Philosophy

With Kant's 300th birthday coming up on April 22nd, I'm seeing a lot of "why study philosophy articles", and frankly I find offensive to even take that tack. To me it's not in question and I'd argue 99% of our misguidedness comes from lack of philosophical vision, why we're in a climate crisis, why there's so much othering, prejudice and oppression. 

I went to look for the examples I've seen recently and wow, there's a lot of articles that say "philosophy" in the title on the internet, I take it back, hardly a trend if I've seen two of them that I can't find now.

They still don't know how consciousness works.

And then Daniel Dennett died. I read Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and went to work and asked if people were evolutionists or creationist. At the time I worked at a special education school. The book made it clear to me that you couldn't be both, that evolution erases the creation narrative of Christianity that is so important to it. Turns out nearly everyone at work believed in both, God created evolution. Very few people believed one or the other. 

I have turned to Buddhism, which many people see as a philosophy, but I see more as a psychology. It's a philosophy of mind of possibility. Uncovering Buddha nature isn't something you have to do or ought to do. It's a long hard path and I can't really proselytize it because it's so hard and subtle. I haven't overcome my flaws, there was no spiritual bypass, you need Buddhism plus other things, it's not axiomatic, you still have make good choices and the vigilance of mindfulness isn't enough, you still have to think too, and have ethics. You can't just be natural, because we're animals, you have to strive, and that's exhausting, guarding the gates of the sense isn't fun. 

Why the World Still Needs Immanuel Kant (NY Times)

"Before Kant, it’s said, philosophers were divided between Rationalists and Empiricists, who were concerned about the sources of knowledge. Does it come from our senses, or our reason? Can we ever know if anything is real? By showing that knowledge requires sensory experience as well as reason, we’re told, Kant refuted the skeptics’ worry that we never know if anything exists at all."