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Author
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Topic: Philosophers Wanted (Nov. 2000)
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Pattie Gillett
True Believer
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posted 10-30-2000 09:35 PM
   
My name is Pattie and I'm the cold-blooded business major who married a philosopher. Actually, I only minored in business but that's not my point. My point is that, even though I slept through my college philosophy classes (and I developed an interest in Philosophy primarily because I believe spouses need to have at least 10 potential argument subjects at all times), I believe that philosophy fosters the kind of thinking that is too rare in the business world.
Dave spoke about the problem of people not recognizing the consequences of their actions and no where is this more true than in big business. To far too many executives, "thinking about the consequences" means calling in the lawyers to cover your liabilities. Is this the kind of thinking that benefits society?
Philosophy challenges you to distinguish what you know from what you've been taught. It makes you ask yourself why you believe what you believe. It makes you question your routine, and consider your methods, even if that's the way things have always been done.
Doesn't that sound like the "thinking outside the box" self-help books du jour?
The way I say it,if you want to make it in the business world and still feel good about your contribution to humanity, don't give Tony Robbins cash for pointing out what you can get from sensible, open-minded conversations. You'll be practicing (to quote a friend) "good philosophy" and good sense, too.
[This message has been edited by Pattie Gillett (edited 11-01-2000).] |
Kevin Ott
True Believer
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posted 11-02-2000 07:22 PM
If you ain't part of the solution, you're part of the problem. It's pretty upsetting that, somewhere along the way, that old chestnut became true.If you haven't registered at this site, do it now. Post a reply to what you've read, or email a member of the This Is Not News team with a question, or let the site inspire you to run for city council or dogcatcher or surgeon general. DO something, even if it's only talking and letting yourself think something you haven't thought before. That's the point of this site. We've got all this great technology working for us here, and as the good people at Gnutella can tell us, it can pave the way for a Great Society, where people can talk to each other without walls or distance getting in the way. I know, it sounds like a pipe dream or a cheesy AT&T commercial. But it's true, and it's a damn good idea, and we shouldn't waste it. Read this site. Bookmark it. Contribute. Don't be scared off. This website, like the Web itself, is for everybody. |
slgorman
One of the Regulars
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posted 11-06-2000 10:53 PM
Someone else who has found a soulmate in Dewey. I really didn't think it was possible. Interestingly enough, my first encounter with Dewey was not in any of my philosophy courses, but in my MS in Health Science curriculum (Educational Philosophy, required course even!). He was one of the early pioneers of adult educational theory and utilizing active learning to engage students of all ages. It's thanks to him that "good" teachers don't just stand up and lecture or "pour knowledge, like water, into a students' heads."Totally off-topic, if you want to hear a wonderful spoken word rant about Tony Robbins entitled "Tony Robbins is the Agent of Satan" (or something like that) by Hugh Brown Shu (aka Hugh Gallagher), email me. I can send you the entirely hilarious and thought provoking tape. [This message has been edited by slgorman (edited 11-06-2000).] |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 11-06-2000 11:28 PM
It really is amazing the number of areas in which Dewey wrote and studied. The man's career spanned about seventy years, and his complete works take up about thirty volumes. I was actually considering getting out of philosophy completely until I spent a semester reading Dewey, James and Pierce. I'm actually glad to hear that he still has some weight in the education field; for the amount of sense he makes, he is ignored way too much in modern political and philosophical discourse. |
slgorman
One of the Regulars
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posted 02-08-2001 10:59 PM
Having attended a liberal arts college as an undergrad, I had to take philosophy (actually I had to take 2-3 philosophy courses, and 2-3 religion classes, but that's neither here nor there) to get a degree. I believe it was a valuable experience. Should philosophy courses be required? |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 02-08-2001 11:15 PM
I'm gonna let other people take a crack at this one, since I think my stance on the issue is pretty easy to guess.  |
Ray Bossert
One of the Regulars
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posted 02-09-2001 02:49 PM
Ahem...philosophy isn't the only branch in the humanities you know.
