@@jimmylin1392 I think it makes as much sense to say that the math/science program failed you as it does to say you failed at it. If they engaged meaningfully with interpretation in math and science classes they'd retain all the would-be philosophers. -a fellow physics drop out
I read philosophy because I spend a lot of my life being confused. Admittedly, Philosophy has not helped much (or at all) in that regard, but I feel I'm in good company.
Realized that these last days. I've been dedicating myself to philosophy for at least a year and a half now, and all I can say is that I still confused and philosophy does not necessarily solves anything, but at least I feel good about it, it makes me excited for things about to happen (e.g. the reading of a new book).
If people want Practical Philosophy, Buddha is literally the Best. The Ancient Greeks never found out the Exact Solution to the Problem of Mental Suffering. Not even the Stoics. Only Buddha did. And I am not saying this because I am a Fanboy. I just know the Facts ...
Regarding your comments about you considering yourself a failed writer, I would like to point out that with the evolution of technology, video essays have become a new form of authorship that connects one's ideas with an audience. Given the size of your channel and the quality content you provide your viewers, you may be a 'failed writer' but you haven't failed letting your voice and ideas on philosophical subjects teach far more people online than any physical classroom can hold of students. I hope you will continue your work on this channel, it hasn't gone unappreciated.
True. In the digital age of the internet, I agree that you don't necessarily have to publish books to be a successful writer. If you have videos that many people watch and influence those people in some way, you are a successful writer because something you wrote, even if presented in speaking form in a video format, impacted a significant number of peoples' lives in a significant degree regardless.
Also, just throwing this out there - writing is an inherently inaccessible format, both to workers and disabled people. As more time is taken away from us the ability to listen to video essays and take advantage of new forms of media is essential. Especially as these forms of media are being injected with garbage constantly
But reading provides introspection, silence and reflection. Which helps to develop a capacity to look at oneself in a somewhat more detached manner. Oral traditions are essential, from Griots to Socrates itself. But stopping the entertainment machine and reflect in silence while submerged in the fabricated world and/or conscious of someone else is sorely needed too. Discarding reading/writing and the solitude and silence it provides doesn’t seem like a good idea. Complementing it, with audiovisual content, definitely. But audiovisual content alone…..
@William it's called _self-deprecating_ analysis that is consciously employed to elicit exactly the response you provided. Profilicity indeed, also known as _playing to your base_ . His Peterson analysis which played out like a UA-camr flamewar, is a great example of where his demographics lie.
One of my philosophy professors called philosophy the midwife of other subjects, and I think that's a good reason for studying it and a helpful way to conceptualise what it is going on in it. It questions other subjects, examines whether what is going on makes sense, questions commonly held assumptions and proposes new revisions or ideas to explain what is going on. This clarifies what is going on and helps improve our understanding of these subjects and the world in general. For example, philosophy examines political subjects and tries to make proposals to explain the way people interact; it tries to understand what scientists do and the practice of science, make proposals about what the practice of science actually is and what it's implications are for people; and it even questions the way we construct knowledge and what actually exists and examines the implications are of this for different fields and life in general. Overall, philosophy just helps us question things and draw new conclusions about the world and the way things are. That's why I loved studying it. It helps us ask better queso, ones which we may not have been thinking of before.
Pete Wolfendale has described philosophy as a discipline that mediates between progressions, which I think is an awesome conception. In that conception the good philosopher is the one who can talk to (or write for) a builder, a linguist, a biologist, and whatever else you can think of, and every one of them would have gained some understanding to practically help them carry out their profession.
@Peter Bedford, 'tries to make proposals to explain the way people interact'. As a trained psychological scientist, my gut reaction is to ask, why not test it? Why do only the theoretical work, while the value of any theory is how it can be used to derive testable, fallible predictions. And subsequentely, to test those predictions to the real world. Obviously, both the testing and the value of a theory is more difficult than these two sentences. But I think it sufficies to bring the point across.
@@QuinnArgo I would love for philosophers to have such a role in science! I do not know much about how philosophers operate, but I am afraid it sounds similar to the statisticians and methodologists I saw at the psychological departments I worked at. Those people also saw themselves as the watchdogs of science and they tried to steer people in the right way to do how. And for decades, a lot of them talked about how bad psychological science was and how it should be improved. However, they wrote about this in journals only other methodologist read and went to conferences only other methodologists went to. It was basically a bunch of people already knowing that science was done badly agreeing with each other. They talked a big game about how they were improving science, but they hardly reached anyone actually doing psychological science. The best example of this disconnect was a guy who gave a talk about how to reach doctors to implement the newest scientific findings. One of his main points was that only writing journal articles was the worst way. Then someone asked how he tried to get this message acros and he had to admit he almost only wrote journal articles.
@@sjoerdglaser2794 it is true, it's a proposition that will probably ultimately only be followed by the fewest people we call philosophers, most of them will stay within their communities of journal-reading philosophers. As someone from the outside of academia though, most philosophers I know of and/or whose works I've read are active in public communication in at least some way or another, most often being invited to speak at social gatherings and political events.
You are being too modest regarding the usefulness of philosophy, because it has enormous practical utility. 1. Scientific Advances: Einstein credited reading David Hume as giving him the insights for discovering relativity. Nobel Prize winners John Eccles and Peter Medawar separetely credited philosopher Karl Popper as critical to their discoveries. I recently gave a lecture at a German symposium entitled "The Philosophy of Drug Interactions" in which I argued that philosophy literally can save lives. (COVID prevented travel to Germany, so I had to make a video of my lecture.) 2. Rational Thought: Philosopher/physician William James, when asked to define philosophy, called it "A peculiarly stubborn effort to think clearly." This is my favorite definition of philosophy. Who could not benefit from more clear thinking? This is why so often the best people in a given field have a philosophical outlook, whether it is in the hard sciences, literature, psychology, politics, the law, and almost any other field. And philosophy doesn't encourage reactive and opinionated thought--quite the opposite. Philosophy tells us to avoid holding beliefs that do not have an adequate rational basis. 3. A Life Well-Lived: I can divide my life into 2 distinct periods--my first 40 years without philosophy, and the last 38 years after discovering Nietzsche, and then having read all of Nietzsche as well as most of the other major philosophers. I went from being a "scholarly oxen" (as Nietzsche called them) to having a much richer and deeper existence. As one example, I now deal with life's slings and arrows with much more equanimity and resolve. (This is not age... it started 38 years ago!) 4. Better Relationship to Money: It is true that philosophy doesn't necessarily make one rich, but it does allow one to put money in it's proper perspective. One does not have to live like Epicurus to realize the greater importance of the inner world compared to material possessions. And sometimes philosophy does lead to wealth. Billionaire George Soros made much of his money by following philosopher Karl Popper's ideas about the necessity of criticism in science. Soros invested in businesses that had survived in an industry where most had gone under--in other words the businesses that had undergone the most "criticism" and yet survived. There are many other practical uses for philosophy, but I don't have the space to list them. I love your videos, but stop being so modest! Philip Hansten Professor Emeritus, University of Washington hansten@uw.edu
I also disagree with his notion of philosophy as "occupational therapy". Much by the contrary, it ain't because people fail in certain areas that they resort to philosophy; rather, these people have so much knowledge and proficiency with a determined area that they can go beyond and put into question the very things they study. That's how Camus was both a fiction writer and a philosopher; how Marx was both an economist and a philosopher; how Derrida was both a linguist and a philosopher. Actually, even my notion is wrong. Being a master in something only makes you a technician, not a philosopher. But transcending your own area of study to the point you critically approach it? Only a philosopher can do such thing; and they can only proceed in doing so by knowing what they're talking about (like analytics know math well enough to talk about it)
1 + 2 are covered by his point about creating concepts through philosophy. 3 is just you making a personal religion out of philosophy you consumed but that is just you using philosophy as self-help which is absolutetly fine but not a function of philosophy itself. The same is true for 4, you are yet again applying philosophy like some would apply (use) religious texts, not to mention that the Soros example is bordering on the ridiculous.
@@LinkesAuge I'm not sure what prompted your vitriol, since my comments were not hostile at all. Sadly, none of your statements make any sense at all given the UA-cam presentation and my response to it. And you obviously know nothing about George Soros. Perhaps you should work on your anger issues before you reply to any more UA-cam comments. And please use your real name, instead of sniping at people while hading behind a veil of anonymity. Most of us are trying to have an actual conversation .
Speaking as a physicist, I find points 1 and 2 very valuable. Even in the very "hard science" nature of physics, the results are interpreted trough some philosophical framework. This is particularly important to acknowledge when doing new science where signals, results and opinions are often difficult to analyse and interpret.
I hold a lowly BA in philosophy, which I earned many years after leaving high school, and my main reason for choosing this degree is for the love of the subject-matter. I do not earn anything from it; my day job is something completely different. My advice for those seeking a title in academic philosophy: study philosophy for its own sake. Job prospects are depressing; and these "top reasons" that universities give are mostly propaganda, as the video says. It's funny, though, how those in the analytic tradition are characterized as "failed mathematicians" because I have just recently (last summer, actually) began teaching myself the rudiments of mathematical logic (1st order logic, model theory, set theory, etc.). It's been a challenge; I'm not very good at it; but it's a great experience!
Tolstoy put it nicely in Anna Karenina: “And don’t all philosophical theories do the same, by means of the kind of thought which is strange and unnatural to man, leading him to knowledge of what he has known for a long time, and knows so well to be true that he cannot live without it?”
Strange and unnatural thoughts that lead to knowledge he not only knows well but knew for a long time some truth he cannot live without… odd.. Maybe he is preemptively speaking of the collective unconscious rather than describe what appears to be a circular contradiction.
@@TrggrWarning in the context of the story - Levin (the character saying this line) goes through a lot of soul searching in his twenties and thirties before accepting the values he was brought up with. I think the idea is that we question many norms (the questioning being philosophy) and reject or alter some, but eventually understand the reason for most norms and accept them. So, Tolstoy's description of Levin's journey is in a sense an everyday example of Hegel's dialectic and aufheben. Perhaps Hänsel und Gretel Moeller could say if this is a fair description or nonsense.
I don't study philosophy strictly, I just learn about it in my spare time, and I think my love of philosophy stems from my natural curiosity. Studying philosophy feels like walking through natural, untouched land; I get the same joy from philosophy that I get from nature. Looking at a flower, even knowing scientifically how its colour is produced, how it grows just so, does not diminish it's beauty and the wonder if evokes, in fact, it makes it more beautiful to me. Looking at society and humanity, through a philosophical lens, creates the same feeling. So for me, philosophy's purpose is giving hope, and giving joy.
I was interested in writing philosophy before I became interested in writing fiction. It was only out of the inspiration of great writers like Sartre and Camus with their philisophical fiction that I started to like the idea of writing fiction, then I started to get interested in ideas relating to actually writing good fiction, and fiction for its own sake.
To be honest, i think that writing fiction is a better way of putting forth philosophy in a format digestible for normal people. Science Fiction in particular, as a genre, explores philosophy a lot. Lot's will read a philosophy book and forget most but the core bits, but a reader holds a good story closely in the heart.
@@Zorbo_the_Grandiloquent I think there may yet be some unexplored ways to transcend genres. Perhaps started by Huxley with his “Island” where the protagonist reads whats essentially a philosophy book and you get fragments of it throughout the story.
@@Zorbo_the_Grandiloquent Actually there is a flaw there. No amount of fiction will ever be as potent as reality actualized and reflected upon. Philosophy proper will always be more potent than fiction if the receiver is actively reading instead of passively reading. In a way, this is like fiction in practice/concrete notion.
@@emmanueloluga9770 when I said better, the key words were *for normal people*. Obviously BERSERK isn't going to have the potency and depth as Birth of Tragedy, but the fact that someone took philosophical concepts and thought to synthesize them into a story is kinda cool imo. What percentage of the population reads philosophy books? And what percentage likes a good story?
