philosophy is pretentious?

@katsucats But engineers actually produce something useful in the real world.
Also like how would this work?

The correct outcome for a philosophical exploration is that you cannot do it by philosophy alone.

@Kamikaze_404 "The basis of science is rationality." Nice platitude, but what does it mean in practice? It means that our emotional state doesn't really affect the universe, and that through enough observation and mental work we can build predictive models. (And technically speaking neither of these is a guarantee, but so far throughout the existence of humanity we haven't observed the laws changing, so that's nice.) It does NOT mean that just by sitting around and thinking really hard we can figure out how the world works, you need to actually interact with it to confirm or deny your suspicions.

Mathematics is NOT a way to predict anything, math's is a set of arbitrary axioms and such that you can play mental games with. Physicists were the ones who adjusted the formulas until they managed to model how the universe works with good enough predictive power.

And while math might have had a historic origin relating to philosophy, they have diverged long ago. Philosophers are generally stuck on repeating ancient arguments, mathematicians actually figure stuff out with practical use. Well, back in the day the collective knowledge of humanity was so little, and a good portion of it was wrong, you could be an expert on everything. Not to say they were dumb, they had to start somewhere, but most of ancient Greece's math is taught in elementary school.

What sort of reason are you looking for in why things happen? The laws of the universe just are, there is no intent behind them... Also imagine using reddit.

That's a funny line, because if physicists are adjusting formulas, then they must be the aforementioned formulas based on the "set of arbitrary axioms". I think the takeaway is that you're the one that's playing mental games.

@JaniSIr I think you have a myopic view of what everything is. Mathematics is philosophy, not just in the past but now. Real mathematicians reason about how the relations of space works exactly how a philosopher would have done in the 17th century. Applied mathematicians apply those realizations to a result. Calling engineers useful but not philosophers is like saying a steering wheel is useful because it can be interacted with by the end user but the engine is not useful. The theories are what drive the application.

I don't understand what you're getting at. An engineer doesn't create products in a vacuum either. An accountant approves the budget, a marketer sells the ideas, and physicists and philosophers create the framework.

To begin with, you don't realize that the math that you think you know is prefaced on an arbitrary set of rules that someone thought up. Physicists do three activities: hypothesize relations (philosophy), conduct experiments (science) and build models (math). There isn't a definite boundary between each categorization like you think there is.

@Kamikaze_404 "The basis of science is rationality." Nice platitude, but what does it mean in practice? It means that our emotional state doesn't really affect the universe, and that through enough observation and mental work we can build predictive models. (And technically speaking neither of these is a guarantee, but so far throughout the existence of humanity we haven't observed the laws changing, so that's nice.) It does NOT mean that just by sitting around and thinking really hard we can figure out how the world works, you need to actually interact with it to confirm or deny your suspicions.

Mathematics is NOT a way to predict anything, math's is a set of arbitrary axioms and such that you can play mental games with. Physicists were the ones who adjusted the formulas until they managed to model how the universe works with good enough predictive power.

And while math might have had a historic origin relating to philosophy, they have diverged long ago. Philosophers are generally stuck on repeating ancient arguments, mathematicians actually figure stuff out with practical use. Well, back in the day the collective knowledge of humanity was so little, and a good portion of it was wrong, you could be an expert on everything. Not to say they were dumb, they had to start somewhere, but most of ancient Greece's math is taught in elementary school.

What sort of reason are you looking for in why things happen? The laws of the universe just are, there is no intent behind them... Also imagine using reddit.

@JaniSIr By your "arbitrary model" we can never really know anything about anything, because everything is set upon arbitrary values and arbitrary bases that can change at any time without apparent reason and are entirely dependent on how we observe them. It's like saying that for all we know, we are actually silicon lifeforms and have 3 kidneys instead of 2. Do you hear yourself? It's ridiculous lol.

