in my experience there are three types of people with regards to understanding philosphy.
1) Average joe, never thinks about anything, thinks that philosophy is a waste of time.
2) Above average intelligence, loves intellectualism, thinks philosophy is good because it has a historical status of being intellectual.
3) Actually smart, naturally engages in philosophical thinking, and acknowledges that it is completely valueless, unprovable, time-consuming mental masturbation.
Is this right?
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sounds like you're number 1.
Yes, gifted people are more aware about the limits and uses of philosophy, and that it is more about enjoying thinking rather than the utilities it provides
But none of the gifted people I met considered it useless or time consuming, they actually loved philosophical discussions without an exception
let me guess, you consider yourself type 3?
if you think you're number 3 then i have a 4th category that you'd fit better in: pseud who thinks that they are the only real thinker, caused by knowing just enough to know a bit and a big ego.
I'm not saying talking about philosophy is bad, but majoring in it retarded.
In terms of job opportunities or the value of the field?
If the latter than you can say the same thing about mathematics too, most people in maths tackle really obscure weird problems, stuff like Nonprocedural Query Processing for Databases with Access Paths
Philosophers are similar too, but they are working on the problems of philosophy
Stuff like The role of death in life: Existential aspects of human motivation
While maths at the top of the field will obviously have much better uses in real life, the motives for studying both fields are similar and they both require a level of intellectual deftness
Don't listen to the haters, OP. I'm with you in group 3. That's basically the point of quietism.
I bet you haven't even read socrates user
No it isn't. Philosophy is the justification of every instituition. The western civilization was built in its singular way because of its evolution in philosophy.
So, if you think the evolution of moral and ethic isn't something important, you are retarded.
>No it isn't. Philosophy is the justification of every instituition. The western civilization was built in its singular way because of its evolution in philosophy.
>he actually thinks this is true
4) Gamercucks
>3) Actually smart, naturally engages in philosophical thinking, and acknowledges that it is completely valueless, unprovable, time-consuming mental masturbation.
4) Retarded Overwatch players
Guess which one you fit in.
you don't know what philosophy is. you think retard continental philosophers talking about nonsense is philosophy. fuck off. you aren't smart.
4. People who post about philosophy on Veeky Forums to make themselves feel smart
It's funny because the way you framed your post in terms of x amount of categories can be traced back to Aristotle to the scholastics and so on. Anyway philosophy is selfish, not bullshit nor useless. Its use is limited to the individual studying it but still. Also calling it bullshit is a little ignorant because not only is it extremely difficult and rigorous (at least when it's at its best) but also genuinely enlightening not only for the lived life (some people feel this way, I dont really but it) but also scientific in its ability to deduce phenomena about reality that can only be talked about prior to science. In other words it's like doing science where science can't go yet. I know this sounds strange but for example I just saw that some if Kants and Heideggers insights into perception have just recently been verified, so it's not all bullshit but kind of gratuitous I guess. It's the luxury of a developed society
This
man that Einstein quote resonated with me, I've never been able to describe how it feels to meet a real idiot savant who seems like they aren't really seeing the larger picture
Fuck you. Philosophy is needed. I study physics and I have came across to few questions that have not been answered. Many other physicist think that if it has a formula then everything is known about it. Yes, quantum wave equation and einstein field equatios describe how does their field of physics work. But they do not answer why do they work. Why does the speed of light be a constant? Why does a particle have only a probability to exist somewhere? We need deeper thinking about these and many more subjects. You can't measure first and theorize afterwards.
Science without philosophy is like a rainbow without color.
It just is nigga.
>) Actually smart, naturally engages in philosophical thinking, and acknowledges that it is completely valueless, unprovable, time-consuming mental masturbation.
Why is examining the presuppositions of your beliefs useless? Are you scared you'll find somthing you don't like? Anyone studying STEM should have to study the basics of the philosophy of science, so people like op won't make retarded threads.
People who think normal people are stupid need to climb down off their high horses.
So are we calling any sort of insight "philosophy" now? Theorizing without concrete evidence isn't philosophy.
>but majoring in it retarded.
Someone has to do it, or all the knowledge will be lost.
What you should've said is "Not everyone should study philosophy at a high level".
That quote by le black science man is retarded. Someone should tweet one of the quotes on the left to him.
>Kants and Heideggers insights into perception have just recently been verified
Can you go into more detail
I'm not him, but Heidegger was a phenomenologist, and he took issue with the idea that what humans actually experience in their surroundings are objects.