"Continental philosophers are failed writers" - Okay fine it may be true but there is no need to get so personal. Nice to see some appreciation for the Rortster though.
You know when you have waaaay too much money but you feel bad for the carbon footprint of literally burning it? Give it to a philosopher instead. That's what philosophy is good for, it's like a bank except without the possibility for withdrawal.
I'm a postgraduate student on sociology from St. Petersburg, Russia and have been watching your channel with great interest for several months now. Only yesterday I suddenly realized that the host is the same person who is the author of the book "The Radical Luhmann", thanks to whom I got acquainted with the theory of social systems a couple of years ago. Despite the fact that I consider myself more as a Bourdiesian than a Luhmannian in terms of social theory, I want to thank you for your excellent analysis of contemporary culture and politics. Some thoughts are an excellent verbal formulation of how I feel when I read the news on the Internet. So, I have recomended your videos to my friends and colleagues. Спасибо от чистого сердца.
Your last point really stuck with me and I think there's a lot of truth to it. While some philosophers also write pretty decent fiction (Camus and Peter Bieri's Nighttrain To Lisbon for instance, but I'm not sure how well-received his philosophical works are), I feel like it's pretty difficult to write good fiction if you're operating on a philsophical mind. I myself am an amateur at best (philosophy major, hobby-writer), but I have noticed that it's quite difficult for most people to appreciate philosophical concepts woven into fiction. It's very hard to pull off/to make palatable and you always run a risk of being unironically pretentious. So there you are, having written an orthographically correct story with what you hope is decent storytelling and interesting, complex characters, but also passages that seem like the narrator has gone off the deep end into some philosophical musings and you lose the reader.
You decry the commodification of philosophy and, by extension, the academy. I respect that, as well as your critical acumen. Unfortunately, the vast majority of practicing philosophers are seated in the United States where commodification is a fait accompli and criticism of it is a luxury of the ever-smaller number of tenured professors who do not have to market themselves in order to survive. Personally, I would far prefer to live in the world in which you operate; but, I do not. I have been a successful adjunct for twenty-five years now precisely because I've learned the necessity of marketing myself and skills, such as they are, to those organizations that have been willing to pay. Because we are disposable to those organizations, the key to our success is to make ourselves indispensable (or appear to be so) to those feudal lords -- sorry, I meant to say "Universities" -- that employ our services and protect us. No university or collection of faculty operates within a vacuum -- the so-called "noble lie" of which you spoke of operates within the ecosystem of higher education in America that is driven by economics and prestige. Neither the Universities nor the faculty are in any position to affect a structural transformation of the interconnected system of interests that govern our practices. On the contrary, the scope of commodification is only increasing in conjunction with the rational-bureaucratic apparatus necessary to manage ever-expanding organizational structures that now compete for diminishing revenue streams in what appears to be a zero-sum game. Academic philosophy survives -- and, one would be right to ask whether philosophy ought to be de-coupled from the academy -- just in case it adapts to market demands and demographic pressures. None of us can, I think, be sanguine about these and other developments, especially in light of the near-total failure of primary- and secondary-public education in this country. Lamenting these things cannot, however, alter the realities within which we operate nor augment the education we can offer to our students. Whether I like it or not, I am compelled to accept these realities, adapt to them and thrive, if I have any hope of being present to my students. Like you, I would concede that it is a myth to believe that merely studying ethics makes us better human beings, although it may better illuminate our own defects and be in a position to reveal those faults to our students. However, that does not mean that the study of ethics is wholly unrelated to self-betterment. Perhaps it is precisely because we who study ethics recognize ourselves to be defective human beings that we are in a better position to expose the pitfalls and other obstacles to self-development to the young who have not as yet chartered the failed paths we ourselves have traversed? Perhaps, not. Nevertheless, the effects of our studies need not be measured by solely by their effects on us. For we, like you, mediate between the unfulfilled potentialities of the present and the unrealized possibilities of a new generation to whom we have the awesome responsible to guide and from whom we, too, may so often learn.
@William Frost I offer my full name and title just so I am responsible for what I say publicly. Doing so creates real-world consequences that do not exist for those who hide behind anonymous screen names (I am making no judgments about you -- none) and engage in a race-to-the-bottom in terms of who can say the most offensive or otherwise outrageous comments. If J. S. Mill's defense of liberty of speech is to survive, we must practice truthfulness in our public engagements and such things are made easier where there exists a transparent relationship between the claim and the claimant. Behind Dr. Moeller is a volume (I cannot tell which) of Habermas' "Theory of Communicative Action". Habermas cautions us that there is no, and should not be, any expectation of privilege in public deliberations about what "ought to be". My title conveys no special status to my speech anymore than your being a layman casts some shadow of doubt on the value of your own contributions. On the contrary, discursive openness is a pre-condition for the epistemic advantages of democratic forms of deliberative decision-making in hyper-complex political, economic, and social environments. In sum, our ideas should be weighted on their merits and not on whose speech they are. I've not read Macfarlane's work but, on the surface, the threefold division he's making and how he's thinking about it appears to have salience. The distinction between biological time and cultural time is obviously going to operate differently precisely because of the role of tradition and its appropriation from one generation to the next. Economic time, and I'm assuming he's referring here to the pace of economic innovation and adaptation, is likely to move sometimes more quickly than biological time and sometimes far more slowly -- prior to 1848, Marx, for instance, likely "felt" the rapid pace of economic time and grossly overestimated the rate at which capitalism would exhaust itself. In any case, it's likely that there would be no synchronicity of the three modes of temporal being in a modern society. Since I'm not sufficiently familiar with Macfarlane's categories and conceptual apparatus, it's difficult to know how to assess your final paragraph. At this stage in the game, I'm reasonably convinced that the Universities and faculty are effectively powerless to affect change but I could of course be in error. As matters stand, I have no intention of martyring myself for what would otherwise appear to be a pointless exercise. I'd like to be wrong about this, but the business of education has tendrils that reach into virtually every aspect of our economic structure so that it's difficult to imagine change happening without us first moving through a period of decline wherein roughly a third of the colleges and universities in this country just disappear. Those that survive may, at some later stage, be in a better position to affect meaningful change but it's very difficult to see how that's going to play. It may turn out that I, too, am one of those jesters of whom you spoke. Such judgments are not for me to make.
@@meravellis I respectfully submit that you have an incomplete picture of the problem I was addressing. The University was and still is a medieval institution -- the relationships within the University are personal rather than impersonal; there exists multiple hierarchies and ranks which align with specific privileges in contradistinction to the standard corporate structure where increasing rank aligns with organizational standing, role responsibility, and rights; and, the functional goals of the system are not altogether consistent with wealth creation or profit but with prestige, knowledge-acquisition and dissemination. In short, the problem of commodification is not an attack on capitalism writ large but upon the more direct demand that all functional social systems, including the university, must yield commodities capable of being bought and sold. And, to the extent that universities do that, they build profit centers around dormitory life, entertain venues, and a whole host of other services otherwise irrelevant to the task of education.
Thanks for your work. Between working two jobs and my own education it’s hard finding time and genuine educational material that doesn’t require the specialized academic language to interact with it. This is very valuable to anyone with a genuine interest at educating themselves.
Before watching this video, I got into general philosophy in my early 20's while deployed in Iraq. I had a lot of free time which meant a lot of time to think about things. I jumped down the libertarian rabbit hole during that time for quite a while eventually coming out of it when I realized the ideologues I had been listening to could not compromise or reconcile their beliefs with the real world. I then went to college to study engineering and took a couple philosophy courses on logic and reasoning. Did Philosophy help me understand the world better? Maybe. Understanding my own cognitive bias from Psychology has helped me approach some conversations with a more even head, and Philosophy has helped me in addressing others in conversation, even the most basic ideas. It's surprising how many conversations get lost in something as simple as equivocation.
Dear Professor. This is the most honest, refreshing and original definition I have ever read/heard in my whole long life. I have never been attracted to reading philosophy because it was never presented to me other than as a mystic, complex and even spooky attempt of millions of human beings at understanding the world and themselves through Metaphysical woo-woo and tortuous explanations with a vocabulary that seldom makes sense at all. And yet, many people look up to philosophers as if they were magicians of sorts, if not deities. I like to see philosophy as the history of human beings struggling to understand where they are and why and how they react to their world the way they do and have. They live in a cave where all they can do is bicker about where they really are and what is really on the outside. If only they were content with living "normal" lives and not killing each other because one insane person pretends to know it all and others stupidly follow. Thank you for your candor. P.S.: May I quote you?
I did a BA and a Master's in Philosophy. I actually started a PhD in it, but bailed after the first year because I realized I'd never get an academic job from it. I ultimately I had to go back to school and train as a registered nurse in order to get a job. Funny thing about that was I had to do a module on medical/nursing ethics which was taught by non-philosophers. They may have understood the empirical, day-to-day issues, but they had no foundation or understanding of the historical foundations underpinning ethics and the meta-ethics that informed the issues, which made for some comical errors in teaching. But I digress -- that was about a decade ago now. Water under the bridge and all that. One thing I will always take away from philosophy will be what one of my lecturers said about the value and purpose of philosophy, namely that 'philosophy is the ability to think in an emergency.'
I love the very first concept of "noble lie" (being not so noble in effect). I do not think it is restricted to philosophy and it is a thing in any given scientific discipline you get. In fact, some disconnection between public presentation what a particular science is for, and its real function is present in every scientific discipline nowadays.
“Today, when I think of the circumstances under which I wrote that book, when I think of the overwhelming material which I tried to put into form, when I think of what I hoped to encompass, I pat myself on the back, I give myself a double A. I am proud of the fact that I made such a miserable failure of it; had I succeeded I would have been a monster.” [Henry Miller; Tropic of Capricorn]
I became interested in philosophy because it made the only credible, moving attempt to answer questions about human nature and justice that gave humanity dignity via cognition. Separating humanity from human, separating myself from my self, and the value of the good versus the nice: I could not find any other field that helped me - the being - understand the 'big me' - the abstract being that preceeded me and lies ahead of me. Philosophy helped me find beauty in seeking understanding. It spoke to my want for knowledge and my appreciation for elegance. I have long considered philosophy the finest form of literary fiction - not to denigrate it - but as a means of celebrating its flourishes and poetry and language.
That last point about philosophers being failed writers/scientists has some truth to it I think (as well as being hilariously self-depricating). I had a friend at university who studied philosophy and he was very interested in science, especially physics (what I was studying). However, he had a serious mental block when it came to mathematics, which often made my attempts to explain physics concepts to him rather difficult.
My interest in philosophy began when I was around 12. I was raised religious and my beliefs were deconstructed by some atheist friends. This put me into a state of general confusion, and then around that same time I gained access to the internet and found out just how wide the array of beliefs and ideologies is and this turned me into a complete skeptic. By 15 I had pulled a Descartes and realized the absurdity of the cogito being all I could know, so I loosened my grip a bit and allowed for scientific knowledge and became your average materialist/naturalist. I maintained this until around 17 or 18 when it started really hitting home to me that complete materialism is nihilism and then I began to read Nietzsche and Camus. At this time I started at university and had no idea what to do, but I had a good scholarship and was good at math so I went into physics. While doing physics I took some philosophy courses to fill in core requirements and eventually I took so many that I decided to double major. I increasingly found the analytic/continental divide to be spurious and that much contemporary and modern philosophy was trying to copy scientific methods to seem valid, but at this point I had already come to terms with my own scientism and moved past it, and the question I really started to want to understand was how philosophy had ended up where it is now compared to what it was through most of human history, and what happened to Christianity. I found my ancient phil. Professor to be one of the only ones who seemed to also have this innate sense of the importance of Truth, in more than a merely factual way and I got deeper into the ancient greeks and the church fathers and the history of Judaism and Christianity and the Bible, but I was still stuck on Nietzsche. It seemed to me that there was no way around Nietzsches view until I found McIntyre, which then led to more reading of the ancients, and also Marx and Heidegger and it was with all of these that I was really able to start to see where philosophy has ended up and why. As I got deeper and deeper into all these things I found it harder and harder to convince myself to study physics except just as something to get a job with, but even that recently felt like a poor excuse to be so specialized so I finally dropped the physics altogether. I'm nearly done with the philosophy degree now and I don't really want to go into academia for a variety of reasons, partly because of what I've learned of the nature of modernity, but also most professors are self-righteous and struggling to get by, and the market is flooded. This seemed like a nice spot to write out a little self history, but also to say that while I am in some sense a failed physicist, I feel like the reason I couldn't study it was because it just seemed meaningless to me after a certain point and I lost what small passion for it I had to begin with. I was mostly doing it out of a sense of pride and job security and neither of those seem important now. Im not sure how it is for everyone, but I imagine there are others who have gone through something similar. My inner Nietzsche wants to call it all cope, but I think there's more going on.
