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To: Neocon who wrote (11175)	6/5/1999 11:12:00 PM
From: truedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17770

to: neocon from: truedog Re: philosophy IMO, philosophers merely state their opinions in pompous language with their noses stuck up in the air. Regards, truedog

To: Neocon who wrote (11175)	6/6/1999 3:43:00 PM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Well Neo, first maybe you should write a beginner's book of epistemology, you wrapped up several centuries quite nicely! ;) Of course you overlooked Hume, and the dreadful logical conclusions his philosophy could lead us down. Radical scepticism is a paralyzing danger that we cant discount from the equation, for if we can not even be sure of our most basic intuitions, that for instance there is such a thing as a cause-effect relation, then only madness and unregulated relativity prevails in our thoughts. Equally with Berkeley, though of course his ideas are fallacious in many respects. What kind of philosophy can we have if we accept that the world only exists when we "percieve" it? Of course he opts in that God percieves everything, and so the world always exists ;) Which brings up Kant and the thing-in-itself, a sticky matter entirely. I dont think it is much of a problem if we accept that we can only know appearance, and the consequence that our knowledge of the world is not infinite. But as you said, Kant is not satisfactory. What then is the relation between the thing-in-itself and the phenomenon? What ideas lie at the root of this concept to begin with? Why must there be something "behind the veil" so to speak? What if appearance is all there really is? Does it really matter to us practically or philosophically either way? Our quest for "truth" leads us to sticky problems of our own making, which inevitably bites us in the ass. This is one reason I have always admired Russell. Logical Positivism feeds a certain desire to do away with the rubbish and deal with problems which can be resolved. I dont agree that we should wholesale dispose of Ethics, metaphysics, or political philosophy, but we must recognize, like Ayer, that there are no objective facts involved in these fields, and so are fundamentally and by their very nature, purely speculative in a certain sense. Philosophy has in the past 20 to 30 years slowly edged away from that school, and there is not the same level of much needed debate on the subject of what philosophy should, or rather can be. In order for the discipline to remain relevent, and not simply be a subsidy for idle persons of the argumentative bent <g> it is necessary that we examine first not what should be contemplated, but what is the nature of human knowledge and what is its limitations, and aspirations. This inevitably must question our place in the universe, and as you remarked, the nature of the universe in relation to us. Too much of philosophy even now in the last days of the 20th century is still human hubris. We must at some point look into that abyss that Nietzsche threw in front of us, and make a choice. God is dead, and we have killed him. What now? A dangerous point in human history has been reached. The fundamental philosophical assumption of the Nazis and the Bolsheviks was: anything is possible....