Fwd: The Invention of Philosophy

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Brent Meeker

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Oct 6, 2020, 4:24:19 PM10/6/20
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Lawrence Crowell

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Oct 6, 2020, 7:18:17 PM10/6/20
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Philosophy really means love of sophistry, philos sophist. Socrates objected terribly to the notion he was a sophist. His main rival was Gorgias, a sophist.

LC

On Tuesday, October 6, 2020 at 3:24:19 PM UTC-5 Brent wrote:

Philip Thrift

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Oct 7, 2020, 6:30:00 AM10/7/20
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I'm in agreement with the certain Wittgensteinian brand that sees the only thing philosophy is good for is just to "clarify" the word messes other subjects make.


Philosophy as an Activity of Clarification

Wittgenstein emphasizes the difference between his philosophy and traditional philosophy by saying that his philosophy is an activity rather than a body of doctrine. We can identify definite positions and theories in the writings of most traditional philosophers but not with Wittgenstein. In fact, Wittgenstein’s writings are distinctly antitheoretical: he believes that the very idea of a philosophical theory is a sign of confusion. He conceives of the role of philosophy as an activity by which we unravel the sorts of confusion that manifest themselves in traditional philosophy. This activity carries with it no theories or doctrines but rather aims at reaching a point where theories and doctrines cease to confuse us. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes, “the work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.” That is, his ideal philosopher works to remind those confused by abstract theorizing of the ordinary uses of words and to set their thinking in order. The clarity achieved through this kind of activity is not the clarity of a coherent, all-encompassing system of thought but rather the clarity of being free from being too influenced by any systems or theories.




@philipthrift

Bruno Marchal

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Oct 8, 2020, 3:26:48 AM10/8/20
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On 6 Oct 2020, at 22:23, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



A very good on; …so typical vis-à-vis Pythagorus and what is called “objective idealism”.

It reminds me also the work of Emil Post, which anticipated everything from Gödel to the Mechanist Immaterialism, before taking this one back after a discussion with Turing, who was materialist/naturalist.

In fact, I have often think that there should be an error in my proof because, as it is technically simple, I could not figure out why Einstein and Gödel did not found it. Eventually, I understood why Einstein did not (I realise that him, and everybody, were genuinely materialist (through his discussion with Gödel and its correspondence), and Gödel missed it like he missed both the Church-Turing thesis and Mechanism. Another reason is that Gödel did never felt allow to take any position on Quantum Mechanics, to avoid to much hot discussion with the old Einstein.

Recently I got at last the Vol.4 and 5 of the complete work on Gödel (mainly his correspondence). It is interesting to see that Gödel was really deeply fond of metaphysics and theology… And was not materialist, which makes even more sad he missed Mechanism and its necessary immaterialism.

What is nice in the cartoon is that it suggests that philosophy has begun with the question “what is reality made of” (which is materialist at the start, so that this beginning of philosophy was … the beginning of “natural philosophy” which has become physics.

About this, with mechanism, the burden of the proof has changed of camp. Once you understand that elementary arithmetic determines a redundant web of all computations, and that a universal cannot know which computations run itself, except that there are infinitely many, it is up to the believer in matter to either find a different theory of mind than mechanism (and then which one?) or to derive the appearance of the physical reality from the statistic on all (relative) computation (which I did).

The path from Thalès to Pythagorus is a short introduction to the path from “physics is the fundamental science” to “mathematics is the fundamental science” made mandatory once we accept the minimal amount of Mechanism necessary to make sense of Darwin, which took the idea from Descartes (but was already present in antiquity).

Philosophy/metaphysics/theology was mainly the fundamental science before deciding the nature of the ultimate reality. It is the stealing of theology by the “political (tyrannic) power” which destroyed the use of “only reason + experience/observation” in theology, exactly like what happened with biology in the USSR. The whole of science has been “stolen” by the Church, and what we call the Renaissance was only the coming back of the natural science in the domain of reason. For the coming back of theology, it will still take some time, despite the discovery that machines have a transparent mathematical theology with the whole of physics as a testable subpart (and indeed, this is how I found the many histories nature of the physical reality, before realising that many physicist were already there (Everett, non-collapse theories, …).

Science has begun with Pythagorus (OK, with Thalès if you insist) and ended with Damascius. One half of science was resurrected with the arab translation of the greeks texts, but for the human sciences, we need much more “Sophia” (wiseness) than the current available one… As things are going, we might need another millennium of obscurantism before this can happen. Philosophy and theology, not physics, is too much entangled with materialism, and philosophers defends the curriculum of their profession … instead of searching truth…

The “post-modern” *relativist* philosophers continue the *absolute* separation between philosophy and physics, but this only to keep their job, and there is no “real” frontier between any science.

Bruno






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Bruno Marchal

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Oct 8, 2020, 3:33:29 AM10/8/20
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On 7 Oct 2020, at 01:18, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

Philosophy really means love of sophistry, philos sophist. Socrates objected terribly to the notion he was a sophist. His main rival was Gorgias, a sophist.


Philosophy is more “philo Sophia”: the love of Sophia (wiseness). It is just the love of the search of the ultimate truth, or of the first principle. The beginning of philosophy and theology *is* the beginning of science, and it basically ended in +500 after about 1000 years of Platonic academism, leading to the dark age, where we still belong. Enlightenment has only been half-Enlightenment, and theology, which was just the fundamental science per definition,  has not yet come back to the academy. The doubt about the nature of the physical universe is not yet open to free thinking…

The separation between science and theology/philosophy/metaphysics does not only make the human science inexact and the exact sciences inhuman, it makes the human science inhuman and the exact science inexact.

