Philosophy as Math-Like Thinking

http://jessylin.com/2019/11/17/what-philosophy-is-good-for/

by gsjbjt • 6 years ago

70 33 6 years ago

pmoriarty• 6 years ago

"Philosophy is a way to address these questions more systematically -- it takes our fuzzy concepts and intuitions and makes them rigorous... In metaphysics, for example, when we talk about ontology, we try to formalize our natural intuitions for objects"

This is only true of certain types of philosophy -- analytic philosophy and its brethren in the 20th and 21st Centuries, and some systematic philosophers of earlier times.

Nietzsche is one of the most well-known counterexamples. Writing in an intuitive, aphoristic style, he was far from interested in any kind of systematization or formalism.

The playfulness of Derrida and the approaches of some other of the Postmodernists are also the antithesis of what this article claims philosophy is about.

The Pre-Socratics and Socrates himself were not interested in systematization or formalism either. Neither was most Eastern philosophy.

Philosophic interest in formalizing only rears its head in philosophy towards the end of the 19th Century with Frege and the logical-positivists (themselves ancestors to the Analytics) who followed him.

There's plenty of philosophy that just isn't interested in this.

On the other hand, if what the author is getting at is that philosophers tend to examine the questions and subjects that interest them in a deeper way than most other non-scientist do, then I would agree with that.

yters• 6 years ago

A lot of Platonic dialogues and Aristotle's works are pretty rigorous like analytic philosophy. Plato also has a mythical and literary element to his dialogues, but there is also logical rigor and careful distinction. Arguably, there is a reason for the literary setting of the logic in the dialogues, more than just 'make it readable.'

And if you want overboard rigor, look to the scholastics. Aquinas is nothing if not methodical. Duns Scotus gets inordinately detailed in his distinctions.

I would argue that rather than being typical, the Nietszche/Derrida/etc. continental sort of philosophy is just one half of the historical philosophy coin. The best philosophers have gone hand in hand with logical rigor and literary poise.

bananamerica7• 6 years ago

Derrida is a lot closer to literature than it is to philosophy, including Nietzsche. He’s a charlatan that uses cryptic language to make his writing seem serious and profound. Not unlike Jacques Lacan and Aleister Crowley.

masswerk4• 6 years ago

Lacan is actually surprisingly rigorous or, at least, methodical. It's just, if you attempt to talk about what preconditions language and language like structures using language, you necessarily enter a metadiscourse. (Having read Lacan in philosophy was actually of help to me to come up with some algorithms as a programmer.)

thebooktocome• 6 years ago

He’s a charlatan that uses cryptic language to make his writing seem serious and profound.

A common criticism, to be sure; but not one with much evidence behind it. For instance, here's a good review of one of his better books, _The Politics of Friendship_: https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/what-jacques-der...

It’s taken me years to read “The Politics of Friendship.” As I’ve inched my way through it, lines here and there have sent me to Derrida’s other writings, or have spurred my mind to chase random memories. I fix on the parts that sing, and I try to catch the gist of the parts that are too complicated for me. The book’s main appeal is the opportunity it provides to follow along as someone grapples with an ephemeral part of human experience. Doing so has come to feel more and more poignant as I have made my slow progress. At times, it seems as though Derrida is describing a bygone way of being, one racked with less anxiety about the bonds that tie us together. In an era of social media and fluid, proliferating channels of communication and exchange, the idea of friendship seems almost quaint, and possibly imperiled. In the face of abundant, tenuous connections, the instinct to sort people according to a more rigid logic than that of mere friendship seems greater than ever.

That doesn't sound like a charlatan. It sounds like a difficult author that few people have the patience or incentive to engage with -- like Heidegger or Wittgenstein, who somehow eschew the "charlatan" label while being much more technically demanding.

claudeganon• 6 years ago

Nietzsche is one of the most well-known counterexamples. Writing in an intuitive, aphoristic style, he was far from interested in any kind of systematization or formalism.

I mostly agree with Lukacz account[0] that Nietzsche’s philosophy was actually a kind of knowing obfuscation of imperialist violence, dressed up in aphorism to make it all seem somehow heroic.

While he’s not of the analytic strain, his book “The Destruction of Reason” (from which the below is excerpted) is an excellent rebuttal of this kind of irrationalism in continental philosophy, from Nietzsche to Heidegger to Late Wittgenstein (all of which also informed Derrida).

