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?
Lv 6
? asked in Arts & HumanitiesPhilosophy · 10 months ago

Why is the search for philosophy truth not too difficult to find, and not too difficult to recognise?

If it was say impossible wouldn't philosophy by now be... "extinct", as a discipline ?

Update:

because I find that 2 subjectivists here have answered a similar Q. saying

that such search-for-truth.. 

Update 2:

... is "EPHEMERAL & TRANSITORY".

Huh ? 

Update 3:

They seem-to-know enough about philosophy to "congratulate each other"

over that,

Congratulations?  To this "Ephemeral & transitory philosophy school" ?

(so called "SCHOOL" that is..)...

5 Answers

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  • It is easy to say that it is easy. This is because you were born in this age of technology and science. But it was not easy thousands of years ago. People had all sorts of ideas. 

    Those ideas had to be worked over the course of many centuries and only very recently have we come to this modern notion of science. 

    But while science has identified various patterns in nature, it still does not tell us the causes. And without the causes, I would only call it a proximate understanding of the world. 

    We observe various behaviours and we see how they produce the overall effect. But reality itself still eludes us. What we have is a description of the world. Not a reason why.

    This is where people are free to imagine what jigsaw this universe fits.  They are free to come up with a total explanation. Science is limited to the appearances and history of such appearances. 

    And this does make a good story but hardly explains it in the ultimate sense. 

    Science is an enterprise of knowledge, of how do we know what we suppose we know. But at best just tethers our imagination to the data it collects with respect to various questions posed in the form of experiments. 

    Have you ever played Mastermind? Where you have to guess the code by testing various combinations and with the clues must reason the result. Well I think that is our situation. Science just gives us the clues. But we must imagine the result. 

    And it is better to imagine a complete picture of reality than to fumble in the dark indecisive in various situations and not progressing as far as we could than if we gamble. 

    We must gamble and constantly improve the gamble until there are no fumbles. And we may never know. And there may be many gambles to choose which do not fumble. We use our critical eye to narrow down the gambles.  

    ……

    People want change so they put forth their philosophical systems. This influences other philosophers to come up with their own philosophies. These philosophies often set a tone on their times. People live by an ethos. Science meant different things in different times. Religion was an influence.

    They struggled to find the place of universals and the good. They resisted mechanistic science paradigm because of the moral relativity it implied

    These people include the line of philosophers from the pre-Socratics to modern times. Thales, Plato, Scotus, Ockham, Kant, Hegel, Whitehead, Dewey, etc. Each were saying something different than the zeitgeist of their day. No one had a clue. 

    Religious influences include Christian, Islamic and Judaic, or more to the point philosophy influences the religious thinkers to incorporate frameworks to supplement their religion.   

    The Christian religion was in search of a metaphysical framework. They adopted Plato’s and modified it to ensure the greatness of God. 

    Augustine was a neoplatonist who believed in some manner in which the lower universe is created in some cyclical exchange of emanation and logos.

    Aquinas adopted an Aristotelean framework which was good because it encourages the seeking of God in nature and with reason. 

    Duns Scotus introduced the idea of Individuation which lead to Ockham to develop his nominalism. Both were changes for the better.

    In the Renaissance Greek/Roman texts were discovered. One of which was of Sextus Empiricus. Descartes employed scepticism but sought a solution to it. Other philosophers responded to him. 

    Spinoza developed a deductive system by which he could guarantee certainty in a pantheistic scheme.  

    Leibniz introduced the concept of the Monad which makes up the various levels of existence from matter to mind to God, and that even though they are closed off little universes from each other causally have the pre-established harmony set forth by God in an ongoing process. This means each is an individual but contains a microcosm of the whole. Each is an individual unique expression of the whole of existence. 

    ……

    Each philosopher builds a framework and that framework can be taken apart, reused and modified by future philosophers. Each new piece developed, each new whole, enlightens human thought. 

    They do not have to agree. What is important is the conceptual architecture they introduce. 

    Philosophy is a long story.

    =====

    My thoughts are not formed. But there exists a mass of information in my imagination from which my thoughts do get formed. The more I absorb the better the image. And producing thought from that mass of information is work in itself. 

    That is probably why students are asked to give outlines to give form to that undigested information.

    But I will with curiosity and desire go back to get a better picture. 

    I have a method which works for me. They start as babies and then they mature. You want clear cut logical explanation. I have to create the baby first. And then I develop the picture and resolve the details. And then seeing the details I can start on the logic.

    ……

    { There is no designation of quantity in the word people. I am not responsible for any assumption that it means all. And if every time I used a symbol, I listed it’s reference then it would hinder the swift expression of my thoughts. And who really thinks I meant all people? It would be absurd. It is unenumerated. }

  • ?
    Lv 7
    10 months ago

    Unlike you, I've yet to find a search for philosophy truth. Moreover, you have redundantly asserted that you had no difficulty doing so. This is fortunate for the both of us so that we never need meet each other on any imaginable level. While you are busy with the obscure and tortured linguistic manipulation of truth, I am free for the truth simply. The truth found me and I learned to accept it. No matter how hard you try, the truth will not be inverted, obscured, or corrupted. 

  • 10 months ago

    I never used a tool to understand the tool.  I used it to fix something.  I never really knew how the tool was made.  I am sure it has an interesting history.  But with so many broken pieces of matter here and about, I find that to be more in need of this tool than anything.  Perhaps someday I will be able to study up on how this tool was made.  You know, help me use it better.  

  • 10 months ago

    you can't search for it because you don't even know what are searching for for., just need to be aware of everything.

  • Anonymous
    10 months ago

    Obviously, the nuances of the English language escape you. By convention, it's 'philosophical truth', not 'philosophy truth'. Also, grammatically, the object of your question is the word 'search', so what you have actually asked is why the search is not too difficult to find, which is nonsensical. The way it should have been worded is "Why is the philosophical truth not too difficult to find...?" Another way to pose the question would be "Why is truth in philosophy not too difficult to find...?". 

    Got that? Good.

    Moving on, truth in philosophy is often exceedingly difficult to find, so your question and tentative conclusion are not entirely valid. It depends on what truths one seeks and many questions are beyond answering, but that hasn't stopped mankind from trying. In fact, the word 'truth' itself is not easily defined and epistemologists have devoted an enormous amount of effort arguing over the meaning and nature of 'truth' and what it represents. That in itself is enough to put many people off of studying philosophy. 

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