[aaimnr]

Profound philosophy needs to take into account messiness, but cannot be messy itself in its use of concepts, reasoning etc.

By being strict one can realise the limits of the very cognitive tools we use. Godel and Quine come to mind. The concepts are limiting, but that's all we have in philosophy.

The article mentions some exceptions, but it's a completely different playground. Rumi, Lao Tzu and Buddha were using their teachings as a practical instructions, rather than theories aiming to prove anything about the world.

For instance Rumi composed all his verses in a specific rhythms (obviously lost in translation) that, when sang and danced to, were meant to induce a specific states of mind.

Buddha explicitly said that metaphysical questions are orthogonal to the problem of suffering that he was solving (or just meaningless).

To make things even more complex, there are some similarities between teachings of the Buddha and western pragmatists.

The main problem (or the most fun part) in such discussions, is that there's no common ground to make such inter-paradigm comparisons. We always have to pick one of these viewpoints as a base and compare it to another one from that perspective.

[deerpig]

>The article mentions some exceptions, but it's a completely different playground. Rumi, Lao Tzu and Buddha were using their teachings as a practical instructions, rather than theories aiming to prove anything about the world.

Is philosophy about proof or understanding? Math and the sciences are there to look for proof. Remember that Science used to be called Natural Philosophy, which has now become a philosophical enterprise based on conjecture and empirical reproducible observation.

We need philosophers through their teachings to make sense of all that messiness and let those branches of philosophy such as the sciences gradually work out how it works in ways that can be confirmed and proven.