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The Consolations of Philosophy

  
  

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Quantum
20:01 / 23.03.07
So I've been thinking of starting this for a while. I'm a philosopher, and I love to discuss philosophies of every stripe, but here in the Headshop it is not a popular topic. I think one factor is the relative paucity of philosophical education- most people don't study it because it's not available until further education. I was lucky enough to have A level philosophy available when I was 16 which I very much enjoyed, and which gave me a taste for it enough to pursue a degree in it, but most people don't have the opportunity to even study the basics.

I'm specifically thinking of classical philosophy like epistemology and ontology, obviously postmodern thought gets a lot of time in the Headshop. The spur for this, I'll admit, is the painful theist/atheist debates in the Dawkins thread among others (don't get me started on the Temple Atheism thread) which makes me wonder whether people even know classical philosophy exists. Here's an old thread Has Philosophy Failed Us?, this one I was intending to discuss whether philosophy was worth studying, people's attitudes toward it and what benefit it provides.

*more*
 
 
SMS
21:37 / 23.03.07
Philosophy is a pleasure.

I try to study it wherever I can, but I do not have the kind of background I want to have. I could not write a dialogue, for instance, accurately reflecting a debate between Aristotle and Plato on epistemology, although I could identify "Aristotelian strands" and "Platonic strands" in an epistemology that could be given. I don't quite know how to approach ontological questions in a broad and sophisticated way, etc. But that doesn't have to be a barrier if the questions are asked in a way that makes the important points clear.

But even so, philosophy is fun.

It is also important to life, simply because the questions that are asked, even at the most basic level "how do we know?" "what is man?" have enormous implications for every area of life, personal and political.

Even the question of why philosophy is worth studying matters. Lenin would say that there can be no revolution without a revolutionary theory. You know, I’m no Leninist, but the point is taken.
 
 
Haloquin
22:16 / 23.03.07
Ooooh! Philosophy in the philosophy/identity etc. forum? Yay!

I love studying philosophy and am always disappointed with how shallow most peoples thoughts on philosophical issues (which is every issue you can think of) are. It mostly frustrates me that as soon as most people realise its a 'philosophical' conversation, even if they are handling it perfectly well, they panic and clam up! Anyway, rant over. BTW; I am blatently not referring to Barbelith.

Context; I am a philosophy student at university, I studied it at A-level but found that A-level philosophy was posing many questions me and my best friend had already discussed... except we had less background.

I come down hard on the side that philosophy and the study thereof is very important, if only because it teaches people that they are capable of looking at things from different angles and challenging their own assumptions. Such as why we think something is real, what we mean by 'real'... how that relates to real life... what it means to be responsible beings, whay we maintain that we have to be held responsible... etc. It also teaches the importance of not caring so much whether someone agrees with you or not... them agreeing is not necessary for your point to be valid.

If you take 'philosophy' as a fairly broad definition; if no-one did philosophy at all, nothing would get questioned.

Its also worth looking at the argument that politicians are influenced by philosophers, as is the rest of society; Plato's hierarchy of forms over matter has influenced our society, mostly through the dualistic tendencies of Christainity. When you study other philosophers you come across more than just that perspective, the current assumption that some kind of dualistic soul-body or mind-body, or even brain-body, worldview is correct is challenged when you see Heidegger's exposition on the nature of our Being... following his arguments it becomes meaningless to posit this kind of divide/dualism.
Which then leads to a reevaluation of the concepts already held in a new light. And the conclusion may be the same, but at least you have a better idea of why you hold it!

In summary... studying philosophy is good because it shows you how to present an argument, how to find the holes in your argument and other's arguments, which can strengthen them... and challenges you to think in ways that may offer insight on the ideas you hold, rather than just accepting them on blind faith.

To be clear, blind faith has its place. But its place is not everywhere... especially not in places where it gets people killed. (e.g. Socrates and countless other people who dared to ask questions to try and make things a little bit better, who, for example, claimed they saw the world was round and the sun stayed still, but were murdered because people were too, what? too scared to challenge their precious worldview.) Perhaps thats one reason people shy from it, we're taught it is bad to question, apparently, so to be questioned and to respond must be bad.

Its getting late and I'm rambling away from myself, I hope this hasn't been too scattered.
 
 
SMS
22:30 / 23.03.07
Some day, someone has to explain to me how dualism is bad or wrong or impossible or whatever one calls it without being dualistic.
 