I don't understand why you're so against the fact that analysing our perception is possible, especially since under your poor excuse for a perspective your perception plays a major role. In fact, it's pretty important if we want to be right about anything at all no matter what we ourselves think is correct. Philosophy isn't just sitting on your ass and thinking - by that logic, formulating scientific theories is also exactly that. It's taking information regarding the human perception of the world and trying to understand why it is as it is, where it originates from, and how it can affect things (this is especially important in science also thanks to the observer effect). It's a little more than that, of course, but I don't think you're capable of processing that kind of information.

Mathematics comes from philosophy - it's very basis has ties to a highly religious and philosophical culture and it was developed further by Greek philosophers. Mathematics is literally an abstract manifestation of philosophy. You say that they have diverged because you know next to nothing about what you're talking about - you're only interested in bias confirmation and feeling smarter than you are. If you actually bothered to read philosophy (or anything except anime subs for that matter) you'd know that a lot of the same logic used to arrive to various formulae is also used in arriving to philosophical ideas and conclusions. This is because logic is a universal thing - it is rationality expressed as thought. Its actual mechanisms do not change whether you think about the composition of an apple or an atom. If mathematics were a bunch of arbitrary bullshit that could be changed as we wish (as you make it out to be) then we wouldn't have been to precisely predict the percentage of helium atoms made by the big bang - yet we did so correctly and were able to verify it.

Of course, it's easy to wave away your own stupidity under an arbitrary system because "well if X happened/you just changed your perspective then I'd be right probably!". The world does not function according to what pleases your ego the most.

You know nothing.

@katsucats Mathematicians do not study philosophy. You can basically finish your masters degree in math and the only time you need to attend to a philosophy class is in high school, and even there what you really study is the history of philosophy, not how to actually make arguments.
It's very egotistical of philosophers to try to appropriate the works of proper mathematicians, just because at one point in time the two were practiced by the same people.

Not all philosophers are mathematicians, but all mathematicians are philosophers and none of them is a sophist!

Philosophy is a great tool to identify posers, frauds, and fools, as those who infest this thread like cockroach-students infest universities.

P.S. If you cannot recognise some of the gentlemathematicians above, do not bother whining about my incredible post, you will be ignored like a proof left to the reader.

This is completely irrelevant to the fact that physicists use math to model things, and an accurate model has predictive power.

Ironically, these two sentences are contradictory in multiple ways. First, Godel was a philosopher. Second, if you can't prove correctness of a logical system, then what about it describes reality?

Math is philosophy by definition. Mathematicians may not take a formal logic course, but logic is embedded in their curriculum. Set theory is an extension and formalization of first order logic and often times offered to students of both fields. Discrete mathematics, graphs, etc., are practically the language used by philosophers to formalize the relations between things, and was invented for that purpose. If you've ever seen a mathematical proof, you'd see symbols such as "there exists" (∃) or "for all" (∀), which are precisely first order logic quantifiers. If you've ever seen symbolic logic derivations, you'd instantly recognize the set theory operators and graphs, e.g.


Like I said, you have a very myopic, ignorant view of what comprises mathematics and philosophy. Actually, it's safe to say you have no idea what mathematics even is, aside from the high school conception of it.

Philosophy itself is not pretentious, rather the people who cover themselves with quotes to purposefully make themselves seem more knowledgeable or superior than most or make themselves something that they are not.

If you are bringing it to a philosophical discussion, sure. If you are bringing it to people who don't give a shit, it's probably pretentious.

Philosophy isnt pretentious, but people can use it to be pretentious. Its people we should worry about, not the science itself.

@Technopunk Indeed. Science is always neutral per se. What makes it positive or negative depends on people and also their moral standards. But branches of science are neutral by themselves.

@Adnash why did you mention science? its separate or in conflict with philosophy

science is about facts but philosophy is about values

@deg Well, @Technopunk mentioned it first. I only added my five cents. We're discussing here about philosophy, so borderline additions loosely referring to the philosophy of science shouldn't be surprising, in my opinion. Although yes, going by the modern standards and definitions, philosophy is not a science. Study, knowledge domain - yes, but not a hard science.

