[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by pbradley

Keeping It Simple posts a banal, oafish opinion, !@#$%! responds with insults, and I soflty whine.

At least it's consistent.

fixed!

but seriously, if it displeases you, why call more attention to it? i only insult the little shit for my own amusement, not to "take the trollbait". as you may have noticed, i've made posts totally unrelated to my username and/or that red angry face i display.

let's try to avoid this:

Originally Posted by Skuj

(Oh dear, what happened to this thread today?)

and instead continue with the more enjoyable stuff:

Originally Posted by Skuj

Anyway, I'm enjoying parts of this discussion, thank you very much, and parts of my 2 new aforementioned books. Interesting that imho, philosophy is rather like chess, an Art and a Science, with debates and hard facts.....

so mang, is this your first foray at all or do you have any prior knowledge of the subject at all? what's motivating you? pure curiosity? something else? i'm curious about this.

Originally Posted by pbradley

I was introduced to philosophy via Plato and Aristotle, it's a bit difficult for me to imagine approaching it any other way. I also had the opportunity of studying them in a seminar class that allowed me to really challenge those philosophers in very open terms. They're really the most immediately relevant philosophers, I believe, for those who are new to the ideas and provide the concepts and questions that inform the relevance of later philosophers. Think about 'the good life' first and worry about induction later.

i agree with a good chunk of your post, as you can see from something i wrote in a previous page, but i can imagine a different approach to philosophy: start with a PROBLEM. something that does not have an empirical solution and requires thought and speculation. attack the problem with your own devices, and then research who and how has addressed said problem before. take from your own post the question of "the good life", and you could go back to the existentialists, for example, or deep ecology, or marcuse, other more immediate ideas, before reaching back to the greeks. of course, since all of philosophy postulates or implies its own history, you do eventually end up back on plato and aristotle, except that you arrive at them from a different avenue, i.e., your own "vital" problem, the questions that you need to answer now, and a research into possible solutions.

part of the reason i think people find a hard time reading plato today is because they are not shown how it may be relevant to their own lives-- though i find aristotle more relevant anyway-- but that's besides the point. the point is that it is not just possible but also viable to approach philosophy from a "here and now" situation rather than by the accumulation of historical knowledge which may or may not apply, eventually, to one's life.

and i'm repeating myself like a broken record at this point.