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Luisgmarquez1985 wrote:Personally I consider myself a philosopher, but publicly I have yet to declare it.
So how would do that? Stand up on a table and shout.
"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN I SOMETHING TO DECLARE TO YOU! I AM A PHILOSOPHER!"
If you were genuinely philosophical you wouldn't really need to declare it because people would just know.
If anything, I use the terms intellectual or thinker when describing myself to others.
Again if you were an intellectual or thinker you wouldn't need to tell anyone about it it would just come across in who you are and everything you say and do. It's not like Socrates had to declare anything people just had him sussed out.
it is not necessarily that I would have to stand up and publicly declare that I am a philosopher. Socrates did not do that but he did practice philosophy personally and publically by debating with this fellow Athenians on certain things that they thought they knew. I do this too in this forum and with my friends and coworkers. For me being a philosopher encompasses more than debate and lecture. It makes no sense, nor any purpose unless we act these ideas out in our personal daily lives and with others.
"True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing" - Socrates
I love how you put that, Present Awareness. If there is one thing that stands out for me as an oldie it is - a returning to childhood and looking afresh at everything - seemingly out of necessity. Fortunately, my wife is a mirror and I can spout away and be dazzled by the reflections. Intellectualising leads to outsight, Philosophy to insight. Now that we are both on our last legs our conversations are more 'unconfined and free' as you put it.
Yep. MindFreeza post #2 ("I do consider myself a philosopher, as do most others who know me. Every properly functioning human being is a philosopher of one sort or another, whether they realize it or not. Simply claiming to know the difference between right and wrong, as most people would, is a philosophy") and Benblag post 154# above appear to be my long-lost brotherly loves....
I don't have the readings, the qualifications or vocation to call myself a "philosopher". Before retiring I worked as an analyst so that's as good a label as any. Or maybe just a crazy old dog lady with a dilettante's fascination with space, life and consciousness.
It's a privilege and a pleasure to be able to converse with such learned and intelligent people about some of these topics. It's also an eye-opener to see the alien mental worlds in which some others live.
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated—Gandhi.
LuckyR and Greta: Between us, I am labeling you both philosophers.
No career is devoid of philosophy. Some careers may have more seeming philosophical potential than others. However, there are too many exceptions among common career perceptions, & the mere distinction would seem to reduce to that which is valued most, & how indeed that can be pursued in any "profession."
In its literal translation from the Greek a philosopher is simply a "lover of wisdom". By this simple definition I'm sure most people would declare themselves philosophers and are quite within their rights to do so. However by common usage a philosopher is generally assumed to be someone who takes a systemic approach to the acquisition of wisdom by using the tools of human reason. This thins out the field somewhat.
Greta wrote:
It's a privilege and a pleasure to be able to converse with such learned and intelligent people about some of these topics. It's also an eye-opener to see the alien mental worlds in which some others live.
I'd like to think I have a foot in both camps even though I spend most of my time in only one of them.
I am a philosopher, and here I tender an essay that may still be raw, but it's been sitting around for a week:
The Searchers/Philosophers
The young philosopher born in a cave, who is nameless, for I’m making her up, but duly representing all, feels the dirt on the floor and thus infers the existence of the Earth and its beginning as two pieces of dust sticking together, as well as all of the universe that must be out there.
Well, it might not have been that easy, but answers do come to those who bravely seek, braving even the devouring flames of the solutions to their perilous ponderings, the side quests along the way taking them to so many adventures, through dimly lit avenues, dark-alleys, dead-ends, and one-way streets, on which journey they risk never feeling the same again after the unexpected truth is cornered.
We are the universe come to life, made in its image of unity with multiplicity, with our holistic brain hemisphere operating in parallel and joined to the other one of sequential detail, like a floodlight of attention illuminating the whole scene at once and connected to the other brain hemisphere to a spotlight of attention moving linearly through the scene, they alternating their cyclic reign, as the yin in the yang and the yang in the yin, for a rounded life, perhaps.
And now the philosophical universe as us has slain blame and shame, the evil stepchildren of the notion of free will, for we dared to fight the free will dragon in its den, where fixed will emerged victorious, and crushed ‘randomness’ and dispensed with ‘luck’, but we are still delighted to have found another of the great revelations sought, never fearing, as seekers, the universal acid that must ever escape from Pandora’a Box of Truths and eat through our folk wisdom, wishes, and hopes.
We, too, have banished the possibility of Nothing’s being and giving rise to anything, leaving in its wake the Eternal ‘IS’ that has no more choice in being here than we do, each in the same boat; nay, ’tis more than that, for we are a part of the ‘IS’ come to life as the ship that sails on the winds of time.
Gone, as well, ‘God’, the Imaginary Fellow cursed for nought, as it turns out, and the exposed imposter, ‘Infinity’, who pretended to be an uncapped extent extant all at once, plus probably ‘Stillness’ squashed, which can never conquer change, and so, ironically, rests in peace, and, finally, the ’Beginning’ and ‘End’ of what IS—shown to be uncreateable and unbreakable, this further indicating a Cosmic merry-go-round of everything possible happening again and again, and even at the same times.
And long since have we learned of the greatest thought that anyone ever had, that of Evolution working via natural selection, resulting in endless forms most beautiful, change slowly accumulated from one stable platform to the next, sifting the best from the rest.
And other notions quashed, too many to list, but, one, for example, of the brain process of consciousness claimed to suddenly become something in itself floating free around the Cosmos as Consciousness, as if a word taken alone could grant the power. Au contraire, Brahman proposers, consciousness helps to visualize action scenarios before committing to them, it extending all the way from the brain to the nerve spindles.
Ah, philosophers, thinkers, and scientists, you are the triad of wise men who herald the birth of the Age of Revelations and the Downfall of Fantasy, this done whether you’ll like or not what’s being shown to be true.
What, though, is the pleasure to this universal play that we must act out, ever thrust onto the stage, blind to determinism’s script, living joyfully through the ups of the highest peaks and painfully in the downs of the lowest valleys?
It is experience, perhaps, for now we as the Cosmos have gained it. Be it though we are ever as tourists along for the ride, the view is awesome.
What to do? Well, we don’t ‘do’; it’s the reverse, the Cosmos does us. We don’t come into the Cosmos; we are of it.
So, the time is ever the present now, with neither a past imperfect nor a future tense, and the place is always right here.
Greta wrote:I don't have the readings, the qualifications or vocation to call myself a "philosopher". Before retiring I worked as an analyst so that's as good a label as any. Or maybe just a crazy old dog lady with a dilettante's fascination with space, life and consciousness.
It's a privilege and a pleasure to be able to converse with such learned and intelligent people about some of these topics. It's also an eye-opener to see the alien mental worlds in which some others live.
