Hello from the Pacific NW!
Posted: Wed Jun 30, 2010 11:51 pm
Glad to find this place. I'm a former Christian coming out of a 15-year period of reevaluating of all my beliefs from scratch, down to the very existence of God and how I do or don't know anything at all.
I've been an avid lay philosopher since high school. Lay because I found out in the UC and Cal State systems that philosophy in the 1970s was more about language than the big questions. I got frustrated and gave up on traditional routes of study. I also got religion, which did and didn't help.
So, 40 years and lots of thinking/discussing/arguing later, I realize that my special interest is epistemology, thus the "skeptic23" monicker--23 because "skeptic" was taken wherever I was online at the time (early 1990s) and I just liked the number 23. It stuck.
I am obsessively skeptical about my own thinking and everyone else's. I can drive people crazy. I keep pointing to "givens" and "self-evident" assumptions and ask them, "How do you know that?" At some point, I find their limits. I know this because they tend to get upset and personal, blaming me for not "getting it." My quandary is that it's not until you get to those limits that things get interesting. Not that I enjoy drama and personal pot-shots, although they can get pretty comical. Those limits are the edges that we need to move in order to advance our thinking. That's hard to do if we pretend that they aren't there. I'm very interested in advancing our thinking, because I don't find its present condition to be enjoyable. I think that everything in life should be enjoyable and won't give up until it is.
Anyhoo, what led me here was Peter Rickman's article "The Epistemology of Ignorance" at http://www.mukto-mona.com/Articles/edit ... orence.htm. Having just finished an abstract of a project I am working on to show that current thinking suffers from lack of recognition of the essential and inescapable role of ignorance in human knowledge, I was of course very interested in contacting him and getting plugged into any work on the subject that he might be aware of. That led me to Philo Now. Cool!
So, I'm looking forward to some intense, friendly discussion with the folks here about my unending passion: why we think the way that we do and what it does to us.
I've been an avid lay philosopher since high school. Lay because I found out in the UC and Cal State systems that philosophy in the 1970s was more about language than the big questions. I got frustrated and gave up on traditional routes of study. I also got religion, which did and didn't help.
So, 40 years and lots of thinking/discussing/arguing later, I realize that my special interest is epistemology, thus the "skeptic23" monicker--23 because "skeptic" was taken wherever I was online at the time (early 1990s) and I just liked the number 23. It stuck.
I am obsessively skeptical about my own thinking and everyone else's. I can drive people crazy. I keep pointing to "givens" and "self-evident" assumptions and ask them, "How do you know that?" At some point, I find their limits. I know this because they tend to get upset and personal, blaming me for not "getting it." My quandary is that it's not until you get to those limits that things get interesting. Not that I enjoy drama and personal pot-shots, although they can get pretty comical. Those limits are the edges that we need to move in order to advance our thinking. That's hard to do if we pretend that they aren't there. I'm very interested in advancing our thinking, because I don't find its present condition to be enjoyable. I think that everything in life should be enjoyable and won't give up until it is.
Anyhoo, what led me here was Peter Rickman's article "The Epistemology of Ignorance" at http://www.mukto-mona.com/Articles/edit ... orence.htm. Having just finished an abstract of a project I am working on to show that current thinking suffers from lack of recognition of the essential and inescapable role of ignorance in human knowledge, I was of course very interested in contacting him and getting plugged into any work on the subject that he might be aware of. That led me to Philo Now. Cool!
So, I'm looking forward to some intense, friendly discussion with the folks here about my unending passion: why we think the way that we do and what it does to us.