Philosophy is Alive

And like that he was gone.

and this is based on what evidence, its a bit rash, also you have to remember science can explain a lot now that philosophy used to

And like that he was gone.

An example, then?

And like that he was gone.

And like that he was gone.

And like that he was gone.

pixcentrix.co.uk/pomo/post-s/post-s.htm

World’s greatest Philosopher Jacques Derrida…

Ha ha, who said Derrida was the world’s greatest philosopher?! :unamused:

“…writing books on how written text has no objective meaning and can be interpreted in infinite ways. You’ve got to ask yourself - has philosophy gone up its own a***?

Well, could one not argue that part of the essential goal of philosophy is now to tear down Derrida’s nonsense and set the contemporary paradigm aright?

Furthermore, wasn’t one of the major thrusts of Greek philosophy to understand and reign in the self, the continual struggle? How than can it be considered irrelevant? Psychology has not taken this over.

There is no such thing as truth.

Now, I have to ask a stupid question here (and if you’ve ever pursued Philosophy you should know what I’m about to ask). Quite simply, is this proposition true or not? If true, than it’s self-referentiall inconsistent. If it’s false…then it’s still false. If neither, then it makes no claim whatsoever…which then compells me to ask: What then are you talking about?

There is no such thing as reality (there just isn’t).

In the physical sense or metaphsyical sense? If in the physical sense, then who am I talking to? In the metaphysical sense, then you’re propositions (constituting part of philosophy as supposedly necessary ‘truths’) do not exist.

As a result of the unrelenting development of science and technology, philosophy has been relegated to the realm of Scrabble: wordplay.

Well, what about the Philosophy of Science? Surely that has some relevance. Secondly, I would dispute your categories and argument that Philosophy has been relegated. Physics, Logic, Ethics, Psychology et cetera are all specialized areas of Philosophy. Physics didn’t rob Philosophy of its speculations on movement and such, it came out of Philosophy. So too with Psychology (study of the mind), Ethics (study of virtue), and Logic. I don’t think this is subjugation, I think this is specialization. Furthermore, the etymology states clearly that Philosophy is the ‘love of wisdom’, not mere speculation about the Forms. Ultimately, there is not essential distinction between Philosophy and Physics, Psychology, Ethics, Logic, and so on. Essentially, all knowledge is of Philosophy and thus is enthused with the same vitality it always had. I would contend that the specialization of fields has lead to an unwarranted conceptual fracture that suggests to people that Philosophy and other areas of study (the aforementioned Ethics, Physics, and such) are distinct and separate from one another, which I would argue is not the case. As Plato penned in The Republic, “Philosopher’s should be lovers of knowledge without distinction,” (475b).

D stated:

If you don’t like something change it. You can’t know shit about philosophy
if you are going around saying that it is the same old questions with the
same old answers. Or your just stuck reading ancient texts and seeing just
how implemented they are in life - which you take to mean that no one
is asking any new questions or that new answers are not being postulated.

Do some research, go to your local library and pick out books on Metaphysics
and philosophy in general, then do specific searches into the many fields of
philosophy - but all of these searches should entail books no older than
2000. Then you will see that there are MANY more questions with MANY more
answers that are far from the past postulates.

D stated:

Well then you are just arrogant. If you don’t need evidence then you don’t
need an argument or anything for that matter, to back your claim up. Which
is to say that you are only here to tell people how it is and not to hear
anyone’s views out. If I am on target I suggest you change, or the members
will be quick to tell you how it is, starting with me.

D stated:

You need to be a little more specific. There is no way in hell that Derrida
is the best, overeall philosopher in the world. Very few philosophers have
been so ecclectic as to delve into all fields of philosophy. So you need to
state in which field Derrida, in YOUR OPINION, is the best. Herman Hesse, a
famous philosopher also pointed out the inadequacy of language and how it
blinds us from the truth. He went so far as to say that true wisdom could
not be communicated…in any way. Furthermore, George Berkeley also illustrated
how language leads us to believe in abstraction which has no basis in reality.
He showed how our minds concatenate the idea of a thing and a word for a thing
into what we believe are the same thing and hence believe that a definition of
a word actually exists in the world. Hence, he was an anti-abstractionist.
But this is child’s play D, there are hundreds of philosophers out there who have
realized the problematic nature of language and communication - Jacques Derrida, for
me, barely shows up as a blip on the radar screen of philosophers.

D stated:

Says who? Can you even define truth for yourself? Plato indicated that we
can never know the truth. Which is usually taken by people to mean that he
is an epistemic skeptic. What most don’t realize is that absolute truth
may never be achieved. But it never has been achieved, we have always made with
the best we got. There isn’t anything wrong with that. It’s actually the
right way to think about things. Stay open minded and realize that any view
you hold could be turned upside down. Hume figured that out a long time ago
and threw his gloves off and admitted defeat. The skeptic always wins, says
HUme, because doubt can be entered into any view point. Which is true, but
if you have come to a view point that is the best that can be come up with
according to the tools at your disposal, then what difference does it make
that doubts may be entered? If you don’t presume to know something as absolute
truth, you may simply answer the skeptic’s doubt with “so what?”, they
themselves don’t have answers, so just ask them if they think your view
is the best they can have so far, if they have a better one than let them
speak, if not then it doesn’t matter how much doubt they enter into your opinion
for it is the best one to hold at the time. Lastly, there are many truthes,
for instance, I typed this post to you on April 11th, 2003. This is the truth.

