I find I have very little patience with re-litigating well established philosophical debates. I also find that such re-litigation seems so profuse in online spaces as to be the rule rather than the exception.
On the one hand, I suppose I get how some of these arguments are new to some people, so there’s some benefit for those people to mentally engage with them. I don’t however see the point in engaging with them to those for which it is well trodden territory.
Examples of such debates: Empiricism vs Rationalism, Realism vs. Idealism
I would suggest that a good rule of thumb would be that if the debate has existed for over 100 years in it’s current form (no one has advanced an argument that is new in any meaningful sense), then it is unlikely that further debate is going to lead to anything new and worthwhile. Personally, I doubt I could add anything interesting that hasn’t already been said on such subjects.
I’d suggest a few reasons why such debates may not have made any progress:
The debate, in the terms it’s traditionally framed in, is ultimately trivial. That is to say that if it were somehow demonstrated that either traditional “side” was uncontroversially correct, it wouldn’t logically entail that I change anything about how I go about leading my life. I think this is true of the realism vs. idealism debate.
The debate is framed in a way that isn’t useful (often as a false dichotomy). Rationalism vs empiricism, or nature vs nurture seems like this to me.
Philosophy is in general divergent in its theories and there seems to be so sign of reconciliation, and this forum does permit old disputes from opening up once again. It doesn’t get any more classic than an argument for or against the existence of God. I agree.
Good call. Also points for mentioning tenderfoots engaging in ancient unresolved debates. I was and am very bad at arguing (debating). Watching debates online has been entertaining and informative for me. People seem to be paying to watch live debates and the question-answer sessions are always a treat.
There are numerous versions of these arguments. Many are well established territory, but there are at least a few new ones. Michael Behe’s case for design, although I think it’s been ultimately shown to fail, is an attempt at using statistics to demonstrate the likelihood of a designer. The fine tuning argument, while being similar to older apologetics, is actually new, and different in some important ways. I’d add that my personal argument against God is not one I’ve heard before… although I don’t think this is the place to get into it.
I’d add a third reason: The debate is non-substantive; that is, it winds up being about how to use certain linguistic expressions, and not about whatever it is the expressions denominate. Mere verbal disputes, in other words. They are irresolvable because there is no dictionary in which we can look up the “correct” philosophical meaning of words like “exist,” “real,” “good”, “substance”,“ought”, et al. That’s because philosophical definitions or usages tend to be ameliorative – prescriptive as often as descriptive.
By no means all philosophical disputes are non-substantive, though.
Don’t agree actually. I got into all this secondly because none of the old famous philosophers had modern physics to ground their base premises, and the vast majority of the more recent ones (last century) also seem oblivious to physics.
So I learned physics, at least enough to know the philosophical implications of the various findings. I find that all the old questions seem to presume classical Newtonian views, questions such as ‘what caused the big bang?’ and such. ‘Who am I?’
The territory I tread seems pretty new to me. I cannot find a single published view that gets close to most of the conclusions I get from trying to stay consistent with physics.
I say ‘secondly’ above. First event was my being educated in a protestant parochial school which taught that (my) religion was not in conflict with science. All was good in the world. Few years later, the fundamentalists (Kansas??) apparently declared open war on science, shattering what I’d been taught. I felt forced to choose. I experimented with questioning the axiom that the Bible was a divine work, and the pieces fell together so quickly I was awestruck.
Only after that did I notice that all the literature out there was written by those seemingly pretty ignorant of science, and the philosophy put out by scientists showed way too many biases that I thought needed questioning.
Can you give me an example of a traditional philosophical debate that hasn’t changed in the last 100 years that you think is informed by modern physics? Certainly any disagreement based on a “billiard ball” model of determinism has certainly changed in the past 100 years.
I don’t agree. I think debate is useful for the minds engaged in it, even old hands. It’s skill-building.
Someone mentioned “Does God exist?” Well, if everyone thought the debate closed, what would we do with our time? And maybe someone has a new way of seeing the question.
I’m also one who thinks we are constantly redefining words and building different things with them, creating new linguistic paths.
I don’t see how rehashing pre-existing static positions develops skills beyond how the generic “pick any side of a position and debate for it” can give practice in pure rhetoric. There’s certainly nothing special about philosophical subjects for this skill.
“Does God exist” is a general question that includes many specific arguments. In my experience, most of these arguments are rehashing of the traditional old arguments, and they are tedious as fuck. The fact that people keep engaging with them isn’t evidence they are valuable. There are however novel arguments, and they are at least potentially interesting.
You don’t have to just believe it, it’s a demonstrable fact that people are doing that. I’m not sure how that relates to my post.
I am enormously impressed with the diversity of philosophical ideas available to draw upon for discussing the issues you mention. The great thing about this smorgasbord of worldviews is that none of them simply follows the footsteps of “well-established debates”. How could they when it is the hallmark of original philosophy that they redefine the meaning of philosophical concepts, which pre-empts the possibility of a mere recycling of old debates?
Debates, such as those involving consciousness, have developed over time. Other debates have remained essentially stagnant. It is the latter that I have no patience with, and which seem abundant.
