Western Philosophy is bankrupt

[Kuznetzova]

I call on all the posters and readers of Philosophy Now! forums to reject the presumptuous foundations of traditional philosophy canon of the Enlightenment in Europe. I declare here a mobilization of the acceptance of a new set of foundational axioms -- axioms which are consistent with the facts we now know about ourselves and our place in the universe.

The entire tradition of Western Philosophy is bankrupt. The basis of the tradition's epistemology was a Cartesian skeptical crisis. This crisis led Rene Descartes to only conclude that he is some sort of disembodied mind which receives sense perceptions, and that he couldn't find a way to demonstrate the factualness of anything beyond that. Thus began the unfortunate departure of a bandwagon of solipsistic skepticism. This bandwagon was joined by a number of later writers in the century following the publication of Descartes' Meditations. The eventual culmination of this (failed) epistemology was that, "All knowledge is derived from sense perception." In other words, we know absolutely nothing at birth, and we literally use deduction on perceptions alone, to produce all of our knowledge.

This tradition is based on wobbly foundations. A more solid foundation is that we are organisms on a planet, and our brains and sense organs are tools which are primarily used to keep our bodies alive in the environment and facilitate our own reproduction. We are not floating, disembodied tabula rasas. The facts of modern biology and modern neuroscience are now running contrary to the mystical framework of the canon. (FBA = Functional Brain Area) A tentative list:

1. The limbic system contains a functional brain area called the Amygdala. This is located in the same location in every human brain. It is therefore, ipso facto, a product of our genetic blueprint. The amygdala is the FBA which mediates panic and fright. In particular it mediates an ancient response to fright that is freezing. Humans do not deduce this freezing response -- freezing in response to sudden loud noise is both innate and operates below conscious control.
2. The brainstem is located in the same location in every human brain. The brainstem is the FBA that is responsible for controlling breathing, heart rate, and body temperature. Even people with severe brain damage my have a completely intact brain stem, allowing their heart and breathing to operate normally. These people are said to be in a "persistent vegetative state". Most importantly for you philosophers: These functions are carried out without conscious control, completely automatically. They proceed normally during sleep, for instance.
3. The brainstem and amygdala demonstrate that entire portions of the brain exist in all humans, whose primary purpose is to keep the body alive in an environment. They have nothing to do with deductions on sense perceptions.
4. There are FBAs in all human brains, roughly located in the same location in the left temporal lobe, whose functions are concerned with the production and processing of speech. They are the Vernicke's Area and the Broca's Area. This means that human children do not reinvent language from scratch, but are endowed with innate capacities to process phonemes in spoken language. Children are not blank slates.
5. How much of the brain actually performs deducing? We can surmise that this is probably done with the lateral prefrontal cortex, with some supporting role played by the hippocampus. (The thalamus will play a role, but only because it plays a role in everything you are paying attention to while awake). The evidence from science for this is that the PFC is the major brain area for applying verbal rules to behavior. Why am I mentioning this example? Because it shows that only a tiny portion of the brain is actually concerned with DEDUCTION in any sense of the word. The rest of the brain is doing low-level processing having to do with memory, visual processing, spatial processing, and processing of fine control of muscles. Don't mince my words: The vast majority of the weight of the human brain is not dedicated to performing deduction.
6. All knowledge is derived from sense perception? Really? But the human eye does not see the world the way it is. The human eye sees the world in such a way that was conducive to the survival of our primate ancestors in rainforest. Consider the facts here -- the human eye only sees a tiny slice of electromagnetic radiation range, called the "Visual range". On top of that limitation, our eyes have a filter for green, meaning our retina does not even receive that particular wavelength. Dogs and cats are nocturnal, and can navigate well in near darkness. And rightfully so. These hunters had to catch prey at night, and that is directly related to their survival. Human eyes are terrible when it comes to vision in the dark conditions of the night. The human retinal cells are trichromatic, whereas the eyes of birds are tetrachromatic. Compared to birds, we have a limited color palette, and we are blind to ultraviolet, which is, ironically, a chief component of sunlight. The eyes of George Berkeley and John Locke were blind to the chief spectral component of sunlight. Mull that over.
7. Cats are nocturnal hunters, thus their eyes can see in near darkness. This ability has a direct bearing on their survival in the environment. This has not a lick to do with "God wanted it that way."
8. Human beings are social animals, and have innate capacities to process faces. When these innate capacities fail, produce bizarre illusions, all documented by neuroscience. Facial processing is directly related to survival in our (social) niche, and has not a lick to do with "God intended it."
9. The organs of perception in our bodies are tools related to our survival in the environment. Organs operate by the laws of physics, and their individual operation is understood at the chemical level, in some cases down to the molecules. It is not the case that "God gave Man eyes so that we could perceive His Creation". The problem is that in order to for you to be a good academic, you need not only suspect and feel like the God-gave-eyes claim might be true on your more spiritual days. Nay -- you must commit yourself to it as a binding axiom of your knowledge. And that is wrong. And that is misguided. This is one of the many reasons why philosophy is becoming marginalized on university campuses.

We enter the world on our first day , screaming, cranky, hungry and thirsty. We are ready to suckle a breast for sustenance from our mothers. We are endowed with innate responses to do so. From the first day, we enter a universe of human value. Those values are primarily defined by biophysical needs of our bodies. This would be a much more fruitful epistemological framework, than the Cartesian one. Descartes will have you believing you are some disembodied mind passively receiving sense perceptions. That you are a mind-container thing holding little objects called "propositions" which collectively constitute your "knowledge". You are no such thing. You are an organism that is born and must survive long enough in a dangerous environment prior to dying. Our entire method of carving up the world into categories is primarily a symptom of these biological values.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are hungry and must eat.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we should salivate around good food.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are thirsty and must drink.

We do not deduce from first principles, that our body is too warm and must start sweating to avoid hyperthermia.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are afraid of something.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are attracted to the opposite sex.

We do not deduce from first principles, that injuring our own flesh is a bad idea.

We do not deduce from first principles, that having sex with the opposite sex is a good plan.

If at this point you still cling to the failed tradition of Western Philosophy, consider the following. Where is the discussion of value in any of these writers? Is the human being a robot, cleanly and logically deducing shapes and regularities from its environment? Or do human beings live in a mental world of valuation? What do you really think is the case? Those things which are conducive to our reproduction all feel pleasurable -- while those things which run contrary create pain and suffering. Why did this simple equation elude the "Greatest Minds" of Europe?

We can speculate -- perhaps the origin of human value was simply too complicated a subject for them to tackle in the time in which they lived.

[Ginkgo]

I call on all the posters and readers of Philosophy Now! forums to reject the presumptuous foundations of traditional philosophy canon of the Enlightenment in Europe. I declare here a mobilization of the acceptance of a new set of foundational axioms -- axioms which are consistent with the facts we now know about ourselves and our place in the universe.

The entire tradition of Western Philosophy is bankrupt. The basis of the tradition's epistemology was a Cartesian skeptical crisis. This crisis led Rene Descartes to only conclude that he is some sort of disembodied mind which receives sense perceptions, and that he couldn't find a way to demonstrate the factualness of anything beyond that. Thus began the unfortunate departure of a bandwagon of solipsistic skepticism. This bandwagon was joined by a number of later writers in the century following the publication of Descartes' Meditations. The eventual culmination of this (failed) epistemology was that, "All knowledge is derived from sense perception." In other words, we know absolutely nothing at birth, and we literally use deduction on perceptions alone, to produce all of our knowledge.

This tradition is based on wobbly foundations. A more solid foundation is that we are organisms on a planet, and our brains and sense organs are tools which are primarily used to keep our bodies alive in the environment and facilitate our own reproduction. We are not floating, disembodied tabula rasas. The facts of modern biology and modern neuroscience are now running contrary to the mystical framework of the canon. (FBA = Functional Brain Area) A tentative list:

1. The limbic system contains a functional brain area called the Amygdala. This is located in the same location in every human brain. It is therefore, ipso facto, a product of our genetic blueprint. The amygdala is the FBA which mediates panic and fright. In particular it mediates an ancient response to fright that is freezing. Humans do not deduce this freezing response -- freezing in response to sudden loud noise is both innate and operates below conscious control.
2. The brainstem is located in the same location in every human brain. The brainstem is the FBA that is responsible for controlling breathing, heart rate, and body temperature. Even people with severe brain damage my have a completely intact brain stem, allowing their heart and breathing to operate normally. These people are said to be in a "persistent vegetative state". Most importantly for you philosophers: These functions are carried out without conscious control, completely automatically. They proceed normally during sleep, for instance.
3. The brainstem and amygdala demonstrate that entire portions of the brain exist in all humans, whose primary purpose is to keep the body alive in an environment. They have nothing to do with deductions on sense perceptions.
4. There are FBAs in all human brains, roughly located in the same location in the left temporal lobe, whose functions are concerned with the production and processing of speech. They are the Vernicke's Area and the Broca's Area. This means that human children do not reinvent language from scratch, but are endowed with innate capacities to process phonemes in spoken language. Children are not blank slates.
5. How much of the brain actually performs deducing? We can surmise that this is probably done with the lateral prefrontal cortex, with some supporting role played by the hippocampus. (The thalamus will play a role, but only because it plays a role in everything you are paying attention to while awake). The evidence from science for this is that the PFC is the major brain area for applying verbal rules to behavior. Why am I mentioning this example? Because it shows that only a tiny portion of the brain is actually concerned with DEDUCTION in any sense of the word. The rest of the brain is doing low-level processing having to do with memory, visual processing, spatial processing, and processing of fine control of muscles. Don't mince my words: The vast majority of the weight of the human brain is not dedicated to performing deduction.
6. All knowledge is derived from sense perception? Really? But the human eye does not see the world the way it is. The human eye sees the world in such a way that was conducive to the survival of our primate ancestors in rainforest. Consider the facts here -- the human eye only sees a tiny slice of electromagnetic radiation range, called the "Visual range". On top of that limitation, our eyes have a filter for green, meaning our retina does not even receive that particular wavelength. Dogs and cats are nocturnal, and can navigate well in near darkness. And rightfully so. These hunters had to catch prey at night, and that is directly related to their survival. Human eyes are terrible when it comes to vision in the dark conditions of the night. The human retinal cells are trichromatic, whereas the eyes of birds are tetrachromatic. Compared to birds, we have a limited color palette, and we are blind to ultraviolet, which is, ironically, a chief component of sunlight. The eyes of George Berkeley and John Locke were blind to the chief spectral component of sunlight. Mull that over.
7. Cats are nocturnal hunters, thus their eyes can see in near darkness. This ability has a direct bearing on their survival in the environment. This has not a lick to do with "God wanted it that way."
8. Human beings are social animals, and have innate capacities to process faces. When these innate capacities fail, produce bizarre illusions, all documented by neuroscience. Facial processing is directly related to survival in our (social) niche, and has not a lick to do with "God intended it."
9. The organs of perception in our bodies are tools related to our survival in the environment. Organs operate by the laws of physics, and their individual operation is understood at the chemical level, in some cases down to the molecules. It is not the case that "God gave Man eyes so that we could perceive His Creation". The problem is that in order to for you to be a good academic, you need not only suspect and feel like the God-gave-eyes claim might be true on your more spiritual days. Nay -- you must commit yourself to it as a binding axiom of your knowledge. And that is wrong. And that is misguided. This is one of the many reasons why philosophy is becoming marginalized on university campuses.

We enter the world on our first day , screaming, cranky, hungry and thirsty. We are ready to suckle a breast for sustenance from our mothers. We are endowed with innate responses to do so. From the first day, we enter a universe of human value. Those values are primarily defined by biophysical needs of our bodies. This would be a much more fruitful epistemological framework, than the Cartesian one. Descartes will have you believing you are some disembodied mind passively receiving sense perceptions. That you are a mind-container thing holding little objects called "propositions" which collectively constitute your "knowledge". You are no such thing. You are an organism that is born and must survive long enough in a dangerous environment prior to dying. Our entire method of carving up the world into categories is primarily a symptom of these biological values.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are hungry and must eat.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we should salivate around good food.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are thirsty and must drink.

We do not deduce from first principles, that our body is too warm and must start sweating to avoid hyperthermia.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are afraid of something.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are attracted to the opposite sex.

We do not deduce from first principles, that injuring our own flesh is a bad idea.

We do not deduce from first principles, that having sex with the opposite sex is a good plan.

