NationStates Jolt Archive

For the past two years I have been studying ancient and modern philosophy. I’ve found it to be an extremely rewarding experience, particularly when I began to explore metaphysic and epistemology. I have found is that my former beliefs, assumptions, and justifications concerning many things including politics, morality, etc are unsatisfactory. Even with my limited understanding of philosophy, I have been forced to be modest in my claims of knowledge. For the most part I’ve suspended my belief, I find it difficult to listen to someone when their ideas have been poorly considered. It seems, with my introduction to philosophy, that very little is absolutely certain.

To that end, I find the tireless rhetoric of the alleged “liberals” and “conservatives” irritating to no end. On television, and in person, those dogmatic individuals and groups claiming to know what is right, or true, or the good way, often offer little or no good reason to why I should believe them. At times political pendants and politicians say completely absurd, logically fallacious and self-contradictory things; all the more diminishing their trust worthiness. It seems to me that the political arena, especially within the United States, has been taken over by sophists. If philosophy can teach modesty then we should all be reading away, so to avoid falling for dogmatism.

*snip*

My favorite part of these tireless debates, is that mostly people debate these issues by repeating someone else's argument. Many times arguments develop over what someone else's opinion of the topic is, rather than the topic itself.

Of interest to you might be a bit of modern philosophy, if you haven't already picked it up: William James' Pragmatism \, which is essentially a series of lectures he gave on the philosophy. At the time it was rather undefined [which is in the nature of pragmatism!], but he helped to put it into words.

Now, why would I mention this? Because pragmatism is diametrically opposed to dogmatic thought. Pragmatism (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/james.htm) is the application of whatever works and is most logical in a given situation; adhering to a single philosophy [doing all things in accordance with liberal or conservative philosophy, for example] is seen as illogical, as no "philosophy" developed by flawed human beings can be correct in every given situation.

And Americans practiced this for about 30-40 years after WWII. But slowly, we fell back into ideological activity.

Yes it seems as though political partisanship is highly destructive, it blinds, or warps, any truth that can be found. Again going back to the sophists.