What Is Philosophy?

[bilby]

High tech, space exploration, etc, is the result of scientific research.

It can be. But need not be. The reason it is in our culture is because of our philosophy.

Scientific research can be done without leading to any technology at all; And technologies can (to some extent) arise without what we today would think of as scientific research.

The Anglo-Saxons produced some of the finest steel made prior to the Industrial Revolution - it wouldn't be bettered until the twentieth century - but their metallurgy was founded as much in superstition as in science. There were many parts of the process they used that could have been omitted, or simplified, without lowering the quality of the end product; And their way of doing things worked, but their smiths didn't know why.

They had high tech. But not scientific research. Their approach was evolutionary and intuitive, not scientific nor empirical. When a particularly good batch of steel came from the forge, they tried to reproduce every part of the process, saying the same prayers, working in the same weather, season, and phase of the Moon, with the same boy working the bellows, the same dog lying near the hearth, etc., etc.

The ancient world had some incredible engineering. It even had some amazing tecnologies. But to get to the moon requires not only technology, and not only technology backed by empirical science, but also philosophy - you need the philosophical understanding of why empiricism is superior to faith or superstition; You need an economy with large surpluses, which comes from employing a range of philosophical ideas from capitalism through to constitutional law; And you need to want to go to the Moon, not as a poetic metaphor, but as an actual desire and strong cultural drive - in the case of the Moon landings, that drive came from the philosophical conflict between capitalism and communism.

"Why didn't the Romans develop to the point of having a spave program?" is a philosophical, as well as an historical question; And the answer lies in their philosophy, rather than in their ability to employ science and technology. They did do science, and a lot of spectacular engineering; But they lacked the philosopy that resulted in the enlightenment, and later in the Industrial and Technological Revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

 

[bilby]

From this it follows that at least in part, the idea that science consists of objectively reproducible data is a fallacy. The data must be interpreted. And science is full of controversy over how to interpret data.

Reproducible observations are required to aggregate data to interpret. Scientific “interpretation” of data is ideally composed of defining support for, or falsification of “interpretations” (hypotheses) that explain the data. Certainty is never absolute, but falsification is.
Controversy is an indispensable feature of humans’ application of scientific methodology, it’s not a bug.

We have a cultural philosophy that says that science is a way to increase the number of possibilities - to make new things possible that were previously impossible. We couldn't go to the Moon; Now we can.

Clearly that philosophy has some grounding in reality. But it is completely opposite to the philosophy of science as driven by falsification. Science doesn't actually make new things possible - if they are possible today, they always were. The Romans could have built steam engines and railroads; None of the science behind that technology was unknown to them, nor has any fundamental part of reality changed since their time to make it more possible today than it was in 200CE.

Science proceeds, not by creating new possibilities, but by destroying old impossibilities (falsification). Just as a sculptor can reveal the statue that was always present in a block of marble, so science strips away the things we believe, that ain't actually so.

Every scientific advance consists of reducing the number of possible ways to do things. When we reduce them far enough, we can see the wood for the trees, and actually achieve things that were previously only potential. It's not until you understand why you could never get to the Moon in a hot air balloon, that you will bother to look into rocketry.

Science has made far fewer things possible. That's why we can now do more stuff. But if our cultural philosophy didn't include the false belief that science makes new things possible, we would likely still be building roads for our horsemen to ride messages across long distances, just the way the Romans did.

 

[DBT]

High tech, space exploration, etc, is the result of scientific research.

It can be. But need not be. The reason it is in our culture is because of our philosophy.

Scientific research can be done without leading to any technology at all; And technologies can (to some extent) arise without what we today would think of as scientific research.

The Anglo-Saxons produced some of the finest steel made prior to the Industrial Revolution - it wouldn't be bettered until the twentieth century - but their metallurgy was founded as much in superstition as in science. There were many parts of the process they used that could have been omitted, or simplified, without lowering the quality of the end product; And their way of doing things worked, but their smiths didn't know why.

They had high tech. But not scientific research. Their approach was evolutionary and intuitive, not scientific nor empirical. When a particularly good batch of steel came from the forge, they tried to reproduce every part of the process, saying the same prayers, working in the same weather, season, and phase of the Moon, with the same boy working the bellows, the same dog lying near the hearth, etc., etc.

