Who are your favorite philosophers?

Godel was a complete fruitcake! Similar to John Nash of Game Theory fame. But like Nash, I - still - wouldn't call him a philosopher. Brilliant, no doubt. Godel is the God of logic, imo. And that's no overstatement. But what's his most philosophical work he's produced? And please don't come up with his formal proofs. If a formal proof is a philosophy, Newton is the greatest philosopher of all time! Or one of the greatest, but you get the idea. He created the non-anthropocentric universe! Or was that Galileo?

My notion of philosophy or rather philosopher, may be too restricted, but yours may be too loose, if you ask me. But I'm afraid this point will throw us into some never ending moral discussion about some personal preferences.

philosopher=lover of knowledge/wisdom

That's pretty f***ing broad if you ask me.

Lets add: has personally written at least one book which could be labelled as "philosophical".

Yes, that excludes Socrates. And yes, this includes Plato. (Talking about friggin set-theory here.)

Logic is generally considered a field of philosophy and it wasn't even really used formally in mathematics before Boole developed symbolic logic in 1854. And the Boolean logic was pretty theoretical tool until Claude E. Shannon had the idea to use it in switching networks in 1930s which led to it's current usage in computer science and engineering.

Logic is the rules of thinking formally. I don't know how much more philosophical you can get.

Also natural sciences were called natural philosophy earlier. Newton was considered a natural philosopher. But maybe this going too far into semantics.

Anyway, I'll add George Boole to my list of favorite philosophers.

  On 1/7/2013 at 9:27 PM, goDel said:

Lets add: has personally written at least one book which could be labelled as "philosophical".

 

Yes, that excludes Socrates. And yes, this includes Plato. (Talking about friggin set-theory here.)

Seems a little bit arbitrary definition to me.

I think it's safe to agree to disagree on this issue! To answer your question, the most philosophical (your sense) works he's produced are unpublished works from his later career. If you're curious, check out Hao Wang's books. (I grant that this might make him a philosopher, but by your criteria not an important one. By my criteria, the incompleteness theorems alone make him an important philosopher, or, as a compromise: philosophically important.)

However, anyone who says Deleuze is a philosopher and Godel or Cantor isn't, must be joking. I will not discuss this point.

With that out of the way, it's good to see some fellow Godel-and-logic lovers on this forum. Mokz, don't forget Frege!

Come on. I've done some courses on logic in my days. Don't start explaining this stuff. The formal logic Godel did, is closer related to mathematics than to philosophy. The only connection is a historical one. It's so technical, the papers involve more formulas than they do actual words explaining ideas. And what's worse, formal logic is not about ideas, but about formal principles and their formal consequences. And don't start with modal logics about belief and knowledge to make some connection to "knowledge/wisdom". It's mostly technical wank with hardly any philosophical content. Just like the proof of Fermat's theorem hasn't got much to do with philosophy. The formal logic of Godel is almost as disconnected from Aristoteles as Fermat's theorem.

So, as you mentioned, every science was once connected. If you pull Logic back into Philosophy, why not the natural sciences? And cosmology? It's all friggin debatable, I'm sure. But the consequence is the any closet filled with books, is potentially a philosophical heaven.

Lets just agree to disagree on this one. I'm seeing more people with favorites from the logical spectrum of science. So I'm on the losing side here.

Quine and Carnap come to mind. They're all brilliant people, but their achievements have little to do with "humanity", imo. It's all unbelievably technical work trying to achieve some connection between words and meanings. And their achievements mostly remain hidden within their fields, if you ask me. To me it's all ontological gibberish in the margin of human thinking. No disrespect to their achievements though. But the niche is so tight, I'm getting claustrophobic thinking about it.

goDel, what is your opinion then of the Continental field/Frankfurt School?

Encey

I don't see how formalism and technicality are bad things in philosophy. I don't say they should be always applied but you can find the limitations of logical thinking by applying logic to itself in a formal manner. I've been mostly studying mathematics and related fields so I might be a bit biased on the issue.

But yes, let's agree to disagree.

  On 1/7/2013 at 11:07 PM, Smettingham Rutherford IV said:

goDel, what is your opinion then of the Continental field/Frankfurt School?

