zimbabwe
Born on May 16, 2009•1373 Karma
Second point: Define meaningful. Philosophy, science, photography, painting, all are essentially ways of passing time before death, if we want to use the cosmic scale; on the personal level each activity has different meanings to different people. I'm not a big philosopher, but I enjoy that much more than science. Science bores me.
Where is it written that philosophy can't evolve based on scientific findings? And what makes you think painting's not useful? Perhaps portraits aren't as meaningful, but even there, designing a web site for a musician I commissioned a painting of him rather than a photo. With paintings you can specify colors ahead of time and make something that fits for the design. So there's an example of an archaic medium being used for modern purposes.
I don't like very much your us-versus-them mentality here. I don't like your suggestion that there's such a thing as too much education. My policy is, to each their own. I'll continue to be fascinated by those over-educated idiots I call my friends, and you can continue to do whatever you choose with your own time.
I expect some refinement of an artist's craft over time. Just look at his faces. As a point of comparison my sister is a long way from mastery but he presents a reasonable progression for a HS student.
14 years old: http://geomexia.deviantart.com/art/Wired-Mother-Earth-273474...
15 years old: http://geomexia.deviantart.com/art/Deep-Sea-Gold-34634785
17 years old: http://geomexia.deviantart.com/art/Looking-Up-37173397
18 years old: http://geomexia.deviantart.com/art/Turn-Around-Turn-Around-1...
Bacon had some interesting ideas, but he lacked the skills to really explore them. IMO, that is forgivable for a dabbler or young person, but it's just not acceptable for a serious artist.
Second when looking for truth, philosophy is a dead end. You can still use a horse and buggy to get around New York but there is a reason it's become far less popular over time. Painting as a means to convey meaning from an artist to his audience has been similarly demoted because there are better ways to capture what you have seen. Leaving panting with abstract ideas better conveyed though words and meaningless garbage.
If you're really looking for truth, then you need at least a little bit of philosophy to tell you what you're looking for. (I don't know about you, but I wasn't born with any very good ideas about what truth is, or why I should want to look for it.)
In my experience, people who claim not to have any use for philosophy usually have philosophical opinions cobbled together from whatever ideas happened to be in vogue ~50 years ago (those that have now permeated into the general culture). Ironically, the whole idea that science has "killed" philosophy is an offshoot of the philosophical school of logical positivism from the first half of the 20th century.
Thomas Aquinas spent much of his life using the bible to make a hole host of philosophic treaties based on the infallibility of the bible. Then he realized that his entire work up to that point was "a house built on sand" and that for example trying to prove the existence of god basses on biblical teachings was pointless. He died in 1274.
He is not all that well known for making that realization, but if you actually read his work it becomes obvious that in his latter work he understood christian philosophy was simply a game he was vary good at. You can study fad's and paint a superficial picture of the development of philosophy but looking at what was published and what was popular does not in any way tell you when an idea was first conceived.
PS: I was 3 years old when I asked my mother why people believe in God. Not "is there a god" but why do people delude themselves. As a christian she defended faith, but I had already decided it was BS. So I assume a significant number of people throughout history quietly called the popular fictions of the day BS, and went about their lives. Suggesting that we needed philosophy to separate some truth from fiction seems pretentious when there is an ancient tradition of "losing the faith".
Well yes, that point of view is very old, but then so is the opposite point of view. I thought your point was more substantial than this, i.e. that modern science somehow invalidated philosophy. This point of view is obviously at least no older than modern science.
I'm not sure what your point is re Aquinas. He was a brilliant philosopher who is still very much worth reading (even if his prose is a bit tedious), so he doesn't seem like a good example of why philosophy is pointless. You certainly don't have to believe in the infallibility of the bible to get something out of his work.
Anyway, finding someone who in his youth wrote elegant treaties on the definition of justice says nothing about his latter beliefs and due to our limited lifespan from a historical standpoint they take place at about the same era. I said / wrote many stupid things as I child that I no longer agree with. All it takes is the realization that your assumptions are often wrong to realize that Philosophy is a dead end. However, once you understand that there is little more to be said on the topic unless you concoct a system that lets you ignore that fact. So you might go from "proving the existence of god' to saying it’s a question of faith.
