What is wrong with philosophy?

[vicdan]

What is wrong with our thoughts?

It's an awesome essay. It's kinda long, and there is no point in excerpting it. Just read the damn thing, and whimper in hopeless dread!

[DHodges]

Ouch!

[Dan Rowden]

Stove seems to have been an interesting character. Yet I wasn't aware of him until recently.

He as an Aussie so that accounts for his thinking quality (logical fallacy be damned!).

[David Quinn]

He waffles like an old woman, and I lost interest.

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[Kevin Solway]

He has some good quotable bits:

There is simply no avoiding the conclusion that the human race is mad. There are scarcely any human beings who do not have some lunatic beliefs or other to which they attach great importance. People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly.

It is hardly more helpful than saying, à l'Australien, that what is wrong with the passages in question is that they are "all bullshit".

Quine argued, with enough plausibility to satisfy some unexacting folk, that philosophy is continuous with empirical science; and Popper once tried to show that philosophical problems regularly have `their roots in science'. Such a belief can make for better philosophy. The only trouble with it is, it is not true.

I therefore believe that the future of the human race is safe in the hands of such typical representatives of it as Colonel Gaddafi, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and the African National Congress. Kant and Hegel, or some other equally 'great thinkers', will still be read with reverence by the most intelligent and educated part of mankind, long after modern science is forgotten, or is confined to a few secret departments of the bureaucracy.

[on Hegel] . . . And now I ask you: is it not true, as I said earlier, that these two real examples of the pathology of thought are far more revolting than any of the invented ones which made up my list of forty pathological propositions? Do you know any example of the corruption of thought which is more extreme than these two? Did you even know, until now, that human thought was capable of this degree of corruption?

[David Quinn]

Only the first quote can be considered in any way decent. So all up, that's only one half-decent quote in god-knows-how-many pages of convoluted rubbish.

I have to say that I am singularly unimpressed with Stove. It's difficult to distinguish him from a normal academic.

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[Kelly Jones]

At least he was brave enough to say that women are intellectually inferior to men, without being paid for it.

That's not something normal academics would do.


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[David Quinn]

But he does it in such a rambling, womanly fashion that it would be hard for anyone to take him seriously.

"Ah, there's grandpa being long-winded and cranky again. The dear is such a rascal at times!"

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[Kevin Solway]

It might be worthwhile for someone to make a summary of his essays, reducing them to about 4% of their original size. Then they might be quite readable.

[Kelly Jones]

It's only slightly easier for people to take you seriously, David. At least you get more creative insults than a fumbling footy star does.


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I shall scrape off Stove's useless growths, unless anyone else gets there first. The title, perhaps, "David Stove's posthumous words on Woman"......

[ChochemV2]

I fell asleep before finishing it but the gist seemed to be: many of the philosophers we hold in high regard were obviously insane and it's equally insane to lionize them especially after reading the drivel they have produced.

[Pye]

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Frankly, I enjoy a decent bitch-slap to philosophy for the sake of its own health, since this has to be the logical positivist's concern, definitively. When Stove says that the most that philosophy can achieve is this deconstruction - this showing where others' thoughts go wrong - I think he shoots his own tradition in the foot. "Metaphysical delirium" would have been dusted off in Logical Positivism 101, and the project then becomes what can be said. Stove's is a breed of positivism that restricts itself to the tasks of diagnostician, for by his own hand, this is all philosophy can do.

Past the elaborate loops of mental illness that a great deal of philosophy has produced (okay, in his book, virtually all of philosophy) are some general things to be gathered up, like the tendency to sense-making for all human beings; the function of error and dream for human being; the need to address its mental condition and subsequent suffering by way of these mental orderings; philosophy as activity, and any number of other things I have not sat down to think of more.

[If] a society of atheists could endure, was a question often discussed during the Enlightenment, though never decided. If the question is generalized a little, however, from 'atheists' to 'Positivists,' then it seems obvious enough that the answer to it is 'no.'

Something is sick here, too, to pick a sick question in the first place to fret over the dispensation of logical positivism itself. He does it again here:

I therefore believe that the future of the human race is safe in the hands of such typical representatives of it as Colonel Gaddafi, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and the African National Congress. Kant and Hegel, or some other equally 'great thinkers', will still be read with reverence by the most intelligent and educated part of mankind, long after modern science is forgotten, or is confined to a few secret departments of the bureaucracy. [empahsis mine]

Hyperbolic social satire or not, "modern science" (whatever he means by that) is well-drilled into the bosom of humanity. I'm blown out by the tenacity of metaphysics, too, now served so insidiously well by the age of terrorism. Nevertheless, this dire scenario demands of the logical positivist much more than his paranoid martyrdom.

Kelly writes:

I shall scrape off Stove's useless growths, unless anyone else gets there first.

my goodness, you are given to the dramatics . . . .

all you other shurggin' fuck-saying, not-worth-my-time readers. You and Stove have something in common, if you'd have read . . . .




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[Trevor Salyzyn]

He tries to appeal to common sense too much. His examples seemed carefully selected to be the worst passages from the writers in question, chosen simply because they make absolutely no sense out of context.

There's a huge difference between telling someone to flip to a random page of Finnegan's Wake and making sense of a random 2 sentences in a row, and reading an entire book to find the absolute worst sentence an author happened to get published. This guy completely ignores the principle of charity. The strawmen he creates are not Hegel, Aquinas, Kant, or Foucault (who are terrible in their own right, but not due to the reasons he gives... and each certaintly has hisr own points of merit).

