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Cogito ergo sum

Here in the Philosophy forum we will talk about all the "why" questions. We'll have conversations about the way in which philosophy and theology and religion interact with each other. Metaphysics, ontology, origins, truth? They're all fair game so jump right in and have some fun! But remember...play nice!

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Existential comics punches scientism in the face, writes articulate blog post why.

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  • #31
    Originally posted by Jin-roh View Post
    If I were to rate comics as comic, I wouldn't put Existential Comics at the top of my list. The art-work is not as great as others for sure.

    I enjoy them though, because its intrinsically funny to see people discuss serious ideas while calling on Captain Metaphysics, or watching Neitzsche literally announce the death of God as a news caster, or see Marx get upset at thoroughly classist board game.
    That's cool. I get the appeal of a comic for philosophy geeks. Probably what rubs me the wrong way is that, stylistically, it seems very similar to the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic strip. I don't find SMBC that funny either (not that I've read a whole lot of it), but compared to this comic, I'd say that it looks like SMBC gets the job done with less effort, and it's wittier. Looking over the last three Existential Comics submissions, the jokes are there, but it all comes across so heavy-handed, and the timing is all off. It feels like someone explaining a joke to me rather than telling a joke.

    Eh, but if people like it, it doesn't really matter what I think.

    Comment


    • #32
      Originally posted by Carrikature View Post
      There is no answer to this question. There's no explanation to be had.
      Questions of ultimate purpose are still asked, and I think it's bit anti-humanist (in the best sense of the word, not in the popularly appropriated sense of the word), to ignore them or pretend like they don't matter.

      Comment


      • #33
        Originally posted by Jin-roh View Post
        Wait... I vaguely remember the screwball thread, but I don't know what "anti-screwball" is.
        http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/sh...l=1#post451770

        Comment


        • #34
          Originally posted by Meh Gerbil View Post
          I attended a Richard Dawkins lecture where he maintained that we shouldn't ask the question of 'Why?' in science.
          He said it was a loaded question.
          I found it odd that a 'free thinker' would define questions that should not be asked.
          In a sense I agree with Dawkins here. Science, while it does pretty good at answering questions of how, where and when, is incredibly ill equipped at addressing questions dealing with "why" which is the bailiwick of religion and philosophy. Of course being beholden to ontological naturalism, Dawkins doesn't want folks asking why because that reveals for all to see that science does not and will never have all the answers.

          I'm always still in trouble again

          "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
          "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
          "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

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          • #35
            Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
            In a sense I agree with Dawkins here. Science, while it does pretty good at answering questions of how, where and when, is incredibly ill equipped at addressing questions dealing with "why" which is the bailiwick of religion and philosophy. Of course being beholden to ontological naturalism, Dawkins doesn't want folks asking why because that reveals for all to see that science does not and will never have all the answers.
            If all the question 'why' does is reveal a gap in science then it has done more for science than all of the other questions combined.
            Actually YOU put Trump in the White House. He wouldn't have gotten 1% of the vote if it wasn't for the widespread spiritual and cultural devastation caused by progressive policies. There's no "this country" left with your immigration policies, your "allies" are worthless and even more suicidal than you are and democracy is a sick joke that I hope nobody ever thinks about repeating when the current order collapses. - Darth_Executor striking a conciliatory note in Civics 101

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            • #36
              Originally posted by Jin-roh View Post
              Wait... I vaguely remember the screwball thread, but I don't know what "anti-screwball" is.
              Basically the opposite of a screwball award, sometimes they call it a "Sanity Award".

              Comment


              • #37
                Originally posted by Cerebrum123 View Post
                Basically the opposite of a screwball award, sometimes they call it a "Sanity Award".
                OI. Monitors -

                Should I report Cerebrum's post?

                The second to last word on the cited post ... is that word even permitted for use here?
                1Cor 15:34 Come to your senses as you ought and stop sinning; for I say to your shame, there are some who know not God.
                .
                ⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛
                Scripture before Tradition:
                but that won't prevent others from
                taking it upon themselves to deprive you
                of the right to call yourself Christian.

                ⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛

                Comment


                • #38
                  Originally posted by tabibito View Post
                  OI. Monitors -

                  Should I report Cerebrum's post?

                  The second to last word on the cited post ... is that word even permitted for use here?
                  The S word?

                  Comment


                  • #39
                    That's the one.
                    1Cor 15:34 Come to your senses as you ought and stop sinning; for I say to your shame, there are some who know not God.
                    .
                    ⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛
                    Scripture before Tradition:
                    but that won't prevent others from
                    taking it upon themselves to deprive you
                    of the right to call yourself Christian.