He claimed that what you actually see is meaning, not objects. When you look at a Coke Can, you don't see aluminium atoms, you see a tool that contains a liquid that you can drink, and conversely, that same Coke Can is not even tool that contains a liquid in a country like North-Korea, where it's literally capitalistic subversion(e.g Coca-Cola Company, an American corporation).
And the same thing applies to every supposed object, according to him.
>doesnt get a piece of paper confirming almost a decade was spent paying for learning about thinking about thoughts
>all knowledge is lost
>or all the knowledge will be lost
>*THE*
Apparently even native English speakers can't differentiate between a noun with and without a definite article.
And yes, if nobody gets educated in philosophy, philosophy will be lost. It's not rocket science.
And while he may be right (and probably is), millions of people before and after him have come upon that thought independently.
The anti-philosophy crowd isn't saying that all philosophical elements are bad; they're saying that you don't need to study philosophy in order to do philosophy.
>millions of people before and after him have come upon that thought independently.
I don't agree, however I do think a good philosopher is precisely someone who points out shit that nobody ever says out loud but everyone knows deep down.
There's more to it then the basic idea. It's an entire systematic undertaking to interpret what being is. That user did an okay job of explaining the most basic idea, but you don't say that you've studied relativity theory just because you know that the speed of light is independent of the motion of the observer. You're just being ignorant when you try to dismiss it or even speak on it without the slightest idea of what you're talking about.
I just gave a gist of it. As you say it's essentially impossible to reduce an actual great philosopher to a couple of sentences.
If you need to be taught how to exercise critical thinking then you probably shouldnt cpncern yourself with abstractions.
you /pol/tards are sad as fuck. his quote has literally the same meaning as the other quotes on the right side.
I'm #3, or at least I like to think I'm a part of that group of people. I'm sure people will call me retarded for insinuating that I'm smart, but as much as I hate to admit it I am pretty fucking intelligent and I spend quite a bit of time considering this kind of shit.
So it goes
There really isn't much of a point to it, desu, but it is a good time sink and it can be fun to grill people about it and to watch their faces contort as you expose them to novel concepts and ask them to form opinions about things they hadn't considered on the spot.
Not like, in a mean way or anything, like, "Ha you retard how did you never think about that before." But more because sharing an idea with someone and working through it with them is something that never stops being enjoyable.
Oh, it's pretty much useless past a certain point because you very quickly devolve into thought experiments where you have to set up specific qualifying conditions that can't really be proven or disproven empirically.
In the end you kind of get to things that say, "well if we define X as Y and then state that Z is true then C must be false" but you can't actually prove Z so it's all strictly hypothetical. At least in science when you posit hypothetical there's the understanding that you'll eventually be able to prove or disprove them somehow, but with philosophy there's no guarantee that you'll ever be able to prove anything.
Maybe it's not completley useless, but it certianly has diminishing returns insofar as there isn't any long term practical benefit of trying to idea to taking them to their logical conclusion most of the time.
You will rarely have a life changing realization from exhaustively exploring philosophy. There are some people who would greatly benefit from it, but they are the minority.
>"My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these attributes, and Substances, and all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there's no excuse for it! In the same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions, and take the contrary propositions, and look at the world and you can't tell which is right."
Feynman
philosophy isn't critical thinking you faggot, it's not just randomly thinking your schizophrenic thoughts, it's a very developed and fleshed out field
you sound like you don't know shit about philosophy, honestly. did you ever bother studying it? did you ever take a class on it? sounds like all you know of it is the shit you read online in anime boards
(the point is the quotes on the right side are retarded)
When will retards realize that philosophy is more than existential bullshit? When will they do it?
>spinoza
He was a meme though. So was Feynman come to think of it.
>and to watch their faces contort as you expose them to novel concepts and ask them to form opinions about things they hadn't considered on the spot
yep, you're intelligent
90% of modern philosophy is mental masturbation, but ancient philosophy is nice and you can use it in real life
fuck off, ancient philosophy, like any ancient pseudoscientific discipline, is meaningless dribble.
the fact that you think this is "nice" and profound and useful, and you claim modern philosophy is mental masturbation shows you don't know shit about what philosophy is
so keep your retarded opinions about subjects you don't know shit about to yourself
well, it looks like you don`t know about Aristotel, Platon and other cool guys.
sadly everyone knows about these people, if only because knowing the names of ancient greeks makes people feel profound
continental philosophy is shit, and ancient pseudophilosophy like aristotle and plato is even more shit, utter garbage
What if you think you're in the 4th category?
Never. They've mostly taken (at best) a course in history of philosophy that ended with Hegel because the prof couldn't bother to do anything post Russell.
brainlets, when will they ever learn?
