Philosopher's craft

For example (not mine):
1. So called vaccine for covid19:
Producers in product data sheet categorised it as medical product. Medical product is more general category than vaccine and vaccine belongs to this category. Orthopedic bed and corrective glasses also belong to this category. While producer does not categorise this product as vaccine then whole fight to vaccinate or not looses it's reason.

2. Russia invades Ukraine and territory of a state:
were borders between Russia and Ukraine settled and approved by international milieu before the conflict? If not then on which territory is war? Discussion of war between those two countries must come to settling borders otherwise makes no sense.
 
Those are practical examples, but what you asked about was much more general. What practical use is there in how we categorize "knowledge", for example?
 
" To which category should I assign "knowledge"? " Michal

Since there's always that which observes the observed , being ? ( somewhat in jest ;-D )
 
Hi axj, it is just exercise but reflecting the problem. Problem is analogical to taxonomy in biology. To understand life on earth in scientific way taxonomy played some role in establishing analogies and differences and pave the way for more precise use of collected material.

A bit from other side but maybe this may show how I think:
In cybernetics for example - study of control - there are only two problems:
1. Cognitive problems - to know, to understand the reality
2. Decision problems - to change the reality
In cognitive problems there are three steps:
1. Exploration - what is there?
2. Definition / classification - how is it? similarities, differences, criteria of segregation
3. Explication - why and what for, what are relation to others, how it works

So coming back to which category would be "knowledge" it is question of definition/classification to category. It is not about word only. It is about the word relation to reality. Word "knwoledge" shows some abstract? or a real thing?
Yes Ricardo, is it a substance or being, existing independently from human or is it maybe relation of a human to reality?

How we understand reality/see reality is some function of our being.
But may we separate learning how to be from our language relation to reality. May we learn reality without language? How would we then convey anything? I am not able to use telepathy unfortunately.
For proper use of language each notion, word should be precise. How otherwise may we communicate?
 
The problem of philosophers in general seems to be that they are trying to answer metaphysical questions by just using the mind (lower mental center), while metaphysical answers or knowledge can only be gained through doing the Work.

Which is why a lot of philosophy is empty speculation with little or no practical use to anyone - unless a philosopher is able to tap into something deeper within himself (higher centers). But that makes him more of a mystic and not just a philosopher, since we are on the topic of classification.
 
" I am not able to use telepathy unfortunately " , perhaps you are , just not cleared enough of the athanor eh :) , axj is pretty much on point (imo) , philosophers may love knowledge , but it's not like they usually share it .
 
I couldn‘t find a more fitting thread, so I put it here:

I personally find the tendency of Philosophers and philosophical minded people highly irritating to make up words as they go and be very wordy and complicated about what they want to say.

I think Caesar had very important things to say about clear language that I ascribe to fully. Here is what Grok said about it after I asked “What did Caesar say about using simple language?“:

Julius Caesar valued clarity and simplicity in language above all else, especially in writing and speech intended to persuade or command.

The most famous quote attributed to him on this topic comes from his criticism of overly ornate or complicated prose. According to ancient sources (particularly quoted later by writers like Cicero and Fronto), Caesar reportedly said:“Avoid an unusual word as you would a reef.”
(Latin: “Ut tamquam scopulum, sic fugias inauditum atque insolens verbum.”)

This line appears in a letter fragment preserved by Aulus Gellius and others, where Caesar was advising on rhetorical style. He believed that obscure, rare, or affected words were dangerous obstacles to understanding—just like hidden reefs are to a sailor.

Effective communication, in his view (especially for military orders, political speeches, and historical writing), required plain, direct, and familiar language that everyone could grasp immediately.

His own writing style in Commentarii de Bello Gallico (The Gallic War) reflects this perfectly: it is famously clear, straightforward, and unadorned—so much so that it became a model prose for centuries of Latin students.

In short: Caesar championed simple, precise, and accessible language as a tool of power and clarity. Fancy words were not just unnecessary—they were risky.
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Here is what Grok said after I asked; “Do philosopher’s tend to make up words as they go quite above the everage range? Do they tend to explaining/suggesting things unnecessarily complicated and wordy in general and in specific by making up words?“:


In addition to what Caesar said and suggested about it, here are just a couple of things that annoy me on top of that as well:

- I reckon, even if you are into philosophy yourself that you will find it pretty hard to follow or understand an argument Philosopher’s make. Now, just imagine how much harder that is for (most) people outside of that field!

- Often I find myself trying to remember and make sense of one of the many words or phrases they either have just made up out of thin air and/or are complicated words/phrases that are not straight forward in regards to their meaning at all. Even if it is a word that I have heard many times (and just as often looked up trying hard to remember it) it just doesn’t seem to want to stick in my mind in regards to its meaning and possibly rightfully/justifiably so! What that means is that it makes it very hard to even follow/understand an argument that spans just one sentence especially if that word is then often followed up by a number of other “nonsensical“ words/phrases.

- It seems to me that a high IQ is often required to follow what Philosophers say. But, as we know, high IQ in and of itself doesn’t help much and most people just aren’t equipped with such fast/complicated “computing“ power.
 
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Cosmos said:
It seems to me that a high IQ is often required to follow what Philosophers say. But, as we know, high IQ in and of itself doesn’t help much and most people just aren’t equipped with such fast/complicated “computing“ power.
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I’ll offer a few points:

1) Depends on the philosopher

2) Erroneous appreciation of philosophy

3) We have been spoiled by reading Laura

4) Technical language in compartmentalisation of specialist fields

On point 1), it’s a lot easier to read and understand some philosophers than others. It depends what areas of philosophy they’re talking about, whether they write systemically or meander around from thought to thought, and what era they wrote in. If you take someone like Heidegger who invented a lot of terms, then even though it may take a while to grasp the meaning of what he’s talking about, it does provide an explanatory framework for understanding our relationship to reality or interpreting works of literature.

On point 2) I think people look at the field of philosophy and think that it’s just some people talking about ideas, and since they are a person, and they have ideas, then philosophy should be accessible to them and all they have to do is read it and they’ll understand it.

I don’t think those same people would look at brain surgery or astrophysics and just assume they could do it, or if they did, they’d find out pretty quickly that not everyone has the aptitude for working in fields like that.

Philosophy is hard and complicated and it does take a great intellect (and great teachers too) in order to be able to grasp and understand the different systems and ideas put forward by the most influential philosophers. Yes, it can be annoying, frustrating and disheartening to come to a realisation that you simply don’t have the natural abilities required to do something. But it takes all kinds of people to make a world.

On point 3), our group are in a weird situation, because regardless of our individual capacities, the way Laura writes and presents ideas and information makes it possible for pretty much anyone to understand concepts that explain a great deal about human life and the nature of our reality. And so we may think of ourselves as actually being ‘smarter’ than we really are. Okay, none of us are complete retards, but there’s a difference between being intelligent and being academic. And I believe that it is having a talent in being academic that is required to work in philosophy. You don’t need to be academic to read Laura. She’s the academic and she breaks everything down and puts the pieces back together for us.

4) It’s pretty well known that all fields have their own specialised terms. On the one hand, they’re born of necessity; on the other, it keeps laymen out of the ivory towers of these fields and increases control and job security for those at the top of them.
 
I´ll offer my 2x cents , there´s also 2x further issues Philosophy for most part ignores humans being 3x centered , so Ontology and gnoseology even if highly "refined" end up being unbalanced tools for lack of a better term , then there´s context which further makes it unwieldy since higher centers are unknown in any "strictly intelectual" effort since historical background is mostly un-accounted and for implicated reasons therein, this also includes and excludes OPs.
 
I think the question is: Do the philosophical mental constructs actually help in any way to perceive reality more clearly and objectively?

It seems that some of the philosophers like Kant were able to use mental deductions to get a clearer view of reality.

And the best ones seem to have been doing some type of Work on themselves at least to some degree - as otherwise mental speculation quickly becomes detached from reality and turns into fantasy. That is, unfortunately, where I see most philosophers residing.
 
