> In message <00001989.sm@dts.edu> Jeff Webster writes:
>
> One of the questions I always want to ask about modern philosophy is this:
> "What was wrong with the old view, that your new view is attempting to solve?"
>
> Philosophy is not a matter of preference, it's a matter of trying to solve
> all
> the problems. Aristotle didn't solve all the problems. Sometimes his
> solutions
> were wrong. Maybe the modern philosophers can't solve them either, but I at
> least give them credit for a) realizing that not all the problems are
> solved; b)
> trying to offer some creative solutions.
Paul, I appreciate what you say here. As a would-be Ph.D. in an area of
philosophy, I hate people thinking that philosophy is just arguing stupid
stuff like how many angels can sit on the head of a pin (even though some
of the graduate seminars that I have had seem that way somethimes :)).
Philosophy is really about how to think properly and with rigor, and it
does try, and sometimes succeed, in answering some big questions as well
as shed light on a lot of questions. It is not just any one's opinion,
no matter how illogical (except in much of feminist or continental phil.).
>
> I know next to nothing about Whitehead, but I believe he was trying to deal with
> problems of time; the kind of problems that Augustine pondered and philosophers
> have studied ever since. I even saw a paper on concepts of time at the recent
> meeting of the AAAS in Baltimore. These problems have not been solved yet.
>
> This is not "chronological snobbery" or modernist arrogance. On the contrary,
> it is simply respect for education and the cumulative progress of knowledge --
> any field of knowledge, not just philosophy. Don't all college professors
> believe this way? ;-)
>
Sometimes, however, I tend to think that the old ideas of Aristotle and
Aquinas beat modern ideas and theories "hands down", and I think that
they were right in a good many things that have never been improved upon,
and often modern philosophy has regressed on.
Jeff