PS: "I think therefore I am" is not necessarily true for a puppet reading someone else’s lines or a part of a far large hole. So, "Do I think?" is about as far as philosophy can take you.
What's your point? The idea of science as something separate from philosophy which could actually replace philosophy altogether is basically a 20th century one, and is certainly no more than a few hundred years old. (Science just wasn't impressive enough before then for it to be a reasonable point of view.)
>All it takes is the realization that your assumptions are often wrong to realize that Philosophy is a dead end.
I don't see how that follows. The vulnerability of initial assumptions is a problem for any form of inquiry, science included, but it isn't a fatal problem. Much of philosophy is precisely about questioning assumptions.
>PS: "I think therefore I am" is not necessarily true for a puppet reading someone else’s lines
I have no idea what you mean by this, but it doesn't seem to address Descartes' argument. (He was obviously not suggesting that anyone who merely says "I think therefore I am" must necessarily exist.)
>or a part of a far large hole
whole?
>So, "Do I think?" is about as far as philosophy can take you.
This is manifestly nonsense. Unless you are seriously claiming that there has been no progress in logic, political philosophy, moral philosophy, the philoosphy of science, etc. etc. in the past few thousand years. At the very least, the range of possible views, and the best arguments for and against these views, are much better known and understood than they were before. And in some areas (e.g. logic, and those aspects of the philosophy of science pertaining to it) there has been progress in a much more definite sense.
If you disagree then [citation needed].
Philosophy is the study or creation of theories about basic things such as the nature of existence, knowledge, and thought, or about how people should live. To be clear Philosophy does not encompass math and it does not require testing of those theories.
PS: Skepticism is a philosophical attitude that questions the possibility of obtaining any sort of knowledge. It was first articulated by Pyrrho, who believed that everything could be doubted except appearances. (ca. 360 BC - ca. 270 BC) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrho
I think you are confused about where the burden of proof lies here. You are asserting the worthlessness of the entire cannon of Western philosophy (and quite possibly other branches of philosophy too). This is an incredible assertion.
By the way, why do you "exclude logic"? Logic has always been a central element of philosophy, at least since Aristotle.
>To be clear Philosophy does not encompass math and it does not require testing of those theories.
Philosophy certainly includes some areas of math (for example, mathematical logic derives partly from work by philosophers). As for whether or not philosophical ideas "need to be tested", that is such a vague locution that it's difficult to respond. But certainly philosophical ideas are supposed to be subject to scrutiny (e.g. compared to alternative points of view, shown to be consistent, etc. etc.)
PS. Thanks for telling me what skepticism is. By the way, if you are interested in testability, you might want to read the ample literature on this notion in the philosophy of science.
Thanks for telling me what skepticism is. no I showed an example of "modern" skepticism that is over 2,000 years old. Think about this ~2,300 years ago people were having the same basic argument as we are having today I can think of no other field which has stagnated to that degree.
It's the "confining oneself to phenomena or objects as they appear" where the break from philosophy occurs. From the scientific standpoint you ignore the concept of life after death and other "perplexities of life" because it's not knowable. A true scientist builds models on what phenomena he sees and lays no clams one what he can't. Now you might question how that works with a paleontologist, but confining oneself to phenomena means a he thinks it's reasonable to look for patterns based on what your eyes tell you because they are not deceiving you even if they are not a window to deep truth. A paleontologist does not argue with the fact god could have created the world ten seconds ago, rather he argues "excluding unknowable things" this is the patterns I see. But, a philosopher sees no lines of inquiry outside of his purview and still attacks the unknowable questions such as life after death or the invisible god who does nothing.
PS: A better example from that time would be how a water clock behaves after you leave the room, if it displayed the correct time when you get back may have gotten up and danced about the room before you got back and hidden that from you but if that's the case it's an unknowable truth best ignored for visible phenomena.
