METHODS OF PHILOSOPHIZING
Philosophical method (or philosophical methodology) is the study of how to do philosophy. A common view among philosophers is that philosophy is distinguished by the ways that philosophers follow in addressing philosophical questions.
LOGIC
Logic (from the Greek “logos”, which has a variety of meanings including word, thought, idea, argument, account, reason or principle) is the study of reasoning, or the study of the principles and criteria of valid inference and demonstration. It attempts to distinguish good reasoning from bad reasoning.
Aristotle defined logic as “new and necessary reasoning”, “new” because it allows us to learn what we do not know, and “necessary” because its conclusions are inescapable. It asks questions like “What is correct reasoning?”, “What distinguishes a good argument from a bad one?”, “How can we detect a fallacy in reasoning?”
Logic investigates and classifies the structure of statements and arguments, both through the study of formal systems of inference and through the study of arguments in natural language. It deals only with propositions (declarative sentences, used to make an assertion, as opposed to questions, commands or sentences expressing wishes) that are capable of being true and false. It is not concerned with the psychological processes connected with thought, or with emotions, images and the like. It covers core topics such as the study of fallacies and paradoxes, as well as specialized analysis of reasoning using probability and arguments involving causality and argumentation theory.
There are two types of reasoning.
Inductive – Particular – General
Deductive – General – Particular
EXISTENTIALISM
It is a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.
Existentialism in the broader sense is a 20th century philosophy that is centered upon the analysis of existence and of the way humans find themselves existing in the world. The notion is that humans exist first and then each individual spends a lifetime changing their essence or nature.
In simpler terms, existentialism is a philosophy concerned with finding self and the meaning of life through free will, choice, and personal responsibility. The belief is that people are searching to find out who and what they are throughout life as they make choices based on their experiences, beliefs, and outlook. And personal choices become unique without the necessity of an objective form of truth. An existentialist believes that a person should be forced to choose and be responsible without the help of laws, ethnic rules, or traditions.
ANALYTIC TRADITION
The school of analytic philosophy has dominated academic philosophy in various regions, most notably Great Britain and the United States, since the early twentieth century. It originated around the turn of the twentieth century as G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell broke away from what was then the dominant school in the British universities, Absolute Idealism. Many would also include Gottlob Frege as a founder of analytic philosophy in the late 19th century, and this controversial issue is discussed in section 2c. When Moore and Russell articulated their alternative to Idealism, they used a linguistic idiom, frequently basing their arguments on the “meanings” of terms and propositions. Additionally, Russell believed that the grammar of natural language often is philosophically misleading, and that the way to dispel the illusion is to re-express propositions in the ideal formal language of symbolic logic, thereby revealing their true logical form. Because of this emphasis on language, analytic philosophy was widely, though perhaps mistakenly, taken to involve a turn toward language as the subject matter of philosophy, and it was taken to involve an accompanying methodological turn toward linguistic analysis. Thus, on the traditional view, analytic philosophy was born in this linguistic turn. The linguistic conception of philosophy was rightly seen as novel in the history of philosophy. For this reason analytic philosophy is reputed to have originated in a philosophical revolution on the grand scale—not merely in a revolt against British Idealism, but against traditional philosophy on the whole.
Analytic philosophy underwent several internal micro-revolutions that divide its history into five phases. The first phase runs approximately from 1900 to 1910. It is characterized by the quasi-Platonic form of realism initially endorsed by Moore and Russell as an alternative to Idealism. Their realism was expressed and defended in the idiom of “propositions” and “meanings,” so it was taken to involve a turn toward language. But its other significant feature is its turn away from the method of doing philosophy by proposing grand systems or broad syntheses and its turn toward the method of offering narrowly focused discussions that probe a specific, isolated issue with precision and attention to detail. By 1910, both Moore and Russell had abandoned their propositional realism—Moore in favor of a realistic philosophy of common sense, Russell in favor of a view he developed with Ludwig Wittgenstein called logical atomism. The turn to logical atomism and to ideal-language analysis characterizes the second phase of analytic philosophy, approximately 1910-1930. The third phase, approximately 1930-1945, is characterized by the rise of logical positivism, a view developed by the members of the Vienna Circle and popularized by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer. The fourth phase, approximately 1945-1965, is characterized by the turn to ordinary-language analysis, developed in various ways by the Cambridge philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Wisdom, and the Oxford philosophers Gilbert Ryle, John Austin, Peter Strawson, and Paul Grice.
During the 1960s, criticism from within and without caused the analytic movement to abandon its linguistic form. Linguistic philosophy gave way to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of language gave way to metaphysics, and this gave way to a variety of philosophical sub-disciplines. Thus the fifth phase, beginning in the mid 1960s and continuing beyond the end of the twentieth century, is characterized by eclecticism or pluralism. This post-linguistic analytic philosophy cannot be defined in terms of a common set of philosophical views or interests, but it can be loosely characterized in terms of its style, which tends to emphasize precision and thoroughness about a narrow topic and to deemphasize the imprecise or cavalier discussion of broad topics.
Even in its earlier phases, analytic philosophy was difficult to define in terms of its intrinsic features or fundamental philosophical commitments. Consequently, it has always relied on contrasts with other approaches to philosophy—especially approaches to which it found itself fundamentally opposed—to help clarify its own nature. Initially, it was opposed to British Idealism, and then to “traditional philosophy” at large. Later, it found itself opposed both to classical Phenomenology (for example, Husserl) and its offspring, such as Existentialism (Sartre, Camus, and so forth) and also “Continental”’ or “Postmodern” philosophy (Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida). Though classical Pragmatism bears some similarity to early analytic philosophy, especially in the work of C. S. Peirce and C. I. Lewis, the pragmatists are usually understood as constituting a separate tradition or school.
