Well,I was thinking along the line, that philosophical  thinking is really nothing more than common sense, its critical thinking.   PS- "in what manner" is not a point of view,it's a question.

Can't it be both ways?

Some philosophy is the foundation for rational thought. (This is quite obvious, as rationality's second-greatest tool -- the epistemology of science -- is philosophy.) On the other hand, much philosophy is based on the ability of logic to express ideas that are not consistent with reality. While that too can be helpful, it often detracts from rational thought.

On an off-topic side note: love the new avatar. It's like the evil love-child of Linux and BSD.

If we understand 'artificial' in accord with its acceptation, then all disciplines are artificial. But if you mean (as you suggested) that philosophical thinking is common sense, I disagree. The following quote from Bertrand Russell (a philosopher with whom I frequently disagree) sums up the often antithetical nature of the results of philosophic study and the conclusions of common sense nicely:

"The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find...that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect."

"Bertrand Russell is definitely one of my favorite philosophers, along with David Hume and Daniel Dennett."

Hume is, IMHO, to be ranked with Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Aquinas as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. There's no philosopher I disagree with more, but, in part because of that very fact, none that challenges me more. So I'm with you here -- Hume's certainly one of my favorites.

Russell is interesting to be sure, but difficult to get a handle on, primarily because there are so many Russells! We usually distinguish, with some difficulty, but in a way that makes a bit of sense, the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus from the later Wittgenstein of the Investigations, but this sort of neat classification would be impossible to do with Russell: we'd need a giant, messy flow chart for that job! All in all, though, he was a wonderfully eclectic philosopher and an undeniably brilliant writer whose popular works have served, and will continue to serve, as excellent introductions to the study of philosophy.

"I just think that the separate 'discipline' of Philosophy in a semi-formal sense has lost much relevance and usefulness these days."

Which perhaps explains Dennett's appeal to you! I enjoy reading Dennett, and I can't deny that the man is simply brilliant -- scary smart, as it were -- but he's not a rigorous enough philosopher for me. His arguments tend to meander, as he moves from questions to stories to interesting scientific data to well thought out criticisms of opposing positions to -- well, one is often left wondering just where it all was supposed to lead to. But, then, this is just symptomatic of his quasi-scientific/philosophical approach to quasi-philosophical/scientific questions.

Now, I do think that contemporary philosophy is both relevant and useful. However, the field is so specialized that it's damn near impossible to keep track of the work that's being done outside your AOS or AOC, that I can understand why it seems irrelevant. But, as is usually the case, the more important insights will begin (indeed, have begun) to trickle down and infect the thought of the rest of us (cf. the contributions of 20th century analytic philosophy to a deep understanding of the distinctions that obtain among the fundamental methodological conceptions of a priori truth, logical consequence, logical truth, and necessary truth), whether we're aware of the source of those insights and the jargon professionals use to express them or not.

Ironic, I suppose, that your post is highly philosophical.

There are philosophies that reject rational thinking. It is a philosophical statement to say that one should think rationally.

This is, nevertheless, philosophy. Also it is fundamental, rather than consequential, to the scientific enterprise. That's why I think philosophy even precedes science .

This justification for science is not scientific, but rather philosophical, namely pragmatism.

That's beside the point.This is like saying the car runs because it has a motor.

Even this is getting into "pure" philosophy, in that it is beginning to look at the metaphysical and epistemic implications of scienctific discovery. This does not seem very scientific though, unless of course you want to expand your philosophy of science to more than inductive modes of discovery. Any way you go, I think you end up doing philosophy...

"I do not consider aquinas a philosopher; he was a theologian"

Those categories are not mutually exclusive. Aquinas was both a philosopher and a theologian. Indeed, that he was a philosopher of the highest calibre is demonstrated by the fact that he not only adopted much of Aristotle's work, *but substantially improved upon it in a number of ways*.

I'm curious, though: Why was Aquinas not a philosopher in your eyes?

Is it because he, say, believed in God first, and worked out his philosophy second? This is a common charge, but it fails for rather obvious reasons: it confuses what motivates an argument with the content of the argument itself. What does and doesn't count as philosophy is a complicated subject, but it manifestly cannot be decided with an appeal to a philosopher's motivations or pre-philosophical commitments. A properly philosophical argument is, well, a philosophical argument, regardless of the psychology of the person who constructs it.

Is it because he argued for the existence of a God? Well, then nearly every philosopher in the Western tradition must be 'demoted' to 'theologian.'

Is it because much of his work is in fact plainly theological? Well, Newton wrote more about theology than he did about science; does it follow that Newton was not a scientist, but a theologian?

These are the three main reasons I've seen presented by people who deny that Aquinas was a philosopher. Are there any others? (Incidentally, I can't think of an actual philosopher who would make that claim: indeed, Aquinas is almost universally recognized among philosophers, even those who profoundly disagree with him, for his philosophical rigour and philosophical genius.)

I see philosophy as more of an umbrella term for scientific thought. We wouldn't be able to do science without underling epistemological ideas. I suppose I just define philosophy differently than most people. I see philosophy as how we discover things and science as those actual discoveries. Its more a semantic distinction.

This statement is a dangerous stick when wielded by a theist. Religions and philosophies are not the same things and the variance is most important in the way they address the subjects they consider. Religious myths are older than modern scientific enquiry and you don't have to scuffle too far through the dogma of most faiths to find them welded to mysticism and improbable revelations and events that cannot be verified using logical scientific method. Philosophy is a key vehicle, I grant you, but when used to prop up beliefs based on 'truths' that are set free of scientific enquiry - what then?

My personal experiences of religion verify an observation I read somewhere that (despite the relative youth of the current big 3 faiths) religious thought is pre-rational thought. I am also disposed to think that there are knowable fundamentals that operate in the universe regardless of human philosophizing and rather than considering that these fundamentals make the world 'finite and obvious' I think of them as the greatest truths of all.

Of course EJ, I know I'm debating a point you were not making so please consider this a private wanking session with no observation required...

 --osophers along with David Hume ans Daniel Dennett.Yeah ! They're great thinkers,but what about  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein -- in my opinion ,one of the most important Philosophers . 

You are conflating the narrow 'discipline' sense and very broad and fuzzy use of the term.

I apologise, you are right, bullcrap is of some use - metaphysics is  worse that useless, as it continue to keep alive modes of thought which are way past there use-by date.

I would contend that most of what is traditionally categorized as 'Philosophy' is masquerading as knowledge and understanding, whereas all it is doing is inventing clever-sounding labels for ill-defined concepts, or ideas precisely defined in terms of poorly justified assumptions, reworked in 'clever' but ultimately pointless ways.

What in metaphysics do you find useful in understanding the world (in the broadest sense)?

OK so you are not conflating, if you only think of Philosophy in broad, ill-defined sense, I was 'conflating' your comments with some of the other posts here. The thing is, in this broad version, it has been diffused to a much weaker and less significant category of thought, AFAICS. It becomes little more than a label for certain kinds of thinking, which in themselves are fundamentally important, but just identifying them as 'philosophy' contributes little to the discourse those thoughts are part of.

I read up a some more on the origins of metaphysics and what it is aimed at studying, and it confirmed my general impression that, of that list, what is not addressed in a far more comprehensive and rigorous manner by Science, is not useful in any real sense to understanding. 

Metaphysics is an 'unnecessary', obsolete discipline, as with much of Greek thought from which it originated. I still acknowledge that the golden age of Greek Philosophy was an very important stage in the progress of human understanding, but we have moved on...

People who have spent way to much time in Philosophy and Metaphysics as compared to Science seem to have a very limited appreciation of just how Science has subsumed much of these earlier disciplines. The fact that it originated from them does not give them any claim to ontological precedence, any more than Alchemy has any remaining status with respect to Chemistry which it gave rise to. 

Philosophy in the broad sense encompasses Science only in the sense that it just refers to a certain category of discourse - it refers to things which Science depends on in the same sense that the grammar and syntax of language does.

I read books on Philosophy earlier in my life, but have been following the progress of Science and those associated discussions and speculations on the fringes of science, which are arguably 'philosophy', for a long time now.

As I see it, as we gain footholds of real, ie evidence-based, understanding of things like the origin and probable fate of the Universe, and life and mind, the areas of knowledge which are left for the older approaches, such as metaphysics, to at least seem to be addressing usefully, have retreated to the periphery of serious discourse.

I'm not a fan of metaphysics,but as Albert Einstein said "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.It is the source of all true art and science.He to whom this emotion is a stranger,who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe,is as good as dead.his eyes are closed. You and Bob Spence 1 had a very good argument over this topic - Philosophy 

Science is not Epistemology, or a sub-category of it. Epistemology is the study of what justifies classifying a belief as 'knowledge', and thus is interested in the core empirical/inductive process of scientific investigation, but Science in no way depends on Epistemology for its working. It is irrelevant to scientists, or should be, that some people agonize over such issues.

Again, Science is not Epistemology.

