Introduction to A Philosophy Blog

First, there is a huge problem in philosophy today. There are many, but there is one big one. If you were to pick up an ordinary academic philosophy journal and read a fairly average article as an average person, you would be unable to read the article because of its use of language. The first part of this is that when we talk about very abstract ideas, we need specific language. The second part of this is that the philosophy community today has fallen off the shelf in its use of language to describe abstraction.

As elitist as the Greeks who founded our Western philosophical tradition were, the goal of philosophy was not to exclude someone who wasn't privy to a certain education. The ideal of even these elitist Greek aristocrats was that philosophy would provide a better way of living for anyone. The idea was to develop, "wisdom," a human knowledge, instead of merely - learning.

One of my favorite philosophy jokes is that we should rename philosophy today, "philo-episteme," instead of, "philosophy." The Greek, "episteme,"" meant learning, and philo meant, "love," or, "affiliation." So instead of, "philo sophos," or, "the love of wisdom," we might more accurately call post-modern philosophy, "love of learning."

So let me lay the plan of the blog out. I'm going to use tags in a very different way at this blog. Each article gets one and only one tag, and these tags will be our bargain bins for different categories of articles. This one will be tagged, "introduction." Some of the articles will be very abstract, but in keeping with avoiding, "ivory-tower syndrome," there will be articles titled, "simple briefs," for those who don't care for intense abstraction - or who don't have a gift for it.

If you don't have a gift for abstraction, this is not a moral flaw. In our better IQ tests today, people with a high abstract ability fail in other areas, particularly in the area of functional intelligence. The nutty-professor image we all have emerges because of this typical problem.

What we see is that a person has a huge abstract ability, but they can't figure out if tube-socks go on the left or right foot. As a bachelor, I've developed some of my functional ability, as I keep my home as best as I can, but the nutty professor image fits. Ask those who have known me for a long time - and it is real.

There will be historical articles, a set of dictionary articles for some unusual terms the blog will be forced to use, and then the meat of the articles will be contained in the tag, "categorical principles." To keep things clear, the breakdown of our bargain bins will go like this:

1. Introduction
2. Simple
3. Historical
4. Dictionary
5. Categorical

I'll revise my idea and use one word for the tag, as that keeps the solution to the problem even more minimal.

Let me finish off with my own biography in philosophy. I was always a person to question, and a buddy of mine who has since gone to pieces recommended the Ayn Rand books to me. I was obsessed with Ayn Rand and her Objectivist philosophy for a few years. I matured, and I saw that the content was not what I had thought, and I saw that Rand's books were mostly polemic, and I rejected the entire ordeal. However, one great part about this is that I started opening other philosophy books, starting with Nietzsche, then Plato, and moved on to Kant and Frega and Sartre and Camus and Santanyana and Nagarjuna and the Guatma Buddha - even Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

I do not have an official philosophy education, but I'm widely read on the topic, and I've formed some serious opinions on the topic. Also, as it turns out, there are two pieces of Rand's Objectivism, first the existentialist, "existence exists," and second, Peikoff's theory of knowledge in context that are very important to my own thinking today. It may be that other philosophers have discussed these ideas better, but those fragments are the ones I have seen, and they are important.

Taking, "existence exists," the way Rand approached it is not effective. That much I knew pretty far back. If we look at the concept of identity in mathematics, this is really important to quantitative analysis. If our number is 3 then it has identity as the number 3. There are other quantities - approximations, quantities defined as having variable quantities, or the limit of calculus.

The limit in calculus is an abstraction that is hard to understand, and yet it forms the basis of our calculus today. I once joked that one way to define a limit is, "a number that doesn't have identity with itself." This is crude and not exactly right, but it is kind of close to the definition of a limit. It really is.

So the idea of identity is important in terms of quantities, but that doesn't necessarily mean it applies to anything else. After scrap-booking a great deal, I think there is credence for the idea that identity is a solid ontological principle, rather than just part of quantitative analysis. Ontology is defined pretty simply as, "a study of what we know to exist (rather than the study of what actually exists.)"

It was one of Kant's firm suggestions - and a quite correct one - that as people we ought to realize that knowledge-of-existence is not the same as existence-itself. It took the Western mind 6000 years to get to dry, dusty, nutty old Kant - who radically suggested that knowledge and existence were not the exact same thing. This is why Kant was no fool. However, you should read a good biography - only Hegel could have been more of a dummy in his personal life.

That about sums up our basic issues at hand. I think what we may do is start with a sort of imitation of Russell's, "The Basic Problems of Philosophy," and then we'll just branch out and fill in the gaps in these bargain bins, and you can trawl the site for what you want to read. That pretty much sets this particular blog up, and so we're off to our next article. Just a moment.