Bruno






LC

On Tuesday, October 6, 2020 at 3:24:19 PM UTC-5 Brent wrote:

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PGC

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Oct 8, 2020, 6:07:36 PM10/8/20
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On Thursday, October 8, 2020 at 9:33:29 AM UTC+2 Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 7 Oct 2020, at 01:18, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

Philosophy really means love of sophistry, philos sophist. Socrates objected terribly to the notion he was a sophist. His main rival was Gorgias, a sophist.


Philosophy is more “philo Sophia”: the love of Sophia (wiseness). It is just the love of the search of the ultimate truth, or of the first principle.

In the spirit of being inspired by the comic and being too bored to read the list, I'd say reality is made of shit, not of stuff as Thales woke up thinking... and philosophy is the activity of looking and hoping for the possibility of the existence of said shit... being cool/good or bad.

Because it can take many forms... the position of yours truly isn't distinguishable from shit, as we never really know if it's bad, cool/good. That is why philosophy gotta be though.

So there's another frame missing in that comic where Thales steps into a time machine to see if philosophy had any bearing on the present moment (to satisfy the itch of Wittgenstein). In the next frame some AI helps him understand the internet upon stepping out of the machine in 2020 and he goes "By the thunderbolt of Zeus, stuff really is shit!". 

This is followed by another frame of the comic artists and editors deciding to delete those frames because they want to relate philosophy in a humorous and family friendly way, even though they concede that the somewhat old school notion of the ontology of yours truly has some bearing on assessing the nature of the reality show on display currently.

And we all saw it coming a mile away Lol.PGC

Bruno Marchal

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Oct 12, 2020, 7:54:43 AM10/12/20
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On 7 Oct 2020, at 12:30, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm in agreement with the certain Wittgensteinian brand that sees the only thing philosophy is good for is just to "clarify" the word messes other subjects make.


Philosophy as an Activity of Clarification

Wittgenstein emphasizes the difference between his philosophy and traditional philosophy by saying that his philosophy is an activity rather than a body of doctrine. We can identify definite positions and theories in the writings of most traditional philosophers but not with Wittgenstein. In fact, Wittgenstein’s writings are distinctly antitheoretical: he believes that the very idea of a philosophical theory is a sign of confusion. He conceives of the role of philosophy as an activity by which we unravel the sorts of confusion that manifest themselves in traditional philosophy. This activity carries with it no theories or doctrines but rather aims at reaching a point where theories and doctrines cease to confuse us. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes, “the work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.” That is, his ideal philosopher works to remind those confused by abstract theorizing of the ordinary uses of words and to set their thinking in order. The clarity achieved through this kind of activity is not the clarity of a coherent, all-encompassing system of thought but rather the clarity of being free from being too influenced by any systems or theories.

Usually I avoid the term “philosophy”. If this word is taken in its etymological sense, it is the “love of wiseness” and this is not teachable through words and course. Wiseness is arguably a protagaorean virtue, which means that it goes only without saying, and it should be remain in the streets or in a coffee-bar.

But metaphysics and/or theology (I take those two expressions as synonymous) should on the contrary be brought back at the faculty of science so that we can use doubt and a critical skeptical mind in the domain, and keep higher the level of rigour and clarity, as well as imposing clear verification means.

The separation of theology from science has made the whole human domain, including psychology, metaphysics, theology mainly in the hands of professional charlatans. Obscurantism, and its exploration by tyrans, or by rotten corporations (cf prohibition) is a direct result of that separation. This does not mean that some philosopher have ket the platonician rigour, even when Aristotelian, but they are always rather exceptional, and often perverted most f the time by their “disciples” or by the academic curriculum. The subject of philosophy can very a lot from universities to universities. In some country philosophy is classified in literature, and in others, some part of it is taught in the faculty of science, sometimes as option, like “philosophical logic” (which means non standard logic, and is also taught in some course of Computer science, to engineers and AI researchers).

I am often amazed that some philosophers defend relativism, but want to keep a clearcut “absolute” distinction between science and philosophy, and their curriculum, where there are none, imo. It is just people who try to understand the nature of reality. With mechanism, this has become science. Note that a scientific is agnostic on the nature of reality. Physicist usually don’t claim to know the metaphysical truth, except that some are not aware that the existence of an *ontological* universe is a theory/assumption (which I have shown to be incompatible with Mechanism, in a testable way, and the tests add evidence to mechanism, and refute Materialism (for those not eliminating consciousness at least).

Very often, something dubbed philosophical becomes scientific/refutable through some progress. When I was young, many physicists around me mocked the EPR paper as being “philosophical” which meant for them “utterly uninteresting”, but they have to change their mind (and some did) after Bell and Aspect. Another such notion was the notion of microbes, considered as metaphysical until the invention of the microscope, which were at first forbidden by the first positivists..).

I have often read or heard that “modern science” is materialist, but that is only an old christian or materialist propaganda, usually by those who claim to have solved the mind-body problem, or even worst: that there is no mind-body problem.

Around all this, I would say that the young Wittgenstein was completely delusional (although not entirely non-interesting) in his young age, but more and more lucid on this when growing up. His “on certainty” (his last text I think) is better than his celebrated “tractatus”.

Bruno

PS sorry for the delays, super-busy October.












@philipthrift

On Tuesday, October 6, 2020 at 6:18:17 PM UTC-5 Lawrence Crowell wrote:
Philosophy really means love of sophistry, philos sophist. Socrates objected terribly to the notion he was a sophist. His main rival was Gorgias, a sophist.

LC

On Tuesday, October 6, 2020 at 3:24:19 PM UTC-5 Brent wrote:

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