But I think people just aren't suited to philosophizing. As a species, I mean – just a little too dumb for it. — The Great Whatever

Is it that we're too dumb, or that we're motivated by something other than being good philosophers? I can't recall which radio program it was, maybe Science Friday on NPR, but there was a show claiming that maybe reason isn't about finding the truth, but rather winning arguments.

If so, then humans are more interested in sophistry.

What are the possibilities of democratic politics today? What is a demos? What is political action? How is each constituted, sustained, and undone? What are the forces that shape a society, and how can one think political agency in and amongst those forces?

All of my engagements with philosophy are oriented towards these kinds of questions, even if they lead me very far from them. They stem from my early interest in history and politics, and subsequently looking for the philosophical basis that underlie them.

I don't think they can be answered definitively - in principle - but there are definitely answers which are better than others.

Humans are more interested in stories than either philosophy or debating.

No, I'm really starting to think that humans are just not smart enough for it. Not by much – we can sort of grasp what a good argument is like, at least in principle, but it's just an empirical fact that even the professionals who spend their lives doing this sort of thing are no good at it. You can look at any major philosopher and find fallacies an undergraduate could point out in their works.

And it doesn't seem practice or intelligence within the scope of what's normal for a human helps. Philosophers seem to become more closely acquainted with a body of literature, and get better heuristics for sorting through certain kinds of arguments. But they don't seem to become good reasoners. A lot of the most apparently profound suggestions people have made are just stupid.

How many philosophers have an uncritical naive realist view of perception coupled with an epistemology that makes it impossible to defend? How many believe in some quantifiable notion of utility? How many believe some version of 'we can't get outside of our conceptual schemes to check them against the world?' These I claim are all stupid things to think, but the finest minds think them.

What are the possibilities of democratic politics today? What is a demos? What is political action? How is each constituted, sustained, and undone? What are the forces that shape a society, and how can one think political agency in and amongst those forces? — StreetlightX

I agree these are good questions, but IMO philosophy has nothing to say about them and generally serves as a propaganda arm for whatever the reigning political dogma is. People in philosophy just end up believing whatever lay people people, and for the same reasons. So it seems the discipline itself teaches nobody anything on the subject.

My experience teaches me differently. Some of my favorite works of philosophy are on exactly these kinds of questions, and I have learned immeasurably from them. With respect to these questions in particular, among the lessons I've learned are precisely that both politics and democracy and incredibly misunderstood notions, not simply among 'lay people', but even - and perhaps especially - by those who count themselves as mainstream political theorists.

I think that it's more useful to overestimate than to underestimate. People are getting stuff by you constantly, all the time. So much meaning in their actions, words and tones.

Everyone's the smartest one on the planet too. Unfortunately though, it's hard to see anything with our heads in the clouds.

Have you, though? We like to think we learn from philosophy, but after it's done it's hard to say what if anything we have. I think it goes double for political, which doesn't have any rigor.

I feel like saying that I've 'learned immeasurably' from any work of philosophy is serious hyperbole.

It's not 'work' in the singular but works in the plural tho. Works that have made me explore everything from aesthetics to ethics, power and desire, religion and art. It's really not hyperbole.

The political just happens to be the focus imaginarius of all of it, as it were.

Humans are more interested in stories than either philosophy or debating. — Baden

That's certainly true.

"With respect to these questions in particular, among the lessons I've learned are precisely that both politics and democracy and incredibly misunderstood notions, not simply among 'lay people', but even - and perhaps especially - by those who count themselves as mainstream political theorists."

Or rather I think it's a feature of society for the political theorists to be particularly targeted to not know what democracy is.

http://highexistence.com/wonder-terror-propaganda-modern-governments-misuse-media-manipulate-bewildered-herd/

More intelligence among the population wouldn't make rationality more potent. In the face of war, famine, earthquakes, or just simple cholera, faith makes people strong.

How many believe some version of 'we can't get outside of our conceptual schemes to check them against the world?' — The Great Whatever

That looks about correct to me...

That looks about correct to me... — lambda

What that implies is that the world is equivalent to our conceptual schemes, which would seem to mean that science can't work.

The problem is more just that we do get outside our conceptual schemes every day, and in fact it would really be hard to live ordinary life if we couldn't. Novelty expands what we're capable of thinking about and the terms we think about it in. We're always going beyond our conceptual schemes and comparing them with the world – we have to do it even just to mature ordinarily as biological organisms.

But entire traditions are built around not recognizing this obvious fact. As someone who was in the thrall of the position before, seeing how stupid it is now, I can't really articulate why it was convincing to me. My only explanation is that people sort of hear platitudes and are convinced by them.

But entire traditions are built around not recognizing this obvious fact. As someone who was in the thrall of the position before, seeing how stupid it is now, I can't really articulate why it was convincing to me. My only explanation is that people sort of hear platitudes and are convinced by them. — The Great Whatever

Maybe part of the problem was that Kant promoted fixed, fundamental categories of thought in response to Hume's radical empiricism instead of a more fluid model. Because it's quite clear that human categories of thought change quite a bit over time. Including our concepts of time and space.

Kant's claims are absurd once you begin to think about them a bit, and he himself starts to crack a little when he talks about the noumenon as negative, the solipsism he ends up being implicitly committed to, and the 'facticity' of the unchanging categories. As to the latter point, even the most basic questions are embarrassing: did human beings develop their faculties? In a sense, that cannot be, and the Kantian transcendentalist has the clever answer that of course time is contained within these faculties, so a Kantian perspective renders the question confused, since change happens within time and thus the very notion of the categories/form of intuitions 'changing' is ill-conceived. But it is Kant who is confused.