D stated:

What’s your definition of reality? Or whose definition are you going by?
Listen, if your convinced there is no reality and are not willing to hear
otherwise, then you waste your time in posting your nonsense. Try to be
more open minded. There are many forms of reality. Some say that reality
is perceiver relative, so each human being has their own reality going on,
each animal and plant has their own reality going on. Maybe Berkeley was right,
though I don’t think he was, in assuming that “to be is to be perceived”. Or maybe
Liebniz was right and we are all Monads representing the entirety of the universe
within each monad but not being the entire universe in ourselves. Maybe we’re all
hooked upto computers and there is a reality outside our own. But no matter
what spin you put on it, anyone can argue against you by defining their reality
as the life they lead, and they will be right by default.

D stated:

Hmmm…there is some truth to your claim here. But you must also realize
that most philosophers make up their own taxonomies. These come from ideas
hashed out from the external world and their own minds and intrinsic feelings.
Some of these ideas were so complex that they needed their own words for them.
Philosophy is relegated to the realm of everything. I can’t think of a topic
philosophy hasn’t delved into. Furthermore, linguistics comes from our
excogitated conceptions of things into communicatable format. It is not something
that has always existed and is somehow outside of us, we created it and it is
entirely dependent on our rationalizations of things.

What’s your take?

I think it was Nietzsche who said, “Truth is whatever is good for man.” That’s the only truth I believe. The word “Truth” when used like in the religious sense doesn’t exist as far as I’m concerned, i.e. (Absolute Truth). I’m also inclined not to believe in any absolute, unless it’s a logical statement (1+1=2). The only truths we have are logical (analytical). Everything else is synthetic, i.e. needs examination to be true. (e.g. There are 3 people living in 32 Main St. Somewhere, USA. Only if we go to this house and check can we know if it’s true or false.) I don’t believe in truths only statistics, meaning 75% of the time something is true, but not always. It’s a percentage truth.

We make our own reality, we believe what we wish to believe, I am I, is one why it was put, the fact I can contemplate this means there must be something and if there’s something it must exist in some form, hence there’s a form of reality. Even if everybody else is just fiction, the fact that I can see and consider them to be real or not, means I exist in a reality, even if it’s only my own private universe.

as long as there is life, there would be philosophy.

descarte spent half his most important book trying to work out if there was anything more then his own conciousness, i think you have a selective memory of philosophy of the past

And like that he was gone.

Prove to me that scrabble playing is unimportant.

I like the link between philosophy and a scrabble game. But any game and profession will do: economists think in terms of chess or maybe baseball, militarists think of football, social scientists are still trying to find the right game. In any event, I am not too sure that we can jump from “game” to “mere game”. Stringing together phrases for pleasure, winning, acheivement, etc… - if that is all you do, and it fills up seventy-odd years of your life, and it adds to the meaning of life for generations to come - then what’s your problem with an activity that has an apparent resemblance to the nature of game playing. It is life nonetheless.

My point, D, is that if you opt out of all the games you are left with nothing. Choose one of more games and start enjoying life. After all, what are you doing here? Are you playing scrabble? Is it a strategy to confuse the other players? To distract them while you come up with your own words. I guess, if you distract them long enough you will win by default… Or you might find that you are playing alone and that other games - by necessity - have started elsewhere.

And like that he was gone.

evidently, I cant really address every point that has been made. But I hope that my opinion offers food for thought.

that seems illogical for we are breathing and thinking, and thus, living.
‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ …

but id like to share this paragraph from a nihilism site :

Death to Philosophy

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,” Albert Einstein. Philosophy fixates on the apparent complexity of nature and classical thinkers ponder the grandeur and mystery of the universe. Yet one who constructs a conclusion using the building blocks of scientific knowledge eventually reaches a stunning, inescapable, yet diametrically opposed conclusion. Existence is so absurdly simple it’s utterly disheartening.

Yet simultaneously the source of life’s excitement is the unknown, the chance and risk residing within all new encounters. Take it away, make everything predictable, knowable and the result is stasis, boredom, hatred for life and eventual suicide. Making things predictable has the unintended effect of eroding grandeur and destroying drama. Just think of the simple fact that the laws of the universe and biology are all even capable of being comprehended with a modicum of human effort. The fact that things are both consistent and quite understandable is utterly devastating to philosophical thought.

While others have pointed out the folly of conflating philolosophy with one man, it should also be pointed out that you’ve massively misread that one man.

Derrida’s often idiosyncratic readings of philosophers are designed, in many ways, to open up philosophy, not to destroy it. Far better to see Derrida as an anti-foundationalist than as the destroyer of anything other than, perhaps, a genre distinction (and that comes from the way he says things, not what he actually says). His point, again and again, is that we can’t and don’t have solid ground from which to discern the allogory from the allegorized. He nevertheless continues to urge the idea that we must do this, must decide this, that we must take the responsibility (what he calls infinite responsibility) even though such decisions will always be tentative and contingent.

It is perhaps easiest to see what Derrida is doing if you compare it to certain commentators on the recent war. When attempting to justify the war, they hide behind certain magic words (truth, justice, freedom, objectivity etc.) without actually understanding that they are no more in a position to make claim to these words than you or I. I know one guy who was infuriated by the lies that were shown on Al Jazeera concerning American soldiers, but if you actually watch AJ, they weren’t really lying, they were putting a spin on it: Take Rumsfeld’s statement that our bombs and missiles are more accurate than ever before and then flash to civilian casualties. The irony is that many Arabs believe/trust Rumsfeld’s comments and are willing to draw conclusions accordingly whereas the infuriated guy, if this was pointed out, screams that it’s all propaganda.

Of course it is. Deal with it.