Sartre's Contradiction

[Triumph36]

Sounds like Mencken had a bad time with Hegel.

Yet it's a sentiment that could only have serious strength after Hegel.

As for Sklansky's contention that philosophy is for those who cannot solve other problems, I find this to be far too 'modern' as well. The only 'indisputable' problems up until Newton were mathematical, and of an even more dubious nature than philosophy (excepting Archimedes).

It takes the entire body of philosophy as we know it to make the statements that Zeno and David made, yet there's something hopelessly utilitarian about both. The intelligent mind should seek out philosophy and then choose to dismiss it on its own. After all, when we're not dealing with indisputible things, we're left to come to our own conclusions.

[Zeno]

Mencken wrote, in part, to jolt, in addition to bringing his skeptical no nonsense approach to things. And he does a good job of it, but note that he mixes separate realms, as if metaphysics is the all of philosophical speculation. But such analysis detracts from the pleasure of reading such a great prose artist.

Cicero may have said it best: “There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.” I think that anyone who has waded through the bog of even a small bit of philosophical writings would have a hard time auguring against Cicero. But then he also said: “Philosophy is the best medicine for the mind.”

In the end, I often wonder if it is more profitable to go fly-fishing or bird watching than to try and muddle through some difficult text about why my existence is so meaningless, the why or why not of God’s existence, or how my knowledge about the external world is all wrong. So what? Beer still taste damn good after a long day of work doesn't it.

-Zeno

[David Sklansky]

I'm betting that most philosophers could not get a Phd in math, physics or chemistry form a good university even if their life depended on it. Maybe I am wrong. Plus they are making a futile attempt to ascribe meaning to a world without God.

[David Sklansky]

Your own words make my point:

"Anyway, simply put:

A being in itself doesn't have consciousness.

A being for itself does have consciousness"

Surely you realize that to the vast majority of people (including me) this is an unclear, imprecicse statement. 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.

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.

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.

I should say that everything above is an opinion. I wouldn't be totally shocked if it was wrong.

[snowden719]

To think that philosophy is wild assertions and speculating on question that are definitionlly unanswerable shows a complete and total lack of understanding oh what philosophy actually is.

[The once and future king]

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For the most part philosophy is for people who are not smart enough to tackle tough questions that have indisputable answers. But unlike artists, linguists, etc they want to pretend otherwise. (Exceptions: Descarte, Leibniz, Russell.)

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This whole statement is rendered redundant by the fact that Science is a philosophy. Not surprising you made it as most people have a very feeble understanding of ontology and epistemology.

In laymens terms you are to ignorant about the subject matter to have an opinion that in anyway approaches validity.

Machines can be biult that pawn the average human being at math. You have a subjetive mind and that is what defines you as an entity. If you want to spend your life trying your best to get your subjectivity to resmeble an objective automated process or a pale shadow of my deskttop calculator go for it, well done you have just decided to utterly squander youre existenze. Might as well kill yourself now.

The mind that thinks>The mind that adds multiplies and subtracts.

[The once and future king]

[ QUOTE ]
Your own words make my point:

"Anyway, simply put:

A being in itself doesn't have consciousness.

A being for itself does have consciousness"

Surely you realize that to the vast majority of people (including me) this is an unclear, imprecicse statement. 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 ]


Pffft. What are you on man. Is this not the philosophy forum?

The Op wants clarification on the meaning of a couple of assertations by Satre. These assertaions dont exist in a vacuum, and as Philosophers hate ambiguity he will have spent alot of time defing exactly what he means in his use of philosophical terminology.

Every field of human knowledge has its unique terminilogy that is opaque to those unversed in this particular field. Exaplain string theory in un dumbed down way and 99% of those listening will not understand the "jargon" used in such an explanation. Philosophy is no different.

As this is a philosophy forum, I think the use of technical philosophical terminology should be acceptable with out attack by those whos own exposure to philosophy is obviously limited.

By the nature of your un provoked aggression it seems you are threatened by philosophy. Is your massive intellectual ego afraid that even if you were to make the effort to engage with the subjective matter your intelectual limitations would leave you still uniformed.

As to the nature of inteligence, my pocker calcuator is dumber than a snail yet is brilliant at maths. Computational ability can be demonstrated therefore to require literaly no inteligence.

[The Yugoslavian]

[ 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]).

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I should say that everything above is an opinion. I wouldn't be totally shocked if it was wrong.

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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

[awarunn]

Should we compile a list of great mathematicians/scientists/physicts who found philosophy to be vastly important to their respective fields?
My friend and I just compiled this list off the tops of our heads in about a minute.(You mentioned a few of these earlier)
Descartes
Russell
Leibniz
Popper
Newton
Frege
Pascal
Einstein
Carnap
Whitehead
Kaufmann
Godel

Do you not trust these brilliant minds that philosophy is significant in order to understand what your scientific discoveries actually mean? There is a whole field of philosophy called philosophy of science that gets to decide what your empirical studies actually mean. Steven Hawking regularly corresponds with a prominent leader in philosophy of quantum theory in order to better understand the meaning of his studies. I will go ahead and take their word for it when they say philosophy is a very important field...espescially when it comes to 'science.'

[maurile]

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For the most part philosophy is for people who are not smart enough to tackle tough questions that have indisputable answers. But unlike artists, linguists, etc they want to pretend otherwise. (Exceptions: Descarte, Leibniz, Russell.)

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There are many more exceptions (e.g., Whitehead, Hume, Mill, Nietszche); but in general, I agree.