Re: your mail

[Lee Daniel Crocker <lcrocker@CALWEB.COM>]

> Chinese philosophy is very different from American philosophy. Chinese
> biology and American biology converge to the same science, (with the
> expected disparity at the cutting edge, of course.) "That which ascends
> converges." Science ascends, philosophy does not-it flops about like a
> dying fish on top of a heap of the already dead, due to its=20
> nonempirical nature. (Please, lets not get into logical positivism.)=20
> The dictionaries also lack the definition which to my mind gets at the
> heart of what philosophy is: a misguided attempt to apply rational
> thinking to existential angst.

OK, I tried to be polite the first time, but this is precisely the
kind of editorial baloney I was trying to avoid putting into the
language.  And the assertions above are demonstrably wrong anyway.
Chinese biology was /nothing/ like Western biology before they
started using Western methods.  Until then it was all about the
flow of chi and breathing patterns and boiled tiger penis.  Today
they study microbes because we showed them how.

Now here's a question: we all agree that Western empirical methods
are better at finding biological facts than the old Chinese methods.
So, if we were to try to explain /why/ those methods are better,
what activity would we be doing?  Philosophy.  Western biology did
better than Chinese biology because of the underlying Western
philosophies of empiricism and/or critical rationalism, where the
Chinese were still stuck with Confucianism and Taoism.

Philosophy often sounds like nonsense--and often is--because that's
its very purpose; to explore the limits of every idea from every
point of view and see where they break.  What's left standing gets
spun off into a useful science.  The broken remains are left for
studying in philosophy class, as well as the methods by which we
broke them, and by which to expand further.  Something like a post
mortem examination; we're studying failures, but learning how to
do better.

ObLojban: I still like "tadnytadni", but "cmutadni" is OK.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com>  <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC