Mark Thomsen's Profile

3. Dishonesty & Betrayal (infidelity, lying):

4. Attacking Your Partner (blaming, abuse - physical, emotional, sexual):

5. Scapegoating (taking your anger or frustration out on you partner):

6. Negativism (nitpicking, nagging, criticizing):

7. Gossiping (telling family or friends about your problems but not addressing them with your partner):

8. Controlling Your Partner ("my way" or else, perfectionism, trying to change your partner, possessiveness):

9. Putting Yourself First (self-centeredness, selfishness, entitlement):

10. Putting Yourself Last (self-neglect, passivity, self sacrifice):

Weinberg makes the all-too common mistake of thinking of philosophy as of an activity whose entire worth is measured by how useful it is to solve scientific problems.

We already have science to help us solve scientific problems,

a) philosophy and science are two distinct activities (at least nowadays, since science did start as a branch of philosophy called natural philosophy); b) they work by different methods (empirically-based hypothesis testing vs. reason-based logical analysis); and c) they inform each other in an inter-dependent fashion (science depends on philosophical assumptions that are outside the scope of empirical validation, but philosophical investigations should be informed by the best science available in a range of situations, from metaphysics to ethics and philosophy of mind).

Science, broadly speaking, deals with the study and understanding of natural phenomena, and is concerned with empirically (i.e., either observationally or experimentally) testable hypotheses advanced to account for those phenomena.

Philosophy, on the other hand, is much harder to define. Broadly speaking, it can be thought of as an activity that uses reason to explore issues that include the nature of reality (metaphysics), the structure of rational thinking (logic), the limits of our understanding (epistemology), the meaning implied by our thoughts (philosophy of language), the nature of the moral good (ethics), the nature of beauty (aesthetics), and the inner workings of other disciplines (philosophy of science, philosophy of history, and a variety of other “philosophies of”).