Errors of Philosophers
Errors of Philosophers
I asked myself if there are any errors philosophers regularly commit, through the centuries and still today. This would be useful information to have. I came up with three. The first is that they seldom if ever acknowledge that positions they oppose generally have things to be said in their favor; they behave as if only their own position is remotely credible. But this is almost never true: there are always reasons that support other positions and account for adherence to these positions. Philosophers need to cultivate an attitude of mind that combines endorsing one position with recognizing the force of alternative positions. You may reject materialism, say, but you should not be oblivious to the genuine reasons that speak in its favor. The same is true of views like emotivism, idealism, Platonism, instrumentalism, eliminativism, skepticism, etc. There are reasons to accept such positions, even if you find them ultimately implausible. Blind dogmatism is never helpful or rational (this is really a plea for intellectual honesty). Second, philosophers have tended to treat the human being as privileged—as if this species alone is the proper subject-matter of the discipline. That is anthropocentric and non-evolutionary. We exist contingently and other animals are proper subjects of investigation. If you are interested in knowledge, say, you should consider animal knowledge of various kinds—and the same for other mental categories. You should also consider hypothetical cases of alien species to test your theories. If there were actually existent species superior to us, we would do well to study the philosophy they produce as well as our own. Our human philosophy has been speciesist and the narrower for it. I hear the Vulcans have some pretty interesting things to say. Third, and connected, philosophers have not been mysterian enough: they have been unwilling to accept human intellectual limitation (though some of been aware of the point). This has led them to adopt implausible reductive and eliminative positions (I write about this in Problems in Philosophy). A healthier attitude recognizes that we might be allowing ourselves to embrace absurdity instead of accepting limitation. These three tendencies have shaped philosophy from its earliest days, and still shape it today. We do well to keep them in mind as we go about our business.
So you think the whole idea of rational thought is speciest or that they are rational in a different way or mental in a different way.
They are different psychologically, though with overlaps.
Allow me to clarify. Take the Freudian notion of overdeterminism: if in a dream my mother is a black cat, the analyst would have me free associate and a whole bunch of thoughts would be revealed as causing me to dream that my mother is a black cat.
So, many causes can join together in a single effect, and to go further, one cause can have many effects.
It might differ, depending on the domain involved.
It is sometimes necessary to disentangle cause and effect and different logical chains. Cause and effect and logic, might be less straightforward than at first glance.
Philosophers talk about causal overdetermination. Of course, effects often have many causes and causes many effects.
Further, perhaps it is easy to map out how causes interact, but how about logic? I’ll come up with examples if you’d like, with some reflection. Maybe I fail to grasp your system or how logic operates.
Maybe.
Can you conceive of any great philosophers who would vote Trump? They would forfeit their claim as a great philosopher by voting for him. I can imagine Heidegger (though he might not be great and might not count as a philosopher) and Hobbes, and some medieval philosophers. Aristotle, no; Plato probably not, though he was a reactionary in politics, he might be a Republican. Trump is the diametric opposite of a philosopher KIng
Only someone who thought an idiot king was better than an intelligent king because not clever enough to do real harm.