Comments by "Mark Pawelek" (@mark4asp) on "Jared Henderson"
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@bohanxu6125 I have no disagreement regarding those 3 methods of reasoning. But, everyone should also be taught basic scientific reasoning (how to experiment, how to hold a variable constant, how to infer a scientific law), as well as reasoning from empirical evidence (how to apply actually existing evidence). Add those as 4., and 5. Another idea I have is to take actual policy debates, and redo them - to take arguments which politicos actually used, in reality, to decide policy and reapply them to look for flaws and or improvements to their arguments. Nearly all university degree students should also study statistics too.
Note: "simple proof based mathematic" reasoning (such as proof by induction?), is harder than you think. If mathematicians find it hard, imagine how hard it'll be for the rest of us?
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History of Philosophy books are too much like compendiums which introduce the themes and the 'who did what when' but won't help much with developing a philosophy.
IMHO: Plato and Aristotle are outdone by The European Enlightenment. Apart from Descartes, not typical of The Enlightenment - but in opposition to the previous Christian Philosophy which rules Western thought. I recommend
4) "The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters" by Anthony Pagden as a good introduction to the European Enlightenment. Also: buy an introduction to philosophical fallacies such as
3) 'How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic' by Madsen Pirie. This is an amusing book which pretends to teach you how to abuse rhetoric, but actually teaches you how to spot it.
So I'm voting YES to the first two recommendations, and last (Russell, Blackburn, and Mill)! 2) Think, and 1) 'Problems of Philosophy', and 5) 'On Liberty'. I numbered my recommendations in the order in which they can be read.
Generally the list doesn't have enougth modern philosophy books in it and doesn't explain how far philosophy ran off the rails in the last 250 years (under the influence of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Pomo, ...) especially since the end of the Enlightenment and Hegel (hiss, hiss, but you still need to read him (or summary of his ideas) such is the reach of his shaddow).
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@realhashimdiab @realaymandiab So according to your logic, or argument :-
Were I an Hindi, writing a blog post - considered philosphical - I would be mandated to write about Chinese, Arabic, Greek, and general world philsopophy - despite not being an expert on such.
You clearly don't think that. It's not woke or PC to say that at all. It's also a daft stance; because it's utterly impractical. In order to understand, say Chinese philosophy, one would have to be steeped in Chinese history, religions, and culture. No one has the time to study every culture, and every philosophical tradition which ever existed.
It seems to me you're quite hypocritical on this topic. In that you'll only try to bully white, Western, men to talk about ALL philosophy; whilst being content to let other writers post whatever contingent philosophical ideas they have. Because that's how you've been educated to think and behave.
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A good list, but one important point not made is that fallacies are often meta-fallacies:
- such as projection and deflection. Projection and deflection are often unconscious, or spontaneous.
* Projection: one projects when one "reasons" by imagining what other person thinks, recounting a precis of it to them, then condemning the ideas in the precis. So projection can include many fallacies (ad hominem, strawman, whataboutism(s), ..., because we find it almost impossible to precis what another person actually thinks (as opposed to what we imagine they think)
* Deflection: talk about something else, it avoids facing the actual topic under debate. Can often be done by recounting an example, or story, or evidence which is either tangentially relevant or irrelevant.
- and multiple-fallacies - which may even be overdetermined. In such a case one identifies the prime fallacy, but, one may even fall for a hidden fallacy entwined with it!
Also - bad evidence. Common examples of bad evidence are:
* bad statistics. For example weak statistics which may have been compiled using one or many of: cherry-picked data, bad sampling, too few data points, weak randomization, weak correlation, obscure of errror-prone maths such as fourier analysis, principle component analysis, or machine learning applied to 'dirty', or 'noisy' data.
* bad modelling. Bad models can have unrealistic assumptions, simplistic, irrelevant, logic (such as game theory algorithms), unrealistic causal chains, inappropriate science, hidden maths: embedded within - such that the argument being presented, or supported, actually obscures itself AND is wrong! Models are never evidence. They are tools for speculation.
If you take a lesson from this talk, I think it should be to practice steelmannning, and to argue empirically (from the evidence), not from logic. Learn to walk before you run. An empiricist, such as myself, probably thinks every argument made purely from logic is either a fallacy fallacy, or castle made of sand, or some other self-befuddlement!
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Rant.
