Philosophy

[omnisppot]

Afriend posted in his goals for 2011 to read some introductions to philsophy. Because I sent him a long reply on my opinions, I might as well share them here.

I just finished " A Begginers guide to philosophy". For the second time. At 200 pages each one is 3/4 cartoons and I learnt absolutely nothing.
To balance that, I recently read the chapter on

Comments

[digitaljunky]

An old friend of mine once said 'science is just trained and organised common sense'. I'm guessing he stole it from somewhere, but whatever - it stuck :)

Hope to see you tonight!

[omnisppot]

might not be clubbing tonight - might just go to a house party instead. Have a great NYE though! :)

[noondaydemon]

I dated a philosophy major (sounds military:) in my early twenties. He would explain what he was studying and I thought it was a load of whaffle. I have heard more interesting theories from friends, and a lot of it boils down to commonsense.

[omnisppot]

agreed - common sense comes under the "bloody obvious" heading. Can I prove the universe exists outside my own head. No. That doesn't mean it's worth debating. Of course it bloody well does. It's the sophists (hey, I learnt something!) that give the whole of philosophy an even worse image than the low opinion of it I think it generally does actually deserve :)

[untermensch]

Fucking spot on, man.

The methods and application of deductive and critical reasoning leads us naturally to the scientific method, which supercedes a lot of the content, as you've basically concluded. The philosophical writings and meanderings of the greats are often pointlessly, aimlessly tedious and frequently lose sight of the forest for the trees - in my experience anyway.

[hotel_noir]

I tried to resist but couldn't

[hotel_noir]

Take one of the most basic philosophical questions "what are numbers?" or perhaps "what are mathematical propositions about?" Of course this doesn't help with calculating the number of peas in a pot, but that doesn't mean that it has no mathematical relevance - an intuitionist Platonist mathematician like Godel has a very different relation to Cantorian transfinite numbers to a formalist like Hilbert. When Godel and Hilbert argue about the nature of mathematical entities they don't think it's a side issue to their mathematical work, they think those philosophical issues inhabit the very centre. Similarly when Einstein argued with Bohr. If you side with Bohr against Einstein and say "the theory doesn't need to make any intuitive sense, we just do the sums and it works" then you've made a philosophical decision about what science "is" that many great scientists including Einstein would disagree with. If you think "Bohr is the real embodiment of the scientific method, Einstein was confused" then again you've made a philosophical or