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>From: brian@norton.com (Brian Yoder)
Subject: MUST Philosopy be a Waste of Time?
Message-ID: <1992Feb01.030627.520@norton.com>
Organization: Symantec / Peter Norton
References: <1992Jan31.161250.12160@convex.com>
Date: Sat, 01 Feb 1992 03:06:27 GMT

cash@convex.com (Peter Cash) writes:
> In article <1992Jan30.012944.5782@norton.com> brian@norton.com (Brian Yoder) writes:
> >Given that this whole discussion relies on a premise that is false (that 
> >people can be identically duplicated by fancy machines) what importance does 
> >whole line of thinking have?  What principle are you trying to derive or 
> >express?  We might possibly learn something about dealing with situations that
> >never arise, but who cares about learning about such things?
 
> Philosophy is (among other things) the study of possibilities; it is the
> study of all things that can be conceived of, and it ignores merely
> practical difficulties as irrelevant to its aims. 

Excuse me, but why should anyone care about "possiblities" which you can't
demonstrate are possible?  You are saying here that the purpose of philosophy
is to study things that never come up in reality (chinese rooms, duplicator
machines for people, time machines, etc.).  I have to ask...why should someone
with such a definition want to bother with philosophy?  I certainly don't accept
your idea of the purpose of philosophy and therefore I see good reasons
to study it.  You on the other hand don't have any such excuse.

> Obviously, you have no
> philosophical inclinations--you are interested only in immediately useful
> knowledge, in knowledge that will fill your stomach and put a roof over
> your head. 

So can we conclude from this that you do not believe that philosophy has any
practical implications or applications?  What utter nonsense.  

>Consequently, the study of philosophy is of no benefit to you
> whatever. 

On the contrary, philosophy is of no use to YOU.  You are the one claiming 
that there is nothing to be gained from philosophy, not I.
 
> By all means then, unsubscribe to this newsgroup.

I have no intention of doing so since I don't agree that philosophy is a useless
subject.  I have a suspician that there are a few other people here who don't
see philosophy as a useless game too.

-- 
-- Brian K. Yoder (brian@norton.com) - Q: What do you get when you cross     --
-- Peter Norton Computing Group      -    Apple & IBM?                       --
-- Symantec Corporation              - A: IBM.                               --
--


