2013-05-02 at

Philosophical Poison

Well, here's the problem... words like "philosophy," "religion," "love," etc. are used informally in a great many different ways.

A lot of people use "philosophy," to refer to "asking questions about stuff in general and coming up with trivial answers to one's own questions." That activity, whatever you choose to call it is, of course, easily a target of criticisms that it is "unrigorous," or "silly."

If, however, you want to turn up the dial on rigour.... then you end up with more of what they call "analytical philosophy." If you turn it up all the way, then you get a lot of symbolic logic, and discussions about how language works, because most of the time we're just using language imprecisely.

Being a pop-philosopher is more a matter of entertainment (which is a meritable activity), and being an analytical philosopher is more a matter of splitting hairs (which has other merits).

Pick your poison...

Recently noticed: FB is raising the standard of literacy in Malaysia. Maybe in a few more years, we can start to have some really technical discussions. Meanwhile I am going to try and avoid the maturing mob, and just focus on making coffee... or something. Is this written in jest? No. Ignorance, maybe, definitely not jest.

No comments :

Post a Comment