IAI_Admin

IAI_Admin OP t1_ivy46c2 wrote on November 11, 2022 at 2:03 PM

Reply to Engaging with philosophy gives you a toolkit that can help you lead a better and more meaningful life. by IAI_Admin

Rebecca Roache, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, argues that philosophy provides us with a set of valuable strategies, tools and techniques that can be applied to real
life situations to help us lead better lives. Firstly, philosophical logic
allows us to have substantial and meaningful arguments with people, because
rather than blindly talking past people and simply pronouncing our own
position, we learn to identify the hidden assumptions and flaws in the others
argument. Secondly, in philosophy we learn to ask why ad infinitum, allowing us
to get deeper into the foundational claims that justify what someone is saying.
Thirdly, it allows you to argue via analogy, to explain why certain like
situations should be treated alike. Through exploring her personal experiences,
Rebecca Roache unpacks how these tools can be used to help us tackle the
challenges we face every day. For example, philosophy allows us to see how we
don’t see the world as it really is, we see it through a kind of subjective
lens. But this idea is also applicable to how we see ourselves. We have
deep-seated ingrained beliefs about ourselves that aren’t immediately visible
to us, but they show up in the choices we make. Using the philosophical toolkit
to examine these choice enables honest reflection on the underlying factors
that have shaped past decisions and allows us to make more free and informed
decisions going forward.

IAI_Admin

The truth about conspiracy theories - We must be open and critical towards all theories. Dismissing putative conspiracy theories while failing to properly interrogate pseudoscience dangerous and irrational.

For world philosophy day 13 thinkers share the philosophical questions that will define this century | Including Noam Chomsky on destruction, Naomi Oreskes on climate crisis and Carissa Veliz on innovation

Postmodernism’s insights have long grown stale. Most theories which aim to succeed it simply repeat the same mistakes. Metamodernism, by contrast, consolidates the positive ground postmodernism achieved without succumbing to its pitfalls

IAI_Admin OP t1_ivy46c2 wrote on November 11, 2022 at 2:03 PM

Engaging with philosophy gives you a toolkit that can help you lead a better and more meaningful life.

Modernity is dominated by loneliness, anxiety, and precarity. To live happily, we should learn from pre-modern thinkers like Plato and Al-Farabi and rationally prioritise our life goals – placing the quest for knowledge above the quest for influence.

The big data delusion – the more data we have, the harder it is to find meaningful patterns in the world.

The strict moralisation of certain ideas in universities is preventing intellectual growth | Tommy Curry, Aaron Bastani and Kathleen Stock discuss the dangers of censoring academia

How effective altruism lost the plot | Nobel principles of charity and generosity have developed into absurd fantasies of a post-human world in which the transformative power for technology controls everything

Stupidity is part of human nature. We must ditch the myth of perfect rationality as an attainable, or even desirable, goal | Bence Nanay

Logical positivism does not dispense with metaphysics, as it aimed to. It merely proposes a different kind of metaphysics, in which natural sciences take the privileged position once occupied by rationalist metaphysics.

“It is the unconscious cognitive dissonance at the heart of explicit racism which prevents explicit racists from seeing the immoral nature of their racist actions.” – Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Gatzia on belief, hypocrisy, and cognitive dissonance.

What we don't owe the future | Longtermism is a philosophy of grandiose ambition but short on useful insights. Our moral obligation is to improve the society we live in, not the ones to come.

The phenomenology of dementia | As memory slips away, it can take with it language, knowledge and even selfhood. But something beautiful can still remain – the ability to live in a simplified present.

The benefits of doing nothing | An overactive 'life drive' endlessly seeks expansion, inevitably leads to burnout, and drains us of the energy needed to truly progress. Finding the time to do nothing is essential to reassessing who we are and who we want to be.

Schopenhauer and the insatiable will to live | To reduce suffering and forge a better world we must resist desire and our metaphysical individualism.

Bruno Latour posed a major challenge to modern philosophy’s key assumption - a distinction between the human subject and the world. Philosophy as a field is yet to properly understand the importance of his contribution | Graham Harman.

The search for universal meaning in an absurd world is pointless. Camus argues meaning must be forged from personal passions.

“Scientific progress is thwarted by the ownership of knowledge.” How Karl Popper’s philosophy of science can overcome clinical corruption.

Modern western philosophy is founded on the search for certainty, but to be certain is to call and end to enquiry, as Eric Fromme suggested. The world is richer when we’re open to alternative ways of seeing the world in all cases.

At our core, most of us are not as good as we think we are - we are a mix of ethically good and bad traits. But can close this ‘character gap’ between who we are and who we think we should be.