the difference between unironically drinking pabst and ironically drinking pabst is so important.

now if he would have pounded a 24oz budweiser out of true love of the delicious flavor of the mass-produced pilsner i could forgive him - even for neglecting foucault.... fuck it I'm thirsty.

Anyone who drinks Pabst outside of a bar is an idiot.

You've never bee to Oregon.

I'm sorry.

Ayn Rand was a sociopath. Since he does not assert that she was a philosopher, no harm is done. Where was the irony? It was a well deserved slam directed at a misanthropic delusional plagiarizing simpleton rape fetishist.

Well, he did assert she was a philosopher because he said that cult leaders can be philosophers too. He was dismissive of her because she was a terrrrrrrrrrrible philosopher, but then he said some pretty catty things about some of the other dudes too so I don't know why THA SUGAH RAIN is getting weepy about Rand.

Be nice guys, or he'll go GALT!

No she was definitely a cult leader. Her followers launched her body into space after she died. She's now on her way to become VP of Sales in that big corporation in the sky.

Sorry, meant to be one star (I am drunk)- Saint Thomas d'Aquinas

I have never met anybody who broadly dismissed philosophy as a waste of time/sham who wasn't a raging dumbass with the depth of character, experience and insight of the red M&M.

These stars are for Poorwill's comment.

As a scientist, you should realize how retarded it looks when someone with a very specialized knowledge of one field thinks they can deliver sweeping statements on any subject, as if it gave them an equal erudition in all fields.

God forbid we thought you were NOT a scientist.

As a scientist, I dismiss that modern science is largely a product of the philosophical search for knowledge and truth. And as a person, I dismiss that thinking about our situation of being and the context of our lives are for fools.

Konversekid: you're so off with your first statement that I can't figure out where to begin. I've honestly tried a few times now to write a decent response but in the end all I can really say is that I hope you'll read more about the history of science. Science and philosophy were not clearly delimited before the scientific revolution. Men like Descartes did valuable work in both physics and metaphysics. You know how they tell you not to look for teleological answers to scientific questions? Descartes. Epistemological naturalism didn't just fall out of the sky. (Even if it had, that didn't settle much as far as truth goes... otherwise Popper could have saved himself a lot of work.) Look at the early arguments about what gravity "is." They were extremely philosophical, just like the QM interpretation squabbles of the mid-20th c. Or the evolution debates leading up to the modern synthesis.

poorwill: A lot of it's bullshit. But a lot of it is practical. see above. And It teaches us to challenge our assumptions. Ptolemy assumed the planets moved in circles. Pre-QM physicists assumed locality. It's important to think outside the box our worldview creates, even if such thinking is not immediately testable.

sorry, meant notascientist rather than poorwill

Note that I said "of the non-natural variety." I am aware that science is a kind of philosophy, and that it owes its origins to philosophers.

What I am saying is that science (employing the term very broadly) is the only productive fruit of the philosophy tree, unless you count keeping douches like this busy as "productive." I acknowledge that meaningless, experimentally intractable navel gazing is an important part of the human experience, but so is, for instance, comedy - and yet we hardly take comedians as seriously as we take philosophers, or at least comedians don't seem to want to be taken as seriously as philosophers want us to take them.

In other words, if you want me to take an idea seriously, you have to do more than simply explain it in vague terms. You have to provide a recipe for what to do in my lab to determine if your claim is true or false. The vast majority of what we now call philosophy doesn't meet that standard - it just kind of loops around ideas in vague verbal circles. It is inexact and underspecified. It might mean something, but no one tells us how we might know if it does.

Note that I am not dismissing the idea that there are truths which are beyond the grasp of what we might for simplicity's sake call positivism or physicalism. There certainly may be. However, unless one can communicate them in a way which utilizes those aspects of our shared experience, that is the material universe, then what is the point of talking about them?

There has been a lot of good philosophy done on ethics, politics, religion, economics, and examining science itself (not just science-y stuff like the nature of time, evolution and psychology etc.). And of course a lot of bad philosophy too.

Take a course, or read a book, on the philosophy of science - dig into Hume, Popper (etc.) and their critics. Easily the best thing I did at university.

