I believe that studying philosophy generates “positive” knowledge.
I.e. insofar that we count scientific knowledge as knowledge, we also must consider philosophical knowledge as knowledge.
I mention “scientific knowledge” only because it’s the seemingly uncontroversial example of “actual positive knowledge”.
I suspect scientific knowledge is not “positive”, which is the sort of wondering this OP is about: What even is a positive knowledge? What is positivism?
Those are more sub-questions that come about in wondering. The thesis I want to defend/explore is that studying philosophy makes you more knowledgeable.
The best way I can think of now: in light of a positivist mindset that believes philosophy cannot generate truths because science is better at it than that I want to say that the ability you learn in studying/doing philosophy is not exactly what you might think it is from a cursory reading of philosophers. The ability you learn is notoriously hard to define. That’s actually a feature of philosophy, IMO.
The thought of this post comes down to – even though there’s no point to philosophy, you still learn something in doing philosophy. What is that something?
Nice, it’s a good question and one that comes to mind often.
In fairness, there are probably some people who practise philosophy in a way that diminishes their capacity for good judgement and leaves them less capable.
I suspect that what you may be looking for is wisdom. I guess the primary way to measure this is by how much more adept someone becomes at managing the vicissitudes of life.
Your notion of becoming more knowledgeable is interesting because, for me, it is often about becoming more aware of how much I do not know, which (as Socrates seems to suggest) is the beginning of wisdom.
@Moliere Incidentally, there’s a way of relating to the world that strongly seeks certainty and factual knowledge. Such people are often drawn to history, politics, and science in an effort to “master” situations and develop frameworks for future action. I think this may be largely dispositional.
This is not something I have ever really shared, perhaps because I am not convinced that it matters or that reality can be fully known. I am more interested in questions and contradictions. The downside is that this can leave me open to the accusation that I am avoiding commitments.
Well In my opinion philiosphy is a personal support. It is rarely cumilative. A caveman could just sit and think and reach that there is no morality (hell he probably wouldn’t even need to deconstruct moreality) or that the world is absurd and whatnot.
But a caveman can not experiment about galaxies or electrons or computers. These have to be built upon for centuries and centuries by scientist adding upon what others did.
Philosophers though can start their papers from scratch and go to where they want to go even now.
Imagine you philosophically crack the code of happiness or the secret to life. Your kid would still have to start from zero and figure it out for himself. But if you figure out that saturn has 5 moons, you can simply tell him this fact.
Funny thing is regarding Albert Camus’ “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem…” one could say that science is pointless whereas philosophy is the only important thing. Because it decides what even matters to begin with. The concept of mattering requires philosophy.
I’m with you at least in spirit. Philosophy is good. I might say — as a “(mutant) positivist” – that it helps us get a better grip on our fundamental signs.
Comte thought of sociology as the supreme science. Husserl called his phenomenology the “true” positivism. We might say that the positivist wants to let the thing “speak for itself.” So it’s empiricism.
There’s also the progressive narrative. Religion is concrete myth, maybe including theriomorphic gods. Then comes metaphysics, which is abstract myth. Finally we get to positivism.
This grand narrative is crude, but it captures something that you can even find on this forum.
I appreciate though why Heidegger’s early work was hermeneutical phenomenology. Note the invocation of Hermes. We are metaphorical beings, and perhaps a “perfect literality” or “pure logic” is an especially deluded and “anemic” myth.
One merit of philosophy is that it tries to account for science and place it in the larger social world. Why do people care about science ? They do and I do too. But why ? Are we really so passionate about truth for its own sake ? What is this truth ?
Should science be understood as a provider of “truth” or more like a method for creating technology ? “Knowledge is power.” What is power ? Do we call power “knowledge” ? Do we call our own beliefs “true” and that’s the gist of this truth-stuff ?
I think we learn to wake up from some of our prejudices through the study of philosophy. Never all of them, for they are enabling. I have to react in a mostly average way to the tribe’s marks and noises to share the world with others.
People seem to flog the dead horse of ‘scientism’, and accredit nothing to brain-power unless it has an attachment, following the scientific code.
In my opinion sense data of brain ought over-rule scientific inquiry if the objective is reasonable.
