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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

dylanfw showed you a flaw in your facts. Sartre and Camus were in fact philosophers by any reasonable definition of the word.

Or rather, dylanfw claimed a flaw in your "facts". But your claim - that they were not philosophers - was just a claim, with no supporting reason given. It can be dismissed just as easily (and with more justice).

And, dylanfw said "... with no supporting argument". He/she can'd dismiss your logic because there is no logic - just some dogmatic claims, with no support whatsoever.

> Arguably, with Hegel, at least in the west, the term philosophy lost any meaning and became mere abstract speculations, similar to theology.

With Hegel, philosophy became irrational. For a good explanation, see "Escape From Reason" by Francis Schaeffer.

> Fortunately, there is Eastern philosophy too.

You think that Eastern philosophy isn't abstract speculation, similar to theology? Why?

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> philosophy became irrational

This is contradiction.

> Eastern philosophy isn't abstract speculation, similar to theology? Why?

Due to its goal and its method. The goal was to find the ultimate reality, as they call it. The method was of removing nonsense, not pilling up more abstract concepts. A recursive process of reaching the ultimate base case, if you wish.

The culmination is, arguably, the Upanishads and to some extent Advaita Vedanta and the Buddhist philosophy of mind. For its time it was remarkable achievements and for the most parts in its fundamental principles it still does not have a contradiction with the principles confirmed by the findings of the classic sciences.

>This is contradiction.

No, it's really not. Philosophy is just inquiry, if the inquiry leads you away from rationalism, you can still follow it, and several philosophers have done so.

It is contradiction with the original meaning and purpose of the whole endeavor - the search for ultimate reality, of what is.

As soon as you ceased to follow the method and start to pile up nonsense it could not be called an inquiry anymore. Some other definition is needed, and the word speculation is better candidate or a dogmatic theology.

At least, ceasing to rigorously follow the scientific method disqualifies one from being a scientist. Similarly, ceasing to follow laws of logic and to keep a "converging/recursive process of approximating to what is by removing nonsense and misconceptions" (which maintains so called connection to reality) in philosophy disqualifies one from being a philosopher.

Please, lets not start about so called ultimate existence of abstractions. Categorization of abstractions is another kind of endeavor.

The obvious example is so-called philosophy of death. No one has been there but so many has a lot to say about it.

>It is contradiction with the original meaning and purpose of the whole endeavor - the search for ultimate reality, of what is.

Only assuming reality is rational. Which is a pre-conceived notion -- and that's even more in contradiction with the original meaning and purpose of the whole endeavor.

Though, even scientists can get it wrong (e.g. "God doesn't play dice", when apparently, she does).

Come on, rationality as a concept of the mind is unapplicable to reality. Reality just is.

Genetic patterns, for example, are not rational or irrational. Some of them encode genes for proteins, so they are preserved by the evolution processes (mutations in, say, hemoglobin would be selected out). Some of them are random noise. The whole thing is stochastic - random mutation occur, so God plays a dice, but some patterns managed to propagate itself, so here is some determinism within stochasticity. That is basic life.

And then everything builds up upon it, up to french existentialists, speculating about abstract freedom.

>Come on, rationality as a concept of the mind is unapplicable to reality. Reality just is.

That's exactly the kind of non-philosophical argument that takes for granted what it should investigate.

Reality barely "just is". And even if it is, we have no way of accessing reality-reality, just our perceptions of it (which is the message of Kant, and to a different degree, Hume).

And whether reality is rational, Hegel would also like to have a discussion with you. He'll agree on the "reality is rational" part, but not in the way you think it (e.g. he accepts reality as contradictory at the ontological level, and event accepts contradictions in his version of logic).

>Genetic patterns, for example, are not rational or irrational.

Philosophical inquiry needed (akin to "citation needed").

> non-philosophical argument that takes for granted what it should investigate.

It has been investigated. The experimental findings of genetics could prune out lots and lots of prior nonsense, the way a backtracking tree-pruning search algorithm would do. Philosophy need to be constantly revisited, to be up to date with what is proven to be the case.

One implication of genetics is that life is proved to be a "mechanical process" - in other words, there is nothing "extra" to it. God is proved to be dead.

The inquiry is quite short. As long as we have established that the mind is what the brain does, and brain is a product of this particular spot of the universe (it requires water, atoms and certain temperature) every concept produced by the mind is withing this closure, not parallel or outside of it. As an Indian philosopher would say, I am That (Brahman - the universe, what is), not something else. A lot of western bullshit could be pruned out that way.

You know, in the Pirsig's book the hero dismissed Indian philosophy, by attending a wrong sect of extreme advaitists, who are naively postulating that everything is an illusion.

To find the distinction where "what is" ends and an illusion (self-conditioning) produced by mind (and society) begins is the task of philosophy as an endeavor, not some scholastic branch. This is the way to see "That" more clearly.

"Before knowing what is lies outside know what lies within" as the ancient saying goes. Know how the instrument works before make any measurements.

> One implication of genetics is that life is proved to be a "mechanical process" - in other words, there is nothing "extra" to it. God is proved to be dead.

Not at all. God is proved to not be needed to explain certain things that are explained by genetics. That's all.

> As long as we have established that the mind is what the brain does...

You haven't. Nobody has. We have assumed, but that's not the same thing.

God is a word, a label. That label could be meaningfully attached to one of the two concepts - the process, of which we are by-products, which is running by the machine we call Universe, or, to the language-possessing, self-conscious mind, looking at which the ancient people created their anthropomorphic toy-gods.

One famous Sufi saying goes like this "Nothing can know god but god [itself]". This, intuitively, gives one a hint about the correct labeling and the recursive definition hints that it is all inside the mind, mere mental concepts and social constructs.

The machine which runs all this... Well, it could be called god too, and Hindu mystics did it three or four millennia ago, destroying all the Vedic anthropomorphic gods as mere products of imagination.

Modern science leaves no place for any god, but one of these two.

Philosophy didn't become irrational on its own. It took Karl Marx's work to thoroughly debunked it as such (e.g. Manuscripts of 1844). At least the action and moral parts. The knowledge aspect remained open to speculation and reflection (i.e. epistemology). What they have in common is the successful negation of Marx's work by placing philosophy on life-support, which it still is today, and by acting as if either the marxist critique never happened, or, it is equivalent to leninist/stalinist ideology.

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