Why Does Philosophy Exist? Why Do We "Do" Philosophy?
20 November 2018 [link youtube]
Ethics, metaphysics, epistemology (determinism and free will)… let's take a step back and ask why a bunch of hairless apes "have" philosophy to begin with. Fundamentally, why is our species taking a step beyond food, shelter and sex to "do" this philosophy thing? What is its function?
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Youtube Automatic Transcription
one of the questions that rarely gets
asked sincerely but that's been put to me many times in my life in in sincere way which is to say a question that people have asked me presuming that there's no possible answer is the question of why do we have philosophy at all why does philosophy exist why does philosophy exist in European culture why did it exist in say the culture of ancient India of ancient China of pre-modern Japan why does it exist today given that most of us start from the assumption now that we are basically a bipedal mammal not so different from an ape given the fact that we regard ourselves as animals that are primarily motivated by food sleep sex shelter such simple things why is philosophy here among us wise have the cultural and historical significance it does why does even have the institutional significance that does so on and so forth as I say most people who ask this question ask it in an instance ear way as a type of approach they ask it in a sense of demanding to know like how anyone could possibly justify this with the assumption that nobody could and the people in my life who've asked me this at different stages since I was a teenager have normally been surprised that I do have an answer and that my answer is somewhat sincere and humble and down to earth the first plank of my answer is that I regard philosophy as a problem-solving method or really philosophy in the plural as you know many problem-solving methods and even collecting these problem-solving methods together and engaging in a comparative study of one about the one against the other but the fundamental point is if something does not have value as a problem-solving method I do not think it belongs in the province of philosophy in the category of philosophy and I'll come back to that because that's one of the main you know morals to this story here is thinking about philosophy as something very different from religion thinking of philosophy is something very different from from propaganda or even you know ethical moralizing preaching ethics is something very different from philosophy of ethics analytical philosophy of ethics there was a time in ancient Greece when the concept of a heliocentric solar system was proposed now why why would anyone propose the idea that the Sun was at the center of the solar system when they had a perfectly working model of the solar system that had the earth of the center and they had worked out all of the equations reasonably well to calculate the positions and distances and the timing of the orbits of the planets and purely everyone already had a system of understanding the solar system that they were quite satisfied with now I've never done the math for ancient Greece this way but I have done the math for ancient India and in ancient India they had shockingly accurate calculations related to the orbit of the planets around the solar system now I hesitate to even say orbit I actually should hesitate me to say planet because their concept of what the planets were was simply what you can see with the naked eye with no telescope these were dots these were little glowing dots that you could see in the night sky that moved much more rapidly than the other stars the other stars were relatively still appeared relatively unmoving and in India that came up with these deadly accurate shockingly accurate calculations and equations so that you know if you knew the position of any two of the planets you knew the position of the other planets so that you could record the time and date of events on earth by noting down the positions of the planets on the azimuth and this kind of thing they really really worked out these equations to to a you know tremendously fine point of accuracy I believe it is down to fractions of a second some of these equations and again I have seen some of that stuff that continued being used as a kolender whole system as a method of recording the the time and date of significant events even into basically early modern Myanmar in in Southeast Asia that tradition from India carried on so I studied as part of the history of tera vaada but is important history of Southeast Asia part of the history of sri lanka - obviously so if everyone has a working system for understanding what the planets are and how they move in their orbits why why would a philosopher challenge this with the idea that the Sun and not the earth ought to be in the center of the solar system and empirically everyone seems satisfied that they can vindicate the system they already have say look the equations make sense you know the calculations work that we have and the calculations are in a sense empirical they are validated but what you can observe with the naked eye with the the motion of the planets from from it or from a terrestrial perspective for lack of a better term there has to be a sincere engagement with the question of what is the solar system from a problem solving method there's an onus on you to show look these equations they have predictive power they have accuracy they're empirically valid but they create some set of problems that are insoluble with the assumption that the earth is in the center of the solar system and that those problems are then resolved they're solved if instead we try to make the math work with the assumption that it's the Sun that's in the center of the solar system so you guys probably know this in ancient Greece in ancient Athens we have the record that this ideal was proposed it was debated and it was ultimately discarded the idea the heliocentric universe really didn't get vindicated until many many centuries later with Copernicus and even then as you may have heard it was a bit of a struggle people did not want to accept this idea that the Sun was at the center of the solar system in ancient India I don't know if they really thought it through as a model of the solar system nothing I've read really indicates that their cause cosmology of what the planets were supposed to be is really another question but as I said they had these