yeah, I don't know what's going on here either. I didn't bring up the book or try to pass it as "philosophy" (well, I suppose I was, but really I was just baiting Hype. )Hype wrote:Now EF, you should know, cut and paste'll get you a C+/B- in first and second year university philosophy classes these days.
But seriously... what is going on on this page of this thread? To put what EF said a bit more nicely: the discipline of philosophy is essentially diametrically opposed to the sort of thing said in so-called 'self-help [philosophy]' books, despite their being placed on the same shelves as actual philosophy at bookstores.
That isn't to say that philosophy, the academic discipline, can't or doesn't offer a kind of 'self-help' if you want to put it that way. Since Spinoza's been brought up... there is what you could call a 'psychotherapeutic' aspect to Spinoza's ethical work. Some scholars have argued that he presages Freud in this respect and when Freud was asked about a connection to Spinoza his response was something along the lines of: "well, I didn't use any Spinoza directly in the development of psychoanalysis, but Spinoza was always "in the air" so-to-speak, of the intellectual atmosphere at the time". What led people to ask Freud this is that Spinoza was among the first to offer a systematic catalogue of human emotions, and the first to come right out and say that he would treat human emotions exactly the way we treat any other area of science. Hobbes and Descartes before him had offered long lists of emotions (in Leviathan and Passions of the Soul, respectively), but it was Spinoza who explicitly tells us that emotions are not to be mocked or scorned or hated but understood, and what's more, because the universe is absolutely determined (everything that happens, happens necessarily), we can't demand that people simply change or otherwise choose to have different emotions than the ones they do have in whatever situations they find themselves in, so if we want to have a realistic ethics and politics, we should probably figure out how to deal with this in a scientific, systematic, causally efficacious way, pace Christianity, for example.
I'm not sure what else to say.
I like what you wrote about the connection between a psychotherapudic, or cognitive, benefit to the philosophical work on ethics and emotions.
But surely if the common folk out there can benefit from a basic "dumbed down" exploration of the general nature of reality and existence, that ain't a bad thing.