get over this cold" Enter antibiotics. "How could we regulate traffic in certain areas?" Say hello to the stop light. "Look at the moon, I wonder what it really is?" We invent complex machinery to play golf on it.

Inventions and new understandings happen every day. Thank the curiosity called philosophy that has enabled them to be birthed.

thx for that, nice to have a sincere, personal, earned defense of philosophy. Needed that, for real.

LIFE is a joke.

Philosophy helps to understand the joke

So you've read Chrissypus.... — Cabbage Farmer

Funnily enough, Epictetus wasn't a skeptic though ;)

I agree with you, that cure should mean more inculcation of the habits and attitudes associated with wholehearted skepticism. — Cabbage Farmer

What exactly do you mean by the habits and attitudes associated with wholehearted skepticism? If you look through the history of skepticism, these have been very different, varying with the time in which the skeptic lived. Skepticisim, precisely because of its non-assertive nature, can lend itself to a multitude of values and practices, including religion (see Johann Georg Hamann) or atheism (Hume), etc. even in the same time period.

it's hard for me to resist the thought that skepticism (properly understood) shows the tracks of human rationality, traces the form of reason, marks the outlines of a discipline of reasonableness, and is that very discipline. — Cabbage Farmer

What is this "form of reason"? Have you been reading Livingston's Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium where he goes on explicating exactly this line of thought traced from Hume, in a somewhat Hegelian/dialectical fashion?

Funnily enough, Epictetus wasn't a skeptic though — Agustino

Wasn’t he a stoic? One of the great schools I mentioned.

You’re not suggesting we cite only those speakers with whom we’re in complete agreement on every point? In that case I might never cite anyone, including myself.

What exactly do you mean by the habits and attitudes associated with wholehearted skepticism? — Agustino

"Wholehearted skepticism" is a phrase I picked up from McDowell. Like many epistemologists in the schools, he persists in arguing against an old academic character called "the skeptic", a moldy straw man who's made to utter antiskeptical absurdities such as "No knowledge is possible". My employment of the phrase is ironic and emphatically critical in this respect, as I believe the old straw man should be laid to rest in a museum, not misleadingly cast as the chief antagonist in public discourses on skepticism and knowledge. On the other hand, I mean it quite sincerely, once we kick the straw man to the curb, the way is open to a wholehearted skepticism informed in part by encounters with prominent skeptics in the tradition, including Sextus, Gassendi, and the full-grown Hume.

If you look through the history of skepticism, these have been very different, varying with the time in which the skeptic lived. Skepticisim, precisely because of its non-assertive nature, can lend itself to a multitude of values and practices, including religion (see Johann Georg Hamann) or atheism (Hume), etc. even in the same time period. — Agustino

Quite so. When Gothic tribes who displaced Rome in the West at last discovered Sextus, the encounter with skepticism induced some Christian apologists to use skeptical arguments in defense of Christian faith. It seems one tendency was along these lines: If reason and science lead us to doubt the truth of scripture, the defense may employ skeptical arguments to make such reason and science seem doubtful.

We might say skepticism is always practiced from a point of view in a cultural context. Even if it were true in theory that, given enough time to move from alpha to omega, skeptical practice always tends toward the same sort of philosophical view; life is short, and cultural contexts various. So it should come as no surprise if two practitioners speak differently or hold different views while engaged in a similar practice.


I distinguish between the "habits and attitudes" most closely associated with the practice of skepticism, on the one hand, and whatever vestiges of belief may remain in a practicing skeptic who’s made some progress learning how to "follow appearances quietly" -- no matter with which cults the skeptic may have associated before his conversion.

I was a naturalist before I was a skeptical naturalist. That naturalism had phenomenological foundations I felt I did not adequately understand and that I hoped to work out. In the meantime, the view promoted strong inclinations in me along the lines of metaphysical materialism. Working on the phenomenological foundations led me to skepticism. In the transition to skepticism and skeptical naturalism, the disposition to metaphysical thinking was replaced by wholehearted skeptical epistemology. I now reject those materialist inclinations in theory, and argue against them along with all other metaphysical inclinations. But it seems vestiges of those inclinations stir in me still, perhaps influencing my thoughts, my expectations, my actions. As a skeptic I'm disposed to treat those vestigial inclinations as prejudices of reason, though bound to report them as among my appearances, until such time as the disciplined practice of skepticism should grind them out of me completely.

I suppose a Christian who becomes a wholehearted skeptic and skeptical Christian apologist might be similarly disposed to his own vestiges. But if he goes on to give explicit assent, even in his private thoughts, to claims like "A benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent, eternal deity created the world", and "Scripture is revealed truth", then perhaps his skepticism is not wholehearted.

For it's not clear how such claims would be supported by the balance of appearances. Clearing the way for a conceivable possibility is not the same thing as giving a positive reason for assent.

I also distinguish between any metaphysical inclinations and the sort of phenomenologically grounded, metaphysically agnostic naturalism that seems, to me, entirely consistent with wholehearted skepticism.

What is this "form of reason"? — Agustino

An excellent question, the resolution of which is far from clear and likely to cost a great deal of conversation.

I might distinguish a practice of “giving and taking reasons”, including reasons for belief or action, from the more basic condition of rationality we seem to share with dogs and other nonhuman sentient animals. It seems the human practice is supported by a greater capacity for abstraction, reflection, objectivity, imagination, and like those capacities closely connected to our power of speech. Along such lines, I might say the art of “reasoning” involves something like an ability to identify, evaluate, and construct justificatory and inferential relations among, for instance, perceptions, beliefs, memories, intentions, hypotheses, judgments, utterances, and other actions. The practice of this art seems to involve something like a capacity for thinking about thoughts, for reasoning about reasons.

Skeptical reasoning aims to correct the unruly impulse to unreflective judgment and belief, to strengthen the habit of critical thinking, by testing the justifications for any claim, by tracing doubt to its theoretical limit, by showing the joints at which conceivable alternatives sprout up for any claim, by thus clearing a path along which one may learn to “follow appearances”.

It seems the way to skepticism begins as soon as we learn a practice of “giving and taking reasons”. For arguably it is that very practice, taken to a sort of rigorous extreme on all sides.

Have you been reading Livingston's Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium where he goes on explicating exactly this line of thought traced from Hume, in a somewhat Hegelian/dialectical fashion? — Agustino

I don’t think I’ve heard of him. I’m no scholar and don’t read much nowadays, apart from conversations like these.

Interpretations of Hume aside, I like the grand distinction I just read in a blurb on the piece, between “false philosophy” leading to melancholy at groundlessness or to delirium at transcendence, and “true philosophy” leading to wisdom. I wonder if “wisdom” would consist merely in avoiding delirium and melancholy, or also in avoiding the correlate views on transcendence and groundlessness.