There is an awful lot of fiction, drama, and poetry that has made people question the way things are and conceptualize alternative modes of being though imaginative perception... Just thought I'd get that out there. And to continue my "Read More About It..." pitch, my Romantic Period class just finished reading William Godwin's "Caleb Williams." While I don't recommend this novel in the least bit because I found it pretty darned boring to read, I will plug Godwin (husband to Mary Wollstonecraft) to you Dewey people because back in the early 19th Century he and Mary were the leaders of the "gradualist" movement which suggested revising the education system as a means of achieveing progressive social change. But the real point of this pedantic tangent is to relate a scene in his novel in which the alleged-but-innocent thief Caleb attempts to prove that his seemingly-virtuous master has framed him. When he attempts to reveal his master's duplicity to an elderly fellow servant, the servant refuses to believe Caleb...not because of the impossibility of the tale, but because he has invested too much in his belief system that he has been serving a virtuous man. To deny his master's virtue means the justification for his entire life of service has been a lie. To make a long story short...people are often resistant to philosophy and reason because it would mean they would have to surrender their belief systems, and we define outselves by these systems. Learning the real truth or at least a more real truth means sacrificing how we see ourselves and who we think we are...I feel like I'm weaving all the threads together right now. Few people have the courage to sacrifice their self-conceptions or even the conceptions others have of them. Therefore, few people want to pursue philosophy. Or, at least, that's what I gather from my book-learnin'. |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 02-14-2001 11:33 AM
Well, the topic title is Philosophers Wanted. Seriously, I think everyone should get a solid foundation in most of the "liberal arts", but that's more a topic for Policy or Life in Practice. I also think that literature and fiction often do a very good job of taking philosophical themes and running with them, exploring the consequences of one position or another. And I think your point about people being comfortable with the myths they've built around themselves is dead-on, which is why philosophical education in particular is so important at a fairly young age. I say this because no other discipline that I am aware places the same emphasis on critical thinking skills, on developing ideas to their natural conclusions and consequences, and on the tentative nature of knowledge. I mean, even college students have their worldviews well-enough formed that Descartes and the skeptical hypothesis hit them like a ton of bricks, but at that age, it's still possible to get some of them to cast a more critical eye on their own assumptions. |
Ray Bossert
One of the Regulars
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posted 02-16-2001 11:31 PM
Not to shower on the philosophy parade, but the fact that philosophy is a human construct arising out of human minds initially shaped by systems of thought instilled by larger social texts still poses an obstacle to its ability to really break the individual out of limited world views.Clearly, I'm not suggesting there isn't a benefit to the liberal arts...and I'm certainly not suggesting that improvement is impossible...I'm just making sure someone plays Devil's Advocate and acknowledges the limitations of so-called reason and rational thought since one is still subject to defining what is "reasonable" through the paradigms offered by those in control of the philosophic discourse. Can you tell I've been reading a lot of Marxist criticism this past week? |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 02-16-2001 11:40 PM
I think you're being far too pessimistic and giving far too much credit to monolithic social forces . . . also a fault of Marxism in general, but hey.Yes, human thought and ways of thinking are shaped by the environments that humans find themselves in. But, and this is the crucial thing here . . . there's a creative impulse that exists within individuals and within societies. There's also a universe that I am convinced is not locked into one way of being. You put those together, you have a tremendous capacity for self-reflection and re-invention. If you deny that, there's no point in having a Marxist critique or a deterministic position or what have you. So maybe human thinking and reason (and by that I mean far more than simple deductive logic) isn't perfect -- but it's the best thing we have, by a long shot. |
Ray Bossert
One of the Regulars
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posted 02-17-2001 12:22 AM
I'm no Marxist, myself. But dare I wax Derridean, we also have the problem of limitations of language and signification.