>he thinks philosophy exists in any coherent form past Russell
enjoy your foucault you fucking poz'd up wanker
>he thinks can know that he can't know nuffin
>So it goes
Is that you Billy?
>like any ancient pseudoscientific discipline, is meaningless dribble.
It's almost always the reddit-tier positivist who is illiterate. I wonder why.
>3) Actually smart, naturally engages in philosophical thinking, and acknowledges that it is completely valueless, unprovable, time-consuming mental masturbation.
t. someone too inept at critical thought to acknowledge rational truth
If you had any understanding of philosophy, you might understand that this isn't an argument, and that your thoughts aren't necessarily "actually smart."
People who think like this have almost no understanding of what philosophy is. Logic is philosophy.
>t. someone who doesn't know what philosophy is
>If you can't show something doesn't exist, it is an argument from ignorance to believe it exists for that reason, therefore it is unlikely to exist.
This ironic argument from ignorance is an example of Bertrand Russell's thinking. His logic faculties were laughably deficient, as tends to be the case with all atheists. Find new heroes. Read Kant or William Lane Craig. Your sneering at this point should indicate to you your cognitive bias.
that is not what you said at all. you are clearly #1 pretending to be #2 because it's pants-on-head obvious even over the internet that you couldn't be #3.
I have a lot of trouble believing people as creative and thoughtful as Feynman could be THAT dense and philosophically illiterate...
Philosophy supplies and refines what is possible, the literal foundation for interpreting scientific observations. Literally every single theory, both from observation and from abstraction, is definitively philosophical. To judge the value of philosophy the standards placed on science is uncannily retarded.
Knowing Feynman, that was probably tongue-in-cheek.
Veeky Forums is #2
why would someone who naturally engages in a mode of thought also think that mode of thought was valueless?
>I have a lot of trouble believing people as creative and thoughtful as Feynman could be THAT dense and philosophically illiterate...
He is right though. Philosophy is pretty pointless. Do something with your life, faggot.
To be quick, I've never gave myself time to learn philosophy properly and only read or heard snippets of it from friends and shows. Not that I consider it a waste of time, I love learning concepts, but I need to worry about physics and other classes that I need for my major. I know I can simply search some books for myself, but seeing that there are people here who know what's good or not, even though it's biased, what are some good picks?
Tl;Dr
I'm just venting here
Any good philosophy books to look for?
I have a pdf of 33 strategies of war. What are your thoughts on the book?
I'm sorry I sounded snobbish there. I didn't mean to insult anyone
Major in continental philosophy here. I totally agree. I'm depressed, wasted 5 years of my life in that field, have to cope with the absence of jobs now. The issue with modern philosophy is that it doesn't have any link with reality, it's very dense, complicated, but overly abstract, like mathematics.
mode of thought isn't valueless, our interpretation of and attempt at describing ''mode of thought'' is bullshit and valueless.
don't compare shitty continental philosophy to math
you should have done analytic
>I have a pdf of 33 strategies of war
fucking kek
the way I learned philosophy is by going through a historical overview of philosophy of science. start with ridiculous bullshit like aristotle and plato, through kinda-makes-sense rambles of descartes and kant up to modern kuhn and popper
just google for some mainstream content of them related to science in that order?
If you are doing philosophy and not doing AI ethics fuck the right off.
This is the only useful field left in philosophy and yet I see all these morons engaging in metaphysics, aesthetics and whatever other braindead unprovable bullshit they dream up.
And to all the trolls who waste my time with epistemology problems: die.
I hate philosophers so much.
My guess would be that philosophy majors are chiefly adamant on learning STEM skills. I had a chat with a philosophy major who said that all science is dogmatic and that's why he chose mathematical realism as the real shit. I started to talk about pretty easy and straightforward examples and theorems that were for and against and he was completely lost. I mean he didn't knew who Euclid was and what many people who developed axiomatic mathematics, neither he understood really how the field has developed through history.
I think the problem with philosophy as a field is that it really has twisted the original view of philosophy. One should do philosophy just after a mastery of different subjects. I suppose that if the problem is that there are too many fields to become a master in everything, one should do philosophy only in a subject they like. Philosophers already do this, but they lack preparation from other skills to really understand the philosophical problems behind them. That's why philosophy and whatever subject you also like double major is the patrician choice. We should return to think of philosophy at the end of intelectual endeavor to prevent charaltans and retards to plague academia which I know many humanities faggs agree as a problem.
I need a 4) to fit somewhere, it would be like the 1) wich is like the 3) without judgement on my mental abilities. That would be perfect.
