Ask a philosopher anything

Ask a philosopher anything.

Book recommendations, questions about various topics and history of philosophy, college and grad school, whatever.

Discuss amongst yourselves as well.

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fuck off

Tell me why i should continue live
Life is too difficult to live, and im finding that i may be too weak and lazy for it

no u

I don't think there are universal reasons to live. You're better suited talking to a psychologist about this but, if you tell me more, I might be able to give some advice since I've struggled with mental illness all my life.

Is your faggotry genetic or a function of a poor upbringing?

my favorite branch is existentialism

A combination, I think. Identical twins are more likely to share the same sexuality, even when raised completely apart, which suggests that genetics plays a role, but not the only role.
Never got into existentialists but I like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, who inspired existentialists.

The only thing im doing is checking em

What qualifies you as a philosopher? And, at which junction of thought exemplifies the turn away from meaning being derived from being itself.

dobit it, when you miss

was studying philosophy worth it? i took it in highschool and it was fun and interesting and all, but should i pursure it for university or focus on getting an actual fucking job.

also, do you follow Karl Popper's definition of science? if not, what defiinition do you beleive in and what person defined it that way.

also, general book reccomendations. currently in my Nietzschean, jean paul sarte and camu phase.

Where did you go to grad school?

Eric Dodson is a cool guy on youtube

youtube.com/watch?v=rfWodl10kbI
Question in vidya.

Amateur. Published-in-an-academic-journal philosopher here. Those are plenty tier philosophers.

*Pleb tier

not sure what u are trying to say...

abandon thread. OP is a massive faggot

you niggers should be reading emmanuel levinas for some real shit plebs

What do you think about memetics?

Thoughts on postmodernism??

If I presented you an individual bound and gagged, and told you that if you did not execute him 10 more innocent people would die, what would you do?

kill you instead

get a blowjob

ty
>qualifies
That I think, discuss, and write a lot about philosophy, that other people recognize me as a philosopher, that I have multiple degrees in philosophy, that institutions recognize me as a philosopher. I suspect you want to get at the question of what it actually is to be a philosopher which, we would probably agree, is vague and uncertain.
>at which junction of thought
I'm not totally sure I understand your question but it sounds like something Heidegger would ask. The only other thing that came to mind immediately that might be relevant to your question would be the linguistic turn around the beginning of the 20th century.
>was studying philosophy worth it?
Yes. I'm glad I did it though there would have been benefits to not doing it as well.
>university
I'd say this. Unless you go into a major that is a direct pipeline to a job (e.g. computer science, nursing), you're going to end up in the workforce like everyone else. I can't answer this for you but you have to decide how much you want to use this opportunity for what it is, an opportunity to educate yourself and become a better person, or an opportunity to have, essentially, an extended job training program with an increased likelihood at a better job. There are pros and cons to both.
>Popper
I'm more of a pragmatist. I think falsifiability is a nice bonus in that it can make it easier to discard a less useful theory more efficiently but that isn't what we should be primarily interested in. We should care more about the value that an explanation/interpretation provides us relative to our goals. Sometimes, a theory can be useful even though it's unfalsifiable.
>general book recommendations
Rorty's "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature." It's very different from what you've been reading but it will acquaint you with a lot of issues in contemporary philosophy and help you understand a certain kind of pragmatist approach, even if you ultimately disagree with it.

what is consciousness?

thought

Who would win in a fist fight: Socrates or Camus?

let me rephrase: what is the nature of first-person subjective experience, in your opinion

Do you even Veda?

Why do you need the title of philosopher to just be someone who thinks and I find it ironic that people who enjoy thinking of original ways to see the world go to school do that

If god doesn't exist then who made god?

Yeah can I get a Big Mac with a large fry no salt please?

You may, but the other 10 will still die. Who's to say the bound man isn't the one to kill them?

I'm inclined to say universals exist.
That wasn't me. Calm down.
Levinas is incomprehensible. I've never met someone who could "explain" anything Levinas says without talking in circles.
I tend to be evolutionary through and through in my thinking so I think memetics is kind of cool, although I haven't researched it very much.
There are creative ideas but also a lot of garbage.
I wouldn't kill that person.
Yeah, I'd actually be more likely to do this, even if the ten still died.

/thread
lol

lol samefag

why do you think about your brother so much?

Nice try faggot

Are you up to date on the latest philosophy of language? Have we solved meaning yet?

Was Derrida right in saying that there's a fundamental lacuna in the Western tradition of the thinking of time, involving the idea of time as the moment of now that is self-present versus time as a continuum of past and future? Is this the problem that Husserl identifies in Descartes and which continues to plague Western philosophy into the present?

tl;dr: we have a fucked, contradictory philosophy of time.

hey guy , please , recommend me a book about what I should expect of the life at the end of.

...

You're beginning with the implication that God does not exist in any form. This would include the understood semantic concept if not the theological or moralistic or theoretical construct idea of God. These all certainly exist, and are older then any society, and far older than the pretension you bring to the table. There is a species of God in the desert, that spoke to the beduin in the sound of wind over sand.

The silence is the God whose name who have never listened to here. Beyond that, God is not a construct as much as all that is constructed is done so through God, as that which renders the possibility of being into the actuality to which we are bound.

>pic unrelated, doggo stung in the face by a bee.

Have you read Heidegger?

What's the deal with airline food?

why does my dick hurt?

>
get a real job you fucking faggot

What's your view on nihilism being used as a justification instead of a philosophy

Are u going to try to get a job in human reaources?
Or mcdonalds?

youtu.be/SJUhlRoBL8M

very Upanishads of you.
> tfw even then the fact that God is unfathomable thwarts our assumptions on the basis that, even if we're doing it right, we're barely scratching the surface of a 'definition', if even that much.

>Have you read Heidegger?
Yes. Derrida was largely riffing off Husserl and Heidegger on the philosophy of time.

How's the job at the philosophy factory?

...

I don't know but I suspect that it's really just a bunch of different processes working in tandem that we end up mistaking for one big, magical, thing.
I have superficial knowledge of Indian philosophy but it was interesting when I was learning about it. I used to be very good about meditating and I wish I'd do it more.
>Why do you need the title of philosopher to just be someone who thinks
You don't.
>I find it ironic that people who enjoy thinking of original ways to see the world go to school do that
You might be surprised at what you can learn from people who make a living thinking really hard about certain things and you might be surprised by how this actually makes your own thinking more creative and original as opposed to making you dogmatic.
aaah get out of my head!!!
I'm not. I recently read Millikan's "Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories," which isn't cutting edge anymore but I enjoyed it.
I find Derrida to be a waste of time.
Try a lighter grip, lotion, or just less of that.
What do you mean?

I'm a Philosophy graduate and Im a software engineer

thoughts on existentialism, specifically albert camus. also, what philsophy do you follow? stoicicsm, or any other one. or do you use different elements of different philsophies to make your own unique one, if so, care to explain and share?

does life have an objective meaning?

How was the job you had before the robot took it?

What is your take on Diogenes?

>fucking love this guy btw, wouldn't abide by his views or cynicism but I do agree with some.

>I find Derrida to be a waste of time.
Sounds like you're ignorant of a major, non-English-language tradition of philosophy and that you're not engaged with what Aristotle and subsequent thinkers have to say about time. Seems like you embrace the worst of Anglophone ignorance.

Are you a transhumanist?

As far as "schools of thought" go, I've been most influenced by the American pragmatists and neo-pragmatists, Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche. To a lesser extent Frankena, Hume, Aristotle, and neo-Aristotelian ethicists. I don't think of myself as a member of something though.

>meaning
Meaning is either something language can have or something we ascribe to an event that has some emotional impact. Life doesn't come with meaning prepackaged beyond that, it's largely something we create by ourselves and with communities.
I find him hilarious.
I don't have a knee-jerk hatred of Continental or any other non-English speaking philosophers. I've found Derrida, specifically, to be incomprehensible and no one who claims to understand him is able to say anything coherent about what Derrida supposedly believes.
No.

how long have you been studying philosophy?
deserted island. 10 books on philosophy. GO!
top 10 favorite movies?

doesnt have to be top 10, just name as many as you can think of.

>I don't have a knee-jerk hatred of Continental or any other non-English speaking philosophers. I've found Derrida, specifically, to be incomprehensible and no one who claims to understand him is able to say anything coherent about what Derrida supposedly believes.
That's basically what anyone trained in Anglophone analytical philosophy has to say about why they entirely dismiss phenomenology and its serious questions about knowledge, time, subjectivity, perception, aesthetics, and related fields. John Searle attempting to say that Derrida makes no sense is the locus classicus of this Anglophone deafness. Your position also encapsulates why philosophy is a narrowing field and is probably the most closed-off and most white and male of all humanities fields in the Anglophone academy.

thoughts on communism?

Do you see automated machine learning spiraling out of control in the near future?

fpbp

i read somewhere that nietzhe was worried that people would adopt science as a religion. not exactly those words, but something similar to that. do you see that happening now? also, can you explain what he means by this? since science is the best way to reach logical and rational conlusions, why shouldnt we use it?

Why is life so unfair to those who do not deserve it?

do youy beleive in a god? if so, why and which one(s).

In no specific order:
- Gorgias (Plato)
- Symposium (Plato)
- Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle)
- Ethics (Spinoza)
- Critique of Pure Reason (Kant)
- Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel
- Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche)
- Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard)
- Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein)
- Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty)

movies in no particular order:
idk anything by Lynch, Hitchcock, Tarantino, Scorcese, Cohen brother's, Gilliam, I tend to like.

Me being an analytic philosopher would be news to the people in my department lol. I also find that the people who love Derrida always bring up Searle and rant about analytic philosophers every time someone doesn't like Derrida, no matter what that person said, which is bizarre.

