[Bups-dis] An alternative approach to the purpose of philosophy

[lj lj]

Greetings,

David-

"As such the question of how to ‘apply’ philosophy
in our lives does not arise, simply because philosophical understanding is
ubiquitous in our existence, it forms an irreducible aspect of our relation 
to
the world"
It does not follow from understanding being non-atomistic that therefore 
philosophical understanding "forms an irreducible aspect of our relation to 
the world". It's a big jump to move from the claim that   UNDERSTANDING is 
non-atomistic to the claim that OUR relation to the WORLD is non-atomistic. 
And that is the claim that you need to make for your argument to go through. 
One might well accept that understanding is contingently or even necessarily 
holistic and yet deny that our relation to the world is, in fact, holistic. 
To use your own example: I might think that one cannot understand religion 
without understanding many other areas but it wouldn't follow that by doing 
so I would therefore be standing in some holistic relation to religion. But 
suppose that you are right and all understanding must/ should be holistic- 
does the fact that I can't understand religion without understanding 
sociology entail that therefore such understanding forms an irreducible 
aspect of our relation to the world? I might well have holistic 
understanding and yet still leave open the issue of what that understanding 
is used for. If I were god-like and knew all that there was to know and I 
knew it holistically, the question of what I might do with that 
understanding would still be, I think, a legitimate question.

What I think you are doing is talking about some kind of view whereby 
understanding is necessarily understood in terms of how people interact with 
the world- you have to be or how else can your argument work? So, for 
example, I might understand religion insofar as my understanding of religion 
puts me in a particular relation to the world. But even then what follows 
from this? Suppose that understanding religion is, necessarily, a matter of 
my standing in a particular relation to the world. Nothing follows about 
what kind of relation I must stand in. At the very least we need to say, 
vacuously, that it's the relation of 'understanding' but that's not going to 
help since it's the relation of understanding which we are trying to 
explicate. If that is, indeed, all we can say then surely there is plenty of 
room for one to say that relations of understanding can be supplemented by 
pragmatic relations. And surely that is the very distinction which allows 
one to suggest that philosophical understanding might or might not be 
useful.

Now, what you say at the end about analytic philosophy resonates with me but 
it seems to ignore the whole point of the is-ought distinction. I mean 
perhaps analytic philosophy is as you suggest but it doesn't seem to me that 
it has to be that way. I mean why can't one be a holistic analytic 
philosopher? There seems to be no compelling reason to suppose otherwise. 
It's not as if holism denies that understanding can be broken down into 
logically independent parts- maybe a holistic analytic philosopher studies 
each atom and its relation to other atoms. Isn't that what they already do? 
And how strong does this holistic claim need to be. Surely the claim that in 
order to have understanding of A we must have understanding of A-Z collapses 
into the claim that there really is no such thing as 'knowing something in 
particular' but, rather, that understanding just IS all the many 
understandings (since it's only holistic understanding that we are talking 
about). But that's way too strong a claim and it just doesn't bear out. For 
example. I don't need to understand any philosophy to understand a great 
many things. So we need a weaker claim.
Perhaps there are domains of understanding that may (necessarily) be 
partially overlapping. But is that so far from analytic philosophy? Does 
anyone really deny that to do analytic philosophy of mind that it helps to 
know some neuroscience, or that to do philosophy of language it helps to 
know some linguistics? If that's right then I guess that analytic 
philosophers are already transformative. But if that's right then their not 
being transformative cannot explain why the means-end distinction used by 
analytics isn't any good.

I don't know. Perhaps I just don't understand what you are saying. Sorry.

Regards,

Luis.

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