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comment by b_b
b_b  ·  4044 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Philosophy Discussion Thread - Descartes, "Cogito Ergo Sum" & Solipsism.

    "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.”)





kleinbl00  ·  4044 days ago  ·  link  ·  

And perhaps I've never been exposed to "good philosophy" or perhaps I know it by another name. Most of what I know is "OH SHIT WE LIVE IN THE MATRIX."

b_b  ·  4044 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Oh shit, I edited after you replied. Anyway, reread above. All contemporary philosophers hated Wittgenstein, because he pointed out that the emperor, in fact, has no clothes.

kleinbl00  ·  4044 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.

b_b  ·  4044 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.