OH I have an idea !
In my experience there are two types of people with regards to understanding philosophy
1) the philosophy teacher
2) the other guy that think phylosophy is kinda outdated science but can still find descent ideas if he's wondering about ethics and stuff.
Ur gai
>im number 3
stopped reading there, gb2reddit
Hello. My name is Simon.
BR Ratio = 0.6 | help protocol initialized.
You have come pretty far. How about you view them as a 'process' of the three steps you've already posted? If you stop thinking of things like a tool ot achieve something, and more a way to achieve something you (desire - suffering[shame]) can contribute to Humanity(You+Me - suffering).
Ergo: The happier you are, the more 'you' you are truly becoming. You have given three postulates.
Why are they postulates?
100% waste of time.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is only telling you otherwise because they wasted time on it, thus need to rationalize that somehow by pretending it's enhanced their lives or critical thinking ability in the slightest (it hasn't)
This.
Why waste the only life you have on a field you could study as a hobby? Majoring in philosophy is a sign of mental retardation.
>He claimed that what you actually see is meaning, not objects. When you look at a Coke Can, you don't see aluminium atoms, you see a tool that contains a liquid that you can drink, and conversely, that same Coke Can is not even tool that contains a liquid in a country like North-Korea, where it's literally capitalistic subversion(e.g Coca-Cola Company, an American corporation).
This is stuff a 13 year old could figure out, Jesus people actually get paid a salary for "teaching" this crap?
Theorical mathematics is the same autistic shit desu. Can't do analytics here (France), only continental philosophy available. Analytics has its own issues too, I'd rather do applied philosophy and ethics.
>Is this right?
No.
cringe thread?
>Is this right?
youtu.be
>Theorical mathematics is the same autistic shit desu
> I'd rather do """applied philosophy"""
well, what are you doing in this board then?
Philosophy is merely coherent thought communicated. Philosophy is the most fundamental tool by which society reflects on itself and its place in the grand scheme of things. It has shaped every aspect of modern human existence.
Saying philosophy is "useless" is hugely reductionary; it's analogous to the universe going, "Hmm, the laws of nature are useless now that they have produced higher-order structure!" Just because philosophy has led to great things does not mean that those great things obviate their roots. The whole system is necessary.
Maybe the problem isn't philosophy but how philosophy is being taught?
I took a few philosophy classes in college before getting into STEM. Although I don't really read philosophy nowadays, I felt like those classes really helped to broaden my perspective and make me a bit of a better person.
I think it's important to be able to carry on a philosophical discussion, and understand argumentation, ethics, logic, and some of the arguments philosophers have made. Not all philosophers have actual things to say, but sometimes folks can at least bring to mind things that are worth thinking about.
So, IMO you should broaden your categories to people who value some degree of philosophy but also caution against masturbating.
seconded
The same goes for math. There are some really advanced and useful things out their which are applicable to the real world, and then there is pure math (which is mental masturbation). It isnt a bad thing if you enjoy it.
Same goes for philosophy, there are useful and less useful bits.
Granted, math is much more rigorous than philosophy.
>pure math isn't applicable
Lol, it's highly applicable, you just need to also understand the subject you want to apply math to. Obviously you cannot apply math to biology if you don't know shit about biology.
Cont.
I guess you can also say the same about philosophy, however, I don't see many philosophers getting out of their ivory tower except for medicine and ethics committees.
>Analytics has its own issues too
If you got memed into majoring philosophy, going to analytics is how you save face without being too much of an idiot.
Philosophical discussion distracts intelligent artists from their own depression
Damn...
Reading Hegel in school should be forced
>hegel
Lel, only if you want to kill any sort of motivation to pursue philosophy.
>His logic faculties were laughably deficient, as tends to be the case with all atheists.
bait
Philosophy is fuckin gay dude
I think philosophy is mental mastubation but thats the point. Its dialetic brain exercise. It helps you see the world from a different point of view. Unless there is true application it is worthless. I guess the best example is the realization that every movement in the world started with some asshole mastubating in his mental cave.
Most of philosophy is just logic that has been formalized in writing. If you're against philosophy in general, you're against logic.
But chances are you're just against the idea of thinking that isn't productive. And if that's your stance, then why not just stop all forms of research in any field and focus entirely on production? Let's all become engineers and technicians and cease all forms of education.
How can you use logic to talk about logic?
You just think it's bullshit because your a little bitch
>muh empiricism
>muh scientific method
without philosophy, mankind if lost
Congratulations, you are now a philosopher!
no, fucko, you aren't against logic you are against the formalizing of logic in writing