Impact Books

[Ric_Flair]

First I am not sure if I would call Saussure a critcal theorist.  I think he pretty solidly in the Structuralist camp.  Marcuse is pretty clearly a critical theorist as are Adorno, Horkheimer, and a few others.  The distinction being that critical theorists have a Marxist bent, while Structuralism and post-Structuralism is more concerned with the analysis of language (hence the talk of the langue and parol).  But as with all isms there are no sharp edges and the differences are usually pointless anyway.

I do like Foucault although I think his popularity is greatly enhanced by what I call the Nietzsche factor--that is it is so trendy to read him right now that 15 year olds trying to look angsty pick up his books.  He does have a lot of substantive things to say, but they get lost in the wind.  I particularly like his polemic on sexual oreintation and hair color.  I also very much enjoyed the idea of the Panopticon, which is funny because Darksteel Citadel makes reference to the Panopticon, again proving that Foucault's actual contributions are overwhelmed by his popular image.

Three funny stories two from firsthand experience and the other from one of my teachers who is a minor star in Continental philosophy, Richard Kearney.  I fixed his stereo one time so I got to quiz him about philosophy and got the inside scoop sometimes.

First, Derrida, whom I respect immensely and I think is probably one of the last real philosophers, i.e. non-scholars after Wittgenstein and Heidegger to do substantive work (Rorty too).  So Derrida comes to Boston College a few years ago for a symposium at the invite of my teacher.  I am talking to my teacher, showing him where the conference room is, and Derrida is with us.  He is sort of spaced out and really preturbed by people basically stalking him.  He is really distinctive looking and everyone knew he was coming.  He is basically an intellectual celebrity.  So he is sort of trying to get away from the crowd.  He is also DYING for a smoke.  So we get on this elevator with some people, me, my professor, and Derrida and about 6 other people.  It is really crowded.  He is finally able to get a cigarette out and he lights it.  Everyone in the elevator is really pissed off at him and someone yells not at him but sort of indirectly "There is NO SMOKING on elevators.  Who doesn't know that?"  And Derrida keeps smoking.  The elevator stops and the rest of the people get out and guy sort of flips Derrida off.  When the doors close again, Derrida says "People in America call French people rude--I needed a fucking smoke and these people looked at me like I was eating a baby."  I am not sure what the point is, but he was fucking hilarious the whole day.  Sad thing is he is dying of lung cancer.  It will be sad when he dies.  Also I wholeheartedly recommend the movie Derrida.  It is a little too worshipful, but it is worthwhile in the end.  His autobiography is a real trip, just to tie back into the theme.  It is totally worth the effort it takes to get through it.  It is written by Derrida and this other guy.  The guy set out to write a real biography and Derrida agreed to let him, only if he could write an autobiography that was published side by side.  The end result is the guy says one thing and Derrida explains why he is wrong.  It is quintessential Derrida.  I prefer his earlier works like his Husserl commentary, On Grammatology.  I also like Glas.

Second, my Julia Kristeva story.  So in the same professor's class we were filmed by the BBC as part of this series on contemporary philosophy.  My professor was the star and host.  The topic was "Aliens, Gods, and Monsters."  As part of the BBC filming our class linked up with people from other classes around the world.  One was with a guy at University of Machester in England and another was with Kristeva's class.  So we were talking about the idea of hospitality (this is befor 9/11, that idea has ZERO currency in America now) and Kristeva's class was talking.  Then Kearny mentioned we were being recorded and Kristeva took over.  She would not answer any questions and only plugged her books.  It was like she was on Letterman or something.  I think at one point she read a passage from a non-philosophy book, totally unrelated to anything we were talking about.  She was such a shill.  So I second the motion on her.  She sucks.