working these working equations so this shows both the weakness and the strength of philosophy in ancient Athens they approach the question of the cosmology of what is the universe the cosmology of the world well you know well how would did the world arise I was created from a philosophical perspective from what they thought they ought to be the significance of elements like fire and water and whether or not fire ought to be in the center of the solar system and so on but the validity of the idea that the Sun is in the center of the solar system it has to be proposed and has to be proven as a problem-solving method if you can't show that there is a problem with the existing model and that this new idea solves the problem then we're not really talking about philosophy we're really just debating something much more like a religious ideal like does it make more sense as a myth or a fable for us to imagine the Sun being at the center of the solar system or for us to imagine an orb a sphere that's mostly water being in the center solar system like planet Earth if it's just about symbolic values and mythological values and not even a problem solving method then with you know even with something that's as empirically obvious is that where the solar system works it still comes back to this this question and another subtle but pervasive question that comes out of ancient Athens when Aristotle asks what is the best system of government is he sincerely questioning is he actually proposing this as a problem and a problem to be solved is he actually investigating what is the best way for human beings to organize government or is he just engaging in propaganda to promote the government that happens to be the government of Athens now in my own opinion I don't think it's just propaganda I think the reason why Aristotle's writing about politics has endured and still has value today was that he was really sincerely interested in in solving problems that he was in conducting an inquiry into how human beings short- government and by contrast just if few centuries later you have an author like Cicero in Rome in Cicero asked exactly the same question he asks what is the best form of government but it is completely obvious that when Cicero asks and answers this question it is 100% insincere propaganda for the glory of ancient Rome all that Cicero is interested in telling you is that the government of the Roman Empire sorry at that time not technically the Empire in terms of how we use the term today but only the government of Rome was the best possible system of government even though it was just a product of random historical circumstances that they had ended up with a better system of government than any of the other systems of government whether in Greece or North Africa Carthage whatever comparison you wanted to make and frankly that in sincerity takes Cicero's work out of the category of philosophy and puts it into the category of propaganda even though ostensibly and at a surface level it is asking and engaging with exactly the same problems that Aristotle asked in his politics and indeed one treatise is modelled on the other so again my sense is that the validity of something as philosophy stands or Falls with it being a problem-solving method and this answers the question of why we as hairless bipedal Apes why we created why we have culturally this thing called philosophy at some point you know within the province of propaganda propaganda has to stop we have to ask these questions sincerely and very often that's what we passed from politics into political philosophy at some point these religious questions have to stop just being cheerleading for one religious view or another we have to ask them sincerely and that's when we get into religious philosophy and of course it's really a very stark line in ethics should we I mean if you're just talking to a child you may just tell that child what they ought to do you may just tell the child what everyone in society ought to do to make society a better place but if you're going to talk about ethics in a sincere way in terms of problem-solving once you get into ethical philosophy then you're asking questions that you genuinely not know the answer to you're engaging in inquiry and you're looking at the methods the problem-solving methods that bring us to those different conclusions and ultimately the validity of a system of ethics and philosophy is not whether or not result it convinces people to be moral as of course you can just go around still in the in a mainstream religion like Islam they just tell people to do things that they consider morally good because if they don't they'll go to hell after they die so obviously if it's just a vote um inculcating a habit of mind into people that's gonna produce socially desirable consequences any kind of lie any kind of insincere beliefs tenets or philosophy could could stand but precisely when we move from religion and propaganda into the province of real philosophy that has to be one more when we're questioning something that I think in an important sense is different from questioning what is the truth we're questioning what is the problem how do we solve the problem and then what is the validity or invalidity of these problem-solving methods so guys that's what I have to say in this video the context from our recording this video today is that I just made last night at 2:30 a.m. when I couldn't fall asleep I made a relatively brief video of talking about the philosophy of determinism and I didn't say clearly in that video I had it in the the caption the written text below the video I said look why do I call determinism a pseudo philosophy I call determinism a pseudo philosophy because I do not see it as sincerely trying to solve a problem I don't see it as having problem solving value I see it more as a kind of myth of religious mythology and the main defense I hear again and again from the terminus is no no no the fact that they believe that a criminal doesn't have any choice before committing a crime that doesn't matter that doesn't change anything the description of the world is just the same no no the fact that I can't control you know the dilation of the pupil of my eye or as I can can roll things I consciously do no no that distinction doesn't matter that's just subjective that's just line you perceive nevertheless this this remains true well what is the problem that this solves because you've presented a theory that to a much greater