Talk:Philosophy/Rationality

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I'm afraid that I reverted the changes. The summary was changed to read:

"As, over time, knowledge has become more specialized, philosophy has come to mean the study of those ideas which are, in some sense, ultimate. What is the nature of reality? What is truth? What is the best way to live? What is the meaning of life? Because of its inclusive nature, any subject that is not trivial and is not already claimed by some other specialized discipline is fair game for philosophy.

"Informally, a "philosophy" is just a way of thinking. Thus one hears about the "philosophy" of golf. A person not overcome by grief is said to have a "philosophical" outlook. And any curmudgeon is called a "crackerbarrel" philosopher.

"One main tradition in philosophy, especially in the West, is characterized by debate, as in the dialogues of Plato, and by logic, as in the writing of Aristotle. (A contrary tradition exists that expresses doubt both of the desirability of logic and of the ability of humans to be logical.)"

The first paragraph is mostly simply false; philosophy is concerned with much, much more than "ultimate ideas" (whatever they are). Moreover, knowledge hasn't become more specialised (though academic disciplines have). Trivial subjects are also open to philosophical discussion, as are subjects dealt with by other disciplines, and the phrase "fair game for philosophy" is surely inappropriate, especially in the summary.

The second paragraph tries to cram too many things into too short a space, so that it's understandable only by someone who already knows what it's referring to (for example: someone who has just won the lottery isn't overcome by grief, so is she philosophical?). The last sentence is at best parochial (I have no idea what it means, to be honest).

The claimed "two traditions" aren't; there's no significant philosophical tradition that denies either logic or humans' logical ability.

With regard to the message above:

"In the modern context, it (philosophy) is used both formally and informally to refer to debates concerning knowledge, reason, logic, and belief in their most elemental and abstracted forms."

No. Philosophy is not used to refer to "debates". Nobody on their way to a debate says, "I'm going to a philosophy." And nobody who says, "This is my philosophy." is understood to be saying, "This is my debate."

This is simply to misunderstand the use of English. That an abstract term is used to refer to various activites doesn't mean that the names for those activities can be replaced by the abstract term. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 10:27, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Ah, well, so be it. I find it strange to argue that not everyone agrees with something that I personally believe. But if even nehilists, and presumably also postmodernists, Zen-Buddhists, Taoists, and Sufis, all agree that rational thought is best, who am I to argue. Rick Norwood 13:50, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

(This is, presumably, a reply to my post, not to Mel's). I don't think they would say it is "best", and would probably place a great deal of scrutiny upon reason etc. But they certainly have room to recognize that philosophers engage in argument and reasoning as a matter of practice. Lucidish 20:02, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Here are the main two sentences I have problems with:

"Philosophical literature is characterized by its conviction that the use of reasoning and argument is the essential method by which one may come to sound conclusions."

"It is generally agreed that philosophical enquiry is guided by reasoning."

Now, I'm a mathematician for goodness sake. I am convinced that reasoning and argument is essential. I believe that enquiry is guided by reasoning.

But to say that "philosophical literature" is "characterized" by its "conviction" about reasoning. That it is "generally agreed"... . These statements are simply false. The only way you can make them true is to take a large number of philosophers -- Lao Tze, Rumi, the Zen Buddhists -- and place them beyond the pale, because their writing is not characterized by this conviction about reasoning, and because they do not join in this "general" agreement.

I'm bending over backward here to keep Wikipedia honest, even at the expense of a cause I believe in. Rick Norwood 20:28, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough. Thanks for your attention to detail. It should read that reason and argument are essential features of philosophical literature. Whether such facts are in turn recognized as legitimate or useful or whatever by the philosophers themselves, is of no concern to us. (By this, I mean a very light-hearted kind of 'reasoning', as in "I believe this, because of this.") Lucidish 22:49, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

1. (Re Lucidish) What kind of scrutiny might be applied to the rôle of reason? Rational scrutiny? Then it's self-defeating. Irrational scrutiny? Whatever that might be, it would be question-begging.
2. (Re Rick Norwood) Religious writers such as Rumi and Zen Buddhists aren't philosophers. Laozi doesn't reject, but uses reason. The implication that those who disagree with you aren't honest, however unintentional, is really best avoided. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 23:00, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

It's not self-defeating, because we're not necessarily interested in their opinions on the status of reason; we're only interested in whether or not they necessarily use it. Lucidish 22:49, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

It is never my intention to suggest that anyone is not honest. One can be honest and still mistaken. You say, "Rumi and Zen Buddhists aren't philosophers". This is from the Wikipedia article on Rumi, "To many modern Westerners, his teachings are one of the best introductions to the philosophy and practice of Sufism. " This is from the Wikipedia article on Zen Buddhism: "Though considered simply a practice by most of its practitioners, Zen is also considered a religion or a philosophy by some."

