playing the philosophy game
If you’ve never heard of Dresden Codak, the best way to describe it is like PhD Comics but with and a focus on philosophy rather than science and academia. And while I’m generally not much for the philosophical, it’s fun to see a comical take on nebulous concepts and thought experiments, especially when they’re combined into a bizarre and elaborate homage to the famous role playing game Dungeons and Dragons. (see full comic…)
Wow. You could write an entire book based on the schools of thought given a cameo in this strip as it seems to cover pretty much every major rundown of influential philosophical theories out there. However, one reason why I’d rather skip philosophy when we can look at empirical data, is because philosophical constructs have one major limitation. Instead of dealing with facts directly, they deal with our interpretations of what they seem to say and what our conclusions say about us. Why not just focus on the data and let the facts take us where they may? Why try to question for the sake of questioning rather than prove something empirically? But that’s not to say that philosophy doesn’t have it’s uses. When dealing with vague concepts like relativism and belief, both of which tend to either fall beyond the realm of science or be immune to it, philosophy is all we have.
Man, you concrete thinking, black and white empiricists know how to spoil a good time! LOL! ;)
Now where did I put my cosmic consciousness?
Philosophy has been of great historical benefit, giving us first math and then science.
More recently it’s spun off theology, which in itself is not useful but has at least finally been put into a box where it’s relatively harmless.
Now – so far as I can tell – the principal activities of philosophers are social criticism (yup, we still need that), the study of ethics (well, of course you & I have that down, but we could sure name a few other people who might benefit…), and epistemology (huh? big word… and how many Weird Things™ would you have left to write about if the populace were a bit more sophisticated in that regard?).
If those three items can be established as independent fields (the 1st is already there), the Philo Depts will be up the ol’ creek in that well-known wire mesh canoe without another budding breakthrough. Since these things so far have taken centuries of R&D, they’d better get crackin’!
Pierce R. Butler, I would argue with you to great length over your post, except that I think we’d be dancing over that ephemeral line into philosophy itself, which is an irony in which I don’t feel like engaging… ;-)
Nevertheless, science and math are offshoots of philosophy? Only if you count them because philosophy was absolutely worthless in providing real answers, and something else was needed. Both of those are empirical, which is one of those few things the various definitions of philosophy specifically exclude.
As for the others, you call them philosophy – I call them imperfect attempts to understand the motivations of human beings, something we hew closer to every day. Ethics is actually fairly simple, as is social criticism – the problem isn’t understanding them, it’s that we think there’s something higher than the individual human being, and all of their personal traits, as the prime motivator. In other words, we’ve been hung up on understanding them precisely because we try to approach them philosophically. Freud, with all of his errors, came closer to answering those fundamental questions than the centuries of philosophers beforehand. We’ve seen several new studies this year alone that show that various other species, including non-primates, have some form of group-benefit and empathic behavior. Only we then have trouble calling it “ethics,” because that’s our species’ domain. Get rid of the labels and assumptions, and we start to see how such they can evolve as beneficial (and yes, physical) traits.