extent than the heliocentric solar system to a much greater extent than the idea that the Sun is at the center of the solar system the people who believe in determinists have proposed a theory that contradicts something empirically obvious to all of us what's empirically obvious is that we make choices that we make decisions that we think about the future that we imagine the future and that when we're engaged in imagining what we might do about the future we are doing something with our mind that is much different from the way the mind controls the dilation of the pupil which is to say I don't consciously control it there's a cause-and-effect relationship if I turn off this light my pupil will dilate one way if I make the light brighter my people will doubt the other way and I have no way to control that no way to do it I have no choice in the matter that's an involuntary reaction in a cause-and-effect way they're claiming that everything we do with their bodies in our minds is in this sense determined in a cause-and-effect way well what is the problem that you're sincerely trying to solve ultimately the heliocentric model of the solar system had to win the math could work either way you actually could come up with equations that accurately predicted the timing of the motions of all the planets without understanding that the Sun was a solar system you could make the math work but the heliocentric model of the universe from a sincere problem-solving point of view and you think about Occam's razor and so on it's a simpler and more coherent account of why and how those equations work out it explains a lot of things like what one of the real ones the ancient world struggled with is what is an eclipse a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse those get really hard to explain if you don't believe in a heliocentric solar system there's some things like this that really raise troublesome questions even when you were just making observations without a telescope with with the naked eye and when people were not necessarily imagining that these glowing dots in the sky were actually planets similar to Planet Earth they probably were not even imagining the earth as a sphere kind of a long story about ancient cosmology and what their assumptions were so real philosophy is ultimately I think not even a search for truth it's not ultimately about epistemology or metaphysics but the type of sincerity that philosophy requires is the attitude of solving problems and you can see you cross a dotted line because if you sit down in the real world of politics you may have some particular biased outcome you're trying to achieve you may be trying to make the world a better place you may be trying to avert a war you may be trying to avert starvation and in order to achieve those goals you may involve yourself in any number of lies deceptions skullduggery you may not be interested in the truth you may not be interested in philosophy and indeed I think some of the worst catastrophes in human history have happened for that reason because people had what they thought were good intentions and in many ways did indeed pave the way to hell as the old as the old saying goes that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and philosophy remains this category that stands outside of the other disciplines precisely because of the attention paid to the discipline itself the function of the problem-solving method and the comparative analysis of those problem-solving methods
asked sincerely but that's been put to me many times in my life in in sincere way which is to say a question that people have asked me presuming that there's no possible answer is the question of why do we have philosophy at all why does philosophy exist why does philosophy exist in European culture why did it exist in say the culture of ancient India of ancient China of pre-modern Japan why does it exist today given that most of us start from the assumption now that we are basically a bipedal mammal not so different from an ape given the fact that we regard ourselves as animals that are primarily motivated by food sleep sex shelter such simple things why is philosophy here among us wise have the cultural and historical significance it does why does even have the institutional significance that does so on and so forth as I say most people who ask this question ask it in an instance ear way as a type of approach they ask it in a sense of demanding to know like how anyone could possibly justify this with the assumption that nobody could and the people in my life who've asked me this at different stages since I was a teenager have normally been surprised that I do have an answer and that my answer is somewhat sincere and humble and down to earth the first plank of my answer is that I regard philosophy as a problem-solving method or really philosophy in the plural as you know many problem-solving methods and even collecting these problem-solving methods together and engaging in a comparative study of one about the one against the other but the fundamental point is if something does not have value as a problem-solving method I do not think it belongs in the province of philosophy in the category of philosophy and I'll come back to that because that's one of the main you know morals to this story here is thinking about philosophy as something very different from religion thinking of philosophy is something very different from from propaganda or even you know ethical moralizing preaching ethics is something very different from philosophy of ethics analytical philosophy of ethics there was a time in ancient Greece when the concept of a heliocentric solar system was proposed now why why would anyone propose the idea that the Sun was at the center of the solar system when they had a perfectly working model of the solar system that had the earth of the center and they had worked out all of the equations reasonably well to calculate the positions and distances and the timing of the orbits of the planets and purely everyone already had a system of understanding the solar system that they were quite satisfied with now I've never done the math for ancient Greece this way but I have done the math for ancient India and in ancient India they had shockingly accurate calculations related to the orbit of the planets around the solar system now I hesitate to even say orbit I actually should hesitate me to say planet because their concept of what the planets were was simply what you can