[salmonax]

I didn't start taking classes in philosophy until several quarters ago and had merely read out of interest for some years. It has always been a matter of some discomfort that people hold even THIS sort of knowledge at arm's length, fail to truly enter into it, mistake a kind of aimless and wandering detachment from the essential questions for objectivity, and fail to develop any understanding whatever of philosophy as a project.

I have no stake in this matter except an intellectual one. It's quite saddening for me to see yet another formal student of philosophy produce such a boring, typical, and downright naive treatise on the subject, a writer who has chosen to convert into assertions of half-truths a thinly veiled myopia.

If this is the sort of intellectual cynicism that the modern institution produces, then I am quite happy that I've had no part in it.

And why on earth is there no mention of the Americans? Is that once burdgeoning and scientifically literate pragmatist tradition completely lost to us? Why are we still dwelling on the befuddled analytic solution to continental problems when such great American minds as Charles Sanders Pierce have made such sharpening new developments without precociously discarding the old? And their writing is as far as anything out there from being mealy-mouthed or inexact.

I'm sorry, but we can do a hell of a lot better than this. And we ought to; our current level of science demands it.

[ww]

A degree in Philosophy = the same value as a degree in computer science. You come out knowing about as much as someone with 2 to 12 months of real life experience depending on how much you applied yourself. You shouldn't expect anyone who 'majored' in something to actually have applied it.

To get that experience I would challenge PG to go around the internet and debate something like universalism vs nominalism. You would have to take the nominalism side if you think 'math' is 'science' and not philosophy. Remember though, that bertrand russel was a universalist .. you know .. that strange believe that numbers exist outside of the human mind and are not physical, sort of like what Plato believed.

PS forget Wittgenstein. To quote him: 'My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless'.