Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

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Ozymandias
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Ozymandias »

Spraticus,
Thanks for the analyzation, it was helpful. Though regarding your conclusion that it is immoral, I'm going to side with Fooloso's claim about tentativeness. It's not black-and-white immoral to practice armchair philosophy, as long as it does not encompass your entire philosophical life. It is impossible for us to know whether our ideas are always right, and so in a way we are always doing armchair philosophy- always building on our ideas, and thinking about them without necessarily sticking to one ideology for fear of being irrational or naive. But we also should implement our ideas as much as we can, for if we spend our entire lives wondering what's right but never act rightly, we will have wasted our human capacity for morality. So it should be held in a balance (like so many other things in philosophy).
Spraticus
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Spraticus »

I would probably go along with that in real life. It's not so far from my first post about the practicalities of daily life making the perfectly philosophical life impractical.
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Belindi »

Fooloso4 wrote:
Wittgenstein said that it is a characteristic of the philosophical temperament to be at ease with uncertainty.
Keats similarly recommended "negative capability". I doubt if either of them intended that mystery is good for its own sake, nor that we should be shallow.

Wittgenstein on language was pointing out that language is a social activity so that utterances cannot be defined as permanent meanings. Keats meant that it's good to appreciate beauty on its own terms without irritably seeking for it to mean something.
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Fooloso4 »

Belindi:
Keats similarly recommended "negative capability". I doubt if either of them intended that mystery is good for its own sake, nor that we should be shallow.
Thanks Belindi. Interesting comparison. I don’t know Keats but in the case of Wittgenstein he sought clarity. In doing this he often questioned the questions. Questions are not necessarily a response to mystery, they may create mystification.
Wittgenstein on language was pointing out that language is a social activity so that utterances cannot be defined as permanent meanings. Keats meant that it's good to appreciate beauty on its own terms without irritably seeking for it to mean something.
Wittgenstein said:
If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do'.
He also talks about rejecting the tendency to want to look behind or underneath things as if there must be some metaphysical ground supporting and giving meaning to them.
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Belindi »

Fooloso4 wrote:
I don’t know Keats but in the case of Wittgenstein he sought clarity. In doing this he often questioned the questions. Questions are not necessarily a response to mystery, they may create mystification.
While Keats is notable for Romantic attachment to, widely, sensuality Wittgenstein's is a social theory of knowledge. In both cases, that of W and that of K, what I mean is that there is no transcendent meaning the implication being that we make our own meanings. Keats was more individualistic in his implication while Wittgenstein pointed to language itself as intersubjective mediator of meaning. However both K and W are heirs of the enlightenment in their humanism and departure from transcendent theism.

I believe that we can also take from them both that while life is tragic we retain our dignity as human beings when we take the courage to make the future for ourselves with what freedom we can muster. This latter is the defining function of philosophy.
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Fooloso4 »

Belindi,

Have you seen the thread on Wittgenstein’s Investigations? It has not had a lot of activity. I don’t know if that is because those who haven’t read the book are not participating or if there just is not much interest. If there is not much interest I think it is because of certain assumptions about his philosophy, but his later work is very different than his earlier work and has recently grabbed the attention of those outside the realm of academic philosophy. He did, however, think of the Tractatus as a literary work. It certainly does share the same austere aesthetic as his architecture.

I don’t want to get too far off topic so I will leave it at that.
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Belindi »

Fooloso4, I have not read the Tractatus of which I know nothing but have I studied tutors' extracts from the Brown and Blue Books and Philosophical Investigations. I support that language mediates and in many instances causes ideas and practices in societies. I also disapprove of presumption that words have fixed meanings, except of course for professional jargons. I understand the later Wittgenstein to be where sociology interacts with philosophy, and to be an important contributor to philosophy of language especially regarding language and learning in schools.

-- Updated February 17th, 2017, 1:30 pm to add the following --

Regarding "austere aesthetic in architecture " (I quote Philosopho4) perhaps one can group the Tractatus with the study of Form whereas Philosophical Investigatons can be grouped with the study of Meaning.
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Fooloso4 »

Belindi:
Regarding "austere aesthetic in architecture " (I quote Philosopho4) perhaps one can group the Tractatus with the study of Form whereas Philosophical Investigatons can be grouped with the study of Meaning.
Interesting idea. With your permission I would like to move this over to the other topic in order to pursue it further.
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Belindi »

Fooloso4 wrote:Belindi:
Regarding "austere aesthetic in architecture " (I quote Philosopho4) perhaps one can group the Tractatus with the study of Form whereas Philosophical Investigatons can be grouped with the study of Meaning.
Interesting idea. With your permission I would like to move this over to the other topic in order to pursue it further.
I am glad my idea can be included in the other topic. :)
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Fooloso4 »

Okay, thanks. I will copy and paste.
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Consul »

Fooloso4 wrote: “Armchair philosophy” is talking about philosophy, but if it is for the sake of talking then it is not for the sake of doing philosophy. It is kind of like talking about exercise.
In philosophy, "armchair philosophy" is not a synonym of "metaphilosophy".
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Steve3007 »

Belindi:
Fooloso4, I have not read the Tractatus of which I know nothing...
I started reading the Tractatus but then somebody spoiled it by telling me the ending.
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Consul
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Consul »

Consul wrote:In philosophy, "armchair philosophy" is not a synonym of "metaphilosophy".
Nor is it a synonym of "pure philosophy" (vs. "applied philosophy").

"If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can. Its traditional method is thinking, without observation or experiment. If the pursuit is conceived as social, rather than solely individual, then speaking must be added to thinking, and several armchairs are needed, but that still leaves philosophy looking methodologically very far from the natural sciences. Loosely speaking, their method is a posteriori, philosophy's a priori."

