Philosophy: books and discussion

[recluse]

*THUD!*

Your humble supplicant brings thee a 500 lb. block of dark chocolate, Your High Priestess Goddess Lady Personess! 85% cocoa as per your edict! And a tiny little question....
Is Ayn Rand a philosopher?
I patiently await your answer, O Radiant Goddess of Arts and Philosophication!

[TimMason]

Is Ayn Rand a philosopher?

Why would she not be? She wrote a series of footnotes to Sade, and on this side of the waters Sade is considered a philosopher.

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by recluse

*THUD!*

Your humble supplicant brings thee a 500 lb. block of dark chocolate, Your High Priestess Goddess Lady Personess! 85% cocoa as per your edict! And a tiny little question....
Is Ayn Rand a philosopher?
I patiently await your answer, O Radiant Goddess of Arts and Philosophication!

Oooh, chocolate! For that price, she can be anything she wants

Ahem... excuse me. Thank you for the chocolate. As for your question, I regret I cannot answer it, never having read the author in question.

But wait, what if I do it Plato style?

OK, I'll be happy to answer your question, but please, first define philosopher.

There, that should keep him busy while I eat the chocolate

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by TimMason

Why would she not be? She wrote a series of footnotes to Sade, and on this side of the waters Sade is considered a philosopher.

Does writing footnotes make you a philosopher? That's handy

Seriously, I suppose Rand was a philosopher, I don't know if she was a good one. As I said, I don't really know her.

Regarding Sade, he was a libertine, which is another current of thought that got a bad name because they were materialists, like Epicurus. Well maybe also because of Sade, I don't know

[TimMason]

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality.

[TimMason]

I do have a vital question in the domain of natural philosophy for our resident pythoness : why is it that when you place books on a library shelf, they always fall the wrong way? If the answer is satisfactory, I'll drop in at the nearest Jeff de Bruges.

[GeoffC]

how can we be sure that the books have been placed correctly onto the shelf in the first place.

do the books sit on the shelf, or does the shelf hold the books upon it.

who defines whether the answer is satisfactory, or not ....

[recluse]

Was it not one of the greatest minds the world has ever known, Mel Brooks, who defined a philosopher as "a bullshit artist"?

And was it not the other greatest mind the world has ever known, recluse, who stated that "it is not the bullshit that matters but the amount of people who believe the bullshit"?

Is Groucho Marx a philosopher?

Your High Priestessness is choking....

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

how can we be sure that the books have been placed correctly onto the shelf in the first place.

do the books sit on the shelf, or does the shelf hold the books upon it.

who defines whether the answer is satisfactory, or not ....

Geoff, I think I will make you my First Assistant. We can... urgh... we can even... ack... OK, I'll say it, we can share the chocolate. But don't eat too much, it's bad for you.

[beppe]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Maybe we should found a new cult. The Church of the Universal and yet Handy Remote. I'd be the High Pristess. I've always wanted to be a High Priestess. With Capital Letters.

I just arrived your Highness. Duty delayed my humble bending at your gracious feet. May I join your worthy cohort? I could be your living carpet and if you so wish, entertain you with my jesting?
Please accept my unworthy homage of 12 cases of nectar and ambrosia.

[TimMason]

If that's the best you guys can do, it'll be Cadbury's.

[recluse]

Hey!

No sharing the chocolate.
If I knew you were gonna share, I wouldn't have licked it first!

I'm still lost on this whole philosophy thing. It doesn't fit in my world view.

[TGS]

Originally Posted by TimMason

If that's the best you guys can do, it'll be Cadbury's.

Shouldn't we call it Hershey's now

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I've always considered the first and primary goal of philosophy to be to answer the question, "How then shall we live?" Certainly there is more to philosophy than that, and many of the things addressed by one or another branch or sub-branch of philosophy have nothing to do whatsoever with that question; but of all the questions to which it seeks answers, I consider that to be the most important. Perhaps that's why I'm especially drawn to that branch of philosophy that deals primarily with Ethics. It's also why I find myself so disappointed with philosophers whose personal lives are anything but shining role models of virtuous lives.

In that view, the subject that has most of my attention lately is the subject of desire.

Common wisdom, in this early 21st Century, is that the way to be happy is to pursue the object of your desire until you achieve it, after which you will live happily ever after. This is a theory that is especially dear to the Hollywood school of thought.

I believe it's an extremely dangerous illusion.

In Seneca's Letters to Lucilius, there is a passage that I can no longer find but that I quoted somewhere in this thread. It says, in effect, that it is not the absence of means, but a surplus of desire, which constitutes poverty.

This was a widespread belief among philosophers at the time of Seneca, a belief that is shared by epicureans, stoics and others (Lucilius is an epicurean, and Seneca is trying to lure him to stoicism, and in the first letters he starts by emphasizing the common ground between the two schools, and he often cites Epicurus).

I think it's very true, although, not being a Roman, I cannot share the idea that if I just stare at my desires sternly for long enough I will conquer them and be happy. Or rather, I don't have the guts to try it for the rest of my life. It might work, but it would be a rather painful journey. My personal approach would be closer to Zen philosophy (what I know of it), and to practices such as meditation.

Someone who taught me a lot about desire is (again) René Girard, in his book "Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World". And he also pointed me in the direction of Marcel Proust, who probably knew more than anyone about desire, its illusions and disillusions.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by TimMason

If you say that there is no other knowledge but the scientific kind, you seemingly pour hundreds of thousands of years of human existence into a large muddy bucket of error.

In that post, I never said that knowledge was unknown prior to the discovery of the scientific method. What I said was, "Throughout our long history, humans have stumbled on many things of benefit to our species, and many of these have been passed on via ritualistic methods, but it has proven to be a haphazard and error-riddled quest." People may have accidentally discovered that eating the bark from certain trees or the leave of certain plants had curative effects, but I still maintain that it is not another way of knowing.

Intuition works, in my opinion, only for the mind prepared by facts. We may gain insights from dreams or eureka moments, but only if the gray cells been fed the information upon which to to work and seek connections, even if that work and those connections have been processed without out conscious awareness. People who routinely achieve successful outcomes by "trusting their gut" may think they are receiving aid from an outside agency or suppose that they have discovered "another way of knowing", but what they are unknowingly relying upon is all those consciously forgotten snippets of information that have been retained subconsciously and upon the mind continues to work without their conscious awareness.

As to whether "hundreds of thousands of years of human existence" has been "a large muddy bucket of error"; I leave to others to decide.