Third, Lacan.  This is a secondhand story from the same professor who studied with Paul Ricouer.  So Paul's son was seriously depressed and Lacan and Ricouer taught at the same university at the time, so Ricouer asked Lacan, who was had his own variant on Fruedian anaylsis to look at his son.  Lacan, who was a weird fuck to begin with--he smoked crooked cigars claiming they tasted better that way and had a jacket made of rat hair, agreed.  About three months later Ricouer's son killed himself.  Distraught, Ricouer confronted Lacan.  There was heated exchange in which Ricouer sort of implied that Lacan didn't do his job.  Lacan responded: "Well, look at it this way, your son is no longer tormented by his demons.  He is cured."  Ricouer and Lacan hated each other ever since.  I guess that one is not funny.  Just memorable.

RE: Ayn Rand.  I recounted this anecdote on TMD 1, but it is worth repeating.  I used to have a summer job next to a Barnes and Noble that stocked Ayn Rand in the philosophy section.  During lunch I would go and browse.  Before I left everyday I would move the Rand books out of the philosophy section, all of them at one time, and deposit them in the teen lit or adult lit section.  SHE SUCKS MY NUTSACK.  Read Robert Nozick and at least people will respect you as a libertarian, they may not agree, but they will certainly respect you for reading the Rawls of Libertarianism.  Read Ayn Rand and people just chuckle.  SHE IS AWFUL, the Roy Spires of the philosophy world*.

*: Dr. S

[PucktheCat]

When I said Foucault "doesn't get you anywhere" I meant it half as a joke, but I will defend my point anyway.

I find that a lot of philosophy boils down to the decision making equivilent of 1 - 1 = 0.  Let me try to expain what I mean.  Foucault's ideas are provakative and his language is very useful, but they pretty much amount to a critique of all possible bases for decision making.  That leaves you no farther forward than when you began - if every decision is based on flawed criteria then why not just make them based on the same flawed criteria you have always made them on?

Now you may respond that he isn't trying to guide decision making, but then I wonder why he wrote at all.  Perhaps he wrote simply to satisfy some need in himself, of just for his readers entertainment, but that comes under my heading of "not getting you anywhere."

Leo

[Bram]

I ate a really taste bagel this afternoon.

[Saucemaster]

I do like Foucault although I think his popularity is greatly enhanced by what I call the Nietzsche factor--that is it is so trendy to read him right now that 15 year olds trying to look angsty pick up his books.  He does have a lot of substantive things to say, but they get lost in the wind.  I particularly like his polemic on sexual oreintation and hair color.  I also very much enjoyed the idea of the Panopticon, which is funny because Darksteel Citadel makes reference to the Panopticon, again proving that Foucault's actual contributions are overwhelmed by his popular image.

That's unfortunately true.  He's also being increasingly ignored by Philosophy departments on most American campuses, taught more in Rhetoric, Anthropology, English, etc.  That's not a bad thing in and of itself, and I think that's pretty true of most contemporary Continental thinkers, but it means that he becomes more faddish and more people have just a passing acquaintance with him.  Which contributes to the "Nietzsche factor".

Re: Derrida, I used to like him more, but I graduated from Berkeley, so I ended up taking, what, 3 or 4 classes taught by Searle.  And of course you know what Searle thinks of him.  My love for Heidegger and Foucault managed to withstand the barrage, mostly because I had fantastic professors teaching both, but somewhere along the way Derrida became a casualty of the general Anglo-American bias of most of my department.  He *is* a fascinating man, though, and funny.

Actually, the Lacan story is a little bit funny.

[Ric_Flair]

When I said Foucault "doesn't get you anywhere" I meant it half as a joke, but I will defend my point anyway.

I find that a lot of philosophy boils down to the decision making equivilent of 1 - 1 = 0. Let me try to expain what I mean. Foucault's ideas are provakative and his language is very useful, but they pretty much amount to a critique of all possible bases for decision making. That leaves you no farther forward than when you began - if every decision is based on flawed criteria then why not just make them based on the same flawed criteria you have always made them on?

Now you may respond that he isn't trying to guide decision making, but then I wonder why he wrote at all. Perhaps he wrote simply to satisfy some need in himself, of just for his readers entertainment, but that comes under my heading of "not getting you anywhere."