see with the naked eye with no telescope these were dots these were little glowing dots that you could see in the night sky that moved much more rapidly than the other stars the other stars were relatively still appeared relatively unmoving and in India that came up with these deadly accurate shockingly accurate calculations and equations so that you know if you knew the position of any two of the planets you knew the position of the other planets so that you could record the time and date of events on earth by noting down the positions of the planets on the azimuth and this kind of thing they really really worked out these equations to to a you know tremendously fine point of accuracy I believe it is down to fractions of a second some of these equations and again I have seen some of that stuff that continued being used as a kolender whole system as a method of recording the the time and date of significant events even into basically early modern Myanmar in in Southeast Asia that tradition from India carried on so I studied as part of the history of tera vaada but is important history of Southeast Asia part of the history of sri lanka - obviously so if everyone has a working system for understanding what the planets are and how they move in their orbits why why would a philosopher challenge this with the idea that the Sun and not the earth ought to be in the center of the solar system and empirically everyone seems satisfied that they can vindicate the system they already have say look the equations make sense you know the calculations work that we have and the calculations are in a sense empirical they are validated but what you can observe with the naked eye with the the motion of the planets from from it or from a terrestrial perspective for lack of a better term there has to be a sincere engagement with the question of what is the solar system from a problem solving method there's an onus on you to show look these equations they have predictive power they have accuracy they're empirically valid but they create some set of problems that are insoluble with the assumption that the earth is in the center of the solar system and that those problems are then resolved they're solved if instead we try to make the math work with the assumption that it's the Sun that's in the center of the solar system so you guys probably know this in ancient Greece in ancient Athens we have the record that this ideal was proposed it was debated and it was ultimately discarded the idea the heliocentric universe really didn't get vindicated until many many centuries later with Copernicus and even then as you may have heard it was a bit of a struggle people did not want to accept this idea that the Sun was at the center of the solar system in ancient India I don't know if they really thought it through as a model of the solar system nothing I've read really indicates that their cause cosmology of what the planets were supposed to be is really another question but as I said they had these working these working equations so this shows both the weakness and the strength of philosophy in ancient Athens they approach the question of the cosmology of what is the universe the cosmology of the world well you know well how would did the world arise I was created from a philosophical perspective from what they thought they ought to be the significance of elements like fire and water and whether or not fire ought to be in the center of the solar system and so on but the validity of the idea that the Sun is in the center of the solar system it has to be proposed and has to be proven as a problem-solving method if you can't show that there is a problem with the existing model and that this new idea solves the problem then we're not really talking about philosophy we're really just debating something much more like a religious ideal like does it make more sense as a myth or a fable for us to imagine the Sun being at the center of the solar system or for us to imagine an orb a sphere that's mostly water being in the center solar system like planet Earth if it's just about symbolic values and mythological values and not even a problem solving method then with you know even with something that's as empirically obvious is that where the solar system works it still comes back to this this question and another subtle but pervasive question that comes out of ancient Athens when Aristotle asks what is the best system of government is he sincerely questioning is he actually proposing this as a problem and a problem to be solved is he actually investigating what is the best way for human beings to organize government or is he just engaging in propaganda to promote the government that happens to be the government of Athens now in my own opinion I don't think it's just propaganda I think the reason why Aristotle's writing about politics has endured and still has value today was that he was really sincerely interested in in solving problems that he was in conducting an inquiry into how human beings short- government and by contrast just if few centuries later you have an author like Cicero in Rome in Cicero asked exactly the same question he asks what is the best form of government but it is completely obvious that when Cicero asks and answers this question it is 100% insincere propaganda for the glory of ancient Rome all that Cicero is interested in telling you is that the government of the Roman Empire sorry at that time not technically the Empire in terms of how we use the term today but only the government of Rome was the best possible system of government even though it was just a product of random historical circumstances that they had ended up with a better system of government than any of the other systems of government whether in Greece or North Africa Carthage whatever comparison you wanted to make and frankly that in sincerity takes Cicero's work out of the category of philosophy and puts it into the category of propaganda even though ostensibly and at a surface level it is asking and engaging with exactly the same problems that Aristotle asked in his politics and indeed one treatise is modelled on the other so again my sense is that the validity of something as philosophy stands or Falls with it being a problem-solving method and this answers the question of why we as hairless bipedal Apes why we created why we have culturally this thing called philosophy at some point you know within the province of propaganda propaganda has to stop we have to ask