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IAI_Admin OP t1_j3vo48x wrote

Janne teller argues that disinterested pursuit is acontradiction in terms – you wouldn’t pursue anything if you didn’t have a motivation. Philosophy, she argues, is the interested pursuit of truth. All humans pursue truth, but they come from particular social perspectives which affects what they are looking for. Barry Smith concurs that the reason why anindividual is doing philosophy cannot, by nature, be disinterested; you have tobe motivated to ask philosophical questions. But he argues that once you get possibleexplanations up and running, then you have to be disinterested and not allow yourown desires to prejudice what answers you arrive at. Silvia Jonas adds thatwhile philosophy strives to arrive at unbiased conclusions, philosophers must acknowledgethat philosophical theories are always established from a particular socialcontext and likely don’t reflect ‘The Truth’. The value of philosophy, Jonasargues, is that it allows us to establish various theories and then adopt acritical stance towards them, allowing us to identify outside motivations wherein other disciplines these biases go unnoticed.

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Light01 t1_j3xdn7p wrote

more than a contradiction, it's a litteral oxymoron, a disinterested pursuit makes absolutely no sense at all, since pursuing something objectively means "going after", you don't chase something you can't fathom axiomatically. It's like chasing happiness, but what is happiness ? I know what it is in my own perception of the world, but what is it in yours, I don't know, I couldn't chase your happiness, because I have no ideas what makes you happy, this would particularily work well in a relationship, often disinterested love isn't that selfless, by making others happy, you make yourself happy.

To my idea of it, there's never such things as "disinterested X", and especially not something you're not even having a grasp on, it's a funny idea to think about, but in the actual world, it's not a contradiciton, it's an unattainability, it's absolutely unfeasable to reach that level of awareness to the point where you could start chasing something you have no knowledge of, otherwise philosophy would definitely be the most scientific and proeminent production, you'd be the emphasis of an anima mundi if you could do that in any degrees.

(I just wanted to talk about the first sentence, because I found it quite intriguing, even though it's not necessarily the idea you were developping within your argument)

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HegelBitch t1_j3y87c2 wrote

Saying that humans are not able to pursue something disinterestedly is also an unfounded presupposition. I assume that with “disinterested” you mean “without particular interest”. So your presupposition is that humans always pursue something for their own particular reasons. This presupposes an idea of man that is not so obvious as you might think. The whole philosophical and religious tradition up until the 19th century thought man was special, in that man alone was able to have contact and insight in the infinite/the objective order (compared to other animals). This insight in the objective/infinite is meant when it is said man can pursue truth in a disinterested way. I just want to point to the fact that your position is not so obvious as you make it sound - rather, it is steeped in contemporary ideas about humanity and really not very critical at all.

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Luklear t1_j408dfc wrote

But if man were not interested in said insight why did he pursue it? The discussion here is whether or not the categorization makes sense, not whether it was used in the past. To me, to pursue something implies an interest, it’s tautology. But I guess we just have a semantic disagreement.

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Light01 t1_j3z9f4m wrote

And this is why knowledge and ideas are something that goes with the flow of time, what I just said earlier would've killed me 3 centuries ago, but there were men at the time who would consequentially build these ideas, people who left us something else than scholastic and nominalism, not entirely sure what you mean by critical in this context, as a mere foreigner, but if you're saying that it is not the preferred theory amongst the population is absolutely unquestionable, but the literature on the question is not that simple, since it was indeed an importance subject of phenomenology, which is certainly modern, but not contemporary.

I kindly disagree with the statement that the paradigm's order we go after because we were blessed with reason is something we don't follow for our own personal gain, therefore, if it could be said to be objective, we do not have a grasp on it. Aristotle's dialectic has a great example for it with the paint as a false representation of the truth (not going through the whole experimentation, because it's long), meaning that what we find and think of objective is a possible fallacy, and we have no possibility to acknowledge it besides theorizing it, there's a complete and vast differential between what we see, and what's to be seen, and that is not a recent thought, Spinoza talked a lot about it in his Ethics around his idea of god.

