Philosphy is a waste of time

[Antonio the Sixth]

I am absolutely distraught by how much I agree with this. I have had a deep love for philosophy ever since I was a child. I continue to believe that philosophical thinking is one of the most profound, beautiful and important activities that a human being can engage in. And yet, the ways in which academic philosophers treat the discipline is anything but profound, beautiful and important. Some of the arguments that they put forward make a mockery of the very notion of rational inquiry, and amount to little more than language games. When you find yourself arguing with a straight face that the sky is not blue, it might be time to take a good look at yourself and wonder if there is any value to what you're doing.

In short, philosophy must be rescued from philosophers.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Agree one hundred percent.

I'll regurgitate last year's concern rant

I think it depends.

Despite heavy philosophising myself (at least I think) I generally don't like philosophy. As much as Judith Butler is a bit of meme, I can understand her, through my own self editing of what she says as opposed to say Jordan Peterson who just talks absolute bollocks. And people mistaking absolute bollocks for wisdom or intelligence is as bad, if not worse than 'Pez' philosophy as the latter doesn't pretend to be anything greater than it is.

But likewise people mistaking genuine complexity for absolute bollocks because they can't understand it or just want to discredit it (as is happening with Butler recently on THAT ISSUE) is just laziness and at times malice on their part.

I have a real visceral dislike of 'thought experiment' secular ethical philosophy; trolley problems or 'imagine you woke up attached to another person' etc. If you have to construct an almost impossible set of conditions in which to play, then what you're postulating is effectively worthless. All of us, no matter when or where we are tend to face variations of the same ethical and philosophical problems as the next person and otherwise complex philosophical exercises are best served by bearing that in mind.

I think what you say about 'lucidity' is true, but one persons inspirational advocate is another persons obvious fraud. So there always has to exist, for example, both Kant and Kantianism, as distinct theatres. You aren't served better by grasping Kant directly or by espousing a more accessible interpretation. Hume's treatise are relatively easy to understand now, in comparison to a lot of his contemporaries but he had to re-write them and often add unnecessary complications to them for the palette of his own audience.

As long as everyone doesn't talk across each other, I think better conversations can be had by people with different levels of engagement.

This last point is key, I think. The problem with modern philosophers isn't that they use specialized jargon - every discipline does that. You can't understand certain ideas without using words that most normal people are unfamiliar with.

The problem is that while those disciplines exist to add meaning to our lives in some way (as did philosophy for most of its existence), modern philosophers instead seem intent on destroying meaning. They take basically every statement a normal person could make and they go "is this really true though?". And guess what, if you do that, you can easily come up for a reasonable-sounding argument for why it isn't. You can do that with any statement. And then you're left with absolutely nothing. Including whatever statements you used to make your argument in the first place. Including your very ability to understand those statements. You have been talking across everyone else, perhaps even across yourself.

Some amount of doubt is healthy and productive - in fact, even a great amount of doubt can be! I have a ton of respect for Descartes, because set out to doubt all his certainties, not just as a fun thought experiment, but to show that he could rebuild all of them more rigorously on the basis of things which he couldn't possibly doubt. Whether he was successful or not is in the eye of the beholder, but the important thing is that he tried. So many modern philosophers instead seem content going "do we ever actually know anything?", shrugging and moving on with their lives. Of course then in their lives they are constantly acting on the basis that they do know certain things, that certain things have meaning. The color error theorist is still going to see the sky as blue any time they look out the window on a clear day. The moral error theorist is still going to have moral intuitions and wish to see them validated. So if these people have proven anything, it's the utter futility of their own theories in their own lives.

Again, I say this from a place of deep love for philosophy. I believe that philosophy is the greatest capacity to create meaning in our lives - but this creative power can just as well be used to destroy. My plea then is for philosophers to choose creation over destruction.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I would hope that there are other ways to cultivate the love of knowledge and wisdom than via the "discipline" of philosophy. Otherwise, I am effectively the null set.

The best way I can put it is that to me, philosophy is the conscious attempt to assign meaning to existence. We all instinctively, implicitly assign meaning to things we do by the mere fact of doing them. We wouldn't be able to eat or drink or get out of bed if doing this had no meaning to us (this is how I read Camus' line that "the only important philosophical question is suicide"). But when we ask ourselves, consciously, which things have meaning to us and why they have it, we are doing philosphy. Of course there is an infinity of answers we could give, and the only ones that matter ultimately will be those that are meaningful to us. I do think all of us can find some answers for ourselves, though, and we all benefit from doing so.

[Antonio the Sixth]

On another note, since the article sings the praises of "hard sciences", we should be aware that there is in fact a similar tendency at work in certain highly theoretical fields of scientific academia. For example, this video makes a pretty compelling case that most of modern particle physics is dominated by highly unscientific speculation that has tried (and repeatedly, embarrassingly failed) to solve "problems" with the Standard Model that aren't actual problems. The video is well worth a watch (the author is herself a fairly respected theoretical physicist, to be clear, so her critiques come from a place of intimate knowledge):

The great irony here is that it seems like what particle physicists are doing is basically philosophy. They reject the standard model, not because it makes incorrect predictions, but because it's not "elegant" enough - in other words, it's not as meaningful as we'd like it to be. It makes a bunch of weird esoteric claims and these claims seem to work perfectly at predicting anything we can measure, but we as human beings don't really know what to make of them. So, physicists search for hidden meaning that will make the standard model intuitive. But of course that's not something science can tell us: all science can do is make predictions and test them.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Existentialism is a school of philosophy that appeals to me.