I'm by no means a philosophy buff. But if you're into the continental versus non-continental debate, I'm probably more on the gooy side of the spectrum, as opposed to the prickly. (I'm sure you're registering the Alan Watts reference here). When it comes to philosophy i'm obviously not too fond of the technical approach. In my book, philosophy is essentially a gooy practice. That's personal, obviously.

But some criticism towards the bits of the Frankfurt school which are up on the wiki, or more in general towards the gooy philosophy, is that i can get annoyed from time to time by the moral judgments. There's nothing wrong with moral philosophy, but when a piece on political philosophy makes judgements about what is, and what isn't moral, the piece looses it's integrity, imo. I hate it when things get judgmental. At points like that, it's more about the opinion of the person behind the piece, than the ideas, so to speak. Hard to explain, but it feels unpure, if you catch my drift.

Edit: ironically, both husserl and korzybski were technical in their own ways. But that still miles away from the technicalities like from godel. Where korzybski is one third technical, godel is close to 9/10 technical. That's robot philosophy.

If you consider that philosophy. I'd consider it mathematics.

Godel was very very private about his philosophy and never really formally expounded it in public literature or talks. His primary body of work, was of course, not "philosophical" in the ordinary sense, but the thinking and perceptions that informed his work, were very philosophical. In a talk with Stephen Jourdain, a thinker I posted a video of earlier, Godel confessed that Jourdain was the first and perhaps only other human being he had met who shared his absolute certainty that the world was an empty, flickering appearance within himself, and that each being is entirely the master of this subjective facade. That is, there is no collective, objective substratum to reality, no linearity. A hell of a proposition for a logician, but that was his underlying perception of things. That said, I don't grant that Godel was a "philosopher." Every 15 year old kid is a philosopher if we don't hold them to the standard of producing work. Gurdjieff is awesome too.

Actually, just read for yourself:

  Quote

“Godel remained extraordinarily discreet about his own experience, preferring to talk about Socrates or Krishna Menon, both of whom he felt had known [truth]. What Godel said was, in my opinion, far superior to what he could write. This man of science, dedicated to objectivity, in theory, went extraordinarily far in rejecting the objective world. He merely evoked this [objective world] in his writings so as not to rob them of all credibility, but when we spoke he was less prudent. In fact, it was on this point that we really got to know each other. We began by talking about the pile of Gaulois cigarette packs we had seen fifteen minutes earlier in the window of a tobacco shop in Saint-Cloud. We began to consider its existence or nonexistence. Godel ended up rejecting the objective existence of the cigarette packs, certainly a surprising proposition from the mouth of a scientist of his caliber. He didn’t believe in the existence of an objective substratum. Yet, the hallucinatory virus at work in the usual state of consciousness, consists, among other things, in the belief of an objective reality! Beyond that, Godel did not believe in the existence of de Gaulle, France’s Third REpublic, the roundness of the Earth… All that was merely pure thought, nothingness, a little of one’s own thought wearing the mask of reality. To reject a pack of cigarettes amounted to annihilating everything — the cosmos, dinosaurs, the Big Bang… Wow! I was very impressed. This was the first and only time in my life that I had encountered a man in whom that rejection was, on the one hand, clearly expressed, and on the other, resulted not from an intellectual concept but from direct experience.”

  Quote

Because people have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams. So the Nothing grows stronger-Gmork

So scary can't look away

Thanks for that quotation happycase, where is it from?

  On 1/8/2013 at 8:43 PM, Joseph said:

Thanks for that quotation happycase, where is it from?

Gilles Farcet's interview with Mr. Jourdain. Most fascinating man I've ever encountered, and as far as I know, the only account of a Westerner who came to a spontaneous enlightenment with no prior preparation. As such, his account is lucid, free from dogma, and totally relatable, because he's so grounded and at home in our mode of intellectual gear.

I revered Lao Zi (Pinyin spelling) in my early college years. These days it's primarily the Dalai Lama, though he's probably more of a spiritual leader than a philosopher.

  On 1/8/2013 at 6:50 PM, happycase said:

That said, I don't grant that Godel was a "philosopher." Every 15 year old kid is a philosopher if we don't hold them to the standard of producing work.

