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by dmreedy
3399 days ago
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I don't mean to understate or disrespect the scale of the task to which philosophers traditionally apply themselves; you're preaching to the choir there. But I do want to be careful not to inject too much mysticism into the picture. There is something persistently mystical to qualia, to sensitivity, to experience, the nature of existence, whatever else you want to lump under the category of 'scientifically unsolvable'. Whether you want to address it via Hegelian Contexts or Quinian Nominalism or Protestant Ecstasy; for as many understandings of these phenomena and their motivating metaphysics, there are an equal number of implicit definitions of the word 'rigor'. Even the romantics were still in the business of establishing their own systems within which to do work, in the form of proofs using the rules of those systems. They may not look like scientific systems, but they are still systems to do the work of solving problems, and thus run parallel to scientific systems (as a sibling poster has described). And so I prefer a much more charitable interpretation of the SO response. I agree with you that the goal of philosophy is not to rigorize its way out of existence - it probably can't, and probably for a superset of the reasons why meta-descriptive paradoxes arise. Nor is it to become a science in the technical sense (i.e., an empirical and deductive process in accordance with the scientific method). But do I think the goal of most philosphers is to build compelling systems within which their apostles may do work, or practice rigor. |
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That may or may not be what the modern philosopher's goal is, but I don't think it's fair to say, unequivocally, this was always philosophy's goal all along—or at the very least, such a claim is contested/disputed.
For example, Rorty [1] made the point that philosophy, as an epistemological enterprise that grounds the foundations of other sciences & give them credibility, really found it's start in the early modern philosophers, with their attempt to carve out a place for science inside dominant the religious world.
(At this point philosophy was continuous with the sciences.)
And then continuing w/ Descartes, Locke & Kant, to this version of philosophy which is no longer continuous with science, but rather playing this special epistemological role.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/#2