Yet children constantly ask "why?" As part of trying to understand what existence means, what the world is and why we are here. It doesn't matter what its hidden in but the roots of questioning and philosophical thought can be found almost everywhere becaue it is innate to human nature. All that academics really do is quantify this innate knowledge into catagories. Haven't you ever noticed that when you read a well thought-out philosophical concept that it resonates with you and that you understand it immediatly? That's becaue you already know it on some level: Just as you should be able to understand what I am writing here.

- Your age is irrelevant, so I wonder why brought it up.
- I didn't claim that the two were identical. I claimed that they overlapped. If this is an example of the level of reading comprehension you're going to be using, perhaps this debate could be dropped right now.
- Way to totally ignore everything else I said, too. Judaism, like Hinduism and Buddhism, teaches it's followers to question, it doesn't rely on blind faith at all. Nor is it alone in this- it is common through the literature and stories we have, starting all the way back with the Epic of Gilgamesh, for people to question the world around them.
- Dogs don't eat cats, but thanks for playing.
- Philosophy doesn't work under the complete realm of logic, either. By definition, when dealing with immaterial topics, assumptions have to be made. I advise you once more to go back and actually read some Socrates, and see how much of his rambling bullshit actually strikes you as intelligent, and how much is wankery and wordplay.

When children ask why they do not know how to come to an answer and that is why they are asking. Which is also why they usually follow up the question with another Why?? We have to be taught how to answer questions. It IS human nature to ask questions. But asking questions does not philosophical thought make.

Merely to presuppose that IF I said I had talked to several people you would understand that I have spent MANY years of my time asking these same questions that we are debating here. At one time I was of the same mind that philosophy and religion were one and the same.
They ARE NOT.

You may go back and say that now but it certainly seemed as if you were proposing that they were one and the same.


We are not going to degrade this into a who is smarter than whom debate are we??? I am reading your replies quite well. Am I supposed to agree just because???
No. I disagree. Disagreeing does not make me stupid.


Do you have a gilgamesh fetish???

I did not ignore anything. It teaches them to question thier faith yes. but it teaches it to strengthen that very same faith and all the answers must be based on such.


You have really never seen a ravaging dog have you??? Dogs are natural predators and if left to thier own devices will eat anything they can catch. Including cats. But I suppose that is just your way of dismissing my metaphor.

Philosophy works off of reason and reason is absolute logic. So how does it not work under logic?
Assumptions can be made in a logical progression.

Socrates was actually a fairly intelligent individual. I am sure that some of the ideals suffer because of translation.

That correlation does not follow naturally at all from your statement. How many years have you spent talking to theologians, and of what faith were they? What did they say that lead you to believe that religion and philosophy are disconnected?



No, but refusing to actually acknowledge opposing arguments and misrepresenting the other side does.



In so far as it's one of my favorite ancient writings, perhaps. It's also the oldest surviving piece of literature we have, and so the ideas it represents are very important towards establishing precedent. The fact that the story asks multiple philosophical questions defeats your assertion that philosophy would not exist for another 2,500 years.


No, such answers spring from a system of logic based on the culture from which that religion came, and that it helped shape. Such questions tend to support the religion, because if they did not, said religion would not have survived long. This is insular in so far as all chains of logic and argument are biased by the speaker. A debate that begins from the assumption that God is all powerful is no more inherently flawed than one which begins with the assumption that one cannot morally base one's course of actions on their likelihood of survival. Nor is the quality of the base assumptions relevant- even bad philosophy built on bad assumptions is still philosophy. You do not have the right to pick and choose what is "true" philosophy and what is not. A systematic questioning of the that which is not falsifiable is all that is necessary.


Metaphors do not work that way. You do not say, "That firework exploded just like a duck with a living bomb inside of it." While it is possible for a bomb to be placed inside of a living duck to be detonated later, this is not in the natural course of events, and so the metaphor is inept and detracts from understanding, rather than adding to it. It is not in the natural course of events for dogs to eat cats. So, no, I'm not dismissing your metaphor; I'm judging it as being poor. It gets a big, red F.


Logic can only be applied to any philosophical debate if you assume certain abstract arguments and premises are absolutely true without any actual proof. This is exactly the kind of smoke-and-mirror bullshit Socrates did all the time- on one hand put one aspect of the debate to intense scrutiny, and then glibly glide over some assumption relating to his side of the debate.

I'm just gonna go ahead and throw this out there, maybe because I'm a glutton for punishment. I'll put it in all caps so you might actually read it.

NOBODY HAS SAID THAT PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION ARE THE SAME THING! IT HAS NOT BEEN SAID BY ANYBODY BUT YOURSELF! PLEASE READ POSTS BEFORE COMMENTING.

*ahem*

Dyshade likes metaphors, lets give him one. The Chevorlet Corvette and the Chevorlet Astro Minivan are two different vehicles made by the same company. Both have the same minds creating them, but both are created for different reasons. An astro van isn't pretty, its practical, it gets good mileage, it can haul a large family. The corvette is an ideal, its shiny and fast and easy to enjoy driving. However, in the end, they are both just vehicles to get from point A to point B. That is what we are saying about Philosophy and Religion. Both are different means to the same end. Both are inspired by man's natural impulses to ask "why".

Now please, if you're going to argue that man has no such impulses, than start backing up that claim. But get off the difference between philosophy and religion already.

Meh.... this is just going in huge circles and I am getting nowhere because people would rather debate intelligence than the real topic. Sarcasm in a debate just really destroys it.

In ending if you believe that philosophy was around before the term even existed something is quite wrong.

Look my opinion goes back hundreds of years---

Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.
- Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670)

What the hell. I am all about beating that horse.