Yeah, I’m (Am I?) into something like that myself. St Augustine and Nietzsche (Yup, You have read it well. Those two. But someone well versed in philosophy surely knows how many things can go on in a man’s mind) were some kind of catalyst in my life. I’m too lazy to write at length about that (Or, maybe, I’m just afraid that a well written discourse on what I actually think will just show my own copings) but I do not think it is simply about philosophy. It is just about living... Sometimes I have questions that for one reason or another torment me. It is not that philosophy is a kind of “deposit of truth” where I put an end to this, but more like a place where I found people with my same thorns in the chest. Sometimes I found here that company, sometimes I found it in other places. I just know i want to live, and live to the fullest... And I just found many other people with the same desire, for one reason or another, in that place. (And I have found the laziest, tiresome and most irritating people there too! But that’s another story. Sometimes, when something is precious, it’s much easier to fall short)
"Materalism is nihilism" what a shitty and conveniently non-specific argument you have there. You know there still is the ability, under scepticism and materialism, to have this "Higher Power of truth"? (A painfully typical and overcooked "Philosophy" major stance) Not everything has to contain lovey dovey metaphysical mysticism to be "Life-affirming".
It’s extremely bold and unelaborated lmao (Probably because any attempt to defend it would immediately run into the obvious fact that mathematicians are trying to do different things than analytic philosophers, and “writers”- he means novelists I guess?- are trying to different things than continental philosophers.)
I would say it's about as true as saying soccer players (in America) are just people who failed to succeed in Basketball or in Football, which would hold true for maybe a portion of people, but ultimately it discredits every single soccer player simply because Basketball and Football happen to pay more and be more popular. Also, the third point is completely irrelevant as it can be applied to every single profession that exists. Actually I would even argue that it is unhelpful to argue on basis of "occupational therapy" because the message comes out saying "X is doing this ultimately useless task A not necessarily because it needs to be done, but because he needs to be paid, and can't do useful task B", which may seem fine, but then you can ask something like "if A is useless, then can't we have X do simply whatever he wants, and still have him paid, or just make him do useful task B, no matter how bad he is at it?"
I have always been interested in humanities and philosophy since I was a child. Now I'm in my 30's and am majoring in Philosophy and Cognitive Neuroscience. Although it's not an easy major, the readings can be quite complex at times.Yet, I find it interesting and relevant in many areas of life.
I honestly love Richard Rorty, I think he said philosophy is less "levers of power" and more like great literary works that help us rethink and essentially explain what's going on around us. Idk, I know he's controversial with some people, but he's interesting to me.
Excellent. This reminds me of a Malcolm Gladwell piece talking about all his years with his therapist where the profound insight was "sometime you may be having dinner with your family and your child says something funny, and you all laugh together, and feel good." Or god being very middle sized. Really entertaining and I always enjoy your dignity.
I studied History & Phiosophy of Science and it was mind-altering. I was literally taught to think and don't know how other people manage to go through life without the skills and insights it gave me (albeit at mere undergrad level). It made me a better scientist and better clinician. And the mental gymnastics of analytic philosophy are fiendishly complex and impressive - there is some really beautiful and careful work done in this field. And most people still think academic philosophy sorta means 'ideology' :/
Pretty fun one! Really made me think of the analogy with mathematics. While people think of math as extremely practical and useful in every day life, what they are thinking of is not math, but tiny little subsections of math (arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus). In reality, becoming a mathematician involves studying things which are well outside anything any normal person, or even any research scientist living today will find ever find useful. These things are complications of complication of abstractions, that are so far removed from reality, it takes a PhD to even begin to understand what is being studied and why. And yet, historically, mathematics invented in an abstract void have found uses in science, often hundreds of years after these mathematical concepts were invented. In a similar way, philosophy can be viewed as constructing and documenting concepts and their relationships. These concepts could then be employed to solve real problems, or to be used as "bones" on which to hang the bewildering facts gathered in the real world.
that 3rd point (especially combined with the 2nd) feels like a massive personal attack (haha only serious, etc.,) I definitely have thought a lot about writing stories and narratives and I always get caught up on writing about concepts instead. But in storywriting, that's ""infodumping"" and is generally """bad.""" Yet, all is not lost -- it's really just philosophy!
A technical error. Stating that moral study helps us understand morality says nothing in fact about whether it makes a person a better person. A few issues with an empirical study as well. In order to determine if a person is better or worse at morality, we need a metric. This implies that we know what is better or worse morality. Where did that come from? Second, multiple disciplines, such as math, logic, and empirical research, will also lend essential skills to maximise your moral behaviour.
Looking forward for the videos about Thomas Aquinas and Augustine. My nephew decided to study philosophy and I congratulated him. I told him: Philosophy is very important and we need more serious and honest philosophers because we need people who question things in a serious manner. (Fox news people are not philosophers even though they question everything). I'm really happy to know I was not that wrong.
In the Intellectual History departments here in Denmark we have this amazing compound word that I have a hard time translating. "Afselvfølgeigørelse". Its a compound word containing compound words! Anyhow, the word basically means "the act of taking something that is taken for granted, and proving it to not be that". I feel like that is a good reason for philosophy, that also makes it broader than solely religion. Philosophy unstabilizes the stable.
You say failed writers/mathematicians/etc., but it's hysterical how even right now in undergrad, I mention the slightest philosophical structure in either lit or math classes(or majority psych classes in my case), and it stumps some of the "brightest" people I've met. They seem to know the symbols and mannerisms and cadence and so on to express what they've learned and what they know, but it also seems like the majority of them have never gone deep or external enough to actually analyze the structure, lack of structure, relations of things within their own fields, etc. of their school of thought or studies, and they seem to be so amazed by philosophy. I think as a philosopher, or someone interested in philosophy/"street philosopher", we can help to expose people who only explore the immediate, practical applications of their work, to a more broad and truly applicable sense by exposing these bright people to different ways in which they can apply themselves, regardless of if an institution or morality of school of thought tells them they are able to or not. They(obviously not all) lack the actual analysis or critical understanding of the thing they talk about every single day, and almost end up never expanding beyond the syntax or semantics that they repeat. You say philosophy can be occupational therapy for an individual who's failed at some sort of subject, which could be true in some cases, but I think it's more of a case of a person being more fed up with standardized, simplified rules of conceptual exploration, and we're able to be a sort of occupational therapy for others who may be trying to expand beyond what they already know and just need a kick-start by being exposed to different aspects of the conceptual structures(or lack thereof) that we focus on every single day. But also I think you're able to do this without being what I would call a conceptual vanguard, or claiming "vanguard-status". I think the second you claim vanguard status to become a conceptual vanguard, you are claiming an unjust hierarchy that deprives another person from the information you initially were exchanging with said-person and are now gifting, rather than exchanging and exposing. Philosophy is very cool and dope.
I'm just starting the video but I have to leave a comment already. I've had the pleasure of meeting Richard Rorty in a somewhat more private context long after I was a big fan of his work - and he equally impressed me. He had such a lovely and kind way of cutting through bullshit.
For me, quite Romantic, I don't think I'm exactly a failed writer, but a failed adventurer. I historically became interested in philosophy because of the tension I experienced in life between my desire to live (and I was the most energetic and curious; filled with wonder), and the world that wasn't alive for me, be it lack of nature, social life, strict regulations, enforced religious beliefs, etc. as a young person thirsty for life and forced to be locked in a room staring at a screen. It has been a solace and therapy, really, yet quite a hard one to be honest, since for a great part it alienated me even more and made me question all being (since philosophy became for philosophy's sake, my new interest, a world of words), at least until I find something to bring me back to life out of my head.
I found a renewed appreciation for philosophy and its relevance in the modern-day due to the controversy surrounding Philosophy Professor Kathleen Stock. She, probably most high profile amongst others, reintroduces us, the general public, to the importance of acknowledging material reality in our society. I think her case speaks to the first 2 points you raised. I am not in the position to speak to the third. Her book definitely reflects our time.
There's a rich tradition of Islamic philosophy carried on by philosophers inspired by ancient Greek's philosophy during the golden age of Islamic rule but that tradition didn't prevent most of Islamic countries to become fundamentalist, at least to some level
Thanks so much for this, i have been wracking my brain since my art education as to why i cant seem to make use of philosophy or even write philosophically, it felt as though there was just some assumption that we can all use and appreciate it. this has been very helpful to me, cheers bud
It’s true that being a philosopher or studying philosophy may not make you a more ethical or moral person, but philosophy can do this, as through philosophy you can strengthen your understanding of ethics or morality. But, it’s not an inherit given, as the philosopher has the onus to determine how they do philosophy and what they focus upon and try to understand, using philosophy as a tool the utilizer plays a role with regard to how it is used.
That last point was so refreshingly self-aware. To this complete tourist (no worthwhile academic experience with philosophy) the value of philosophy lies in the promotion and systematization of inquiry, including the application of this to several specific topics. Part of the systematization is a set of rules and conventions for consistent communication of abstractions. Arguably most importantly, epistemology establishes and evaluates the processes we use to acquire knowledge and allows us to assess our confidence. This seems plainly useful. Other subfields like political philosophy have produced ideas absolutely fundamental to how we relate to one another and structure society. For example, it has been taken for granted in the west that the state is beholden to the individual (in principle... In practice this is very messy and can be grossly violated), but historically this is an actually fairly uncommon concept requiring some clever abstraction of human relationships and assumptions about values. However it's worth mentioning that the openness of philosophy comes at great cost. In general it seems so cautious to effectively discard bad ideas that much of philosophy is basically pretentious storytelling.
You misread the study. The study shows that ethical philosophers don't act more morally in various categories compared to other philosophers. The average donations for all of them, however, was well above average for income level in even the most generous countries.
I've been watching a lot of your videos and I really appreciate the work you're doing. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavours ☺️ also, I really like your warnings at the beginning and ends of your videos.
I think Chuang Tzu give few answer on this in story about a peculiar useless tree and somekind of big nut and medicine? (I kinda forget). I think the use of philosophy is.. 1. Creative understanding of new creative way using or understanding something. It is the technological side of it. Building base conceptual engine of our mind. 2. Human nature loves philosophy. It bring peace and joy to mind. It is like how music operate. It is to clear confusion in mind (or avoid boredom).
Maybe a bit more specific on the final point. Philosophy is something that anyone can do and does not require specialized talent or skill, but it is an intellectual practice that intelligent people who are not specialized can enjoy, and by intelligent I merely mean thinking individuals. It’s therapeutic aspect is that anyone can access it and enjoy their mind, understand ideas, and share with others. It’s not equal to, worse, or better than any other intellectually narrowed or specialized skills like math, science, astrophysics, or so forth. Yet, it has significant purpose and meaning like any of these other potential practices.
I think that another function of philosophy is to keep the scientists honest! This is particularly relevant to our time because 'science as religion' (aka scientific materialism) needs to be critiqued severely. Another way to put it is that the function of critiquing religion focuses on religious myths and that of critiquing science focuses on scientific myths. If you think that the latter do not exist you are in dire need of such a critique!