Depends on the branch of philosophy we're talking about. Epistemology is more focused on the whole subject of fact-value distinction than, dunno, metaphysics.

I think the words you were looking for were "inductive" (as science use inductive reasoning) and "deductive" (as philosophy uses deductive reasoning). I prefer this approach myself. I feel that facts-values distinction used in this specific context unnecessarily oversimplifies the whole thing. I prefer to go with inductive-deductive reasoning distinction. It's not perfect and one can point out it also simplifies the discussed issue, but I think it's more accurate whatsoever. But that's my opinion, anyway.

@Adnash the thing is no amount of any kinds of reasoning is enough without empirical data or the scientific method as said by the razors of philosophy too so at least inductive reasoning is better

so overall philosophy deals with right or wrong aka values while science with facts

@deg that's just one field of philosophy, philosophers do occasionally try to make statements of objective reality, which just doesn't work...
Arguments for the existence of God are the obvious examples.

@JaniSIr god is not objective reality though and when people talk about god its religion aka morals

but if you mention metaphysics sure but im talking overall things here

@deg Religion isn't just about morals, God is also the creator of the universe for the followers of the religion. How literally they take the Bible and such for example varies, but still.
So like an argument would be that God is defined as a necessary being, therefore he exists.
It's a statement about objective reality, not morality.

@Adnash the thing is no amount of any kinds of reasoning is enough without empirical data or the scientific method as said by the razors of philosophy too so at least inductive reasoning is better

so overall philosophy deals with right or wrong aka values while science with facts

In addition to what Nya_chan5623 I think another issue that stems from philosophy (like mathematics) is that the topic can really abstract really quickly. If a topic becomes too abstract it becomes difficult relating it to real life and people will lose interest as they have a hard time connecting with it on a meaningful level. To apply philosophical ideas effectively not only must you bridge that gap between the abstract and reality but you need to do it in a way that is easy for a layman to understand who does not study the topic in depth.

Too often people who engage in philosophical debates often go out of their way to use jargon not as means of communicating effectively but as a way of conveying their intellectual superiority. I think it is this behaviour that people take offence to. This type of attitude ultimately does a disservice to the topic and if you want to generate interest you need to apply the ideas in a way that is grounded in real life and in a way you can get a large audience to understand. Avoid jargon and if it must be used then explain your ideas in a way that is easy to grasp.

In fact, these traits of explaining difficult concepts in simple terms is what separates a good teacher from someone that is at best merely knowledgeable and at worst is practising excessive navel glazing.

I'm not sure if people really know what the word pretentious means and are just throwing it around because it's a really cool word or whatever, but a lot of the subjects that people are debating against philosophy are equally pretentious if not more depending on how you see it.

OP for instance talks about how philosophy is just "sitting around and thinking about the world," but really all that tells me based on how much they talk about math is they haven't really advanced that far in a graduate math setting (and for the record, I haven't either), because outside of applied math, a lot of high level math is also just sitting around and thinking about shit.

If we're talking about how useless philosophy is as a measurement of how pretentious it is, then look no further than all of the highly theoretical work being done in math, computer science, natural sciences that have no real world application and exist exclusively because people think it's cool shit.

Maybe there's a debate that math and other subjects are more beautiful or maybe they're better because they're derived from more natural occurring phenomenon, but the irony is you'd probably need to rely on certain philosophical principles to answer or discuss that question in good faith.

Anyway, I like philosophy enough. I had a phase when I was like 16. I still read some philosophers now in my spare time, but it's not really an important preoccupation for me. Is it pretentious? Yes, but I think a lot of philosophers were either very good writers (Nietzsche, Levinas, Wittgenstein, Marx) or had really interesting thoughts from a socio-cultural context (Baudrillard, Adorno, Marx). Even the kind of nonsense philosophy among postmodernists or poststructuralists I appreciate and see value in (Derrida, D&G, etc) and I kind of like that stuff so whatever.

Jargon doesn't exist necessarily to inflate your ego. Yes, this is typically what happens when people who have a passing interest in philosophy go online and start talking on forums to look cool. However, a lot of fundamental concepts of philosophy laid out by canonical philosophers (Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, for instance) were built on vast texts, systems, and volumes of argumentation. Jargon in this case exists to condense these massive works into shorthand that allows people to engage with historical precedent in ways that would be too inefficient if we had to explain everything from scratch.

Yes, this runs the risk, as it often does, of appearing too ivory tower and academic, but it does serve a purpose.

And while I agree with the above poster that one great sign of a good teacher is someone who is able to extract meaning from jargon and explains things to laymen, there's two things. The first is laymen don't need philosophy. It's an accessory, and I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that if I'm on the lookout for a good philosophical discussion over a text, I'm not going to typically have that by talking to a laymen.

Second, a lot of good teachers are actually not good teachers. There's a really popular Youtube series online that covers a lot of the major philosophers. I watched one with my partner about Kierkegaard and it becomes pretty apparent that either the professor misread Kierkegaard or is massively simplifying a lot of what he wrote in order to fit a more popular audience. But the professor is accessible. He's funny, and he condenses topics into
lectures that are simple and easy to follow.

That being said, does the laymen come away really knowing Kierkegaard in that case? Some might say yes, but there is a lot of unlearning you have to do if you end up getting to the point of needing to seriously engage with a philosopher's work (seriously engaging being kind of a pretentious activity, but whatever). The same came be said about Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy which, while it's fine as a survey for someone who will never really read a lot of philosophy, they'll probably come away with really warped views on Nietzsche and the Stoics because Russell absolutely butchered his explanations of both of them.

Oh my god, I hate this kind of thing so much lol. There's all these YouTube videos, saying saying shit like "How SpongeBob Squarepants Explores Nihilism" and I just want to gouge my eyes out every time I see it lol.



A society cannot function on science alone. It's not from science where we get our values, or our morals, that shape how our communities are formed. A world purely based on science is not a world of pure fact, but rather a world of pure consensus. One is not inherently better than the other, they both serve their purpose.

Oh my god, I hate this kind of thing so much lol. There's all these YouTube videos, saying saying shit like "How SpongeBob Squarepants Explores Nihilism" and I just want to gouge my eyes out every time I see it lol.



A society cannot function on science alone. It's not from science where we get our values, or our morals, that shape how our communities are formed. A world purely based on science is not a world of pure fact, but rather a world of pure consensus. One is not inherently better than the other, they both serve their purpose.

Oh my god, I hate this kind of thing so much lol. There's all these YouTube videos, saying saying shit like "How SpongeBob Squarepants Explores Nihilism" and I just want to gouge my eyes out every time I see it lol.



A society cannot function on science alone. It's not from science where we get our values, or our morals, that shape how our communities are formed. A world purely based on science is not a world of pure fact, but rather a world of pure consensus. One is not inherently better than the other, they both serve their purpose.

@DreamWindow I know right, haha. I noticed it's especially a common thing among anime and manga fans. Headcanons, fever dream-tier delusions, or searching hidden meaning where there's not any hidden meaning at all... or being overly critical when talking about, dunno, an animated series dedicated mostly to teenagers, that it doesn't have the depth offered by the most refined live-action movies that feature complex drama and psychology themes. ;D

Everyone can enjoy the entertainment media whatever they want, but there is a difference between discussing something, and making up a fictional story in order to spoonfeed others with it as if it was real. As someone who used to analyze various types of literature in the past, it sometimes doesn't even look hilarious, but rather pitiful.

