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Nayan asked:
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I just saw Dr Klempner's website:
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http://www.pathways.plus.com/glasshouse/
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Don't you think all philosophy is just a 'mind game'...constant churning of thoughts which takes you
away from reality...away from what is here in front of you right NOW.
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All philosophy is just an assumption of reality...has any philosopher ever come upon what reality/ truth
is??
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Is dissection of a flower necessary to enjoy the beauty of the flower....?
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Just wondering!
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A seeker from India.
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===========
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Given that there is a flower, why can't we both enjoy its beauty and dissect it to gain knowledge of it?
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While I agree that a lot of philosophy seems to be a mind game (possibly a fun game though if you
like that sort of thing and why not enjoy, dissect and have fun too?), it is not at all true that philosophy
assumes reality. It is quite the reverse. A large amount of argument central to the study of philosophy
questions what reality is. There is disagreement about the nature of reality and the mind's relation to
reality, as there is disagreement about truth. Here, I think that you might accuse philosophy of being a
mind game because we will never know how things really are as we cannot get beyond our own
mental capacities to any sort of pure mind-independent reality. But we can still consider, and it is
interesting to do so, the ways the mind might relate to reality — or whether it is a relation at all — and
in our considerations of what reality and what truth are, we do learn more about the nature of things
closer to home, like what a belief is, or what a proposition might be.
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In considering this, we get even closer to the less conceptually abstract nature of man, since we have
to understand how the mind works and what thought is. The interest in this comes from our
knowledge that we think and have a mind and so it seems, to those interested, that we might be able
to find an answer. At the centre, the arguments are not simply about reality or truth which might be
mind-independent, but are about ourselves. A dissection, it is true, but that we can still appreciate
mankind at a normal level of interaction.
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Rachel Browne
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