The thing that bites guy's ass is ridiculously sized if a lion was intended, and that front leg looks more human than animal (then again, he might be going for some mythological chimera-ish thing).
Overall, the drawing is confusing and I can't make out what many of the lines in the legs/ground area are supposed to represent.
Finally, this is not a casual doodle. Lines were drawn and refined several times over. If he was going for manierism or El Greco-ish stylization, fair enough, but still proves little about his ability to draw. If he was trying to achieve a render true to anatomy and perspective, I call fail.
I don't know whether Cézanne could draw or not, but I don't think this works as evidence that he could.
Are you saying JooJoo is interesting if you don't buy into the completely web-oriented whatever? Because they're not saying It won't sell for this price in your quote. They're just saying, unless your goal is to use the Internet, this isn't what you want.
Exactly my point. Throw in the fact that Google is putting all of their effort into relying fully on the web/cloud, I would think that the journalists would love this device too.
As for this tablet thing. Every person whose sources I trust have said the Apple tablet will be announced in early 2010. They've been saying early 2010 since late 2008, so I think I'm assuming that's correct. And I'm not saying it will be better than this glorified web browser, but Apple has a pretty superb track record when it comes to making new and innovative products. So there's hope that it might be really cool, as opposed to this, which is really lame.
Now, that's one of the reasons I'm interested now in the Apple Tablet. I'd bet that if Apple is releasing one, it's because they've figured out something clever that I'm not seeing myself, and their product will stand out from its competitors in terms of core functionality, and I'd like to see what that is.
I upvoted the comment because, for all Wired is jizzing over it, we're talking about a product that was just released. There're no really interesting information here. And from what I see of the product, it looks painfully limited. Perhaps it executes well, but it's just not doing much. Compare to Apple, which makes products that do a lot and still manage to do it well.
So when Wired mentions how it's just like the iPhone zomg!!!, I get this little voice in my head telling me the author doesn't know what he's talking about. That makes me more willing to upvote somebody making a snide comment that I agree with.
Maybe it's not the most intelligent HN comment, but how's that become groupthink to upvote it? How's it stupid or worth your losing your mojo?
Did you read the article?
And yes, your description of my sneer as having all the hallmarks of a sneer are right on too.
If you're only posting to be a cunt, there's no reason to be posting at all. You're allowed to sneer on your cozy little weblog for all your friends to read. Here we're pretending to be gentlemen.
Afraid I don't know enough about programmers or painters to spout names, but in any other artistic medium you've got a mix of all types. I'll use film as my example because film's a medium in which you have a hundred people working together, and very elaborate roles evolved to let people do exactly what they want to do.
Some directors function as merely directors. They decide what they like, and they have other people execute. But other directors can and do insist on controlling other parts of the creative process. I'm not a fan of James Cameron, but the guy writes, directs, and edits his movies, and he's very involved in set design as well. Some props he insists on making himself because he doesn't trust anybody else to do it right. So there's a guy who knows what he wants to do, and is also capable of the incredible technical feats required to pull it off.
Are you saying you like none of Picasso's later work? Or even Dalí's?
> There are forms of art where accuracy is prized, but in any kind of modern art, any rule can be broken if the result is interesting. > Are you saying you like none of Picasso's later work? Or even Dalí's?
I do like Picasso's and Dali's work and also Cezanne's work. I even like the picture I linked to. But this is the key part:
> if the result is interesting.
I don't see how the wrong perspective and tilted platter add to the appeal of the painting. It seems to be an accident.
Certainly for me, a tilted bowl of fruit that defies logic is more interesting than a boring bowl of fruit. It still doesn't fascinate me incredibly, but it at least adds something worth thinking about. I'm not that well-versed in painting, however, so perhaps somebody more enthusiastic than I can explain to both of us what makes Cezanne so awesome?
James Joyce not being a writer till 32? The man wrote the "best" novel of all time.
Sylvester Stallone wrote Rocky in three days? Hot damn, perhaps my own situation isn't so bad.
I'm just hoping they nativized the Mac version; I'd love to have a fourth major browser for tinkering with stuff.