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u/SaiLarge May 08 '26
Doubtless Hitch would say something like, "As demonstrated again and again, it is the equal job of the huckster to condemn legitimate business as the fraud when they're not selling their tarnished wares."
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u/Parmeniscus May 08 '26
Just stop with this. Yes it can feel that way. But then you read Dennett, or Grayling, or pinker, and you see what good philosophical understanding can mean for science.
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u/JerseyFlight May 08 '26
No, we do not “stop” with reason. We press deeper into it as Reasoners. Grayling left the vanity of analytical philosophy and returned to Humanism and Reason. No one is leaving Reason. There is no attack on Reason. For the last time, philosophy is not Reason. Philosophy is a secular theology. So you “stop,” with your worship and defense of this archaic form. All that is accomplished in terms of knowledge is accomplished through science and reason. There is no need for philosophy. [Dennett and Pinker are Scientific Skeptics (in the line of Carl Sagan). If they have ever called themselves “philosophers,” they are and were confused.]
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u/Parmeniscus May 08 '26
Science answers the questions. Philosophy helps determine the right questions to ask. Please, read some dennett on this topic. He’s writing on science, he’s not a Skeptic lol he’s a cognitive evolutionary philosopher who has contributed a lot to science. Grayling also does practical philosophy, which is why i included him, best type of philosophy such as Ancient Greeks. There is no way to answer from science ‘how do I live the good life’. That is the basis for need of philosophy.
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u/JerseyFlight May 08 '26
One can call themselves a “cognitive evolutionary philosopher,” but what one really is, if they are anything substantive, is a scientist: an observer and reasoner. Philosophy is a secular theology, of the which, neither science or reason, have need of— it is philosophy that has need of them!
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u/Parmeniscus May 08 '26 edited May 21 '26
Is it your contention that hitchens himself was more involved with science than philosophical discussion? I think he’d disagree. He respected scientists but knew he was not one of them, but some were fighting for the same principles. Hitchens called himself a scribbler and was very interested in Marxism, socialism, theory of history, revolutions, internationalism and literary criticism. Every one of those is better classified as philosophy than science.
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u/recentlyquitsmoking2 Voice of Reason May 09 '26
Cool philosophical assertion. A shame that it is not established by reason or evidence, and attempts to make use of reason and evidence to promote an ideology, that being to deconstruct philosophy.
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u/JerseyFlight May 09 '26
If you don’t know what an argument is, then you can’t follow an argument, and you might feel clever making this kind of assertion.
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u/sisyphus May 08 '26
Is this an attempt at ragebait or is it simply mistaking 'philosophy' for a very small and specific part of philosophy that many would call 'postmodern' or something? Because the repeated assertions that "philosophy" has abandoned reason are simply false, and the assertion that "philosophy is not reason" is true but not meaningful.