Philosophers often align their brands with lost causes, because they figure that all the good ones are taken. Intellectual progress is so slow that you can pick a hill to die on, build an indefensible home there, and generations later it may still look like a fortress.
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Replying to @Plinz
If your goal is to "defend" something, you're doing it wrong. :P The point of philosophy is to ask questions and collect the answers into something that feels useful for deciding what to do with your life.
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Replying to @thewiseturtle
I disagree. For me, the point of philosophy is to discover what can be known. Philosophy can often be applied, but usefulness is not always a good criterion for deciding about truth. Feelings of usefulness are irrelevant by themselves.
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Replying to @Plinz
That's science you're talking about. Philosophy isn't about truth, but about the bigger picture of how we decide that we fit into the universe. What we imagine our role to be in life as a whole is where the usefulness comes in. If we don't fit in, we feel useless.
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Replying to @thewiseturtle
I would call this not philosophy but therapy, but I don't think that it matters. The academic philosophers don't have a trademark on the term :)
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Replying to @Plinz
Therapy is science, too. Philosophy is above all that factual/objective/practical stuff. All philosophy uses science in a broad way to connect the self to reality as a whole. It's the bridge between the personal (subjective) and the cosmological (objective).
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Replying to @thewiseturtle
I think that you arrived at different answers than me, mostly because your epistemology is different. I erase all confidence in the absence of evidence, and rebuild from there.
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Replying to @Plinz
There is no evidence of anything, ultimately, other than "something exists". Beyond that it's all subjective categorization. The something gets split into fractional parts and we label those parts on a whim. My epistemology led me to label things using some basic math/geometry.
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There seems to be a way to derive a mathematical theory that maximizes the conformance of our models to the ground truth if what exists.
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