I certainly agree with this, and this is a real problem for metaphysics, far more than for Science, which makes the minimum initial assumptions, mainly that evidence and induction are the key paths to useful understanding and insight about what we perceive as external reality.

Curious as to what other things some would add.

I seriously disagree with the ideas of Tipler in this area, as you may not be surprised to know.

It may well 'invigorate' metaphysics. I don't give a flying f**k about metaphysics. I do deplore effort wasted on totally pointless speculation, which is how I see such 'disciplines'.

Empirical induction is an epistemic mode of justification, among others, and why I think it is a subset of a larger epistemology. What about science would make it its own category?

Tipler, for example, included religious ideas in some of his books such as immortality and the trinity seemingly calling it science when it is not.

Obviously, but not everyone shares your views on the subject. You seem to think so on pragmatic grounds, which is fine, but itself is not scientific and also seems to be a rather weak mode of justifying anything.

One can assign categories in various different ways, just as there are  many different approaches to trying to gain insight and understanding. There is no one 'correct' way, some may 'work' better than others in different contexts, and for people of different mind sets.

Science has its own set of assumptions and methods, which will inevitably overlap to some degree with other 'disciplines'. Some no doubt originated in other and earlier disciplines, and those disciplines will in turn 'borrow back' some of the refinements of science, to 'invigorate' them...

The reality of this back and forth is far too complex to support some tidy classification and categorization.

I think you are spending way too much time trying to identify the hierarchy of disciplines and which is dependent or part of another. I really think that is all irrelevant to the practice of the disciplines themselves, whatever value it may have in tracing the 'History of Thought'.

Empirical induction simply does not need theoretical justification to be applied very usefully, that is way over-thinking the whole thing, and ultimately futile, just as it ultimately impossible to logically justify the validity of logic itself.

Precisely, which is why I disagree with him, and agree that his ideas should not be considered part of Science, and you seem to agree, so why bring it up?

The fact that "not everyone shares [my] views" is a very weak argument against them.

As I said you are welcome to your ideas, I just want to let you know I think they have no special validity in categorizing the different streams of human reasoning and speculation.

My view of Metaphysics is based on what I see as its ultimate sterility in generating real insights, it being mired in out-moded models of thought and reality, which is all the justification I need to ignore it.

Science is pragmatic... 

You find your way of thinking about these things 'works' for you, fine.

I obviously prefer my approach, which has developed after a lot of time spent reading about and thinking on the nature of 'Life, the Universe, and Everything', initiaily including a significant amount of Philosophy, but more and more on Science.

It relates to concepts and the history of science that's all,no great woof.

As I said, if you find it Metaphysics interesting, fine. I don't.

Science is the study of reality, Metaphysics is the study of ideas about reality, how we think about things. It will have some overlap there with cognitive science and psychology.

Science is not Epistemology. It has an overlap with Epistemology when evaluating different forms of checking and verifying results and theories.

These classifications of 'disciplines' give a false impression of clear distinctions which simply do not exist. Some central ideas will clearly be distinct, but they often overlap in many ways.

Whenever you label some incidental comment as 'philosophical', that simply demonstrates that Philosophy, at least in that sense, is ultimately a truly 'Trivial Pursuit'. It is conveying no useful or interesting information, at least to me. Insofar as it is true, it is describing the bleeding obvious.

It is not the usefulness of Science that stops me delving into areas like Metaphysics, it is the relative uselessness of those other areas which I now perceive whenever I look into them. That is a very good reason, at least to me, and that is the only basis I can honestly use. This is not to say I ignore the idea that my judgement may be faulty, just that in assessing this I value insights from cognitive science and psychology, based on actual empirical investigation of the way the mind/brain works, vastly more than Metaphysics.

Douglas Hofstadter is very interesting in this area. If you haven't already read 'Gödel, Escher, Bach', you really should. He frequently employs arguments and examples based on computer programming. I was drawn into serious playing with Common Lisp by some of his discussions. I have also read 'The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul', co-edited with Daniel Dennett. They are great examples of the sort of discourse which has deeply fascinated me for a long time. They may well have some overlap with aspects of interest to 'modern' Metaphysics, but I much prefer approaching these ideas from their direction than from the PoV of Metaphysics.

From The New Oxford American Dictionary:

"Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion".

Science is NOT epistemology, it is about gaining knowledge about the empirical 'world'.

There is some study of the validity of its own methods, but this is more properly categorized as the Philosophy of Science, which could be described as Epistemology.

As I think about it now, I would say all of it. As I said above, what you are thinking of is properly part of the Philosophy of Science.

