Re: Sartre\'s Contradiction
[ QUOTE ]
Surely you realize that to the vast majority of people (including me) this is an unclear, imprecicse statement.
[/ QUOTE ]
Yeah, like you never do this, [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]. And yes, I do realize that what I said is fairly unclear.
[ QUOTE ]
Yet you make it without an accomanying explanation. That is either because
1. You want to appear smarter than you really are by using jargon unknown to the reader. or
2. There actually is no way to make this statement totally precise. So leaving it unexplained is both necessary and again makes you really look smarter than you really are.
[/ QUOTE ]
I actually don't really care if I look smart or not (feel free to read my STT forum posts...this point should be obvious). It is very difficult for me to make a point about Sartre's work precise b/c as I've mentioned, I haven't read nearly enough of him or given enough thought to go in depth. This is the reason I recommended the OP to read Sartre's work directly. That's certainly what I'd want to do before going any further in my explanation than I already have. I do feel that I could study Sartre's work and make the above explanation clear to much of 2+2. In a similar way to how you could take a fairly complex scientific concept and distill it into terms that people without such a background could generally understand.
[ QUOTE ]
As to:
Do you mean to say the following two things:
"1. For the most part, philosophers aren't smart enough to solve tough mathematical and/or scientific questions that can be 'proven'?
2. *And* instead, they spend time investigating answers to tough questions that cannot be 'proven' but think that they *are* proving the answers?"
Yes to #1. But I don't think they think they are proving anything. Rather I think they are well aware that they are invstigating questions that have no indiputable answer and choose to do that so they can hide their incompetance (even while looking smart). There are exceptions of course.
[/ QUOTE ]
Okay, that's much clearer to me. I actually agree with you it would seem. There is a very large % of philosophy majors I've met who want to look smart due to feared incompetence, yet they would have trouble looking smart in math/science course. In fact, there is a continuous burden on many/most (philosophers and people in general) to appear smart in many situations and this hinders them from actually becoming smart and/or being able to truly understand subjects (hey, as long as one can repeat the jargon one reads, that's enough).
[ QUOTE ]
I realize that to major in philosophy you need to take a course in symbolic logic. So philosophers are smarter than average.
However my guess is that the vast majority of philosophers struggled with that course. Whearas mathmeticians and physicists would almost always ace it.
[/ QUOTE ]
Yeah, pretty much. I certainly agree with you here. I had a very easy time with my logic course, although I didn't really enjoy it and didn't take more advanced ones (however, I did end up doing a lot more symbolic logic due to my thesis talk/paper - hopefully that, indeed, made me even 'smarter' [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]).
[ QUOTE ]
I should say that everything above is an opinion. I wouldn't be totally shocked if it was wrong.
[/ QUOTE ]
I think that the philosophers capable of work in mathematic/scientific veins are able to engage in extremely useful work that influences more narrowly focused scientific/mathematic people. Philosophers (the best anyway) are able to provide a fundamentally different view of science, math, social sciences, etc, than the individuals mired within those disciplines. Ideally the philosopher has dual interests to leverage his/her analytical tools in another discipline.
Yugoslav
|