No one's used philosophical thought to challenge themselves; to challenge or improve their own beliefs? or to try and learn about new or potentially useful concepts?

Do the people who take on more difficult or complex jobs only do so to confirm their existing skill-set? Or earn more money? Or could some actually want to challenge themselves? Same with exercise. Same with a number of other things.

Lastly, could some use philosophy to guide their beliefs about moral oughts and values? Knowing about the - is - through science, only offers half the picture.

Philosophy: just as the word implies "love of wisdom". Philosophy is "science" or in the Latin "sciere" or "to know" .

So long as one believes that we live in the world of "opinions" and that each of us has and creates his own thoughts, therefore making the world of thinking a crass " chaos", we have a philosophical problem.

This problem is the problem of modern times and of modern philosophy which is the relation of one's "ego" to knowledge .

Philosophy has/had reached an impasse with respect to this question and in some measure has be relegated to the back pew by a materialist perspective of, as noted in another post, the "dogma of experience" which is modern science.

James is no more than another pragmatist who states that we cannot know( ala Kant) so lets treat the matter "as if" it were true and go from there. Ergo, modern materialist science.

"Wisdom" is within and without us and this search is the work of the human being, better known as Man, a work in progress.

Out of fear of the Inquisition, but yes you have the right idea here.

The details here are multitudinous but I believe it is common historical insight that the "dark ages" came to an end through the Renaissance and the primary mover of this Renaissance was a return to the Grecian ideals , specifically the works of Aristotle.

Now, I personally do not consider the "dark ages" as dark but glaringly bright but given the nature of the progressing man we have those who cannot live with their present unless they denigrate all that came from the past.

Naming it the "dark ages" is no different and is poor history. In any case the return to Aristotle brought reason (age of reason) and brightness to the fore as per historical understanding.

First paragraph of Stanford reference: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/a...m-renaissance/

" Aristotelianism in the Renaissance
First published Wed Nov 16, 2005; substantive revision Wed Feb 28, 2018
“Renaissance” is used as a useful short label for the period ca. 1348 to ca. 1648. But the use of the term “Aristotelianism” as applied to texts, contents and contexts of that period is problematic.[1] Some authors did indeed consider themselves as part of a “peripatetic” (i.e., Aristotelian) current or school,[2] but it would be counterintuitive to limit the application of the term “Aristotelianism” only to those authors of whom such statements are known (since it probably would exclude most Renaissance commentators on Aristotle). [3] On the other hand, if we use the term “Aristotelianism” to denote everything in Renaissance philosophy that with some high degree of probability makes direct or indirect use of Aristotle’s texts: this would mean that “Aristotelianism in the Renaissance” and “Philosophy in the Renaissance” are equivalent terms (cf. Keßler 1990).

However, there are texts in Renaissance philosophy that are obviously more “Aristotelian” than others, namely, the commentaries on texts by Aristotle. There are more of them than we have from any other period of the history of philosophy. And in many of the Renaissance universities philosophy training was keyed to the interpretation of texts by Aristotle and often involved the use of textbooks derived from works by Aristotle and his commentators. In addition to this, the corpus Aristotelicum was used as a matrix for textbooks and encyclopedias and as a starting point for treatises on more or less special philosophical questions."[4]

An interesting aside is that when Aristotle and Alexander in their travels to the East met the Arabic scholars who imbibed Aristotle in toto which includes his politics, science, physics, medicine,etc... whereas in the West the logic and reasoning was adopted by the the West but not so his other and extensive works.

The battles of Islam and Christianity had the effect that Islamic scholars with Aristotelian ideals battled again with a Christianity imbued with Aristotelian structure and in this there is the culmination of realism/nominalism; realism championed by Aquinas and nominalism championed by Averroes.

Aquinas won the day but believe it or not the scientific nominalism of our times is the direct offspring of Islamic thought . This thought leads to abstract thinking or thinking which has no inner reality or the world of dead thoughts. Look to Francis Bacon of Verulam as the expression of modern science, the science lifeless amoral thoughts.

Many roads here but like it or not bright thinking, Grecian style ala Aristotle in the Renaissance.