If at this point you still cling to the failed tradition of Western Philosophy, consider the following. Where is the discussion of value in any of these writers? Is the human being a robot, cleanly and logically deducing shapes and regularities from its environment? Or do human beings live in a mental world of valuation? What do you really think is the case? Those things which are conducive to our reproduction all feel pleasurable -- while those things which run contrary create pain and suffering. Why did this simple equation elude the "Greatest Minds" of Europe?

We can speculate -- perhaps the origin of human value was simply too complicated a subject for them to tackle in the time in which they lived.

Kurz, you are obvious not a big fan of Descartes. But that's ok, not may people are these days. Let me try and defend Descartes by way of a thought experiment:

Imagine a brain in a vat. The brain is removed from an average person an placed in a solution of preserving liquid so that it can remain healthy. It pretty much goes without saying that the brain is cut off from all previous sensory experience. The brain has no idea where it is, how it got there or what is happening in the outside world. All it knows at the moment is that it is thinking therefore it must also exist. An interesting question arises in terms of how does it know it exists within this unusual situation it finds itself. The most likely answer is that it knows as much because it can recall past experiences.

Let us take this thought experiment a step further an imagine that we can deprive this brain of all past experiences. It has becomes a "white sheet of paper with nothing written upon it". Does existence suddenly disappear? Does,the knowledge of existence suddenly vanish as well? Have we not a least one first principle that is in need of no support?

[John K]

Good luck with your crusade...

[QMan]

"If at this point you still cling to the failed

tradition of Western Philosophy"


Qman:
Please clarify more concisely, where and how is W. Philosophy failing?

[John K]

"If at this point you still cling to the failed tradition of Western Philosophy"
Qman:
Please clarify more concisely, where and how is W. Philosophy failing?

It hasn't produced Utopia.

[Conde Lucanor]

We may agree that knowledge is NOT directly derived from sense perception, that the human brain is not a tabula rasa, and that modern biology and neuroscience can explain the structures of our minds and bodies, and how they interact with the environment. We may agree that the philosophy of Descartes, Locke and Hume is a failed epistemology that must be left behind. But how can this rejection become a "new set of foundational axioms", if Kant already did that more than two centuries ago? Wasn't he the one laying the foundations of metaphysics as a science? Wasn't he already doing his "Copernican revolution" in philosophy? Just wondering.

[Kuznetzova]

Conde Luncanor,

Our brains are not deduction machines. They are primarily an organ whose purpose is the survival and maintenance of the body. The same is true of sense organs.

Is this baseless propositioning on my part? No. Look at the evidence we have today. We cannot see in the dark of night, because we do not hunt mice at night in tall grass. There is an animal which does so, that is the cat, and because this behavior is directly related to their survival, then cats are nocturnal. We cannot see polarization of sunlight, but many birds can. Why? Because they fly in the sky for hundreds of miles when migrating, and they using polarization of sunlight to navigate. Because this is directly related to their survival, they have this capacity. We do not since we don't migrate for hundreds of miles in the sky.

Already our sense organs are dividing the world up in a way that is conducive to our survival, and not because we were designed to "see the world the way it is". It does not take a leap of faith, nor a wild conjecture, to claim that the mental categories of humans are related to our survival values. Since our brains contain functional areas whose purpose is survival of the body, then the mental categories may also be a product of categories whose boundaries are defined along value.

Emanuel Kant lived in a time when no one knew of the theory of evolution by natural selection. From that we gain "Traits of organism are properties of their survival in an ecological niche".

No one in Kant's time knew about molecules or how and why molecules are composed of atoms. His contention that no one on earth knew what the noumenon was -- well that claim was largely true during Kant's lifetime. But not anymore. Philosophers often confuse this by pretending like atoms were known to the "Greek Atomists" of antiquity. This is a common confusion. The "atom" of the greeks was an indivisible smallest unit. It was a philosophical and conjectural tool used in their intellectual arguments. It had nothing to do with the atoms we know today, who have structures and whose properties are determined by their nucleus, the shape of their electron orbits, their temperature, their pressure, and so on. The fundamental intellectual error with Greek antiquity was that the "atomic" scale was directly below the scales of ordinary daily objects. That was profoundly false. The greeks were missing several levels between atomic scales and people scales. There is the molecular level above atoms. And then molecules comprise cells. Then cells comprise tissue. And only then we are to the human scales.

