Sartre's Contradiction

[Scotch78]

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Agreed. But the subject allows less than the best practitioners to go on with what they do without being exposed as incompetant. Thats my gripe. The same is true with many other fields of course. The difference is that everybody knows that about those other fields.


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Which philosophy courses did you take? Logic is the only one I've taken that didn't focus on identifying and disproving the faults of previous philosophers.

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To make it clear, I have no problem with people being philosophically minded. I just don't like it when the subject is made unnecessarily formal.

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Please name an academic discpline more formal than your own mathematics. Failing that, please show how logic, i.e. extreme formality, is unneccesary in arguments, i.e. philosophy.

Scott

[David Sklansky]

"Think of it this way, what could possibly render human life more pointless than the existance of a Christian god. In that scenario we are little more than dogs with a master and have no control over out ultimate destiney. What point in living if to live is to simply obey the laws of our master or suffer the consequences."

Even if that statement is correct it does not mean there is no god.

[The once and future king]

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"Think of it this way, what could possibly render human life more pointless than the existance of a Christian god. In that scenario we are little more than dogs with a master and have no control over out ultimate destiney. What point in living if to live is to simply obey the laws of our master or suffer the consequences."

Even if that statement is correct it does not mean there is no god.

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No, but it demonstrates that it is best to live as though there isnt one.

[fritzwar]

Maybe this post is a joke. If it's not, it shows how badly uninformed you are about philosophy.
You should take a good course at a reputable university in any of a variety of subfields of philosophy (logic, decision theory, epistemology, philosophy of science) that might interest you and then report back on the issue.

And the same can be said for so called "softer" areas of philosophical study such as applied ethics which you seem to be posting about quite a bit recently. The fact, if it is a fact, that indisputable answers aren't available on some controversial questions doesn't mean that rigorous analytic work on the questions isn't being done and isn't helpful in, for example, sorting out confusions, eliminating some clearly bad answers, showing that some lines are argument are poorly constructed.

My sense is that your view of philosophy is driven by stereotypical examples of self-proclaimed philosophers doing largely incomprehensible writing and grandiose theorizing without providing serious arguments and without a grounding in logic and related disciplines. This isn't a significant percentage of what is happening at major US philosophy departments (UCLA is probably the closest one to you - stop by and see if there is anyone there smart enough to get past your description - or ask Chris F - he might know). Anyone doing philosophy the way you're describing it wouldn't last a week in a serious graduate, or even undergraduate, philosophy program.

Take home quiz - guess what college majors score highest on exams tightly correlated with IQ (such as the GRE, LSAT, etc...)? Somehow despite your claim that those drawn to philosophy aren't smart enough for questions with indisputable answers, philosophy majors are right at the top on these exams, along with some engineering sub-disciplines and the math majors. It's no surprise to me, because I know that students who can handle the advanced training in logic, rational argumentation, and (in some programs) decision theory that we provide are pretty smart.

Fritz Warfield
Philosophy Department
University of Notre Dame

[fritzwar]

Exposure of incompetence can be tricky. On the *negative* side it's fairly easy in the *journals*: leading philosophy journals use refereeing procedures that will keep the trash out. Books are another matter: the obvious analogy with poker seems appropriate. Simplifying just a bit, the best publishers of poker books are going strive to publish only very high quality books; others will publish just about any old trash if they think they can make a buck off of it.

It will be at least as hard to get an article past referees at, eg, The Philosophical Review, as it is to get an article past referees at Nature or Physical Review (where, by the way, *many* philosophers publish right alongside the physicists you think are so much smarter than us!).
But book publishing is another beast all together. It's much easier, for instance, to publish a book with a "mid-rank" press (academic press or not) than to get an article accepted at a top 5 philosophy journal. Publishing a book with some press somewhere is many *many* times easier still.
All of these points can be made about science publishing too - the parallel is pretty tight. "Trash physics", for example, gets "published" all the time, but it's rare for it to get published by a top physics journal and also rare for a strong University press to publish it. But that's all on the screening / negative side of responding to incompetence.

On the positive side it's harder. In philosophy, as in the hard sciences, the main reaction to bad work on the part of serious researches is to ignore the work. You're right that this doesn't expose the incompetence, but this is no special problem that philosophers have. Scientists have it too. About the only thing I can think of on the positive / active side of exposing incompetence is the occasional book review or critical discussion in an article. But usually a piece of work has to rise above incompetence before it's even worth reviewing or critically discussing - again, lots of bad *published* work in physics (in barely refereed journals or no-referee books) gets ignored because it's obviously incompetent to any expert in the field.

Fritz

[fritzwar]

I agree that most philosophy PhDs couldn't get a PhD from a top University in math or physics, for example. But I also think the following:

(1) most math and physics PhDs couldn't get a PhD from a top philosophy program.
(2) most philosophers from top schools specializing in logic and/or philosophy of physics could get relevant PhDs. (Some do -- there are many "double PhDs" crossing these disciplines, one two floors up from me for example -- and almost all who don't do the PhD still do PhD level coursework in these fields and publish in leading, peer-reviewed physics journals (for the phil of physics specialists) -- math/logic journals for the others.

