I find it difficult now to recapture my sense of let-down when I first came across him. His whole message was that the important thing in life is rational thought – being logical – and that it automatically leads to ethical behaviour. He even thought that it transports the philosopher to heaven. It is an enormity of rationalistic narrow-mindedness and limitation. It has only to do with the rationalistic thought…
Philosophy Anti-Philosophy Logic
What’s Wrong with Philosophy? 1: it’s just verbal logicking
What defines the philosopher is firstly his commitment to logicking with words as the path to Wisdom; and secondly, a lack of Human Sensibility to Human Life (which I shall go into in my next post.) These are the two concepts that are the nearest I have yet got to understanding my exasperation with Philosophy. Philosophers have another kind of mind, directed towards logicking and even mathematicking. Philosophy consists of problems…
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Philosophy Anti-Philosophy History of Philosophy
What’s Wrong with Philosophy? 7: from Socrates onward
THE LATER GREEK PHILOSOPHERS I was amazed by Socrates the first time I came across him, sitting in the empty market-place before breakfast with people gathered round him, and drawing them out with his quizzing. He asked questions like: What is Courage? What is Virtue? What is Duty? and asked them one by one to speak up with their examples of each. Some of these examples were contradictory to each…
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Philosophy Anti-Philosophy Leavis
What’s Wrong with Philosophy? 2: It lacks sensibility to human life.
Wisdom should be about human life, but human life is something that philosophers have the wrong kind of minds for. Philosophy lacks ‘human sensibility to human life’. It lacks that particular human faculty of feeling for human matters. What it has always offered is logic, maths and science, which aren’t the appropriate mental methodologies for the knowing of human life. Philosophers do a reductionism on human life until it isn’t…
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Philosophy Anti-Philosophy Descartes Dualism
Descartes 3: his dualism – a problem for philosophers!
Descartes proposed his’Ontological Dualism’: that some things such as the brain are material, and others such as the human mind and God are spiritual. So what’s wrong with that? Isn’t it just obvious, unproblematical and commonsensical, almost by definition of the words used? But it was the one fraction of his thought that later philosophers weren’t impressed by. ‘Cartesian Dualism’ became the basis for ‘The Mind-Body Problem’ for subsequent philosophers (from…
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Philosophy Anti-Philosophy
What’s Wrong with Philosophy? 4
Wisdom is learning about oneself and about Adam and Eve. It’s not some kind of objective knowledge arrived at by logic, mathematics or science, that can be argued, and demonstrated to other people for them to agree with, and that students can write down in their lectures. It requires another kind of intelligence which perhaps can be called Sensibility to Human Life, see previous post. Philosophy hasn’t got it. …
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Philosophy Anti-Philosophy History of Philosophy
What’s Wrong with Philosophy? 6: The Pre-Socratics.
THE BEGINNINGS OF REASON IN ANCIENT GREECE This may be a popular version of History of Philosophy but here it is: Reason, I have read, was synonymous in ancient Greece with Logic, with Argument, with Thought and with Philosophy, and that it hasn’t always been with us. That seems glaringly obvious by now. The Classicists tell us that the pre-Socratic philosophers started it, for the Western world, in about 580…
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Philosophy Anti-Philosophy
What’s Wrong with Philosophy? 3, It wipes away wisdom
PHILOSOPHY USES THE WRONG METHODS FOR ‘WISDOM’ Wisdom is about human life which philosophers are simple-minded about. They lack sensibility to human life, here. They have always lacked that special intelligence and capacity for understanding that human beings have been blessed with Philosophers either lack it or leave it disregarded and fallow. The birth of philosophy was in some ways a regression from the wisdom already present in the…
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Philosophy Anti-Philosophy
What’s Wrong with Philosophy? 5
Many people come to Philosophy expecting something high and deep, from the depths of human experience and self-knowledge, something to rival and supersede religion, but what they get is logicking! They were right in their original expectations of what Philosophy should be. When I started reading interpretations of the great Philosophers of the Western World, from Thales of Miletus onwards, I couldn’t believe they were really serious in expounding…
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