Ask Lemmy

Identifying an arguments fallacy by name usually doesn't resolve an argument

PhD is philosophy doctor.

My favorite is Lakoff's category theory. He notes that philosophy largely pretends that categories are defined based on rules of inclusion and exclusion, but in fact human thinking is mostly based around categories defined by a prototypical example and various relations to that example. So, e.g., a penguin and a sparrow are both birds, but a sparrow is more like the prototypical bird, since it's smaller and it flies.

Many of the great philosophical questions over the years have been about trying to decide on precise rules of inclusion and exclusion for categories, even though the closer people look, the less it seems like there's a meaningful boundary (e.g. "life" vs "non-living," where you start to see things like viruses, prions, etc. that don't fit cleanly into either category).

There are many branches in philosophy, and it's easy to mix them up. Depends on what you're into.

• Ethics: notions of right and wrong and moral values.
• Epistemology: questions of knowledge. How do we know what we know.
• Metaphysics: ideas of space, time, existence.
• Aesthetics: appreciation of art, beauty, music, literature, etc.
• Logic: for the math-oriented. How do we reason and arrive at conclusions? If X, then Y.
• Language: how we communicate. Meaning of words, symbols, and metaphors.
• Phrenology: method of relieving cranial pressures.
• Science: how to reason about the physical world.
• Religion: Understanding the divine and how we fit in.

I can just say the old Greek already knew everything.

• Cogito ergo sum.

• Nothing really matters.

• Diogenes was a cool dude.

Stoicism helps massively in a chaotic world like today

Idealism is intellectual jerking off. Quite fun!

People get upset if you try to say they aren't real

Cars have windows and can move.

Houses have windows and cannot move.

Therefore it's not the windows that make the car move, but something else entirely.

• PJ Evans

All marxist analyses are analyses of failure.

I know that Ayn Rand is an charlatan posing as philosopher

Almost everything I know I learned from existential comics. This is one of my favorites https://existentialcomics.com/comic/540

I do know about something and don't call me Philosophy

A philosophy major explained to me that studying philosophy isn't really as useless as it seems. That's because whenever philosophers start to understand what they're doing, they stop calling it philosophy and branch into real scientists. He said it's unfair to judge the value of philosophy by the useless proto-sciences currently under study, but to consider the whole history of philosophy which includes every other field of study one can get a PhD in.

The only thing I know is that I know nothing.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Machiavelli was not saying to be mean as much as be prepared to be mean.

The philosopher Schopenhauer absolutely HATED noisy people. He once threw a cleaning lady down a set of stairs because she was making too much noise.

Later he wrote a treatise where he posed that a persons tolerance towards noise is inversely related to their intelligence.

Also, one should not remove the anal beads as if one is attempting to start a lawnmower.

Time is an illusion. Lunch-time, doubly so.

I watched The Good Place like 5 times, so I know just about everything about moral philosophy. I also took computer science, so I know to always give lots of chopsticks when serving a group of philosophers.

Absurdism. Life, the universe, existence, is absurd and irrational.

It's comforting and liberating to accept.

Oh waiter, this conversation isn't very good.