Me too. It recognizes that meaning doesn't have to be an Objective Feature of the outside world - it's something you can make at home, so to speak. I think that can a liberating realization for a lot of people. Personally, I don't know if I subscribe to it exactly - I might rather say that making meaning is a collective, collaborative effort. But still, it's a very inspiring perspective.

[Antonio the Sixth]

What is Philosophy?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vT-WrqjWdI

Yes, I rest my case. Like I said. A waste of time Agnes. Deal with it. If you really want clarity, legal reasoning and constructs actually get you from A to B. What does it mean that I am busy you ask? It means that I would rather be doing something other than interacting with you at the moment. You know, like chewing my finger nails. Or noticing that BRTD had put up yet another spam thread. What does spam mean Agnes? Your turn. Any more questions?

Wait... are you seriously arguing that clarity and univocity of language is a characteristic feature of legal reasoning? For real?? My dude, I'm all for taking the speck off the philosopher's eyes but maybe you should pay attention to the beam in the lawyer's eye as well. Lawyers are the biggest and most adept players of language games of all.

Anyway, the point of the video here seems to be that philosophers try to think systematically about the meaning of ordinary language. I would agree with that. The point is not to say "you're using language wrong" which is the real problem with a lot of skeptical philosophical perspectives. Rather, it's trying to describe the meaning that's communicated and how a simple sentence can carry a lot of meaning. You're kind of making that point right here with the "I'm busy" example - there's actually a lot you're not explicitly saying but that your interlocutor will grasp implicitly. All the philosopher is doing is trying to make that explicit. Again that's a very different project from trying to destroy all meaning, which is my problem with a lot of modern philosophers.

As for this person's personal life, it certainly seems sussy but I have no interest in looking up the details. I am indeed busy in that regard.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Well lawyers understand a word can have different meanings in different contexts, and learn to cope with that, and if that gets too problematical, to create words or art, or develop case law with often more developed definitions from the case facts or hypotheticals in the reasoning, sort of what Agnes was yammering about as philosophy, but it is sort of like brushing your teeth, it is just an ordinary activity that does not need someone who seems to be getting paid by the word but isn't, to torture the minds of students by making it all seem impenetrable but important. Successfully understanding and coping with ambiguity is a form of the risk management of life.

...so you don't think lawyers often deliberately play on the different meanings of words in order to obfuscate a given issue rather than clarify it? If you're seriously denying this I. Honestly don't know how to respond. That's like, the one thing everyone knows about lawyers.

And I think consciously thinking about how you use words can be a deeply helpful activity and allow you to better understand yourself and others. Sure, a lot of our communication will work just fine on instincts, but you never know when you'll get into problems or arguments that seem intractable unless you seriously think about what the words actually mean. When that happens, philosophy does come in handy. That's in addition to the other point I mentioned about giving us reasons to care about our life and others', something which many people can be seen to clearly lack.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Well lawyers understand a word can have different meanings in different contexts, and learn to cope with that, and if that gets too problematical, to create words or art, or develop case law with often more developed definitions from the case facts or hypotheticals in the reasoning, sort of what Agnes was yammering about as philosophy, but it is sort of like brushing your teeth, it is just an ordinary activity that does not need someone who seems to be getting paid by the word but isn't, to torture the minds of students by making it all seem impenetrable but important. Successfully understanding and coping with ambiguity is a form of the risk management of life.

...so you don't think lawyers often deliberately play on the different meanings of words in order to obfuscate a given issue rather than clarify it? If you're seriously denying this I. Honestly don't know how to respond. That's like, the one thing everyone knows about lawyers.

And I think consciously thinking about how you use words can be a deeply helpful activity and allow you to better understand yourself and others. Sure, a lot of our communication will work just fine on instincts, but you never know when you'll get into problems or arguments that seem intractable unless you seriously think about what the words actually mean. When that happens, philosophy does come in handy. That's in addition to the other point I mentioned about giving us reasons to care about our life and others', something which many people can be seen to clearly lack.

Lawyers clarify or obfuscate depending on what serves their client's interests, but typically one of the two contending lawyers would be on the clarifying side. In contract negotiations, typically both lawyers would want to be on the clarifying side, unless the idea is to pull a fast one on the other side.

The best lawyers have the best skills in espying ambiguity (issue spotting), and seeing the dissimilarities in apparent similarities, and visa versa. Isn't that grand?

I like to think I am pretty good at that, or at least was, before my mind when to hell.

Cheers.

That's fair enough, but the bottom line here is that lawyers clearly do not seek truth - they seek their client's interest, as you say, and that interest is sometimes served by truth, sometimes not, but in either case truth is at best a secondary goal. What matters is making the most compelling case for your client, and while you're right that being able to spot obfuscation in the other party is a helpful skill in that respect, an equally helpful skill is to learn to obfuscate and get away with it. And since, in most legal cases, neither side's case is perfectly served by the truth (truth is typically inconvenient to everyone), usually both sides are doing some amount of obfuscation.