                    ⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛

                    Comment


                    • #40
                      Originally posted by Charles View Post
                      Yep, why does something exist instead of absolutely nothing. Never seen a scientist - or a philosopher for that matter - answer that question.
                      I have asked this question a few times. The only answer anyone has offered was "Why not?" Not sure who wrote it I think either Tass or JimL.
                      Micah 6:8 He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

                      Comment


                      • #41
                        Originally posted by Jedidiah View Post
                        I have asked this question a few times. The only answer anyone has offered was "Why not?"
                        It's of course one of the great mysteries.

                        I like the 'why not' answer in the sense if, in the beginning, nothing existed, then that nothing included no rules or limitations or laws preventing things from existing. And thus anything and everything that was possible to exist, began to do so, because nothing prevented it from doing so. And thus all possible universes and all possible worlds came into being.
                        "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                        "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                        "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

                        Comment


                        • #42
                          I didn't like the OP comic and, having qualifications in science and philosophy myself, generally would side with the scientists.

                          Yes, there can always be some philosophy behind everything. However, science has been very good at producing new answers, and has also been very good at answering questions previously thought of as philosophical questions. Philosophy on the other hand has not been particularly good at giving us new answers, and armchair philosophers can bicker all day without really getting anywhere. Thousands of years in the future, when science has finished giving us all the answers that it can, there might be about 5 questions that it's possible to do philosophy-of-the-gaps on, and wildly speculate with no way to ever prove yourself right or wrong on those things.

                          In sum, philosophy as a modern subject isn't really going anywhere (historically, of course, philosophy was a major subject at universities and as new areas of research were discovered they were split off from the philosophy department to become their own departments), whereas science is. I would say the New Atheists on the whole have the right approach, and the OP comic on the whole is wrong.
                          "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                          "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                          "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

                          Comment


                          • #43
                            Atheist philosopher, and critic of scientism, Massimo Pigliucci does a fantastic job (in my opinion), of tearing down the ridiculous claim that philosophy does not progress in his open letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson,

                            Source: Neil deGrasse Tyson and the value of philosophy by Massimo Pigliucci

                            • Contra popular perception, philosophy makes progress, though it does so in a different sense from progress in science. You can think of philosophy as an exploration of conceptual, as opposed to empirical, space, concerning all sorts of questions ranging from ethics to politics, from epistemology to the nature of science. Imagine a highly dimensional landscape of ways of thinking about a given question (such as: do scientific theories describe the world as it is, or should we think of them rather as simply being empirically adequate? [10]). The philosopher explores that landscape by constructing arguments, entertaining counter-arguments, and either discarding or refining a certain view. The process does not usually lead to one final answer (though it does eliminate a number of bad ones), because conceptual space is much broader than its empirical counterpart, which means that there may be more than one good way of looking at a particular question (but, again, also a number of bad ways). Progress, then, consists in identifying and “climbing” these peaks in c-space. If you’d like, I’ll send you the draft of a book I’m finishing for Chicago Press that expands on this way of looking at philosophy, provides a number of specific examples, and compares and differentiates progress in philosophy from progress in a number of allied disciplines, including science, mathematics and logic.

                            • Another popular myth is that philosophy keeps dwelling on the same questions, the implication being that, again, it doesn’t settle anything and consequently cannot move on to something else. But if “the same questions” are defined broadly enough, we can raise the very same criticism about science itself. I mean, your own profession of cosmology has been dwelling on “the same question” (the origin and evolution of the universe) since the pre-Socratic atomists (philosophers, by the way). And my discipline of biology has been concerned with the nature of adaptation since Aristotle’s (another philosopher!) articulation of his four fundamental causes. I’m not being flippant here, truly. Of course there are plenty of more specific sub-questions in cosmology (or evolutionary biology), some of which have indeed been settled; and of course we have made tremendous progress on the broader picture as well (usually, by settling some of the sub-questions). But the same — at a different scale and within a different time frame — can be said of philosophy, or mathematics, or logic.

                            • You and a number of your colleagues keep asking what philosophy (of science, in particular) has done for science, lately. There are two answers here: first, much philosophy of science is simply not concerned with advancing science, which means that it is a category mistake (a useful philosophical concept [11]) to ask why it didn’t. The main objective of philosophy of science is to understand how science works and, when it fails to work (which it does, occasionally), why this was the case. It is epistemology applied to the scientific enterprise. And philosophy is not the only discipline that engages in studying the workings of science: so do history and sociology of science, and yet I never heard you dismiss those fields on the grounds that they haven’t discovered the Higgs boson. Second, I suggest you actually look up some technical papers in philosophy of science [12] to see how a number of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians actually do collaborate to elucidate the conceptual and theoretical aspects of research on everything from evolutionary theory and species concepts to interpretations of quantum mechanics and the structure of superstring theory. Those papers, I maintain, do constitute a positive contribution of philosophy to the progress of science — at least if by science you mean an enterprise deeply rooted in the articulation of theory and its relationship with empirical evidence.

