Metaphors

keu

I love metaphors

I'm stuck on ether, of which the dictionary definition is:"Physics. An all-pervading, infinitely elastic, massless medium formerly postulated as the medium of propagation of electromagnetic waves."
Er, read that more carefully - the idea has now been discarded by physics.

what idea?
the idea of human electromagnetism?
have they replaced it with something else?

all philosophy is a metaphor, there is no deliniations silly people, there is no definitive proof by science or any other method of reasoning by logical means of the construct of thought or its point of origin. In order to determine if the mind can exist independantly, you would first have to figure out what the mind is. I have yet to see an answer...so I'll just wait til you people come up something definitive.

..and by de by..fysh proved nothing more than the fact that by his understanding, probability suggests the anti matter thing is not correct, yet admitted that the mathematical equation is just too complex to comprehend.
..tsk...

simu

I was going to send this to the recycle bin as it's way off topic but it's an interesting subject matter.

I don't agree that all philosophy is metaphor. A metaphor is when you use one thing to take the place of another thing implying that things one and two have one or more qualities in common.

The problem is that, if there is more than one possible quality that the two things could be said to have in common, the metaphor becomes ambiguous. If you say that Mary is like a leopard, that could mean that she is wild or endangered or spotty or some other quality of a leopard or that she has all or a combination of these qualities. It works really well in poetry, especially when you let the reader see something in a new way. In philosophy, I think metaphors can be useful as a form of "brainstorming" or trying to find new ways of thinking about something but after this it's better to try and explain thoughts as unambiguously as possible. That's what I think anyway and maybe I'm stating the obvious in this paragraphs but tis better to be clear about these things.

There are some philosophers who delight in the multiple meanings that they can get by use of metaphors though. I'm thinking mostly of Helen Cixous, a French philosopher and writer who, if I remember my French lectures correctly, tried to find more open ways of writing that could be interpreted differently by different readers. (It could be argued that all reading is subjective and it is to a degree but yet, overall we do manage to communicate precise information to each other through words so there must be some sort of overall agreement amongst people who speak the same language as to the content of any given text).

I'm wondering though - what do people think of this sort of metaphoric, open-ended writing style, especially with respect to philosophy? Or even, what are your thoughts on the writing styles of different philosophers in general?