If 'a philosophy' needs a 'reasonable point of reference' it does sound important. Physical theories may have no reference points for a time, but only abstract and non-testable criteria for some time, that might be removed later. Cosmological theories may be set in a hundred of extra dimensions and be just conjecture in the mind of brilliant mathematicians and physicists, while philosophical work needs a reasonable rather than an extravagant or silly point of reference. Such a point of reference must be at least equal in quality to U.S. Government budget planning that reasonably sees a reversal of deficit spending economics after the total is 21 trillion dollars. That can be our example for a reasonable point of reference. Another example is the deployment of 30, 000 more troops to prop up a puppet government that will have broad support in 18 months when the troops are withdrawn (that sounds like a banking procedure-deposit with loans then withdraw). In 18 months the puppet government of Afghanistan will have large taxation authority able to gather all of the people of Afghanistan together to tax them enough to pay for the government and a large military able to defeat the Taliban insurgency that will arise when U.S. troops withdraw. Now that sounds reasonable.
Philosophical work, unlike physical cosmology requires a higher standard that we can take from the U.S. Government economic and environmental planners. Philosophers need at least one reasonable point of reference to start with. Personally I like Oprah for that, and then just go on to symbolic logic or whatever. W.V.O. Quine in 'Methods of Logic' just took apart the construction of logic making it easy to construct language, of course he didn't have an Oprah endorsement as a reasonable point of reference. Who will the reference be for a definition of reasonable here anyway.
Romanticism cannot be the alternative obviously. Corporatism is an effort to collectivize a society over which they might rule for point of profit. Individualism and individual legal rights are eschewed by corporatists as troublesome remnants of democratic tendencies. It is better to bundle everyone as a collective class without rights as individuals and then decree what each class is entitled to-even communist can agree with that reasonable point of reference. Since we eschew collectivism as a legal concept and admire private property in order to pursue individualized and copyrightable private intellectual capital acquisition ventures it is good to return to other points for consideration on the topic of our inquiry presently.
Philosophy is an effort of thinking about reality and truth. The love of wisdom isn't restricted to a pre-defined anything-referrals or whatever we may posit as some primordial essent of ground of being such as the Nazi Head of Education for some time in the 1930's sought in his book ' Being and Time'. Sein und Zeit is a brilliant work on the philosophical topic of phenomenalism. Heidegger resigned his post before the war- comprehended what the Nazis were or were becoming, and retired to a hut to pursue his philosophical investigations on the nature of language and perceptions of reality. There are no fundamental preconditions in the vocation of a philosophical investigations that are not malleable to construction as new synthetic compositions or for reconstruction within existing lexical criteria.
Language are historical evolved sets of meaning-units socially comprehensible and of use for communication. Philosophy often seeks to move beyond that pre-set language and look to the deeper meaning of things in themselves. Some are skeptical that such philosophical research regarding things perceived for-themselves can be known. Many phenomenal or perceived things exist as specialized experiences for human or other sentient life, as if they were conditional, contingent things that would disappear without being regarded by humans.
Consider a form of advanced computer virtual reality unit that could be placed over your head and that would allow you to perceive just those aspect of reality that were selected by some electromagnetic spectrum selector, and then reformed by a computer program into some completely fictional alternative construction for visual perception by the human wearing the head unit. The perception of that view of reality, if consistent and given to all other human beings with the same filter and reprogramming would present patterns and forms recognizable by all, yet of course the perceived views would not exist in nature but instead only in the common experience of the viewers of the analog reality. The reality would be derived from things known by the raw data acquisition system yet presented to each human without giving any idea of what reality looks like for itself.
Such a unit and program logic might provide a certain level of resolution to the viewer-experiencers. Philosophically, out own cognitive and neurological inheritance may provide something like that artificial experience naturally. The structure for cognition provided by our innate human sense organs and brain reasoning structure create a kind of sentient objective awareness of our own natural interpretation of the heterodox otherness of the material Universe-if we may call it material at least nominally.
Philosophers must regard such things as exist. Probably people considering relationships between things before they understood the concept of number-even 'one' may have been an underused term at some point way back in then past.