Leo

I think this one thing that contemporary readers of philosophy find problematic.  They wind up the toy and it just sits there.  People, in our impatient age, shout "DO SOMETHING!"  But the truth is that philosophy is not supposed to DO ANYTHING, or anything in the traditional sense.  

Philosophy, in my mind, is not really about doing something, like other disciplines.  Philosophy, once you realize that the systematizing of the traditional philosophers is inherently broken, is about a method of seeing the world.  Saying philosophy does nothing is sort of like saying your glasses or contact lenses do nothing.  Philosophy, properly conceived, is a way of oreinting yourself to the world.  It is a method of evaluating information and a comportment towards questioning reality.  There is no end or finish line, no goal to achieve.  So criticizing Foucault for "not accomplishing anything" because he just laid bare our prejuidices is not really the point.  He is not trying to show us that everything is wrong so we should adopt a NEW way to doing things, but merely to show us how our prejudices work.  Once we know that we can mitigate for their flaws and keeping going.

[PucktheCat]

You are putting my response in a box.  Even if Foucault does what you say, exposing prejudices so we can try to act beyond them, that is still guiding decision making.  I would call that very productive.  The fact is, he is utterly incabable of escaping his own critique of knowledge.

I guess the question is this: how can I see Foucault as anything other than another product of the existing language-knowledge-power structure?

Leo

[Ric_Flair]

You are putting my response in a box.

Funny double meaning here.

Ultimately you are right.  That is why I think that I prefer Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein.  They seem to all see the trap you refer to and they deftly escape it, or they at least do a much better job at trying.

[walkingdude]

Foucault is awesome if only for the stuff he’s inspired. Judith Butler and her ilk were all heavily influenced by Foucault and without them feminism would have been left in the hands of idiots like Dworkin and McKinnon.

[jpmeyer]

We count Saussure with literary theory because Structuralism is really important when actually analyzing languages and exactly how texts are put together.

[Smmenen]

Foucault is awesome if only for the stuff he’s inspired. Judith Butler and her ilk were all heavily influenced by Foucault and without them feminism would have been left in the hands of idiots like Dworkin and McKinnon.

I was ambivalent toward MacKinnon, at best, until I met her in person.  She was not only brilliant, but lucid, funny, and spot on with everything she said.  

Steve

[Dr. Sylvan]

I ate a really taste bagel this afternoon.

Did you put it in your toaster? More importantly, did you understand why you would do so?

[Bram]

I had a vague preexisting concept of why it would be 'good' to put the bagel in a toaster. I was ambivalent on the matter however since I could not come to an objective definition of 'good' (nor a subjective one that would offer incentives to act or consolation in case of failure). Moreover, I wondered to what degree the information I had regarding bagels was based on externally superimposed values and socially conditioned institutional patterns. I could not bring myself to make a decision based on possibly flawed criteria and since I realised this dilemma was impossible to solve, I chucked the toaster out of the window, which landed on the head of my high school philosophy teacher killing him instantly, and just ate the bagel.

On a semi-serious note: I attended a lecture by a well-known Dutch philosopher a while ago. He pointed out that in the past, all the sciences were part of (and indeed called) philosophy. It's interesting to see that whenever mankind discovered something substantial about something (be it biology, chemistry, physics, sociology, econmics or law) to the degree that we could actually predict situations or put the theory to actual use in any way (practical or theoretical), it 'fell out' of the realm of philosophy and was awarded its own discipline. Which would be another way to define philosophy: the science of things that are useless and/or we don't know shit about yet.

[Saucemaster]

I think this one thing that contemporary readers of philosophy find problematic.  They wind up the toy and it just sits there.  People, in our impatient age, shout "DO SOMETHING!"  But the truth is that philosophy is not supposed to DO ANYTHING, or anything in the traditional sense.  

