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

[hotel_noir]

What you miss is that philosophy isn't a bunch of ideas that you can pick and choose from like "labour are better than the conservatives" or "long hair looks cooler than short hair" and where there is nothing much to force you to pick one rather than the other except personal choice. Rather, in philosophy someone gives an account of "how language relates to the world" and it's ALWAYS wrong, always inadequate, and we can all have pointed out to us and see exactly why this account in inadequate, and once that problem is established we can all work on the issue. No one thinks "Heidegger was right about everything", rather they put forward a series of propositions that they think account for something like "the nature of mathematical entities" or "the nature of ethical obligation" and someone else then points to a major hole in that, they then reformulate, restate, its criticised, etc. etc. and eventually we produce sophisticated notions ranging from the grounding of maths in set theory to the ethical appropriateness of euthanasia, none

[untermensch]

This seems interesting and pertinent:

http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=11/01/10/1433246

[omnisppot]

Whilst this book may indeed be interesting to read, the following sentences worried me

[untermensch]

I've never read any Ayn Rand and I've heard many goodbad things about her novels, and I've seen her interviewed a few (nightmarish) times. LOL:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. -- Kung Fu Monkey

However, the discussion about what knowledge actually *is* and how it is attained and understood, is of some interest to me. There are far too many people who get stuck in the (to my mind) absurd and self-defeating mindset that, since you can never absolutely prove scientific theory, the veracity of imperical measurement, and interpretation thereof, there is therefore no such thing as absolute truth and knowledge in these regards. As if this in some way undermines our ability to understand, predict and utilise our environment.