Humanity was born in the stream of change and given flow of space-time that Heraclitus said that we can never step in to twice. Like Moses we were cast into that ever changing yet eternally one stream flow in a human being basket of integrated thought experience with nature. Our own experience of life is of the same one continuous flow co-existing with our own lives and being always to become part of the present and future. Our own unified experience of being is the origin of our ground of philosophical endeavors from which the effort at understanding all must flow.
Such active personal tributaries of inquiry into the overall compilation of the nature of existence is a kind of human wonder. We wonder if our ideas accurately correspond to accurate accounts of how things really are in themselves. With some certainty we believe that reality is far deeper than even profound yet nominal physical cosmological research can enlighten us about. The division of the world of p0henomenal apperception into a microcosm of quantum mechanics following logic brings the investigation for a physical etiology like the inquiry of reverse mitosis to the cellular origin of the primordial membrane of zero dimension. Sure and begorrah it must have then expanded. For we are certain that all things originate with thermodynamic change and generally of cyclical and pervasive physical patterns and structures understandable through analysis, research, and so forth. If God is plural and had neither a singular origin nor was originally singular, we must be able to relate or negate such conjectures because we would have a hard time reconciling such considerations with our present human condition if we did not, right?
Philosophers, unlike some others working at fixing plumbing for instance, may consider experience and phenomena from many approaches and avenues of inquiry. Reasoning to the truth comprises analytic and synthetic thought, yet if the world is a creation of the One, it may require neither objective references, as is advocated by certain mystics such as in the book on knowing God 'The Cloud of Unknowing' while alternatively it may involve entire sets of experience or phenomenal deliberations upon such that is transcending number as either one, two, five a dozen etc. A philosophy rather that being an objective product for marketing to the masses is, for some philosophers at least, a living way of being. If an angel of God approached one with some communication, then the subjective experience would not be subject to delimitation as either subjective or objective, for such is the nature of human perception of reality, and in such a problematic realm of being is the quantum reality of space-time to a certain extent. We must await the quantization of virtual particles before the Big Bang in a vacuum before the inflation to know if the number is one or infinity.
There are additional approaches to consider regarding the nature and quantity required for 'reasonable points of reference'. The Vienna Circle of philosophers including Schlick, Carnap, Neurath, Gdel and many others led to logical positivism and empiricism. Quine of course later destroyed empiricist premises in his 'The Two Dogmas of Empiricism'. The Vienna Circle tried to establish a principle of verifiability, or the inverse principle of falsifiability into extensional or scientific statements about the world. They hoped to eliminate metaphysics and reduce philosophical thought to rigorous science. Wittgenstein's analytic philosophy and investigation into the philosophy of logic led him to assert that the 'meaning of a sentence is in its verification'.
One point of verification or falsifiability will not make any scientific statement necessarily true. Philosophers such as Popper found science to be a more intuitive process with dead reckoning combined a variety of methods as it deems useful to form a falsifiable hypothesis. We cannot however say that philosophy must necessarily be scientific nor that the inability for some to form falsifiable hypothesis regarding analytic, mathematical structures means that it cannot be done, or that mathematics and logic have no a priori similarity to the fundamental structure of the quantum mechanical universe of which human beings are a part.
If we regard language itself as a word and referent linguistic composition, then obviously any lexicon must have at least one word. Yet we are not considering philosophy to be such a fundamental verbal construction as that, but something of a higher order structuring of words to produce meaning. Perhaps Zen may ideally have no referents, yet Western philosophy also has an ideal of becoming One with the will of God. Perhaps that too is philosophical, yet we still cannot positively assert any particular number of referents as in some way being fundamental to philosophical constructions. A reasonable point of reference is a little vague itself. Einstein's theories of relativity did not seem very reasonable in its first publication to most people.
In the Perennial Book of Sophistry we can discovery the listing for 'requisite philosophical points of reference' under sub-heading auxiliary B-29 article 13F; On the Requirement that All Philosophies Must Have Initial Verifiable and Subsequent Points of Reference'.
I will stipulate that I only briefly perused this expensive reference book. Even an annual subscription to it's supplements costs more than I can afford (998 Euros per year), so haven't referenced the current update, yet public libraries have the 2009 philosophers guidelines that at least mention the reference book in credited citations ex libre.
Maybe a philosophy can start without a point of reference and hope to find one. They could be like Cartesian coordinates or g.p.s. points. Personally I believe that is one is sailing in the Adriatic then it would be on the port rather than the starboard side.