Philosophy, in my mind, is not really about doing something, like other disciplines.  Philosophy, once you realize that the systematizing of the traditional philosophers is inherently broken, is about a method of seeing the world.  Saying philosophy does nothing is sort of like saying your glasses or contact lenses do nothing.  Philosophy, properly conceived, is a way of oreinting yourself to the world.  It is a method of evaluating information and a comportment towards questioning reality.  There is no end or finish line, no goal to achieve.

TMD's resident philosophy students hijacked this thread already, Dutchie.  Hands off.

[Bram]

That's so not what I meant.

Ofcourse philosophy students will give a twist to my reasoning, since they feel the need to validate what they're doing. I say 'It does nothing'. They retort 'It's supposed to do nothing.' Maybe it's true. But please realise that that's exactly what they'd say if it weren't true, too.

I just meant that it seems odd that the fashion in which we now look upon philosophy in many ways resembles the fashion in which we looked upon all the other disciplines back when we knew next to nothing about them. Over the course of hundreds of years, many of these disciplines have extended far beyond the reach of philolophy into the domain of 'hard' science, and philosophy is left with problems that either cannot be solved, or that we are to stupid to solve. And what do we do? We say we aren't supposed to solve them, or make up other excuses. It's easy to say that there is no goal to achieve when you find yourself inable of achieving (or even defining) it.

From my perspective, outside philosophy, that seems odd. And endearingly pathetic, too. If philosophy really is nothing more that an outlook on life, a tool to help one percieve reality, then it is as useless as religion.

Thank you.

[PucktheCat]

From my perspective, outside philosophy, that seems odd. And endearingly pathetic, too. If philosophy really is nothing more that an outlook on life, a tool to help one percieve reality, then it is as useless as religion.

I am a committed agnostic/atheist (those are slippery terms), but it is hard to say religion is useless.  It has certainly served as a source of social cohesion throughout human history.  Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is a different question, but certain people have found it very useful.

At least one (mis-)use of philosophy historically has been very similar.  It is used to provide the unifying rhetoric for a community.  The dominant language of American political speech is still arguably the language of the Enlightenment political philosphers that the founding fathers were reading.

Leo

[Bram]

OK, so let me rephrase that to:

(...) then it is in my opinion as useless as organised religion is in this day and age.

Better?

I am a committed agnostic/atheist (those are slippery terms),

Indeed they are. And contrary to popular belief, they aren't even mutually exclusive. While agnosticism is, strictly speaking, the 'doctrine that humans cannot know of the existence of anything beyond the phenomena of their experience' (Encyclopedia Britannica), the term has come to be equated with skepticism about religious questions in general.

However, one can accept the fact that one cannot know anything outside the realm of what one has experienced, while still believing in (a) god.

Knowing and believing are two very separate things. And even by the original definition, one can have had a 'personal experience' that 'proves'  the existence of god, thereby removing the religious question from the concept of agnosticism for the person in question alltogether. I fit into the former category rather than the latter.

[PucktheCat]

I generally self-identify as agnostic for exactly the reasons you posted (not that it is often necessary to self-identify as anything), but I wanted to emphasize my skepticism in my previous post.  Sometimes agnostic is taken to mean "undecided" as in "I kinda think religion is good, I am really conflicted about it, blah blah, blah."  Taken that way my post might have been misinterpreted as apologism.  I ain't really in that camp, so I thought mentioning atheist would avoid that issue entirely.

Leo

[walkingdude]

Foucault is awesome if only for the stuff he’s inspired. Judith Butler and her ilk were all heavily influenced by Foucault and without them feminism would have been left in the hands of idiots like Dworkin and McKinnon.

I was ambivalent toward MacKinnon, at best, until I met her in person.  She was not only brilliant, but lucid, funny, and spot on with everything she said.  

Steve

I’ve never met her in person, so I’m working only from her writings and fairly early ones at that, so it’s possible that I’m being unfair to her.  In fact, I know I was being unfair to her by calling her an idiot, her ideas (while imo wrong) are complex and developed enouph that she would have to ahve been sharp to come up with them.  

However, even if she is a brilliant person I still think gets shredded by Butler.

