Philosophy is a high logicking that the rest of us can’t manage, but it isn’t wisdom. 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…
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 is 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…
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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 the 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. The Classicists tell us that the pre-Socratic philosophers started it, for the Western world, in about 580 BC. But surely, wasn’t primitive Man…
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Philosophy Anti-Philosophy
What’s Wrong with Philosophy? 3
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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