 
SMS
22:31 / 23.03.07
That wasn't meant to be snarky. I mean, I really would like it explained.
 
 
Haloquin
23:01 / 23.03.07
I'm not thinking its necessarily bad or wrong, just that it isn't the only option. It gets bad rep because its so prevalent and our language makes it difficult to say anything that doesn't imply a dualism... which means that if we want to express a different idea the language makes it hard. I'll try and respond more directly to the problems of dualistic thinking in terms of mind/body etc, when I'm less tired, but my point was intended to be that there is more than one way of looking at things, which is somethimes hard to see.
 
 
Charlus
09:23 / 24.03.07
If you feel the need to ask this then, perhaps, a) you are looking for some kind of answer ] or b) you shouldn't bother.

Perhaps it is all hinged on maturity?
 
 
Haloquin
13:39 / 24.03.07
Feel the need to ask what? 'why bother?' ?

Surely the reason to go to the bother of asking the question in a place where people try to answer implies that an answer is desired by the person asking... or at least I'd hope that was the case.

Why does it hinge on some area of maturity to ask people what their opinions are about whether or not we should bother with a particular subject and what their opinions are on it? Or do you mean that it takes maturity to 'do' philosophy?

I'm a little bemused/confused by your response, and still thinking about SMS' query on dualism.
 
 
Quantum
14:15 / 24.03.07
Perhaps it is all hinged on maturity?

Sorry, what? That's not making a lot of sense I'm afraid.

Some day, someone has to explain to me how dualism is bad or wrong or impossible or whatever one calls it without being dualistic.

Basically, Descarte's Meditations on First Philosophy is full of holes, yet is the fundamental position most people take as 'common sense', a kind of philosophical Newtonian mechanics. If the Mind and Body are seperate and different things, how do they interact?
As it happens, I recently came across Experiential Dualism which doesn't posit physical and *mental*, but instead says there is a physical world and also non-physical experience which is undeniable (qualia). I found it pretty convincing, but there's not much online about it. Here's an overview of the philosophy of mind if that helps.


Here's the *more*- I see the study of philosophy as more of a procedural skill than a body of knowledge, it's about training yourself to think in a certain way. I think it fosters clarity of expression and intellectual rigour, and is a formalisation of the urge everybody gets in the middle of the night to work out the Big Questions, why are we here, is there a god, what is reality like, how do we know things etc.
Philosophy also (IMHO) underpins all other disciplines, allowing us to examine belief systems and their assumptions and implications, like an intellectual microscope or theoretical X-ray machine. You get the philosophy of science but not the science of philosophy for example.
So for me, Why bother? can be answered easily in one way- it's a basic impulse, an extension of my curiosity, thinking about philosophy is like poking something interesting with a stick or throwing stones at the sea, it's just something humans do. In another way it's a hard question, because why *do* we lie in bed at night wondering what happens when we die, or if we're a butterfly dreaming we're a person or whatever? Where does that impulse come from?

(Consolation of Philosophy is a philosophical work by Boethius written in about the year 524 AD. It has been described as the single most important and influential work in the West in medieval and early Renaissance Christianity, and is also the last great work that can be called Classical)
 
 
unbecoming
14:36 / 24.03.07
Some day, someone has to explain to me how dualism is bad or wrong or impossible or whatever one calls it without being dualistic.
I also thought that the problem with setting up an opposed duality is that one of the terms is privileged over the other.

a kind of philosophical Newtonian mechanics
I like this phrase. To me philosophy can act as an interrogation of the operations of the human consciousness, and, as a consequence, the greater operations of the culture we find ourselves within.
 
 
Charlus
10:21 / 25.03.07
Well, perhaps you could ponder what maturity means in relation to philosophy. Perhaps someone could provide a post on maturity in general, I don't know.

Your post gave me the shits, good and proper. But I felt it to be disappointing, more than anything else.
 
 
SMS
13:08 / 25.03.07
seamus, if you find a post (and, by God, a thread!) to be disappointing, please ignore it. There’s no reason in the world people here should be worried about whether you find their posts disappointing. If you hear two people talking in the hallway about something that doesn’t interest you, you don’t interrupt their conversation and say, "excuse me, but I couldn’t help overhearing and I just wanted to tell you that I don’t find anything you two are talking about very helpful."