                            • A common refrain I’ve heard from you (see direct quotes above) and others, is that scientific progress cannot be achieved by “mere armchair speculation.” And yet we give a whole category of Nobels to theoretical physicists, who use the deductive power of mathematics (yes, of course, informed by previously available empirical evidence) to do just that. Or — even better — take mathematics itself, a splendid example of how having one’s butt firmly planted on a chair (and nowhere near any laboratory) produces both interesting intellectual artifacts in their own right and an immense amount of very practical aid to science. No, I’m not saying that philosophy is just like mathematics or theoretical physics. I’m saying that one needs to do better than dismiss a field of inquiry on the grounds that it is not wedded to a laboratory setting, or that its practitioners like comfortable chairs.

                            • Finally, Neil, please have some respect for your mother. I don’t mean your biological one (though that too, of course!), I am referring to the intellectual mother of all science, i.e., philosophy. As you yourself seem to have a dim perception of (see your example of Newton), one of the roles of philosophy over the past two and half millennia has been to prepare the ground for the birth and eventual intellectual independence of a number of scientific disciplines. But contra what you seem to think, this hasn’t stopped with the Scientific Revolution, or with the advent of quantum mechanics. Physics became independent with Galileo and Newton (so much so that the latter actually inspired David Hume and Immanuel Kant to do something akin to natural philosophizing in ethics and metaphysics); biology awaited Darwin (whose mentor, William Whewell, was a prominent philosopher, and the guy who coined the term “scientist,” in analogy to artist, of all things); psychology spun out of its philosophical cocoon thanks to William James, as recently (by the standards of the history of philosophy) as the late 19th century. Linguistics followed through a few decades later (ask Chomsky); and cognitive science is still deeply entwined with philosophy of mind (see any book by Daniel Dennett). Do you see a pattern of, ahem, progress there? And the story doesn’t end with the newly gained independence of a given field of empirical research. As soon as physics, biology, psychology, linguistics and cognitive science came into their own, philosophers turned to the analysis (and sometimes even criticism) of those same fields seen from the outside: hence the astounding growth during the last century of so called “philosophies of”: of physics (and, more specifically, even of quantum physics), of biology (particularly of evolutionary biology), of psychology, of language, and of mind.

                            © Copyright Original Source

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                            • #44
                              Originally posted by Starlight View Post
                              In sum, philosophy as a modern subject isn't really going anywhere (historically, of course, philosophy was a major subject at universities and as new areas of research were discovered they were split off from the philosophy department to become their own departments), whereas science is. I would say the New Atheists on the whole have the right approach, and the OP comic on the whole is wrong.
                              I would not go this far, but I sure think there is a point to be taken in what you wrote. I can agree that perhaps philosophy in its current form has become rather narrow because of the historical development you describe. I also think it is absolutely fair to say that philosophers could do a lot more to take part and scientific and political debate. There is a tendency that they stick to themselves too much.
                              "Yes. President Trump is a huge embarrassment. And it’s an embarrassment to evangelical Christianity that there appear to be so many who will celebrate precisely the aspects that I see Biblically as most lamentable and embarrassing." Southern Baptist leader Albert Mohler Jr.

                              Comment


                              • #45
                                Originally posted by Starlight View Post
                                I didn't like the OP comic and, having qualifications in science and philosophy myself, generally would side with the scientists.

                                Yes, there can always be some philosophy behind everything. However, science has been very good at producing new answers, and has also been very good at answering questions previously thought of as philosophical questions. Philosophy on the other hand has not been particularly good at giving us new answers, and armchair philosophers can bicker all day without really getting anywhere. Thousands of years in the future, when science has finished giving us all the answers that it can, there might be about 5 questions that it's possible to do philosophy-of-the-gaps on, and wildly speculate with no way to ever prove yourself right or wrong on those things.

                                In sum, philosophy as a modern subject isn't really going anywhere (historically, of course, philosophy was a major subject at universities and as new areas of research were discovered they were split off from the philosophy department to become their own departments), whereas science is. I would say the New Atheists on the whole have the right approach, and the OP comic on the whole is wrong.
                                What do think of Karl Popper?

                                Comment

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