I.e. 'progress' by pragmatic negations - making room for agency (pace Kant) - rather than by incrementally more general, or abstract, totalizing systems (or "theories of everything").What is philosophy aiming for, by what criteria would we judge success or at least progress in philosophical endeavors?
— Pfhorrest
1.2 Philosophy's horizon, at which it's always been aimed, is wisdom - habits of 'thinking well' (free mind) and 'living well' (free body) acquired through reflective inquiries & reflective practices. (By reflective I mean 'self-examining'.)
1.21 The criterion is internal to thinking & living since philosophizing - the exercise itself - is its [own] product, unlike e.g. chemistry which produces new & improved formulas or industrial materials; or painting which produces new expressive styles & artworks; or politics which produces new movements & social arrangements. To the degree, at any moment, a philosophical discursive practice has filtered-out pseudo-questions & pseudo-problems as well as marginalized the irrelevant/trivial, this [reflective-critical process of elimination] counts as "progress" of an evanescent kind, achieving topic-specific clarity. — 180 Proof
I.e. 'progress' by pragmatic negations - making room for agency (pace Kant) - rather than by incrementally more general, or abstract, totalizing systems (or "theories of everything"). — 180 Proof
I don’t understand this seemingly pejorative use of the term “totalizing”. — Pfhorrest
I don’t understand this seemingly pejorative use of the term “totalizing”. In all fields, finding common principles that underlie many diverse phenomena is an admirable goal. Are QM or GR too “totalizing” of physics because they explain too many diverse phenomena previously accounted for by separate, unrelated theories? How is not relating things to each other good? — Pfhorrest
In all fields, finding common principles that underlie many diverse phenomena is an admirable goal. — Pfhorrest
Philosophy, at its best, rids you of the traps thought can keep you in, so you can move on safely to what matters. Its a painstaking self-inoculation. Totalizing systems are like guys who steroid themselves against past humiliations into near-immobility. — csalisbury
https://poets.org/poem/hugh-selwyn-mauberly-excerptThese fought in any case,
and some believing,
pro domo, in any case . . .
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria,
non "dulce" non "et decor" . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies. — Pound
Generalizations avoid the nitty-gritty. — jgill
My plus-stroke taken, I offer a plus-stroke to you in return, a perenially recognized personality, with an invariable, quite-worldly, courtly signature. The offerings burnt, the room confirmed cool ( whose quotes don't you like path?) I can only respond by sayingI like that. — path
another aphorism path
You can't kill a discarded self by proximity to a marquee truth. I mean, heck guy, what do you think the import of 'path' is? — csalisbury
That the place beyond myth is itself a seductive myth — path
I'm unclear what you take the aim of philosophy to be, that your account of its progress is as you've said. And if you see attempts to do different things as unrecognizable as philosophy. — Pfhorrest
I, for instance, as outlined in the OP, see philosophy as something like meta-science: the aim of philosophy is to account of how best to go about answering our various questions, investigating things like what our questions even mean, what criteria we use to judge the merits of a proposed answer, what methods we use to apply those criteria, what faculties we need to enact those methods, who is to exercise those faculties, and why any of it matters at all. — Pfhorrest
The only thing "totalizing" about any of it is just a big picture of what abstract principles have what implications on all of those different kinds of meta-questions. — Pfhorrest
Yeah that's the move — csalisbury
Like I said, maybe I'm crazy, but I really do think that we are profoundly mythological animals and that our interactions occur within a shared gallery of types. We all play off on each other against an inherited background of types. TV imitates life imitates TV. It doesn't mean we don't love one another, but it does raise the question of what exactly it is we love. A beloved person is another vortex in the shared cultural stream, another critic of the movie of the world, perhaps a co-hero, and philosophy is perhaps the critic as hero. — path
As philosophy becomes safer and more dry, perhaps it also becomes the dry legitimization of an ordinary sanity that doesn't really need it. — path
The general worldview I am going to lay out is one that seems to be a naively uncontroversial, common-sense kind of view, i.e. the kind of view that I expect people who have given no thought at all to philosophical questions to find trivial and obvious. Nevertheless I expect most readers, of most points of view, to largely disagree with the consequent details of it, until I explain why they are entailed by that common-sense view. Many various other philosophical schools of thought deviate from that common-sense view in different ways, and their adherents think that they have surpassed that naive common sense and attained a deeper understanding. In these essays I aim to shore up and refine that common-sense view into a more rigorous form that can better withstand the temptation of such deviation, and to show the common error underlying all of those different deviations from this common-sense view. — The Codex Quaerentis
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