If you have an actual point to make (such as suggesting that philosophy isn’t terribly helpful, really, and that there’s no reason for a mature person to engage in it — hence, no "mature" philosophy, no Philosopher (in the classical sense) who performs philosophy — then you need to flesh out that point.
 
 
Blake Head
14:20 / 25.03.07
Quants, I was fortunate enough to be in one of those schools that offer pre-further education classes in philosophy, and on top of affecting my own ways of thinking about things by introducing new concepts, and providing a language to discuss such issues with, it meant I went on to study philosophy during the earlier half of my degree. The dual focus on learning a body of knowledge as well as procedural skill feels familiar, but I was disappointed that during that period of study the emphasis was always placed firmly away from developing that procedural skill as a way of better resolving the great philosophical issues, and restrained within a historical context of examining and explicating how other philosophers had done so in the past - not that those are worthless, it just felt limited to that if you see what I mean. Almost the sense that if we the philosophical establishment haven’t been able to solve these insoluble problems, then you the undergraduates certainly haven’t a chance (certainly not until you’re working on your doctorate at least), and in fact they most likely must be incapable of resolution, and therefore we must concentrate on the techniques and methods of argument as an end in themselves. Which is a shame, I felt, as philosophy even beyond other more practical disciplines shouldn’t at all be a way of withdrawing from the detailed examination of the world and instead a way of getting much deeper into it.

It was that sort of dissatisfaction with an unwillingness or lack of motivation to attempt to furnish the Big Questions with Big Answers that meant I concentrated more and more on using whatever skills I’d picked up to address the details of issues as they arose, and to be honest I’ve largely lost interest in pondering the organisation of complete systems. That might all have been related to the subjectivity of the specific department I was studying within of course – I’m sounding quite bitter here aren’t I? So far, the results for me personally have been a patchy knowledge of most of the major historical issues, and perhaps more significantly a (highly imperfect) tool which can be applied to issues in which I’m currently focusing on – and in that sense I most often find it very useful as a very precise, very selective skill for dissecting the minutia of arguments rather than in systematic building work, and even then there’s an effort to reward ratio in how effective that tool is in certain environments.
 
 
SMS
14:52 / 25.03.07
I think that's a fair criticism of a number of schools. I'm reading a book by Luc Ferry right now, where he essentially makes the same claim, that philosophy has become a study of how people have dealt with important questions, but that the people today have pretty much given up on them. I wonder what criteria we apply that makes our generation particularly hopeless about philosophy’s prospects.
 
 
Quantum
13:46 / 27.03.07
philosophy has become a study of how people have dealt with important questions, but that the people today have pretty much given up on them.

I get a feeling that the way the questions are framed is the problem. We need something akin to the quantum revolution in physics. When people were debating whether light was a wave or a particle, it must have seemed impossible to resolve, but with hindsight it's clear the framing was in error, the fundamental assumptions about the world were wrong. I'd like to think that the problems of Mind, Free Will and the rest will eventually be resolved not by a killer argument but by re-framing the questions.

One problem with philosophy is it's tendency to pointlessness. I'm thinking about things like proof that you can truly say 'P is not-P' and other intellectual novelties- most people would rightly see that sort of philosophy as having little utility. I think of that sort as 'art' philosophy, making beautiful conceptual structures for their own sake, contrasted with 'work' philosophy which has practical relevance, like determining the nature of consciousness and AI theory etc.


For those interested, I can prove that 'P=notP' is true and meaningful. Like an epistemological party trick
 
 
Closed for Business Time
14:37 / 27.03.07
Oh go on then! I once taught 8-year olds that 2+2=5.. Fun getting paid for that.
.......................
I do see your point about philosophy having an "art" section and a "work" section. I just don't think you can divorce the two from each other in any meaningful way, at the moment. What is a beautiful, but seemingly remote piece of conceptual structure can the next day be directly relevant to the daily grind. I'd nominate a lot of philosophy of mind as candidate for a field of philosophy where a lot of previously obtuse and obscure thought has with the advent of cognitive and neuro-sciences become very relevant.
 
 
Quantum
14:50 / 27.03.07
I just don't think you can divorce the two from each other

I suppose not, but certainly the layperson's view of philosophy is that it's all about angels dancing on the head of a pin or saying ridiculous things like there's no such thing as existence or mathematics is arbitrary.

