Philosophy is an art
I'm not a professional philosopher but I did study the subject at one time.
The main point about philisophy isn't its concepts or theories as these can and do change over time and through circumstance. For instance the question about what is consciousness has changed as we've become more knowledgeable about neurology and even of quantum mechanics.
What philosophy does is to teach one to think and reason in ways that one otherwise would not have done. It enlarges one's worldview which makes it easier for one to grasp new ideas and concepts, and to be open to fields of knowledge that one may have otherwise bypassed.
Add to that reading the works of great philosophers is a mind-opening experience. Many of these works have stood the test of time because the ideas they contain have widened the minds of those who've studied them.
A lot of the sciences (as all fields of study at the university) is more art than science (in the English sense). Locking in philosophy to be more like the sciences, narrows down the enquiry. Take the social sciences, where philosophy is crucial to provide epistemology, how do we know, that is crucial to look at when conducting a study. Or ontology, what is there really, what are social relations, what is culture. Philosophy's metaphysics grounds the sciences, the project of Kant who came from the sciences, and was shocked by rationalism and empiricism, which shake the very foundations, the former basically saying we cannot trust our senses and have to derive everything from thought alone, and empiricism, saying thought is messy, everything has to based on sense-data. Kant then provides the synthesis of both concepts, and in the culture wars we can still see its reminiscences. We never have cold facts, all of what we know is based on apriori knowledge, things we take for granted, learned, are influenced by society. So philosophy is crucial as a base layer. Trying to abolish this layer only impoverishes the sciences.
Deleuze defined philosophy as something like “the creation of concepts.” I’ve always found that to be the best way to think of the field. It’s also a refreshingly creative one, because “philosophy” courses tend to really be “history of philosophy” courses that cover already-existing concepts.
I don't like categorizing Philosophy as an art form. People don't read philosophy like they would poetry. They want to learn something about the world, something factual, preferably.
If philosophy can't "prove or disprove facts", then what's its use ? To be pleasant to read ? To provide endless empty rhetorical discourse on wether we have a soul or whatever other useless question ?
I'd actually never heard of Margaret MacDonald before, but this approach sounds similar to the more contemporary Richard Rorty, for example in "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" (which is more artistic and less academic than Rorty's earlier book "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature").
The most value I’ve gotten from philosophy is the discovery of “anti-philosophy”. Or rather analytically countering thoughts and ideas that are not fruitful. Maybe Quietism?
The mind constantly makes philosophy. Kind of. Or mine does. Why this, why that. What if this and that. Sometimes it is useful to just let the thoughts be. Sometimes to more analytically counter it: this is not worth neither worrying about nor philosophizing about because A, B, C.
See for example William James and his counter-arguments to philosophers (according to him) who worries about “Angels balancing on a needle’s pin” (Pragmatism).
I’ve also incorporated William James thoughts on religion to reconcile my atheism with my spiritual/religious beliefs (The Will to Believe). He says something like: if you believe, what are the upsides, what are the downsides? You might not be able to prove it scientifically, but is that necessary? How I’ve applied it: if I believe in religion X and I find out before I die that it was not true, have I wasted my time? (This is more about praxis than theory.) This is counter to a lot of theists and atheists who mix religion too much with identity. I.e. I am rational therefore I ought to not believe. To be concrete: if I practiced Buddhist meditation for five years and found out that Buddhism is not true,[1] will it have been for nothing? Probably not because the benefits of meditation are well-documented at this point.
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The most fascinating philosophy is the Tibetan Buddhist philosophy that rigorously analyzes things in order to ultimately arrive at conclusion that sort of says that most of metaphysics are ineffable to the analytic mind. Because you might need the process of analysis in order to arrive at that non-answer. Maybe that was something that Wittgenstein did in his first book?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-Buddhism-True-Philosophy-Enlighte...
The common English idiom/concept of "art vs. science" presents an appealing duality at a fundamental level.
The modern world is a stark departure from the world of the past. This we know.
Fields of art and study naturally fall into a binary categorisation. This we know.
It is the division of philosophy into two distinct forms -- one that seeks explanations of reality through reason and the other that attempts to use reason to explain reality -- that allowed this modern world to exist. This we know.
An analytical thinker uses poetic thinking (and poetry) as an argument. Dude was mad or mad satire.
By "art" some readers think "not methodical" or esoteric/unsharable because the language is denormalized.
I think what's meant is closer to Nietzsche saying (post-Kant) that philosophy is justified aesthetically, i.e., by its ability to actually change minds.
