Top 5 most damaging philosophies?

[Aristoddler]

Originally Posted by ogden

Aristoddler, would you expound on this one please? I don't get it.

It's widely misunderstood.
Therefore, people who try to use it to their advantage often use it incorrectly...

[ogden]

Originally Posted by saiboimushi

This is exactly how Socrates got killed!

Socrates wasn't killed, he could have fled but he drank poison instead(so they say).

Many people assume that if you question a doctrine (especially one this sacred), then you must be an advocate of some other, usually contradictory, doctrine. It's hard for people to understand that it is really possible to question in a truly open-ended fashion, without some underlying and potentially sinister motive creeping into the picture. The reason why people have so much trouble understanding this is simple: most of the questioning that humans do IS rhetorical, IS done from a position of advocacy or doctrine.

Sorry, I didn't realize your questions were rhetorical.

So when I question our sacred beliefs, I am (for natural reasons) confounded with rebels and rabble, lowlifes and know-nothings. Yet I am full of patience and understanding, and am ready to declare, "they know not what they do."

Thanks, I guess I am the know-nothing lowlife then, sorry.

I admit, however, that by questioning sacred beliefs, I am indeed attempting to destroy them. For I am an iconoclast. But even so, you should embrace my surgical method, as false idols are "harmful" to humanity, and the sooner they are destroyed the better! If I can help society to replace belief with knowledge, then am I not its greatest beneficiary? I don't want you to exchange one belief for another--e.g., to stop believing that the holocaust was evil and start believing that it was good. Rather, I want you to come to the knowledge that it was evil! That way you will be better equipped to resist the poisonous charms of eugenic fascism--

You have saved me from those poisonous charms, thanks?

you will be armed with genuine understanding, which is more powerful than true belief, for true belief can easily be perverted into false belief, whereas understanding wavers not.

Now you have armed me with understanding protecting me from "false beliefs" thanks again (I'm being sarcastic).

But my original point was that the very notion of "deleterious" is vague to me, and so I am unable to say with certainty which philosophies have been the most harmful. This makes me a moral agnostic--a very dangerous thing to be, as this thread clearly demonstrates.

This point is well taken and I agree that it requires a bit of presumption to think that any of us can really decide what is most harmful.

I'm sorry Saiboimushi, I guess I'm really not too smart and I often just missunderstand what you say.

[saiboimushi]

Thou art forgiven! But will you forgive me?

[ogden]

Originally Posted by saiboimushi

Thou art forgiven! But will you forgive me?

YEA! All is well .

[saiboimushi]

Thank you. It's been a hard day. I got really sick this morning but went to work anyway. At least I get to go home in a few minutes. Take care

Oh, and keep philosophizing! We're all going dark in a few infinitesimal quanta of Infinite time. If I could spend eternity studying mathematics, I'd devote a google years to it--not a minute more and not a second less.

[Didymos Thomas]

Unless we use some catch phrase which carries negative connotations (like racist), there is no such thing as a dangerous philosophy.

The only danger in philosophy is extremism. And no philosophy is inherently extreme, unless you compare it to your philosophy.

[ogden]

Originally Posted by Didymos Thomas

Unless we use some catch phrase which carries negative connotations (like racist), there is no such thing as a dangerous philosophy.

The only danger in philosophy is extremism. And no philosophy is inherently extreme, unless you compare it to your philosophy.

I agree that extremism is a danger, but I feel that philosophy has the potential to be widely accepted and damaging simultaniously. Obviously philosophy in itself is not damaging but the affect of them are. I'm thinking of the Aztec philosophy that required human sacrifice as one example. It may seem extreme to us now but I doubt that it seemed extreme to them at the time.

Do you agree?

[NeitherExtreme]

Talking about extreme philosophies makes me wonder about apathetic phillosophies. While it might be hard to claim that apathetic philosophies and attitudes are driectly responsible for anything bad (or good for that matter), it seems that apathy has been a breeding ground for some more obviously damaging philosophies.

[ogden]

Originally Posted by NeitherExtreme

Talking about extreme philosophies makes me wonder about apathetic phillosophies. While it might be hard to claim that apathetic philosophies and attitudes are driectly responsible for anything bad (or good for that matter), it seems that apathy has been a breeding ground for the more obviously damaging philosophies.

I think that any philosophy that pramotes apethy is directly damaging in that it shunts the posibilities that could have been realized. As an example think of the idea that fate is at work and there is really nothing you can do to change what has been predetermined; this idea hinders the idea that real change can be effected.

[Aedes]

I don't think the harm that has befallen people has happened because of philosophies. The victims of Naziism and Stalinism were not victimized by a philosophy -- they were victimized by an orgy of murderous hatred in the absence of any sense of shared humanity, by need for slave labor on an immense scale, and by humans who en masse somehow became psychologically blinded to the perversity they were committing.

It's amazing how varied and even counterposed philosophies (like Naziism and Stalinism) can lead to the same thing in the end -- mass killing, war, dictatorship, and concentration camps / gulags. The underlying philosophy is nothing but the veneer of rationalization.

This point of view of mine encapsulates my larger idea that philosophy doesn't really ever change history -- it merely reflects it. Arts and music and science and many cultural phenomena are reflections of larger movements in history and culture. And philosophy is yet another manifestation of its own era. Hume and Berkeley and Locke did not create the Enlightenment -- the Enlightenment created them. Plato and Aristotle did not create the rich intellectual environment of Athens -- that environment created them. And the philosophies we call "damaging" are products of their era and context as well.