Of course not. They invariably will use it to strengthen their preconceived ideas against onslaught. Where personal growth can be seen, it is simply due to the underlying cultural norms x personality x mood changing and no philosophizing was necessary.

Philosophizing isn't a course on small engine repair.

It can, on rare occasions, lead to an illusion of greater internal consistency. That makes certain personality types feel better about themselves.

Sure. They had all the benefit of access to Greek ideas, but didn’t have centuries of scholastic dogma. They were free to call out a lot of the bull**** that was in those ancient scrolls. They also hit on the idea of basing ideas on experimental data.

That paragraph about Islamic medicine-source ??

You're demonstrably wrong here. I never knew about ideas such as nominalism, the absurd, dual ontologies, bad faith, phenomenology and hundreds of others, until I read philosophy.

These ideas did nothing to strengthen my beliefs against onslaught. I merely find them interesting, in the way that people who love bugs are interested enough to collect and catalogue different bugs. The reasoning to get to such ideas I have found invaluable, in terms of personal utility.

None of this has to do with me defending some preconceived ideas; these are brand new ideas to me, and brand new ways of reasoning. In this sense, you could say im motivated by the new; by discovery. Not by the old, the preconceived. Maybe my new-found ability to reason, at times, will help me to defend some ridiculous positions; but this has nothing to do with my interest in ideas, in philosophy.

If you see no value in something, perhaps it's wise to say that you see no value in something; not that there is no value in that something.
If you can avoid fallacious argumentation (e.g. false dichotomies, red herrings, false equivalences etc.) through the study of philosophy, then there's no illusion of greater consistency; there is greater consistency.

There should be a super hero comic book where PhilosophyMan defeats various villains by means of pointing out the villain's use of fallacious reasoning. I see Matt Damon for the movie.


PairTheBoard

Preconceived notions are notions yet to be considered presently and accounted for whole. And how long ago did we start accounting for preconceived notions anyway? Who said that blurb about not knowing what they don't know or whatever?

"Unknown unknowns are closely related to unintentional consequences."
- PairTheBoard

I thought that I had written something about philosophizing being a fine way of passing the time, and therefore of value.* Like learning about various cheeses or collecting interesting shirt buttons is of value. It is, without a doubt, a great source of amusement for many of us.

One cannot avoid them, but it is fun.

*I'm entirely sure that I had written precisely that, but didn't post it since it seemed so obvious.

Plato:

"Knowledge is the food of the soul"

Not sure:

Man, as the futuristic expression of the Divine.

And this:

Why not Toothsayer ?

Mostly agree with all of your take here. I would say that the Muslims continued to build on what they received and there was no “dark ages” whatsoever in the Muslim world of science. Many renaissance scholars were more excited to read translations of Muslim texts than anything else, and rightly so.

So when you, oddly enough, write something to your father, prefaced by the fact that it's all opinion and that it should be criticised and taken in context, that writing should be held accountable for the history of slavery and x, y, z, where x, y, z = something bad.

Politics, power games and so on, btw, are observed to be quite a beast of their own, larger than both religion and philosophy.

P.s. am intoxicated, don't take this very seriously please.

Yes, religion held back science (Copernicus, Galileo etc.), not post-Aristotle scientists/philospohers. This is not the first time you have proven my point without seemingly realizing it.

The church was not worried about if objects fall faster than others; there's no statements in the bible about the issue.

Arguing about what philosophy is has a nice irony to it in the vain of Aristotle.

The moors or muslims did preserve through translation many or most of the ancient Greek texts, thankfully. Constellations, many of which have Arabic names.
Islam and its prophets and schisms put a stop to that carry on and the years thereafter were rather dark, to put it lightly.

You just asked me to not take words seriously and seemingly apologized for being intoxicated.

I don't understand your request.

Probably with no more than "blindly touching the toe of an elephant" from a different angle?
I love the analogy.

My youngster got a program called Universe Sandbox 2 and it can make universe out of pixels. Are pixels close to nothing and what would have Aristotle done with such a thing?

Oh, and he called me in to watch him "wreck the sun". 🤣Which looked to cause a pretty big something for the whole simulated solar system. Kid's these days and the power they can imagine. Whole universes in their hands.