A mathematician or logician wants to establish, hold, and apply principles -- no surprise that it's engendered by conservative wealthy people. MacDonald listening to Wittgenstein and pulling herself out of sickness and poverty was more interested in the transformation possible - the aesthetic effect - and its impact on what might be called one's moral sense.
Plato never severed the social context or personal agency from the discourse. Readers (gleaners?) who pluck words from his dialogs as "ideas" without appreciating the dramatic moment generate all sorts of straw-man misconceptions. Plato presented a host of ways people failed to change their minds, through learning or critique (elenchus), giving us (at least) a catalog of fault models that still apply, and which the reader is supposed to learn and avoid.
Math and CS today change minds in a sense (mostly because that's where the money is), but nothing actually or historically prevents those people from building bombs, surveilling populations, manipulating markets intended to discipline power, and generally disclaiming responsibility for their work product.
It's similar to the opportunism driving social justice warriors to have anti-social effects. Structuralism provided methods for disclosing cultural systems, post-structuralism reduced that to critique undercutting the systems (of oppression). Impact is its own justification.
In MacDonald's terms, math and critical theory enlarge certain aspects of existence (and diminish others). Nietzsche and Plato pose the question of responsibility for that effect: what happens after (the man-made illusion of) God is killed? Was Socrates as teacher responsible for his students becoming democratic tyrants? (If you could influence the thinking of generations, wouldn't that be even better than the immortality of fame? But how can you avoid unleashing generations of sophistry?)
I think it minimizes MacDonald to say she was only concerned with acknowledging the value of artistic appreciation, as if philosophy were arm-candy for the real men of science. At that moment, nothing bothered scientists and logicians more than knowing their domain is incomplete, so that's the main thing she established. But the real question that posed is what's considered moral philosophy: what thinking leads to good people?
I could not read past the first 50 words of schoolman precepts.
Philosophy perfects human nature by arriving at harmonious agreement between men on what is the good life.
It is certainly:
Healthy Beautiful Fortunate
It focuses on the agreement of achieving these ends for all through the faculty of reasoning ergo obedience to the truth ergo lawfulness in the cosmos.
If we speak of genetic "code" within the cell nuclei of organisms, does that imply that life is some flavor of executable?
And if life is a biochemical executable, then philosophy could therefore be seen as an effort to document the operating system.
If philosophy is the art, then what is the craft? Sophistry?
(inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40074089 )
Philosophy is reasoning through language and the purpose is to create good explanations that are hard to vary.
Headline seems weirdly reductive. Would the philosophy of art be 'an art of art'?
Viewing philosophy through the lens of art is interesting consept for me
> Philosophy is an art.
No, philosophy is fishing, in one's subconscious sea. For most people anyway.
Prove me wrong!
Of course, creating software is a science, er, I mean engineering. Oh hell, a craft? Guess and test?
In both cases there is a core of mathematical thinking and science-like exploration, inspiring the higher minded names for the subjects. All wrapped in a massive amount of less formal stuff and activity whose nature is not really emphasized or formally named.
Philosophy encompasses all arts. In both sense of the verb.
medicine is an art.
pretty soon there will be doctors of philosophy
One way to understand the legitimacy and value of non-analytic philosophy is first to realize that the unmeasurable complexity of the world defies complete exposition by rigorous analytical methods. We must then ask ourselves, are we to bury our heads in the sand and consider only what is provable and what yields to such methods? There is certainly a great deal of value in doing this, modern civilization is built upon brilliant scientists and technicians who have done just that. But to deny the very existence of things outside the scope of analytical methods is to deny fundamental truths about the world.
Ok, if we want to pick our heads up and look around, what are we to make of what we see? How are we to navigate in this strange environment where grotesque and beautiful things undulate, merge, unmerge and dance almost tauntingly all around us at a frenetic pace? The first thing is to give up any hope of tracing this process by unambiguous cause and effect, which in turn means giving up on proof or replicability. Crucially however, one need not give up on truth, for there is a world out there and things are really happening, and it is possible to describe the action you observe, in spite of it not being reducible to neat and tidy chains of reason.
The difficulty with this is that we cannot necessarily share our findings and observations with others and expect them to agree, or hope to build a stable consensus, because the sorts of truths we are concerned with are not trivially derived in the way that mathematical truth is, in its exposition, trivial. Thus in occupying ourselves with these things, we condemn ourselves in a way to perpetual conflict, both internal and external. But the important things to remember is, reality is still out there, it's still happening in a particular way at a particular time, whether we can agree on it or not.