Take for example, the thread ‘Does Pain Exist?’, if we are being scientific, it cannot be proven. It can even be suggested it doesn’t exist. However, if we accredit true-value to brain power, we can all agree that it does exist.
Scientism has left death and destruction in its wake, the fallacy of believing brain power to be too weak to determine truth has resulted in stupor; for example, people arguing pain doesn’t exist.
Philosophy does generate positive-knowledge.
The latter is a tool override(this has predictable problems, and they are clear to see in society).
I’m going to be very vague here. The “something” you ask about is some sort of movement in the direction of understanding, I think. And the “point” of philosophy is surely to seek out such ‘somethings’ as I have just defined so vaguely?
Yes, you could. But you found out by studying astronomy, while he learns nothing from your fact except that fact. He doesn’t learn where the fact came from, or how you discovered it…
N.B. My words here are not criticisms, by any means; they’re offered as ‘food for thought’.
These days, most ‘philosophy’ forums are actually sciencist talking-shops. I had to leave one, not so long ago, when it changed under my feet. One minute, all subjects were open to discussion. The next minute, no subject that cannot be treated by science is acceptable for discussion.
And yet science is a powerful and valuable tool; its record speaks for itself.
If only its sciencist worshippers would refrain from applying science when other tools are more appropriate to the job in hand. If only…
The only problem with science is its misapplication, outside its own bailiwick. IMO!
But doesnt that imply that we were sleeping? And don’t we just swap one prejudice for another? If so, does that mean we never wake up? And is the living within a prejudice a passive and static affair, or does a prejudice dynamically reinterpret itself every moment in subtle respects? After all , we construe on the fly , while in motion in a contextually changing world. The ‘pre’ of prejudice is only one pole, one ingredient of the alchemy that goes into a simple construction of a familiar event, and this ‘pre’ is always altered as we construe not only how an event is similar to what we have seen before but how it differs. In this accounting for novel aspects we are awake even in our prejudices.
It is the sort of knowledge that we currently most prize, but I would say that the crux of your OP turns on the idea that philosophy is ill-defined. At one point in history scientific knowledge and philosophical knowledge were not considered separate, and I don’t think attempts to separate them end up being coherent.
“Philosophizing” is something like “thinking,” full-stop. Surely thinking generates knowledge. Should we then ask, “What kind of knowledge does thinking generate”? The answer is that it generates knowledge qua knowledge. Thinking/reflection/contemplation is how knowledge is had.
If this is right then the question is flawed, namely via the bolded word ‘kind’: “What kind of knowledge does thinking generate?” The presupposition is that thinking (or philosophizing) generates a specific kind of isolatable knowledge. I would say that this presupposition is faulty, and that the confusions arise from it.
Of course, given the ill-defined word “philosophy,” one person might associate that term with one school of philosophy; another person with another school. Those people should be able to isolate a determinate form to one extent or another, but others who focus on different schools of philosophy will obviously not agree with them (because an equivocation is in play on ‘philosophy’).
Great topic. It’s amusing to notice that you could flip it around and it would still make sense as a thesis: Even though you don’t learn anything doing philosophy, there’s still a point to it.
So what is that something? Two thoughts:
First, “philosophy” covers a lot. I’d say there are some inquiries within philosophy that do generate positive knowledge, and can answer questions (somewhat) definitively, or at least as definitively as science does. But they’re in the distinct minority.
Second, perhaps the most important thing I learn from philosophy is to identify the limits of rational inquiry. Philosophy takes me to a locked door. I can choose to unlock it; philosophy will not provide the key; but it serves a very useful function by showing me how to get to the door.
Yes, the metaphor of “waking” from prejudice suggests that we were initially “sleeping” in prejudice. Since we are “prejudice on wheels,” we never “wake up” from expectant disclosure in general — unless you count the “waking” of dying.
Is this question really for me ? Prejudice is enacted. The world is a raging bonfire. The singular existence is a reckless torrent.
I have always used a simpler, more open, definition of philosophy: serious and considered thought. Such serious thought can be applied to almost anything, but that makes no difference. It’s still philosophy, whether it’s used for studying “fundamental nature”, or something else.
I think philosophy has a good point. Like training improves the capacities of athletes, philosophy trains its practitioners to think clearly.