PHENOMOLOGY
Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.
Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to other key disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but it came into its own in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others. Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of mind.
Phenomenology is commonly understood in either of two ways: as a disciplinary field in philosophy, or as a movement in the history of philosophy.
The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy: ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), etc.
The historical movement of phenomenology is the philosophical tradition launched in the first half of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, et al. In that movement, the discipline of phenomenology was prized as the proper foundation of all philosophy—as opposed, say, to ethics or metaphysics or epistemology. The methods and characterization of the discipline were widely debated by Husserl and his successors, and these debates continue to the present day. (The definition of phenomenology offered above will thus be debatable, for example, by Heideggerians, but it remains the starting point in characterizing the discipline.)
In recent philosophy of mind, the term “phenomenology” is often restricted to the characterization of sensory qualities of seeing, hearing, etc.: what it is like to have sensations of various kinds. However, our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation. Accordingly, in the phenomenological tradition, phenomenology is given a much wider range, addressing the meaning things have in our experience, notably, the significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these things arise and are experienced in our “life-world”.
Phenomenology as a discipline has been central to the tradition of continental European philosophy throughout the 20th century, while philosophy of mind has evolved in the Austro-Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy that developed throughout the 20th century. Yet the fundamental character of our mental activity is pursued in overlapping ways within these two traditions. Accordingly, the perspective on phenomenology drawn in this article will accommodate both traditions. The main concern here will be to characterize the discipline of phenomenology, in a contemporary purview, while also highlighting the historical tradition that brought the discipline into its own.
Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called “intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experience is directed toward—represents or “intends”—things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean.
The basic intentional structure of consciousness, we find in reflection or analysis, involves further forms of experience. Thus, phenomenology develops a complex account of temporal awareness (within the stream of consciousness), spatial awareness (notably in perception), attention (distinguishing focal and marginal or “horizonal” awareness), awareness of one’s own experience (self-consciousness, in one sense), self-awareness (awareness-of-oneself), the self in different roles (as thinking, acting, etc.), embodied action (including kinesthetic awareness of one’s movement), purpose or intention in action (more or less explicit), awareness of other persons (in empathy, intersubjectivity, collectivity), linguistic activity (involving meaning, communication, understanding others), social interaction (including collective action), and everyday activity in our surrounding life-world (in a particular culture).
https://www.quora.com/What-philosophical-ideas-have-influenced-your-life
I have always been fascinated by the idea of freedom. However, deciding whether freedom was an illusion or not has gradually become a secondary preoccupation to me.
Having studied only in private schools in Brazil until the day I reached the age to enter a public University, I recall to have once shocked some of my classmates as I answered candidly to a question directed to me from our teacher on Politics 101 on whether illiterate citizens should be granted the right to vote.
That moment has shaped me in ways that I can't explain.
Perhaps, that was enough to capture my attention and has led me to entertain an almost naive fascination for many philosophical constructs on the topic of political freedom. Always.
Below, a sketchy list of what comes to my mind as representative of some philosophical ideas that inspired my thinking when studying political philosophy. Ideas I believe have foundational status in the quest of defining the contours of freedom (4 and 5 are not directly related to political philosophy. However, they have been relevant to me and have broaden my horizon when I set up to study philosophy).
- The idea of Social Contract — from Rousseau to Hobbes. From Hobbes to Rawls. Rosseau in Book I of his The Social Contract (1762) tells usabout the viability of the social contract between individuals. He prescribes it as a means to enhance our freedom, in which regards our relation to the sovereign, in chapter 7: “This formula shows that the act of association consists of a reciprocal commitment between society and the individual, so that each person, in making a contract, as it were, with himself, finds himself doubly committed, first, as a member of the sovereign body in relation to individuals, and secondly, as a member of the state in relation to the sovereign.” Later, in chapter 8, in that which regards entering Civil Society via contract: “The passing from the state of nature to the civil society produces a remarkably change in man; it puts justice as a rule of conduct in the place of instinct, and gives his actions the moral quality they previously lacked. It is only then, when the voice of duty has taken the place of physical impulse, and right that of desire, that man, who has hitherto thought only of himself, finds himself compelled to act on other principles, and to consult his reason rather than study his inclinations.” Hobbes’s negative view on human nature commands men to resort to the leviathan and leave the state of nature: “And because the condition of man, as hath been declared ( ) is a condition of war of every one against every one, in which case every one is governed by his own reason, and there is nothing he can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemies, it followeth that in such a condition every man has a right to everything, even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to everything endures, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise so ever he be, of living out the time which Nature ordinarily alloweth men to live. Leviathan (1668, part 1, chapter XIV) . In his De Cive /On the Citizen (1641) I find this passage representative of the Hobbesian view of negative freedom or liberty: “ Liberty is simply the absence of obstacles to motion; as water contained in a vessel is not free, because the vessel is an obstacle to its flowing away, and it is freed by breaking the vessel. Every man has more or less liberty as he has more or less space in which to move; so that a man kept in a large jail has more liberty than a man kept in a small jail. And a man may be free in one direction but not in the other (…).” Hobbes launches his ideas in the direction of the social contract: “Liberty is commonly thought of as doing everything of our own freewill and with impunity; not to be able to do so is reckoned to be servitude. But this cannot be so in a commonwealth, or coexist with the peace of the human race; because there is no commonwealth without the power of government and the right to coerce.”
- Kant’s conception of respect founded in the concept of Reverentia.
- Hegel’s project of reconciliation founded on the notion of Sittlichkeit as ethical life. Hegel conceives an idea that aims to bridge the gap between the individual and society/ individual and state. His idealism proposes to free man from atomism. And self-actualization is possible when there is a symmetry between individual will and universal will — in which we would have actual freedom. Robert B. Pippin (2009) offers an insightful interpretation: “Hegel’s idea is that freedom does not involve being the center of causal agency, nor in merely being free from external constraints in satisfying what we happen to want, nor in conforming to or realizing the essence of human being as a distinct species, nor in being the vehicle for the self-realization of Cosmic spirit. This raises the stakes for him in coming up with a clear positive answer to the question because he certainly also thinks that everything of value in human life depends on actualizing freedom adequately. He thinks this because he believes that any value that gives my life meaning, secures a guiding commitment that can be sustained over time, makes possible genuinely “leading a life”, presupposes a Rousseauian point that Hegel fully accepts: that nothing can be a genuine value for me unless it can be a value to me; in his terms, unless I can recognize myself in what is proposed as a good for me, and that means unless I am free. And he accepts a Kantian point that such identification or non-alienation requires a certain sort of responsiveness to reason; what sort being the central question. Being able to “stand behind” a deed with justificatory reasons is how I can claim the deed as my own or “own up to it”.
- the notion of a pragmatic a priori in analytical philosophy has removed the rigidity of apriorism in general : “a priori knowledge rises exclusively from the analysis of concepts. This means that we can determine the veridicality of an a priori knowable statement by rendering explicit what the concepts involved mean.” (Jarvilehto — )
- The essentialism of the notion of volitional necessity in Harry Frankfurt.
There’s a paper by Galen Strawson called, “Against Narrativity” where he argues against this widespread view:
Humans must conceive of their lives as consisting of narratives. Not only must they, but they should, otherwise they are not full persons and not full moral agents.
Now one of the interesting moves Strawson makes in the paper is to distinguish between a diachronic and a synchronic sense of identity.
Some people are diachronic, meaning that they conceive of themselves as extending through time. Diachronic people look at the person who they were 15 years ago as if their identity was tied with that person. They feel some kind of bond or closeness with that person, as if they were some old friend or something. The same goes for future selves, except maybe it’s not like an old friend, but some bright future that they’re constantly hoping for.
Other people are synchronic, meaning that they conceive of themselves as relatively existing in the present. They look back at their selves 15 years ago as if they were some stranger that they barely know. Similarly, they look forward, and feel alienated by a person they cannot even know.
Of course there’s going to be a big spectrum among these two, but it’s helpful to distinguish the two poles.
Now I am someone who is more synchronic. I don’t conceive of the entities of my past and future as if they were somehow close to me and attached to me. In fact, I find them more foreign and alien than I do my close friends, or even the people I meet regularly in life. They might as well be strangers that I can never meet or characters in some story that I read on occasion.
What this distinction has done for me, however, is made sense of a whole realm of discourse that was always confusing to me. For example, I have a friend who experienced a kind of existential crisis because he did not have a clear picture of where he was headed. And all of a sudden this made sense to me. If you care a lot about your future self, so much so that they are really a part of who you conceive of yourself as being, then you are of course going to feel in a crisis if you don’t know what the future brings.
And I have countless other examples like this. Suddenly other people made so much more sense to me. I spend a lot of my days confused or perplexed about why people do and say the things they do, and this brought in rays of light where there previously had been untouched darkness.
*Update: For those of you who requested it, Strawson’s article can be found here:
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/a...
Having been seasoned by more academic readings by different scholars and differing interpretations of great works, I am now less susceptible to the moments of sudden revelation that many people talk about when entering philosophy. I’m not even sure which ideas have influenced my life, because at this stage there is very little to do with how one should live one’s life to the fullest.
But there are some, as I fondly recall, that have changed my perspective significantly:
Heidegger’s lifeworld
During my first six months of reading the history of philosophy, I was taken aback by how Heidegger’s thought was always mentioned as a monstrously complex enigma that nobody could wrap their heads around. It took me many more months to finally have the courage and purchase Being and Time, and I was astonished at how much I missed out.
One of the key ideas inside, despite being rarely mentioned, is the concept of Umwelt, or lifeworld. This was the splitting point of Heidegger’s phenomenology from Husserl’s — that we are thrown and submerged within a interconnected network of influences, that heavily governs how we think, move, speak, etc. Within the lifeworld we have ‘normal’ practices that we engage daily that won’t come to attention unless something goes wrong, in which we switch to a more scientific, analytical, cautious approach in attempt to restore normalcy.
For readers that are experienced with reading Heidegger, this is indeed a highly inapt summary of Heidegger’s practical philosophy. But his description of the lifeworld truly shook me to the core of my being. It made me reflect upon the habits, tasks, and cultural stigmas that I engage in daily life, and become more aware of being too “submerged” within our rituals. His analysis of the lifeworld includes “negative distractions” such as curiosity, idle talk, and ambiguity, which are fascinating beyond words, and of course, the scope of this discussion.
Sartre’s The Look
The mention of Sartre usually begins with bad faith, but what really impacted my view was a concept that came much later in Being and Nothingness: the Look. Simply put, the Look is the lingering paranoia that we usually have in the public, as if someone is watching each and every of our actions right behind us. It isn’t exactly a kind of feeling, but something covertly motivates us to behave in ways that are acceptable to others and culturally appropriate through the emotions of shame, guilt, etc.
Unlike Hegel’s exposition of mutual recognition, Sartre’s elaboration of interpersonal relations are antagonistic in nature, i.e. each conscious being will try to “fight against” the other conscious being. The Look is hence seen as a weapon of control of one being against the other. For Sartre, we are always in mutual conflict due to our fundamentally solipsistic point of view (we’d always think of others as the Other, but never equal or even similar to oneself).
Hegel’s Aufhebung
This term, like many other German terms that Hegel employs, has no accurate English translation, and the closest you can get is sublation. Many people who don’t read Hegel often complain about the postulation of an Absolute that defeats the purpose of his entire project, which was to overcome the Kantian noumena (at least, one of them) through a systematic investigation of the movement of our thoughts.
What was monumental of Hegel’s system, in my opinion, is not the amount of jargon that he plays around with, or the Master-Slave dialectics that is so carelessly expounded upon nowadays. Deep within his thought lies a fundamental optimism of the human mind, which is that thought can always find ways to surpass the very limits that it places upon itself. From Aristotle to Kant, philosophers have been insistent that logical processes of thought will lead us to truth (yes, even with Kant, whose project was one step above the rest but ultimately belonged to the same endeavour). Hegel was one of the first to realise that the power of thought lies upon its self-reflexive nature.
Hegel’s approach will definitely not please more rigorous philosophers, especially those falling within the analytical and naturalist field of work (despite being one of the most rigorous in the entire history of philosophy). Even so, Hegel’s move of hinging upon the reflective nature of our thoughts struck me as ingenious. When we engage in certain practices, we are not just aware of the specifics of those activities, but we are also aware of other aspects such as the meaning of those activities for us, the “what if”’s that became improvisations, and whether these activities are impactful to others.
Safe to say, Hegel’s thoughts have had profound impact upon mine, in reshaping how philosophy should be conceived, in thinking less of what would otherwise be obvious and could be found out and more about things that we find to be incredibly mundane (e.g. critical thinking, personality, philosophy itself, skepticism).
The philosophical idea that has had the greatest impact on me is the idea that our minds naturally work against us as creatures who dream of a well-functioning, peaceful civilization. We would like to think we’re rational, well-intentioned beings, but if we’re not vigilant enough to stay critical of the meaning we seem to automatically derive from our experiences, we can end up laying a cognitive minefield for ourselves.
David Hume pointed out a specific example of this mistake in A Treatise of Human Nature:
We have a distinct idea of an object, that remains invariable and uninterrupted thro’ a supposed variation of time; and this idea we call that of identity or sameness. We also have a distinct idea of several different objects existing in succession, and connected together by a close relation; and this to an accurate view affords as perfect a notion of diversity, as if there was no manner of relation among the objects. But tho’ these two ideas of identity, and a succession of related objects be in themselves perfectly distinct, and even contrary, yet ‘tis certain, that in our common way of thinking they are generally confounded with each other. That action of the imagination, by which we consider the uninterrupted and invariable object, and that by which we reflect on the succession of related objects, are almost the same to the feeling, nor is there much more effort of thought requir’d in the latter case than in the former. The relation facilitates the transition of the mind from one object to another, and renders its passage as smooth as if it contemplated one continu’d object. This resemblance is the cause of the confusion and mistake, and makes us substitute the notion of identity, instead of that of related objects. However at one instant we may consider the related succession as variable or interrupted, we are sure the next to ascribe to it a perfect identity, and regard it as invariable and uninterrupted. Our propensity to this mistake is so great from the resemblance above-mention’d, that we fall into it before we are aware; and tho’ we incessantly correct ourselves by reflexion, and return to a more accurate method of thinking, yet we cannot long sustain our philosophy, or take off this biass from the imagination.
Hume is wonderful, isn't he? He was still only in his early 20s when he wrote this. The above passage alludes to the way the mind, below the level of awareness, makes an inference about a specific object based on its understanding of the concept of the object, leading the conscious mind to unjustified conclusions about the specific object in question. The most common or prominent features of related experiences subsumed under a category are what the understanding uses to make inferences about a current happening which seems to be quite similar to those experiences subsumed under the category.
Kant spells it out a little more clearly in Critique of Pure Reason (A303/B360):
We make a distinction between what is cognized directly and what is only inferred. The fact that in a figure bounded by three straight lines there are three angles is cognized directly; but the fact that these angles taken together are equal to two right angles is only inferred. Since we constantly need to make inferences and thereby finally become quite accustomed to doing so, we ultimately no longer take note of this distinction, and often—as in the so-called deception of the senses—regard as directly perceived something that we yet only inferred.
Beware those who claim to often “go with their gut.”
Well, there are so many philosophical ideas that influenced my life.
I assume that by “philosophical ideas” you mean not only technical philosophical concepts or ideas that are studied in classrooms such as qualia or a priori or correspondence theory of truth but also general, somewhat intuitive ideas that are considered to be part of wisdom in various traditions. So in the sense of philosophical ideas as wisdom below I list some ideas that significantly influenced and continues to influence my life (in no particular order).
- All being(s) is transient. This idea is developed in Buddhism but the Bible devotes to this very issue a book too (Ecclesiastes). Almost all high religions recognize that everything changes and nothing lasts. Remembering transience of life helps me to keep things in perspective and balance my passion with changing reality. Simply put, I avoid becoming obsessed with things, relations, and events. I avoid losing myself in pursuit of wealth or so called happiness or success or competition. All these things will pass away, change and disappear. The Quora, including all your questions and my answers, will one day be gone. You and I will be gone one day as physical, flesh-and-bone living organisms.