If the very system of discourse is promotes particular ways of thought, then we might need more than just logic and reason to bring us to a better system.Maybe we realyl do need a kind of revolution, though not necessarily a bloody one of united workers, to affect the changes we need. |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 02-17-2001 12:31 AM
I'm not sure I accept the premise you seem to be working with, that says that the ways of thinking given to us by our language are static. Part of human reason, like I said, is its spontaneity and creativity. And since the world around us is in something of a state of flux, it constantly presents us with new situations that demand that new ways of thinking work themselves into the language. From there, it's a matter of communicating those new ways of thinking effectively, which is always the real challenge and what I hope we're accomplishing in some small way here at TINN. |
Ray Bossert
One of the Regulars
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posted 02-19-2001 10:43 PM
By no means do I mean to suggest our thought must be static...but I am suggesting that there our boundaries to our thoughts due to our limitations of language and that our language can have biases which work against our attempts to alter it. These are not, of course, original thoughts of mine. I mean, people invented language, so it must be possible to "create" new language. But I'm not sure how we would be able to communicate it even if we could, given that we would have to approach it from our own language first. I'm not quite sure how one would conceptualize and then communicate some a new system... |
slgorman
One of the Regulars
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posted 02-19-2001 11:56 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Ray Bossert:
I mean, people invented language, so it must be possible to "create" new language. But I'm not sure how we would be able to communicate it even if we could, given that we would have to approach it from our own language first.
Slang comes to mind, immediately. Not really a part of the language before it's use, but "common" enough that certain groups of people understand its meaning.
Or what we refered to in high school as "Franglais", a bastardization of French and English that students with a rudimentary knowledge of both would understand. Or am I, once again, totally off target?
[This message has been edited by slgorman (edited 02-19-2001).] |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 02-20-2001 01:08 AM
Nah, sl, I think you're on to something -- stuff like slang and pidgin and Franglais are ways in which we sort of build new ideas into our system. If, for example, French and English speakers have different ways of framing concepts, then the creation of a language that forces members of either group to think in terms of the other is going to open those speakers to new ways of thinking.That said, I see Ray's point that language creates boundaries -- we can't just create any new way of thinking. Just as we influence our environment, our environment influences us. But I prefer to take what I guess would be considered an optimistic approach to that problem. Our thinking, while certainly heavily influenced by language, has within it concepts that let us be critical of language. It's a self-evaluating, self-reinterpreting, self-adjusting thing -- you don't need to get outside language to add to it. No, it's not perfect, but it's on-target enough that we can interact with and understand our environment in a meaningful way. |
slgorman
One of the Regulars
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posted 02-20-2001 01:22 AM
Maybe I'm weird this way, but I take perverse joy (at least at work) in trying to fine the "perfect" way to speak or write about something. It's difficult, but spending that extra time to find the best way to express my complex ideas usually is rewarding. Strangely enough, I don't always do such a good job here... |
Ray Bossert
One of the Regulars
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posted 02-23-2001 12:34 AM
Deconstruction teaches us that any sound can signify any thing, and that even sounds that mean one thing can, through metaphor, end up signifying something totally unrelated.However, to be understood, we need to be understandable...we need to conform to significations that make sense. Slang, generally, makes sense. It doesn't break free, it simply switches signifiers around and in ways, I would suggest, that do more to reinforce the larger system than to repel it.
Just think of rap music.
Gender roles, social hierarchies, these all get played out again in slang. And exchanges between languages doesn't really mean creating something new...although finally grasping a term that has no immediate correlation in the native tongue seems to come closest.
The big question is what makes one cultures go in different directions with their signifiers...I think the "environment" plays a big part. But what we are dealing with is how to break out of languages already created, which seems a very different task than creating them from scratch. |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 02-23-2001 01:05 AM
You might find it helpful to explain the technical meanings of deconstructionism, significations, etc., Ray, since those can be academia- and even discipline-specific.Your point about appreciating a term that doesn't have an equivalent in a native lanugage is what I was going for -- there's a reason why teachers talk about learning to feel comfortable thinking in a new language. It can help you think differently. I also think that catch phrases or slang or mateaphors that achieve a level of popularity can in some ways affect the way we look at the world. I think there's something about being able to appreciate the way, for example, the Monty Python guys use language. And while slang can simply reinforce and reflect social conditions, it can also be used as a commentary on them. But the larger point I suppose I'm making is, I don't feel a need to "break free from language." Language is self-transforming, responding to the changes