He also said "Philosophy does not lead me to any renunciation, since I do not abstain from saying something, but rather abandon a certain combination of words as senseless." So he would agree with Kant and Socrates, it's not about become more opinionated, but less.
Great video as always! Do you think the first point could be changed to "Questioning dogmas"? Dogmatic thought can show up outside of religion as well, in science, mathematics, philosophy itself, etc, and philosophy would help to question these dogmatic thoughts.
But isn't Science just the philosophy of emperiricsm? Also, I think Einstein spoke quite seriously about how philosophy and science "are dependent upon each other. Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled." To him I actually don't think this was at all a superfecial fig leaf to the philosophers. I remember reading about how at the core of Einstiein's drive was the yearning to understand the great mystery of why our universe is here. Is that a scientific question of a philosophical question? He wasn't jsut doing science for fun(although i'm sure there was some of that). He was driven, ultimately from philosophical influences. This, I think is different from today when science is driven only by it's own self-informing data. Data that is basically still just working off what Einstein proposed over a century ago. And I don't really understand the whole 'failed writer/scientist thing.' I mean of course you'll be a failed writer with that attitude haha? and like to be honest, the world doesn't need another scientist now. Our problems are fundamentally not scientific in nature. For example, we have the science to tackle cliamte change, but it seems we are not well equipped in other intellectual areas to inact this. My favourite philospher is Mark Fisher, whom in my opinion had a diagnosis of society that ellucidated reality with a specificty that a scientist obviously can't do, methodolically and likely due to an inferiority in some congitive capacities. Plus, I forget who said it, but there's this quote that goes something like'When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.'" I'm probably way off here, but my main point is, If we want to make sciencetific advancments we must use philopsphy to fix the society with which such progress is dependant. Such a pedastooling of science is in my opinion a consequence of capitialism lending itself towards a purely scientific framing of reality, and an affilaite apoliticsm that comes with this. Such an apolitical undersatning of reality serves to negate any ability to identify the injustuces of capital within society.
I'd just like to add that even though the case of Socrates is best known, the criticism of religion in ancient Greece predates him (notable examples include Thales, Xenophanes, and Heraclitus).
LOL. I really like how carefully he laid up the last point. Not necessarily correct but quite thought provoking, beautifully philosophical. (from a non-philosopher)
Philosophy led me into Buddhist philosophy. It drew me closer to religion. When you're searching for meaning, philosophy seems the most natural place to begin your search.
Funny thing is the more we fall pray to the advance of a neoliberal frame of thought the less room we make for this hegelian jewel u mention here. I for once cannot understand the appeal that these ideas have... specially since without this hegelian contribution I would not make heads or tails of history and thought (and for that also of science) and I often assume that not making heads or tails of all that is preciselly their point. In any case, pleasd excuse my going off on a limb. U did a great work here and I thank u.
such a beautiful analogy for continental and analytical philosophy. I think if Bertrand Russell lived in 21 century, he would have youtube channel and support peace.
About the point of making you a better partner in conversations; I think there's truth to that, not that philosophy necessarily makes a person eloquent and confident but can give one new perspectives which other people can find interesting, also one might be less inclined to fall into traps of logical fallacies.
the universities could hardly write on their webpage "are you too shit with numbers to do maths? We have just the course for you..." It was a brutal ending lol.
For people who read in french , because unfortunately this immense philosopher , one of the first analytical philosophy scouts in France , has written a few books about the "meaning of philosophy " ..one his old books " Le philosophe et les autophages " was a response to Michel Serres' " Le passage du nord ouest " ...or his "Nietzche contre Foucault, sur la vérité, la connaissance et le pouvoir " ..and his long list of other books treating of reason, truth, religion. For those who are interested I have most of Jacques Bouveresse's books in soft copy )))
Concerning religion, I would say that philosophy makes it easier to question any dogma. It's just that religious ones are so prevalent in society. They are powerful institutions. I would say that the reason that it allows people to question dogmas is because philosophy helps us grasp knowledge that lies beyond the day-to-day experience that shapes common sense. Including, into the past. It connects us to society's collective accumulated knowledge. And I agree on the issue about professional philosophers. If philosophy is about shaping a world view, everyone does some philosofying in their interaction with the natural world and the social world. The person who calls himself a philosopher is different simply because he has sistemized that information in a way that is more internally consistent, that he can express explicitly, that he can transmit to others and that has more explaining power than the other's common sense. After all, if it does not have any capability of explaining reality, then they are just the crazy individual people avoid at the bus stop. The other caracteristic is the professional part, which is specific to capitalism: where the only good we have to sell at the market is our labour, so philosophers need to find a way to make their labour have use value to others so they can sell it, making use of their ideas as a trade value, a commodity. Which is what those university sites are doing. Philosophy is not so bad, it can be used like in this sentence, to get a clearer picture of the precarity capitalism, our reality, forces upon us. And how it hasn't always been like that and thus, it need not be like that in the future. And how it can't be if we are to avoid climate change extinguishing humanity. Despite the media and politicians informing our common senses otherwise. With philosophy we can more easily tell how they are being disingenuous.
I as a scientist, found that philosophy provides the framework or the tools to tackle the question; how do I know what I know? Putting it in different words, the same framework is applied to the production of real (a troublesome term) knowledge. Since I'm writing a post, I would like to add that as a man in the field (I specialize in atmospheric chemistry) scientist nowadays apply a miss-mash of Inductivism, Deductivism, Popperian Falsification, and consensus based agreement. In my opinion, students trained in philosophy (philosophy of science?) could be instrumental in a society that is becoming more and more knowledge oriented, where the means of production is knowledge generation.
If thought and knowledge are a house, then philosophy is the bricks and cement within. I don't see why philosophers should bother about usefulness. Usefulness as a concept is very vague and unmeasurable. While I laughed at the ironic statement at the end(it's quite amusing to think of us that work as philosophers as failures), I don't think it's clear. Philosophy is a practice of failure: the failure of thought and the failure of grasping the knowledge of anything. It's precisely the attitude of failure that defines it. To see the failure of what we think is true or good or even correct. So failure, in a sense, isn't a failure. To see philosophers as failed x or y isn't very accurate. It's a symptom of academicism (which I am part of). Academia tends to create an ecosystem of thought governed by productivity. Philosophy tries to justify it's usefulness by affirming itself. But I think it should be the opposite. Everything we know is a byproduct of the little problems philosophy has solved. When it is solved in any way it becomes something different from philosophy, something to be questioned by philosophy, but only by questioning do we realize that there is something to be known. Trying to justify the usefulness of an activity that affirms its unusefulness is, in a form, unuseful. Philosophy is the reflection of the reflection. In a sense, it opposes unthoughtful actions. Why is philosophy useful? Because it regards action as something that fails to know itself, because it refuses to conform itself with appearence and dogma, because it questions the very nature of usefulness as a purpose.
I agree with you, and it reminds me of some of Kant's work. Honestly I think Philosophy is much more brutally simple than people make it out to be. Much of it, continental or analytical, involves the logical classification of the grammatical parts of thought and derivation of the (rational) psychological preconditions of their unity as consciousness. Its less mystifying than people want to make it. It is like "daydreaming", in the sense that its thinking about thought itself, and I don't just mean Aristotle's work on metacognition Apart from any specific content. Structurally and grammatically. Almost everything else is popular philosophy, which is largely just propaganda or scientism in disguise. With some exceptions like Paul Tillich, philosophy almost has little to do with "the meaning of life". Happiness. Usefulness. Becoming more productive Politics. Etc. That stuff can be better investigated by social psychologists like Fromm, Frankl, Rollo May. It’s not about how to live life, or anything. It’s more about distinction, boundaries, critical limitation of what thought can do with regard to various objects and the synthetic organization of knowledge domains. Here's a quote from Heidegger that might be helpful for some: "...it is meaningless to ask why and to what purpose we philosophize. For philosophy is grounded only in terms of itself-or else not at all, just as art reveals its truth only through itself. One can never prove that, and why, philosophy is necessary. Every such attempt at proof already misunderstands philosophy. But for the same reason, it is also impossible to show that philosophy is superfluous and that it is about time to get rid of it, or repress it at the outset. Whoever speaks this way proffers the most brilliant proof for the fact that he is in any case completely unable to speak and treat of that which he only puts down; he is completely ignorant of philosophy."
Personally, I feel like philosophy is a great "seed value" for any artistic endeavor. Reading Kamu and being inspired by the idea of rebellion against absurdity. Or the term itself - The Will of The World by Schopenhauer. Even questionable science can give birth to these mesmerizing endless pits of our cognition, and it's so much fun to take them as a starting block for your work. Even though, admittedly, it probably falls into "coining concepts" in your books. But I still think it's a separate and very promising use case.
The best whay to find answers is the scinetific method. To scientifically prove something, you need an experiment. But for some questions one can not make a valid experiment (at least until now, or maybe at all). Examples are: does God exist? What is the meaning of live ? What are we exactly ? How do you live a moral live ? That is why we need a more versatile method. This method is philosophy.
I got this question so many times in my life. Nowdays i usualy (not)answer it by something like "Its not specificaly good for anything and thats the point of it. Doing something pointless, while taking it deadly seriously, make you experience a radical freedom and joy." Because isnt the problem how to answer the question already in the formulation? It presupposes world when everything a person does have to be good for something. So people should stop killing vibe with this silly question, philosophers just wanna have fun.
Why are you interested in philosophy?
One time I read Battelle's Story of The Eye and got into philosophy through that
cant help myself
I studied in a few of your undergrad courses in UCC
I like to think of things I wouldn't face otherwise
The screamo band Orchid had a song titled “I Am Nietzsche” - I thought that was a cool name and googled it, fell down the rabbit hole
"i think of analytic philosophers as failed mathematicians"
me, a math major drop out, now philosophy major watching this: 💀
o7
LOL im so close to dropping out but i decided to keep going but now im all into philosophy💀please give me motivation🙏
I am a physics major drop out and now doing philosophy too 💀 this video hit me like a bus. I'm so embarrassed.
@@jimmylin1392 don't be embarrassed, embrace the failure and dive into the prosperous, career offering and good talking partner world of philosophy!
@@jimmylin1392 I think it makes as much sense to say that the math/science program failed you as it does to say you failed at it. If they engaged meaningfully with interpretation in math and science classes they'd retain all the would-be philosophers.
-a fellow physics drop out
I read philosophy because I spend a lot of my life being confused. Admittedly, Philosophy has not helped much (or at all) in that regard, but I feel I'm in good company.
Realized that these last days. I've been dedicating myself to philosophy for at least a year and a half now, and all I can say is that I still confused and philosophy does not necessarily solves anything, but at least I feel good about it, it makes me excited for things about to happen (e.g. the reading of a new book).
@@comu157 a message from a decade+ down the road: I've become less confused about terms, but no less confused about anything else. 🙃
That says a lot about you, not philosophy
@@ferdia748 that's the harsh truth but really the implementation of philosophy in one's life is a heavy task
If people want Practical Philosophy, Buddha is literally the Best. The Ancient Greeks never found out the Exact Solution to the Problem of Mental Suffering. Not even the Stoics. Only Buddha did. And I am not saying this because I am a Fanboy. I just know the Facts ...
Regarding your comments about you considering yourself a failed writer, I would like to point out that with the evolution of technology, video essays have become a new form of authorship that connects one's ideas with an audience. Given the size of your channel and the quality content you provide your viewers, you may be a 'failed writer' but you haven't failed letting your voice and ideas on philosophical subjects teach far more people online than any physical classroom can hold of students. I hope you will continue your work on this channel, it hasn't gone unappreciated.
True. In the digital age of the internet, I agree that you don't necessarily have to publish books to be a successful writer. If you have videos that many people watch and influence those people in some way, you are a successful writer because something you wrote, even if presented in speaking form in a video format, impacted a significant number of peoples' lives in a significant degree regardless.
