Monthly Archives: January 2019

Why do we need to study philosophy?

One might love learning, or one might see the practicality of learning. Either way learning philosophy is something we cannot avoid or should not avoid. The good news is that there are many ways of getting into it, from a very introductory to a more sophisticated. Let’s start with a fun introductory way. Let’s talk about “The Hobbit and Philosophy” edited by G. Basham and E. Bronson.

You can learn more about the book following this link:

https://books.google.com/books?id=h2gpEAXIyaYC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Basham and Bronson start by quoting Aeschylus: “Men shall learn wisdom, by affliction schooled” and later quoting Confucius: “The gem cannot be polished without friction, not man without trials.”

These quotes made me think about what is going on around the world and particularly in the USA. It looks like there is a little friction and grinding as one is needed to polish a gem. The gem metaphor for me is humanity. We need to go through these changes, so we can mature from an individualistic selfish and childish society to a grown-up tantrum free, peaceful society.

The changes we are witnessing now make people anxious with a feeling of vulnerability but they are good and necessary for the maturation process. It is not an idiotic ignorant posture as so called pragmatics would say, it is a logical posture based on historical data. We have become better and better over the years, it is (called the better angels of our soul) what keep us going and struggling.

J. R. R. Tolkien in his “The Hobbit” makes it clear that in order to have a better life we must go through a transformation. One that brings us out of our comfort zone, the ordinary and forces us to see other perspectives. By doing so we learn more about ourselves thus becoming wiser and happier.

After all what is the meaning of life if it is not the pursuit of happiness?

I are irrational numbers truly irrational? or imaginary numbers truly imaginary ?

What can we do to know what the truth is?

How can we know what reality is?

Scientist have a way to learn about the world, we called it “The Scientific Method” and is the process by which we have studied natural phenomena and discover many of the things we know about the universe, including of course about our world. What is important to realize is that it appears that the more we know, the more questions we can ask. A kind of paradox: The More We Know The Less We Know. The More We Know The More We Want To Know.

Part of this process is the gathering of data. Data that has to be fitted to models, hypothesis  that conform a theory with laws, principles, and a-priori assumptions. Similarly social sciences, not being exact sciences, try to model human behavior in order to understand social phenomena and predict how societies will be.

Analyzing data through statistical methods is not easy in either case, in hard sciences or social sciences. On top of these difficulties we have semantics, as the meaning of words is many times obscured, confused, or out right spun out of meaning. Take for example “economics” as the study of the production and distribution of goods and services. (As I heard today a new friend William Denis to define it for me.) Directly economics has nothing to do with the welfare of a society as it is a secondary consequence of the production and distribution of goods and services, but, (there is always a but) why would goods and services be produced and distributed in the first place if there was no societal impact, mainly for some benefit of the individuals in that system. The name “goods” semantically will indicate that it is for a benefit. It will not be “goods” if it was not, for sure.

Likewise the idea of common sense, is one of those myths about truth, and reality. Books about “common sense” or “Against Common Sense” (Kevin Kumashido) have been written to articulate what the authors ideas are about the rights or wrongs in our society, claiming that what they believe is backed by common sense. This is the worst way of arguing about ideas as most common sense ideas in the past have been wrong. Reading history we can find innumerable examples of common sense being wrong, like the earth is flat or the earth is at the center of the solar system.

I will conclude that one way that will not reveal what the reality is, is common sense. So let’s turn around a find other means of finding the truth about reality. One way of course is what was mentioned at the beginning, it is the scientific method with Falsifiability as introduced by Karl Popper in his “Critical Rationalism” to analyze the scientific process.