in our experience -- they reflect back on each other. Just as one example, we mean by the word "craft" something completely different than the ancient Greeks did -- for them, almost any tasked that required a learnable skill was a craft or a techne, whereas the term is much more limited for us. We also have different meanings for words like "cause," "atom" and "substance," although I won't try and get into them here. Those different meanings affect how we look at the world -- it's part of why reading even a well-translated text by Plato or Aristotle can be really difficult. But they're also a result of our interacting with and investigating the world. (So the answer to your question, Ray, is, I suppose, that the different experiences of cultures -- and the different reactions of the members of those cultures to those experiences -- is what can lead one culture to develop different meanings.) We're not totally "locked into" any way of thinking or social structure by our language, and to the extent that language does create inequities, we're not prevented from reinterpreting and changing our use of language. It's part of the thinking and critical reasoning process that makes human experience what it is. And academic philosophy, for all its faults, is an excellent way of cultivating these skills. |
Kevin Ott
True Believer
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posted 02-27-2001 11:58 PM
Enter the linguist.First off: It's possible to create new language, in a sense. Esperanto has thrived for years, and there is a languange called Boontling spoken by only about 50 people in (I think) a northern California town. However, these are extreme exceptions. Most invented languages simply don't take, or are spoken by so few people and are so hard to spread that they eventually die out. If you think it's hard trying to get new people to post to a new website, try getting them to change their grammar and inflections to something that came to you in a fever dream. Language is something alive and fluid, and like social conventions, it's not anything someone can consciously grab hold of and tame. Similarly, I agree with Dave: Coming up with ideas that are completely alien to what we've known isn't really an option. The interesting thing about language is that it's one of the few things humans are hardwired for. Spiders are born knowing how to build webs, pachycephalosaurs are born knowing they've got to use their bony crests to do battle for the one they love, and humans are born knowing how to interpret the world through meaningful-to-them yet completely arbitrary vocal terms. But just as spiders build different webs depending on their environment, we too create different languages to describe our world and convey our ideas. But we have an advantage spiders don't. We can talk to people who have evolved terms and concepts in a world different than ours. Spiders can't do this. ("Hi, Bob? Yeah, Jerry. I was wondering if you might want to get together over lunch next week and discuss weaving techniques.") Thus we create new ideas and philosophies merely by hearing terms from others. I never would have thought that Schadenfreude was an actual thing until I heard the word used. And consequently, we come up with entirely new philosophies based on our personal readings of stuff like Plato and Aristotle. As a result, I'm not sure that language creates boundaries. Self-expression -- which I think is something philosophy boils down to -- can be done easily if you look around hard enough for the terms. And hey, if you can't find the right words, make 'em up. |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 08-30-2001 11:31 PM
quote:
And consequently, we come up with entirely new philosophies based on our personal readings of stuff like Plato and Aristotle
I'm still not convinced by this. Not to be the old crank who claims there's nothing new under the sun, but even a wild and innovative reinterpretation of Plato and Aristotle is still connected in some way to Plato and Aristotle, if only because they're framing the questions that we in our interpretations are trying to solve. Heck, look at all the wildly different philosophical positions that have been developed in the western world over the last few centuries. And most, if not all, of them can be boiled down to arguments over Descartes. |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 09-27-2001 07:53 AM
Bringing this back up because I wanted to talk about how those of us who have inquisitive natures, or put an emphasis on critical thinking, developed those interests and skills. When I was a kid, I used to read a lot, to the point that my mother treated books and newspapers the way other parents treat TV for grounding purposes, so I'm sure that helped. I especially think my fondness for science fiction prepared me for my interest in philosophy, because from the beginning it got me to ask the question, "What would happen if . . . ," which is, I think, where the whole process starts.How about you? |
slgorman
One of the Regulars
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posted 09-27-2001 12:54 PM
Along the "What would happen if..." model, that's why I've always liked science. The whole idea of experimenting, whether it be with water and dirt to make mud or something a little more complex, was fascinating to me as a child. I was the strange kind of kid who liked to color with crayons but always wondered what you had to do when you made them to have them be different colors. |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 11-29-2001 01:46 PM
"How does . . . happen?" and "What if . . . happened?" are probably two of the most basic questions that scientists AND philosophers ask themselves. And probably two questions we should always be asking together. Which is why it sometimes baffles me to see science and philosophy treating the other as some sort of lunatic aunt in the attic. |
Kevin Ott
True Believer
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posted 12-02-2001 04:41 PM
I'd wager that art figures into that "How and What If" equasion there somewhere too. | |
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