I find wading through some philosophers and their work turns my brain into a pretzel.:umm: I found Iain McGilchrist’s discussion about philosophers in Chapter 4 of The Master and his Emissary really intriguing for a different viewpoint on philosophy in general.

He sees philosophers as cultural exemplars of either left-hemisphere or right-hemisphere “modes of being” and assesses their work by how it aligns with either hemisphere’s style of cognition. To him, philosophers do not merely think in isolation, rather their work expresses their cultural zeitgeist. And language by its very nature (sequential, analytic and therefore left-hemisphere based) takes away from apprehending reality as a whole

Quoting some of the chapter, bold emphases mine:

McGilchrist said:
To return to philosophy and the brain, we should expect them to illuminate one another: philosophy should help us understand the nature of the brain, and the nature of the brain should help to illuminate philosophical problems…

In Western philosophy for much of the last two thousand years, the nature of reality has been treated in terms of dichotomies: real versus ideal, subject versus object. Over time the meanings of the terms, and sometimes the terms themselves, have changed, and the constant need to transcend such dichotomies has led to modifications and qualifications of the kind of realism or idealism, the type of objectivism or subjectivism, but the essential issue has remained: how are we to connect the world and our minds? Since our world is brought into being by two hemispheres which constitute reality in profoundly different ways, it might seem likely that some of these dichotomies could be illuminated by the differences between the worlds each of the cerebral hemispheres brings into being.
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It has nothing to do with the idea that, for example, one hemisphere might be subjective and the other objective. That's obviously untrue. Rather the point is that philosophy in the West is essentially a left-hemisphere process. It is verbal and analytic, requiring abstracted, decontextualised, disembodied thinking, dealing in categories, concerning itself with the nature of the general rather than the particular, and adopting a sequential, linear approach to truth, building the edifice of knowledge from the parts, brick by brick. While such a characterisation is not true of most preSocratic philosophers, particularly Heraclitus, it is at least true of the majority of philosophers since Plato in the West until the nineteenth century, when, for example, Schopenhauer, Hegel and Nietzsche began to question the basis on which philosophy made its advances. Philosophy is naturally given, therefore, to a left-hemisphere version of the world, in which such divides as that between the subject and the object seem especially problematic.
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Though Husserl brought a background in Cartesian philosophy and the methodology of science to bear on mental phenomena, he came to realize that this philosophy and this methodology failed to account for the nature of experience. According to Husserl, the roots of the European crisis of modernism lay in ‘verirrenden Rationalismus’ and ‘Blindheit für das Transzendentale’ a sort of mad rationalism and a blindness to the transcendental. In his later philosophy, Husserl aimed to transcend the apparent duality of subjective and objective, of realism and idealism, that had so troubled philosophy since Plato: he emphasised the role that empathy, the capacity not just to put oneself in someone else's shoes but, importantly, to feel what they are feeling, plays in constructing the world. He came to the conclusion that there was an objective reality, but that it was constituted by what he called intersubjectivity. This comes about through shared experience, which is made possible for us by our embodied existence alongside other embodied individuals. He distinguished between the two ways in which we know the body: as a material object (Körper), alongside other objects in the world, and in that sense alien to us, and the way we experience it as something not just living, but lived (Leib), as it were from the inside. When we see others engaged in action in the world, we feel them to be leibhaft, as though we shared with them our consciousness of embodied existence.
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In this emphasis on the body, the importance of empathy, and intersubjectivity (which forms part of what I mean by ‘betweenness’), Husserl is asserting the essential role that the right hemisphere plays in constituting the world in which we live. He, too, emphasises the importance of context: things only are what they are because they find themselves in the surroundings in which they find themselves, and are connected to whatever it is that they are connected to. This raises the spectre of epistemological circularity, since achieving an understanding of any one thing depends on an understanding of the whole; and the tools of language and logical analysis take one away from context, back to the set of familiar concepts that, if one is a philosopher, one is constantly trying to transcend through analysis in language. That was the purpose of what he called the phenomenological reductions. His own approach is linear, but is forced to acknowledge the awkward truth displayed in Escher's hands. The world arises from a circular process that circles and searches its origins, more like a picture that comes into focus all at once, than a linear address to a target: by a right-hemisphere process, in other words, rather than a left.
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It is a truly fascinating read. McGilchrist maps Western history as alternating phases dominated by:
Right hemisphere (e.g., early Greek thought, early Christianity, Renaissance)
Left hemisphere (e.g., late scholasticism, the Enlightenment, modernity)
I highly recommend reading his book, as well as Laura’s series of articles on Ark’s blog on The Cosmic Context of Greek Philosophers for a further understanding of the political and environmental contexts surrounding the Greek philosophers.
 