To think clearly helps us avoid conceptual confusion or fraud, for example, in politics, economy or at work places, schools, or in social groups plagued by nonsensical beliefs, habits, or power mad individuals.
Having read the main responses to this thread, a majority of them being great, I have had to dig deeper in order to provide a non-repeating take to the question at hand that being: what is this “something” you tend to gain in learning philosophy?
I guess it all boils down to the nature of this game we call life, both simple and complex at differing times, we constantly aim to make an understanding of the phenomena at hand which can be simple as 1,2,3 and at other times (if not most) algebraically complex to the point one would be playing a fools game trying to discern how the phenomena is grounded to the underlying when accounting for several biases, such as that of the hindsight variety (in relation to this example); so this is where philosophy comes in, it simply provides ‘something’ to adequately fill these gaps.
True. Though if so then I want to read that as in support of the position that in studying philosophy one can learn something – if there is a bad way of doing something then there’s a good way of doing something and thereby something to learn.
Once upon a time I’d answer “wisdom”, but now I suspect that philosophy is even wider than this. The classical works are often works of philosophy of wisdom, but we could philosophize about the nature of games, for instance, and properly be perceived as not really pursuing wisdom as we normally mean it yet still doing philosophy for all that.
But then I think it could lead to a kind of wisdom, too, in that by learning how to think (in a particular way) we could come to be able to utilize these ways of thinking in other circumstances that prove beneficial to ourselves (make choices which lead us to a good life, or the best sort of life we could have given the circumstances).
Interesting reflection. I want to say that philosophers of the past could be roughly divided along this distinction, though – so that the latter also have their philosophers (if only to undo the work of those who seek control).
That makes sense. Philosophy is the study of our (or a particular ours?) fundamental signs which, being fundamental, happen to crop up in all sorts of disciplines. One learns how-to sign. (An opaque synopsis which can unpack in various ways, but I find something satisfactory to the straightforwardness of the answer)
I think this might be a particular mode of philosophy, but not an answer to what it is one is learning in studying philosophy because “movement in the direction of understanding” seems to me to be a good summation of a rationalist philosophy which seeks to contain or place the world under how one prefers to stand towards the said world: Group 1 in @Tom_Storm 's reflection above.
So it would leave out those philosophies which do not seek to understand, yet still manage to teach.
Yes this is another iteration of one of my favorite questions to repeat and rethink: What is philosophy?
This is where I begin to disagree. I’m not so sure that thinking generates knowledge unless we specify what kind of thinking we’re talking about. So I would be inclined, even in speaking about philosophy as thought as such, to still ask:
or maybe something like “When we think philosophically what kind of philosophical thinking leads to a positive knowledge which is also clearly philosophical in the sense that it’s applicable to every particular philosophy we know about? Is there something, even in the diversity of philosophy and its aims, that we are learning which is particularly philosophical?”
I think this is a bit of a pandora’s box rather than an illusion of modern philosophy. In the past philosophy and science were not so separate, but now we treat them as such. Yours is a coherent answer, but it relies upon a unity of philosophy that we just don’t see today unless we restrict ourselves to a particular set of texts.
Or, at least, I’m not sure how we go about justifying your opening criticism – that of a lack of a proper definition. In asking for a proper definition isn’t that just re-asking the same question again?
Good observation!
Nice. Would you commit to the practical aspects of philosophy as @jkop does following you? :
My instinct is to point to something like “it teaches you how to think, so it will help you in any situation you happen to find yourself in where thinking might be required” such as the above scenarios.
The problem with the pragmatic justification @jkop that I can see is that it does improve something like what we mean when talking about the athleticism of athletes which prepares the body for all kinds of particular feats of the body be it football or wrestling or working on the docks, but instead for the case of “the mind” as somewhat not the same as the body in athleticism.
BUT we can learn this same thing without philosophy in particular circumstances. If I work in a Fraud department catching and persecuting fraud for a living then I learn how to think in that circumstance. That’s the sort of pragmatic concern people often lob at philosophy: that one can learn this in some other way without the text and skip straight to the good stuff and simply learn a job to learn how to think since you’ll be thinking there anyways.
But that’s exactly the sort of belief I intend on targeting by offering a positivist thesis of philosophical knowledge.
