I was just thinking about how the last time i learned any philosophy was 15+ years ago, so i wonder, what’s something y’all know about philosophy? Let’s talk about it!
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The most philophically inclined people I’ve known in my life all ended up being frustrated little nazi cunts. Philosophy is used waaaaay too much as religion is, to rationalise the unacceptable. I avoid “philosophers”, it’s just brainbloat for the sake of brainbloat because they have to compensate for the size of their lil dick.
I met a few libertarians like that. It’s not great.
Libertarians are the worst.
All philosophy is based on the two opposing views “Cogito Ergo Sum” vs. “Esse Est Percipi”.
I recognize the first (i think therefore i am, Descartes big innovation) but my Latin is not great, what is the 2nd? Something like "that is perceived?“
Some philosophers have written in intentionally hard to understand language.
I know the world suffers so today because not enough people understand philosophy.
philosophy was replaced by philanthropic endeavors by the grossly rich. recorded and streamed online for all to see how “good christans” treat the destitute and needy.
morals are obligations only the poor are required to pay.
the world as we know it is dying horrifically and there’s nothing any one person can do to stop it.
the call to the danger is drown out by the incessant shrill bells of subscriptions releasing hourly, 24 hours a day. nobody will hear it before it’s too late.
we are already dead.
I majored in PHIL and took significant personal interest in it before that. I also deconstructed my faith in the 5 years prior to that. Philosophy asks all the questions, not just the ones that have immediate practical meaning or application or serve the will of those in power. Beyond that, it helps us develop better question asking and reasoning skills that are applicable to many other topics and pursuits. In some ways, philosophy is what education should be. It encourages you to discover and try to understand rather than just flip open your noggin on a hinge for someone to shovel in a bunch of junk for you to mindlessly repeat. If every school aged kid was introduced to philosophy the world would be a better place.
We had philosophy as a subject in school, but it was less about learning to think and more about interpreting texts written by some philosophers. Most (including me) dropped the class after the year.
And that was forty years ago…
I think that’s pretty common to start that way. Although where I live it’s only the first semester, then it’s about how to think by using those methods we just learned about.
eat shit have fun :)
edit: i should clarify that is what philosophy is all about
The corrolary to fuck around and find out!
There’s a Canadian mechanic on YouTube and one of his sign-offs was “if you don’t fuck around, how will you ever find out?” Which does feel kind of philosophical to me lol
To get serious about this i think there are two broad tracks: 1. Learn through education and 2. Learn through experience.
Sometimes I’ve wanted to experience something that other people have told me, no you can learn the lesson without having to do it. But i know that I’ll learn the lesson better if i experience it first hand, in context.
For other things, i can learn from others. E.g., take a science-based COVID vaccine. When the risks are great for myself and others, i don’t have to “fuck around and find out.”
I first encountered this phrase as a coping mechanism for nurses and other healthcare professionals who had to care for people who had gotten sick and died after getting COVID, so it’s always had a specific flavor for me.
That seems like a very balanced approach beyond what I was even considering; I like it.
The guys channel is full of mad science slapdash stuff to make things work that otherwise, just shouldn’t lol. I take that approach to my homelab (with some caveats, since I’m not trying to lose all my data lol), and just kind of throw things together with some minimal understanding of how they fit conceptually.
Moral philosophy can be broadly divided into a few categories
Consequentialism - the idea that the morality of an action is determined by its consequences. For example, utilitarianism suggests that moral actions are the ones which produce the most happiness.
Deontology - the idea that there are moral laws, and that moral actions are those that follow the laws.
Virtue ethics - the idea that virtuous actions help us flourish and vicious (from vices) actions hinder us. There is also the concept that virtues exist in the middle (“golden mean”) of a scale between two vices, for example bravery is a virtue between the vices of cowardice and recklessness.
Pragmatism - the idea that there can be a moral progression of society and knowledge via study and inquiry. This is not so much a category of its own, but it’s compatible with the the main ones mentioned above.
On a personal note, I do not like consequentialism as a moral theory. I lean more towards pragmatic deontology but virtue ethics is also compelling.
You’re making me remember a term exam I had in my only philo class, freshman world philosophy. The professor asked something like the following,
My neighbor told me he thinks me feeding the birds in my backyard isn’t good for the environment. What do you think? Is it right, wrong or something else? Use what you’ve learned this semester to answer.
I thought this was brilliant because he got to have a room full of undergrads think and write about a real moral conflict he was having with another human, and also, good for having us use our educatuon as applied to a real question.
I can vaguely remember my answer, but I don’t really remember any of the world philosophy…
It’s an interesting one! I haven’t taken any classes but would love to do at least an introductory one. The Great Courses has a good series on moral philosophy and I enjoyed the book How to be Perfect by Michael Schur (creator of The Good Place tv show).
That question in particular would be difficult for me to answer in a purely philosophical sense. I suppose we’d need to define what good/bad for the environment mean etc.
The birds are fed, is that good for the environment? The birds are part of the environment, so yes I guess so.
Are the birds being fed appropriate food? We’d have to ask the professor.
Are at least some of the birds invasive or causing some other trouble in the environment? Have to gather more information.
Perhaps by feeding the birds, they are not eating as much other food like insects, which can cause pest issues?
I like to think your professor would grade on both your questions and your answers. Do you remember many of the specifics in your answer or any feedback you got?
Kind of a sore memory. This might have been the exam that for years afterwards whenever I saw this professor at social gatherings. He would say, hey sem, I still have an exam to get back to you. And I’d say, okay, I’ll come by your office, but I never did. We were a fairly tight knit small program, and he prof had a tradition of inviting people to his house on friday evenings for discussion or special guests, just to show you what the vibe was.
He knew i struggled with procrastination, which he didn’t hold against me. He would tell me how he once turned in a paper a year past the deadline.
I might be mixing up memories. I do remember him sharing by name his favorite answer and which student wrote it, which I disagreed with. That kid was very religious and studious, and had a scripture-informed answer, but he supported with other techniques from the class, that much I remember.
How you answer the question depends on you you frame right and wrong, moral and immoral, and thinking through those decisions and questions like you were doing is what he was looking for.
Wouldn’t deontology and virtue ethics be same in your description? Like virtues are those moral laws? (I never took a philosophy course btw)
Virtues are human traits, like bravery, honesty, kindness etc
Moral laws tend to be more about specific actions, like “lying is wrong”, “it is good to give to charity”.
They might arrive in the same place, but take different routes. In addition, with the golden mean aspect of virtue ethics, applying moral laws too much can be bad.
For instance, deontology might feel is it is wrong to lie and good to tell the truth and those will be absolutely, categorically true. Golden mean would suggest that it is possible to tell the truth too much, perhaps if we are too forthcoming with it, or too blatant/tactless with it, or needlessly offensive. I’m not a scholar on this stuff, but that’s my best explanation!
That makes a lot of sense, thanks!
I got as far as foucault, and the main thing i took away was that even with wildly differing moral philosophies, two people can always come to understand each other’s position if they can talk to each other long enough, though they won’t always agree in the end. There is no universal truth that is true for all of us.
Is that post-modernist philosophy?
Yeah, modernity was about things to be discovered and post-modernity was all about “everything is relative to social context”
Modern formal logic is still considered part of philosophy, and is the basis of most programming languages. Ethics is very practical and specialized versions get taught in a lot of professional educations (medicine, law, economics, teaching, et.c.) - and it sure would be nice if people paid more attention to political philosophy.
In this spirit, all of science used to be part of philosophy, under the umbrella of “natural philosophy”.
I knew someone who took an engineering ethics course in college that completely changed his career and i think made him a better person.
Identifying an arguments fallacy by name usually doesn’t resolve an argument
The fallacy fallacy!
PhD is philosophy doctor.
My favorite is Lakoff’s category theory. He notes that philosophy largely pretends that categories are defined based on rules of inclusion and exclusion, but in fact human thinking is mostly based around categories defined by a prototypical example and various relations to that example. So, e.g., a penguin and a sparrow are both birds, but a sparrow is more like the prototypical bird, since it’s smaller and it flies.
Many of the great philosophical questions over the years have been about trying to decide on precise rules of inclusion and exclusion for categories, even though the closer people look, the less it seems like there’s a meaningful boundary (e.g. “life” vs “non-living,” where you start to see things like viruses, prions, etc. that don’t fit cleanly into either category).
Wouldn’t that be structuralism? Ie the truth (category in this case) is defined by the relations an entity (penguin or sparrow) has with some other entity (the example bird) rather than something intrinsic to that entity
That is a neat insight!
There is a whole category of misunderstandings that happen when contexts collide.
I feel like science tries to get specific so they can make predictions and explain phenomena, but using the same language the rest of us gives us things like the penguin and sparrow conflict, tomato is a fruit, strawberries aren’t berries, etc.
Meanwhile I’m over here like, not only can you call all insects “bugs”, you can call spiders, small arthropods, anything that fits the general vibe of small and bug-like, so long as you’re not causing misunderstandings in a scientific context
In the case of penguins and sparrows,
I know that I know not enough, and nothing more.
A philosophy major explained to me that studying philosophy isn’t really as useless as it seems. That’s because whenever philosophers start to understand what they’re doing, they stop calling it philosophy and branch into real scientists. He said it’s unfair to judge the value of philosophy by the useless proto-sciences currently under study, but to consider the whole history of philosophy which includes every other field of study one can get a PhD in.
It’s true. They haven’t done that in a few hundred years, though.
I always get a kick out of the overlap between philosophy and math when it comes to formal logic/ proofs. Like, the underpinnings for dissecting an argument are exactly the same regardless of whether the discussion is about number theory or what it means to have consciousness.
Philosophers used to be nearly unemployable but suddenly there is high demand for them in the AI industry. Shudder.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/ai-companies-hiring-philosophers/687417/
i was thinking this would be related to ontology
“What ontologies in both information science and philosophy have in common is the attempt to represent entities, including both objects and events, with all their interdependent properties and relations, according to a system of categories. In both fields, there is considerable work on problems of ontology engineering (e.g., Quine and Kripke in philosophy, Sowa and Guarino in information science),[5] and debates concerning to what extent normative ontology is possible (e.g., foundationalism and coherentism in philosophy, BFO and Cyc in artificial intelligence).”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)
The last two and a half millennia of western philosophy has been the slow realization that Epicurus and Heraclitus were closer to the truth than Plato or Aristotle.