IN the 20th century, we probed the properties of the fundamental constituents of atoms, and we have a very fine theory of how they operate that we call the Standard Model. So Kant was correct in his day, but wrong in our contemporary time. We do not know everything about the noumenon, but we know a lot about it -- well above zero knowledge. I should emphasize that the Standard Model is not conjecture or hypothetical physics. It is solidly established science and it appears in textbooks.

We have obtained the following technologies: X-ray diffraction crystallography, Mass spectrometry, Scanning-tunneling microscopy, and Atomic Force Microscopy. There is zero room for speculation and argument. The world is composed of atoms and those atoms form into molecules though chemical binding. This process can be simulated in a computer using the equations of quantum mechanics. The results of those simulations are consistent with the real world.

[Andy Kay]

1. The limbic system contains a functional brain area called the Amygdala. This is located in the same location in every human brain. It is therefore, ipso facto, a product of our genetic blueprint. The amygdala is the FBA which mediates panic and fright. In particular it mediates an ancient response to fright that is freezing. Humans do not deduce this freezing response -- freezing in response to sudden loud noise is both innate and operates below conscious control.
2. The brainstem is located in the same location in every human brain. The brainstem is the FBA that is responsible for controlling breathing, heart rate, and body temperature. Even people with severe brain damage my have a completely intact brain stem, allowing their heart and breathing to operate normally. These people are said to be in a "persistent vegetative state". Most importantly for you philosophers: These functions are carried out without conscious control, completely automatically. They proceed normally during sleep, for instance.
3. The brainstem and amygdala demonstrate that entire portions of the brain exist in all humans, whose primary purpose is to keep the body alive in an environment. They have nothing to do with deductions on sense perceptions.
4. There are FBAs in all human brains, roughly located in the same location in the left temporal lobe, whose functions are concerned with the production and processing of speech. They are the Vernicke's Area and the Broca's Area. This means that human children do not reinvent language from scratch, but are endowed with innate capacities to process phonemes in spoken language. Children are not blank slates.
5. How much of the brain actually performs deducing? We can surmise that this is probably done with the lateral prefrontal cortex, with some supporting role played by the hippocampus. (The thalamus will play a role, but only because it plays a role in everything you are paying attention to while awake). The evidence from science for this is that the PFC is the major brain area for applying verbal rules to behavior. Why am I mentioning this example? Because it shows that only a tiny portion of the brain is actually concerned with DEDUCTION in any sense of the word. The rest of the brain is doing low-level processing having to do with memory, visual processing, spatial processing, and processing of fine control of muscles. Don't mince my words: The vast majority of the weight of the human brain is not dedicated to performing deduction.
6. All knowledge is derived from sense perception? Really? But the human eye does not see the world the way it is. The human eye sees the world in such a way that was conducive to the survival of our primate ancestors in rainforest. Consider the facts here -- the human eye only sees a tiny slice of electromagnetic radiation range, called the "Visual range". On top of that limitation, our eyes have a filter for green, meaning our retina does not even receive that particular wavelength. Dogs and cats are nocturnal, and can navigate well in near darkness. And rightfully so. These hunters had to catch prey at night, and that is directly related to their survival. Human eyes are terrible when it comes to vision in the dark conditions of the night. The human retinal cells are trichromatic, whereas the eyes of birds are tetrachromatic. Compared to birds, we have a limited color palette, and we are blind to ultraviolet, which is, ironically, a chief component of sunlight. The eyes of George Berkeley and John Locke were blind to the chief spectral component of sunlight. Mull that over.
7. Cats are nocturnal hunters, thus their eyes can see in near darkness. This ability has a direct bearing on their survival in the environment. This has not a lick to do with "God wanted it that way."
8. Human beings are social animals, and have innate capacities to process faces. When these innate capacities fail, produce bizarre illusions, all documented by neuroscience. Facial processing is directly related to survival in our (social) niche, and has not a lick to do with "God intended it."
9. The organs of perception in our bodies are tools related to our survival in the environment. Organs operate by the laws of physics, and their individual operation is understood at the chemical level, in some cases down to the molecules. It is not the case that "God gave Man eyes so that we could perceive His Creation". The problem is that in order to for you to be a good academic, you need not only suspect and feel like the God-gave-eyes claim might be true on your more spiritual days. Nay -- you must commit yourself to it as a binding axiom of your knowledge. And that is wrong. And that is misguided. This is one of the many reasons why philosophy is becoming marginalized on university campuses.