these questions sincerely and very often that's what we passed from politics into political philosophy at some point these religious questions have to stop just being cheerleading for one religious view or another we have to ask them sincerely and that's when we get into religious philosophy and of course it's really a very stark line in ethics should we I mean if you're just talking to a child you may just tell that child what they ought to do you may just tell the child what everyone in society ought to do to make society a better place but if you're going to talk about ethics in a sincere way in terms of problem-solving once you get into ethical philosophy then you're asking questions that you genuinely not know the answer to you're engaging in inquiry and you're looking at the methods the problem-solving methods that bring us to those different conclusions and ultimately the validity of a system of ethics and philosophy is not whether or not result it convinces people to be moral as of course you can just go around still in the in a mainstream religion like Islam they just tell people to do things that they consider morally good because if they don't they'll go to hell after they die so obviously if it's just a vote um inculcating a habit of mind into people that's gonna produce socially desirable consequences any kind of lie any kind of insincere beliefs tenets or philosophy could could stand but precisely when we move from religion and propaganda into the province of real philosophy that has to be one more when we're questioning something that I think in an important sense is different from questioning what is the truth we're questioning what is the problem how do we solve the problem and then what is the validity or invalidity of these problem-solving methods so guys that's what I have to say in this video the context from our recording this video today is that I just made last night at 2:30 a.m. when I couldn't fall asleep I made a relatively brief video of talking about the philosophy of determinism and I didn't say clearly in that video I had it in the the caption the written text below the video I said look why do I call determinism a pseudo philosophy I call determinism a pseudo philosophy because I do not see it as sincerely trying to solve a problem I don't see it as having problem solving value I see it more as a kind of myth of religious mythology and the main defense I hear again and again from the terminus is no no no the fact that they believe that a criminal doesn't have any choice before committing a crime that doesn't matter that doesn't change anything the description of the world is just the same no no the fact that I can't control you know the dilation of the pupil of my eye or as I can can roll things I consciously do no no that distinction doesn't matter that's just subjective that's just line you perceive nevertheless this this remains true well what is the problem that this solves because you've presented a theory that to a much greater extent than the heliocentric solar system to a much greater extent than the idea that the Sun is at the center of the solar system the people who believe in determinists have proposed a theory that contradicts something empirically obvious to all of us what's empirically obvious is that we make choices that we make decisions that we think about the future that we imagine the future and that when we're engaged in imagining what we might do about the future we are doing something with our mind that is much different from the way the mind controls the dilation of the pupil which is to say I don't consciously control it there's a cause-and-effect relationship if I turn off this light my pupil will dilate one way if I make the light brighter my people will doubt the other way and I have no way to control that no way to do it I have no choice in the matter that's an involuntary reaction in a cause-and-effect way they're claiming that everything we do with their bodies in our minds is in this sense determined in a cause-and-effect way well what is the problem that you're sincerely trying to solve ultimately the heliocentric model of the solar system had to win the math could work either way you actually could come up with equations that accurately predicted the timing of the motions of all the planets without understanding that the Sun was a solar system you could make the math work but the heliocentric model of the universe from a sincere problem-solving point of view and you think about Occam's razor and so on it's a simpler and more coherent account of why and how those equations work out it explains a lot of things like what one of the real ones the ancient world struggled with is what is an eclipse a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse those get really hard to explain if you don't believe in a heliocentric solar system there's some things like this that really raise troublesome questions even when you were just making observations without a telescope with with the naked eye and when people were not necessarily imagining that these glowing dots in the sky were actually planets similar to Planet Earth they probably were not even imagining the earth as a sphere kind of a long story about ancient cosmology and what their assumptions were so real philosophy is ultimately I think not even a search for truth it's not ultimately about epistemology or metaphysics but the type of sincerity that philosophy requires is the attitude of solving problems and you can see you cross a dotted line because if you sit down in the real world of politics you may have some particular biased outcome you're trying to achieve you may be trying to make the world a better place you may be trying to avert a war you may be trying to avert starvation and in order to achieve those goals you may involve yourself in any number of lies deceptions skullduggery you may not be interested in the truth you may not be interested in philosophy and indeed I think some of the worst catastrophes in human history have happened for that reason because people had what they thought were good intentions and in many ways did indeed pave the way to hell as the old as the old saying goes that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and philosophy remains this category that stands outside of the other disciplines precisely because of the attention paid to the discipline itself the function of the problem-solving method and the comparative analysis of those problem-solving methods