Okay, party trick in a nutshell. Thought experiment- you go back in time to the middle ages, when they thought madness was caused by demonic possession. You with your modern knowledge of human psychology know that in fact they are not demonically possessed but suffer psychological disorders, but the people of the time have never heard the term because psychology hasn't been invented, so you are forced to refer to the group of people you mean by the terms they use.
You say 'All those people possessed by demons are not possessed by demons' i.e. All X are not-X, and it is true, meaningful and not a paradox. Voila.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
15:15 / 27.03.07
Hah! Nice try, but no cigar... I think you would have to rewrite this as "All the people X you think are Y are in fact not Y, thus X = not Y". Otherwise you're just obfuscating it by phrasing the proposition awkwardly, no?
 
 
Quantum
18:52 / 27.03.07
All the people X you think are Y are in fact not Y, thus X = not Y

Ah but there is only the one group to refer to (people-possessed-by-demons) so X and Y are the same term. Write it out in full- All the people-possessed-by-demons you think are possessed-by-demons are in fact not-possessed-by-demons, thus people-possessed-by-demons = people-not-possessed-by-demons. It was part of a proof of something else presented by a professor of mine to his colleagues that my friend and I crashed as undergrads, the rest of what he said was too abstract for me to understand enough to remember. The key to it is that you can't say they are Y (suffering from psychological disorder) because there is no Y to say, in that context it is meaningless. Thus under some specific circumstances it's possible to truly say X=notX.
 
 
Slim
02:43 / 28.03.07
I suppose not, but certainly the layperson's view of philosophy is that it's all about angels dancing on the head of a pin or saying ridiculous things like there's no such thing as existence or mathematics is arbitrary.

Are you aware that you cited an experiment involving time travel to prove that philosophy is not ridiculous?
 
 
Slim
02:45 / 28.03.07
Or rather, are you aware that such an example would probably not keep "lay people" from thinking that philosophy is ridiculous and a waste of time?
 
 
Princess
08:31 / 28.03.07
Well I'm fairly lay and I didn't think it was ridiculous. The point of thought experiments is to highlight problems/ideas by moving them into unreal/extreme circumstances. If it was framed as a thought experiment and then unpacked into a more practical context for the anti-philosophy peeps (Misosophists?) I can't see many of them taking issue.

Although you could say "those people, who you think are possessed by demons, are not possessed by demons" which would be a bit clearer and solve the problem.
 
 
Quantum
17:13 / 28.03.07
Hey slim- try re-reading these words what I wrote upthread;

One problem with philosophy is it's tendency to pointlessness. I'm thinking about things like proof that you can truly say 'P is not-P' and other intellectual novelties- most people would rightly see that sort of philosophy as having little utility...

That might clear some things up. While we're at it though, your objection to counterfactuals has philosophical precedent, some people say since it didn't happen that way it's pointless to talk about what-ifs. On the other hand, thought experiments have traditionally been very useful in clarifying implications of arguments, for example, 'what if we were just brains in jars'? That's not only a ridiculous counterfactual claim but a thought experiment too, what toss! It sounds like you are a Wittgenstein fan, am I right? 'What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence'? Perhaps a logical positivist after Ayer, denying as meaningless any untestable proposition?
 
 
Quantum
17:23 / 28.03.07
Just to put the thought experiment into it's grave, I think we can agree that you could pretty quickly explain to your mediaeval audience what mental illness was and thus explain what you meant. The point of it is that the proposition 'P=notP' is meaningful even though it violates one of the fundamental laws of thought, the law of identity (P=P) which Aristotle mentioned back in the 4th century BC;

"Now 'why a thing is itself' is a meaningless inquiry (for -- to give meaning to the question 'why' -- the fact or the existence of the thing must already be evident-e.g. that the moon is eclipsed-but the fact that a thing is itself is the single reason and the single cause to be given in answer to all such questions as why the man is man, or the musician musical', unless one were to answer 'because each thing is inseparable from itself, and its being one just meant this' this, however, is common to all things and is a short and easy way with the question)." - Metaphysics Book VII, Part 17

So. Let us never speak of the possessed people again, it was a dreadful and confusing mistake for me to bring it up at all and I apologise.
 
