What is Philosophy? - Knowlege vs Wisdom

What is philosophy? The clue is in the word - philos (love) + sophia (wisdom). It's a question of knowledge vs wisdom. Academic philosophy in the Analytical tradition has something of an existential crisis on its hands in answering this question. It aspires to create knowledge but finds that compared to the fledgeling science it has very little accumulation of knowledge to speak about. In today's episode of the Living Philosophy I explore my views on the subject looking at the definition of knowledge vs wisdom and the answer to the question what is philosophy and also the other important question - what is wisdom?

Media and clips

#philosophy #thelivingphilosophy #wisdom

[OrdnanceLab]

Working through your previous videos has been a great time.

[yomo-]

It would be verry interesting to know a bit more about you, the human behind those ideas and passionate videos

[stevenschilizzi]

Knowledge is about how to build a nuclear bomb, Wisdom is about how not to use it.
Einstein did say something like that, but nobody listened. Or perhaps did: they haven’t been used since August 1945. Maybe we’re not, after all, “prehistoric apes playing around with nukes”. Let’s hope the Ukraine invasion won’t change that.
On another topic, I have found out you (the presenter) are very discreet and I had to expend some effort to find out who you are! James Cussen, hailing from Ireland, life coach and master in NLP, fell in love with philosophy as a teenager through Albert Camus’ work and these words of his: THE philosophical question is why I shouldn’t commit suicide right now. If I decide not to, what’s worth living for? - Basically a search for the meaning of life, that we now know, or believe, is something we must construct for ourselves. Nobody can do it for us if we wish not to end up as a “Nietzschean slave”, someone whose thinking is determined and led by others.
I too studied some philosophy as a student, and immediately hated “academic philosophy”. It was like a baker baking bread only for other bakers. An incestuous inner circle. I thought, and still think more than ever, that knowledge of what other deep thinkers (philosophers) have said should, must be used and tailored to “positioning ourselves” in our own world today, with its current, often urgent problems. Linking the two, applying their work towards our own challenges today in the position we’re occupying in society, history and geography. Nuclear weapons and other WMDs, disinformation, abortion, cloning, genetic re-engineering of the human species, bionic humans, Neuralink, universal income, political governance with advanced AI, the flaws and hypocrisy of actual democracies, the even worse autocracies and dictatorships, the individual “vs.” the collective or social, etc. No dearth of urgent challenges facing us today. Silicon Valley is hiring psychologists and ethicists because, as Yuval Noah Harari puts it: Ethics has become an engineering problem while engineering has become an ethical problem. This may be a good thing if, as Knowledge increases, Wisdom is also made to increase (Hawking’s Formula).
It would be nice if the “academic” philo-sophia curriculum listened to you: it could, perhaps should start in primary school. Otherwise “real” love-of-wisdom will happen outside the educational system: in the street, in city parks, on the beach, at the pub or in the café (already happening), on the hiking trail, in sport, in hospital… anywhere. The alternative for people is to be led blindly (and often destructively) by one’s emotions or, worse, by others, the many (more or less disguised) Hitlers of our world, with the consequences we all know (but don’t love!)
Philo-sophia, the love and self-practice of wisdom, starts at home, at work, in the street and often ends there too. In the meantime, it changes home, work and the street into something we hope, not “is better” but “keeps trying to make things better”. To avoid it all ending with a fist-fight or with nuclear bombs, because my better is better than your better, wisdom also means that my better is never the final word: aiming for better also means growing what better means to me. It is a path, a road, not a destination. When better becomes an end destination, war breaks out, and death and destruction. This is what History is made of.
Thanks James for trying to better your better - it may also help to better ours.

'She has wisdom and knows what to do. She has me and she has you...'

The Doors~Love Street 🌱💚 x

[joshuawheatley]

Salam brother. Thank you for this video! I had a similar experience when I was studying philosophy in school. Aside from intro to philosophy, we never got around to discussing or studying the question of "how to live". Forgive me, in no way do I mean to diminish the contributions that many philosophers have made in so many other areas. I eventually understood what I had been searching for and academic philosophy was not it.

May God guide you in the path to wisdom brother.

With all respect,
Joshua

[stevenschilizzi]

Hi James ( I hope I’ve got your name right!”). Your presentation suggested another thing in my mind (tell me if I’m getting it wrong here):
Human knowledge accumulates across humanity and over generations; wisdom accumulates within the individual.
Which suggests I cannot “learn wisdom” in the same way I can “acquire knowledge”. This does sound like what the ancient Greeks said. I can watch the behaviour of a sage, a wise (wo)man, and I may try to imitate him or her, but that will not allow me to become wiser. Wisdom must come from the inside. But how? - A fascinating new area of research today is whether engineers can seed-program AI machines to be “wise”. There is a growing field of study called “Artificial Wisdom” - which leaves me a bit perplexed if we don’t know ourselves what wisdom is or how to acquire it. But who knows? It wouldn’t be the first time that we learn about ourselves through machines of our own making. Let’s stay tuned!

[owretchedman]

Knowledge is mental materialism. When I was younger I accumulated knowledge the way others accumulate houses or fancy cars. In the end, who gives a damn if the earth is flat or round or a simulation? Not me.The only question is How to live and die?

[andrewmcdonald]

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information." TS Eliot (1934). Now just add a layer of where is the wisdom, knowledge and information we have lost in data, fact, factoid, and nothing but a subjective truth, a personal opinion, as absolutely equally valid as everyone else, but, without context, where is the sacred?

[alst]

I’m in agreement with your general disappointment (is that the right word?) with academic philosophy. As a 17 year old choosing what to study at uni it seemed mysterious and highly intellectual, with the chance that I would come across real ‘wisdom’. Well, I didn’t, and many years later went back to do a PhD in politics, although if I’m honest I still consider myself to be a philosopher first. I found myself thinking about the aim of philosophy recently, and my view probably aligns more closely with mainstream analytic philosophers: science is successful when theories can hook onto some real objective human-independent structure in the world (not important to decide whether those theoretical structures are “real” or not). Philosophy does not function like this, and it is a mistake to assume it must. This is because philosophy exists in a space that is epistemically ‘upstream’ of any possible experiments in the world: a single philosophical position does not produce one or several possible models that can be tested, but rather may give rise to a whole world of possible real world models. In other words it functions as a meta science, and therefore aims to produce knowledge but of a different class to scientific knowledge.
Edit: On that view then, “wisdom” is entirely left out, unless it is a special class of knowledge? What actually is wisdom? Can the view of academic philosophy above produce it? My gut says that it can’t.