Capitalism vs Communism

big rosa wrote:It’s not a fallacy, in the US or elsewhere for that matter, despite what you might read on the internet. It was invented back in the 1970s by that lapsed atheist, the late Antony Flew (who wasn’t an impressive logician, even though he was an impressively poor philosopher).

Conservatives like this ‘fallacy’ (Flew was a conservative) since they think it allows them to criticise socialists who want to argue that so-and-so wasn’t a ‘genuine socialist’. However, you will find many conservatives arguing, for instance, that a certain, named Republican wasn’t a ‘true Republican’ (and was a ‘Republican in Name Only’ — a RINO) because they fell short in this or that respect.

So, if a Republican were to argue in favour of most of the following: open borders, a greatly reduced military, atheism, gun control, high taxes and big government, I think we’d all agree he/she wasn’t a true Republican — otherwise the word “Republican” would seem to have no meaning at all.

If words have meaning then at some point we’d have to agree that in some cases, such and such wasn’t a true representation of its meaning if it violated or failed to meet enough of the connotations we normally took to be associated with the meaning of that word (as we have just seen).

In which case, this is no true fallacy.

big rosa and big schop wrote:His greatest contribution? To die of Cholera years before his time.

Schopenhauer was right about that charlatan:

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"If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.

"Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [...] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right....

"At first Fichte and Schelling shine as the heroes of this epoch; to be followed by the man who is quite unworthy even of them, and greatly their inferior in point of talent -- I mean the stupid and clumsy charlatan Hegel...."

"But the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity...."

"Fichte is the father of the sham philosophy, of the disingenuous method which, through ambiguity in the use of words, incomprehensible language, and sophistry, seeks to deceive, and tries, moreover, to make a deep impression by assuming an air of importance in a word, the philosophy which seeks to bamboozle and humbug those who desire to learn. After this method had been applied by Schelling, it reached its height, as everyone knows, in Hegel, in whose hands it developed into pure charlatanism....

"In Germany it was possible to proclaim as the greatest philosopher of all ages Hegel, a repulsive, mindless charlatan, an unparalleled scribbler of nonsense....

"If indeed I now chose to call to mind the way in which Hegel and his companions have abused such wide and empty abstractions, I should have to fear that both the reader and I myself would be ill; for the most nauseous tediousness hangs over the empty word-juggling of this loathsome philophaster....

"It may be said in passing that one can see how important the choice of expressions in philosophy is from the fact that that inept expression condemned above, and the misunderstanding which arose from it, became the foundation of the whole Hegelian pseudo-philosophy, which has occupied the German public for twenty-five years."

big rosa wrote:I am not sure what the worst is, but this must be near the top:

big rosa and big petey wrote:First of all, dial down your expectations. Not one single 'philosophical problem' posed by Ancient Greek thinkers (or any others since) has been solved, or even remotely solved. Nor are they likely to be. After 2500 years of going nowhere slowly, we don't even know the right questions to ask, for goodness sake!

As Oxford University Philosopher, Peter Hacker, noted:

"For two and a half millennia some of the best minds in European culture have wrestled with the problems of philosophy. If one were to ask what knowledge has been achieved throughout these twenty-five centuries, what theories have been established (on the model of well-confirmed theories in the natural sciences), what laws have been discovered (on the model of the laws of physics and chemistry), or where one can find the corpus of philosophical propositions known to be true, silence must surely ensue. For there is no body of philosophical knowledge. There are no well-established philosophical theories or laws. And there are no philosophical handbooks on the model of handbooks of dynamics or of biochemistry. To be sure, it is tempting for contemporary philosophers, convinced they are hot on the trail of the truths and theories which so long evaded the grasp of their forefathers, to claim that philosophy has only just struggled out of its early stage into maturity.... We can at long last expect a flood of new, startling and satisfying results -- tomorrow."

"One can blow the Last Trumpet once, not once a century. In the seventeenth century Descartes thought he had discovered the definitive method for attaining philosophical truths; in the eighteenth century Kant believed that he had set metaphysics upon the true path of a science; in the nineteenth century Hegel convinced himself that he had brought the history of thought to its culmination; and Russell, early in the twentieth century, claimed that he had at last found the correct scientific method in philosophy, which would assure the subject the kind of steady progress that is attained by the natural sciences. One may well harbour doubts about further millenarian promises." [Hacker (2001) pp.322-23.]

Second, begin with Bertrand Russell's 'Problems of Philosophy', which is about as good an introduction to Traditional Philosophy as one could wish to find -- and which is also well written.

Then, perhaps read some of the more accessible 'classics', such as Descartes's 'Meditations', or his 'Discourse', Hume's 'Enquiries', Berkeley's 'Three Dialogues', Plato's 'Republic', or his 'Meno' (Aristotle is, alas, far too difficult!), Kant's 'Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics' -- steer clear of Hegel (who is impossibly obscure).

Then, check out a completely different approach to the subject:

Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'The Blue Book'.

Traditionally Philosophy has always been regarded as a sort of 'super-science', a discipline capable of revealing fundamental truths about 'reality', valid for all of space and time, ascertainable from thought, or from language, alone. Or, indeed, as some sort of uniquely authoritative moral or political guide, or perhaps even a clue to the 'meaning of life'. But it isn't like any science you have ever heard of. Traditional Philosophers typically spend a few hours in the comfort of their own heads -- by-passing all those boring observations and experiments, with their expensive equipment and a requirement that the individual concerned becomes technically competent --, and, hey presto, they emerge with a set of super-cosmic verities.

This isn't to deny that some philosophers engaged in empirical work -- for example, Aristotle -- but that wasn't a core aspect of their work. Moreover, the sciences have gradually freed themselves from Traditional Philosophy by subjecting their work to empirical test (howsoever one interprets this). Nor is it to deny that scientists don't indulge in amateur metaphysics (especially in their popularisations), speculating about the nature of space or time, for example.

But, Traditional Philosophy is quintessentially a 'conceptual enquiry', which directly or indirectly revolves around what certain words mean (such as, 'time', 'space', 'matter', 'knowledge', 'belief', 'existence', 'identity', 'meaning', 'language', 'causation', 'justice', 'freedom', 'fate', 'good', 'evil', 'god', 'soul', etc., etc.), but this in fact provides us with a clue to its fatal defects, and why it hasn't advanced one nanometre closer to a 'solution' to its 'problems' than Plato or Aristotle themselves managed.