Sunday, February 20, 2005
Cogito...
I have started taking my first philosophy class of my life, not by choice. It is an intro to Phil type class. And, what is my conclusion after the first week?
Two or three philosophy departments in the world could take care of discussing anything that remains useful in philosophy. The rest is a waste of money and resources that could go to much better ends.
The most important contribution of Western philosophy today, in my view, is just to remind people they need to ask questions, specially about anything that is value related. Regarding the rest, the social sciences have each grown in their various directions, incorporating the reflexivity of earlier philosophy questions, in ways that left philosophy (as a field) mostly asking abstract questions that have little practical use. Although a person who does not know much about a particular field can still ask some profound questions about that field, this questioning person will be able to ask even more questions or more profound questions if they know more about the field. This has not always been so, quite on the contrary, philosophers were highly influential before the explosive growth of the social sciences. But nowadays, it seems it's become one more vain and vacuous tenure country club.
So far, in my vast readings for the first week of a couple of Intro to Phil texts, an overview of 25 centuries of Western philosophy and a couple of specific foci, I find myself profoundly irritated about how ignorant philosophers are regarding human psychology. Philosophers have a crude and limited knowledge of the human mind and psyche, while all the body of knowledge put together so far by psychology, sociology, psychiatry, and others is comparatively enormous, much more sophisticated and complex.
Apparently this has gone by unnoticed by philosophy profs and students who seem to delight themselves in thinking they know a lot about what happens in the upstairs region of the homo sapiens. So I have already started the course with an expression on my face that says, "I am not amused." But still I am curious to see what discoveries lie ahead for me in the course.
My Intro to Philo is actually a combo of two courses, and one of the professors is simply excellent in terms of teaching and classroom communication. This guy was born to teach. Half of the class time, my eyes are glued on him, not because I am interested in any of the wasteful philosophy stuff he is trying to elaborate on, but because I am so very keen in observing how he teaches and analyzing why it is that he is such a good teacher, how he engages the students, how he illustrates, elaborates, throws out intriguing enigmas and answers tricky questions, so that I can learn from his example. The other half of the time I actually pay attention to what he is saying or think about other more interesting things.
On a personal level, most of the questions about fundamentals in life that big name philosophers inquired, I don't need to read about, not that I mind, it is, I must admit, interesting. Specifically regarding the big questions on ethics, either I have already asked them to myself long before last week when I read that some famous philo dude also made an eloquent and silver-tongued speech about the issue, or because I had already figured out some answers by other means. Then there are the enormous amount of useless questions that philosophers love to ask about "what is" (these endless recursive logic questions about basic building blocks of meaning), and it is like daydreaming or solving game puzzles, a nice diversion if you have nothing more serious to do in life.
My big question at the moment is what do I want to spend my life doing, given the enormous existing restraints and course obstacles? What is the most important for me to invest my sweat and labor to accomplish in the remainder of my life and how to do it? Near future, mid, and long-term. Given that I already have a good deal of the answer figured out for the master plan, although it needs to have a more narrowly focused answer, most of my remaining questions are at the practical "how to get from A to B" level, that is, how to overcome the 100 obstacles that lie ahead between A and B, then B to C, and so forth. And no philosopher answers any of that.
So, right now, my impression is, modern philosophers are quite tied to the chains of their philosophy cave in more ways than they'd care to admit. As long as there are high paying philosophy tenure tracks, they will remain very comfortably in their chains.
All in all, I am looking forward to see what next week's class will reveal in this grandiose subject. Undoutedly, there are lots of gold nuggets amid the remaining glittering cheap foil of Western philosophy. And the cave allegory was certainly my favorite discovery this week.
Two or three philosophy departments in the world could take care of discussing anything that remains useful in philosophy. The rest is a waste of money and resources that could go to much better ends.
Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.
~La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1678
The most important contribution of Western philosophy today, in my view, is just to remind people they need to ask questions, specially about anything that is value related. Regarding the rest, the social sciences have each grown in their various directions, incorporating the reflexivity of earlier philosophy questions, in ways that left philosophy (as a field) mostly asking abstract questions that have little practical use. Although a person who does not know much about a particular field can still ask some profound questions about that field, this questioning person will be able to ask even more questions or more profound questions if they know more about the field. This has not always been so, quite on the contrary, philosophers were highly influential before the explosive growth of the social sciences. But nowadays, it seems it's become one more vain and vacuous tenure country club.
So far, in my vast readings for the first week of a couple of Intro to Phil texts, an overview of 25 centuries of Western philosophy and a couple of specific foci, I find myself profoundly irritated about how ignorant philosophers are regarding human psychology. Philosophers have a crude and limited knowledge of the human mind and psyche, while all the body of knowledge put together so far by psychology, sociology, psychiatry, and others is comparatively enormous, much more sophisticated and complex.
Apparently this has gone by unnoticed by philosophy profs and students who seem to delight themselves in thinking they know a lot about what happens in the upstairs region of the homo sapiens. So I have already started the course with an expression on my face that says, "I am not amused." But still I am curious to see what discoveries lie ahead for me in the course.
My Intro to Philo is actually a combo of two courses, and one of the professors is simply excellent in terms of teaching and classroom communication. This guy was born to teach. Half of the class time, my eyes are glued on him, not because I am interested in any of the wasteful philosophy stuff he is trying to elaborate on, but because I am so very keen in observing how he teaches and analyzing why it is that he is such a good teacher, how he engages the students, how he illustrates, elaborates, throws out intriguing enigmas and answers tricky questions, so that I can learn from his example. The other half of the time I actually pay attention to what he is saying or think about other more interesting things.
On a personal level, most of the questions about fundamentals in life that big name philosophers inquired, I don't need to read about, not that I mind, it is, I must admit, interesting. Specifically regarding the big questions on ethics, either I have already asked them to myself long before last week when I read that some famous philo dude also made an eloquent and silver-tongued speech about the issue, or because I had already figured out some answers by other means. Then there are the enormous amount of useless questions that philosophers love to ask about "what is" (these endless recursive logic questions about basic building blocks of meaning), and it is like daydreaming or solving game puzzles, a nice diversion if you have nothing more serious to do in life.
My big question at the moment is what do I want to spend my life doing, given the enormous existing restraints and course obstacles? What is the most important for me to invest my sweat and labor to accomplish in the remainder of my life and how to do it? Near future, mid, and long-term. Given that I already have a good deal of the answer figured out for the master plan, although it needs to have a more narrowly focused answer, most of my remaining questions are at the practical "how to get from A to B" level, that is, how to overcome the 100 obstacles that lie ahead between A and B, then B to C, and so forth. And no philosopher answers any of that.
So, right now, my impression is, modern philosophers are quite tied to the chains of their philosophy cave in more ways than they'd care to admit. As long as there are high paying philosophy tenure tracks, they will remain very comfortably in their chains.
Leisure is the mother of Philosophy.
~Thomas Hobbes
All in all, I am looking forward to see what next week's class will reveal in this grandiose subject. Undoutedly, there are lots of gold nuggets amid the remaining glittering cheap foil of Western philosophy. And the cave allegory was certainly my favorite discovery this week.
If you've never met a student from the University of Chicago, I'll describe him to you. If you give him a glass of water, he says, "This is a glass of water. But is it a glass of water? And if it is a glass of water, why is it a glass of water?" And eventually he dies of thirst.
~Shelley Berman
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