Also, just throwing this out there - writing is an inherently inaccessible format, both to workers and disabled people. As more time is taken away from us the ability to listen to video essays and take advantage of new forms of media is essential. Especially as these forms of media are being injected with garbage constantly
But reading provides introspection, silence and reflection. Which helps to develop a capacity to look at oneself in a somewhat more detached manner. Oral traditions are essential, from Griots to Socrates itself. But stopping the entertainment machine and reflect in silence while submerged in the fabricated world and/or conscious of someone else is sorely needed too. Discarding reading/writing and the solitude and silence it provides doesn’t seem like a good idea. Complementing it, with audiovisual content, definitely. But audiovisual content alone…..
@William it's called _self-deprecating_ analysis that is consciously employed to elicit exactly the response you provided. Profilicity indeed, also known as _playing to your base_ .
His Peterson analysis which played out like a UA-camr flamewar, is a great example of where his demographics lie.
✅
One of my philosophy professors called philosophy the midwife of other subjects, and I think that's a good reason for studying it and a helpful way to conceptualise what it is going on in it. It questions other subjects, examines whether what is going on makes sense, questions commonly held assumptions and proposes new revisions or ideas to explain what is going on. This clarifies what is going on and helps improve our understanding of these subjects and the world in general. For example, philosophy examines political subjects and tries to make proposals to explain the way people interact; it tries to understand what scientists do and the practice of science, make proposals about what the practice of science actually is and what it's implications are for people; and it even questions the way we construct knowledge and what actually exists and examines the implications are of this for different fields and life in general. Overall, philosophy just helps us question things and draw new conclusions about the world and the way things are. That's why I loved studying it. It helps us ask better queso, ones which we may not have been thinking of before.
Pete Wolfendale has described philosophy as a discipline that mediates between progressions, which I think is an awesome conception. In that conception the good philosopher is the one who can talk to (or write for) a builder, a linguist, a biologist, and whatever else you can think of, and every one of them would have gained some understanding to practically help them carry out their profession.
Yes, better queso is always a welcome addition
@Peter Bedford, 'tries to make proposals to explain the way people interact'. As a trained psychological scientist, my gut reaction is to ask, why not test it? Why do only the theoretical work, while the value of any theory is how it can be used to derive testable, fallible predictions. And subsequentely, to test those predictions to the real world.
Obviously, both the testing and the value of a theory is more difficult than these two sentences. But I think it sufficies to bring the point across.
@@QuinnArgo I would love for philosophers to have such a role in science! I do not know much about how philosophers operate, but I am afraid it sounds similar to the statisticians and methodologists I saw at the psychological departments I worked at. Those people also saw themselves as the watchdogs of science and they tried to steer people in the right way to do how. And for decades, a lot of them talked about how bad psychological science was and how it should be improved.
However, they wrote about this in journals only other methodologist read and went to conferences only other methodologists went to. It was basically a bunch of people already knowing that science was done badly agreeing with each other. They talked a big game about how they were improving science, but they hardly reached anyone actually doing psychological science.
The best example of this disconnect was a guy who gave a talk about how to reach doctors to implement the newest scientific findings. One of his main points was that only writing journal articles was the worst way. Then someone asked how he tried to get this message acros and he had to admit he almost only wrote journal articles.
@@sjoerdglaser2794 it is true, it's a proposition that will probably ultimately only be followed by the fewest people we call philosophers, most of them will stay within their communities of journal-reading philosophers.
As someone from the outside of academia though, most philosophers I know of and/or whose works I've read are active in public communication in at least some way or another, most often being invited to speak at social gatherings and political events.
You are being too modest regarding the usefulness of philosophy, because it has enormous practical utility.
1. Scientific Advances: Einstein credited reading David Hume as giving him the insights for discovering relativity. Nobel Prize winners John Eccles and Peter Medawar separetely credited philosopher Karl Popper as critical to their discoveries. I recently gave a lecture at a German symposium entitled "The Philosophy of Drug Interactions" in which I argued that philosophy literally can save lives. (COVID prevented travel to Germany, so I had to make a video of my lecture.)
2. Rational Thought: Philosopher/physician William James, when asked to define philosophy, called it "A peculiarly stubborn effort to think clearly." This is my favorite definition of philosophy. Who could not benefit from more clear thinking? This is why so often the best people in a given field have a philosophical outlook, whether it is in the hard sciences, literature, psychology, politics, the law, and almost any other field. And philosophy doesn't encourage reactive and opinionated thought--quite the opposite. Philosophy tells us to avoid holding beliefs that do not have an adequate rational basis.
3. A Life Well-Lived: I can divide my life into 2 distinct periods--my first 40 years without philosophy, and the last 38 years after discovering Nietzsche, and then having read all of Nietzsche as well as most of the other major philosophers. I went from being a "scholarly oxen" (as Nietzsche called them) to having a much richer and deeper existence. As one example, I now deal with life's slings and arrows with much more equanimity and resolve. (This is not age... it started 38 years ago!)
4. Better Relationship to Money: It is true that philosophy doesn't necessarily make one rich, but it does allow one to put money in it's proper perspective. One does not have to live like Epicurus to realize the greater importance of the inner world compared to material possessions. And sometimes philosophy does lead to wealth. Billionaire George Soros made much of his money by following philosopher Karl Popper's ideas about the necessity of criticism in science. Soros invested in businesses that had survived in an industry where most had gone under--in other words the businesses that had undergone the most "criticism" and yet survived.
There are many other practical uses for philosophy, but I don't have the space to list them. I love your videos, but stop being so modest!
Philip Hansten
Professor Emeritus, University of Washington
hansten@uw.edu
I also disagree with his notion of philosophy as "occupational therapy". Much by the contrary, it ain't because people fail in certain areas that they resort to philosophy; rather, these people have so much knowledge and proficiency with a determined area that they can go beyond and put into question the very things they study. That's how Camus was both a fiction writer and a philosopher; how Marx was both an economist and a philosopher; how Derrida was both a linguist and a philosopher. Actually, even my notion is wrong. Being a master in something only makes you a technician, not a philosopher. But transcending your own area of study to the point you critically approach it? Only a philosopher can do such thing; and they can only proceed in doing so by knowing what they're talking about (like analytics know math well enough to talk about it)
@@SpiderMan-gf1lc Well said, Spider Man.
1 + 2 are covered by his point about creating concepts through philosophy. 3 is just you making a personal religion out of philosophy you consumed but that is just you using philosophy as self-help which is absolutetly fine but not a function of philosophy itself. The same is true for 4, you are yet again applying philosophy like some would apply (use) religious texts, not to mention that the Soros example is bordering on the ridiculous.
@@LinkesAuge I'm not sure what prompted your vitriol, since my comments were not hostile at all. Sadly, none of your statements make any sense at all given the UA-cam presentation and my response to it. And you obviously know nothing about George Soros. Perhaps you should work on your anger issues before you reply to any more UA-cam comments. And please use your real name, instead of sniping at people while hading behind a veil of anonymity. Most of us are trying to have an actual conversation .
Speaking as a physicist, I find points 1 and 2 very valuable. Even in the very "hard science" nature of physics, the results are interpreted trough some philosophical framework. This is particularly important to acknowledge when doing new science where signals, results and opinions are often difficult to analyse and interpret.
Dick Rorty’s unfriend, Bernard Williams, used to say that philosophy helped us tell apart what we think from what we think we think.
Even though I'm an engineer, I still feel incredibly enriched by my study of philosophy. It has forever altered and enriched the way I view the world.
I hold a lowly BA in philosophy, which I earned many years after leaving high school, and my main reason for choosing this degree is for the love of the subject-matter. I do not earn anything from it; my day job is something completely different. My advice for those seeking a title in academic philosophy: study philosophy for its own sake. Job prospects are depressing; and these "top reasons" that universities give are mostly propaganda, as the video says.
It's funny, though, how those in the analytic tradition are characterized as "failed mathematicians" because I have just recently (last summer, actually) began teaching myself the rudiments of mathematical logic (1st order logic, model theory, set theory, etc.). It's been a challenge; I'm not very good at it; but it's a great experience!
This means a lot, I'm majoring in philosophy next school year for the same reason. May I know what your job is?
@@7c6wprq I'm a freelance translator.
Tolstoy put it nicely in Anna Karenina: “And don’t all philosophical theories do the same, by means of the kind of thought which is strange and unnatural to man, leading him to knowledge of what he has known for a long time, and knows so well to be true that he cannot live without it?”
Strange and unnatural thoughts that lead to knowledge he not only knows well but knew for a long time some truth he cannot live without… odd.. Maybe he is preemptively speaking of the collective unconscious rather than describe what appears to be a circular contradiction.
@@TrggrWarning in the context of the story - Levin (the character saying this line) goes through a lot of soul searching in his twenties and thirties before accepting the values he was brought up with.
I think the idea is that we question many norms (the questioning being philosophy) and reject or alter some, but eventually understand the reason for most norms and accept them.
So, Tolstoy's description of Levin's journey is in a sense an everyday example of Hegel's dialectic and aufheben.
Perhaps Hänsel und Gretel Moeller could say if this is a fair description or nonsense.
I don't study philosophy strictly, I just learn about it in my spare time, and I think my love of philosophy stems from my natural curiosity. Studying philosophy feels like walking through natural, untouched land; I get the same joy from philosophy that I get from nature. Looking at a flower, even knowing scientifically how its colour is produced, how it grows just so, does not diminish it's beauty and the wonder if evokes, in fact, it makes it more beautiful to me. Looking at society and humanity, through a philosophical lens, creates the same feeling. So for me, philosophy's purpose is giving hope, and giving joy.
👌
I was interested in writing philosophy before I became interested in writing fiction. It was only out of the inspiration of great writers like Sartre and Camus with their philisophical fiction that I started to like the idea of writing fiction, then I started to get interested in ideas relating to actually writing good fiction, and fiction for its own sake.
To be honest, i think that writing fiction is a better way of putting forth philosophy in a format digestible for normal people. Science Fiction in particular, as a genre, explores philosophy a lot. Lot's will read a philosophy book and forget most but the core bits, but a reader holds a good story closely in the heart.
@@Zorbo_the_Grandiloquent I think there may yet be some unexplored ways to transcend genres. Perhaps started by Huxley with his “Island” where the protagonist reads whats essentially a philosophy book and you get fragments of it throughout the story.
@@Zorbo_the_Grandiloquent Actually there is a flaw there. No amount of fiction will ever be as potent as reality actualized and reflected upon. Philosophy proper will always be more potent than fiction if the receiver is actively reading instead of passively reading. In a way, this is like fiction in practice/concrete notion.
@@emmanueloluga9770 when I said better, the key words were *for normal people*.
Obviously BERSERK isn't going to have the potency and depth as Birth of Tragedy, but the fact that someone took philosophical concepts and thought to synthesize them into a story is kinda cool imo.
What percentage of the population reads philosophy books? And what percentage likes a good story?
"Continental philosophers are failed writers" - Okay fine it may be true but there is no need to get so personal.
Nice to see some appreciation for the Rortster though.
IKR 😭😭
Loving the last definition you gave. Quite the slap in the face, in a welcoming, deeply challenging kind of way :D
You know when you have waaaay too much money but you feel bad for the carbon footprint of literally burning it? Give it to a philosopher instead. That's what philosophy is good for, it's like a bank except without the possibility for withdrawal.
I'm a postgraduate student on sociology from St. Petersburg, Russia and have been watching your channel with great interest for several months now. Only yesterday I suddenly realized that the host is the same person who is the author of the book "The Radical Luhmann", thanks to whom I got acquainted with the theory of social systems a couple of years ago.
Despite the fact that I consider myself more as a Bourdiesian than a Luhmannian in terms of social theory, I want to thank you for your excellent analysis of contemporary culture and politics. Some thoughts are an excellent verbal formulation of how I feel when I read the news on the Internet. So, I have recomended your videos to my friends and colleagues. Спасибо от чистого сердца.