I've never been able to understand this obsession with ethics which philosophers have. So much so, that they study book after book on it! My philosophical obsessions were always epistemological - mainly because it's so simple, but so many people get it so wrong. It leads to a puzzle. Why are you - the rest of you - so bamboozled over what is real? Most of us (AKA: you) have an epistemology which is back to front. It follows, that my obsessions revolve around: why do we (AKA: you) get reality so wrong? As I see it - misunderstanding epistemology, in practice, philosophical systems always lead philosophers misunderstanding reality? For me, this obsession with ethics the rest of the human race has is a kind of sin because it leads so many of you to evil: to want to impose your views on everyone else - always badly - because you misunderstand reality so badly too. Although I am an atheist, when I talk about most people 'getting reality wrong' I'm referring to both the common people and the intelligentsia.
So my study of epistemology - doesn't lead to a theory of knowledge but to theories of error, or mis-knowledge. Misinformation, as the media call it. I'd be interested in what happens when ethics meets misinformation. AKA: Lies and deception. Because one sure way to get followers is to taut one's ideas as ethical - when - if they're based on misinformation - they must surely be anti-ethical. Which leads to a question for Jared, or anyone: What is a good book on Bad Ethics?, on Ethics gone wrong?
So Jared's choices are alien to me. Yet I still love that he gave us this video. Of the books in the list, the only one I object to is Hegel. Because Hegel's meta-story of human nature inverts reality. It cons its readers into thinking they're seeing through to an underlying reality (or chain of causation) when they're merely be ing told a tall story by a master storyteller. Alternatively to #10, one may as well have added Tolkien or J.K. Rowling as Hegel. But hey, thank God there's no Heidegger in your list. Heidegger - even more of an anti-philosopher than Hegel!
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@realhashimdiab If you see connections between the concerns of Chinese philosophers and "some random British Philosopher from the last two-three centuries" then please tell us all about it. We want to know what those connections are. I'm especially interested in connections which are extra-cultural, or outside of culture. One point I'd raise is - had there been deep connections between the concerns of the Western tradition and, for example, the Chinese philosophical tradition - them some philosopher would've found those connections and written about them by now.
But please don't question me about it. Tell us about the connections you found yourself.
I was wondering how long you'd take to accuse me of "racist", "exclusionary" tendencies while claiming to be my "friend". Not long I see.
A "Westerner", talking about the philosophical tradition of the West is NOT racist. No more so than an Indian talking about the philosophical tradition of India would be.
BTW: My own interest in the Western tradition is mostly my interest in The Enlightenment and Empiricism. I have no racial bias, but I may be biased by my relative lack of interest in Stoic, Christian and Ethical philosophy, and my actual antagonism towards anything metaphysical. As Groucho might say: "Those are my biases, and if you don't like them, ... well, I have others."
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I, maybe, disagree on your choice of "Beyond Good and Evil", I'd picked "The Geneology of Morals" instead. Thanks for the list. Some appealing books there which I wouldn't otherwise look at.
I think debate and logic are mostly practice. It's very hard to exclude bad logic such as fallacies because one has to entirely exclude common sense thought - given what a bad example the media set - that cannot be easy for the average person today.
Re: Skeptics. Pagden goes into that in detail. I think there are 3 big movements in Skepticism: Greek, Enlightenment and Postmodernism. Ancient Greek Skepticism was indeed radically skeptical. But it died with Western Philosophy when Justinian closed the non-Christian, Athenian schools. Skepticism ware reborn with The Englightenment and, from the first day, it had a new target. Englightenment was skeptical of the Christian Aristolean tradition of Natual Law. Englightenment thinkers nearly always defered to empirical facts - although sometimes, as in Rousseau, they made their "facts" up.
The workd "skeptical" re-entered US thought largely due to the work of Michael Schermer (who isn't, stricktly, even a philosopher, but does teach a course on Skepticism 101) Yet prior to Schermer: Postmodernism had already repainted modern thought with a deeply skeptical brush. Postmodernist skepticism seems, to me, to go back in time to the radicalism of the Ancient Greeks - in a shared contempt for the real. It's also radically Anti-Western, Postmodernism could also be seen as a 2nd go at the Enlightenment, but targetting the West (as avidly as most of the Enlightenment has targetted Natural Law); and also having a sisterhood of victims in contrast to Enlightenment's Cosmopolitanism of Equals.
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