Re: The meaning of philosophy and the lawn chair
From: Joe Dees (joedees@addall.com)
Date: Tue Jun 19 2001 - 11:02:09 MDT
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>Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 01:10:14 -0700
> Samantha Atkins <samantha@objectent.com> extropians@extropy.org Re: The meaning of philosophy and the lawn chairReply-To: extropians@extropy.org
>
>hal@finney.org wrote:
>>
>
>> With effective policies and ideas, you don't need propaganda. People
>> will come to see the value in them using their own powers of reason
>> and perception. The West neglects philosophy because its ideas work,
>> and it doesn't need fancy rhetoric to fool people.
>>
>
>
>Philosophy is not about fooling people. Philosophy provides the
>grounding for the ideas and for our very understanding of what
>"it works" means. The founders of the US understood this. Most
>of them were well steeped in philosophy. Since then we deny the
>importance of philosophy and lose more of our freedom and more
>of the understanding of what is important and how we got here
>every year.
>
>> Propaganda is the last resort of a failed ideology. Better to let the
>> facts speak for themselves.
>
>Facts never speak for themselves. They must be processed in
>order to speak at all. They are processed through philosophical
>filters whether that philosophy has been explicitly created and
>mantained or has been largely imbibed from the environment.
>
Everyone by necessity philosophizes, any time they try to draw an abstract general principle from a concatenation of concrete and specific processes or events; those who do not study the discipline, however, have a much greater chance of doing so badly, as they do not benefit from the discoveries of paths and errors made by those before them, thus they cannot see as far without those shoulders to stand upon, and most likely are even unaware that they are indeed attempting to philosophize. For example: everyone practices logic (a branch of philosophy) in language, but those who have studied logic are able to employ it better not only because they have a knowledge of the structures of the process and of the common logical arguments and fallacies, but also because they are self-consciously aware of and attentive to their employment of it.
>
>- samantha
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