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Comment by mapcars | Hacker News Reader

Philosophy to me is a kind of fanciful thinking. Article mentions something about being "purely theoretical", but is your life theoretical or real? If it's real you can't approach it by pure theory. As well as there is much more to life than just thinking.

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> Philosophy to me is a kind of fanciful thinking.

Then you don't properly understand philosophy.

One thing philosophy does is help you construct valid arguments and to recognize fallacies, which are very useful, practical skills.

I took a course on logic as part of my undergrad degree, and it was there that I learned about De Morgan's laws -- which I use frequently when I'm programming.

Moral philosophers confront some really big issues, but they're not all bizarre hypotheticals. Many of them have real-world consequences, such as the debate over euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Philosophy is not all about navel-gazing. It's unfortunate that so many people hold mistaken views about it.

I am quite competent software engineer and good at math too. But never really understand what Philosophy meant and what does it tries to study. To me sometimes it sounds like too much of a fake stuff like religion. Any resources or books that you can point to get a clear understanding of what philosophy really tries to study about ?

Ancient philosophers didn't believe it was purely theoretical. They thought it was a way of gaining wisdom and living a good life (or study of physics, but again, practical). But, then again, it is kind of an equivocation to say that most modern philosophy is philosophy in the sense it was taken before. It was taken to be highly practical in days of yore.

It's worth noting that a good part of the continental tradition since Marx doesn't view it as purely theoretical either, after all:

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."

Philosophy is the study of concepts. To get to something purely theoretical, you need to abstract the precepts of your original concepts. Then it becomes a floating abstraction.

Take for example Einstein: he found some mathematical formulas, proved they were right and then used them as the abstraction for everything else. His example of 'what if I stand on a train traveling at the speed of light and it gets hit by lightning' is no longer something that you can prove in reality.

Ideally, you need precepts and concepts to work together and keep validating that your concepts work in reality.

Mathematics and logic are more of a study of concepts than philosophy, highly contaminated by language and imprecision, could ever warrant to be.

(These are earliest branches out of philosophy by the way.)

Use of natural language makes most of the ideas entertained by philosophy highly ambiguous until they get formalized.

Even ethics can be strictly formalized in a more advanced logic system, making the ideas and applicability clear.

Or are we trying for something more complex, such as creativity?

That's what analytic philosophy has been trying to do for the past century. How well it has succeeded is debatable.

Maybe instead of thinking of language as poor, ambiguous version of logic, we should think of logic as a limited version of language.

Logic can't tell us what we should care about, how we should feel, what's worth pursing, what it means to exist as an animal with needs. We suffer, we desire, we wonder. Natural language captures that in a way that logic cannot.

Language can tell us all of that but it doesn't seem to get any closer to letting us know which ones are true and which ones aren't.

But that means you can't make valid conclusions relying on natural language alone.

Before mathematicians get to play with abstract concepts, they rigorously define and prove them. Philosophers also want to make conclusions about abstract concepts but they refuse or are unable to pay that price.

Shouldn't you be making your own argument within a formal logic, to avoid this awful ambiguity that makes it impossible to understand what you're saying or argue with you?

Exactly. I really think Philosophy is like religious gurus confusing the listeners with confidence and as though only they can understand but not put in clear words.

Out of curiosity, which philosophers have you attempted to read?

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