Archive for April 21st, 2021
“Knowledge lovers”: Part 2 of this twilight
Posted by: adonis49 on: April 21, 2021
Twilight of “Knowledge lovers”, Part 2
Posted on January 28, 2010
- In: Book Review | engineering/research/experiments | Essays | philosophy | religion/history
- In part 1, I exposed the theme that philosophy was the super-structure of the dominant class in any period of what is now called “Class Ideology”, and that the economical aspect was not included in the philosophical system of reasoning. (Just Not to open the eyes of the educated on the basic aspect of their conditions?)
Man has been asking questions; he has been cultivating doubts.
Every question generated many non-answered questions. Every man is a philosopher once he starts jotting down coherent questions and then realizes that his “universe” is based on doubts.
Most of his questions have no satisfactory resolutions to constitute a perceived “structured comprehensive world” in his brain.
A philosopher sets out to devise a set of structural questions that he thinks are “logically deductive” in nature (it means that it would not be feasible to answer a previous question before resolving several basic questions).
Thus, philosophers have been driven to accept a few fundamental “given” solutions, or “elemental facts,” or principles just to get going in their projects of building structured understanding of man and the universe.
Since Antiquity, philosophy (love of knowledge) was a catch-all term to represent all aspects of knowledge, including metaphysical concepts.
Since sciences were barely founded on facts or empirical experiments (not appreciated within the dominant classes), except during the Islamic Golden Age (9th to 12th century), and after the “what is not measured should be measured” by Galileo in the 17th century, philosophers fundamentally based their structure on abstract premises and deductive logic.
This makes sense: Once knowledge is firmly grounded on empirical facts (assuming the design of the experiment is valid) then philosophy should take secondary place in rational societies.
Sure, the name and meaning of philosophy was lost in the absurd long gestation toward the advance of knowledge.
The mathematician Descartes was the first European who tried to delimit boundaries between sciences and philosophy: Descartes differentiated between invariant primal impressions and secondary perceived variables. It was the period when sciences got ascendance over abstract philosophical structures.
Before the 16th century, Europe’s philosophical systems were towing sciences (principally natural sciences).
Descartes influence stems from differentiating between forms of realities/ “substances”. The first kind of substance is the mind which cannot be subdivided. Examples of such substances are the notions of time, space, and mass with which quantitative properties of an object can be measured.
The second kind of substance or “extensions to the matter” represents the qualitative properties of an object such as color, smell, taste, and the like.
Descartes division in forms and reality is being validated in equations: the right hand side and left hand side in any equation must be compatible with the same dimensions of time, space, and mass (what is known as compatibility in units of measurement). By the way, Descartes was a lousy philosopher but first-rate mathematician.
There are attempts at “refreshing” interest in philosophy by giving new names and labels to ancient philosophical schools and beginning with the prefix “neo-something”. For example, we hear about neo-empiricism, neo-Marxism, neo-Darwinism, neo-materialism, neo-existentialism, analytical philosophy and so forth.
All these new lines of current philosophical structures have historical roots that reach to antiquity and pre-Socratic philosophers.
The new “refreshed” lines of thinking apply current scientific fields (such as anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, or sociology) to ancient philosophical systems to validate their contentions.
For example, current nuclear physicists are fundamentally pre-Socratic in their quest for the elemental matters; they want to be able to offer a satisfactory explanation of “what is matter?” This problem is thus a vital part of their “life’s philosophy”, the “essence” or an answer to the question “what is my nature”?
I conjecture that most universities have branches called “philosophy” or something related to logical processes: students need topics to write thesis and dissertations.
Sciences have taken over: they can extend answers to “what can be answered”.
Sciences are far more efficient than philosophy: faulty answers go unnoticed very effectively.
There are very few practiced scientists, but every man think he is a philosopher: man can feel what’s wrong with a philosophical system, but he refrains to claim knowledge in sciences.
Twilight of “Love of Knowledge”?
Posted by: adonis49 on: April 21, 2021
Inertia of a thinking system in “Love of Knowledge”. Part 1
Posted on January 27, 2010
- In: philosophy | politics/finance Today
- There is this notion that philosophers are after the “Truth”, based on the assumption that they have this urge to go to the tiniest details and exhaustive possibilities of a concept.
- I beg to differ. Once a philosopher starts building structures for his line of thinking, then it is the system that tows and guides the “Truth”. It takes an insurmountable character of honesty to shake off the inertia erected by a system for a philosopher to restart his independent reflection in search of truth.
Philosophy from Antiquity till now was what is currently called “Ideology of the power to be” of the politico-economic system (the dominant classes of the period).
Philosophy was the super-structure of the apologetic social structure of a culture that has been flourishing for decades. Consequently, philosophy tried to make sense of the mood of the time.
What is striking is that most philosophical systems refrained to include the economical structure aspect into the equation. At best, the economic structure was indirectly referred to.
For example, slavery was accepted as a qualitative level in human nature: since animals are difficult to communicate with then it is better to leave it as is. It was if economy was a taboo notion because the class structure could not be altered.
Every politico-economic dominant class needs a valid interpretation of the statue-quo coupled with a rationale for the intelligentsia to take stock of the inevitable status that settled in and come along.
Thus, philosophers’ interpretations always were phased out by several decades of the “has been reality”.
In periods of alliances between the religious institutions and the monarchy it was required for God to taking center stage: people had to get used to letting God run their destinies.
Usually, the philosophical lines of thinking revolved in that guideline; these philosophical trends lasted long because the power was concentrated in the hand of the almighty alliance.
Superstition was king and empirical works led the bold experimenters to the fire to be burned alive as witches. Knowledge was built around abstract concepts or the realm of religious dogmas. Religious institutions dictated how the universe functioned and detailed the proper mental activities.
In periods of the rising middle classes (of traders, merchants, and lately the industrial class of entrepreneurs) philosophical systems set man in center stage of the universe.
It was important that man regains his place instead of God: The church-monarchy alliance was not to regain political-economic supremacy and control. Consequently, man was to discover and investigate his “backyard” (earth and universe).
Scientific knowledge, empirical experiments, discovery, and world adventures were the result of opening up new market for exploiting many more people for added values of merchandises, and mostly for enslaving and exploiting more people.
Hegel realized the historical interpretation process of philosophical structures as a fundamental aspect of civilization changes, but Hegel failed to find the intimate connection with the politico-economic source.
The historical dialectic method could make sense of the super structure of “knowledge” development in an a posteriori phase; thus historical dialectics could not forecast the synthesis for the current period since the source of the dialectics (politico-economics) was not within his range of expertise.
It was Marx who realized the power of historical dialectics when applied to politico-economic realities. It made sense from Marx position to declare that history started when class struggle was identified as the catalyst for change and knowledge development.
It means that if a “hot” culture wants to understand or create a history for its society, then it must invest in gathering artifacts and ancient manuscripts that shed light on the class structures through the phases of its history.
Democratic systems are trying hard to diminish civil administration interference with religions in its habit of demanding religious inputs and backing to political activities and programs. This phenomena is called “separation of religion and civil rules”
Adonis Diaries 