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Originally Posted by peter12
I think my own perspective is at odds with a lot of people on this board who are predominantly liberal, classically or progressive, and modernist. I have no real problems with this mindset so far that it represents the most revolutionary form of thought to ever exist. You want to talk about flapdoodle? If John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, among the liberal social theorists, had been engineers or farmers instead of philosophers, we would not live in the society we have today. Everything springs from ideas.
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That's all well and good, but you were talking about RELIGIOUS philosophy when I responded with the flapdoodlery. Are Locke and Hobbes RELIGIOUS philosophers? No.
Ideas are important. Ideas about the nature of God and his relationship to humans, the world, and the multiverse, however, are ultimately uninteresting, because there is no God. You seemed to be implying that one can't comment on religious thought if one doesn't know the philosophy behind it, but you miss the point that if religion is bunk, the philosophy of it is bunk as well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
We think in terms of reductionism and practicality, sadly there is no use for virtue or wisdom anymore, unless it is deemed realistic.
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Who is "we"? For someone who studies philosophy, you seem to have a poor grasp on how people think. I can use reductionist, logical or scientific arguments for or against ideas without being trapped within those methods all the time, and I'm sure I'm not unique in that. Science has moved on from just taking things apart and then wondering why they are broken, you know; that's been passé for a couple generations now.
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Originally Posted by peter12
I entirely accept the legitimacy of atheism and the scientific method. I do not accept reductionism as a legitimate worldview. That's fine, we can always argue about it.
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I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm not a reductionist. At least, not anymore than I'm a skeptic, a logician, a humanist, a humorist, and any number of other things. "Reductionism" is mostly a bugbear of the creationists and other assorted worshippers of mystery - it doesn't exist much in the pure form anywhere anymore.
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Originally Posted by peter12
Philosophy is the pursuit of knowledge. Thus in its quest to understand the human condition, it encompasses all the disciplines. Even science is guided by a philosophy formed by thinkers such as Spinoza, Descartes, and even Luther (the Protestant roots of modern science are quite undeniable).
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Defining philosophy as the "pursuit of knowledge" is a little too encompassing for my taste - if I defined science as the "pursuit of knowledge", then does science=philosophy? I don't think so, and thus I think that definition is much too broad.
Philosophy is the study of meaning and how to think about reality, to my way of thinking, and that is much more narrow in its scope. Otherwise, all kinds of thought become "philosophy", and you end up claiming military and political thinkers as philosophers - like Clausewitz. Perhaps in elder times philosophy encompassed all disciplines, but once natural philosophy - science - branched off and out of its clutches, it was no longer a universal system despite the aspirations of its acolytes.