Chess will never be solved, here's why

Well, not me because I'm unknown so I can't be important. How about Richard Rorty? First one that springs to mind.

Charles Sanders Peirce. Both of these are Americans and I'm a Brit, which shows I'm not biassed. Well, not very.

Hegel was important but not amazing. Same with Kant. Both German. I don't think the British really do philosophy because they like practical things like engines too much. The French can't do it .... see Descartes and Derrida. India and China wasn't bad. The Greeks were awful at it. They always killed themselves when someone disagreed with them. You're supposed to argue well, instead.

I bought Simulacra and Simulation, by Jean Baudrillard on Amazon a few years ago. Ever since then, they've been selling me on stranger and stranger postmodern philosophy. Some of it has possibly moved the needle on how I actually think about things, but you know how inertia is. Always acquiring knowledge, but never coming to the knowledge of the truth.

Even when I read something radical, I'm like, "okay, so I guess that's true. Something is fundamentally wrong here." But then the amount of things you can do with that radicalized perspective shrinks as long as you don't keep building it back up by reading more propaganda. Kind of like the climate activists. "The planet is up in flames! What, no one's listening? Okay, I'm going to watch Netflix."

Unless I'm a post-modernist myself, I never studied it too much but if I'm right, modernist thought tended to be physicalist and was at its height in the very early 20th century. I studied phisosophy in the early 90s when I was just turned 40. At that time, philosophy was in a different place and since then, alternative concepts have arisen but I'm not sure of their value.

I consider myself a dualist but in a different sense from Descartes etc. That was all about "mind-body dualism" and "the mind-body problem", as if we shouldn't be able to think or function as we do because the good and the great can't work out how the mind and body interact. I suppose I could describe my position as that of logical dualism. I just came up with that now. Don't know if it already exists. You see, based on the idea that we apply our minds to the study of our situation in the universe, in reality, in relation to other people with minds etc etc, we form hypotheses, which Hegel might call "a thesis", which is really just a premise. The antidote to it is the antithesis and for Hegel, the synthesis of the two was the Authoritarian Nation State whilst for Marx, the synthesis was government of the people by the people.

So you see how quickly the attempted philosophising, in both cases, gave way to politics? No depth at all ... simply two opposed political ideologies which still exist in some form today.

The real and more worthwhile idea is to apply the mind to those differences and to find a real synthesis, if you like, of opposing virtues, by means of successive, logically related, correlated dualistic thought, which may lead to different peoples finding common ground with each other.

On the mind body problem, we can state that the mind does affect the material and that the mind does not affect the material and use that kind of thinking, which is rejected by modernist, mathematically based enforcement of a mutual exclusion of mutually negating ideas.

I'm not totally sure if I expressed that right or clearly but I was only intending to give a flavour of the kind of thing I'm interested in.

I looked up logical dualism and it seems that AI has grabbed it as an alternative name for mind-body dualism. This is an example of how bad AI can be for thinking. It immediately grabbed the idea and pretended it means something else, because what I'm saying means nothing to it. But it was the same 15 or 20 years ago when I did a similar thing and there was no AI then. It seems that Western thought doesn't encompass and can't accept what I'm suggesting, which might have flourished in early tauist thought, 3000 years ago in China, but which was swept away by Confucianism.

what?

There's a long list.
Who's 'important' depends on who is to decide.
Including the reader - student - whoever.
There's also What is important.
Who What Where When Why How.
Is Kant important?
Just one look at the opening of his work - suggests immediate arbitrary authoritarianism.
Wittgenstein? SImiliar - 'we should not speak of it'. Its ridiculous.
However - to know a lot about the contributions of those two would involve a lot of study.
And they didn't become famous for nothing.
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Bertrand Russell. Brilliant. Logical. Useful. The 'Capablanca' of philosophers?
John Stuart Mill. I like him. In the sense I like something that is supposedly connected with him.
'Evil triumphs when good men do nothing'.
The What of that is more important than the Who of who said it.
Descartes: 'I think therefore I am.' Descartes another brilliant man.
Even if he 'stole' from Pascal.
Lawrence J. Peters not a philosopher?
Does it matter? - No. His 'Everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence' (may not be the exact quote) can obviously be applied to philosophy and to everyday life.
Pareto and Nash were mathematicians but some of their important work could be applied to philosophy.
Except that whoever might want to 'serve' the dictionary and the word 'philosophy'.
Language evolves to serve us - not the other way around.
Although many might want it to be the other way.
----------------------
Can various other fields be applied to philosophy? Sure.
Like economics and mathematics and history to name some.
Would 'philosophers' want to think of themselves as very special?
Sure they would. Probably not all. But conceit and arrogance probably abound in that field.
In a way - everyone is a philosopher no matter how much they might try to deny it.
Exceptions? People in a coma.
Philosophy is always there in at least one form however insidious.

