Bullshit versus Philosophy

Of the many hats that philosophy (greek: philo (wisdom) sophia (lover)), including integration of sciences, theories of knowledge, regulation of sciences, regulation of art, integration of art and science, ethics, adn so on, philosophy is also concerned with the truth.

In this way, my friend Carter was sitting at the dinner table last semester with me and some friends and he said, "A lot of my friends say that Philosophy is a lot of bullshit."

Well, I think in one way that that statement is correct. Philosophy chases its own tail a lot. By being concerned with the truth, it is as if you have to differentiate between what is true and everything else. This includes falsity (literally not-truth) but also bullshit.

Okay so 'I'm a human' is true. But there are some cool applications of 'I'm not a human' being false. More on that when I have more to say on that.

But bullshit, which Frankfurt describes in his work of pop philosophy On Bullshit, is more like words that have a disregard for truth. In this way, in order for something to be false, it has to at least work off of truth. Bullshit does not do such a thing.

In a similar way, last week, when Cramer was on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart said that he considered Mad Money and the Daily Show to be snake oil, but that the Daily Show at least called itself snake oil.

Running with this a bit, studying philosophy and doing philosophy is kind of like being in a snake oil market. You get to be so analytic of just about anything that in order to find out what is true you have to call everything bullshit to start with in order to get that one bottle of real medicine. Which of it is good and which of it is bad is something I've got to cover later, because I'm not there yet, myself.

It's incredibly wacky. In my last post I described how science had to become less and less dependent upon outside events and more on reason in order to make sense of it. This culminated in this blog's namesake, with Immanuel Kant's theory that rationality has to be applied to science and not the other way around.

It is a really weird thing that by creating a theory of Knowldege meant that Kant had to surrender to the worst skepticism. He laid down all claims about knowledge in order to see what was real. I think this is pretty cool.