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Hey, /sci/, check this out, and let me know what you think, please.
A while ago, I was discussing the idea of philosophy with someone who had a Ph.D. in the field. He was quite accomplished, apparently, and had studied directly under Jacques Derrida, whom he considered a hero. I asked this man how it could be known that a philosopher making any statement was absolutely correct or incorrect. He considered the notion naive, and eventually admitted that there is nothing more to philosophy than rhetoric. A philosopher is only correct to the extent that he can gain more support from Important People than his opponent; This support is dependent upon the biases of the Important People, the qualitiy (or, really, obscurity) of the philosopher's argument, and personal politics.
I asked whether he was ashamed to be involved in a field with such possible import to humanity but which had abandoned hope of finding absolute answers.
He was offended, of course, and explained that language and the human mind are incapable of encompassing the totality of existence. Any intellectual investigation, he said, was a game of approximates and guesses.
He gave, as an example, the inability of theoretical physicists to use mathematical language to describe the ultimate nature of reality in a way that was self-consistent and consistent with observation and experience on both the relative and quantum levels.
Continued next post.
Pic related: my face when reading post-modernist philosophy.