Your last point really stuck with me and I think there's a lot of truth to it. While some philosophers also write pretty decent fiction (Camus and Peter Bieri's Nighttrain To Lisbon for instance, but I'm not sure how well-received his philosophical works are), I feel like it's pretty difficult to write good fiction if you're operating on a philsophical mind. I myself am an amateur at best (philosophy major, hobby-writer), but I have noticed that it's quite difficult for most people to appreciate philosophical concepts woven into fiction. It's very hard to pull off/to make palatable and you always run a risk of being unironically pretentious. So there you are, having written an orthographically correct story with what you hope is decent storytelling and interesting, complex characters, but also passages that seem like the narrator has gone off the deep end into some philosophical musings and you lose the reader.
I made a comment asking for a video about Rorty and the Analytic/continental divide a few months ago, now I'm thrilled. Thanks for your sharing!
You decry the commodification of philosophy and, by extension, the academy. I respect that, as well as your critical acumen.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of practicing philosophers are seated in the United States where commodification is a fait accompli and criticism of it is a luxury of the ever-smaller number of tenured professors who do not have to market themselves in order to survive. Personally, I would far prefer to live in the world in which you operate; but, I do not. I have been a successful adjunct for twenty-five years now precisely because I've learned the necessity of marketing myself and skills, such as they are, to those organizations that have been willing to pay. Because we are disposable to those organizations, the key to our success is to make ourselves indispensable (or appear to be so) to those feudal lords -- sorry, I meant to say "Universities" -- that employ our services and protect us. No university or collection of faculty operates within a vacuum -- the so-called "noble lie" of which you spoke of operates within the ecosystem of higher education in America that is driven by economics and prestige. Neither the Universities nor the faculty are in any position to affect a structural transformation of the interconnected system of interests that govern our practices. On the contrary, the scope of commodification is only increasing in conjunction with the rational-bureaucratic apparatus necessary to manage ever-expanding organizational structures that now compete for diminishing revenue streams in what appears to be a zero-sum game. Academic philosophy survives -- and, one would be right to ask whether philosophy ought to be de-coupled from the academy -- just in case it adapts to market demands and demographic pressures.
None of us can, I think, be sanguine about these and other developments, especially in light of the near-total failure of primary- and secondary-public education in this country. Lamenting these things cannot, however, alter the realities within which we operate nor augment the education we can offer to our students. Whether I like it or not, I am compelled to accept these realities, adapt to them and thrive, if I have any hope of being present to my students.
Like you, I would concede that it is a myth to believe that merely studying ethics makes us better human beings, although it may better illuminate our own defects and be in a position to reveal those faults to our students. However, that does not mean that the study of ethics is wholly unrelated to self-betterment. Perhaps it is precisely because we who study ethics recognize ourselves to be defective human beings that we are in a better position to expose the pitfalls and other obstacles to self-development to the young who have not as yet chartered the failed paths we ourselves have traversed? Perhaps, not. Nevertheless, the effects of our studies need not be measured by solely by their effects on us. For we, like you, mediate between the unfulfilled potentialities of the present and the unrealized possibilities of a new generation to whom we have the awesome responsible to guide and from whom we, too, may so often learn.
Thanks a lot for sharing this.
@@hans-georgmoeller7027 Thank you for the clear and highly insightful analysis you provide in your channel content.
@William Frost I offer my full name and title just so I am responsible for what I say publicly. Doing so creates real-world consequences that do not exist for those who hide behind anonymous screen names (I am making no judgments about you -- none) and engage in a race-to-the-bottom in terms of who can say the most offensive or otherwise outrageous comments. If J. S. Mill's defense of liberty of speech is to survive, we must practice truthfulness in our public engagements and such things are made easier where there exists a transparent relationship between the claim and the claimant.
Behind Dr. Moeller is a volume (I cannot tell which) of Habermas' "Theory of Communicative Action". Habermas cautions us that there is no, and should not be, any expectation of privilege in public deliberations about what "ought to be". My title conveys no special status to my speech anymore than your being a layman casts some shadow of doubt on the value of your own contributions. On the contrary, discursive openness is a pre-condition for the epistemic advantages of democratic forms of deliberative decision-making in hyper-complex political, economic, and social environments. In sum, our ideas should be weighted on their merits and not on whose speech they are.
I've not read Macfarlane's work but, on the surface, the threefold division he's making and how he's thinking about it appears to have salience. The distinction between biological time and cultural time is obviously going to operate differently precisely because of the role of tradition and its appropriation from one generation to the next. Economic time, and I'm assuming he's referring here to the pace of economic innovation and adaptation, is likely to move sometimes more quickly than biological time and sometimes far more slowly -- prior to 1848, Marx, for instance, likely "felt" the rapid pace of economic time and grossly overestimated the rate at which capitalism would exhaust itself. In any case, it's likely that there would be no synchronicity of the three modes of temporal being in a modern society.
Since I'm not sufficiently familiar with Macfarlane's categories and conceptual apparatus, it's difficult to know how to assess your final paragraph. At this stage in the game, I'm reasonably convinced that the Universities and faculty are effectively powerless to affect change but I could of course be in error. As matters stand, I have no intention of martyring myself for what would otherwise appear to be a pointless exercise. I'd like to be wrong about this, but the business of education has tendrils that reach into virtually every aspect of our economic structure so that it's difficult to imagine change happening without us first moving through a period of decline wherein roughly a third of the colleges and universities in this country just disappear. Those that survive may, at some later stage, be in a better position to affect meaningful change but it's very difficult to see how that's going to play.
It may turn out that I, too, am one of those jesters of whom you spoke. Such judgments are not for me to make.
@@meravellis I respectfully submit that you have an incomplete picture of the problem I was addressing. The University was and still is a medieval institution -- the relationships within the University are personal rather than impersonal; there exists multiple hierarchies and ranks which align with specific privileges in contradistinction to the standard corporate structure where increasing rank aligns with organizational standing, role responsibility, and rights; and, the functional goals of the system are not altogether consistent with wealth creation or profit but with prestige, knowledge-acquisition and dissemination. In short, the problem of commodification is not an attack on capitalism writ large but upon the more direct demand that all functional social systems, including the university, must yield commodities capable of being bought and sold. And, to the extent that universities do that, they build profit centers around dormitory life, entertain venues, and a whole host of other services otherwise irrelevant to the task of education.
@UC7_xRYe0IV-Q9Pt_7EzI-8Q Thank you for taking the time to reply.
Thanks for your work. Between working two jobs and my own education it’s hard finding time and genuine educational material that doesn’t require the specialized academic language to interact with it. This is very valuable to anyone with a genuine interest at educating themselves.
Before watching this video,
I got into general philosophy in my early 20's while deployed in Iraq. I had a lot of free time which meant a lot of time to think about things. I jumped down the libertarian rabbit hole during that time for quite a while eventually coming out of it when I realized the ideologues I had been listening to could not compromise or reconcile their beliefs with the real world. I then went to college to study engineering and took a couple philosophy courses on logic and reasoning.
Did Philosophy help me understand the world better? Maybe. Understanding my own cognitive bias from Psychology has helped me approach some conversations with a more even head, and Philosophy has helped me in addressing others in conversation, even the most basic ideas. It's surprising how many conversations get lost in something as simple as equivocation.
Dear Professor. This is the most honest, refreshing and original definition I have ever read/heard in my whole long life. I have never been attracted to reading philosophy because it was never presented to me other than as a mystic, complex and even spooky attempt of millions of human beings at understanding the world and themselves through Metaphysical woo-woo and tortuous explanations with a vocabulary that seldom makes sense at all. And yet, many people look up to philosophers as if they were magicians of sorts, if not deities. I like to see philosophy as the history of human beings struggling to understand where they are and why and how they react to their world the way they do and have. They live in a cave where all they can do is bicker about where they really are and what is really on the outside. If only they were content with living "normal" lives and not killing each other because one insane person pretends to know it all and others stupidly follow. Thank you for your candor. P.S.: May I quote you?
I knew reason #3 was gonna be some great punchline. Didn't disappoint 🤜
I did a BA and a Master's in Philosophy. I actually started a PhD in it, but bailed after the first year because I realized I'd never get an academic job from it. I ultimately I had to go back to school and train as a registered nurse in order to get a job. Funny thing about that was I had to do a module on medical/nursing ethics which was taught by non-philosophers.
They may have understood the empirical, day-to-day issues, but they had no foundation or understanding of the historical foundations underpinning ethics and the meta-ethics that informed the issues, which made for some comical errors in teaching. But I digress -- that was about a decade ago now. Water under the bridge and all that.
One thing I will always take away from philosophy will be what one of my lecturers said about the value and purpose of philosophy, namely that 'philosophy is the ability to think in an emergency.'
I love the very first concept of "noble lie" (being not so noble in effect). I do not think it is restricted to philosophy and it is a thing in any given scientific discipline you get. In fact, some disconnection between public presentation what a particular science is for, and its real function is present in every scientific discipline nowadays.
“Today, when I think of the circumstances under which I wrote that book, when I think of the overwhelming material which I tried to put into form, when I think of what I hoped to encompass, I pat myself on the back, I give myself a double A. I am proud of the fact that I made such a miserable failure of it; had I succeeded I would have been a monster.” [Henry Miller; Tropic of Capricorn]
I became interested in philosophy because it made the only credible, moving attempt to answer questions about human nature and justice that gave humanity dignity via cognition. Separating humanity from human, separating myself from my self, and the value of the good versus the nice: I could not find any other field that helped me - the being - understand the 'big me' - the abstract being that preceeded me and lies ahead of me.
Philosophy helped me find beauty in seeking understanding. It spoke to my want for knowledge and my appreciation for elegance. I have long considered philosophy the finest form of literary fiction - not to denigrate it - but as a means of celebrating its flourishes and poetry and language.
That last point about philosophers being failed writers/scientists has some truth to it I think (as well as being hilariously self-depricating). I had a friend at university who studied philosophy and he was very interested in science, especially physics (what I was studying). However, he had a serious mental block when it came to mathematics, which often made my attempts to explain physics concepts to him rather difficult.
My interest in philosophy began when I was around 12. I was raised religious and my beliefs were deconstructed by some atheist friends. This put me into a state of general confusion, and then around that same time I gained access to the internet and found out just how wide the array of beliefs and ideologies is and this turned me into a complete skeptic. By 15 I had pulled a Descartes and realized the absurdity of the cogito being all I could know, so I loosened my grip a bit and allowed for scientific knowledge and became your average materialist/naturalist. I maintained this until around 17 or 18 when it started really hitting home to me that complete materialism is nihilism and then I began to read Nietzsche and Camus. At this time I started at university and had no idea what to do, but I had a good scholarship and was good at math so I went into physics. While doing physics I took some philosophy courses to fill in core requirements and eventually I took so many that I decided to double major. I increasingly found the analytic/continental divide to be spurious and that much contemporary and modern philosophy was trying to copy scientific methods to seem valid, but at this point I had already come to terms with my own scientism and moved past it, and the question I really started to want to understand was how philosophy had ended up where it is now compared to what it was through most of human history, and what happened to Christianity. I found my ancient phil. Professor to be one of the only ones who seemed to also have this innate sense of the importance of Truth, in more than a merely factual way and I got deeper into the ancient greeks and the church fathers and the history of Judaism and Christianity and the Bible, but I was still stuck on Nietzsche. It seemed to me that there was no way around Nietzsches view until I found McIntyre, which then led to more reading of the ancients, and also Marx and Heidegger and it was with all of these that I was really able to start to see where philosophy has ended up and why. As I got deeper and deeper into all these things I found it harder and harder to convince myself to study physics except just as something to get a job with, but even that recently felt like a poor excuse to be so specialized so I finally dropped the physics altogether. I'm nearly done with the philosophy degree now and I don't really want to go into academia for a variety of reasons, partly because of what I've learned of the nature of modernity, but also most professors are self-righteous and struggling to get by, and the market is flooded.
