Anthony Ozoh Midterm Post

Me: Ok gentlemen, let’s get down to business. We have a lot of questions to answer and things to discuss this episode so without further delay let me introduce the first topic…

(1)   "Do you think philosophy can help people learn to respect truth, facts, reality, and one another, and to reject falsehood, superstition, selfishness, polarization, partisanship, and mutual hostility based on differences of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, belief, etc.? If so, how? If not, why not?

 

 

Kurt Anderson: I think that Philosophy can do all those things, I mean it’s what has progressed Humanity into the Golden Age it’s in now. I would say that Personal Philosophy gave the West the key ingredient to what would lead to its domination of the world through its ideals of hard work and Capitalism that was really pushed to the mainstream when Protestantism popped up in Europe. “Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God’s glory; success looks like a sign of His grace.”(FL pg.42) However, just like Protestantism, Philosophy has enabled everyone to have their own personal ideas of the world and accept them as true or false, sometimes in direct opposition to established and accepted truths. So, in short, Philosophy can help us find the truth, and base our decisions on reality but; we can also find ourselves: embracing falsehoods, increasing polarization and partisanship, and artificially multiplying the differences we have with each other. “But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.” (FL pg. 42)

 

Nigel Warburton: I think that Philosophy can help people. For many people Philosophy is a way for people to examine their lives and beliefs and make sense of it all. My book A Little History is a look at some of the most influential Philosophers coming to grips with their lives and the world around them. Many times, we see it as them questioning the existence of such things because very early on when you realize that everything is subjective to just your own head you quickly realize that senses can’t be trusted, “Descartes points out, it would be unwise to trust something that has tricked you in the past. So, he rejects the senses as a possible source of certainty. He can never be sure that his senses aren’t tricking him. They probably aren’t most of the time, but the faint possibility that they might be means he can’t completely rely on them.” (LH pg.64) But they seem to always find a way back to some kind of level ground using something from the laundry list of ideas that have come into human thought in the last 3000 years or so. Honestly I think Philosophy is the only way that people can get to those goals in the question because Philosophy is more of a personal ideal that everyone has an uses to meet those goals.  

Julian Baggini: I think that the response to the question would differ drastically based on where you’re getting the Philosophy. In how the world thinks I showed that Philosophy around the world isn’t the same and doesn’t have the same goals. I do think that no matter where you go, you’ll find that Philosophers have been trying to use Philosophy to answer those same questions for a very long time. Now, when we talk about finding out the truth then that’s something everyone can agree on but ironically the truth is subjective. In the West we see the truth as an objective fact, something that can be measured out or found through some type of experimentation. While in the East, truth is more like an idea, something that you can achieve not through experimentation but through, “direct, attentive experience of the world than we are to conceptualize it by detached reasoning. In such experience the distinction between subject and the world disappears.” The worlds have a similar idea of what their looking for but the methods and expected outcomes are so different that sometimes you wouldn’t even be able to tell we’re talking about the same things here. 

(2)   What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"

Me: Honestly, the world has so much potential for good. It was only recently in human history that the idea of the world that you would live in would be completely different from the one that your parents lived in, and that your children would have access to all types of great life changing technology. A far cry from when everyone just thought that the world was just going to be the same as it had always been, what a boring way to see it. The reason I’m saying all of this is to put in perspective how close we are to the radical changes that the future can bring. Most of the time since the Industrial Revolution we saw this idea of a utopia just a few decades away. Now all fields of tech and science are moving so fast that we now have reusable rockets and a man is claiming to have turned back aging in rats. I think in the next 20-30 years the world would have made quite something for itself…