Описание: A few thousand years ago I'm sure the world seemed younger. Hardly anything today could be as exciting as wondering what it all meant in the dawn of understanding.
In those days, information and socialising opportunities were harder to come by. This was a Goldilocks moment. Cultural accomplishments: languages, oral traditions ... meant big-picture issues could be talked about.They had not mounted so high that nothing remained to discuss.
We know this because these populations generated the myths now regarded as common-sense and realism.
In those days - celebrated as Hellenism, the pre-Socratic era, Plato and Aristotle - philosophers rambled around buttonholing anyone who would listen. The resulting conversations spawned the sciences and arts that became corporations, nations and the modern world.
Ironically, after deputizing scientists and artists to do their heavy-lifting, philosophy shriveled into an arcane activity practiced in remote corners of universities.
In these reduced circumstances, philosophers continued sharpening logical tools.They pondered moral questions no one else cared about. Not noticing their emeritus status, they soldiered on, hoping to corral at least one eminent truth.
This cannot, happen. Philosophical standpoints define what count as truth. They cannot be tested to determine whether they are correctly situated.
A second difficulty is that philosophers always attempt to overturn - or at least improve - points of view they come across. Since they lack anything resembling Large Hadron Colliders to investigate perplexing questions, mutual sniping is the name of the game.
The good news is that the big questions all remain on the table. The better news is that important insights have been achieved along the way: John Rawls' theory of justice and Immanuel Kant's universalizability test come to mind. Ludwig Wittgenstein advanced and then discarded the picture theory of language that earned him a doctorate at Cambridge University. His challenges to commonsense notions are still being mined. There have been no epiphanies however, only increasingly subtle questions.
What's valuable about not coming to conclusions?
Politicians, corporations, nations ... have no difficulty coming to conclusions. They harvest resources as if they were bottomless. They ride rough-shod across everything to secure these resources. I think this means wars, global warming, global poverty ... reflect philosophers' historical failures to challenge, indict, publicize, excoriate ... their half-witted, doubt-free progeny.
This is my hope for Modern Problems, Ancient Perspectives .... Political, economic and psychological mischiefs embedded in science and religion dramatize the consequences of failed skepticism.
Skepticism is what philosophers are good at.They have rendered one another scoreless for thousands of years
