- Joined
- Jul 27, 2023
Eh, kinda. Philosophy has a tendency to become bullshit in the same way that regular masturbation has a tendency to become gooning. So long as you keep a discipline and know why you're doing it, and that why is not 'just because', you should be fine.
For me personally, any worthwhile philosophy is centered around some kind of practice and is a meditation of that practice. You are thinking about what you are doing. The practice grounds the philosophy to something tangible, keeping it from being a contemplation of ideas for ideas' sake, and creates a conduit by which conclusions of the philosophy can be realized and tested in the practice itself. Examples of this are a philosophy of aesthetics centered on a practice of art, a philosophy of language centered on a practice of linguistics and writing, a philosophy of analysis centered on a practice of mathematics.
Of course there are philosophies that are purely observational to some system, with no central practice. These require more care to keep away from abstract nonsense - think the physicist compared to the engineer. These philosophies largely contend with the world around us, with 'the way things are', and thus to keep them grounded one must have a method to confirm the correspondence of conclusions with reality. The most concrete of these is the scientific method servicing the natural philosophy. However, in other philosophies of this sort concerning society and history, the method is less dependable. One confirms their conclusions with records, intuitive truths, and the validity of survival in those doctrines of the past. It is serviceable but inherently flimsy. It is why I sometimes feel that social and historical philosophies are more elaborate opinions than philosophy.
For me personally, any worthwhile philosophy is centered around some kind of practice and is a meditation of that practice. You are thinking about what you are doing. The practice grounds the philosophy to something tangible, keeping it from being a contemplation of ideas for ideas' sake, and creates a conduit by which conclusions of the philosophy can be realized and tested in the practice itself. Examples of this are a philosophy of aesthetics centered on a practice of art, a philosophy of language centered on a practice of linguistics and writing, a philosophy of analysis centered on a practice of mathematics.
Of course there are philosophies that are purely observational to some system, with no central practice. These require more care to keep away from abstract nonsense - think the physicist compared to the engineer. These philosophies largely contend with the world around us, with 'the way things are', and thus to keep them grounded one must have a method to confirm the correspondence of conclusions with reality. The most concrete of these is the scientific method servicing the natural philosophy. However, in other philosophies of this sort concerning society and history, the method is less dependable. One confirms their conclusions with records, intuitive truths, and the validity of survival in those doctrines of the past. It is serviceable but inherently flimsy. It is why I sometimes feel that social and historical philosophies are more elaborate opinions than philosophy.