The first sentence doesn't follow from the second, since Godel produced quite a lot of "purely" philosophical work; most of it just wasn't published until after his death. You can find it in his 5-volume collected works.

Some of it was published, like his essay on the relation between relativity and the Kantian conception of time.

Would anyone else like to offer new criteria for philosopher-hood that exclude Kurt Godel?

  On 1/8/2013 at 10:04 PM, ambermonk said:

I revered Lao Zi (Pinyin spelling) in my early college years. These days it's primarily the Dalai Lama, though he's probably more of a spiritual leader than a philosopher.

Daoism and Buddhism are the only pseudo-religious/spiritual texts that I truly adore. The "heart" is in the right place, for lack of a better explanation.

I've only been reading philosophy for a few years and at this point don't feel ready to say 'this is the best!' or 'that is the best!' but I've enjoyed reading Whitehead (he was not just a mathematician). Some of it is a bit dated, but in my experience whenever someone mentioned science and religion in the same breath, further breaths reveal they don't have a fucking clue what science is (aside from a hazy impression of people in universities who do sciency stuff), and a very limited understanding of religion. Whitehead was probably the first read I came across that actually had something interesting to say on the historical connection between the two beyond the usual boring tropes. Love his 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness' also, and his ontologies, well, i just find em fun to read and visualize. I might have something different to say if asked again like 5 years from now.

-edit- Oh yes back in the day I used to enjoy reading zen buddhism, so I guess you could throw the gateless gate in there too.

  On 1/8/2013 at 11:41 PM, TwiddleBot said:

I've only been reading philosophy for a few years and at this point don't feel ready to say 'this is the best!' or 'that is the best!' but I've enjoyed reading Whitehead (he was not just a mathematician). Some of it is a bit dated, but in my experience whenever someone mentioned science and religion in the same breath, further breaths reveal they don't have a fucking clue what science is (aside from a hazy impression of people in universities who do sciency stuff), and a very limited understanding of religion. Whitehead was probably the first read I came across that actually had something interesting to say on the historical connection between the two beyond the usual boring tropes. Love his 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness' also, and his ontologies, well, i just find em fun to read and visualize. I might have something different to say if asked again like 5 years from now.

 

-edit- Oh yes back in the day I used to enjoy reading zen buddhism, so I guess you could throw the gateless gate in there too.

As an atheist, I often find it strange how my fellow atheists are wont to admit the undeniable connection between the two....well, at least historically.

  On 1/8/2013 at 11:48 PM, Smettingham Rutherford IV said:

As an atheist, I often find it strange how my fellow atheists are wont to admit the undeniable connection between the two....well, at least historically.

As an atheist, er, maybe more an igtheist.. Likewise! I don't think it helps though when someone says 'science is a religion' because dude is butthurt that empiricism doesn't agree with his belief that water has memory.

What i mean is, the really good/interesting arguments aren't put forth as much..

  On 1/8/2013 at 11:51 PM, TwiddleBot said:

  On 1/8/2013 at 11:48 PM, Smettingham Rutherford IV said:

As an atheist, I often find it strange how my fellow atheists are wont to admit the undeniable connection between the two....well, at least historically.

 

As an atheist, er, maybe more an igtheist.. Likewise! I don't think it helps though when someone says 'science is a religion' because dude is butthurt that empiricism doesn't agree with his belief that water has memory.

 

What i mean is, the really good/interesting arguments aren't put forth as much..

LOL....we are in agreement. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

  On 1/8/2013 at 11:55 PM, Smettingham Rutherford IV said:

  On 1/8/2013 at 11:51 PM, TwiddleBot said:

  On 1/8/2013 at 11:48 PM, Smettingham Rutherford IV said:

As an atheist, I often find it strange how my fellow atheists are wont to admit the undeniable connection between the two....well, at least historically.

 

As an atheist, er, maybe more an igtheist.. Likewise! I don't think it helps though when someone says 'science is a religion' because dude is butthurt that empiricism doesn't agree with his belief that water has memory.

 

What i mean is, the really good/interesting arguments aren't put forth as much..

LOL....we are in agreement. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

w00t finally, a subscriber

Habermas, Kant, Aristotle when I'm 'ere. Also special shout-out to Hannah Arendt.