Considered myself a communist when I was younger. My heart's still there in a lot of ways and I still hover around various anarchist ways of thinking about politics but I'm not sure where I lie anymore, ideologically speaking. I think a lot of evil has been done in the name of communism but a lot of evil has also been done in the name of capitalism.
Yes.

Since you're a philosopher whos struggled with mebtal health, I would assume one of the thoughts you've had before was "why continue?" I have these constantly and they seem to make more and more sense the lower i get, but i noticed my mood when im alone changes drastically day to day. Lately they've been on the worse side, but my question being how did you accept and escape the thoughts if my assumptions of you were true?

what is your job? like do you publish papers? what exactly is it you do. please go in depth since i am considering that career path

>Me being an analytic philosopher would be news to the people in my department lol. I also find that the people who love Derrida always bring up Searle and rant about analytic philosophers every time someone doesn't like Derrida, no matter what that person said, which is bizarre.
A better answer than I expected, though it still doesn't deal with the fact that:
- I raised a philosophical problem (and a very well recognized one)
- You went ad hominem on the originating person without saying anything about the problem
- You generalized more widely about those who make reference to this figure
- You still avoided the problem

Whatever philosophy you work on most, I'm now convinced that you're closed minded and rigidly prejudicial in your thinking, which is precisely the opposite of what a competent philosopher is meant to be.

Not OP but, closest to memetics that isn't the qsuedo Dawkins is Wittgenstein. Taking his language-game theory beyond conventional language and extending it to mannerisms and cultural mechanisms.

I know what you're referring to though I also can't recall exactly where it was said. I think it was in BGE. I take this to be an application of his more general criticisms of the herd mentality. People let others do their thinking for them and scientists are often taken as the final authority by some people. Sometimes scientists are talking out their asses but certain laypeople accept what's said anyway. I think experimentation and hypothesis testing are great tools but they aren't the only ones and they don't always suit what's at hand. There's a sense in which a poet can do a better job expressing my feelings than a neurologist. Dogmatically embracing technical thinking and only technical thinking might as well be suicide since robots can do it a lot better than humans.
Because the universe isn't magic, karma isn't real, etc. Having a good life is a matter of luck to some extent.
No.
Make small, manageable, changes in your life. The more you do so, the more easily you can make more positive changes until the question, "why continue?" doesn't even pose itself to you. Exercise, eat better, sleep better, have better hygiene and care for your body, fashion sense, go outside and do something, make more plans, clean the house or a part of it, socialize, list all your bad habits and work on stopping one of them, etc. You can't do all of these at once when you're low but pick one and start doing it, no exceptions, no excuses. You'll find a sense of discipline you didn't know you had and that feeling is its own reward.

How can someone be that gay?

Hey, I did my Bachelors thesis on Rorty

...

Getting a bachelor's can be good if you're cool with going into the general workforce and having to do a little extra if you want to do something else (take EMT training, get a teaching license, etc.). It can also be good if you want to go to law or med school. Don't go to grad school unless you're certain you want to teach philosophy and you're good at philosophy.
There are a lot of different paths.
Nice. Do you remember what you argued?

I was post end 480
My bubble of everything putting off depression burst earlier this year. My entire life of escapism in vidya, paired with gf of four years leaving in middle of semester causing withdrawal causing gpa plummet. I would just postpone and do everything last minute and with every problem instantly accrued my way of life is in danger. Ive also never really enjoyed change and still listen to all the music ive been listening to for years. Just need a place to start but i cant have everything done by people for advice. Thanks for taking the time philanon. I'll be lurking and figuring things out

What should I do with my mind? I tried to construct a memory palace in my mind years ago so that all my thoughts could be well structured and I'd have access to all the information I've taken in. I wanted to always have something to occupy myself with. All I ended up doing was learning mnemonic methods but I treated it like I didn't want to mess anything up, like I didn't want to have any imperfect thoughts or get any information that would mess up my mind, so now I'm uneducated and very ritualistic and compulsive. I look around at people and see how they always seem to know what to do from moment to moment.
Is there a default activity or starting point that the mind ought to return to regularly? Like an internalized home base or hub?

Best of luck. You can do it if you put forth the effort to make small changes. Don't be afraid to see a therapist or get medication if need be. It's better to do so when you need to instead of waiting for a crisis moment.
You sound too obsessed about this. Stop worrying about whether or not your memory is working properly and just let it work.

Well I'm going to kill myself since I already wasted too much time

...

>I already wasted too much time
I doubt it. There's time to improve your life. I've been suicidal at an age probably older than you are now and I turned my life around.

Can you explain the difference between dasein and lebenswelt? As a Kantian I have trouble discerning the ontological difference between the two concepts, and I've been told it's this ontological analysis which is causing me confusion.

I don't know enough about that tradition to give a competent answer, sorry.

How pissed off was your dad when you told I'm going to college to get a useless degree?

My parents were surprisingly supportive of every one of my academic and artistic pursuits.

>artistic
read that as autistic
for a moment i thought you were self-aware

>autistic
I probably am, slightly.