I think I'm a fundamentally pragmatic person and I have a prejudice against things I find lacking pragmatism, such as philosophy. I don't say this with pride - I say it to illuminate a personal blind spot of mine. I also agree with you as far as curiosity and perspective, but I think I'm far more open to, shall we say, "applied philosophy." This is one of the things I love about Kundera - his works are very much an exploration of "what would you do? And why?" while Daniel Quinn drives me up the fucking wall ("allow me to contrive an artificial situation so that I can make a point that has no basis in real life"). It probably is related to an engineering background- or at the very least, an engineering mindset. Theoretically, you should be able to divide a bar of chocolate in half an infinite number of times. Practically, you're going to hit the wall just a little bit south of "chocolate chips." Theoretically, I can walk halfway to the wall forever. Practically, I'm going to bump my nose after a few minutes. Asymptotes are very real but so is precision, and there are very few things in life where the precision of the problem permits asymptotic behavior. So I look at a list like this and think "Qualia? Who fucking cares? So long as we can all agree what blue looks like does it really matter?"
Ha! Exactly! But that's still a form of philosophy. It's just divergent from the main stream (the main stream, in this case, is incorrect, IMO). That's why I argue that bad philosophy can hold us back quite a bit, scientifically speaking, but that good philosophy can help us look in interesting places and form new ideas. (As an aside, your statement is almost exactly what Wittgenstein, the most hated of philosophers by philosophers, argued in The Philosophic Investigations; the book is written in conversational form; the quote: “How is he to know what color he is to pick out when he hears ‘red’? — Quite simple: he is to take the color whose image occurs to him when he hears the word.”)"Qualia? Who fucking cares? So long as we can all agree what blue looks like does it really matter?"
I'ma read me some then. Fukkit. I've been building a studio and mainlining audiobooks at double speed for the past three weeks and could use a change. On the plus side, I now understand the middle east, terrorism, islam and the PNAC. On the minus side, it'd take me a week to explain.
His two major works are The Philosophic Investigations and Tractatus Philosophicus Logico. Do read Investigations; don't read Tractatus. Tractatus is his early work that made him really famous, and he completely retracted it when he wrote Investigations. Many people criticize Investigations for inventing the precursor to what became relativism. I would argue, however, that physicists already invented relativism decades before. But that's just my naive view.