When I did my degree, we were told that "you can't get past Kant ... he crops up everywhere in philosophy and even if you disagree with him, he has to be taken into account". There are some philosophers who seem to have contributed to the general air of authoritarianism and arbitrary pronouncements which contributed greatly to the general feeling which caused the First World War, which led to the Second one.

I didn't like Kant, basically because he makes things up to support his pronouncements. The things that he takes for granted are plucked from an invisible tree .... the Tree of Unnecessary Invention.

I also agree with you about Wittgenstein. He was from a wealthy familiy and was a schoolmaster by choice ... a very authoritarian one. These days he would have been imprisoned for beating his pupils, as he did.

Yet there are some who think that Wittgenstein is "the greatest philosopher ever" even though he entirely negated his own output, part way through his career. He is almost famous for creating a bad tempered, public argument with perhaps the greatest philosopher of science of the early 20th century.

Regarding Peters, "promotion to incompetence" was definitely not Peter's idea at all. It's an old idea and one example of previous use is relevant to another thread here. It was used regarding Rommel by German generals who believed Rommel to be incompetent but just lucky. They said that he shouldn't have been in charge of anything more than a Battalion and yet at his pinnacle, he was nominally in charge of an entire Army Group, although he was actually prevented from exerting his authority.

You just did some philosophy. Give yourself a good talking to!

In France they like Montaigne. Michel Onfray a French philosopher --lots of books-- says that everything was already in Montaigne. Guess he meant everything that was later discussed from Berkeley to Kant "à l'époque des Lumières?" Just bought Sarah Bakewell's 2013 A life of Montaigne. Reddit says Montaigne is difficult to read.... like Shakespeare; it's actually quite old fashioned writing ✍

"toutes les grandes questions de l'existence.

Comment affronter la peur de la mort? Survivre à la fin de l'amour? Tirer parti de chaque instant? Garder son humanité? Surmonter ses échecs? Vivre avec les autres? Etre ordinaire et imparfait? En deux mots: comment vivre?

Google translate:

all the big questions of existence.

How to face the fear of death? Survive the end of love? Making the most of every moment? Keep your humanity? Overcoming your failures? Living with others? To be ordinary and imperfect? In two words: how to live?

Maybe neuroscience is the problem, since it gives people irrational anxieties about the operation of philosophy on the brain.

Good point 👉 anxiety 👈 is normal with the mind - body problems

I agree we should always be on our guard, though, lest anyone should spoil us through vain philosophy.

In Bakewell's book it's said that the French philosopher had an original take on " temperance" Will read that later. But let's see AI Overview:
 
In his essays, Michel de Montaigne wrote about temperance in a few ways, including:

Moderation
In his essay "Of Drunkenness", Montaigne wrote that it's enough to moderate one's inclinations, and that it's not possible to completely suppress them.

Avoiding excess
Montaigne suggested that people should focus on the pleasures in their own lives, and avoid excess. He also warned against getting involved in agendas that could threaten their independence.

Reordering virtues and vices
Montaigne re-ordered the traditional Christian list of virtues and vices, ranking cruelty as the worst vice and truth as the most fundamental virtue.
Self-mastery
Montaigne wrote that passions are easier to evade than to moderate, and that they are more easily eradicated than governed.

For fun.

What would you know about people's real lives? You think people never ask the question "Why is this happening to me?" when they have "moderate problems", as you call them? That's a philosophical question.

What?

Some of the most banned books in the 2023-2024 school year include:
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
Looking for Alaska by John Green
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky