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I recently (within past 6 months) heard Bill Bennett being interviewed on some other radio show, and he at one point mentioned "I was a double-major, literature and philosophy." I nearly burst out laughing. No wonder the guy's such an empty blow-hard.

Guess that must make me an empty blowhard, too, omnivore; for I was a double major in literature and philosophy. (I hope my minor in history might improve my "rep" a little in your eyes....)

Goodness, I find it amazing that you would find the humanities "dehumanizing." I'm simply speechless....

But I'm over that now: If I might make a "humanities" recommendation: Boccaccio's Decameron, a fourteenth-century collection of 100 short stories. It is a celebration of universal humanity that is by turns hilarious, ribald, scatological; serious, profound, tragic, noble. It presents man as he is, warts and all; saints and sinners, heros and villains, etc., etc. Everytime I read this work, I am struck by the thought "I KNOW these people! They are just like the people you meet everyday!" -- a testimony to the constancy and durability of human nature, down the ages.

Plus the book gives a fascinating account of the Black Plague in ~1350 A.D. Florence: the horrors, the social transformations it caused, etc. (Recommend the Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella translation. Their language is very modern and fresh -- which is most fitting; for Decameron was among the very first works of literature to be published in the vernacular: It was "the height of modernity" in its own time. The book was deplored and condemned by the religious authorities practically everywhere it went. :^) Up to quite recent times! Go figure....)

You wrote that most college-bound students have a good handle on the basic skills of reading and writing "by the end of the third grade." Simply amazing, that they could begin their college career "literate," and yet manage to graduate as illiterates -- and not just in reading and writing skills, but also in terms of knowledge of their own culture and history.

If you believe that writing doesn't require the most painstaking thinking -- well, I guess I should stop myself now, otherwise I'll surely say something I'd regret....

You wrote: "If philosophy were actually so all-fired 'fundamental' and important, philosophers would be at the leading edge of finding new knowledge...."

omnivore, philosophy is the MOTHER OF SCIENCE. As late as the 19th century, science was still called "natural philosophy." Philosophy is the historic source of mathematics (Pythagorus, Euclid), psychology (Plato's specialty), biology (Aristotle), physics (Democritus, Leucippus) -- the list can be easily extended, but I hope you get the picture.

Both Einstein and Bohr -- you know those guys who radically transformed all of physics in the twentieth century -- had a consuming interest in the philosophy of science, and Bohr was probably one of the greatest epistemologists who ever lived. Einstein was (IMHO) a frank Platonist; and his thought was strongly influenced by Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, a seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher.

You wrote:

For me, reality starts where we leave the words behind, and the weird stories and primitive beliefs that we construct with words, and deal with the physical world physically, in its own language, which is mathematical.

For me, reality starts before there are words to describe it. And that is why our articulations about it are so important -- they are the only means we have for grasping knowledge and communicating it to others.

We -- you and I -- are parts of the physical world; but neither of us is reducible to mathematics in the sense I gather you to mean.

Guess we just have different points of view, omnivore. Thank you so much for sharing your observations with me!

Of course there are philosophers and then there are philosophers. Some are engaged in trying to explain or identify truth, and these are the greats, there are the ones who even after a hundred generations we can still read with profit, because the questions are still current, even with all of the water under the bridge since then.

To read these guys, and to attack the same problems with modern eyes is to become part of a 3 thousand year old conversation that is still ongoing.

Others seem to be engaged in building their own reality, and in this I am in agreement with people who refer to it as empty wordplay (as would Socrates, who spent most of his time going after such people). Foucault is a good example of this, and a host of others like him.

When you think of philosophers, you think of the classic thinkers, and of the war of ideas that we deal with every day, and there is nothing more necessary, nothing more interesting, civilizations rise and fall on the outcome of these debates. These debates are not really fought out in college classrooms by the clueless boobs assigned to teach them, obviously, they are fought out in peoples’ souls.

To be ignorant of the big questions is to be just one more of the herd, unaware of your destination and purpose, unaware of who is directing your steps and with what motive.

You aren’t a “philosopher” because you have a PHD and tenure, you are a philosopher if you have a clue, and are engaged in the war of ideas. In other words, you, my friend, are a philosopher in the best sense of the word, I say that having read you for years now. I know you. But if your college philosophy professor was one, it was a lucky accident.

There is another class of philosophy as it relates to science. Philosophy in this context is both pre-science and post-science, in a way. Science operates at the edge of knowledge, and when our scientist stares out into the dark past the ring of campfires and asks the unasked question, he is engaging in philosophy. He may be a scientist on his day job, but at that moment he is doing philosophy. The scientist sets about doing the research that sheds light on the question, and as the data is uncovered, it is again the scientist wearing his philosopher’s cap that tries to make sense out of what he is seeing.

And then there are guys like me, looking over his shoulder, I can’t do the science but I can do opinion all day long.