Some of the neo-Kantians, as I understand it, introduced a kind of historicism into the transcendental machinery and allowed for their development. But unless one posits an infallible logic as to how this development occurs, which amounts to positing a higher-order faculty of faculties, the problems repeat, and in order to truly solve them one needs to abandon the Kantian presuppositions. It is an interesting question why anyone was ever convinced by Kant, or any other such philosopher who makes similar such claims. It could be that the notion of a set of 'rules' by which everything works, and into which everything must fit, is inherently attractive to the ordering mind, and the equation of these rules with the operation of the mind itself, to ensure a closed circle of inquiry, is the logical end-game of any totalizing project of thought. But whatever it may be, it looks like a symptom of people just not being very good at thinking. Kantianism 'solves' a number of arcane and pointless puzzles while making ordinary existence utterly inexplicable.

What is interesting, then, is to go back to those little sentences philosophers write and ask, 'really?' Anyone who asks 'really?' to the Kantian dictum that we can't get outside our faculties I think won't return with a positive answer.

Anyone who asks 'really?' to the Kantian dictum that we can't get outside our faculties I think won't return with a positive answer. — The Great Whatever

Really? And what could it mean for us to "get outside our faculties"? I think it's far more likely that you are just confused about Kant, than that Kant was "simply stupid" and "not a very good thinker".

And what could it mean for us to "get outside our faculties"? — John

It could mean, for example, learning something you didn't know before. We constantly acclimate to new ways of thinking due to outside influences shaping our thoughts.

Things learned remain 'within our faculties, though, don't they? As far as I am aware, Kant never denies that there are "outside influences shaping our thoughts".

Not that I can see. It's obvious that we can learn to think about things in new ways. So why isn't this getting out of our faculties to compare them to the world? The Kantian/etc. must answer 'because there is a yet higher-level unchanging generalization about the way we must think.' But we have no examples of such higher generalizations, and so as of yet no reason to believe in them. In fact a child has to maturate to acquire pretty much all of our conceptual faculties to begin with, which seems to be solid evidence against the notion.

I can't see how the fact that we must think our faculties are affected by influences outside them, entails that we "get outside our faculties" in in order to compare them, as it were, side by side with the outside influences, and to be able to see precisely how the former is influenced by the latter. This would entail that we could get entirely outside our faculties which would seem to mean that we would be left with no faculties at all and yet be able to compare things, which seems an unthinkable contradiction.

This is why the outside influences are transcendental.We do know the in itself as the for us, and we have very good reason to believe that this is a real knowing and not illusory. Hegel 'corrects' Kant by pointing out that the in itself is only in itself for us. It is nothing in itself for itself, or if it is something in itself for itself we could never know it.

It's true that at any particular moment, our capacities will be whatever they are. But the passage of time allows them to be expanded, or changed, such that we do get outside of them.

To get outside of your faculties doesn't mean to be left with none; it means to have changed. And my claim is that this is perfectly commonplace.

OK, but I don't believe Kant would disagree that we get outside of our capacities in this sense that they are changed by something greater.

This is a form of transcendence; an immanent transcendence, where we constantly become what we were not (and hopefully more than we were) previously.

This is a form of transcendence; an immanent transcendence, where we constantly become what we were not (and hopefully more than we were) previously. — John

There's nothing 'immanent' about it. There's no super-facultiy 'inside of which' it takes place. Anyway, this is getting off topic.

To get outside of your faculties doesn't mean to be left with none; it means to have changed. And my claim is that this is perfectly commonplace. — The Great Whatever

I don't believe Kant would disagree that we get outside of our capacities in this sense that they are changed by something greater. — John

I think Kant can be credited with creating a ground zero for epistemology. Ultimately we can't know the noumenal in any direct fashion, we can merely suppose. But then for pragmatism, that's fine. We can build up quite reasonably from that.

So Kant leaves us in the position where our only certainty is of some change or development in our state of conception. And then we can either attribute this change to "the world", or the alternative would be strict solipsistic idealism. And that doesn't seem a hard choice given that believing in the world results in a greater predictable regularity of our state of conception. It minimises the change, the confusing flux, that we experience (as in for example the contrast between dreaming and being awake).

So we get down to ground zero - in the end, all our impressions of a world could be a big dream. Yet the way to minimise the flux or uncertainty of our impressions is to believe in the fact that there is the noumenal out there acting as a some external set of constraints.

We can't transcend our capacities or faculties to sneak a direct peek. But it is completely reasonable to think that if we have worked to minimise the flux of our impressions in any way possible - such as principally by believing in "a world" - then by definition, that puts us in the best position to notice further "facts" about the world. With our created backdrop of stability, we are now in a position also to recognise what is a surprise or some new change "out there".

I wouldn't go overboard defending Kant (as my position is essentially Peircean here), but it might rather flip perspective on his great "failure" over non-euclidean geometry. Could we have imagined bendy space without having already fixed an idea of flat space? It took the Newtonian certainty about the one to fully sensitise us to the other as a now measureable "objective" surprise.

All change (at least what we can be aware of) occurs within our experience, doesn't it? To anticipate an objection, I am including all future change which is not within present experience but will be within experience taken as a whole, as well as change that we imagine must be going on that we are not experiencing, or cannot, due to physical constraints, experience.

We could in principle experience such changes, and we do in a way, by proxy, experience them by thinking about them. But all of this whether direct present experience, direct future experience or thought about possible experience, remains within the ambit of experience doesn't it? That's what I mean by immanent. What is transcendental is what the in itself is for itself; which may indeed be nothing at all, and certainly cannot be anything for us beyond a formal category. In any case it is the transcendental in principle, at least.

All change (at least what we can be aware of) occurs within our experience, doesn't it? — John

No.

Great...whatever. This is where it always seem to end up with you.

Again, just read that sentence back to yourself and ask, 'really?'