This seemed like a nice spot to write out a little self history, but also to say that while I am in some sense a failed physicist, I feel like the reason I couldn't study it was because it just seemed meaningless to me after a certain point and I lost what small passion for it I had to begin with. I was mostly doing it out of a sense of pride and job security and neither of those seem important now. Im not sure how it is for everyone, but I imagine there are others who have gone through something similar. My inner Nietzsche wants to call it all cope, but I think there's more going on.
Yeah, I’m (Am I?) into something like that myself.
St Augustine and Nietzsche (Yup, You have read it well. Those two. But someone well versed in philosophy surely knows how many things can go on in a man’s mind) were some kind of catalyst in my life.
I’m too lazy to write at length about that (Or, maybe, I’m just afraid that a well written discourse on what I actually think will just show my own copings) but I do not think it is simply about philosophy.
It is just about living... Sometimes I have questions that for one reason or another torment me.
It is not that philosophy is a kind of “deposit of truth” where I put an end to this, but more like a place where I found people with my same thorns in the chest.
Sometimes I found here that company, sometimes I found it in other places.
I just know i want to live, and live to the fullest... And I just found many other people with the same desire, for one reason or another, in that place.
(And I have found the laziest, tiresome and most irritating people there too! But that’s another story.
Sometimes, when something is precious, it’s much easier to fall short)
"Materalism is nihilism" what a shitty and conveniently non-specific argument you have there. You know there still is the ability, under scepticism and materialism, to have this "Higher Power of truth"? (A painfully typical and overcooked "Philosophy" major stance)
Not everything has to contain lovey dovey metaphysical mysticism to be "Life-affirming".
This video ages like fine wine
The last point is the saddest truth i ever heard.
the sincerity of the answer stunned me
It’s extremely bold and unelaborated lmao
(Probably because any attempt to defend it would immediately run into the obvious fact that mathematicians are trying to do different things than analytic philosophers, and “writers”- he means novelists I guess?- are trying to different things than continental philosophers.)
I disagree with it because it’s really far too cynical. He underscores the genuine love of these fields that many people hold coming in.
Radical honesty is amazing. Love your work, Prof. Please keep going!
I would say it's about as true as saying soccer players (in America) are just people who failed to succeed in Basketball or in Football, which would hold true for maybe a portion of people, but ultimately it discredits every single soccer player simply because Basketball and Football happen to pay more and be more popular.
Also, the third point is completely irrelevant as it can be applied to every single profession that exists. Actually I would even argue that it is unhelpful to argue on basis of "occupational therapy" because the message comes out saying "X is doing this ultimately useless task A not necessarily because it needs to be done, but because he needs to be paid, and can't do useful task B", which may seem fine, but then you can ask something like "if A is useless, then can't we have X do simply whatever he wants, and still have him paid, or just make him do useful task B, no matter how bad he is at it?"
Very humble of you to say so, thank you.
I have always been interested in humanities and philosophy since I was a child. Now I'm in my 30's and am majoring in Philosophy and Cognitive Neuroscience. Although it's not an easy major, the readings can be quite complex at times.Yet, I find it interesting and relevant in many areas of life.
I honestly love Richard Rorty, I think he said philosophy is less "levers of power" and more like great literary works that help us rethink and essentially explain what's going on around us. Idk, I know he's controversial with some people, but he's interesting to me.
Well for starters, he is an antirealist.
Excellent. This reminds me of a Malcolm Gladwell piece talking about all his years with his therapist where the profound insight was "sometime you may be having dinner with your family and your child says something funny, and you all laugh together, and feel good." Or god being very middle sized. Really entertaining and I always enjoy your dignity.
I studied History & Phiosophy of Science and it was mind-altering. I was literally taught to think and don't know how other people manage to go through life without the skills and insights it gave me (albeit at mere undergrad level). It made me a better scientist and better clinician. And the mental gymnastics of analytic philosophy are fiendishly complex and impressive - there is some really beautiful and careful work done in this field. And most people still think academic philosophy sorta means 'ideology' :/
That was fantastic. Thanks so much for sharing yourself and your dignity.
I'm interested in philosophy because changes to my understanding is exciting
Pretty fun one!
Really made me think of the analogy with mathematics. While people think of math as extremely practical and useful in every day life, what they are thinking of is not math, but tiny little subsections of math (arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus).
In reality, becoming a mathematician involves studying things which are well outside anything any normal person, or even any research scientist living today will find ever find useful. These things are complications of complication of abstractions, that are so far removed from reality, it takes a PhD to even begin to understand what is being studied and why.
And yet, historically, mathematics invented in an abstract void have found uses in science, often hundreds of years after these mathematical concepts were invented.
In a similar way, philosophy can be viewed as constructing and documenting concepts and their relationships. These concepts could then be employed to solve real problems, or to be used as "bones" on which to hang the bewildering facts gathered in the real world.
This is probably my favorite video on UA-cam thus far.
that 3rd point (especially combined with the 2nd) feels like a massive personal attack (haha only serious, etc.,)
I definitely have thought a lot about writing stories and narratives and I always get caught up on writing about concepts instead. But in storywriting, that's ""infodumping"" and is generally """bad.""" Yet, all is not lost -- it's really just philosophy!
same lol. btw you look cute🙃
That third reason was just brutally honest.
You gotta respect em for it XD
I thought it was meant to be ironic, but seems like most people at least in the comments took it seriously
@@chrisbuchanan8579 can you spell it literally out? In what way ironic what's the inverse message you thought it would have been, exactly?
4. Laughter (especially when presented, in case three, with deadpan sincerity)
A technical error. Stating that moral study helps us understand morality says nothing in fact about whether it makes a person a better person.
A few issues with an empirical study as well. In order to determine if a person is better or worse at morality, we need a metric. This implies that we know what is better or worse morality. Where did that come from? Second, multiple disciplines, such as math, logic, and empirical research, will also lend essential skills to maximise your moral behaviour.
Looking forward for the videos about Thomas Aquinas and Augustine.
My nephew decided to study philosophy and I congratulated him. I told him: Philosophy is very important and we need more serious and honest philosophers because we need people who question things in a serious manner. (Fox news people are not philosophers even though they question everything). I'm really happy to know I was not that wrong.
Great video! Thank you 🙏
As a paid mathematician and scientist, I study philosophy for a personal framing of reality. 🤪 Thanks for teaching.
That ending was pretty sad, I didn't expect that lol
In the Intellectual History departments here in Denmark we have this amazing compound word that I have a hard time translating. "Afselvfølgeigørelse". Its a compound word containing compound words! Anyhow, the word basically means "the act of taking something that is taken for granted, and proving it to not be that". I feel like that is a good reason for philosophy, that also makes it broader than solely religion. Philosophy unstabilizes the stable.
You say failed writers/mathematicians/etc., but it's hysterical how even right now in undergrad, I mention the slightest philosophical structure in either lit or math classes(or majority psych classes in my case), and it stumps some of the "brightest" people I've met. They seem to know the symbols and mannerisms and cadence and so on to express what they've learned and what they know, but it also seems like the majority of them have never gone deep or external enough to actually analyze the structure, lack of structure, relations of things within their own fields, etc. of their school of thought or studies, and they seem to be so amazed by philosophy. I think as a philosopher, or someone interested in philosophy/"street philosopher", we can help to expose people who only explore the immediate, practical applications of their work, to a more broad and truly applicable sense by exposing these bright people to different ways in which they can apply themselves, regardless of if an institution or morality of school of thought tells them they are able to or not. They(obviously not all) lack the actual analysis or critical understanding of the thing they talk about every single day, and almost end up never expanding beyond the syntax or semantics that they repeat. You say philosophy can be occupational therapy for an individual who's failed at some sort of subject, which could be true in some cases, but I think it's more of a case of a person being more fed up with standardized, simplified rules of conceptual exploration, and we're able to be a sort of occupational therapy for others who may be trying to expand beyond what they already know and just need a kick-start by being exposed to different aspects of the conceptual structures(or lack thereof) that we focus on every single day. But also I think you're able to do this without being what I would call a conceptual vanguard, or claiming "vanguard-status". I think the second you claim vanguard status to become a conceptual vanguard, you are claiming an unjust hierarchy that deprives another person from the information you initially were exchanging with said-person and are now gifting, rather than exchanging and exposing. Philosophy is very cool and dope.
Would someone who failed at analytic philosophy draw the conclusion that enjoying reading philosophy makes them a failed reader of good fiction?
I'm just starting the video but I have to leave a comment already. I've had the pleasure of meeting Richard Rorty in a somewhat more private context long after I was a big fan of his work - and he equally impressed me. He had such a lovely and kind way of cutting through bullshit.
Well put!
Great video and really straightforward. Loved the list and discussion. Thanks!
For me, quite Romantic, I don't think I'm exactly a failed writer, but a failed adventurer. I historically became interested in philosophy because of the tension I experienced in life between my desire to live (and I was the most energetic and curious; filled with wonder), and the world that wasn't alive for me, be it lack of nature, social life, strict regulations, enforced religious beliefs, etc. as a young person thirsty for life and forced to be locked in a room staring at a screen. It has been a solace and therapy, really, yet quite a hard one to be honest, since for a great part it alienated me even more and made me question all being (since philosophy became for philosophy's sake, my new interest, a world of words), at least until I find something to bring me back to life out of my head.
this is really a wonderfully self-deprecating interpretation of philosophy.
I once had a prof who enquired to the class: "Are you confused? ...Good! You are one step beyond ignorance...it means you are thinking...
Brutal and honest ending. I always had similar thoughts.
the most honest self-description i ever saw/ but honest does not mean deep/
Is the over-examined life worth living? Can maps replace territories?
I found a renewed appreciation for philosophy and its relevance in the modern-day due to the controversy surrounding Philosophy Professor Kathleen Stock. She, probably most high profile amongst others, reintroduces us, the general public, to the importance of acknowledging material reality in our society. I think her case speaks to the first 2 points you raised. I am not in the position to speak to the third. Her book definitely reflects our time.
this was absolutely brilliant
#3 is an extraordinary example of projection
"Failed mathematician"...you left the sword through the heart right at the end
There's a rich tradition of Islamic philosophy carried on by philosophers inspired by ancient Greek's philosophy during the golden age of Islamic rule but that tradition didn't prevent most of Islamic countries to become fundamentalist, at least to some level
Thanks so much for this, i have been wracking my brain since my art education as to why i cant seem to make use of philosophy or even write philosophically, it felt as though there was just some assumption that we can all use and appreciate it. this has been very helpful to me, cheers bud
It’s true that being a philosopher or studying philosophy may not make you a more ethical or moral person, but philosophy can do this, as through philosophy you can strengthen your understanding of ethics or morality. But, it’s not an inherit given, as the philosopher has the onus to determine how they do philosophy and what they focus upon and try to understand, using philosophy as a tool the utilizer plays a role with regard to how it is used.
Glad I found this video before finishing my bachelor in philosophy haha
That last point was so refreshingly self-aware.
To this complete tourist (no worthwhile academic experience with philosophy) the value of philosophy lies in the promotion and systematization of inquiry, including the application of this to several specific topics. Part of the systematization is a set of rules and conventions for consistent communication of abstractions.
Arguably most importantly, epistemology establishes and evaluates the processes we use to acquire knowledge and allows us to assess our confidence. This seems plainly useful. Other subfields like political philosophy have produced ideas absolutely fundamental to how we relate to one another and structure society. For example, it has been taken for granted in the west that the state is beholden to the individual (in principle... In practice this is very messy and can be grossly violated), but historically this is an actually fairly uncommon concept requiring some clever abstraction of human relationships and assumptions about values.
However it's worth mentioning that the openness of philosophy comes at great cost. In general it seems so cautious to effectively discard bad ideas that much of philosophy is basically pretentious storytelling.
You misread the study. The study shows that ethical philosophers don't act more morally in various categories compared to other philosophers. The average donations for all of them, however, was well above average for income level in even the most generous countries.
