Why is pursuing philosophy important if its impossible to obtain a universal truth standard? Feel free to disagree and explain why if you think a universal truth standard is obtainable through philosophy.

This will be an insufficient reply, but it seems to me that "pursuing philosophy," whether we assign it importance or not, is in some sense an inescapable (if often implicit and low-level) activity that is entailed by being sentient and desiring to think about reality.

Give me anything that DOES obtain this 'universal truth standard' of which you speak.

What is this standard?

Why this standard?

What's the point of obtaining it?

What constitutes obtaining it?

(Oh wait, you need philosophy now.)

Rly?

philosophy is the basis of logic and science so the answer is pretty obvious as to why people should study philosophy

yarly

Your very question establishes the (an) answer.

Because you can sometimes, eventually, get to the point where your brain is no longer itchy. Absent that itch, there's virtually no point to all but the most practical strains of philosophy, and even there the stimulus of public controversy is generally required - bioethics, say.

Many people believe that it is not impossible to "obtain a universal truth standard." For them your question is not relevant. Many people believe that it is not possible to "obtain a universal truth standard." For them, your question is relevant. To answer it, they would have to pursue philosophy.

For example, they might become Rorty-style pragmatists, and claim that the purpose of philosophy is not to find some mind-independent truth, but rather to help us form better ways of living with other people. Or they might follow Nietszche or Foucault, and focus on ways in which philosophy can used as a form of power over others. Or they might use philosophy as way of playing with texts a la Derrida.

But philosophy itself doesn't stand or fall with any of these answers--only particular ways of doing philosophy.

People don't really argue about what logic is imo. They might argue about its ontology and stuff but they would have to use the same logic in order to do so.

I'm not sure what you are saying here, but every interpretation I can think of is false.

But isn't logic untestable?

You know Flynn I spend a lot of time lately studying theologians and they are like philosophers in that they take different approachs in defining/explaining their theology.

Reading one of them recently it did occur to me that all these philosophers each have their own approach. Kant's version of reality/truth will be different from Hegel's who's different from Nietzsche who's different from Plato who's different from etc. etc. Then they argue them but they never arrive at a definitive conclusion for everyone or everything.

So how can you trust philosophy? It is very helpful in sharpening reasoning ability though.

because despite any lack of absolute truth you can still be absolutely wrong.

its that way <----------

No I'm trying to look at the question more neutrally.

Classic vs Paraconsistent vs Intuitionistic...


Oh yeah, people argue over logic a lot...you're just not aware of it.

Some do, but not many. In > 95% of all math papers no one argues about or questions what logic is to be used.

That's because it's a logic or philosophy of logic or philosophy of math topic...it's not a MATH topic.

So you're already seeing things from only a 'math' perspective...there's more to academia than just math (and by that, I mean more to academia that's relevant to math than just math).

If twenty 500 IQ Aliens landed on Earth, impervious to any human weapons, should anything in the philosophy books apply to them?

Alternative logics have certainly been tried in math. You're right, however, that they're more popular elsewhere, e.g. computer science has a million logics.

So if there's a bunch of logics why don't people when they argue here first clarify which one they're using? That never seems to happen.

Because they're not aware of them.

Most people IF they know anything about philosophy know little more than a course or two they took in undergrad.

Even people with BA degrees are very limited in what they know about what's really going on in modern philosophy. It's not until you get kinda deep in your PhD that you actually get to start working on stuff that's literally so new that it's unpublished (forthcoming papers...ones that will be published).

So it's no shock to me that a general forum like this wouldn't know that there are alternative logics...it's pretty obvious that basically everyone just assumes classical anyway (in fact, there's a strong argument to support that that's how we think in general anyway). Intuitionists may disagree

Yup: problem of induction.

I'd like to know if they solved that

of course, morality applies to them as well.

The moral relativism of their world or ours? A lot of sci-fi movies like Orson Wells "War of the Worlds" revolve around this theme.

Way to assume relativism = true.

Plato's Ring of Gyges specifically addresses whether 'might makes right' (he thinks not).

I'm not a moral relativist or an absolutist. I believe they complement one another.

I used moral relativism because I assumed chezlaw was a moral relativist.