Unless this essay is written farcically, I can't consider this man a philosopher. He makes too many easily avoidable mistakes. He's solipsistic, not truth-seeking.

[DHodges]

I'd like to think that they way thoughts can go wrong, while different in the details, would have several main categories; that a taxonomy of those ways would be helpful in avoiding mistakes, although there may be underlying differences in the exact ways different things went wrong.

For instance, while Astrology is wrong for different specific reasons than Numerology, it seems to me there are corresponding underlying errors. Both assign a meaning to something that in itself does not have one (a number or constellation). Both rely on the tendancy to notice things that agree with an idea (prejudice) you have, while discounting things that don't agree with that generalization. (Or finding patterns in random noise.)


The statement that really hurt my head was

8 There is an integer between two and four, but it is not three, and its true name and nature are not to be revealed.

which is some sort of attempt at creating mystery where there is none; kind of reminds me of that guy who came through here (Bubblefish?) a while back, always spouting off something about Mystery.

On the other hand, I kind of agree with:

37 The number three is not an ideal object of intellectual contemplation, but a concrete product of human praxis.

Is there an error there? What is it? Is it in insisting (or assuming) that it be one or the other, rather than allowing it to be both or neither? Does it mean anything for an abstraction to be a "concrete product"?

[Kelly Jones]

K:I shall scrape off Stove's useless growths, unless anyone else gets there first.

P: my goodness, you are given to the dramatics . . . .

all you other shurggin' fuck-saying, not-worth-my-time readers. You and Stove have something in common, if you'd have read . . .

I think you're getting a bit exciteable, Pye.

It wouldn't make sense to dechaff useless growths, and that was the alternative word I was thinking of.


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[Kevin Solway]

On the other hand, I kind of agree with:

37 The number three is not an ideal object of intellectual contemplation, but a concrete product of human praxis.

Is there an error there? What is it? Is it in insisting (or assuming) that it be one or the other, rather than allowing it to be both or neither? Does it mean anything for an abstraction to be a "concrete product"?

I gather that his point was that the number three has a direct reality in the human experience - in the Zen sense - and the more words you use to describe it the further you are away from the truth.

For example, what is "an ideal object of intellectual contemplation"? Is it an idea that has no practical value? Is there such a thing? The words seem to create even more problems than we began with.

[DHodges]

For example, what is "an ideal object of intellectual contemplation"?

I took that to mean a Platonic ideal. (Some mathematicians are closet Platonists.) But you make a good point - how can you say whether it is or is not such a thing? First you have to be clear on what such a thing would be. Otherwise it's kind of meaningless, or at least vague.

The words seem to create even more problems than we began with.

Indeed. Maybe that was part of the point - that this kind of thinking generates problems where there aren't really any. like that Holy Ghost thing.

I gather that his point was that the number three has a direct reality in the human experience - in the Zen sense - and the more words you use to describe it the further you are away from the truth.

Does it make sense to ask, what do we mean when we say the number three exists? It doesn't exist in the same way as a table exists - "three" it not itself a physical object, but a property of a group of objects.

Is that meaningful, or just getting caught up in semantic trickery?

[Elizabeth Isabelle]

I gather that his point was that the number three has a direct reality in the human experience - in the Zen sense -

I agree that his essay was boring, which is why I didn't bother going through all of it - and didn't even skim well until this interpretation came up. I found that section, and Kevin, I'm not sure what you mean by "in the Zen sense" here. Perhaps he was trying to be Zennish, but much of his Zen-sense seems to be nonsense.

To me, this explains what he meant by all those blurbs, which I gather he stated tongue-in-cheek:

I decided, if they were given some common thread of subject-matter, however slight; and better still, if that subject-matter were something so homely that no one would think it likely of itself to make our thoughts go wrong. I decided on the number three for this common thread of subject-matter; but nearly anything else would have done just as well.

The number 3 was chosen nearly at random. There is no real significance here.

Furthermore:

Here, then, are examples of forty different ways in which thought can go irretrievably wrong, of which we can identify only the first two.



1 Between 1960 and 1970 there were three US presidents named Johnson.

2 Between 1960 and 1970 there were three US presidents named Johnson, and it is not the case that between 1960 and 1970 there were three US presidents named Johnson.

List of US Presidents (on the left) and US Vice-Presidents (on the right)

Okay, maybe that was one of his better stabs at Zennishness, but still not really good IMO. Here is a particularly bad one:

29 Three is a positive integer, and the probability of a positive integer being even is ½, so the probability of three being even is ½.

Here, what he demonstrates is the fallacy of composition. Unless Zen is fallacious, this man has not demonstrated Zen.

Since his title was "What is Wrong With Our Thoughts" perhaps he was demonstrating fallacies, rambling, etc.?
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[Kevin Solway]

Since his title was "What is Wrong With Our Thoughts" perhaps he was demonstrating fallacies, rambling, etc.?.

Yes.

[Elizabeth Isabelle]

At least he was brave enough to say that women are intellectually inferior to men, without being paid for it.

Okay, I was able to read it once I figured out that the whole thing was intended as sort of a joke (although pointing to something true about how humans think poorly) - but Kelly, I can't find where he said anything about gender difference in intellect. Would you quote it please?
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