"That which doesn't kill us only makes us stronger," I think is false. How are you stronger for having your arm cut off?

I think we have to be careful in making distinctions. Of course your mental character and other limbs will grow stronger. But we shouldn't say that all cutting of arms off is good or a good thing.

We have to somehow encourage the good and dis-encourage the bad. I think retrospectively "That which doesn't kill us only makes us stronger" is a great reliever, a sort of calming aphorism, but I don't think it's always true.

We have to be careful of mixing up sciences, too. Ramus basically made half of his career from critiquing Quintillian's claims that rhetoric is everything(even doing good deeds?) which seems kind of silly.

I always talk about how philosophy should play a part in the integration of sciences between each other, and the interaction of sciences.

I also talk about how philosophy can play referee to the sciences, in light of the study of knowledge (Epistemology).

But this third part I'm talking about is the dis-integration of sciences. Sometimes we call the wrong stuff philosophy, or the wrong stuff chemistry when we really mean physics.

I've also talked about the Magritte problem on this blog: Magritte draws an apple and under it writes, "This is not an apple." Because of course it isn't, it's just a drawing of an apple.


But we also make this problem of unhealthy mixing when trusting scholars. Somehow we trust actors more than scientists when they sell us things. Somehow we trust Al Gore or Michael Crichton on climate change more than the actual scientists who study this stuff. I believe in global warming and that it exists, but I lament the fact that we can't trust scientists when they tell us this.

And sometimes these people aren't scholars in the least. Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein turned their brains into political analyzers over the course of their careers; but what does nuclear physics have to do with politics? This is cool when Einstein talks about Nuclear Proliferation, but not necessarily when Russell talked about the Vietnam War.