Is philosophy necessary or useful for materialists?

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tonyrey said:
In other words your nihilism is diluted when you think fit. You select what suits you as valuable and reject the rest… Rather naughty, don’t you think? 🙂
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I don’t understand what you mean. When I think fit?
 
Stillness said:
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	I don't understand what you mean. When I think fit?
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You stated:
I meant to say that it is important only in a relative sense, in that you can use it to explain certain things if you accept underlying assumptions. But if you do not accept such assumptions, it has no purpose.
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It is impossible to make any rational statements if you don’t make any assumptions at all. You need to explain what you mean by “important only in a relative sense”. Relative to what?
 
Tyrion said:
That is the step which is missing from the claims of religion. There is no “final” authority, who can demonstrate the veracity of those pesky “immortal souls” or “guardian angels” or “demons”, or what have you. Of course the church “claims” to be an authority, but it is just a self-claimed one. The church cannot demonstrate its claims any more than you do.
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I’ve just given two. Now calm down and take up the challenge and come back in a few months and let us know what you think. Linus2nd
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tonyrey said:
You stated:

It is impossible to make any rational statements if you don’t make any assumptions at all. You need to explain what you mean by “important only in a relative sense”. Relative to what?
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I see, I did not elaborate enough on what I said. I mean to say that philosophy is important only if you believe certain assumptions to be true. But even then, it would not actually be important if those assumptions were wrong. It would only be perceived as important. So I do not mean to say that philosophy is actually useful or important in a universal sense. It is only percieved as such.
 
Stillness said:
I see, I did not elaborate enough on what I said. I mean to say that philosophy is important only if you believe certain assumptions to be true. But even then, it would not actually be important if those assumptions were wrong. It would only be perceived as important. So I do not mean to say that philosophy is actually useful or important in a universal sense. It is only percieved as such.
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On what do you base your nihilism?
 
tonyrey said:
How do you select your assumptions?
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I select them from observations made about the world around me, both those observations made by myself and by others. Building off those observations, philosophical tendencies develop. But even this carries assumptions; I must assume that my senses are percieving the world correctly, I must assume the things around me actually exist, and I must assume that I exist.
 
Stillness said:
I select them from observations made about the world around me, both those observations made by myself and by others. Building off those observations, philosophical tendencies develop. But even this carries assumptions; I must assume that my senses are percieving the world correctly, I must assume the things around me actually exist, and I must assume that I exist.
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Then strictly speaking you are not a nihilist because you believe in the value of your senses and power of reason…
 
tonyrey said:
Then strictly speaking you are not a nihilist because you believe in the value of your senses and power of reason…
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Somewhat. I would say it is less because I place value on my own senses and more because my mind forces me to do so. It is nearly impossible for the limited human mind to exist without making assumptions or developing some train of thought. So assuming my assumptions are correct, then my assumptions are pointless.
 
Tyrion said:
You don’t “know” that. Here is a short writeup on this:
  1. There is an interface between the two kinds of existence. The material can influence the non-material (by prayer, for example), and vice-versa (by miracles). In this case the interface “belongs” to both worlds, that is it is partially material. Therefore the interface can be studied by the usual scientific methods. And this is where the problem occurs - for the believers. No matter where we look, there is no interface. There is nothing to study. So the believers will say: “of course not, since God cannot be tested!”. “It is all magic”. And with this assertion they remove themselves from rational consideration. You cannot have your cake and eat it, too. If there is an interaction between the two worlds, then the interface can be studied. There is no “magic”.
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The interface is the soul ( the immaterial substantial form of the composit man). Naturally it requires the body to acquire the forms it uses from the existents which exist outside of the soul. The forms abstracted from material reality provide the objects of the soul’s intellectual reflection. This reflection the soul performs without the aid of the body. So how can a purly physical body know the forms which exist outside itself and form concepts upon reflection without the immaterial form called the soul? In the same manner the soul, reflecting upon the concepts it has formed begins to ask philosophical questions about the principles of being.

Nothing magical about that. As long as you brought it up, what could be more " magical " than a material, ever changing universe just existing without a cause which exists outside itself? See the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas, S.T. Part 1, q 3.
This was a serious blunder. One cannot expect to prove a “negative”. I have seen so many times: “can you prove that God does not exist?”. What a sad joke.
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But is certainly is fair to ask how a material, ever changing universe can exist without a cause existing outside itself. No one has yet been able to prove that either. Linus2nd
 
Stillness said:
Somewhat. I would say it is less because I place value on my own senses and more because my mind forces me to do so. It is nearly impossible for the limited human mind to exist without making assumptions or developing some train of thought. So assuming my assumptions are correct, then my assumptions are pointless.
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If your mind is forced to force you to place value on things which are not really valuable you are not responsible for your conclusions - including the conclusion that you are a nihilist!
 
tonyrey said:
If your mind is forced to force you to place value on things which are not really valuable you are not responsible for your conclusions - including the conclusion that you are a nihilist!
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Yes.
 