(And please, refrain from making assumptions of what I believe or state as evident, since neither I or you knows a pinch of what is obviously accurate in this world, in this particular matter)

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TimeToWander t1_j3xi7xm wrote

Ha! In my science b.a there was a mandatory philosophy class, that suffice to say, not one person seemed interested in its pursuit.

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fursten123 t1_j3yk0l9 wrote

Well, I do think there are general basis for happyness, and other phenomena that can be shared intersubjectively.

Isnt maslows basic needs or jungs personalitytraits, if not science at least good philosophy based on a set of generalities shared by most people?

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Light01 t1_j3z2eop wrote

But it's shared by whose standard ? It's pure conjecture, we see others basically as mere different versions of ourselves, and it works for the most part, but what if it doesn't and you're actually wrong ? Suddenly you get into the reality, people are having lots of problems communicating precisely because their life experiences are divergent enough to make it difficult to comprehend, let alone getting a chance to build on it with another individual. Fortunately no one is that different, we have a lot in common thanks to our cultures, but what if we were living in caves, would it be so easy ? Thinking of allegory of the cave, if you were the one to leave, assuming they don't kill you when you come back, do you think they would understand what makes you happy ?

Therefore, we can guess, and it's fine, it's doing the job, but that's where it stops, we make lots of guesses based on our own experience, objectively we are reflecting our own self, I can never get into your head to actually get a sensible feeling of what you really think, I would just mimic it and pray for the best, it's not exactly the same thing.

My knowledge about others in general is not that impressive, but Sartre, Heidegger, or even Locke have lots of deep thought around this idea that we can't do more than reflecting ourselves into the other, it's our only way to communicate, mimicking each others.

As to know if a good philosophy is something that convey into the masses, well I don't have the capacity to judge it, but it sounds foolish to me, philosophy is not a competition, it's about substance, not acceptance, the quality of your ideas are not measurable by the amount of people who read you, otherwise, people like...I can't come with an American name, so let's throw a A.Soral –a french one notoriously known for being dog shit– who sells lots of book would be a better philosopher than say Schopenhauer who couldn't sell any of his work during his lifetime, it'd be foolish nonetheless. Although, I might've misunderstood your sentence, so I'll also build a bit around both ideas; To me, I've said this in another comment here, philosophy is mostly accurate because of mimetism, someone really smart (start with Aristotle) begin to think about the world, and gather people with the same purpose around him, and then suddenly, he (Platon) starts to write and describe his own view of the world, the next person smart enough to get into the work build his own ideas using the previous work as a fundamental, to better contradict it, and then it goes on ad vitam eternam, so concomitantly, most ideas are build bricks by bricks to suit our reality, philosophy is not something such as "this one is bad, but this author is fantastic", every piece of work is interconnected, there's no philosophy unworthy or absolutely false (as long as you deem it worth reading), any and every ideas will be used to enhance further our comprehension of our surrounding, hence when we use "philosophy", we don't think of an individual theory, we use them all, whereas if we dig into it further down, every individual has its own philosophy into a gigantic dialogism that we confront with each others every day of our lives to prevent ourselves from alienation.

In writing on my phone, it's hard not to lose focus writing posts like this, so excuse me of my possibly inaccurate topic.

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rdrigrail t1_j3zre77 wrote

If philosophers are the only discipline that notice their biases we'd have a lot more problems than we have now. I thought the entire basis for our use of the scientific method was the absolute pursuit of the truth. Like the answer to a math equation. Theories are brought to light and invited outside scrutiny, regardless of social context, is given consideration. The rules of engagement force the theorist to remove any biases when examining any subject, lest you have your ass handed to you by the social context you failed to see before uttering your theory. One good shellacking from an informed peer having a different social context in public I bet that bias gets considered or you take a seat.

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