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LOATHING_PHILOS
October 31, 2007
It's always fun to have
philosophical arguments
with people who don't
know that they're doing
philosophy.
Philosophy has a bad rep with many
people: It's often regarded as
useless, and indeed, it does tend It's always seemed to me
to be full of convoluted arguments that this is at least a
that never seem to get any where. bit unfair to philosophy
because historically
whenever philosophy does
But there is at least one "get somewhere" that part
useful thing that you of philosophy gets spun
learn very quickly in off as a new discipline.
study of philsophy: the
difficulty of coming up mathematics
with any real answers, We learn science
the near impossibility of nothing psychology
finding any where to from law
stand that's really philosophy
solid. except What we call
that we "philosophy" is
But everyone has learn the residue of
philosophic premises of nothing inquiry that hasn't
some sort or another, from ... quite landed...
there are just some
people who don't know it. "... as soon as a way is
And if you don't know it, found of arriving at
if you haven't really definite knowledge on
examined those premises, some ancient question,
you may not even realize the new knowledge is
that you're on shakey counted as belonging to
ground. 'science', and
'philosophy' is deprived
The philosophically of the credit."
naive readily jump -- Bertrand Russell,
into the same old "Philosophy for
traps, following leads the Layman"
long since discredited,
with no sign of any
consciousness of the
morass ahead of them.
And I was going to go on
about the dangers of
fantacism lurking in these
unexamined premises, but I
see -- unsurprisingly -- that
in the essay that I just
quoted, Bertrand Russell has
gotten to my punchline long
before I did:
"Some kind of philosophy is a
necessity to all but the most
thoughtless, and in the
absence of knowledge it is
almost sure to be a silly
philosophy. The result of
this is that the human race
becomes divided into rival
groups of fanatics ... "
And also --
unsurprisingly --
he's taken it a
bit further:
"But if philosophy is to serve a
positive purpose, it must not
teach mere skepticism, for, while
the dogmatist is harmful, the
skeptic is useless.
"For it is not enough to
recognize that all our knowledge
is, in a greater or less degree,
uncertain and vague; it is
necessary, at the same time, to
learn to act upon the best
hypothesis without dogmatically
believing it."
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