Tyrion said:
Why do you ask me? I never asserted the highlighted proposition. Indeed I see no value in philosophy, per se.

One can study the natural sciences to learn about the physical reality. One can study the abstract sciences. like mathematics. Others can study social sciences, which are still very simplistic, but of they are on the way to grow. One can go and study biology and medicine. Others can turn out to be writers, musicians, or engage in sports…

You know what is the most frequent utterance of a philosophy major after he graduates? It is: “You want fries with that?”.

But that highlighted sentence is incorrect. The actual, physical reality can only be discovered by the “physicalist”, scientific method. This method is inapplicable to the abstract sciences. There is no observation there, only axioms, theorems and proofs. When it comes to aethetics, there are no objectively “true” or “false” propositions. All of them are subjective. When one wishes to find out about the past, usually there are no physical clues, only testimonials. If the testimonials are first-hand, if there are many of them; they are actually known, and had several works before, and especially if they are reported by different people with different biases, then one is inclined to accept them. However, when there are only a few, all with the same bias, none of them have a real name, none of them had other works to evaluate, none of them was an eye-witness, and what they report is not just widely improbable, but actually contradicted by our actual knowelge, then the only reasonable approach is to discard them as factual. One simply puts that work into the “mythology” section.

Now the questions of religion do not belong to this category. Their deity is supposed to be alive today. So to point to some ancient book as “evidence” only underscores that their claims cannot be substantiated by actual, real evidence.

There is one thing I cannot answer: “how does one find out if a proposition pertaining to the supernatural (every time I write that word, I struggle not to write ‘stupidnatural’ or ‘stupornatural’) is true or not”? I have no idea, and therefore I keep ansking the believers about their epistemology, and NONE of them EVER offers an objective method that a skeptic can use. They immediately try to criticize the objective “scientific method”, thereby attempting to hide the fact that they have nothing to say. The Emperor has no clothes!!!

But, NO. Not all answerable questions can have answers arrived at by the scientific method. There are some “ill-informed” and usually very stupid people who keep on asserting that nonsense, no matter how many times they are corrected. But, of course one hallmark of stupidity is the lack of willingness to learn. (Names will not be mentioned ;))
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Ah, like you refuse to learn from the philosophers? Well, say what you want but to say that God exists and does what the philosophers say and Revealed Religion says He did and does makes a lot more sense than to say the universe existed or came into existence uncaused. That makes absolutely no sense at all. And all the science in the world up to this time has not been able to make it make sense. That is why the current crop of scientific crackpots are off on flights of fancy that are only surpassed by the Scinece Fiction industry. Linus2nd
 
Tyrion said:
Of course we aspire to have a better, happier, more meaningful life. These aspirations are meaningful for us, precisely we have a limited lifespan. There is a wise old saying: “It is the trip that matters, not the destination” and “the winning is not relevant, what matters is how you play the game”. As a matter of fact, for the believers in “afterlife” it is useless to worry about this existence, except as a “preparation” stage, where there is only one thing that matters, how to “appease” God, how to avoid his wrath.
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I have already addressed some of the issues of this post. I would like to address the above. Of course the " trip " is important and it hopefully it will be meaningful for all. However it can only be fruitful if we follow the teachings laid out by wiser men and women of Faith. Your remark about appeasing God and avoiding his wrath needs a little modification. Of course eternal life, united with our creator, who is all good and is the source of every good thing in our lives, entails that we live our lives well.

Some reject this and as a consequence reject the source of Goodness and Truth. And that is a free choice we make by the way we live. In the end we will be judged by that criteria. The strange thing is that it is not really God who will judge us. We will judge ourselves. We will see clearly in an instaneous flash the good and the evil we have done and we will reject God at that moment with finality. Theologians think that even if God would welcome us at that moment we would refuse the offer. That is how much we will hate God.

So while the evil we have done does indeed deserve punishment ( how could it not ), the real eternal suffering will be the everlasting knowledge that we are where we are by our own free choice and even then we would not change that choice, even in the midst of the suffering. Linus2nd
 
levinas12 said:
Not only did I not invent the “referent”, I did not invent the “sense” or the “signifier”.

See Frege and de Saussure.
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And, of course, Heidegger (Sein crossed out) and Derrida (“differance”).
 
Tyrion said:
There is one thing I cannot answer: “how does one find out if a proposition pertaining to the supernatural …] is true or not”? I have no idea, and therefore I keep asking the believers about their epistemology, and NONE of them EVER offers an objective method that a skeptic can use.
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This was before your time on these forums, but there was another user that went by the name of Spock that asked the exact same thing (see thread Supernatural Epistemology). Sadly I don’t think every one took him seriously. A few months after this thread (And after a few other threads on discovering God) he finally left this site.
 
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