Philosophy Now Forum

An Obvious Philosophical Crêpe Suzette wrote:Miracles!! If that's what you reckon philosophy is all about then you've made a navigational error and landed in the wrong forum. Try down the hallway with the preachers in their pulpits.

I suggest that with this unequivocal statement we arrive at the core of Monsieur Obvious' error - and his contradiction. I suggest - continue to suggest - that the first order of philosophical business when it is understood that philosophy arises out of 'religion' (Cf. 'From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculations', F. M. Cornford, 1912), is precisely the miracle of things, of all things, and the possibility of things. That first order of appreciation is as in standing in awe before a miracle: that anything exists. This is the beginning point for human awareness and consciousness and all speculation. It is this endeavour that defines the human.

I also suggest - and continue to suggest - that we have no reason to assume or understand that philosophy must not focus on this, or that it is silly or stupid. Philosophy in its most relevant sense is not determined by an academy, nor by politically correct conventions, nor by some too-adamant voice that lays out Pronouncements that are highly questionable. Indeed, questioning them is philosophy!

Cornford wrote:Philosophy, when she puts aside the finished products of religion and returns to the 'nature of things', really goes back to that original representation out of which mythology itself had gathered shape.

May I remind a local pontificating crackhead that the historical concept of φύσις 'physis':

• "...is concrete: it is a material continuum, which is also alive and divine, Soul and God - a substance, therefor, invested with mythical properties. This substance, rather than the manifold phenomena which Nature presents to us through our senses, is the primary object of early speculation; and from its inherent properties, as material, living, and divine, the various systems can be deduced, according to one or another interpretation is put upon what those properties imply."

I suggest that raw_thought has presented what might be called an 'immediate' thought, and one that rises up with a certain force of understanding, but one that is really quite vital and necessary.

By contrast, I am interested, therefor - as with each post certain writers here reveal, starkly, their metaphysics - what the implications of this shutting down of the sense of wonder is and may be. Because I note that these are metaphysical propositions in essence. Just as much so as any other position. Ideas have consequences, and our ideas start from our predicates.

It contrasts, boldly, with a previous Declaration in which the religious and existential platform of a primitive people (the Aboriginals) was held up as a Value, and something to emulate, a way of being superior and necessary (as was implied).

It seems to me that we are wise to remember that we moderns have nothing to say at all about existence, nor can we or do we make any interpretive statements. We stand before everything in just as much uncertainty as all generations of man, extending back 60,000, 600,000, 600,000,000 years ... or Eternity.

We don't know what anything is, and we do not know for what it is. We know nothing. We could just as easily revert to a Dreamtime explanation, and live according to that, as with a rational/philosophical one.

Thou gavest with one hand, Obvious, and snatchest away with the other.