- God is and therefore being (creation) is. I’m a theist which is a short way of saying that I believe in personal God who has agency and created whole universe(s) who also interacts with creatures. God makes creation meaningful. Everything gains meaning in context of God. This philosophical (and theological) idea helps me to transcend myself and connect with other creatures in deeper levels. Belief in God helps me to avoid reducing love, justice, mercy, compassion etc to pure chemical processes in my brain or chemically-biologically conditioned behavior. Belief in God also gives me existential hope and opens my heart to mystery and mystical experience that cannot be conveyed through words.
- Compassion for others and self-sacrificial suffering for the sake of others’ growth towards good and peace have redemptive power. This is where Christian and Buddhist influences converge in my life. As Bodhisattva’s cling to this life for enlightenment of others, as Jesus Christ sacrificed his life for salvation of many, so I strive to live a life that avoids ego-centeredness and pursues intangible truths of spiritual realm. I have to confess that I fall way behind compared to great many saints and heroes of humanity. Nevertheless, this is the ideal I have. Primacy of compassion and sacrificial life helps me to frame my days. I don’t live to buy many cars, big houses, and travel all over the world. I live so that I can take my modest car and go help a refugee or be a little help here and there to people who suffer. That has redemptive power for others and for me in God’s presence.
- Evil is real and elusive. Evil is not just a matter of perspective or relative to our context. No amount of postmodern sophistication is going to make Jewish holocaust, Rwandan genocide, or nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima be simply a matter of neutral thing or “bad here and good there.” Yes, evil includes perspectival element but more than that it is elusive and it has deep, dark, mysterious core that makes it recognizable. it cannot be fully grasped and defined by people despite the fact that we know or sense or intuit it somehow. This idea helps me to resist injustices (injustice is evil) yet not to jump into condemning people whose beliefs or actions might look like evil. (because evil is elusive and what I may consider evil may not be evil at closer investigation).
- Platonism. Last but not least, my life has been influenced by Plato’s writings. I think Plato’s dialogues makes me think about my own blind spots.
A walk in the park, a cup of tea in a busy café, losing focus at a crowded meeting, and intense discussion with a spouse about where to shop, a memory reborn in the process of looking for a credit card in your pocket. We are creatures condemned to think, feel, and reflect on everything that has, is, and will happen to us, and the world around us. As such, philosophy is more relevant today then ever before. In spite of our beliefs, we still engage is a discourse with ideas we may have read, or learned long before. Let’s look at Dostoevsky, Camus, Nietzsche, Joseph Campbell(not a philosopher), Sartre, Foucault, and Kafka.
Dostoevsky through his ‘Underground Man’ showed that in a world and life demanding of objective rational conformity in our decisions, behavior, and choices, perhaps are one last freedom is our irrationality, and freedom to act upon it. By this I mean I can revolt against the idea of being on time simply because I-will-to-do-so, and enjoy playing a joke at another. Both may bring me a certain satisfaction, despite the fact that if I was asked to give a rational explanation for it, I couldn’t. Why? maybe I will buy an extravagant paining, even though it serves no useful value, except that I like it. Perhaps we can give ourselves the freedom to say that’s enough. Dostoevsky also noted in “The Grand Inquisitor” that for some freedom is the greatest threat, and some immediately need a religion, ideology (political ideas) to cling to for identity. So we have the freedom to be irrational, or conform to a belief system, so long as we are making the choice to, and perhaps life will seem richer.
This takes me to Sartre, who stated that we have the power through our decisions (choices) to define ourselves. We are our decisions. Then off-course it the anxiety that it we are our choices, we can make mistakes and make decisions without the luxury of thinking adequately, or being in full possession of the facts. Equally, we can be judged as an object (label) by others when seen, and our subjective experience of the world can be off-set by this when we are aware that we are being objectified by another person. This is not necessarily a bad thing. We all must have got a twinge of satisfaction when you felt you impressed someone, or received a glowing look for what that person (accurately/or inaccurately) thought we were. So our decisions make who we are in our own eyes, and this perception of ourselves is also shaped by how we think others see us (for better or worse).
This takes me to Kafka, like his tale, The Trial, we live our lives with a sense of guilt to some extent. Why? Well just the day-to-day fact of being human and making decisions makes us vulnerable to doing something good and bad. Sometimes, we discover too late what we should have done. Similarly, we have a sense that there is a thread of life going on within us, that is often divorced from our day-to-day life. This was outlined in the Metamorphosis, where a man discovers that he is transforming, and yet his mind is stuck on his family obligations, failing to realize this significance. We have a similar experience when we go to our doctors appointment, and discover that we have not been keeping ourselves as well as we should, or someone makes a comment on what we look like today, compared to yesterday. So, life has threads (sub-narratives) running through or guilt, and change that we need to reflect on before they surprise us one day when we are not expecting it.
Nietzsche showed that qualities like forgetting, ambition etc may not be bad things, and perhaps at times being humble and resenting those more prosperous aren’t good value (despite being taught that they were). Equally, if we ignore ideas given by a belief system, then it is up to us to create our own values. Everything is open, our lives, and our futures, and so we have the freedom to choose our virtues. Maybe we should be ambitious if the end result helps others? Maybe we should forget things, if they only hurt us, and bring suffering?
Meanwhile Camus showed that we don`t need a reason for life, but rather should experience life, accept it, relish it (do our best), and in that way it defines us and makes the here-and-now become meaningful. Campbell would say follow your bliss (your passion) and see where it takes you. Trust is where your heat takes you, and accept your life like a chapter in a book, for which you are a character. Hopefully, its a comedy.