'A philosophy' hasn't necessarily got a definition of a point of reference to build in, nor certainty if it should be included free as software to start with. Inclusion of a point of reference after the start of a philosophy would present the problem Hume had with cause and effect investigations I would think. That can be very troubling.
If we included several reference points such as 'north of the Peace River and west of Athabasca' will we get deserved credit for it? Philosophies apparently can be favorably compared with cartography. Keeping that in mind you might get illustrations done too for illuminated manuscripts. Every philosophy needs a good cartoonist for large-page graphic philosophy books.
We must return from the lofty realms of cumulus philosophy with its Irwin Correys to more mundane issues concerning the effort to increase human wisdom.
'The kingdom of God is within you', Our Lord said. We need not run to where the vultures have gathered to find our point of reference. Faith surpasses understanding, and God brings one to awareness of His righteousness rather than vice versa.
A philosophy is usually done by a human being. Some humans consider themselves as comprising their own point of reference, yet we will consider that of computers. Does a computer need a reasonable 'point of reference' when making 'a philosophy'? Can we imagine then right ingredients of a completely abstract philosophy without reference points off-line?
A computer needs a good encapsulating box to live in...something like a homeless person or a billionaire, yet billionaires may have several big boxes to live in and so their point of reference could be multiple boxes and variable. In fact the spaces could be considered to be abstract boxes or encapsulating spaces for such a one as has many potential boxes of habitation. The homeless guy with a cardboard box to live in might have just one point of reference, yet if making a philosophy that would be a good place to start. If it were me I would use a magic marker because they work good for writing on cardboard. Yet we were on the subject of computational points of reference for computer philosophies.
Well, can a computer actually have a philosophy? It has no internal point of reference besides egalitarian data storage binary bits. Quantum computers may have more than binary bit states of information content storage yet they would all be the same value for a point of reference. The point of reference would be the one central processing unit them. The entire abstract group yet real collection of all of the storage unit bytes are the point of reference, Maybe every thinking thing has its own self as a point of reference.
Computers don't think of course, so self awareness is its own point of reference that seems to arise from the brain's complex bio-chemical neurons and synaptic procedures. It differs from the neurons and chemicals for-themselves obviously in that they aren't self aware. Self-awareness needs no point of reference though; it is for-itself aware before self-reference.
Computers function in producing information without ever having a self-awareness. I believe they could even be programmed to produce a philosophy paper or thesis without ever realizing they had done so. It would actually be the writer of the program that had produced the philosophy paper instead of the computer. Computers we shall conclude have no points of reference meaningful to themselves. They also have no self.
Human beings can create many things that we might call 'a philosophy'. I would guess that a painting of abstract expressionism could be considered to be a philosophy in some cases. Then we would ask the perennial question is it abstract or representational? Could it be both simultaneously?
Must a philosophical quest or supposition be about something found in what used to be considered to be the empirical world? Are entirely analytic philosophical activities that are about thought not philosophical because they don't refer to things outside the mind? Then do we exclude brilliant algebras and group theories from being 'philosophies' because they are exclusively analytic?
What if analytic-synthetic combination of things occur in actuality. If Quine's ideas about empiricism are right then thought can be considered as epiphenomenalism in space-time. It is the only part of space-time that we understand directly as it is present in our mind. Must we believe that our own thoughts are a little alien from our self-awareness, that they are passing through our minds like cleverly assembled data bits temporally just to be forgotten soon after? Computers lack the self awareness capacity yet process the information without it. Humans are watchers on a premonitory of the sunrises and sunsets of the world of ideas that passes before their awareness. Will creates it's own content of experience interactively with the Universe providing the quarking components of self. In the midst of the concatenated experience we do not create permanent points of reference, and few or none are given to us. Time and space remove either our selves or the objects of our experience from experience. Philosophical activity may be a pursuit of wisdom and knowledge, yet Socrates said that he knew that he knew nothing. I agree. Faith is the best we can do. One may have faith without an immediate point of reference. We find such a hypothetical, metaphysical object obscurantive to the nature of philosophical inquiry.
