PHILOSOPHERS

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Abelard - Intention alone makes an action good or bad – besides this statement being a bald assertion with no foundation there are several prolems. 1) no action ever need be taken, whether spoken or acted. 2) An intention to care about all people could accompany the act of harming all people and it would be a good. 3)The intention to harm all people accompanied by help for all people would be a bad. 4) No intentions means no good or bad exist.

Aenesidemus – "Ten tropes" –Skeptic -- perception must not be trusted. There is no highest good, not pleasure, happiness or knowledge or virtue. Perception will always be given trust no matter what precepts are used to undercut them. What must be accepted is the lie of the perceptions and that actions and ideas that result are guesses.

Aesop master was Xanthus contemp was Avianus......

continued –
ENTIRE LIST OF PHILOSOPHERS

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       ALPHABETICAL ORDER

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Flash : Philosophy Repeats Itself


June 3, 2007
Last update July 8, 2007

Sometimes the best philosophers are the worst at communicating their contributions to the understanding of existence. While they often see the same issues, they afterwards confuse their message - not only by their varying eras, languages and cultures, but often they try to obscure their shortcomings in jargon and mystical assertions (as Hume similarly complained long ago). There is only one life to talk about yet, as a kind of copyright protection device, most philosophers from Plato to Deleuze encrypt the subject of life as though they are our only gatekeepers, and ride pretense into their own fantasy world.

Science, for all its faults, allows a continuity of discussion and the 'standing on the shoulders of giants', or 'progress'. Philosophers, instead, are continually built up as precious islands of immortality - and the more artfully confusing and misleading they are the more champions they seem to gain. Their fanatics then pressure readers to weigh every word (and intention) equally (sometimes in the original) before judgement is permitted - but this is still insufficient for them. No one shall judge their heroes, they imply, so these islands become unassailable Lost Worlds.

In science, at least, we are all allowed to test a claim and discard the useless and outdated without knowing every coma that led to it. There's no reason philosophers can't be subject to similar standards. And, as there is only one kind of existence to talk about, so the communications handed down by philosophers already must be assumed, in part, to refer to the same world.

There is, if you are looking for useful philosophy, some small hope of progress in the all the doggerel systems. In the past, a story of progress was made out of various 'Lost Worlds' - of Socrates' turn from natural science to ethics, or Descartes 'new' idealism, or Hume's scepticism, or Kant's redemption of it all, or the current fight against relativism - with the adjunct story of eastern philosophies thrown in. These stories are reasonable because each of the successive philosophers had read and responded to his predecessors, usually quite openly; and often one style contaminated the next. Progress is visible by such criterias. The best of these narratives (like David Berman's on Schopenhauer) make sense of vastly different personalities and styles, even when the intentions of the philosopher-subjects was to break with the past.

Despite all this, there is no reason to assume that the response/counter-response formula indicates a sufficient criteria to claim progress. I will make two objections. First, it is false by its own assumptions. Many cases of 'progress' are actually cases of amnesia and irrelevance. For example, Schopenhauer says Kant's great contribution to thought was adding an innate psychological frame for understanding space and time to Hume's innate frame for causality. Actually, Kant may have just read Anaxagoras in Plato ("..the mind is really the arranger and cause of all things", Phaedo 97D) and added to it a common innate-ness. Also, claiming an innate structure for understanding space and time is just making manifest the implications of Hume's innate causality, and is also a repackaging of Plato's all encompassing innate-ness. Amnesia regarding innate knowledge and irrelevancy regarding space and time - if Kant can be considered great and called a progressive force in philosophy, much mind numbing thinking is called for.

Second, the claim of progress is false because of the influence of the rules of narration. It matters little to the narrators of philosophy that brilliance (like Montaigne's {or even Kant's, if given a different context}) would be left on the cutting room floor for the sole reason that they could not fit it in - for narrators, stories need to be made, revelations don't.

A reassessment of the whole 'story' project is needed. Instead of the wide scope that is typically the purview of philosophy there is just one main story to look at, but it involves more of a see-saw than a progress - that is the theory of knowledge. It is the main narrative because if you don't believe in what you know, nothing else matters.

Two currents mark this story: the first is the question of whether knowledge comes before or after birth; and the second, whether knowledge is all relative or whether some of it can be absolute. (This is an example of what philosophy needs - more conflation and less hair splitting.)