That is not a pragmatic justification of Philosophy as a valid current discipline. I have many times acknowledged that Science, Logic. Math, etc. historically derived from Philosophy.

That argument could be used to justify Alchemy.

That ships analogy would appear to be true, unfortunately. I would describe Metaphysics as an outmoded series of speculations on the nature of reality.

If it empirically tested its ideas, it would be Science, if it doesn't, it can only be speculation, with no way of justifying any of its ideas as reaching the level of 'knowledge'.

I think it falls between two stools, with neither the empirical and results-based justification that Science can claim, nor the rigorous, deductive elaboration of the implications of elementary axioms, which map easily to fundamental real-world states, which Logic and Mathematics provide.

I have already strongly hinted I find your obsession with categorization as a distraction from seeking 'real' knowledge and insight. There is much discussion on the fringes of Science and the Philosophy of Science which I think covers most of what traditional Metaphysics addresses. You could conceivably classify that as contemporary Metaphysics, but it is mostly a different and updated approach, so I think it should not be tarred with that brush, even if it shares some concepts.

Hofstadter is not primarily into AI, that is an assumption on your part, altho I think he touches on it, especially in 'The Mind's Eye'. However in 'Gödel, Escher, Bach', he is addressing much wider topics.

From the Wikepedia article on this book:

Yeah - you've got me. I always thought metaphysics was a kind of fast and loose way of trying to link multiple scientific disciplines that was driven by the facts but was called on to bend them in order to get to all the ends into the middle. Does that makes metaphysics really real or is it expedient, or should I get my dictionary out? 

Dictionary definitions don't really do it for me when it comes to defining epistemology and metaphysics, but a primer is helpful. I had a negative view of it until I actually picked up some literature about it and started reading. The primer I read on metaphysics and found to be helpful is the one I mentioned to Bob by E.J. Lowe, but it's long. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives digest versions of epistemology and metaphysics.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/

I'm sure you are not trying to blur, but in practice that is what you are doing, when you stretch and bend the definitions of both Science and Metaphysics because you don't accept the dictionary definitions.

I don't believe Science can replace everything either, but it certainly addresses far more than it used to, and far more than what most people think, who don't follow scientific developments as closely as I do.

But if you are after as solid a base of real world knowledge as possible, Science is it. Philosophical or Metaphysical discourse which is not aware of what science may or may not have revealed that is relevant to their area of study and discourse is almost guarranteed to be talking nonsense.

The problem I see is that the attempt to establish any certainty about the certainty of 'knowledge' is ultimately futile, and hardly merits a whole discipline. There is some merit in thinking about how best to think about things, and coming up with various strategies and suggestions as to how one might form a world-view. That seems to be the strongest contribution of some Eastern Philosophies, especially Buddhism at its best. IOW, the one area than can be most appropriately addressed by internal intuition and contemplation is thought itself, and the internal perspective on the mind.

Such introspection is not particularly reliable about the broader nature of mind and the source of consciousness, but at least it can address those feelings, emotions, urges, desires and their management that we can access 'from the inside'.

It also is very appropriate to address the personal perspective on morals and ethics.

I am certainly aware that many such statements could be identified as within the domain of Metaphysics, but many of those same statements could also be claimed by science as well.

If you just want use the term Metaphysical as a description of certain kinds of statement, then fine. I personally don't like it as it carries so much medieval (and earlier ) baggage.

You need more than this to justify it as a serious 'discipline', leading to significant insights.

I could equally say that I am doing Physics every time I carefully measure something, as part of building or modifying some structure. It is true in an informal sense, but not in the sense of Physics as an organised domain of study.

I do continue to wonder just what you are 'looking for'...

No domain of study, whether part of 'Science' or of any Religion, Philosophy, mystical world-view or whatever, can determine what constitutes the 'real world'. They could all be true, or equally relatively true, or valid, from the appropriate point of view. Our very definitely finite brains/minds can only perceive a subset of ultimate reality.

I would see that that whatever claims other world-views may have to being a valid world-view, let alone the valid interpretation of "reality",  "Science" has by far the best track-record in revealing the deeper levels of the version of reality that appears to impinge most directly on most people, simply because it tries to filter out the errors that we are most prone to. 

Because of the epistemic nature of science, it informs one about "reality", but in and of itself does not assume any particular metaphysical account about the world it is observing. One needs only permute science with something else to have everything science has to offer then some.

I've always liked to think of philosophy as an eggregious form of mental masturbation. Fun to do, but only fun to watch when you're into that kind of thing.