Taking Philosophy Forward (original) (raw)

Philosophy Is Not Dead: A Vision of the Discipline's Future

2014

Is philosophy dead? Stephen Hawking has said so, and Neil deGrasse Tyson has warned students away from it. This book responds by explaining why philosophy is relevant in contemporary American society. It may not be dead, but it is troubled by its invisibility and an appearance of irrelevance, at least some of this its own making. The author offers an explanation of how modern philosophy found itself marginalized within academic cubicles and offers a thesis on what kind of job philosophy might do in a contemporary society that is intellectually, morally and spiritually adrift. That job: identify, clarify, and critically evaluate prevailing worldviews as they are embodied in institutions and cultural practices, or make themselves manifest in contemporary cultural events.

Reimagining the Study and Teaching of Philosophy for Our Time

2019

The importance and relevance of philosophy has come to be recognized more today than ever before in recent history. In many colleges and universities philosophy is now an essential component of interdisciplinary studies. The public interest in philosophy is increasing. UNESCO’s initiatives to promote philosophy are laudable. All these call for reimagining the study and teaching of philosophy for our contemporary time − a task worthwhile for philosophy studies in ecclesiastical institutes as well.

When Philosophy is Disparaged (2023 ed

Human beings are paying a dire price for disparaging philosophy in all facets of life, especially in the field of natural science where the most intelligent explorations of nature for the survival and advance of Homo sapiens species are supposed to be conducted. In the mean time, the professional discipline crowned with the title “philosophy” has been haunted by its own collective and systematic pitfalls. Consequently, despite of the apparent rapid growing global prosperity, the earth civilization is indeed walking at a fast pace down to a deep crisis. To make matters much worse, due to its intelligent challenge, the weakened collective philosophical capacity in the world is not something that can be made up with some crash courses as for scientific and technological trainings. If there were some kind interstellar competitions as claimed in some ufologist products, this hazardous trend in human mainstream philosophy would definitely put earth civilization in a scarily disadvantageous position; even if the interstellar competitions are only fairy tale, the collapse of human collective philosophical capacity would undoubtedly be hazardous for humans when facing expected or unexpected disastrous natural perils, let alone those created by humans due to the poor collective philosophical capacity. This writing will demonstrate through examples how philosophically erroneous mistakes in mathematics and physics that were made at the turn of 20th century could last for more than a century without being identified, as well as an issue that has lingered for several centuries and still confuses the whole world with its philosophical complexity. In those examples, we could see that scientists with the aura of the smartest people on earth could easily be convinced by “simple, straight, and brilliant ideas”, which could bring aesthetically attractive convenience but would lead to various kinds of false knowledge and wrong practices, and then defend those ideas with all their lives for a long time, simply because the scientific community has not been prepared with strong philosophical capacity of reasoning. In addition to the mistakes in mathematics and physics, this writing will also discuss the devastating stale status of the existing academia of philosophy as well as the need and vision of having a parallel new professional community of philosophy.