Lastly, Foucault, showed how to be aware of the dangers of power. Power can work by labelling, surveillance, and other procedures that are used to impose a body-of-knowledge on another person. in are camera-everywhere, GPS, check-your-email-every-minute life, we should learn to resist this by turning our phones off, avoiding the news (one form a power/labelling) used, and be conscious of the words we use, and how words are used on us. These are in a sense used to put us in a context/space. If we challenge them, then we can move towards a more equal society.
In conclusion, I think these philosophies come down to accepting others, ourselves (through knowledge of what we feel and why),pursing our bliss with trust and the perspective of a hero, and finally keeping track of our inner lives, and allowing for irrationality because life needs aesthetic beauty, and just plain fun.
Thanks for the A2A,
Beatrix Esmond!
- Mortalism — I don’t know if it has a name, but knowing my time is short motivates me to, well, do stuff!
- Atheism — Pretty sad, I know, but I used to be super into atheism. Not Philosophy of Religion, but Dawkins-esque atheism. Although it was a bit lame, it did help me get familiar with religious and atheist arguments, if in a biased manner. It helped me read more too.
- Nietzscheanism — I think this dude (Oh, yeah, I’m cool now!) helped me look at religion and atheism more critically, and made me more balanced. Yeah, I know he’s an incredibly biased Anti-Christian, but he also dislikes Scientism and Humanism. Practically, he also motivated me to study more and appreciate the beauty and life, albeit less pretentiously.
- Utilitarianism — This philosophy, in its flaws, helped me realize that maybe there was more to morality than happiness, since this philosophy has some strange consequences. However, it has helped me consider vegetarianism. (Thanks Singer — I liked Pepperami and you had to take it away from me!) I’m not vegetarian, but am considering it — its not very practical when I have two brothers though!
If these seem a little bare, it’s because I’m pretty average in how I live — I basically use empathy, because I don’t believe in Objective Morality. So I don’t think ‘Does this align with Immanuel Kant’s Humanity Imperative?’ when I do something — I just do it. (Not that I understand Kant, but I can dream, okay!)
At a point in my life when I was extremely frustrated with the logical positivism inherent in western science and its awful incongruity with the personal, human ‘soul’ of medicine (if you will) I approached a sort of epistemological anarchism (the remnants of which you may still see in my writings) and set about reading Rene Descartes
Discourse on Method.
I found the young Rene to be a very likeable, humble and passionate writer. His painstakingly processed decision to make doubt useful appeared to me as the philosophical equivalent of the creation of Zero. Furthermore, the reconciliation of his own imperfect yet powerful cognition with the unapproachable yet absolutely actual divinity of God is a constant challenge and comfort to me.
When faced with the despair of utter uncertainty (which he reaches by the most genuine attempt to remove one’s biases that I am aware of), Descartes founds his philosophy not only (most famously) on himself but on the creative context he owes himself to. This apparent creation of the philosopher’s stone amidst the sea of chaos that arises from his anchoring to the invisible seafloor of spirituality gave me a most welcome reef to wreck myself on at a time that I was charting a course to world’s end.
I wrote one of my oldest songs about it:
Okay Renee
Philosophy, philosophos as lover of wisdom. Hit the target on the foundation of my self-identity and I have researched the possible function of philosophizing in the realization of different types of wisdom. One of my books on this topic for FREE download, where I am in the top 0.5% of 500,000 academics
The nature, functions and aims of philosophizing, philosophicalmethods, techniques and tools for example the 9 types of Socratic questioning in section 4 (i) and different philosophical tools in section 4 (ii)
That philosophizing is part of the many leveled and multi-dimensional processes of theorizing
Philosophizing is part of the Process/es of Theorizing
That by meta-philosophy it is possible to explore philosophy, philosophers, the aims, methods and rational of philosophy and philosophizing
Meta-Philosophy Questioning Philosophizing
That there is a diversity of perspectives possible on life, existence, ist meaning and value or lack of meaning and value, towards the possibility or impossibility to reveal truth and meaning, resulting in my own positions, value of no values, amorality as nihilism, Pyrrhonism, radical scepticism and minarchy -
NIHILISM, MINARCHISM, PYRRHONISM META-PHILOSOPHY - Living Radical Scepticism
Human dignity. Human dignity shapes how we treat each other. Human dignity is the basis for truth, honesty, justice, and keeping promises. Human dignity is the biggest check against violence or dehumanization.
ALL OF them - Every time you open a tap for water, the water is delivered by a complete chain of events that begins with some spider in a closed up room hiding from life spinning a web of deception that covers every student it touches which results in that mental “virus” affecting that “student’s” values manifesting as “judgements” exercised in their daily execution of the jobs they get hired to perform. I canNOT look up at the sky without seeing Contrails that _I_ NEVER PUT THERE. But now, if you want planes, and like Contrails, then why is it ILLEGAL for JUST ANY OLD BODY to take a lawn mower engine, slap it onto some properly formed fuselage and wings and make heir Own Contrails; and NO That “public safety” Crap DON’T WASH when you DON’T mind killing folks by the tens and hundreds through “failures” of the SAFE planes and by the hundreds and thousands with “better” warfare methods than a simple Duel between two private lunkheads. You’re EXCUSES Are Filthy and only executed at the threat of INCONTESTABLE Violence in the name of “peace”. You CAN NOT HONESTLY exploit Kids YOU Educated committing “slaughter” on Their schoolmates as an excuse to Institute “Requiring” 5 to 30 cops to beat the crap out of ONE “man” or shoot a WalMart Parking Lot to pieces because their Armor that you give them, their Training That YOU Give Them, Their Skills that YOU Give them can POSSIBLY HONESTLY Render them “in fear of THEIR lives” but NOT The Least Care In The Cosmos for Lives of the Public They Shoot Into! DISGUSTING, Dishonest, Cowardly Sadistic HYPO-CRISY. The instant the “philosophy” of “original sin” DISTRACTED handling simple EMBARRASSMENT into “Complexities” of Time, Place, Spelling, Punctuation, Apples, Trees, Superpowers, and all the rest, You Embarked and Remain On A STINKING Business of Slavery and Theft. And your jobs will NEVER be safe until you come out of your closets and simply be honest enough to ask to be fed and STOP “convincing” the cosmos you’re worth more than the minerals it takes to assemble you from.
That would be the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Epictetus, Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Adam Smith, Kierkegaard, William James, Josiah Royce, F.H. Bradley, John Dewy, Betrand Russell, P.F. Strawson, Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor and John R. Searle.
Definetely the idea of dead, but not the fact that i'm gonna die, but that it's gonna be forever; the idea of no heaven or something else. Also the idea of a cosmic existence or that i'm part of something much more bigger; when i realized about those ideas i decide to stop wasting my time in meaningfulness relations, closed FB and opened quora (no kidding), better diet (i used to eat tons of junk food)
Well, i'm not sure if those are philosophycal ideas in the way you expected, so i Will try again: the deleuze' rizome really hit me hard; the idea that everything could (or should) be connected ; Wittgenstein's “What can be said, can be said clearly”. But i have always prefered greeks, especially Epicurus idea on the importance of friendship.
I'm not sure if Lacan was a philosopher and definetely Wittgenstein would not like him, but his position about language is really in my mind lately (Maybe because i really like Wittgenstein), well Lacan said that one Word always leds you to another Word, and that Word to another and so on… it means that there really no such thing as “meaningful words”, so why and how we communicate among us? Well, this explanation is pretty simple, hope to be helpful.
I’m not going to write a lot here. The philosophical idea that’s had a deep effect on my life was (and still is) Existentialism. I’ve read Sartre’s books (except Being and Nothingness - if you can go through that monster, kudos to you), then from Sartre I dipped back to the 19th Century Russian literature (Dostoyevski mainly, but Tolstoy is also a must, I think) and other Existentialist works as well. I had always had my questions about religion and the belief in a supreme being, but Sartre’s works somehow clarified things for me once and for all. I don’t think anything else had a similar effect on me as Existentialism, or rather I don’t think I’ve reacted the same way to a philosophical theory as I did to E.
I hope this opens up certain channels for you too.
Cheers.
Ideas originally from Carl Jung (through Jordan Peterson) about the shadow, its very complex but the main example I always think of is the capacity for violence. Randomly and brutally killing a prostitue comes from the same capacity for violence from which a person defends their infant child from a mad dog, the effect this had was mainly in the discovery that in order to have balance within yourself you have to reconcile your ability to do terrible things with what you want to do, you need to be prepared to fight for what you believe is worth fighting for if you want to be a good person and that willingness to fight does come from a darker place inside of your mind.
Do you agree?
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Hayek’s and von Mises’ concept of vast societal and economic systems arising out of innumerable interactions instead of anyone’s conscious design. This is one of the most important concepts that anyone has ever come up with on the nature of reality. And perhaps the most difficult for humans to grasp. We are used to deliberate design and its implications, and so we naturally assume that everything around us has been deliberately designed (hence the intellectual errors in most theologies and philosophies). But actually, most things were never deliberately designed. They simply emerged.
Thin is the veneer of human civility.
See Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt; The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Eric Hoffer; Obedience to Authority; Stanley Milgram.
I will include two- one from the western tradition, one from the eastern.
- Absurdism is the philosophy of the absence of meaning in the universe, thus making man’s quest for a final truth futile. This philosophy made me wonder, is everything around me a chaotic mess? Certainly not! Then what did the gentleman Camus see in the nature of the universe to feel so cheated? Perhaps in searching for meaning the gentleman assumed a principle independent of man, which would guide him to a final truth. This may or may not be true, however what remains is fact, which is we have the power of organisation which arranges the randomness of nature into patterns which may be deciphered and invariants which may endure the test of time, not to be ravaged by it. This much, I humbly say before the vast and awe- inspiring cosmos, that if there be a creator of these and other parts, let this entity know full well that man has created meaning all by himself, and has thus noble creator who forgot life having created it, is your intellectual equal.
- Advaita is the philosophy of the East which has most affected me because it falls in line with my ideas of a continuum of the universe, different parts of which possess a single foundation with the only difference between one and the other being qualitative and the tools of science forged in the foundry of man’s meticulous efforts at organisation only closing the gap between understanding and realising the final truth, if at all it exists.
After getting universal spacetime laws of physics, I feel happy forever and sharing with the whole world on
http://quora.com
I must say Schopenhauer’s ideas influenced my life deeply, even to a sickening extent.
Yes, I didn’t experience war, starvation, poverty or else. However, I’ve also experienced the opportunism in economy to the extent that I think no power holder even cares about your well-being, that it’s not about the money for humanity, that it is all about humanity as a money source. I’ve experienced the cultural and social corruption to the extent that your power does not need to be justified by rationalities, it’s all about taking the power and make the others suffer. I’ve experienced massive rise in hypocrisy, to such an extent that it is not about keeping your words, it’s all about promising.
I have lost hope but you know what? I think I’m beyond the depression, I’m in the state of acceptance. I think I’ve accepted that we are all evil creatures, including me. I know this is not exactly at the same line with Schopenhauer, but I share his pessimism. Evil is what empowers us.
