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Friday Fun Thread for August 4, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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because that's ostensibly the whole point of the enterprise.

Well... not really?

Philosophy started as a comprehensive rational inquiry into the nature of reality. It was math, science, and metaphysics all wrapped up into one. Knowing how to live a good life might be part of that inquiry, insofar as it's a prominent feature of our reality that we observe people making good decisions and poor decisions, and we want to know what the difference between them is - but it's only one component.

The surviving texts we have from the pre-Socratics are heavy on theoretical speculation about metaphysics, logic, and mathematics, but they contain relatively little in the way of practical life advice. When Plato considered ethical questions, it was typically done as a pretext to introduce broader theoretical issues (e.g. the moral dilemma in the Euthyphro turns into an inquiry into the metaphysical status of moral facts as such). Certainly by the time we get to Descartes, we have a model of a theoretical philosopher who focuses solely on metaphysics and epistemology and pays no attention to ethics at all. So the situation you bemoan has been commonplace for at least 400 years now.

That being said, there are philosophers who make "living life" their main focus, and you'll mainly find them in the continental tradition: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Lacan, etc.