Fuck Philosophy

Ok, so I'm a senior now, and I needed two cognate departments so I could graduate; one of them has to be outside of the College of Arts and Letters, the other may be within my college. Ideally I would have taken something like computer science and engineering and statistics, but the problem is that I neede 12 credits from each of them in one school year (2 semesters) and the way their classes are set up, I wouldn't have been able to fulfill those requirements (what with prerequisites etc.). So, I was stuck with taking Anthropology as one, which isn't terrible since I've got a lot of credits there already for some reason. I still needed one outside of the CAL so I decided on Philosophy, mainly because it was late to sign up for classes as it was, and PHL had a bunch that I could get into and be able to get my 12 credits. I figured, what's philosophy, just a bunch of squares thinking about shit and giving their opinions, sorta like I do on my blog, so it shouldn't be too hard right?

Well, I've always had this opinion about philosophy, that it was sorta a waste of time. It was people thinking about more or less irrelevant shit, and trying to convince other people that their way of thinking about it was more accurate or appropriate. As a man who's been based in the scientific method, I never saw any validity to philosophy. As far as science goes, I always thought that it was an unfair and wasteful use of otherwise good brain power, power that could be devoted to actually doing stuff. I mean there are ways to think about the world where accomplishments are made, where results are found.

Even before I started taking these philosophy classes, I had a little respect for the philosophers of old: Aristotle, Socrates, Plato etc. and I really had an open mind about philosophy. I mean, I tried to open it up on the first day of classes. Maybe I had been wrong, maybe this stuff was actually a valid pursuit of the mind. No, fuck that. It's not. Not only has it been shown to me that there is no greater way to waste a brain than to pursue philosophy, but also it's been shown that I don't need to respect those old fuckbags of yore who spent their time thinking. Sure, back then, 2500 years ago, they didn't have the advantage of technology and previous scientific and ethical inquiry, so maybe there was nothing else they could do but just think about it. Wrong, there were people even back then, like Pythagoras who, rather than saying "Hey maybe this is what's going on." he said "Oh, let's figure out whats going on by using what math we have." and bam, Pythagorean theorem! Results man, that's what I want and big man captain P proved that it was possible even waaay back then.

But my biggest beef is with the later philosophers; the guys we're dealing with in my Existentialism class. What a waste! Guys like Jean-Paul Sartre, Hegel, Kierkegaard and shit-for-brains like those. I have the advantage of going into this class without any previous formal philosophical background, so I can see this stuff that we're being fed with an untainted view. I'm listening to these words that my Italian-borne, French professor is spewing and thinking "What?! Seriously, is this what's being said?" My main problem isn't with the subject of what we're talking about, although I'm not too fond of that either. I'll get back to that. What I hate is how they talk about what they're talking about. Their words are so whispy that they're not really saying anything. These are some exact notes that I took down:

Kierkegaard presents his philosophy as a dialectical progression of existential stages. The first is the aesthetic which gives way to the ethical, which gives way to the religious.

What does that mean? "Gives way," are you kidding me? They've got ways of expressing stuff that could be expressed in a clear and concise manner (even though what they're expressing is neither clear nor concise) but they choose to do it in this philisophical stuff that they think sounds deep and well-thought-out.

Ok, so whatever, they can talk about it how they want. I'm sure someone could make the same arguments about how linguists talk. In fact, I'll make the argument for you. This is an excerpt from a book I'm reading about formal semantics.

The operations F2-F5 each take a CN as an argument and syncategorematically introduce a different determiner, combinging it with the CN to yield a T.

The difference, I would argue is that although, to the untrained reader, both the philosophical writing, and the linguistic writing are more or less unintelligible, the goals of each are drastically different. Philosophy is great for writing about what you think of some random thought, or some random aspect of the world, but little else. Linguistics has a goal, which is to understand the way that the human brain processes a very real and tangible (maybe) part of every day life: language.

Philosophers argue about what it means to exist, what it means to be ethical. Maybe it's useful but, I'll put it this way: when they come to a conclusion about how to exist the best way, how to be the most ethical, what's gonna happen? Nothing. Someone's gonna say, Ok, but how about this is more ethical? It's all based on their world-view. When Linguistics comes to a conclusion, and believe me it has come to a couple in it's day, we say "Oh shit! So that's what's happening when people have speech impediments, this is what's going on in someone's brain when they are diagnosed with aphasia, here's a way we can medically help them." It happens. If you don't believe me, look up an article in Neuroscience or Neurolinguistics about aphasia and see what sort of tangible (yes, actually tangible, you can see where language is being processed and, assuming you have the technology, you can see where memories are stored etc.). I dunno, I'm definitely biased here. But what's the use for arguing about something that has no definite answer? Whatever.