*eyes shellfish warily* LOL. This really needs to be an icon.
Most of this comment is the stuff I am most having trouble replying to. I feel you are asking the question 'up or down' and as far as I'm concerned the answer is 'marmalade'. For me cogito ergo sum isn't an observation it is just an irrelevant Latin tag. If I want to understand the origins of thought I look to biology, ecology and cultural evolution, not philosophy. Philosophy is not useless, because no intellectual endeavour is useless, but it frequently strikes me as irrelevant. In the past philosophy was used to approach problems that had no alternative approach, and one of those was the origin and nature of thought itself, but since philosophy developed into natural philosophy, and then into the modern disciplines of science, the answer has become 'marmalade' and the questions so completely divorced from the original one that the philosophical approach just becomes a suduko puzzle - enjoyable in its own right, satisfying to find a consistent answer for, but that is all. So philosophise away, I am all in favour of it, were it in my power I would cheerfully vote university grants to support it and make it a compulsory element on everyone's curriculum, because thinking about thinking is a valuable mental exercise and highly enjoyable, and good and important and vital things have arisen from philosophy in the past and doubtless will do so again, but... when I see someone actually basing their beliefs on something that is not rooted in empirical observation in a way at least vaguely similar to my own, well then I am left very puzzled, and with that niggling sense (which I suspect most of us are prone to) that the other chap can't really mean what they say.
no subject
LOL. This really needs to be an icon.
Most of this comment is the stuff I am most having trouble replying to. I feel you are asking the question 'up or down' and as far as I'm concerned the answer is 'marmalade'. For me cogito ergo sum isn't an observation it is just an irrelevant Latin tag. If I want to understand the origins of thought I look to biology, ecology and cultural evolution, not philosophy. Philosophy is not useless, because no intellectual endeavour is useless, but it frequently strikes me as irrelevant. In the past philosophy was used to approach problems that had no alternative approach, and one of those was the origin and nature of thought itself, but since philosophy developed into natural philosophy, and then into the modern disciplines of science, the answer has become 'marmalade' and the questions so completely divorced from the original one that the philosophical approach just becomes a suduko puzzle - enjoyable in its own right, satisfying to find a consistent answer for, but that is all. So philosophise away, I am all in favour of it, were it in my power I would cheerfully vote university grants to support it and make it a compulsory element on everyone's curriculum, because thinking about thinking is a valuable mental exercise and highly enjoyable, and good and important and vital things have arisen from philosophy in the past and doubtless will do so again, but... when I see someone actually basing their beliefs on something that is not rooted in empirical observation in a way at least vaguely similar to my own, well then I am left very puzzled, and with that niggling sense (which I suspect most of us are prone to) that the other chap can't really mean what they say.