(Williamson, Timothy. "Armchair Philosophy, Metaphysical Modality and Counterfactual Thinking." Presidential Address, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (2005): 1-23. p. 1)

So, basically, "armchair philosophy" is (purely) a priori, non-empirical, intuition-based philosophy (with its conceptual analysis, "the method of cases", and thought experiments). However, there's a difference between not doing empirical labwork or fieldwork oneself and not taking empirical facts into consideration.
Armchair philosophy is often contrasted with "experimental philosophy", with experimental philosophers doing empirical fieldwork themselves. In this sense, armchair philosophy is itself non-empirical, but it doesn't have to be anti-empirical in the sense of ignoring empirical facts. But if empirical facts are taken into consideration, armchair philosophy is no longer purely a priori.
By the way, philosophy done from the armchair can well be empirical, because introspective analysis (in the philosophy of mind) is an empirical activity.

"It used to be a commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their minds worked. They took an interest in reason and passion, culture and innate ideas, the origins of people’s moral and religious beliefs. On this traditional conception, it wasn’t particularly important to keep philosophy clearly distinct from psychology, history, or political science. Philosophers were concerned, in a very general way, with questions about how everything fit together.

The new movement of experimental philosophy seeks a return to this traditional vision. Like philosophers of centuries past, we are concerned with questions about how human beings actually happen to be. We recognize that such an inquiry will involve us in the study of phenomena that are messy, contingent, and highly variable across times and places, but we do not see how that fact is supposed to make the inquiry any less genuinely philosophical. On the contrary, we think that many of the deepest questions of philosophy can only be properly addressed by immersing oneself in the messy, contingent, highly variable truths about how human beings really are.

But there is also an important respect in which experimental philosophers depart from this earlier tradition. Unlike the philosophers of centuries past, we think that a critical method for figuring out how human beings think is to go out and actually run systematic empirical studies. Hence, experimental philosophers proceed by conducting experimental investigations of the psychological processes underlying people’s intuitions about central philosophical issues. Again and again, these investigations have challenged familiar assumptions, showing that people do not actually think about these issues in anything like the way philosophers had assumed."


(Knobe, Joshua, and Shaun Nichols. "An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto." In Experimental Philosophy, edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, 3-14. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. p. 3)
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
Fooloso4
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Fooloso4 »

Consul:
Fooloso4 wrote:“Armchair philosophy” is talking about philosophy, but if it is for the sake of talking then it is not for the sake of doing philosophy. It is kind of like talking about exercise.

In philosophy, "armchair philosophy" is not a synonym of "metaphilosophy".

The OP used the term to mean:
… the act of discussing philosophy for its own sake, without necessarily intending to apply that philosophy in one's life.
And followed that with:
My question is whether it is moral, and/or whether it is logical to discuss real philosophical questions without following the ideas you find.
My comment above was with regard to talking about these questions, not the question of what philosophy is. The OP's question does, however, lead to metaphilosophy and that is what much of what I discussed was about. And, it was with regard to what I take philosophy to be that I made the distinction between talking and doing.
"If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can. Its traditional method is thinking, without observation or experiment. If the pursuit is conceived as social, rather than solely individual, then speaking must be added to thinking, and several armchairs are needed, but that still leaves philosophy looking methodologically very far from the natural sciences. Loosely speaking, their method is a posteriori, philosophy's a priori."

(Williamson, Timothy. "Armchair Philosophy, Metaphysical Modality and Counterfactual Thinking." Presidential Address, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (2005): 1-23. p. 1)
I don’t agree. This certainly wasn’t the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and the Stoics. It was for them a question of how best to live, and this was not just talk, but rather a matter of practice, that is, living according to what seems best. It is fundamentally concerned not simply with what one says or thinks or believes but with what one does. Thoreau, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein are more recent proponents of this way of doing philosophy

It is clear from Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics that he did not make a distinction between philosophy and the natural sciences.

Steve:
Belindi:
Fooloso4, I have not read the Tractatus of which I know nothing...

I started reading the Tractatus but then somebody spoiled it by telling me the ending.
Ha! Whoever told you wasn’t paying attention. Some people just can’t keep silent.
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Consul
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Re: Armchair philosophy- good, or potentially immoral?

Post by Consul »

Fooloso4 wrote:
Consul:
"If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can. Its traditional method is thinking, without observation or experiment. If the pursuit is conceived as social, rather than solely individual, then speaking must be added to thinking, and several armchairs are needed, but that still leaves philosophy looking methodologically very far from the natural sciences. Loosely speaking, their method is a posteriori, philosophy's a priori."

(Williamson, Timothy. "Armchair Philosophy, Metaphysical Modality and Counterfactual Thinking." Presidential Address, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (2005): 1-23. p. 1)
I don’t agree. This certainly wasn’t the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and the Stoics. It was for them a question of how best to live, and this was not just talk, but rather a matter of practice, that is, living according to what seems best. It is fundamentally concerned not simply with what one says or thinks or believes but with what one does. Thoreau, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein are more recent proponents of this way of doing philosophy.
Ethics (metaethics, normative ethics, including applied or practical ethics) is but one branch of philosophy and it is clearly different from science – which is not to say that moral philosophers should ignore scientific facts (particularly psychological and sociological ones concerning conditions of well-being).
Fooloso4 wrote:It is clear from Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics that he did not make a distinction between philosophy and the natural sciences.
Well, what is now called natural science was once called natural philosophy (and even Newton's famous book from 1687 is still titled "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), and natural science in the modern sense was developed in the 16th&17th century.
Anyway, I see no sharp boundary between philosophy and (theoretical) science (in the modern sense). A lot of scientific theorizing is done from the armchair as well. One could say that philosophy (metaphysics, ontology) is the (most) conjectural or (most) speculative part of theoretical science.
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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