I’m in a state that I don’t really care about hope or happiness, neither do I seek for those. I just don’t care, that’s all. When happiness arrives, I somehow enjoy, clearly accepting the fact that it will fade away soon. When it isn’t here, I really don’t care.
I started to enjoy small things, like looking at the sky, drinking coffee, pondering around.
The other thing that has influenced me so far is the structuralism in linguistics, computer-related stuff (oh, computer really enlightens me), stuff that I desire to describe (or debug?).
Many, but here’s one that has stuck with me (which Plato also presents in the Meno, his dialog): people are basically good, but they seem to do evil out of ignorance.
This idea is a sturdy brick in my belief system, probably with a lot of other things stacked on top of it. As far as I can tell, it has served me well, because I haven’t gotten caught up in being afraid of “evil” people, or feeling like the world is going to hell, or blaming or feeling victimized by “evil” people, or expressing incredulous outrage at horrible acts. I mean, maybe I’ve done some of that, but as I write those things down, they don’t feel familiar to me at all.
I think the reason why is because, each time I see something that someone might call “horrible” or “evil” or “atrocious,” instead of my belief system saying that “that’s really evil!”, it will say something along the lines of, “wow, that’s a lot of unconsciousness/ignorance,” or “wow, that person experienced a lot of pain which compelled them to act out.”
One could say… I don’t think evil really exists. I think unconsciousness/ignorance and pain/trauma do exist, which, combined, result in basically all of the things we could call “evil” “malicious” etc.
For example I wouldn’t say Hitler was evil. I would say he had a painful childhood and made some very, very destructive beliefs later—like “the Aryan race should rule the world; inferior races should be extinguished”—which were totally mistaken and arose out of deep unconsciousness/ignorance. A more conscious person would say: “All living beings deserve to live and I will not take life from them” and “All persons are equal in their absolute value by virtue of existing.”
Underneath the belief that “everyone is basically good, while plagued with varying degrees of unconsciousness,” is the spiritual feeling that we are all beings of Light and Love. This is a feeling that, unfortunately for my philosophical friends, I can’t make a rational argument for—an argument that would convince someone through pure logic/intellect.
But I would say, from that feeling, that Hitler, Stalin, and every criminal mastermind and “evildoer” in history is just as much the Light as I am, and as anyone else is, in their essence. In essence we are all One, even One with those whom our egos judge and dislike—haha!
By far, the most influential Western philosopher in my life has been GWF Hegel. His insights into every aspect of knowledge, science and ethics has improved my perception of all these fields. His philosophy is still very poorly disseminated, but I expect major benefits to come in world history as a result of the dissemination of Hegel’s philosophy.
So I believe in one thing which I think everyone should believe it this life of ours is so small and unpredictable that anything might happen the very next moment.maybe now I’m writing and might be tomorrow I’m not alive anything can happen so I believe in being happy and making everyone happy around me .your definition of happiness might be different from mine but happiness is not having a big car or costly phone happiness is in small things and small moments .we all should enjoy every moment of our life be happy no matter what ever the circumstances is.Its high time we all should stop thinking about society and what people will think because it hardly matters at the end your happiness matters the most.guys do everything that make u happy unless u all are hurting any one. Remember we have this only one life.apply for that job.date that person.buy the plane ticket.move to that city
.do all the things that scare you, that’s worth it. If we all have this philosophical concept it will definitely change your life and I’m sure you all will love your life even more.
The existentialist conception of freedom, especially as presented by Sartre, has its flaws, namely a misguided refutation of the facticity of human nature and material conditions, but I’ve always found it to be a fascinating account of what it means to be free not only for political agency but also as a psychological representation of the will. I frequently, somewhat jokingly, refer to myself as an existentialist libertarian, since I have always found this account more compelling than natural rights or other such classical liberal accounts of freedom.
Hm. Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" concept made me think for a while, and the concept of truth tables created by Wittengenstein made me have less sympathy for people who attempted to tell white lies that were really in the black, but I'd say that really any idea is a philosophical idea, and I've been influenced by too many philosophical ideas to be able to pick any out at this point.
I was attracted to philosophy because of the actual nature of philosophical process and I was influenced by Socrates attitudes towards life. I ponder much on his philosophical proposition like; unexamined life is not worth living, ignorance is the source of all evils,if man know what is evil, he would refrain from it.etc.
What philosophical ideas have influenced your life?
Reading and studying Plato and Aristotle, and later St. Thomas Aquinas, I realised that there was a reason for all things, a purpose not only in the visible, but also in the invisible Universe! It all makes sense! My life since that realization has been a quest to put it all together!
To not give a f*ck about anything that doesn't f*ck with your life and save the f*cks to give worth giving f*ck things.
- THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A FUCK.
“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” Marcus Aurelius.
I am very influenced by the Stoics. I had actually come to same conclusions by myself without reading them and then when I read Marcus Aurelius, I was like, “that is so true.”
Happiness is not who you are, where you are or what you have; it is how you think. You can have everything and be unhappy; you can possess very little and be happy.
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill probably kept me up nights more than most anything else I have ever read. You have to read it for yourself
Rationalism and Empiricism were quite useful to me while pursuing a degree in physics and mathematics.
Descartes, ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ was helpful in finding my way back to ‘Square One’ when I was trying to divest myself of decades of religious (god-) baggage.
Philosophical ideas are all man created. Some good some ridiculous, some plain hype and crap. Try God’s principals of living and you will never be defeated.
