[QUOTE="Frame_Dragger"]

What do modern philosophers have to offer? How many do we need? In a world where you can pursue a career in this, but given that only a few in each generation will have anything novel to offer, how do we filter the signal from the noise?

We tend to study a relatively small number of great philosophers, yet we now live in a day and age which allows for an enormous number of people, regardless of intelligence or talent, to pursue this as a career, and degree. To further complicate matters, you have information sharing on a scale that is growing, and is exponentially greater than only a few decades past. How do we sort the vast majority which is chaff, from those few inevitable gems who arise in any given generation?

What do we then do with that vast number that represents a useless and failed pool, offering nothing, barely sustaining their own existence?

I'm not making a statement, but I'm curious to see what OT's thoughts on this are, given that this is a very diverse crowd.

Mawy_Golomb

I''ll tell you what they have to offer. Nothing but a set of beliefs, without proof, all which are nothing but wishful thinking. This whole idea of "progress" is nothing but a Utopian ideal. Philosophy is just that...ideas that will never truly come to fruition.

At least nihilism is honest by stating that all political, religious, philosophical, and moral ideologies are nonsense. Authority of all kinds is nothing but a way to keep people oppressed, living under all sorts of superstitions. The quote in my sig is exactly what reflects the state of reality.

- As philosophy has, especially in the past century or a little less, become more self-consciously academic, it's possible to make a career out of interpretation. So now you have people like 'Spinoza experts' or whatever which is fine but which isn't going to give you breakthroughs on the order you're talking about.

- That said, all of philosophy is pretty much dialectical, some authors more than others. But everybody was responding to something that came before. And so you look at the most influential philosophers of the last century and take somebody like Wittgenstein, who was pretty much working in response to Frege/Russel/was also a genius. Point being that this whole process that philosophy has become of reading the literature and working out your problems with it is how you get to innovations.

- How we practice science today comes right out of modern philosophy. Without Hume science as we understand it today doesn't exist.

Philosophy is mostly bullsh*t, and most philosophers are full of sh*t. Which is unfortunate, because philosophy can be very interesting in the rare event that what the philosopher in question is saying actually means something.MannyDelgado

-This is extraordinarily ignorant, I think. What you mean here is not 'philosophers' but angsty teenage kids who've maybe heard of Nietzsche or somebody and think that reading the SEP article on him makes them experts. The popular idea that philosophy is a field that you can say whatever you want and never be accountable for it is misinformed. Although I personally do think that some fields of philosophy are a little easier to get away with not knowing what you're talking about than others, there's a right way to do philosophy just like there's a right way to do science.

I'm looking for an open-world sandbox-y game for the summer and I'm wondering how these two games really differ at all, aside from the setting? I figure I'll burn out on the open-world thing after one of the two games so going for both doesn't make sense. Given that GTA IV costs about half of RDR, which is the better buy? Thanks.

The more I hear about this the more convinced I become that this is all a hoax. 

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