I understand that you and others sincerely maintain that any school of thinking that does not use logic is not philosophy. But you go to far when you say that this is a subject on which there is "general agreement". It only took me a minute to find two Wikipedia articles that do not join in this general agreement. Rick Norwood 00:10, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm not intending to add more fuel to the fire, but it seems to me that this involves a fairly simple confusion of concepts, specifically, the multiple uses of the term "philosophy" (and, of course, the difficulty of defining this term in some sort of cross-cultural way). The paragraph after the paragraph in dispute states that "'philosophy' may refer to a general world view or to any specific ethic, belief, ritual, doctrine, or claim which is characterised in terms of abstraction and self-reflection" -- let us leave aside the merits of this particular formulation. It points us towards an understanding that philosophy can be understood in a much more informal sense, that is, as a "world-view" than the sense that (generally) constitutes this article, the sense of "academic philosophy". -- I suppose it is of some interest to determine which direction to take this article in, but, speaking from personal experience, I am aware of nothing besides, perhaps, a dictionary which pays significant attention to the "informal" definition.

It can be no rejection of historical figures that they are somehow "religious figures" -- just because they are involved in "religion" doesn't seem to exclude them from philosophy (and whether Taoism or Zen qualify as a religion in any meaningful sense of the term is a contested issue). One would simply have to discard such seminal figures in the history of (western) philosophy as Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kierkegaard, and arguably parts of Descartes and Hegel.

There is also the question of what qualifies as the use of reason itself. We might quite easily point to two basic uses: "reason" as the expression of some sort of rationalist doctrine, that is as a human faculty which is able to grasp all of reality, and reason in the sense of validly arguing from a set of premises to a definite conclusion. Now the former sense is fairly obviously objectionable (I am not claiming that it is false, but simply that it is possible for some one to claim it is false). The later sense, that is, the movement from accepted premises to a conclusion, is hardly questionable without presenting an unintellible "philosophy".

I'm sorry that this has gone on for so long and really said so little, so let me come out to a definite conclusion: I think it is wrong to say that Philosophy is "characterized by its conviction that the use of reasoning and argument is the essential method by which one may come to sound conclusions" (emphasis added). However, philosophy is characterized by the use of reason (in the second sense) to form arguments. Ig0774 06:18, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments; I agree with you on most points. With regard to the identification of philosophers, one can be a religious figure and a philosopher, only a religious figure, or only a philosopher. Of the people that you list, only Augustine and Aquinas fit into the first category, surely; the others wrote about religion (except for Descartes, strictly speaking, who merely used religious concepts in his philosophy), but were clearly philosophers. Rick Norwood is, as you say, confusing the loose, informal sense of "philosophy" as either world-view or (as he himself wrote in the revision of the article about which we're talking) the philosophy of golf with the subject of the article.

I also agree that the sentence in question is rather clumsy and inaccurate (as I've said further up the page, that unfortunately applies to much of the article). It's also inaccurate; philosophy is distinguished from some areas of human thought and activity (mainly religious) by its use of reason, but not from others (such as the sciences). --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 09:30, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

My recent comments are, it seems, completely in line with lg's comments. Though I'm not sure there has ever been any confusion, here, over the difference between formal and informal definitions, rather there has been confusion between use and conviction (brought on by someone's insensitive edit to the article to change "use" to "conviction"). Lucidish 04:00, 12 February 2006 (UTC)\

As I hoped to make clear, most of my comments are directed at the position that Rick Norwood seems to have adopted in this particular discussion. Other than that, I do reject Mel Etitis' apparent notion that, e.g. Laozi and Zen Buddhists necessarily represent "religious" as opposed to "philosophical" thinkers -- this is not to say that Zen Buddhism or Taoism are not religious, but rather that they have elements to them that are recognizably philosophical. Thus, for example, many of Dogen's comments, where they are not definably "Zen", in a religious sense, are, I think, philosophical in nature. However, if Zen (and Taoism too) are taken in this way, they do not reject "reason" (in the second sense I laid out), even if they accept certain "non-rational" claims as inherently true (e.g. the nature of the Tao and the nature of Zen, as it is understood within those traditons).

I suppose I should also point out that the definition I proposed rejected not just the term "convictions" but also the explicit mention of "sound conclusions" which seems, to me, to be a phrase too heavily rooted in the Analytic tradition of philosophy.Ig0774 06:20, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

In fact I specifically didn't place Laozi in the category of non-philosophers, but that Zen Buddhists don't count is pretty uncontroversial. Taoism was a philosophical system before it was degraded to a popular religion, and the philosophical and religious continued to exist side by side, with some overlap. As philosophy is a process, a way og thinking and reasoning, then strictly speaking comments and ideas aren't philosophical; what counts is how one gets to them. Zen Buddhism explicitly rejects the esential activities of philosophy.

While being inclined to agree that most Continental philosophers aren't really worried about the soundness of their conclusions, I'm not sure that they'd agree... --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 11:53, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

It is evident to me that the informal/formal distinction has not been a problem here. So, no.

