as stated before…
“intellectually, all the problems of Medieval and modern philosophy have
arisen from the conflict of new experiences and new knowledge with
traditional thoughts and attitudes” …
so we haven’t reconcile the new experiences and new knowledge
of the modern age with traditional thoughts and attitudes…
I am a child born in the fifties went to school in the 60’s and
I recall as a child in Illinois doing drills like if a nuclear weapon hits,
to go under the desk and cover your eyes. Being a child, it seem
reasonable that a desk would protect you from a nuclear weapon…
nowadays, I have my doubts a desk would survive a nuclear weapon…
but hay, I could be wrong…
those experiences (in part) made me who I am today as they made
all those children from that era partly who they are and those experiences
are different from any other children experiences in human history because
never before has humanity been so close to total extinction and we knew it…
how do we reconcile my experiences has a baby boomer with traditional thoughts
and attitudes? how do I reconcile modern physics with its random and chaotic
evidence of the world with traditional thoughts and attitudes?
how do I reconcile quantum physics with traditional thoughts and attitudes?
how do I reconcile the history of the 20th century with its wars and a depression
with traditional thought and attitudes?
how do we reconcile modern technology with traditional thoughts and attitudes?
the pace and speed of our world is unprecedented… we hear of news from, say china,
in a matter of minutes on CNN… in the past, it would have taken months for
news to travel from China to Europe…now, minutes…I can, potentially,
communicate with every single person on earth with computers and phones…
that has never happened before…
traditional thoughts and attitudes come from the world traveling at a
pace of no faster then a horse, nowadays you have to travel very far to even
see a horse… you have cars, planes, trains, rocket ships, all moving people
and goods around… you have communication around the world taking seconds…
you have the knowledge of the potential of death of the human race
coming from a number of different sources… the sky in the form of rocks from the
sky and death from nuclear weapons and death from diseases that we haven’t
heard of today and death from manmade weapons of diseases to various forms
of WMD’s… how do we reconcile all this with traditional thoughts and attitudes?
how to turn all this into a coherent philosophy that we can reconcile with
traditional thoughts and attitudes? if you look at the 20th century philosophy
with 20th century history, you see philosophy response to the history of the 20th
century with escape into logic and word philosophy and a side trip into despair
which is the existentialism philosophy…
philosophy response to the horror and despair of the 20th century by
hiding its head in the sand and spend its time on the meaning of being…
or what Augustine meant by time and other useless crap…
that is in part why philosophy has lost its place with the public because
philosophy refused to face up to the challenges of the 20th century
by engaging with the 20th century… philosophy ran away from the
challenges of the 20th century like the coward it is and hid in the
minutiae of the difference between Aristotle categories and Kant’s
categories! philosophy deserved to lose the respect of the public
given its shameful retreat from the tough questions of our time…
philosophy has become irrelevant because it hid from
tackling the serious and difficult questions of our times…
what does it mean to be human in the modern age?
how do we reconcile the horrors of the concentration camps
and the war to end all wars and the fight to save democracy from
Fascism and the cold war that lasted 40 years…
with traditional thoughts and attitudes?
philosophy may have hid because the task is daunting but
it is not impossible… we have so much to reconcile with
traditional thoughts and attitudes, how do we begin?
we can just jettison the entire idea of traditional thoughts
and attitudes and begin anew? begin with the modern world
and just pretend the world began in 2000 AD…
or we can accept the past and begin the serious task of
understanding the last 117 years of history and science into
some context that allows us to begin to formulate
a philosophy of what it means to be human in 2017…
because to be human in 2017 means something different then
it did in 1900 because of all the changes and history that has
passed in the last 117 years…what does it mean to be human
when artificial intelligence is possible or what does it mean to be
human when we have the human body being “fixed” with modern
technology and replacing body parts… I had spinal surgery many
years ago and they replaced two of my vertebra with cadaver vertebra…
and I am not alone in this… does this change my “humanness”?
so how do we reconcile our modern age with traditional thoughts and attitudes?
Kropotkin