I didn’t always have a high opinion of “philosophy” because I didn’t have a high opinion of most of the empty nonsense that pours out of the pens of people who are usually being lauded as great thinkers. They remind me of the kind of guy your school system hires as this year’s poet laureate, who pays for his year’s stipend with some awful and endless verse that the kids have to be forced to listen to at some school assembly, or the guy who is this year’s “resident composer” who comes up with some awful symphony that will be mercifully forgotten as soon as everyone files out of the auditorium and can get to their MP3.

The ones we love to hate are precisely the guys like Derrida and Foucault, and why leave out frauds like Chomsky, guys only a college professor could love, and will be forgotten as soon as the current crop have retired and been replaced by the next crop of walking clichés.

Real philosophy is precious when you find it. Most of its would-be practitioners are not only wrong but laughably wrong, or dangerously wrong, ranging from the too-dumb-to-know-they’re-wrong to transparently evil to conmen, and if you have the stomach for it you study them so you can defeat them before their ideas become headlines in your morning paper or whole chapters in a history book. And the few philosophers who are capable of divining truth, doing battle on its behalf, and refuting the rest, these are the guys you are looking for. These are the guys we aspire to be.

”I find it amazing that you would find the humanities ‘dehumanizing.’”

Thanks for the ping, betty. Like you, I’m amazed.

I’m amazed that anyone but a Liberal would think that most college-bound students are at an acceptable level in the basic skills of reading and writing. On this very forum have we not heard, from almost every side, that America’s reading & writing skills are in a miserable state? Is this not the case? Correct me if I’m wrong. I would be very glad to hear that I am mistaken.

I’m amazed to read that Bill Bennett is an empty blowhard. I didn’t know there was any other kind of blowhard save an empty one, but it’s shocking to learn that friend Bennett is to be found among them. But, then, again as usual, we read the accusation stripped of any attempt to make the case, as though the accusation proves the fact. Of this latter I am not at all amazed, for it is a standard Liberal schtick.

I am amazed to read that the humanities are "dehumanizing." I wasn’t aware that there was anyone of discernment left in America incapable of making the distinction between the humanities and what in most universities is quaintly identified as “the Humanities Department” (more often some bastardized title being substituted). Anyone who has followed the battles of Dr. Mike Adams with the University of North Carolina surely must understand the distinction without a need for coaching. And, of course, there are many on this forum who have no need for the example of Dr Adams either, being themselves participants in the battle.

We all know who is in charge of our universities and our public schools. It is not Conservative Christians. Yet we learn that it is the fault of Conservative Christians that our universities and schools are overflowing with Socialist/Marxist garbage. I am not merely amazed to hear this; I am astounded.

And then once again I am propelled well past mere amazement to learn that self-evident truths and the consent of the governed are but pointless words and useless philosophy.

Regarding post 185, by fundamental, I didn't mean in the sense of "first people who tried to do something." I meant as in, what's needed in a course of study.

With a science like physics, roughly speaking, you have four years to get the students from Newton to the Standard Model (1970's basic understanding of physics, which is nowadays taken as a departure point for any variant theories, hence the name). Yes, there's stuff from before Newton and after the Standard Model, but that's the bulk of it, about 300 years of work of really smart people, packed into 4 years. That's about a 75:1 compression ratio between how long it took to figure the stuff out and how long you have to learn it. So only the essential stuff gets included; anything non-essential gets at best a footnote.

How the students demonstate knowledge is by doing it: working problems with numerical answers, proving derivations mathematically, and reproducing the fundamental experiments in lab classes. Wordy explanations count for diddley.

Very early on, like first or second week of a freshman physics class, gravity will come up. Aristotle gets a mention - as how not to do science. Aristotle comes in as the guy who says heavy things fall faster than lighter things. Galileo comes in as the guy who says things fall at the same rate, aside from possible influence of air resistance. (Yes, there's dispute over whether he really tried it with wood vs metal spheres. I'm betting he did.) Then they show the film clip of the astronaut standing on the moon, dropping the hammer and feather in vacuum. They fall at the same rate. Galileo is confirmed, Aristotle is disconfirmed. That bit lasts about 90 seconds, then it's on to the next thing. As I say, there's a lot to cover in very little time.

Which is not to say Aristotle was a dope, although that's certainly the impression a lot of physics students take away. The point of the lesson is, do the experiment to settle the question, rather than just yakking about it. With yakking, you can convince yourself of anything. Experiments disabuse people of wrong ideas.

And biology is even more experimentally-focused than physics. There is very little theorizing. It's mostly wet, yukky, smelly experiments at a lab bench. Aristotle's notions of biology are irrelevant to modern biology students, they probably spend even less time on him than physics students.

The idea that arguing things out with word-discussion can "help" is part of the philosophy of lawyers, etc. In reality (the physical world) it's useless, because the physical world doesn't pay attention to our words. (When I think of words interacting with the world, I think of stories of witches casting spells by means of incantation, like on one of those shows from the old WB or UPN network or whatever it is now.) It also doesn't settle anything between people. If it did, these threads would come to some sort of agreement. They don't. They just spin endlessly.