I have arguments against reductionism. I am just saying it sure explains a lot to some limit of interest and theory and to deny the reality of the causal link between matter and what we call our consciousness and everything which is a product thereof- whichis, you know, everything human beings create- is short sighted.
Existentialism as I understand is the belief that the meaning fo life, if there is one, is to be found in human existence and not with reference to God or religion.
Has to be said about JS Mill that utilitariansim with its presumption to be able to perform a calculus of cost / benefit and pain / human happiness has given rise to its own monsters, like Peter Singer who should be of interest to us mostly as a autisitic mental case as opposed to a philospher. Him and the euthenasia policies of the Scandinavian nations, which are demented, are really concerning.
Well, there's something to be gained from all philosophical thoughts I think. Some hold up better than others over time. I tend to like Aristotle/Aquinas' worldview, and I think it comes back up in Husserl and Heidegger later on.
Descartes' gives us a lot (science/scientific method), but the sacrifice of divine ideas (forms/essences) is dangerous, and I think it's become endemic in modern and postmodern thought with reductionism and relativism.
Mill's Utilitarianism can certainly be abused, as any theory can. Reading him with the wrong pair of glasses, it can come off a lot like Das Kapital by Marx! Hahaha! I remember in grad school, many classmates had only read that, some Foucault and a bit of Nietzsche - they were SJWed to hell and back. Anything else was Cliff notes through someone else's interpretation. It was sad, and these folks were probably 100x more well read than the average person with regard to Phi.
The debate about types is a good example of what I mean by anachronistic.. most of that discussion was moved to either technical discussions of physics stuff like what it means for a wave to exist as a probability (does a thing exist or not.. what is meant by a "thing" and "existence".. what is "really real" ?) and the study of the brain (is there an minimal table, possessing Platonic tablehood which everyone recognizes as a table no part of which can be removed without subjects reporting it's not a table?).
That kind of shit.
It's like they were all eating a feast and the table got picked up and moved somewhere else but they're still sitting right there moving their empty forks and knives in eternal gestures of eating food that isn't there anymore.
I sound like I think they have nothing to offer and that's not (that) true. I am sure they do . Maybe through some turn of fate science will be forced back on the questions they pondered in the way they pondered them and we'll see they were really radical geniuses beyond anyone's understanding.
That's what Heideggerians must believe. God knows you could go splunking in those caves and come back with pretty much anything you wanted to given enough license for interpretation, and HD has plenty to loan.
Maybe HD found the way to eternal truth- be vague, invent terms freely, posit ill-defined relationships between them and then elaborate on them like you're writing a Bach fugue. Feel free to contradict yourself so long as the contradictions are separated by at least 500 words of brain exhausting verbal thicket.
I have arguments against reductionism. I am just saying it sure explains a lot to some limit of interest and theory and to deny the reality of the causal link between matter and what we call our consciousness and everything which is a product thereof- whichis, you know, everything human beings create- is short sighted.
Existentialism as I understand is the belief that the meaning fo life, if there is one, is to be found in human existence and not with reference to God or religion.
Has to be said about JS Mill that utilitariansim with its presumption to be able to perform a calculus of cost / benefit and pain / human happiness has given rise to its own monsters, like Peter Singer who should be of interest to us mostly as a autisitic mental case as opposed to a philospher. Him and the euthenasia policies of the Scandinavian nations, which are demented, are really concerning.
Well, there's something to be gained from all philosophical thoughts I think. Some hold up better than others over time. I tend to like Aristotle/Aquinas' worldview, and I think it comes back up in Husserl and Heidegger later on.
Descartes' gives us a lot (science/scientific method), but the sacrifice of divine ideas (forms/essences) is dangerous, and I think it's become endemic in modern and postmodern thought with reductionism and relativism.
Mill's Utilitarianism can certainly be abused, as any theory can. Reading him with the wrong pair of glasses, it can come off a lot like Das Kapital by Marx! Hahaha! I remember in grad school, many classmates had only read that, some Foucault and a bit of Nietzsche - they were SJWed to hell and back. Anything else was Cliff notes through someone else's interpretation. It was sad, and these folks were probably 100x more well read than the average person with regard to Phi.
The debate about types is a good example of what I mean by anachronistic.. most of that discussion was moved to either technical discussions of physics stuff like what it means for a wave to exist as a probability (does a thing exist or not.. what is meant by a "thing" and "existence".. what is "really real" ?) and the study of the brain (is there an minimal table, possessing Platonic tablehood which everyone recognizes as a table no part of which can be removed without subjects reporting it's not a table?).
That kind of shit.
It's like they were all eating a feast and the table got picked up and moved somewhere else but they're still sitting right there moving their empty forks and knives in eternal gestures of eating food that isn't there anymore.
I sound like I think they have nothing to offer and that's not (that) true. I am sure they do . Maybe through some turn of fate science will be forced back on the questions they pondered in the way they pondered them and we'll see they were really radical geniuses beyond anyone's understanding.
That's what Heideggerians must believe. God knows you could go splunking in those caves and come back with pretty much anything you wanted to given enough license for interpretation, and HD has plenty to loan.
Maybe HD found the way to eternal truth- be vague, invent terms freely, posit ill-defined relationships between them and then elaborate on them like you're writing a Bach fugue. Feel free to contradict yourself so long as the contradictions are separated by at least 500 words of brain exhausting verbal thicket.
OK OK too dark I know.