These two currents are addressed continually (as in the Kant example given above) but, at some point, most philosophers eventually trick themselves away from making the best choices (i.e. all knowledge is relative, and it begins before birth with adjustments made afterwards). These philosophers, including the likes of Socrates, Pythagoras, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and most others, were self-tricked because they needed to redeem life by asserting certainty: usually a voice or god did the trick - sometimes power, or the supposed supremacy of man could mask the relativity. But if you follow the two currents in many philosopher's theories of knowledge, contained in their work, whether implied or stated, is evidence for the relativity of all meaning based on innate structures in the human mind.

Forget the bickering and sniping they do at each other, or the absurd conclusions their arguments contain, accidentally or not, there is more than enough evidence to have taken the whole of philosophy somewhere. Instead it has just been repeating itself. A separate list of numerous philosopher's comments shows all this to be the case. From the most famous to the least, from the beginning to the present time, philosophers have been standing still replaying an issue that may have been resolved many times over by a few observant people, like Montaigne, who saw by raw experience that instinct and experience both have a role in knowledge and that knowledge is relative.

Of course philosophy is more than theories of knowledge, but if it continues to cede 'progress' to its offspring science, it will be further relegated to the anti-knowledge of ethics and science will increase it's dominance. Knowledge needs the breadth of philosophy and a way to avoid the mercantile rut of science. From now on philosophers must rid themselves of their confusing synonyms and idiosyncrasies and judge fearlessly and recklessly like scientists. Debunkers say of magicians and faith healers: if you 'know' it's just a trick, you can work out how it's done. That's now the task of philosophers and historians. With an eye to the common reality that is always the subject of philosophy we can all debunk the Aristotles and Foucaults of this world and not be anchored to their mistakes and misservices. We are not at the mercy of some long dead mythological philosopher's integrity. Philosophy needs to escape its self delusion and get something accomplished. It needs to know what it has done and get on with figuring things out.


GRH

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"For ignorance provides the happiest life" Sophocles, Ajax, 550? BC

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A Dutch proverb boasts "The older a Dutchman is the stupider he gets"

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"Take a chance with [being] stupid" mistaken and censored version of Gwen Stefani's "What You Waiting For?" 2004
listen to musical quote

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"The very nature of all things of this sort  [dice, dancing, drinking, plays]  is that the more folly they have, the more they enrich man's life, for if that is joyless it seems scarcely worth calling life at all." Erasmus, Praise of Folly (32), 1509

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Nothing is more difficult for man than to apprehend a thing impersonally: I mean to see it as a thing, not as a person: one might question, indeed, whether it is at all possible for him to suspend the clockwork of his person constructing, person inventing drive even for a moment. He traffics even with ideas, though they be the most abstract, as if they were individuals with whom one has to struggle, to whom one has to ally oneself, whom one has to tend, protect and nourish. Human All Too Human; 2nd edition 26

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Absolutely Petrified
Tristan Tzara (Sami Rosenstock) 1896 - 1963 ( Includes early Game Gene Theory, October 21, 1996 )

Geoffrey Hamilton
October 21, 1996

The story of Tristan Tzara is also an outline for the problem of this century regarding knowledge: the fearful reluctance of influential thinkers to stare down the meaninglessness of existence without needing to redeem it.

From Einstein to Jung, from Chomsky to Tzara, all wanted to make the world a better place. It wasn't that Tzara in particular lacked an overall courageous attitude, After all he risked his life, his honour and his self respect continuously in the pursuit of his ambitions. But when he discovered the relativity of all meaning while in his teens he was afraid of the implications for all humanity and himself. He needed to redeem that meaninglessness by proving that relative meaning could be an absolute.

It was much later in his life when he saw what he was doing at this time of Dada. In 1947, at 51 he said dada was born out of a moral requirement to search for absolute truth untainted by preconceived ideas. He blamed history for the relativity of meaning. As well as the use of conventions, and institutions.

This blaming of constructions is why, he, in a sense, represents so many great thinkers, and why he and so many turn to Communism, fascism, or other poitical affilations. Tzara like the others was afraid of the obvious answer, that meaning cannot be anything but relative. It was this fear which prevented him from recognizing the exactitude of his own words......

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Tzara continued

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all essays

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