[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/destruction-re...

stiglitz• 6 years ago

I’ve read some po-mo stuff (like Baudrillard). Terms are constantly used without clear definitions, and rather than a logical progression of thoughts it’s a snaggle of metaphors. That kind of reading is very thought-provoking, but it’s the antithesis of math.

cam_l• 6 years ago

I feel the same way about reading math (without ever studying it).

chongli• 6 years ago

What math are you reading? All of the math textbooks I’ve read, in university, begin each section with a precise definition and then proceed to examine the implications. Theorems begin with a precise statement of the hypotheses and conclusion before proceeding to the proof.

If you’re trying to read math on Wikipedia, without having studied it, you’re going to have a bad time. Wikipedia’s math pages are better used as a reference to remind you of what you already know and give you a jumping-off point for related topics. They are not meant to teach you math.

zozbot234• 6 years ago

'Philosophy is like math's ne'er-do-well brother. It was born when Plato and Aristotle looked at the works of their predecessors and said in effect "why can't you be more like your brother?" Russell was still saying the same thing 2300 years later.' ~pg

ngcc_hk2• 6 years ago

Not sure it is. And I think the paper argue more about rigorous thinking and expressing it.

jpster• 6 years ago

I’d be interested to hear book recommendations that discuss “fuzzy thinking” and how to avoid it.

hliyan• 6 years ago

Not entirely the point of the book, but I found that the first chapter of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (which discusses formal systems, symbol manipulation and how that relates to thinking) was a catalyst for me to tighten up my thinking processes.

justinpombrio• 6 years ago

Hooray! This section of "Rationality: AI to Zombies" deals with exactly that:

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/7gRSERQZbqTuLX5re

mwlp• 6 years ago

I had similar thoughts after finishing an engineering ethics course. Everything is an argument. Strong arguments often demonstrate their superiority over alternatives. The more dimensions the problem context has (or, of course, the more alternatives), the more difficult this becomes. Luckily, arguments can usually be abstracted to ethical frameworks or philosophical traditions.

Sometimes these wrappers are easier to reason about. Sometimes, if the problem context is a foreign government's pending social credit system whose design and implementation is clouded by deceit and unknown consequences, all we can do is turn to Aristotle and ask, "[How] can we teach others to be good citizens?"

---

Don't take philosophy for the math-like thinking. Take math for that. Take it for the cool readings, discussions, and qt existentialist girls rarely found in compilers.

FranzFerdiNaN2• 6 years ago

Philosophy is more than just cool readings. You have book clubs for cool readings. Philosophy is for learning critical thinking (just like math is, just both in different and complementary ways), evaluating arguments made by others, forming arguments on your own and thinking those arguments and their consequences through to the very end.

Take both math and philosophy, as both enrich your life and aren't interchangeable.

derex• 6 years ago

You learn to find an isomorphism between the concepts in your brain and someone else’s.

Coming from a math background myself, this is a really great way to relate philosophy to something I'm used to thinking about. So many times in conversations I've noticed that people talk about the same fundamental ideas but use different language and constructs to express them, and end up thinking (mistakenly) they disagree with each other.

romwell• 6 years ago

Math is just a branch of philosophy which is not constrained by reality.

jamesrcole• 6 years ago

I've read a fair bit of philosophy, and I think the approach this post describes is often problematic.

They try to treat concepts as if they were like mathematical symbols that they can reason precisely with. The problem is when they don't understand the concepts involved well-enough to be able to treat them in this way. This is often the case, given that the subject-matter is in philosophy.

So you end up with a situation where it looks like they're drawing conclusions in a rigorous fashion, but where it's actually a kind of garbage-in-garbage-out situation.

Precision is really important. But you have to acknowledge the level of precision that your level of understanding affords. Trying to be more precise than that makes things worse.

ngcc_hk2• 6 years ago

It is the argument and the process that counts. The destination is never satisfactory. Like a tourist who enjoy the train (of thought) journey. Get out and and onto another.

There is no answer. Those have answer like Maths or Physics is not superior but just left. What remains are the hard part. And we left with only with signpost and past journeys.

Philosophy is post-thinking. Nothing like maths.

coldtea• 6 years ago

This person confuses philosophy with what anglosaxon barbarians consider philosophy...

Philosophy as Math-Like Thinking

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