The ancient world had some incredible engineering. It even had some amazing tecnologies. But to get to the moon requires not only technology, and not only technology backed by empirical science, but also philosophy - you need the philosophical understanding of why empiricism is superior to faith or superstition; You need an economy with large surpluses, which comes from employing a range of philosophical ideas from capitalism through to constitutional law; And you need to want to go to the Moon, not as a poetic metaphor, but as an actual desire and strong cultural drive - in the case of the Moon landings, that drive came from the philosophical conflict between capitalism and communism.

"Why didn't the Romans develop to the point of having a spave program?" is a philosophical, as well as an historical question; And the answer lies in their philosophy, rather than in their ability to employ science and technology. They did do science, and a lot of spectacular engineering; But they lacked the philosopy that resulted in the enlightenment, and later in the Industrial and Technological Revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Slavery played a part. With cheap labour readily available to do the hard work, no unions, no compensation, no sick pay, holiday pay, leave loading or rostered days off, there was no great incentive to mechanize, where social and economic conditions shaped the attitudes and thoughts of the leaders, the Emporers, the Senate, the wealthy citizens of the empire...that was a major factor that shaped their philosophy and held back scientific progress.

 

[No Robots]

Slavery played a part. With cheap labour readily available to do the hard work, no unions, no compensation, no sick pay, holiday pay, leave loading or rostered days off, there was no great incentive to mechanize, where social and economic conditions shaped the attitudes and thoughts of the leaders, the Emporers, the Senate, the wealthy citizens of the empire...that was a major factor that shaped their philosophy and held back scientific progress.

Slaver philosophy is essentially dualist: there are those who work and those who do not. Science is retarded here because it is work and work is denigrated. It is with monism that scientific work expands. Monism is a product of Judaism. "My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working." (Jn 5:17)

 

[bilby]

Slavery played a part. With cheap labour readily available to do the hard work, no unions, no compensation, no sick pay, holiday pay, leave loading or rostered days off, there was no great incentive to mechanize, where social and economic conditions shaped the attitudes and thoughts of the leaders, the Emporers, the Senate, the wealthy citizens of the empire...that was a major factor that shaped their philosophy and held back scientific progress.

To a degree. Though it's notable that labour was cheap, plentiful, and powerless in the UK until after the Industrial Revolution - Unions, sick pay, paid time off, and even basic safety provisions were a consequence of, not a precursor to, industrialisation.

 

[DBT]

Slavery played a part. With cheap labour readily available to do the hard work, no unions, no compensation, no sick pay, holiday pay, leave loading or rostered days off, there was no great incentive to mechanize, where social and economic conditions shaped the attitudes and thoughts of the leaders, the Emporers, the Senate, the wealthy citizens of the empire...that was a major factor that shaped their philosophy and held back scientific progress.

To a degree. Though it's notable that labour was cheap, plentiful, and powerless in the UK until after the Industrial Revolution - Unions, sick pay, paid time off, and even basic safety provisions were a consequence of, not a precursor to, industrialisation.

Sure, and when conditions for workers became incredibly bad, workers formed unions as a means to achieve better pay and conditions. Slaves had no such option.

Earlier times, a series of plagues decimated the population which led to higher wages for workers due to a severe labor shortage.

It seems that to a large degree it is the environment that shapes our 'philosophy' perspective and thought procesess.

 

[No Robots]

It seems that to a large degree it is the environment that shapes our 'philosophy' perspective and thought procesess.

Environment plays a substantial role in determining a person's philosophy. But also playing a role is a person's own nature. As Waton puts it:

Philosophy does not determine life, it is life that determines philosophy. Men do not live by philosophy, but they philosophize; according to the life that is in them. The life in them is their sub-consciousness. The sub-consciousness determines the motives for what men think and do. Hence, men may philosophize, yet they will think and act as their sub-consciousness will determine them to think and to act. Still more, their sub-consciousness will determine what philosophy they shall accept, and what philosophy they shall reject. They will accept a philosophy that agrees with their sub-consciousness; and they will reject a philosophy that disagrees with their sub-consciousness. And the same is true of religion, politics, science, art, and all aspects of human progress.

Few are able to free their thinking from their own immediate material circumstances and interests. "All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given." (Mt 19:11)

 

[bilby]

when conditions for workers became incredibly bad, workers formed unions as a means to achieve better pay and conditions. Slaves had no such option.

Nor, legally, did workers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolpuddle_Martyrs

Slaves, like other workers, frequently revolted against their masters, who were terrified of them for that reason.

Unionisation was effective in the 19th Century because the industrial world brought workers together in big towns and cities, where unionising could make them strong enough to win. In an agricultural economy, workers were too divided geographically to be effective as a collective in demanding better treatment by their bosses.