One fact to consider in making these cross-disciplinary comparisons is the somewhat artificial division of the fields. For example, philosophy departments include people who do everything from, eg, Logic and phil of physics and decision theory, all the way over to people specializing in the *history* of philosophy. Obviously the technical requirements for these fiels are quite different. The former require strong formal (logic, math, etc...) skills while the latter require (typically) foreign language and translation skills, historical reserach methods skills, and that sort of thing. Imagine if the physics department included *both* specialists in eg, nuclear physics, relativitiy, etc.. on the one hand *and* specialists in *history of physics* on the other hand. The math skills of the historians of physics wouldn't be trivial (just like even the philosophy history specialists have to pass graduate level logic courses) but they wouldn't be up to the standards of the straight physicists who weren't doing "history of physics".

Fritz

[fritzwar]

You wrote:

"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."

The math majors (especially), and to a smaller extent the physicists, who take symbolic logic courses typically are in the upper group of scores in these courses. Interestingly, the philosophers who take physics and math courses are also typically in the upper group of scores in those courses. There are important but I would think *obvious* selection effects involved in these comparisons.
1. the philosophers who take advanced math or physics courses are going to be drawn from the small subset of philosophers with high interest and aptitude in physics and they will furthermore select courses of special interest to them, putting them in competition with physics majors who typically lack *special* interest in a particular course.
2. the math majors who take logic courses are drawn from those math majors most intersted in logic, while the philosophers in such a course will be drawn from the full range of philosophical sub-disciplines. This puts the math majors with special interest in logic in competition with the full range of philosophy majors, not simply the philosophers specializing in logic.

Despite these selection effect interferences, I do think that if we required all math and all philosophy specialists to take the logic requirement, the math majors would do much better on average. But I think this fact is explained by the fact that the disciplinary boundaries are drawn in different ways. I posted about this elsewhere, but, in brief: "historians of physics" aren't members of physics departments, nor are historians of math members of math departments. Historians of philosophy are members of philosophy departments and their "technical skill requirements" are more in the direction of foreign languages and historical research methods, not the math/logic direction that the best non-history of philosophy philosopers are focused on.

Fritz

[NotReady]

I think I missed your post when you originaly made it, just now came across it. Thanks for the link. I've actually read that before though it was some time ago. I also have Zuidema's review of Sartre for the Modern Thinkers series. It's very helpful and probably as difficult to understand as Sartre, though I think most of the difficulty is due to terminology not unlike Kant.

I re-read Zuidema and didn't find anything specific on why Sartre thought the existence of God entails a contradiction. I think I do now have a primitive grasp of the idea and it has to do with Sartre's definition of being. I can't quite express it because the images are somewhat vague, but I think Sartre wasn't being illogical but rather simply wrong in his definitions.

I agree with what the link said about the contributions Sartre has made to Christian thinking and I especially liked his reference to Ecclesiastes - I've always thought of that book as the first statement of existentialism. I also believe all major philosophers have made some contributions to man even when they are promoting fundamental lies about God and man.

[The once and future king]

Not ready.

How can you not see then that the existance of the God you have faith in totaly deystroys the ability for any given man or woman to be truely moral.

Which of the following men is the most moral.

The man who is moral because he knows it is the will of God.

The man who chooses to be moral of his own free will and knowing that there is no transcendental justification or meaning in his actions. He is moral purely for the sake of being moral.

If God wants us to be truely moral creature then there is nothing more -EV he could do than let his will or presence be known to us.

[NotReady]

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How can you not see then that the existance of the God you have faith in totaly deystroys the ability for any given man or woman to be truely moral.


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There are several problems with your position. Perhaps the most fundamental one is what I think is your definition of morality. You must think the moral law is independent of God and is discoverable by man without revelation from Him. I think this is wrong because if the law is higher than God then He isn't God. The moral law is part of Who God is, it's an expression of His nature. The only way we know what is moral is through His revelation to us. The most clear revelation is in His Word, though the Bible also tells us that He made us with a conscience, which does give some indications of right and wrong.

Another error I think you make is you think it's possible for man to keep the law. Originally this was the case as "God made man upright", but when Adam and Eve sinned humanity fell and no one since (save One) has had the ability to keep the law. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God". No one is righteous in his own merits, no one can achieve moral perfection. That's why God became incarnate in the Person of Christ - He was the blameless sacrifice for sin because He kept the law and voluntarily laid down His life that we might live. "By grace you have been saved".

It is indeed a humbling concept to know that the very best you can do is far short of what God requires. The pride of man knows no boundaries - it is that pride that resulted in philosophers like Sartre who unashamendly sets the goal of man to become God - which is the same motive Eve had in the garden "You will be like God, knowing good and evil".

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The man who chooses to be moral of his own free will and knowing that there is no transcendental justification or meaning in his actions. He is moral purely for the sake of being moral.


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This is a perfect example of the ultimate contradiction of atheism. If there is no meaning how could the word moral have any content? Sartre was right when he talked about the absurd.