@scorpiomover the object of philosophia is not "useful knowledge" or prudence (
prudentia; φρόνησις), but wisdom (
sapientia; σοφία), of which prudence is the practical aspect.
It's the lack of usefulness in what Modernists call "philosophy", that makes so many people turn against philosophy.
But then, that's probably intentional. If philosophy was useful, then so is what Socrates had to say, and then it's worth studying the past as well as the Modern, and tehn Modernism must be wrong. Do you disagree with my hypothesis?
Practical philosophy (ethics, politics) is incomplete without speculative philosophy (physics, metaphysics), which seeks, among other things, the principles that justify our understanding of man as a political animal and the ethical judgments that we use to regulate our lives.
Speculation is not worth anything until you can use it in some way. But the point of speculation is that some things are unsolvable from your current perspective, and so often, when you choose to speculate from a different perspective, you gain a much greater understanding that causes massive breakthroughs in machine technology and social technology.
Speculating about non-Euclidean Geometry led to Einstein's theory of Relativity, which made satellite transmissions so accurate in their timekeeping, that it made the idea of GPS, Satnavs, and mobile phone communications feasible.
To reduce philosophy to analytic judgments, similarly, is to reduce wisdom, not to its practical aspect, but to its rational aspect. Wisdom is not exhausted by rational knowledge (scientia; ἐπιστήμη), by knowledge of hypothetical necessities, but includes intellectual, noetic knowledge, which is knowledge of principles, those independent 'first causes' on which these necessities ultimately depend.
I would agree that philosophy is not just about "analytic philosophy". Where we differ, is about the meaning of the word "analytic".
Now, the statement of a principle cannot be analytic, since the content of such a statement must be independent, but the meaning of an analytic judgment is by definition dependent on the definitions of its terms (that an analytic judgment cannot be the statement of a principle is in fact an analytic judgment); therefore, all such statements must be synthetic.
If a statement is not dependent on the definitions of its terms, then it doesn't have any basis. Even if someone has an intuition, they still need a basis for trusting it, even if it's just that they have observed that their intuitions are more often right than not, and so ignoring one's intuitions is ignoring valuable information and making one's life worse unnecessarily, which is tantamount to being self-masochistic.
What I suggest, is that there are 2 types of ideas within mathematics:
1) Ideas that are not obvious at first glance to those who are already familiar with their axioms, such as Pythagoras' Theorem, which is based on the basics of geometry and algebra, but not obvious to those who have learned both but not yet learned the proof of Pythagoras' Theorem. They are brilliant. But they are also easy to misunderstand and easy to use in error. In mathematics, a synthetic idea is usually called a "theorem". If an idea is extremely synthetic, it is usually called a "theory", such as the "theory of calculus".
2) Ideas that are obvious at first glance to to those who are already familiar with their axioms. They are so obvious that they hardle count as ideas at all. But everyone familiar with their axioms is unlikely to get them wrong. If the idea is a simple conclusion from axioms, then it is called a "proposition". If the idea is a simple conclusion from a theorem, then it called a "corollary".
I propose that Kant called #1 "synthetic", and #2 "analytic".
What Modernists mean by "analytic" is something wholly different, as it is clearly not intuitionistic, but is so in contradiction with all of the rigour of mathematical logic, that I really see no virtue in it, other than being able to waffle on and on in philosohpy lectures and make a good middle-class living as a philosophy professor while saying little that is worth listening to.
Do you understand what people mean by "Analytic Philosophy" today? Can you explain it to me?
Thus, just as denying the non-practical aspect of wisdom leads to a voluntaristic pragmatism, so does denying its non-rational (though by no means ir-rational in the sense of being contrary to reason!) dimension lead to scientism. Both are forms of relativism: pragmatism demands that everything be useful, forgetting that usefulness of things is determined by values which themselves have no use;
Pragmatism is more about choosing to look at everything from the lens of "what is pragmatic". What people mean by "what is pragmatic", tends to be "what I can personally benefit from at the current time".
As a result, Einstein's theory of Relativity was not "pragmatic", because at the time, no-one could benefit from it, and now that we have satellites and mobile phones, the technology has already been applied, and so again we don't need it.
So not everything that is useful, is pragmatic, and thus, some things are not pragmatic, but are still useful.
scientism demands that every judgment be analytic, ignoring the fact that all analytic judgments are grounded in other judgments, and this leads to an indefinite regress of epistemic reasons
If science was held to the same standards as mathematics, I'd agree. But in maths, if something is true for all but 1 out of a trillion cases, it's thrown out, and in maths, if some proof is so strong that it's got a 1 in a trillion chance of being wrong, it's thrown out. Even if you have a perfect proof, but make a tiny mistake somewhere, like Andrew Wiles did with his 1st proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, it's thrown out. So quite clearly, science is not held to the standards of mathematics.
Logical empiricists would hold science to the same standards as those of mathematics, which is why are forced to reject 99.9% of science.
Everyone else clings to Scientific Positivism, when Positivism was a philosophy of the French Englightenment, that no-one really seems to understand or describe all that clearly.
Do you understand Positivism? Can you explain it to me? What's your explanation of Positivism?
analogous to that indefinite regress from means to ends to which pragmatism leads.
Same problem as Xeno's Paradox. Until you have solved the paradox, you'll be confused. But paradoxes are things that seem to not make sense, but make sense when you think about them. So once you think about Xeno's Paradox, you understand why that's not an issue. Can you see the solution?
That these simple facts could be ignored so that relativism today enjoys an almost unchallenged dominance is, it seems, due to an irrational and epidemic preference for skepticism over dogmatism the roots of which go back to the seventeenth century (Galileo and Descartes) if not earlier. Studying philosophy helps me to uncover these deep prejudices and, at the same time, the principles that they tacitly deny. And this is why I continue to "drink the bleach": as I said to AK, "You're only damned if you do it halfway."
Then it sounds like you are saying that philosopy is USEFUL to you. Hence, to you, philosophy counts as "useful knowledge". Do you agree?
