Aristartled!

Aristotle, Descartes, Immanuel Kant. What do the three of these men have in common? Well, aside from being famous philosophers, they all confuse the crap out of me! As a religion major at Trevecca Nazarene University, I'm required to take TWO semesters of philosophy. Of all the subjects I've studied in my liberal arts education, philosophy is easily the worst of them all. Let's face it, Philosophy is among the most pointless pursuits in all of academia. It has no end, no aim. It's simply a study of the garbled nonsensical thoughts of centuries old dead men. Most philosophical ideas can now be completely disproved by modern scientific thought or are replaced in peoples' lives by religion. It has no place, no relevance in today's world.

Here's how the study of philosophy works. You start with Socrates and learn about his ideas and methods, then you move on to Plato who is slightly more coherent than Socrates but whose actual ideas make even less sense. He says something about Forms and weird metaphysical realities and blah, blah, blah. Then we move on to Aristotle who puts them all to shame in terms of strange ideas about the nature of reality and knowledge. You continue this pattern all the way up through the modern philosophers. You study one dead guy and his ideas then move on to the next dead guy and discuss why he thought the previous guy was all wrong and why in fact, it is he who is right. Then another dead guy comes along claiming he knows the real truth and explaining why the other guy who found out the answers to everything before him was actually wrong about everything and it is in fact he, the new greatest philosopher who actually knows the answers to everything. Confused yet? Me too.

So what do these philosophers actually philosophize about? I'm glad you asked. The job of the philosopher is to sit and speculate about the nature of unknowable things. Every philosopher has a new idea about the nature of God, the nature of good and evil, the nature of reality (physical and/or metaphysical), the nature of the universe, the nature of knowledge, and of truth itself. It's safe to say that there really are no answers to these concepts. Neither modern science nor any religion can really offer us a solid explanation of any of the above. Yet, this is what philosophy seeks to do. In the words of the Teacher in Ecclesiastes, "All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind." Philosophy is just like that. No matter how hard you try to grasp it, you will just end up with a fist full of nothing.

Let me leave you with an example of how a philosopher tries to discover the nature of a thing. He stands up and points at the chair on which he had previously been sitting, He asks the class, "What is this? Is it a chair? How do you know it's a chair. What about it makes it a chair? Is it a chair because I can sit on it? I can sit on my desk. Does that make my desk a chair? If I stand on the chair is it still a chair? Maybe what the chair is made of makes it a chair? Do the wood, fabric, and metal define its nature?" What if I took it apart and put the pieces in a pile on the floor? Is it still a chair? There must be some universal idea of what gives a chair it's "chairness." But what if the chair doesn't really exist at all? Maybe it is only a perception. But I can see, feel, and sense the chair so it must be real. Unless the physical reality of the senses isn't REAL reality! AGGGGHHH!!!

This is philosophy in a nutshell. No matter how you spin it, Aristotle and his buddies leave me simply Aristartled!

Thanks for reading,

Disgruntled Philosophy Student

P.S.

Obviously this post was written tongue in cheek. However,  I'm sure some have differing opinions. Please feel free to comment about your own thoughts on philosophy!