Philosophy Now Forum

Nicholas Maxwell says we need a total rethink concerning the way we think.

http://philosophynow.org/issues/65/Are_ ... al_Warming

Sure!

Philosophers have being polluting the air for years with their mumbo-jumbo, adding to global warming.

But seriously, though I was being serious before, they be no more responsible for that than they are for womanizing. But, then!

Has anybody notice the correlation between the increase in population and the increase of pollution in the air. It is said there be 7 billion humans on earth right now. There is probably just as much air pollution. But humans, like trees, are here to breath in dirty air, filter it in their lungs and send it out cleaner. So, the population wouldn't stop increasing until we get global warming and air pollution under control. Why haven't philosophers told us that?

But perhaps philosophers have said something about it because industry is beginning to make cleaner engines that sort of act like people's lungs, which breath in and help purify the air. The next billion people should be longer to get to than the last.

This article implies that philosophers didn't tell us hard enough that we were polluting the world.

Philosopher for years have been trying to tell us how we ought to behave. We have rarely listened to them. This is because humans are a perverse lot. We act first and listen later. We tend to do the right thing after the fact, or the wrong thing for the right reason. There is nothing truer than the idea that we learn best from our mistakes. So listening to the advice of philosophers comes secondary. It is like one's father giving advice and you don't heed it but later realize he was right. We have to learn for ourselves, not because of something a philosopher tells use. After all, we have in our mind, philosophers can be wrong too.

There are few philosophers who understood that humans learn in a perverse, irrational manner. I think Kant and Nietzsche understood this. Adam Smith believed that humanity works best if it acts 'selfishly', which seems counterintuitive. And Hegel understood, that we develop, progress and understand through the dialectic, by going through the motions and building on them. I image that the writers of the Bible also knew this, that what ever wisdom they imparted to us would only be absorbed through action and humans engaging themselves in the real world, not just through dictates but through deeds.

Philosophers also don't exactly know what works best. It is hard for them to teach us pragmatism. That's why we act first and discover later.

Maybe philosophers haven't been warning us about global warming because they've been too busy arguing over what the words 'global' and 'warming' mean.

keithprosser2 wrote:Maybe philosophers haven't been warning us about global warming because they've been too busy arguing over what the words 'global' and 'warming' mean.

Yah, global warming is too abstract and metaphorical for some.

Thought itself is the source of global warming.

This is easy to see. Imagine that tomorrow morning we wake up to discover someone has invented a totally clean and totally free source of energy, which is ready for immediate use, on any scale we want.

What would happen next? The economy would take off like a rocket, and we'd then be consuming other crucial limited resources at an even faster pace, increasing pollution, loss of habits etc. That is, the crisis would not be solved, but simply transferred from one department to other departments.

The core problem is that no matter how much we have, we always want more. 7 billion people and growing, empowered by technology, on an endless quest for more, more, more and ever more. We talk about this as a moral crisis, but it's deeper than that, more fundamental.

Philosophers are to blame if they claim to be experts on thought, and then don't make this relationship between thought and global warming clear.

Typist wrote: Philosophers are to blame if they claim to be experts on thought, and then don't make this relationship between thought and global warming clear.

That is a peculiar statement, connecting thought with global warming.

I am incline to think global warming comes more from the other end. Take cows, for instance, and their contribution to global warming.

I am incline to think global warming comes more from the other end. Take cows, for instance, and their contribution to global warming.

Ok, let's take cows for instance, good idea.

You are correct that cows contribute to global warming.

http://nature-talk.com/atmosphere/clima ... lanet.html

And so we can ask, given that we know this, why do we keep so many cows?

Cows are not needed for food. My wife and I have been vegetarians for over 30 years, and we are in great health. In addition, cows are a very inefficient way to produce food. In addition, meat contributes to heart disease, the leading cause of death in developed countries.

You could say, well, we're stupid. While that is hard to argue against I believe the problem lies deeper than that.

Not only in the content of thought, but arising from the nature of thought itself. No matter what we have, thought compares it to something else, and wants the something else, even if it's a highly irrational something else which endangers not only our personal health, but the planet all of us depend on.

Meat production is a major source of global warming and a coming global catastrophe. And we are pushing ahead with it anyway, because we like the way meat tastes. There's more to it than just being stupid, imho.

Typist wrote:

I am incline to think global warming comes more from the other end. Take cows, for instance, and their contribution to global warming.

Ok, let's take cows for instance, good idea.

You are correct that cows contribute to global warming.

http://nature-talk.com/atmosphere/clima ... lanet.html

And so we can ask, given that we know this, why do we keep so many cows?

Cows are not needed for food. My wife and I have been vegetarians for over 30 years, and we are in great health. In addition, cows are a very inefficient way to produce food. In addition, meat contributes to heart disease, the leading cause of death in developed countries.

You could say, well, we're stupid. While that is hard to argue against I believe the problem lies deeper than that.

Not only in the content of thought, but arising from the nature of thought itself. No matter what we have, thought compares it to something else, and wants the something else, even if it's a highly irrational something else which endangers not only our personal health, but the planet all of us depend on.

Meat production is a major source of global warming and a coming global catastrophe. And we are pushing ahead with it anyway, because we like the way meat tastes. There's more to it than just being stupid, imho.

Well, I think cars are stupid. I don't have a car. The combustion engine is an inefficient use of fuel. Nevertheless we keep on using it.

Humankind is stupid and irrational. But that seems to be how we thrive and remain dynamic.

spike wrote: Humankind is stupid and irrational. But that seems to be how we thrive and remain dynamic.

Humans are, by any interpretation of the word, the least 'stupid' species on earth. But intellectual smarts may not have been a beneficial turn, evolution-wise. We've been around for a few minutes, in global time-scale terms, and we're close to making ourselves extinct. The real stupid creatures, like cockroaches for example, survive and thrive much better than us geniuses.

Thundril wrote:The real stupid creatures, like cockroaches for example, survive and thrive much better than us geniuses.

Is this a fact or just an urban myth?

Well, they've been around a lot longer than hominids, and they show no sign of becoming extinct, much less of making themselves extinct.