Philosophers tend to use their natural logic in a somewhat more disciplined way than do most people. They may construct a theory of everything or just a theory about thought. Language and logic have themselves been the subject of philosophical investigation as well as the nature of the material or spirit perceived by the mind. When one strips down the methods of logic and language to its bare essentials we have an opportunity to process data that may be presented to mind and reasoning a little more constructively. There may be ten-thousand 'points of reference' or perhaps just one (although that would be a very monistic criterion making the observer or user of one reference point something of a passive partner to the one point of reference perhaps).
Cognitively we are philosophically challenged to find any 'external' reality of such a super-real character that it is a transcendent reference base. Einstein's theory of relativity transcended Newton's concept of absolute space and left us with a space-time in relationship to other points. Of course we may leapfrog over that and assume that the mass-energy field has an absolute time position value in the reference frame of the Universe from time=0 at the inflationary era. Perhaps alternatively time does not exist but is transcended by energy-mass form criteria. We find the Universe in primordial uncertainty.
Referred to points may be suitable for a particular set theory, yet of course we would prefer more than one point if we hoped to construct something meaningful. In systems of relativity at least three points of reference are required for directions of motion to be established. In language, one referent would be a one word vocabulary. Primordially even apes accomplish more than that with recognizable grunt referent meanings. The challenge for linguistics is to denote specific lexical ontology referents amidst others. Philosophically the challenge may be to reduce the possible plethora of words and objects to primary structures of meaning. Martin Heidegger pursued language in such a way looking for 'essents'. Modern analytical philosophers may exploit some of the ontological references of science for their cosmological criteria as well as neurological foundation for thought similes to epistemological phenomena subjectively.
Unreasonable points of reference are a little hoary, so we prefer reasonable ones if we are compelled to choose. So one must make a reasoned reasonable point to have a philosophy and eat it too, as if it were a cake. How might one argue with such fell logic as that? I think we must try.
A philosophy as an objective thing in itself seems something of a trivialization of the activity of the pursuit of wisdom. Yet moderns like to have sound bite reasoning and packaged products such as 'a philosophy' and then describe the contents it must have to be a marketable product. It needs a point of reference, and the point of reference must be reasonable. We cannot say who the judge must be of whether or not a particular point in a philosophy is reasonable or not. Certainly in ecclesiastical history there were those that de facto stipulated that 'a philosophy' was heretical and the authors would be burned at the stake or given unto the inquisition. At least Galileo learned to mind his p's and q's and was spared be burned at the stake. He knew when to assert a reasonable point of reference and when to kow-tow to the communist party ideologues of the day (a Chinese former communist professor was just given a ten year prison sentence for forming a political party. Only one party is reasonable in China).
We like to believe that in the many fields of philosophy including political philosophy virtually any approach regarding the mind or matter, spirit or social order, mass or energy might be taken with potential for good results. The French philosopher Descartes intentionally dispensed with any conventional points of reference in his quest to understand existence. His existential doubt was a result of the will to found philosophical knowledge upon first principles-things or ideas he could regard as direct knowledge in personal experience as true. He had no 'point of reference'. Cogito ergo sum was self-standing or self-evident. At least he believed it was and that belief advanced philosophy significantly.
Jean Paul Sartre's existentialist researches expanded French philosophical rationalism beyond the a priori, analytic thinking efforts of Descartes. Sartre's existentialism made the entirety of experience a self-aware cognitive field that was all that might be known. He recognized the heterodox nature of experience with the existence of other's in the cognitive event. The Critique of Dialectical Reason was an effort to describe the concatenated nature of that experience.
If one has a reasoning mind it is important to keep free the criteria of investigation with which one might construct a philosophical lexicon of ideas. If one doesn't have a reasoning mind then find a point of reference and make that your philosophy. Be an elephant that grasps hold of the tale before thee and waddle along to the beat of the same drummer booming through the speakers of your brain housing unit. Otherwise break down those ideas into workable size and use a little symbolic or even classical logic to analyze the meaning they have. Remove all of the adjectives and such to get to the salient proposition if it may be approached that way. Determine like Hume did what is sophistry and what isn't. Determine what is actual rather than some sort of actually meaningless metaphysics or passing the buck refer to a point of reference next that is just one of an infinite series of points in some order along a meaningless path of unnatural numbers representing computer generated phrases. Think for yourself but read those great ideas worth learning in order to not reinvent the wheel each day.
