Words

Today I had an epistemology class and I was stricken by a few things in that class. One of them being that the teacher can go on endlessly talking about tangents, something that I would agree is a lot of fun. But I think that it could be representative of a core facet of philosophy that is extremely strange.

We are currently discussing some attributes of Hume, Berkeley, and Reid. Talking, specifically, on their positions in regards to perception, most of them referencing the qualities that Locke categorizes as primary and secondary qualities.

But as I saw in the debates on skepticism, it always seems that they all have problems with the definitions of words. Hume, as far as I am concerned, was the most realistic about the whole thing. But Reid comes in and argues against both Berkeley and Hume but in regards to some words that Reid views differently. And actually, Hume does a similar thing with "abstraction" in regards to Berkeley's idealism.

But it got me wondering, most of these philosophical debates seem to be just debating terms and their meanings. That throughout history it has just been about how to define particular words and feelings.

And I currently see this as a wholly wrong position to take. Because as Hume and Moore both show in many of their writings, that you just can't show that something exists, but that is wholly irrelevant to use and practicality.

So why are philosophers still, to this day, debating about direct realism (the belief that things exist because we can sense them)?

It seems that philosophers are not satisfied with that definition, but also, on some levels they probably already have a preconcieved notion of what existence is and should be.

If you look at Berkeley's arguments, they can wholly be applied to existence without changing any perception at all of anything, in a sense this is the perfect viewpoint because it does not affect anything about reality as we know it.

But another argument is that we exist within this realm, as many common sense philosophers have shown, and that is all that matters.

But this point is also irrelevant to my real point that I want to discuss, which is the fact that all philosophical debates seem to be wholly involved in terminology. It could be the use of philosophy is to expand terminology, definitions, ideas within language. But I think that accepting language as the purest tool and the one by which we can explain and understand, is kind of egocentric.

THis is where I will potentially lose people. If we have a beautiful landscape that we see and we stand back in awe. Is it because the tree is placed in the right place? is it because the grass sways in the right way? Have you ever just thought something was beautiful for no true reason at all?

Nature is the best example of this because some could argue that the composition of a painting is about techinical beauty (to which I would ask: name any painting you know, and tell me what, on a technical level, makes it beautiful).

But nature kind of defies this because it isnt about how someone can interpret, its pure, already depicted reality.

So, imagine some beautiful scenery, and please tell me, in detail, what makes this scenery beautiful?