The Last Post Game!!!!

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I'm not fully ready for the epistemology treatment yet. I'll have to start slow an easy before the serious meat.

Last _{I still have to make diagrams reading Kant} Post

[Aggie]

I will admit that I'm under-read in philosophy and self-centered enough to only really be interested in my own personal understanding (and navigation) of the world. I do intend to take another run at Heidegger's Being and Time at some point soon. It's been staring at me from the bookshelf for too long.

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[Swatopluk]

Goof luck with that. It's considered unreadable even in the original German. I wonder how it was possible to translate it since Heidegger coined a lot of new terms.

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[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Is it possible to translate something you don't really understand?

Last _{ask google} Post

[Swatopluk]

Depends. If the text is unambiguous, a translation may be fully correct without any 'inner' understanding necessary.

Last _{The square root of the cube of x divided by the cube of the square root of x equals one unless x equals zero.} Post

---
I fed that into google translator. As it so often does it drops negations

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Are you implying that philosophy is by definition ambiguous?

Last _{Kant would be offended} Post

[Swatopluk]

Linguistically it is unavoidably so, at least if we follow Wittgenstein that thinking (and consequently philosophy) is bound by and to language.
One can consider philosophy as a creative way to deal with language and naturally its ambiguities. A totally unambiguous language would not have sparked it.

Last _{but the language also needs a lot of inner coherence (allowing for flexibility) to become the seedbed} Post

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I'm not convinced, even an unambiguous language user would have to deal with the fundamental questions, only that they would spend far less time understanding the concepts and agreeing/disagreeing with them.

Last _{again, have you read Kant?} Post

[Swatopluk]

I try to avoid it on most days
Of course the result of philosophy limiting itself to linguistic manipulations disregarding (physical) reality is scholastics.

Last _{a rather unpleasant waste of time and mind with occasional murderous side effects} Post

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

There are always murderous side effects if you have the psychopaths in charge looking for excuses to do their business.

Last _{unless the philosopher him/herself is a murderous psychopath*} Post

*and I have a recent one in mind

[Swatopluk]

The problem starts when the philosopher takes his abstract conclusions as more valid than reality and then tries to have reality conform to them.

Last _{Aristotel war ein Trottel und der Hegel war ein Flegel} Post

[Griffin NoName]

only really be interested in my own personal understanding (and navigation) of the world.

......but....philosophy does aid one's own views...........

As to language, surely it must always be ambiguous. We don't know absolutely that we perceive things the same way as each other. Plus. the apes making particular noises, forerunner to language?, meaning "big nasty thing approaching with teeth" was definitely ambiguous since it could describe many types of animals.

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[Aggie]

......but....philosophy does aid one's own views...........

Certainly, but what I meant to say there was that I'm not much concerned with being able to discuss the history of philosophy and accurately recount the contributions made by various philosophers over time.  I will scavenge a few ideas where I can, but I place more emphasis on being able to think about my own life.

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[Swatopluk]

Historically, most of philosophy has been recycling.

Last _{not to say regurgitating} Post

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Well, a xtian apologist philosopher, would hardly admit plagiarizing a Greek pagan.

Last _{knowledge cleansing} Post