Me: Apologies for running late. The traffic was crazy. I see you all have already gotten your cup of coffee. Anderson, I did not have you picked for a ‘Pink Drink’ kind of guy. I like it. Anyway, thank you for all meeting me here today. I have been struggling with a question lately and was looking for the input of my most intelligent friends. “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?”
Warbuton: Of course. I believe philosophy is not just a way of thinking and questioning but also teaching. In my book, “A little History of Philosophy” I talk a lot about the teachings and writings of many great philosophers in our times of mankind. I have gone in depth on philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In my book I explain the thoughts of what wisdom means, “Wisdom for Socrates was not knowing a lot of facts, or knowing how to do something. It meant understanding the true nature of our existence, including the limits of what we can know” (LH 3). With that being said I also believe that there are teachings that can change and are also subjective. Boethius once had a conversation with the Philosophy Lady. In that conversation She tells him that luck is random and often changes. She also explained that mortals are mistaken by allowing their happiness to be dependent on things that can change, and that they should get happiness from themselves (LH 42). This shows that philosophy is a great tool being used to question life and find truth in hard questions, but it also explains how some things are just left up to chance. Philosophy can teach us many things but it also has the power to divide us. “Philosophy, after all, thrives on debate. It thrives on people taking positions against each other and arguing, using logic and evidence” (LH 245).
Anderson: Philosophy has been, for me, has been a way to stray from what some consider to be “blindly following” whatever you hear from people of authority. Whether that be people on power, media, peers, etc. Philosophy has given us the power to believe and question whatever we want instead of becoming a mindless follower, In my book, Fantasyland I quote, “The easiest thing of all is to deceive oneself; for we believe whatever we want to believe.” The society as a whole has been convinced of being able to make their life into whatever they want it to be. We live in a technological era where anything we want is at the tip of our fingertips. We have been deceived into thinking that we are entitled to whatever we want, “People want what they want, whether it's truth or falsehood, and that's just the way people are now” (FL 10).
Baggini: In my book, How the World Thinks, I explain how the world as a whole benefits from Philosophy. It is almost as if it is a language that is known worldwide. "Harmony cannot be achieved if all differences are eradicated or if they are so marked as to make common purpose impossible"(p.323). Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and our differences are what can make us be bonded together and make harmony.
Me: Thank you all so much! I think that’s my coffee. It was nice catching up with you all.
"It is almost as if it is a language that is known worldwide" - a singular language of philosophy? But Baggini's point is that different cultures invent different languages and (thus) concepts, characteristic points of emphasis, etc. To become a world philosopher, or a more cosmopolitan thinker, you must become multi-lingual in this sense. Or at least you must acknowledge the different languages (or in Wittgenstein's phrase, language games) and make an attempt to grasp their specific differences. The differences themselves aren't our bond, it's an appreciation of the differences that can bridge the gap between us.
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