Uwot,
Read your last post, don’t you see a perfect example of using “platitudes”.
Wiki: "A platitude is a trite, meaningless, or prosaic statement, generally directed at quelling social, emotional, or cognitive unease. The word derives from plat, Frenchword for "flat." Platitudes are geared towards presenting a shallow, unifying wisdom over a difficult topic. However, they are too overused and general to be anything more than undirected statements with ultimately little meaningful contribution towards a solution. Examples could be statements such as "Meet in the middle", "Everybody has a right to an opinion", "Everything happens for a reason", "It is what it is", and "Do what you can". Platitudes are generally a form of thought-terminating Cliché."
Philosophy is about putting your experiences into a context. In practise this means doing exactly what Kelly is complaining that philosophy doesn't do. Everybody has some principles that guide them: seeing is believing, trust your head not your heart; god exists, no he doesn't; having respect for people matters, stuff everyone else. It is true that people have argued about those sort of core values for thousands of years to absolutely no avail, but the fact is that people have different outlooks and always will. What philosophers try to do is organise their thoughts in a coherent manner, so that the world makes sense according to their core values; even if those core values are the cause of disagreement or conflict. What some opponents will do is argue about the core values. What philosophical opponents will do is try and prove that the logic is faulty and that the worldview is incoherent.
It's all well and good to talk about "core values" but the "core values" the founding philosophers attempted to establish was
understanding the nature of the concepts i.e. existence, knowledge, truth, right, consciousness, etc. Unfortunately their approach to understanding the nature of these concepts was not systematic and they failed. This has caused Traditional Philosophy to become merely the archived writings documenting their failure. The followers of this failed Philosophy have no logical foundation to guide their thinking, resulting in confusion and total lack of consensus among themselves. Evidence of this is any Philosophy forum.
I ask you; what is so offensive to the followers of failed Traditional Philosophy that its' members abhor any effort to engage in collaborative coordinated effort to correct its' failure. This is the reason; our psychologically existence is a construct of our individual ideas about the nature of things and conditions. Thus, the state of our psychological existence/self-esteem depends on our individual ideas being "right" and any ideas different from our own is a threat to our ideas being "right" and to our self-esteem. The followers of failed traditional Philosophy feel threatened by new and different ideas that can fix their failed Philosophy.
If this psychological condition is not detrimental enough to fixing the problem, the mental ability of the follows of traditional Philosophy has been so degraded that the systematic effort required is outside their capabilities. Evidence, is the fact that philosophers have not constructed, in twenty-five centuries, a single comprehensive definition of any of the concepts, which, if these concepts were not important to the welfare of mankind, Philosophy itself would not exist.
A comprehensive understanding of the philosophical concepts is more important to the welfare of mankind today than ever. Yet philosophers continue to resist any effort to fix the problem by constructing the new and different ideas needed.
The condition of the concept
Truth determines the interaction of individuals in our effort to satisfy our needs on which the survival of mankind depends. Yet the followers of failed Philosophy vigorously resist any effort to construct a comprehensive definition of Truth because the ideas needed are different from their own.
kelly