Unions were a consequence of industrialisation, not a cause of it.

 

[DBT]

It seems that to a large degree it is the environment that shapes our 'philosophy' perspective and thought procesess.

Environment plays a substantial role in determining a person's philosophy. But also playing a role is a person's own nature. As Waton puts it:

Philosophy does not determine life, it is life that determines philosophy. Men do not live by philosophy, but they philosophize; according to the life that is in them. The life in them is their sub-consciousness. The sub-consciousness determines the motives for what men think and do. Hence, men may philosophize, yet they will think and act as their sub-consciousness will determine them to think and to act. Still more, their sub-consciousness will determine what philosophy they shall accept, and what philosophy they shall reject. They will accept a philosophy that agrees with their sub-consciousness; and they will reject a philosophy that disagrees with their sub-consciousness. And the same is true of religion, politics, science, art, and all aspects of human progress.

Few are able to free their thinking from their own immediate material circumstances and interests. "All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given." (Mt 19:11)

An interaction of genes and environment, yet if you took a baby from Roman times and raised it in our culture, the child would not have a Roman philosophy or way of looking at the world. The same applies to different cultures in our time, take a child from a devout christian family and raise it in India with a devout Hindu family and Hindu culture, speaking Hindi, worshipping the Hindu gods, it would be a different child, a different outlook, beliefs and philosophy.

 

[DBT]

when conditions for workers became incredibly bad, workers formed unions as a means to achieve better pay and conditions. Slaves had no such option.

Nor, legally, did workers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolpuddle_Martyrs

Slaves, like other workers, frequently revolted against their masters, who were terrified of them for that reason.

Unionisation was effective in the 19th Century because the industrial world brought workers together in big towns and cities, where unionising could make them strong enough to win. In an agricultural economy, workers were too divided geographically to be effective as a collective in demanding better treatment by their bosses.

Unions were a consequence of industrialisation, not a cause of it.

The business class saw the potential in industrialization. And workers were exploited to whatever extent possible at that time, which became so bad that the consequenece was organization of labour for leverage, unions were formed.

The point being is that the conditions of time and place, culture and conditions determine our outlook and expectations.

 

[steve_bank]

Spence influencing art ? Let me think .. could this be aesthetics in philosophy? Does philosophy guide art?

I thumbed through Hagel years back. One thing I thought he was saying is that tere is ore to philsohy than logic and debate.

Escher's impossible waterfall and gravity

Perpetual Motion



Gravi9ty

 

[steve_bank]

Hegel viewed philosophy as
the comprehension of its time in thought and as a science that reveals the underlying truth of reality. For him, philosophy does not dictate what the world should be, but rather explains what the world is by interpreting its already completed process of formation through a rational, conceptual framework. He saw philosophy as the final, rational expression of the "spirit" or human consciousness, which moves through history through a process of development and self-understanding.

 

[No Robots]

^Hegel's great, the only non-Jew since the Greeks to make a significant contribution to philosophy. All the same, he needs a little Jewish reworking, which we get from Constantin Brunner, Harry Waton and Karl Marx.

Btw, it is tendentious to say that, with Hegel, spirit is human consciousness. Without going into too much detail, it is better to say that human consciousness is the ultimate manifestation of Spirit.

 

[pood]

Of course there is a whole philosophy of art. See Heidegger for example.

The philosophy of art goes back to antiquity. Socrates and Plato.

In the 19th century the philosophy of art gained new ground with the arrival of the impressionists and post-impressionists, who challenged the very criteria of what art was and what it was supposed to do. These radical upheavals led to the Fauves, the expressionists, Picasso and Cubism, etc.

 

[pood]

Picasso and Braque attempted to do for form more or less what the impressionists did for light. They were motivated by Cezanne’s experiments in flattening the picture plane and simplifying forms. All of this is philosophical, pondering what a picture is and what it is supposed to do. The general modernist sentiment of the 20th century became that pictures should be independent objects in their own right, not just representations of reality — imitations of imitations, the pictures in our minds being merely secondhand in themselves, since we have no access to any kind of objective mind-independent reality, but only our own private subjectivity. This all paved the way for schools like abstract expressionism.

 

[pood]

Picasso also believed art should engage with social concerns, hence Guernica among others. This is art philosophy.

 

[pood]

Plato’s philosophy of art, and later reactions to it, up to the modern day.

 

[pood]

This is a philosophical branch known as aesthetics.