I'll be damned. When notascientist expanded upon his single paragraph, he proved Poorwill right. Looks like all that philosophizin' did Poorwill some good.

BTW... notascientist... no ethical claim can be empirically verified, and yet they're absolutely essential to our lives.

There's a problem with your world view when it can be shown to be invalid with a single sentence.

I would agree that modern academic philosophy has problems with scholasticism, and that a lot of what goes on in philosophy journals doesn't seem to be of much value.

Nevertheless, philosophy is just as a system of thinking about the world. If you're not refining your system constantly, learning new ways to think about the world, and testing your current system, then I think you are an incomplete person.

For example, despite being "experimentally intractable" learning about stoic philosophy has changed my life, and continues to change it. It was fruitful in that it helped resolve my crippling fear of death and improved my interactions with others.

I can't provide a lab protocol that tests whether stoic philosophy is a useful system for thinking about the world. Keep in mind though, that you also can't provide experimental evidence for why your positivist system is the only arbiter of an idea's validity. In a sense, your own philosophy can't pass the test you apply to other people's system of thinking.

I admitted above that there are plenty of things which impact upon the human condition which are not tractable by scientific methodology, the most important of which is what we desire, ultimately. One cannot scientifically derive what is the correct thing to do desire or what is "good." I think that is pretty obvious.

However, the solution is not to say "Oh well, we need to believe some things are cosmically good because otherwise human life would become very inconvenient, so we will legitimize discussions of this mythical 'good' as though it were a real thing, for our own convenience." This is essentially an argument from consequences. I'm personally of the opinion that moral and ethical ideas are just lingual fuzz around naturally evolved tendencies to engage in particular personal or socially beneficial behaviors, and that they are not universal concepts. In this view, morality and ethics arise from natural processes and can be studied in the context of physicalism, if one chooses to do so. They are, however, no longer cosmically binding concepts. This doesn't seem like that big of a deal, practically.

Baldr, I think you are right that philosophy can be a useful item to have in one's life, but I think its ultimately more akin to music or literature in terms of its value to the human pursuit of truth - essential but perhaps not cosmically meaningful.

I just finished writing my dissertation a few months ago, so the last "serious" exposure I had to philosophy (other than natural) was the "Great Courses" course on Consciousness (my mother gave it to me). I'm a neuroscientist, and from that perspective, it seemed like the entire philosophy of mind was an attempt to obfuscate the relatively strong case that the brain is an entirely physical object, and consciousness a consequence of that object, in favor of a series of vague ideas which were more fun to talk about, or less frightening, than the relatively certain scientific conclusions. It left a bad taste in my mouth about the subject.

Oh well, here we all are engaging in philosophy. I guess in a way this proves me wrong.

It's not enough that an idea is testable. It also has to be logically valid, and there is always the thorny problem of undiscovered auxiliary hypotheses (call it bias or worldview if you like). And even if you've met the first two and come close on the third, you still only have a model of the truth. Think of philosophy as being like that -- a search for useful models of truth.

Even if we did have actual truth, I doubt we'd have a framework for expressing it, if I understand Gödel's incompleteness theorems correctly.

I took issue with the specific claim that science didn't come out of philosophy. The scientific revolution was made possible by western philosophy, especially the rejection of goal-oriented explanations for things ("gravity exists because objects want to fall," etc.) Hell, Newton was an alchemist. Inquiry is inquiry. Science is a special kind, and certainly the most useful kind for investigating naturalistic claims, but it's silly to sum up philosophy as tautologies and wanking.

Ok, I've said more than I intended to and I'm sure I made a few enemies... sorry.

NAS: Our worldviews overlap pretty much 100%, FWIW. But take philosophy of ethics: I think it's useful to have a discussion about pure ethics without it always going back to "we're wired for empathy, that's where it comes from." We know where it comes from, now let's see where we can go with it.

I didn't even watch it but I'm going to assume it had to do with William of Ockham. It's possible to do this right, though:
http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=58564

Well actually I watched it up until "Pythagoras was good with numbers," at which point I'd seen enough.

Yeah. This is a pretty terrible video. But it brought some douches out of the woodwork, so I don't regret my 5 stars.

Much.