However, I am not sympathetic to tactics which dismiss even Zen Buddhism from the category of philosophers, since presumably they address issues that philosophy traditionally deals in. For instance, that old saw, "if a tree falls in a forest...", while perhaps meant to provoke the confusion and disorientation that's associated with skepticism, is also quite simply a question of epistemology (and which can nowadays be answered by philosophers with some ease). Lucidish 17:11, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Philosophy doesn't lie in the question or the answer, but in how the question is approached, thought about, and answered. "Are unicorns possible?" might be answered in terms of biology, or it might be answered philosophically; the two answers will be very different, though the words used in the question are the same.

Why do you talk about "dismissing", though? To say that something isn't philosophy isn't to make a value judgement; physics, maths, history, thrology, philology, etc., are all not philosophy, but that's not to dismiss them. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 18:15, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

It seems to me that philosophical literature can pull out at least two themes: the methods in coming to answers, as you suggest, and kinds of questions, those rooted in the conventional branches of philosophy.

I can't imagine leaving out the latter; it's too conventional. But I know that objections have been raised about it, because, for example, philosophy is interested in theories of knowledge, but is not interested in knowing about turnips; and those seem to be conflicting sentiments. The "second order nature" clause, I suppose, is meant to resolve that dilemma.

But conflicting sentiments do not make conflicting propositions. While the study of turnips (or gluons, or galaxies, or cells, or societies) may be instrumentally interesting to theorizing about knowledge, none of them are necessarily interesting. For in the end the locus of concern is knowledge itself, and not its applications.

The issue is about whether or not to consider "x" a philosopher, or their works philosophical. That's not to say anything about judgment of their worth, sure. But it is a matter of dismissing them from, or admitting them into, the philosophical pantheon.

The "tree falls in the forest" example is one instance where Zen Buddhism seems quite epistemological, since it engages with our theorizing about the nature of knowledge, and not just a particular instance of knowledge. Maybe it is at the periphery, since it fails to offer reasoning. But the convention really is that topics and subject matter (such as epistemology) play some role in the nature of philosophy. Lucidish 19:32, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I think you're last comment about the "epistemological" nature of "tree falls in the forest" shows something quite difficult about the whole process of "defining" philosophy (if such a thing can be done, which I am hopeful it can be). Here's what interests me, while koans such as "tree" can have a certain epistemological "sense" (and this particular example has been used in the West as such), this is not its use, as I understand it, within the Zen tradition itself where it is, in fact, used to eliminate "epistemological" questions (according to the tradition, there is no particular "answer" the koan, it is a "gate" to some kind of inexpressible truth).

On the other hand, I do object to the categorical exclusion of particular tradition as "not philosophy", if that ignores the possibility of philosophically interesting material in the tradition itself (see for example Nishitani Keiji's Religion and Nothingness, which is, admittedly, philosophical, but has its roots in Zen Buddhism). There is a distinction to be made between what is really philosophical and what is not philosophical (in brief, I agree for the most part with Lucidish's comment above).

As it stands, however, the introduction and definition sections are, I think, as good an outline as can be expected (which is not to say I agree entirely or that they are complete, but it does, hopefully serve as a basic skeleton which is, I think, all that is needed).

Finally, about the formal/informal distinction -- that was only really aimed at Rick Norwood's comments. I don't think it has actually crept into the article proper. Ig0774 06:04, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

One can, of course, acknowledge the philosophical interest of some subject matter without saying that it is itslef part of philosophy. More importantly, in a general article on the nature of philosophy, it's confusing to bring in peripheral material (though this can be dealt with in more specialised articles). We don't need to cram everything into this this one introduction. In other words, I still deny that Zen Buddhism is philosophical (it's almost anti-philosophy), but in so far as it has philosophical interest, it doesn't belong in this article. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 22:11, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I can agree to that. Lucidish 23:07, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Bit late to jump back at this discussion, but I rather agree with that too. My point wasn't so much to argue that "We must include a mention of Zen Buddhism on this page", but simply point to raise of problem with the explicit exclusion of a particular tradition. In other words, the page should not contain a sentence like "Zen Buddhism is not philosophy". Ig0774 05:38, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

If the tree koan is traditionally used to put an end to thought, then that might seem like evidence (on the face of things) to dismiss it as unphilosophical. So fair enough. But what I'd like to re-examine is the similarity that Zen Buddhism, in this respect, has with ancient skepticism. The aim of both seems to be, roughly, a kind of ataraxia. (Though there are differences between ataraxia and enlightenment, of course. In the former, one is comfortable with their own ignorance, IIRC, and in the latter, they have achieved, I suppose, an understanding independent of thought.) And both use a thought-experiment as their means.

The critical difference between the two seems to be the use of reasoning. In skepticism, verbal argument is key; in Zen, it presumably isn't. Lucidish 17:23, 13 February 2006 (UTC)