Philosophy is more than an epistemology or theory of knowledge. A theory of knowledge is implicitly referential to something other than the immediate self-awareness; that is it must explain itself preferably within its own terms and context. Of course to do so is in a way self-defeating. Theories of knowledge naturally tend to be propositional ontologies other than self. If one is referring to a theory of knowledge as a theory of mind, which one presumably has, then it must always be a kind of alienation of idea as experience from self. It is a reductionism from mind to an ossified phrase and inert, or dead.
A point of reference does seem to a prior assume that points exist, and that a particular point-do we mean geographic or linguistic coordinate reference points- has some ordination from which all other inferences and deductions are made. A philosophy would seem in this context to be contingent upon a prime meridian for meaning, placing the meridian at a higher level than the egalitarian context of the rest. One may reasonably assume certain axioms within any given ontology to induct and construct the remainder of the composition members of the element set. In matters of life and experience referring to the world as it appears we find it improbable that a single reference point-a most obscure assumed premise-might adequately serve to anchor a theory of either monism or pluralism. it is instead a kind of social myopia that fails a criterion of pragmatism.
W.V.O. Quine's 'Word and Object' and 'Ontological Relativity' of course are linguistic and logic based philosophical analysis of the meaning of language and of how it is used. It especially considers how the philosophical uses of language and symbolic logic are structured. Life itself has a self-standing reality about which people talk. Talk and words to refer to present and not present things or events are primordial in the history of mankind. Perhaps one-hundred thousand years ago more or less simple human languages existed. Language has as many objects or referents potentially to talk about as there are objects in the Universes of experience and imagination. Words refer to objects. It is a wonderful fact that words can refer to themselves. They are address points of meaning. The Universe itself is the one primary referent, and of course we include ourselves within this Universe. Human beings even refer to their own being, and self, in self-reference.
Philosophically we prefer to consider knowledge of what is experienced, and of knowledge beyond one's personal being, and of course of existing at all as activities or investments of our time worth the pursuit. Some element of wisdom seems to exist in learning all one can about life. Of course we also pursue these most general yet intimately important of concerns is philosophical activities. Philosophy is a method of inquiry. Knowledge continually should advance without ever reaching a conclusion in some sort of omniscience.
Theologically our interests are developed in learning about the Ultimate Designer of the Universe1 and of any potential other Universes. In such concerns our metaphysical inquiry becomes an alternate ontology rather than the self-evident one into which we are born, live and die.
It is somewhat fashionable nowadays more than a 150 years after Darwin's theory for many in society to regard themselves as liberated from hoary church dogma of creation. So many were oppressed by corrupt ecclesiastical neo-theocratic relationships with feudal lords that history did not refer sufficiently to the role that the Catholic Church played occasionally in opposing rising national imperial powers. Following the Inquisition such neglect was perhaps well deserved in the popular realm. At any rate following the Darwinism many were concerned that the disbelief that a scientific explanation for the origin of the species could not be anything besides a contradiction and even a negation of the Genesis story of creation. The last forty years have shown us that a theistic evolution of the Universe is consistent with the Bible, yet without modern scientific knowledge there were few that could interpret the book of Genesis in such a light.
The 'incredible lightness of being'; the giddiness of disbelief in God was feared by some authorities as leaving mankind rootless and adrift in a meaningless mechanical Universe. Of course the assumption that the Universe as it is cannot be a self-evident ground for being philosophically grounded isn't too valid. Cicero's natural law and a myriad other systems are able to provide an ordination for morality inferred from the criterion of being in-the-world. Kant's categorical imperative is a deontological inference from logic and being. Kant believed in God yet his moral law is axiomatic.
The 'point of reference' a mariner might have wanted in the era before the invention of the compass isn't too applicable to philosophy. The Universe of experience exists for-itself; the 'reference' is all around us. We believe also that God exists transcendentally though we have no material point of reference for that faith. The ungrounded with hysterical 'philosophies' requiring a 'point of reference' have existed throughout history even before Darwin or the reformation. The Dionysian choice may itself become an ethic for a majority of ruling elites. A point of reference is no assurance of the existential validity of a particular philosophical ontology.
Philosophers did not first invent an a priori language such as found in Descartes cogito and then construct reality from it; they simply have tried to learn more and more about the actual world experienced. Perhaps some could miss it. Take the first right...