I grant you all you say above, but it seems impossible to find a place for phenomenal consciousness (conscious experience) in that model of the world. As Chamlers notes: "Most existing theories of consciousness either deny the phenomenon, explain something else, or elevate the problem to an eternal mystery" ( http://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf ). It contributes nothing to dismiss the problem as "woo-woo" and bury one's head in the sand.

[uwot]

IN the 20th century, we probed the properties of the fundamental constituents of atoms, and we have a very fine theory of how they operate that we call the Standard Model.

True. And while I wouldn't wish to encourage 'woo-woo peddlers', it is a fact that no one knows what fundamental particles or their associated field are 'made of'.

[Ansiktsburk]

Why I like Descartes is that I find his approach putting the self in the center. A good, fruitful start. I am not a little brick in the universe, I AM the universe.
If that's western thinking, that's fine by me.

Then you can slice the brain up and down and find out all kinds of things about how it works. But what will you do with that? What is a non-Western philosophy approach here?

Einstein didn't kill Newton. OK, he was not perfectly correct but for all practical purposes in my life Newton is usable. And in the same manner, whats wrong with good old "genetics and environment"?

[homegrown]

I would argue much the same conclusion with regards to the cannon of western philosophy - but for reasons that subsume yours. Descartes was a contemporary of Galielo. Descartes published 'Meditations' after Galileo was arrested by the Church for his thesis 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.' While the proximate subject of Galileo's work was planetary motions, it was a work on epistemology: the principle questions of the discipline being 'what can we know' and 'how can we know it'? Descartes was asking the same questions in Mediatations, after Galileo's arrest, and reached a conclusion consistent with the doctrine of the Church. Galileo died under house arrest while Descartes went on to teach in the Court of Queen Christiina of Sweeden.

What I'm saying elsewhere is that Galileo's work should have been accepted by the Church and Western philosophy incorporated scientific knowledge over the past 500 years. That so you wouldn't have Locke arguing that children are a tableau rasa, or his political works, or even many of the bald assertions of Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations. There wouldn't be any nations - for the divine right of Kings would have been first in line for the chop. Conceivably, there'd have been a scientific empire stretching from London to Kumchatka by 1800. Nice photo BTW. That you?

hg.

[Kuznetzova]

I would argue much the same conclusion with regards to the cannon of western philosophy - but for reasons that subsume yours. Descartes was a contemporary of Galielo. Descartes published 'Meditations' after Galileo was arrested by the Church for his thesis 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.' While the proximate subject of Galileo's work was planetary motions, it was a work on epistemology: the principle questions of the discipline being 'what can we know' and 'how can we know it'? Descartes was asking the same questions in Mediatations, after Galileo's arrest, and reached a conclusion consistent with the doctrine of the Church. Galileo died under house arrest while Descartes went on to teach in the Court of Queen Christiina of Sweeden.

What I'm saying elsewhere is that Galileo's work should have been accepted by the Church and Western philosophy incorporated scientific knowledge over the past 500 years. That so you wouldn't have Locke arguing that children are a tableau rasa, or his political works, or even many of the bald assertions of Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations. There wouldn't be any nations - for the divine right of Kings would have been first in line for the chop. Conceivably, there'd have been a scientific empire stretching from London to Kumchatka by 1800. Nice photo BTW. That you?

hg.

Dear homegrown,

Thank you for your response. I give you an A. I want you to know that I was on the phone with someone in my real life only but a few days ago. We were discussing this topic. Over the phone, they said exactly what you have posted here, nearly verbatim. You should know there are people out there who know about history and think just exactly as you do.

So there you go. Cheers

[Ansiktsburk]

... Descartes went on to teach in the Court of Queen Christiina of Sweeden...

Where he died. Those frenchies cannot handle a little cold weather. Like Focault, who kept coughing and said he was the new Descartes. Takes tough people to survive up here.
OT, sorry.

[HexHammer]

Most traditional philosophy are severly outdated, and only produces glaring nonsens. Only few branches actually offer any useful way of thinking.

We need to rewrite philosophy.

[homegrown]

I got an 'A.'

Now all I need is a real-life!

hg.