/r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | January 30, 2023

Submitted by BernardJOrtcutt t3_10p33no in philosophy

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread. This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our posting rules (especially posting rule 2). For example, these threads are great places for:

  • Arguments that aren't substantive enough to meet PR2.

  • Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. who your favourite philosopher is, what you are currently reading

  • Philosophical questions. Please note that /r/askphilosophy is a great resource for questions and if you are looking for moderated answers we suggest you ask there.

This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. All of our normal commenting rules are still in place for these threads, although we will be more lenient with regards to commenting rule 2.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

7

Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

Past-Shelter-7761 t1_j6oas65 wrote

Mario Bunge (1919-2020), argentine-canadian physics and philosopher, was a very important XX century science philosophy specialist, similar in quality and importance of ideas to Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Richard Dawid. He wrote that nonsense ideas are not able to be investigated; so that, it is impossible to declare them as false (try to imagine the time you need to fly from one place to another one using Heidegger´s definition of time as "maturation of temporality").

Bunge refuses to apply scientific methods in case of moral lack and describes four distinctive authentis science features: mutability, compatibility with previous general knowledge, partial intersection with another science (at least one of them) and scientific community supervision. Science is an always mutable knowledge.

He never accepted strings theory: according to him, the consistence, sophistication and beauty are never enough in science research. String theory is suspicious of pseudosciencia. It seems to be science fiction or at least failed science. (Bunge dixit)

Bunge explains that if we´d like to explore the mind as an immaterial entity and our goal is to understand mental processes, so the shortest way is free speculation. As a consequence, the idealistic conjectures so described will be no adequate to be confirmed by cerebral research. But, in case you understand that mental activity is cerebral activity, the scientific method is inevitable. This is the basis for cognitive neuroscience. So, there is always a more or less tacit philosophy on the basis of any research.

According to his definition of science, Bunge wrote that psychoanalysis was the most important XX century scientific fraud.

3

Mysterious_Case6656 t1_j6j7dxr wrote

Why am I seeing frequent posts about Andrew Tate on this sub all of a sudden?

1

Grim-Reality t1_j6jlosd wrote

Are the IAI people mods on this subreddit or are connected to them? They lock threads and silence people left and right under the guise of broad meaningless rules that can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. Removing comments is questionable at best, but locking threads to prevent further criticism when it’s not going in a favorable direction to the article is simply unwarranted. The amount of censorship in this subreddit is beyond astounding considering this is a philosophy subreddit. Wtf is going on here? When someone says something they don’t like, it’s gone in an instant. There was some unwarranted criticism towards a Tate piece but the mods just silenced the whole thread and removed everything. This is beyond disgusting and a serious abuse of power. Even though I liked the piece very much, the censorship and the silencing of people and their opinions is alarming.

Why can’t people talk about what they dislike and like, people have died throughout all of history to fight censorship like this, yet these mods are extremely abusive with their power. It’s a distasteful abuse of power, in a subreddit where difference of opinion and skepticism should be encouraged, not silenced. Locking whole threads and preventing people from commenting or posting is extremely backwards. It’s not a good sign for a philosophy subreddit to be like that.

2

ADefiniteDescription t1_j6ncjj7 wrote

>Are the IAI people mods on this subreddit or are connected to them?

Nope.

> They lock threads and silence people left and right under the guise of broad meaningless rules that can be interpreted in a myriad of ways.

The rules are extremely straightforward if you bother to read them. Most people who complain about the rules either seem to not have read them, or disagree with their intent. The latter is fine, but irrelevant; if you don't like this subreddit you're welcome to find another philosophy su reddit.

> Removing comments is questionable at best, but locking threads to prevent further criticism when it’s not going in a favorable direction to the article is simply unwarranted. The amount of censorship in this subreddit is beyond astounding considering this is a philosophy subreddit. Wtf is going on here?

It isn't "censorship" to remove rulebreaking comments, or at least not in any problematic sense. The rules are there to promote good discussion because anyone who has been on other subreddits or forums without any rules will notice the quality of comments is awful.

> When someone says something they don’t like, it’s gone in an instant.

This simply isn't true. If you just comment and say "This is shit" then it will be removed, yes, but that's because it doesn't meet CR2.

> There was some unwarranted criticism towards a Tate piece but the mods just silenced the whole thread and removed everything. This is beyond disgusting and a serious abuse of power. Even though I liked the piece very much, the censorship and the silencing of people and their opinions is alarming.

When the majority of a thread is filled with rulebreaking comments and is likely to continue to be such we lock the thread. The moderators are volunteers and aren't going to waste their lives removing hundreds of godawful rulebreaking comments.

>Why can’t people talk about what they dislike and like, people have died throughout all of history to fight censorship like this, yet these mods are extremely abusive with their power. It’s a distasteful abuse of power, in a subreddit where difference of opinion and skepticism should be encouraged, not silenced. Locking whole threads and preventing people from commenting or posting is extremely backwards. It’s not a good sign for a philosophy subreddit to be like that.

If you're looking for a subreddit without any rules I recommend going elsewhere, because that is not going to change here.

4

bumharmony t1_j6jwfaq wrote

Since say one this has been a religious, rather a philosophical community. Not that I would like to discuss Tate in particular.

2

bradyvscoffeeguy t1_j6l2dsl wrote

It's funny because most articles will get through no matter their (poor) quality but original posts and comments will get blocked and deleted. I haven't been around enough to notice Tate posts. I think he is a fucking scumbag and an idiot, and I imagine you could get some fucking bad misogyny in anything related to him because hey this is reddit, and I imagine there's a point when that violates sub rules. I mean I I think it's in everyone's interest for the level of discourse to be above the 4chan shit you can find on other subreddits. Anyway I'm not familiar with the post you're talking about so I don't know if this is relevant.

1

ADefiniteDescription t1_j6nbj75 wrote

I don't think this is remotely true; the only one I can recall is the IAI one yesterday.

2

bradyvscoffeeguy t1_j6l2y1w wrote

Heyooo so anyone tired of all the Continental bullshit you have to engage with nowadays??

1

ephemerios t1_j6nc0ms wrote

"Continental bullshit" as in continental philosophy? No, not really. I'm tired of vacuous, frequently politically motivated criticism of continental philosophy though.

3