"""

Another difference is the fact that philosophy tends to emphasize just the use of reason and critical thinking whereas religions may make use of reason, but at the very least they also rely on faith, or even use faith to the exclusion of reason. Granted, there are any number of philosophers who have argued that reason alone cannot discover truth or who have tried to describe the limitations of reason in some manner — but that isn’t the quite the same thing.
You won’t find Hegel, Kant or Russell saying that their philosophies are revelations from a god or that their work should be taken on faith. Instead, they base their philosophies on rational arguments — those arguments may not also prove valid or successful, but it is the effort which differentiates their work from religion. In religion, and even in religious philosophy, reasoned arguments are ultimately traced back to some basic faith in God, gods, or religious principles which have been discovered in some revelation.
A separation between the sacred and the profane is something else lacking in philosophy. Certainly philosophers discuss the phenomena of religious awe, feelings of mystery, and the importance of sacred objects, but that is very different from having feelings of awe and mystery around such objects within philosophy. Many religions teach adherents to revere sacred scriptures, but no one teaches students to revere the collected notes of William James. Finally, most religions tend to include some sort of belief in what can only be described as the “miraculous” — events which either defy normal explanation or which are, in principal, outside the boundaries of what should occur in our universe. Miracles may not play a very large role in every religion, but they are a common feature which you don’t find in philosophy. Nietzsche wasn’t born of a virgin, no angels appeared to announce the conception of Sartre, and Hume didn’t make the lame walk again. ""
Austin Cline

More fun acknowledgement that Philosophy was birthed by the Greeks--

""What happened in Greek cities politically and socially was extraordinary enough, but it is also our clue about the origin of philosophy. Although we can only imagine the nature of the causal connection, the correlation between philosophy and the cities of commercial wealth and political transformation is obvious. Greek philosophy began in Ionia (today on the west coast of Turkey), in the wealthiest and most active cities of their time in Greece. For some years Greek philosophy then seemed to circulate around the Greek colonial periphery, from Ionia (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximines, Heralcitus, Xenophanes), to Italy (Pythagoras, Parmenides, Zeno), Sicily (Empedocles), and the northern Aegean (Democritus, Protagoras), to Ionia again (Melissos). Then philosophy migrated from every direction to Athens itself, at the center, the wealthiest commercial power and the most famous democracy of the time [9]. Socrates, although uninterested in wealth himself, nevertheless was a creature of the marketplace, where there were always people to meet and where he could, in effect, bargain over definitions rather than over prices. Similarly, although Socrates avoided participation in democratic politics, it is hard to imagine his idiosyncratic individualism, and the uncompromising self-assertion of his defense speech, without either wealth or birth to justify his privileges, occurring in any other political context. ""

AND---

""If Greek philosophy was different from what came before, as previously considered, the next question would be, "Why the Greeks?" What was different about the Greeks that led to the origin of philosophy with them? Years ago, the simple answer might have been that the Greeks were "different," they just had some kind of special "genius" that enabled them to think about things in new and different ways. That kind of answer is unsatisfactory, not only because it doesn't really explain anything, not only because it sounds disturbingly like some kind of racism (the Greeks just must have been genetically different), but because it cannot then in turn explain why philosophy only occurred among some Greeks (e.g. Milesians, Athenians, etc.) and not among others (e.g. Spartans). ""

And for those who still think that Philosophy existed BEFORE the Greeks let me cut and paste this---

""As it happens, Greek philosophy, and Indian and Chinese, were different from what came before; and we can specify what the differences were. Pre-philosophical thought can be characterized as "mythopoeic," "mythopoetic," or "mythic" thought. "Mythopoeic" means "making" (poieîn, from which the word "poet" is derived) "myth" (mûthos). There is a large and growing literature about mythology, but here all that is necessary are the points what will serve the purpose of distinguishing philosophical thought from the thought of people in earlier Middle Eastern civilizations (Egyptians, Babylonians, etc.) about the nature of things. With the identification of the characteristics of mythic forms of human thought, it becomes possible to identify the unique innovations of philosophy. Note that philosophic thought does not replace mythopoeic thought but supplements it. ""

I hope that this is some eye opening material.

I can't even believe you just did it again.

Quoting a couple of philosophers who no doubt believed that western thought was the center of the universe does nothing to prove your point in an objective light.

.

Would you care to elaborate beyond such a simple statement/reply.

Three seperate things have been at debate here.

#1- Philosophy/religion and the difference between the two.

#2- the advent of modern philosophical thought and when it occured.

#3- advanced society creating the atmosphere for the ability to formulate philosophical thought.

I am trying really hard to teach you folks the differences, the civilization which created it, and how they did so.

All I get in return is that mythic stories are philosophy costumed in adventures and that religion is the exact same and/or shares enough similarities to be not very much different at all. Plus rebuffs playing on sarcastic terminology and snippets of subtle insults.

I am sharing historical fact, opinions and writings from philosophers themselves, and backing up my opinion with grounded fact. I have yet to hear more than devils advocate opinionated replies.

#1- There IS a huge difference between Theology and Philosophy and they are not the same.

#2- The advent of Modern Philosophical thought began in Greece.

#3- It was because of the mix of Greek culture and civilization that created an atmosphere conducive to philosophical thought. Some would say that within the Greek Republic lay the founding of modern freedoms and democracy.

Very easy.

And asking DM if he has a "gilgamesh fetish" isn't a "snippet of subtle insult"?

Come on, you're no better than anyone else in this argument. And you keep saying the same stuff over and over.

He has brought up the same story 3 times. Seems like a fetish to me. there are far more ancient stories to make the same point but he keeps bringing that one into it.

I am no better. Nor am I stating so. But I am correct.