Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
Should philosophical discussions in general — and discussions of ethics in particular — make an attempt at being entertaining? In an article on the Huffington Post website, Sam Harris made this comment:
.....Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven't done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this literature, I did not arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like "metaethics," "deontology," "noncognitivism," "anti-realism," "emotivism," and the like, directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.
..........— Sam Harris (1967 - ), American neuroscientist, author. "Toward a Science of Morality", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-ha..._b_567185.html, posted May 7, 2010.
What do you think?
This is certainly not meant as a reflection upon anything anyone here has said. Personally, I find everything said in this thread to be fascinating, but full disclosure demands the admission that I'm a boring person with a limited range of interests.
Should philosophers make a greater attempt at mass appeal? Can a discussion that deliberately attempts to avoid academic philosophical terminology be considered truly philosophical? |
I think it is possible for philosophical discussion to happen without resorting to words like the ones in the quote, but philosophy as a discipline is highly technical, and as such it has developed a (well, several actually), technical vocabulary. Just like other technical vocabularies it helps technical discussion but excludes lay people - I just have to think about when the guy who repairs my car tries to explain what was wrong and what he has done about it to realize just how much lay people can be excluded by technical vocabulary. Often technical vocabularies develop because they provide efficient ways of capturing complex concepts - if you don't have the technical vocabulary there are just some things you cannot express, or cannot express very well.
Stephen Hawking writes popular books about cosmology, reading them and discussing them with my mates down the pub doesn't make me a cosmologist, it doesn't make those conversations "doing cosmology", but that doesn't mean I can't have perfectly meaningful conversations about cosmology. I think it's the same with philosophy.