I've been watching a lot of your videos and I really appreciate the work you're doing. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavours ☺️ also, I really like your warnings at the beginning and ends of your videos.
I think Chuang Tzu give few answer on this in story about a peculiar useless tree and somekind of big nut and medicine? (I kinda forget). I think the use of philosophy is..
1. Creative understanding of new creative way using or understanding something. It is the technological side of it. Building base conceptual engine of our mind.
2. Human nature loves philosophy. It bring peace and joy to mind. It is like how music operate. It is to clear confusion in mind (or avoid boredom).
Maybe a bit more specific on the final point. Philosophy is something that anyone can do and does not require specialized talent or skill, but it is an intellectual practice that intelligent people who are not specialized can enjoy, and by intelligent I merely mean thinking individuals. It’s therapeutic aspect is that anyone can access it and enjoy their mind, understand ideas, and share with others. It’s not equal to, worse, or better than any other intellectually narrowed or specialized skills like math, science, astrophysics, or so forth. Yet, it has significant purpose and meaning like any of these other potential practices.
I think that another function of philosophy is to keep the scientists honest! This is particularly relevant to our time because 'science as religion' (aka scientific materialism) needs to be critiqued severely. Another way to put it is that the function of critiquing religion focuses on religious myths and that of critiquing science focuses on scientific myths. If you think that the latter do not exist you are in dire need of such a critique!
“Philosophy is an instrument that is useful only against philosophers and against the philosopher in us.” - Wittgenstein
He also said "Philosophy does not lead me to any renunciation, since I do not abstain from saying something, but rather abandon a certain combination of words as senseless." So he would agree with Kant and Socrates, it's not about become more opinionated, but less.
Another great video Herr Professor Doktor! I wasn’t entirely sure if you were joking about no. 3 😉
Great video as always! Do you think the first point could be changed to "Questioning dogmas"? Dogmatic thought can show up outside of religion as well, in science, mathematics, philosophy itself, etc, and philosophy would help to question these dogmatic thoughts.
He might consider all those things to be types of religions.
But if they did that they would probably be cancelled i.e. bullied out of their jobs.
I love 3rd point. Totally agree with all 3 points, especially 3rd.
You got any video about some tips to study philosophy?
But isn't Science just the philosophy of emperiricsm? Also, I think Einstein spoke quite seriously about how philosophy and science "are dependent upon each other. Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled." To him I actually don't think this was at all a superfecial fig leaf to the philosophers. I remember reading about how at the core of Einstiein's drive was the yearning to understand the great mystery of why our universe is here. Is that a scientific question of a philosophical question? He wasn't jsut doing science for fun(although i'm sure there was some of that). He was driven, ultimately from philosophical influences. This, I think is different from today when science is driven only by it's own self-informing data. Data that is basically still just working off what Einstein proposed over a century ago. And I don't really understand the whole 'failed writer/scientist thing.' I mean of course you'll be a failed writer with that attitude haha? and like to be honest, the world doesn't need another scientist now. Our problems are fundamentally not scientific in nature. For example, we have the science to tackle cliamte change, but it seems we are not well equipped in other intellectual areas to inact this. My favourite philospher is Mark Fisher, whom in my opinion had a diagnosis of society that ellucidated reality with a specificty that a scientist obviously can't do, methodolically and likely due to an inferiority in some congitive capacities. Plus, I forget who said it, but there's this quote that goes something like'When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.'" I'm probably way off here, but my main point is, If we want to make sciencetific advancments we must use philopsphy to fix the society with which such progress is dependant.
Such a pedastooling of science is in my opinion a consequence of capitialism lending itself towards a purely scientific framing of reality, and an affilaite apoliticsm that comes with this. Such an apolitical undersatning of reality serves to negate any ability to identify the injustuces of capital within society.
I'd just like to add that even though the case of Socrates is best known, the criticism of religion in ancient Greece predates him (notable examples include Thales, Xenophanes, and Heraclitus).
Us art school instructor say we’re a failed philosopher. Comically true in light of this video.
LOL. I really like how carefully he laid up the last point. Not necessarily correct but quite thought provoking, beautifully philosophical.
(from a non-philosopher)
Philosophy led me into Buddhist philosophy. It drew me closer to religion. When you're searching for meaning, philosophy seems the most natural place to begin your search.
this video just gave me a potentially life altering epiphany! cheers!!!
Funny thing is the more we fall pray to the advance of a neoliberal frame of thought the less room we make for this hegelian jewel u mention here. I for once cannot understand the appeal that these ideas have... specially since without this hegelian contribution I would not make heads or tails of history and thought (and for that also of science) and I often assume that not making heads or tails of all that is preciselly their point.
In any case, pleasd excuse my going off on a limb. U did a great work here and I thank u.
such a beautiful analogy for continental and analytical philosophy. I think if Bertrand Russell lived in 21 century, he would have youtube channel and support peace.
The biggest misconception about studying philosophy is thinking that studying it makes you a philosopher.
About the point of making you a better partner in conversations; I think there's truth to that, not that philosophy necessarily makes a person eloquent and confident but can give one new perspectives which other people can find interesting, also one might be less inclined to fall into traps of logical fallacies.
Plz plz plz make a well-structured online course about philosophy!
I'd honestly pay for that lol
To identify the limitations inherent in all systems of conceptual thinking and in so doing to gain greater freedom from those systems of thought.
the universities could hardly write on their webpage "are you too shit with numbers to do maths? We have just the course for you..." It was a brutal ending lol.
It was great video though as usual!
Philosophy is like food for the soul. Finding deeper purpose in life outside of material needs
For people who read in french , because unfortunately this immense philosopher , one of the first analytical philosophy scouts in France , has written a few books about the "meaning of philosophy " ..one his old books " Le philosophe et les autophages " was a response to Michel Serres' " Le passage du nord ouest " ...or his "Nietzche contre Foucault, sur la vérité, la connaissance et le pouvoir " ..and his long list of other books treating of reason, truth, religion.
For those who are interested I have most of Jacques Bouveresse's books in soft copy )))
Concerning religion, I would say that philosophy makes it easier to question any dogma. It's just that religious ones are so prevalent in society. They are powerful institutions.
I would say that the reason that it allows people to question dogmas is because philosophy helps us grasp knowledge that lies beyond the day-to-day experience that shapes common sense. Including, into the past. It connects us to society's collective accumulated knowledge.
And I agree on the issue about professional philosophers. If philosophy is about shaping a world view, everyone does some philosofying in their interaction with the natural world and the social world. The person who calls himself a philosopher is different simply because he has sistemized that information in a way that is more internally consistent, that he can express explicitly, that he can transmit to others and that has more explaining power than the other's common sense. After all, if it does not have any capability of explaining reality, then they are just the crazy individual people avoid at the bus stop.
The other caracteristic is the professional part, which is specific to capitalism: where the only good we have to sell at the market is our labour, so philosophers need to find a way to make their labour have use value to others so they can sell it, making use of their ideas as a trade value, a commodity. Which is what those university sites are doing. Philosophy is not so bad, it can be used like in this sentence, to get a clearer picture of the precarity capitalism, our reality, forces upon us. And how it hasn't always been like that and thus, it need not be like that in the future. And how it can't be if we are to avoid climate change extinguishing humanity. Despite the media and politicians informing our common senses otherwise. With philosophy we can more easily tell how they are being disingenuous.
I as a scientist, found that philosophy provides the framework or the tools to tackle the question; how do I know what I know? Putting it in different words, the same framework is applied to the production of real (a troublesome term) knowledge.
Since I'm writing a post, I would like to add that as a man in the field (I specialize in atmospheric chemistry) scientist nowadays apply a miss-mash of Inductivism, Deductivism, Popperian Falsification, and consensus based agreement.
In my opinion, students trained in philosophy (philosophy of science?) could be instrumental in a society that is becoming more and more knowledge oriented, where the means of production is knowledge generation.
If thought and knowledge are a house, then philosophy is the bricks and cement within.
I don't see why philosophers should bother about usefulness. Usefulness as a concept is very vague and unmeasurable. While I laughed at the ironic statement at the end(it's quite amusing to think of us that work as philosophers as failures), I don't think it's clear. Philosophy is a practice of failure: the failure of thought and the failure of grasping the knowledge of anything. It's precisely the attitude of failure that defines it. To see the failure of what we think is true or good or even correct.
So failure, in a sense, isn't a failure.
To see philosophers as failed x or y isn't very accurate. It's a symptom of academicism (which I am part of). Academia tends to create an ecosystem of thought governed by productivity. Philosophy tries to justify it's usefulness by affirming itself. But I think it should be the opposite. Everything we know is a byproduct of the little problems philosophy has solved. When it is solved in any way it becomes something different from philosophy, something to be questioned by philosophy, but only by questioning do we realize that there is something to be known.
Trying to justify the usefulness of an activity that affirms its unusefulness is, in a form, unuseful.
Philosophy is the reflection of the reflection. In a sense, it opposes unthoughtful actions. Why is philosophy useful? Because it regards action as something that fails to know itself, because it refuses to conform itself with appearence and dogma, because it questions the very nature of usefulness as a purpose.
I agree with you, and it reminds me of some of Kant's work. Honestly I think Philosophy is much more brutally simple than people make it out to be. Much of it, continental or analytical, involves the logical classification of the grammatical parts of thought and derivation of the (rational) psychological preconditions of their unity as consciousness. Its less mystifying than people want to make it. It is like "daydreaming", in the sense that its thinking about thought itself, and I don't just mean Aristotle's work on metacognition Apart from any specific content. Structurally and grammatically. Almost everything else is popular philosophy, which is largely just propaganda or scientism in disguise. With some exceptions like Paul Tillich, philosophy almost has little to do with "the meaning of life". Happiness. Usefulness. Becoming more productive Politics. Etc. That stuff can be better investigated by social psychologists like Fromm, Frankl, Rollo May. It’s not about how to live life, or anything. It’s more about distinction, boundaries, critical limitation of what thought can do with regard to various objects and the synthetic organization of knowledge domains.
Here's a quote from Heidegger that might be helpful for some:
"...it is meaningless to ask why and to what purpose we philosophize. For philosophy is grounded only in terms of itself-or else not at all, just as art reveals its truth only through itself. One can never prove that, and why, philosophy is necessary. Every such attempt at proof already misunderstands philosophy. But for the same reason, it is also impossible to show that philosophy is superfluous and that it is about time to get rid of it, or repress it at the outset. Whoever speaks this way proffers the most brilliant proof for the fact that he is in any case completely unable to speak and treat of that which he only puts down; he is completely ignorant of philosophy."
@@hazardousjazzgasm129 Great quote. Thanks. From which text did you get it from?
@@Azzy1921 It's from Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom
to exersise my my mind and to help me think about the world i live in.
Also ,i am a philosopher,though unpublished.
Personally, I feel like philosophy is a great "seed value" for any artistic endeavor. Reading Kamu and being inspired by the idea of rebellion against absurdity. Or the term itself - The Will of The World by Schopenhauer. Even questionable science can give birth to these mesmerizing endless pits of our cognition, and it's so much fun to take them as a starting block for your work. Even though, admittedly, it probably falls into "coining concepts" in your books. But I still think it's a separate and very promising use case.
The best whay to find answers is the scinetific method. To scientifically prove something, you need an experiment. But for some questions one can not make a valid experiment (at least until now, or maybe at all). Examples are:
does God exist?
What is the meaning of live ?
What are we exactly ?
How do you live a moral live ?
That is why we need a more versatile method. This method is philosophy.
I got this question so many times in my life. Nowdays i usualy (not)answer it by something like "Its not specificaly good for anything and thats the point of it. Doing something pointless, while taking it deadly seriously, make you experience a radical freedom and joy." Because isnt the problem how to answer the question already in the formulation? It presupposes world when everything a person does have to be good for something. So people should stop killing vibe with this silly question, philosophers just wanna have fun.