Proclus wrote:

Just because you found something subjectively difficult does not actually mean that there was a problem with an argument.

I have seen students of Calculus insist that the whole thing doesn't make any sense and doesn't prove anything just because they found it difficult.  One of my own students insisted to me that modus tollens was invalid because it didn't make sense to her.

I think the popular conception of how much consensus there is in science and how little consensus there is in philosophy is deeply misleading.  As a matter of fact there are widespread divisions over fundamental questions in science.  GUT has been famously elusive.  On the other hand, there is a lot more consensus in philosophy than might first appear to be the case simply because philosophy typically proceeds by laying out all the views regardless of the real percentages of people who believe them.  For example, I don't know anyone professionally who disagrees with the law of noncontradiction.  David Lewis is famous for being one of a vanishingly small percentage of philosophers willing to embrace modal realism.  I could go on and on.

If we are going with subjective level of certainty as a kind of confidence level, I am more certain that God exists than that electrons really are the way they are described in my physics textbook.

I did not mean that there is something wrong with the argument. Rather that for me to judge fairly, I needed to spend a lot of time which in the end would not be fruitful. So I gave up.

On the issue of God it is also worth considering these results:
God: theism or atheism?
Accept or lean toward: atheism 1257 / 1803 (69.7%)
Accept or lean toward: theism 295 / 1803 (16.4%)
Other: 251 / 1803 (13.9%) 
The Survey was taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students.

I just filtered out the response by faculty and/or PhDs. If I am to be honest, I should have realized that rationally probably God does not exist.


Regarding science, I agree that deep questions within science are not still answered conclusively. However, it also seems to me that hypotheses are more easily tested in science compared to philosophy. Because in science you depend on experiments where as in philosophy you depend on the power of reasoning. Morever, the point is not to compare different disciplines (science and philosophy); rather it is to point out that it seems that philosophy was not successful at reaching its goal.
 

Last edited by nojoum (5/01/2017 4:34 pm)

I agree with Proclus, and would also question whether the goal of philosophy is really to give us "knowledge of the world", as you say.  Pythagoras and Plato certainly thought that there was a difference between wisdom and knowledge, where wisdom was something beyond purely discursive facts or theories.

If philosophy does aim to give us knowledge (as opposed to wisdom) it seems that the knowledge aimed for would not be knowledge of the world, but knowledge of the self, like Socrates was after.  This would include morality/ethics, psychology (as in "logos of the soul", not in the contemporary sense of quantitative, empirical studies concerning cognition), and human nature.

Perhaps by knowledge of nature though you mean metaphysics, questions like "Is determinsim true?" or "What is the nature of time?".  In that case, there are many reasons why we don't we see "progress" in philosophy.

Brian wrote:

In that case, there are many reasons why we don't we see "progress" in philosophy

I'm reminded of a comment John Heil once made:

It is said that there is no progress in philosophy. The illusion of standing still, however, arises only when we lose sight of our history and so fail to notice the distance we have travelled. Philosophers nowadays find obvious ideas and themes that, as it happens, emerged slowly and painfully and largely in reaction to prevailing sensibilities.

Consider contemporary modal notions. You and I take them for granted, but our philosophical forebearers wouldn't have until around 1300 AD when Duns Scotus started working them out as an alternative to then dominant “temporal modal” theories.

John West wrote:

nojoum wrote:

However, I think still it does not quite solve the problem with philosophy (that it does not have conclusive answers for our deep questions).

Curious: how would you argue for the thesis that “[philosophy] does not have conclusive answers for our deep questions”?

I think I did a generalization based on a few issues that I was reading about casually (Morality and Existence of God). I should not have generalized it to the major of philosophy as a whole.

Let's take the existence of God as an example. The mere fact that I have to go and consider different sides of debates, study metaphysics and so on to judge whether God exists or not is a sign of inconclusiveness of Philosophy. Even if someday from my point of view it seems that God exists/ does not exists, I should not have a firm belief about it because if things were so sure, you would not have this much debate over this topic.

For a sharp contrast, consider the fact that I as university student do not have to worry about whether scientific books are correct or not. I can easily trust the books and their conclusions. (I agree that philosophy is on whole another level of investigation but this is only to show the difference in levels of the trust I can put into these areas)
 

Last edited by nojoum (5/02/2017 2:26 pm)

There is also E. J. Lowe's point that it's impossible for anyone to actually live without taking positions on substantive philosophical issues (e.g. without having beliefs, making ethical claims, assuming certain beings exist, etc), and so it's probably a good idea for us to examine those positions and make sure they're coherent even if we could never have conclusive answers about them.

(I'm hoping to write more about the paragraph you tacked on at the end later.)