[Jhaggs]

Thanks for all the suggestions.  I wrote alot of the authors down that I have yet to read.  Here are some other title that I have read that I thought were great and that many would enjoy.  I suspect that several people have read these books but they are DEFINITLY worth mentioning.      

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
by Jared Diamond (Awesome read!)

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
by Eric Schlosser  (Haven't eaten fast food since.)


The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene  (Some of this book went right over my head but it IS written in such a fashion where most can understand what Greene is saying.  I'm not mathmatically savy but I was able to comprehend a lot of what he was driving at.  It is a really great book.)

Demon-Haunted World: Carl Sagan (This book kicked ass!!!  Sagan breaks down so many of societies misconceptions and falsehoods.  Plus alot of the book is hilarious.  His bit on "Baloney Detection" is classic.)

[Matt]

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Good luck.

[Saucemaster]

If philosophy really is nothing more that an outlook on life, a tool to help one percieve reality, then it is as useless as religion.

I couldn't possibly disagree more.  The problem is that we are beholden to some philosophy--you, me, everyone--whether we realize it or not.  Our culture, our upbringing, our language, our various experiences; all of them induce some sense of perspective on reality.  They teach you what is important, what is useless, what makes sense and what doesn't.  We are all beholden to a philosophy already.  Only most people don't know that, and have never thought about it.  Their decisions, their judgments, their actions, even their thoughts are ruled by systems of beliefs and a stance toward the world that isn't even their own.  If Philosophy is what Ric Flair says it is--and I agree with him-- then studying philosophy, even just a little, gives you a chance to recognize and interact with the forces that have already partially defined you.  It gives you a chance to change.  You are already beholden to a philosophy.

Put it another way.  If someone was born and raised a devout Christian, for example, if he'd inherited his religious beliefs entirely from others and never really had a chance to look at those beliefs critically, what would you think of him if he refused to study or think critically about the religion he was born believing?  Would religion be a useless waste of time then?  As someone born and raised in a Christian minister's home who eventually ended up deciding that he was agnostic about God, I can tell you that religion has been anything but useless in my life.  For those who believe it informs their entire existence, and if you're going to make your own decision about it you have to know damn well what you think and why you think it.

Everyone is already in a situation just like this, except that instead of something as obvious as a religion, they are in the grip of subtler and more varied systems of belief.  Would you rather stumble around blindly or at least try to find another way to view the world?

As for religion being useless, it's been put to plenty of uses across history, some good, some horrible.  There are plenty of people dying all across the world because extremists figured out long ago that it's very easy to manipulate someone who was born believing certain things and will die without ever questioning them.  I say fuck dogma, and philosophy, properly conceived, shafts dogma but good.

EDIT: P.S.: And in an on-topic note, it's been a while since I read it, but Greene's book on String theory was great, so I second Jhaggs' recommendation.

[Matt]

Yeah, I'm actually in the middle of that one right now.

[Bram]

I couldn't possibly disagree more.

I expected no less

If Philosophy is what Ric Flair says it is--and I agree with him-- then studying philosophy, even just a little, gives you a chance to recognize and interact with the forces that have already partially defined you. It gives you a chance to change.

If philosophy is what Ric says it is--and I don't agree with him--then one doesn't need to study it. All one has to do is think about one's actions and what causes them. Why would I need to read other people's opinions on different outlooks on life? If I assume that I'm smart, then I can figure it out for myself. If I assume that I'm stupid, then I'll just fall from one philosophical dogma into the next just because I read more books by this guy than by that one, or bacause I happen to have missed the works of some alltogether different dope whose writings cater to my  preexisting views for perhaps no other reason than that they are contrary to these.

If someone was born and raised a devout Christian, for example, if he'd inherited his religious beliefs entirely from others and never really had a chance to look at those beliefs critically, what would you think of him if he refused to study or think critically about the religion he was born believing? Would religion be a useless waste of time then?