"Mad rationalism and a blindness to the transcendental" is indeed a good way to describe much of current philosophy.

The counterbalance to that seem to have been different forms of mysticism in the past - to explore and work on the inner world directly, enhancing clarity of perception instead of just using the rational mind.

The higher centers also include the higher mind which goes beyond the limitations of the rational mind and can be more easily accessed in meditative states, a kind of 'deep pondering' to get insights on a deeper level.

It seems that accessing the higher mind may have been done more frequently by the "right hemisphere" philosophers of the past.
 
Very good points! Often, you can get the feeling when someone has "too much knowledge, but too little being" because it comes across as "full left hemisphere mode".

Gurdjieff quoted by Ouspensky, "In Search of the Miraculous",

"Knowledge by itself does not give understanding. Nor is understanding increased by an increase of knowledge alone. Understanding depends upon the relation of knowledge to being. Understanding is the resultant of knowledge and being. And knowledge and being must not diverge too far, otherwise understanding will prove to be far removed from either. At the same time the relation of knowledge to being does not change with a mere growth of knowledge. It changes only when being grows simultaneously with knowledge. In other words, understanding grows only with the growth of being.
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Well, one of the most famously borderline incomprehensible writers was Heidegger, and he has been rightfully criticized for it. And yet his project was to move the reader away from modern assumptions about our relationship with the world, and his sort of language game, using all these made-up words with double meanings, was his tool to do that - and McGilchrist for example praises him a lot for it. So it's not as simple as "difficult/complex = bad"; it depends on the case. Each philosopher, if they are any good and seriously wrestle with the nature of reality, has to find a way to talk about and express things that go beyond our ordinary understanding; hence the variety of prose, form, approaches etc., ranging from formal logic/math to abstract systems to more poetic writing or even funny rants. Not every approach will resonate with everybody, and that's okay, as long as some people get something truthful out of it that helps them think about reality more deeply.

One way of looking at it is that at its best, philosophy asks: what in our view of reality is just based on the conventions of our time and culture, and what has a deeper truth to it, i.e. lies beneath it - or, deeper yet, what in our understanding is "merely human" and what goes beyond it (in our terminology here, what is "just" 3D thinking/perception, and what might be a higher form of thinking/perception of reality, and how can we approach it when thinking about these things). This implies that our ordinary daily life language can only go so far, because our daily life language is the most socially-culturally-human-conditioned, arising as it does from 3D practicalities. Hence philosophy can get abstract, complex, mind-bending (or artistic, metaphorical, mythological etc.) very fast.

As for jargon, I think it's a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it can make communication among those who know the canon more efficient. On the other hand, it can box you into a specific way of thinking, again conditioned by time and milieu, unaware that these terms often come with a lot of unacknowledged presuppositions (Collingwood talked a lot about that). I often prefer it when people try to express things in their own words instead of relying on jargon, even if they have to come up with their own new words, if done in a helpful and creative way.

All of that should be no excuse for using overly complex or verbose language for the sake of it; that's just bad and stupid, and often serves to disguise bad and stupid thought processes that would be apparent if they were expressed clearly. I think any writer, including philosophers, should strive towards clarity and making it as easy as possible to be understood. But the nature of the beast also means that a lot of people still won't understand it, or even write it all off as nonsense. Depending on what they are talking about, they may even be right (there is a lot of pretentious nonsense in philosophy), but they also may just not get it, or worse, they might be "arguing for their limitations" in the sense that they will defend their socially-culturally-3D-conditioned views instead of making an effort to transcend them, in a quest towards broadening their horizon.
 
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