 
Good Intentions
22:36 / 06.04.07
Well, you know, just because most people make no study of logic doesn't mean that it's pointless. I used to think logic was kinda irrelevant, because the only things we know from logic are things we had already known. This is true, but misses what logic is and what it's used for. If I go, for instance, like I very often do, for your claim to be true, this other thing has to be true, and it isn't, so your claim falls down, then you are using logic.

Well, you know, just because most people make no study of epistemology doesn't mean that it's pointless. For instance, philosophy of science, which is strongly epistemological, very closely informs how people go about science, and we can all agree that there are advances made in science (even if we can't agree as to how much progress is going on). When someone goes well, that's true, but it's not particularly meaningful, because you can't falsify that statement, as people very often go, that's straight-up Popper. That's not only philosophy, that's very recent analytic philosophy . It's also staggeringly useful.

Well, you know, just because most people make no...
 
 
Good Intentions
22:46 / 06.04.07
Just to put the thought experiment into it's grave, I think we can agree that you could pretty quickly explain to your mediaeval audience what mental illness was and thus explain what you meant. The point of it is that the proposition 'P=notP' is meaningful even though it violates one of the fundamental laws of thought, the law of identity (P=P) which Aristotle mentioned back in the 4th century BC;

I liked your example, but you're going a bit far now. Without getting too deeply involved in the distinctions between symbolic logic, what you're talking about, and philosophic logic, what Aristotle's talking about (because we both know them, I'm sure, and nobody else here cares), you are making a statement in the form P is not-P, but the logical content of your statement is that P is false. You have shown an interesting problem in affixing identities which shows why symbolic logic was developed (where there is a distinction between the label of the group and the logical truths about that group, for those keeping score) but you have hardly contradicted the laws of thought.
 
 
SMS
04:13 / 08.04.07
Let P signify its own representation (ie, the color black against a white background, with a particular location in space and time and a particular meaning).

Then P ≠ P. What's more, given any x, P ≠ x, for x could at best only signify the infinitely self-referential P, but could not thereby be signified by that same P, which only ever refers to itself.

The bit about the demons is helpful because it points out some practical limitations of language. As was said, the bit about the demons could be overcome by a bit of explanation to the Medieval audience (who, by the way, would probably find most modern people incredibly condescending and who often would be perfectly justified in telling us to bugger off), but there are also practical limitations of language, as well. The propositional form S is P has its limitations. The analogical form X is to Y as A is to B has different limitations, since it allows communication about B even without potentially substantive knowledge about B’s content. Beyond this, there are performances, acts of speech, poetic expressions, …
 
 
Good Intentions
09:30 / 08.04.07
Let P signify its own representation (ie, the color black against a white background, with a particular location in space and time and a particular meaning).

Then P ≠ P. What's more, given any x, P ≠ x, for x could at best only signify the infinitely self-referential P, but could not thereby be signified by that same P, which only ever refers to itself.

Sorry, I didn't follow that. You assign a label to something, something very specific (though why you use the term 'its own representation' I don't get), and then you say that label is false. I don't follow that.
 
 
SMS
13:05 / 08.04.07
The first symbol is meant to signify itself. The second symbol is meant to signify itself. Thus, the first cannot be equivalent to the second because the first is the first and the second is the second. The equals sign separates them making it impossible for the two to be equal to each other.

I think this is supposed to tell us something about subjectivity (the I who speaks and the me of whom I speak), but some other people here might know better than I.

or me …
 
 
Good Intentions
00:09 / 09.04.07
Oh, P means that P. OK, I'm with you.

That says absolutely nothing. It carries no content. Look disparagingly at people who tell you things like that. It would be clearer if you labelled the seperate Ps differently, because they refer to different things.
 
 
Quantum
10:56 / 19.04.07
you are making a statement in the form P is not-P, but the logical content of your statement is that P is false.

Well since we're playing... my professor was using it as a part of a proof about the philosophy of language. The group of people referred to, let's call them D for Demonically possessed, are defined by one characteristic- demonic possession. We see their common characteristic as mental illness instead, but the group is the same, sharing only one factor.
When we say "D are not demonically possessed" we are referring to a group of people. To our audience that group of people is defined by the quality of demonic possession, to them "D are possessed by demons" is a tautology i.e. to deny it is a contradiction.

So when we come along and deny it, to them it is just as if someone came to us and said "All things that are red are not red"- obvious nonsense, P=NotP. From our enlightened future perspective it makes sense, to them it doesn't, just as future people will look back on things we believe now and see them in a way we can't grasp because the concepts haven't been invented yet.