I didn't mean useless to individuals. Many people find comfort in the idea of an omnipotent being. Hell, I believe in god myself. And I certainly didn't mean useless in the past. Religion has in many ways shaped our current culture by uniting us, giving us a goal and elevating us from the level of nomadic barbarians. I simply meant that organised religion serves no purpose anymore for society as a whole in this day and age (other than perhaps to incite fear and animosity). Anyone who doesn't think critically about anything he believes in is a moron. And if you're a moron, then it makes precious little difference wether you believe in God, or in Schopenhauer.

I'm not trying to convince you of my views and you sure as hell won't succeed in convincing me of yours. In my opinion, the detrimental characteristic of every belief system, be it religion, philosophy or ideology, is the need to convince or convert others. I don't need people to share my girlfriend, so why would I need people to share my views? It's so immature to think that one is right about anything (especially if this misconception is based on the fact that one can recite the names of more philosophers than the other guy, as is the case with many of the philosophy students I've met). I don't pretend to be right; I'm just informing you of my views, which happen to suit me very well.

Oh, and:

[PucktheCat]

Why would I need to read other people's opinions on different outlooks on life? If I assume that I'm smart, then I can figure it out for myself.

Wouldn't the same thing apply to well . . . everything?

It would certainly apply to everything that is discussed on this board  

Leo

[Bram]

Wouldn't the same thing apply to well . . . everything?

Yes, and no.

Yes, because that was basically my point. Ever since smart people started figuring out things for themselves, the domain of philosophy started to shrink, until only that which noone can figure out was left. All that remains is theoretical bullshit on the nature of existence and such which I can very well judge on my own, thank you, without being indoctrinated by idiotic writers who think they know what they're talking about. It also means that this particular discussion has no real point, which is why I will discontinue my contribution to it after the following paragraph

And:

No, because you failed to quote me on the most important part of my argument: the morons. Usually, smart people figure stuff out for themselves and the ignorant remain just that. But in this case, you can have ignorant people thinking they have an opinion, while in reality, they are still stumbling along in the darkness, blindly following the next 'rage' in philosophy. Philosophy only teaches people who are smart to begin with to think. It teaches the rest to think they can think. To quote. To recite. To argue. To do exaclty what organised religion has taught us from the dawn of time. See where I'm going with this? When applied to some externality by smart people, philosophy can be a powerful tool. In the hands of most philosophy students however, it's simply either a substitute for religion, a way to fill some existential gap in their souls, or a means to place themselves (in their own eyes at least) above the masses that they despise.

[Saucemaster]

Why would I need to read other people's opinions on different outlooks on life?

Because no matter how smart you are, you don't know everything.  And you won't think of everything.  And because there's an inherent value in knowing and understanding the thoughts and beliefs of other people.  If you rely solely on your own acumen to critique your understanding of the world, you will rarely be challenged and you will inevitably miss things that others will not.  Can you honestly say that you have never been surprised by someone else's ideas?  That no one, smarter than you or more stupid, has brought up a point that set you back?  What can I say, I think that fundamentally, exposure to other perspectives is a good thing.  

In my opinion, the detrimental characteristic of every belief system, be it religion, philosophy or ideology, is the need to convince or convert others. I don't need people to share my girlfriend, so why would I need people to share my views? It's so immature to think that one is right about anything (especially if this misconception is based on the fact that one can recite the names of more philosophers than the other guy, as is the case with many of the philosophy students I've met). I don't pretend to be right; I'm just informing you of my views, which happen to suit me very well.

A) Are we talking about conversion or persuasion?  What I'm saying is that critical thought is a useful and sometimes necessary corrective to becoming too firmly entrenched in ANY dogma, be it forced upon someone by circumstances or be it solely of their own devising.  Conversion is precisely the problem.  I'm not saying read Schopenhauer so that you can become one of his devotees; I'm saying that reading Schopenhauer may challenge the way you see the world and force you to think about things you may not have thought about otherwise.  And again, I think that's inherently good.  And hell, someone might even persuade you that they're right about something.  That's ALSO good.  It's the sign that you're open-minded and NOT STUCK IN SOME DOGMA.  Persuasion is the way you build consensus without force.  Consensus is the way that you govern without force.  Take what you're saying to its logical extreme: I can't convince you of anything, you can't convince me of anything, no one can convince anyone of anything.  What is there left to do but remove you if we disagree about something important and fundamental?  I'm just not okay with that.  Once again, it sounds to me like it's not the students of philosophy who are being dogmatic here.