Indeed. It's not like society can be drawn as a vast plain with separate bubbles with "science", "philosophy", "art", "morals", that are completely autonomous and can exist alone without any problems. Society is formed from all aforementioned (and many more) elements interacting with each other, intertwining, sometimes clashing, or just "minding their own business" and developing almost - but not entirely - autonomously. All of them serve their purpose. It's been like that since the dawn of the human civilization.

@DreamWindow thats why i said if you care about values like ethics and aesthetics then philosophy is still needed but if you care about facts then science is also needed so they both can coexist

its just today there is too much personal values involve and there is war on science aka facts

The act of putting priority on science is inherently a value judgment in of itself. There are many cultures that do not value this at all. And deciding whether or not one approach is superior to the other is also a value judgment. What I am saying, is that facts are always at the discretion of personal values, regardless of what it is. Therefore, a committee who determines and interprets a set of facts will also be applying value judgments in determining the value of that fact, and what should be done about it. There's no one correct reaction to any set of facts. It's all value judgments.



I don't mind it if people try to come up with theories, for example. But typically, when people inject philosophy into something like that, they are just using something popular to spread their own personal agenda.



Agreed. All of it spawns organically, and therefore cannot be dictated by any committee of planners, scientists, or artists, or whatever else. That elitist mentality simply isn't how communities and cultures are formed.

The act of putting priority on science is inherently a value judgment in of itself. There are many cultures that do not value this at all. And deciding whether or not one approach is superior to the other is also a value judgment. What I am saying, is that facts are always at the discretion of personal values, regardless of what it is. Therefore, a committee who determines and interprets a set of facts will also be applying value judgments in determining the value of that fact, and what should be done about it. There's no one correct reaction to any set of facts. It's all value judgments.



I don't mind it if people try to come up with theories, for example. But typically, when people inject philosophy into something like that, they are just using something popular to spread their own personal agenda.



Agreed. All of it spawns organically, and therefore cannot be dictated by any committee of planners, scientists, or artists, or whatever else. That elitist mentality simply isn't how communities and cultures are formed.

when climate change denial and anti vaxxers are a dangers in society because of twisting facts due to their personal values or beliefs then you know something is wrong

The only reason that you value any issue that you do is because of your own personal value judgments. There are alternative solutions to issues that different value systems have. The act of choosing one over the other is purely based on discretion from the one interpreting it. The real problem is assuming that there is only one set of value judgments that should be chosen. That's how you get tyranny.

@DreamWindow there is such a thing called false balance especially with facts about climate change and covid being dangerous to the world you simply cannot have alternative values for cases like that

call it tyranny i call it the right thing in those cases

Assessing what is a danger is also a value judgment. A danger to a communist dictator would be dissent of said dictator. A danger to a liberal would be the tyranny of the individual. Both are valid arguments, in certain cases. It's a matter of deciding what value judgment is correct for any given situation. Which is, once again, a value judgement. To those who share a different set of values, you need to convince them that your values are correct. Which is not something that you cannot do, because they have a different set of values.



Lets say you become dictator, and gulag all of the climate change deniers, and anti-vaxxers. What happens then? You can say that you have the correct value judgment, since no one is disagreeing with you anymore, but then you can apply this to any matter. Even ones that make no logical sense whatsoever. It's nothing more than might makes right. So what makes you, objectively speaking, the omniscient being that should decide all value judgments that every individual should hold?

@DreamWindow no im simply saying values are not all or nothing aka black and white so force or authoritarianism is necessary in some situations like in dire situations but not all situations

just like values are subjective personally its subjective to different situations too

dude you value personal freedom above all else as a libertarian and like i said that can be dangerous in the face of things like climate change and anti vaxxers

@deg Not this topic again... I'm pretty sure we have discussed a couple times already why being an extremely alarmist on these issues is bad even if the threat is real.

@deg Not this topic again... I'm pretty sure we have discussed a couple times already why being an extremely alarmist on these issues is bad even if the threat is real.