So yes, in a way you could rephrase it to "Demonic possession is a lie" or something but that isn't the point- in it's actual phrasing, it is a valid, meaningful proposition in that circumstance to say "D are not D".


And regarding the utility of Philosophy, I heard a philosopher on Radio 2 yesterday debating the ethics of wi-fi, and I bet he got paid. There's still hope!
 
 
Good Intentions
14:17 / 19.04.07
No, I stand by what I said. When you label a group D and when you say that people are not-D, D in those two cases are strictly speaking different. In the first case it's an identifier, in the second it's a statement. You can describe that exact set of people in any way you like, giving them any name that you like, and all would be fine as long as you did it consistently. When I say that the people that are possessed by demons aren't, you know who I'm talking about, what I'm referring to, which would be impossible if I was using a logical contradiction (if I said to a material science class: "all the solid gasses") - there's more going on with naming these people D than the ascribtion of demonic possession. You have a set D, labelled in whatever way. One would be confused to think that the label and the thing described by the label are the same thing. An example - when I say Newcastle, do you think 'new castle' or the city on the Tyne (or in Australia, or the dozen or so other places)? The meaning of the term when unpacked is perfectly clear - a recently acquired fortification - but that's not what you mean when you say it. That's what I've been saying, and why I maintain that it is correct. Set D are not possessed by demons. Newcastle is not a new castle.

You can go about it another way, which still backs me up. You can say that D describes the set of people who are (actually) possessed by demons. The medievals would place in this set D all mentally disturbed people. What you are saying when you are saying 'the people who are possessed by demons aren't possessed by demons' is 'set D is empty'.

Modernite: "Those people aren't possessed by demons."
Medieval:"What, the people we say are possessed by demons?"
Modernite:"Yes."
Medieval:"What are they then?"
Modernite "[something else]"

It's not a matter of me being able to twist this statement in this way, it's that you can't twist it to mean what you say it does in a logically cogent way.
 
 
Quantum
16:42 / 19.04.07
Modernite: "Those people aren't possessed by demons."
Medieval: "What people?"
Modernite: "The people you say are possessed by demons."
Medieval:"The possessed people aren't possessed?"
Modernite: "That's right. Allow me to explain..."

One would be confused to think that the label and the thing described by the label are the same thing.

Of course. But when referring to external objects, we describe them with language, labels, which the statement 'P=notP' is composed of. That formulation is usually considered contradictory and thus false. It's not about the people themselves, the things in the world, ding an sich, it's about the language.
More concretely, to a madiaevalite 'non-possessed possessed people' sounds like 'all the solid gasses' does to physics students.
 
 
Lurid Archive
19:28 / 19.04.07
Im not sure I really buy the example, quants. Not that I am a big fan of using logic in any strict sense for everyday situations (outside math and science applications, perhaps), but it seems that if you are going to flag up a contradiction you should at least take an example which doesnt assume that the audience has no actual human intellience. I mean, I'm sure you can design a computer to go "Does not compute!" when faced with the "logical contradiction" of new information - this is what your example really is - but Im not sure what it really tells you apart from the fact that a model of truth that allows no exception, change or amendment isnt actually very useful. *shrug* Not so surprising though, is it?
 
 
SMS
00:38 / 20.04.07
But there's still the question of whether the form of the statement might not be an essential factor in the meaning. When the modernist speaks to his medieval counterpart (and with the utmost arrogance in assuming that he is just unadvanced and 'without certain concepts' like mental illness), the meaning is shaped by the tone of the voice, the facial expressions, the indication of the hands, and by the relationship the two persons already have with each other. To attempt to cut away the complexities of that meaning and bring out a pure meaning, which could then be expressed with all the dryness of chalk on a board, with a professor lecturing his students — is this not a vain attempt? Is it not destined to so completely alter the original meaning from something about demons and menal illness to something as anal and self-referential as discourse on discourse? It does just that. The new meaning expressed on the chalkboard has virtually no relation to the original meaning (its mother, so to speak). If anything is to be said of the remaning relationship, it is that the man at the chalkboard could only be a modernist, now speaking to other modernists.

And that’s one of the major pitfalls of the modern philosopher. His title can get to his head. He might begin to think that he has discovered and needs to relay his discovery to an unsuspecting and underdeveloped civilization.
 
  

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