B) How in the world is it immature to think you're right about something?  If you don't think you're right, don't you want to BECOME right?  Or are you just okay with being wrong and knowing it?  What's immature is thinking that you're right and then refusing to be open-minded enough to be convinced that maybe you're not right.

Honestly, I think you're overstating your case because you've met some dumbass Philosophy students in the past.  I have a degree in Philosophy, and believe me, I know that there are plenty of them.  I also know alot of Computer Science majors with no personal hygiene, but that doesn't invalidate their entire enterprise.  

Anyway, the point of all of this is that I think, at least, that Philosophy is good precisely to the extent that it surprises and challenges you and forces you to reevaluate the way you interact with the world.  If you feel incapable of being surprised and challenged by the ideas of others, then yes, Philosophy is certainly not going to help you out.  But then I think there are other problems to address.

Also, we got here first.  This thread isn't Dutch-jacked yet.

EDIT:

Usually, smart people figure stuff out for themselves and the ignorant remain just that. But in this case, you can have ignorant people thinking they have an opinion, while in reality, they are still stumbling along in the darkness, blindly following the next 'rage' in philosophy. Philosophy only teaches people who are smart to begin with to think.

Bram posted while I was posting.  I actually agree with your generally misanthropic views, Bram.  I guess my point was just that because it *is* a useful tool for sharp and intelligent people, it therefore has some value.  And the fact that there are many people in the world who are unwilling or sometimes even unable to think critically about their views on the world is all the more reason for Philosophy: the only way that people are going to get better is if the people leading them and governing them are as well-equipped and open-minded as possible.  I think Philosophy helps with that.

[Jhaggs]

Since the thread has been "dutch-hijacked" I'll chime in a little.  Ric and Sauce Master have pretty much summed up my opinion on the merits of studying philosophy.  I'll try to add a little more.

A great virtue of philosophy is that it doesn't teach what to think.  Instead it teaches how to think. It is the study of meaning, the study of a principle's underlying conduct, the study of thought and knowledge. Philosophy traines you to analyze, to question orthodoxies and to express things clearly.  Immanuel Kant says it best: sapere aude - "dare to think".  Personally, it has helped me to think critically and has motivated me to exhaust all avenues before rendering a judgement or delivering an opinion.  I really enjoyed the classes that I took and it has helped me breakdown some preconcieved notions that I held as well as answered a lot of questions that I have had.  

While I was studying philosophy I often used this site for research:

http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html

It's a great source to familliarize yourself with a lot of topics without having to dig through a volume of text.

[Saucemaster]

Oh man, I'm sorry Jhaggs.  Now we've got you participating in your own thread-hijacking.

I would just like to say that I'm actually quite enjoying this debate, but that's probably because as stated above, I like being challenged.

[Jhaggs]

Oh man, I'm sorry Jhaggs.  Now we've got you participating in your own thread-hijacking.

I would just like to say that I'm actually quite enjoying this debate, but that's probably because as stated above, I like being challenged.

Not to worry.  I've enjoyed reading the thread as well.  Besides, there have been several recommendations that should keep me busy.

[Saucemaster]

Well, um... to bring it back around to the topic, I don't think that Philosophy is the only or even necessarily the best way to challenge your world-view.  I think that's also a function of art, literature, "hard" science, even things like music and mathematics on a hard-to-explain level; pretty much all those human endeavors that technically don't "do anything".  So recommending fiction (yes, even Ayn Rand ) seems just as valuable to me as recommending Philosophy if you're looking for books that will have an impact.