I don't understand the island analogy. While the external world is disjoint from the island, our world -- with its scientific knowledge of contemporary physics and biology and astronomy and psychology, mathematics and logic and, of course, the internet -- is a product of our history. In other words, while it's true that history didn't have the internet, it is also the reason that we do.
People like Frege and Russell made certain choices in the design of formal logic because they were influenced by Leibniz, who, in turn, arranged things in a certain way because he was influenced by Aristotle. If you don't know what Aristotle said, it's hard to understand Leibniz, and if you don't know Leibniz, it's hard to understand Frege and Russell.
I believe it should be possible to rephrase the philosophical ideas of the past in modern language, instead of requiring study of original texts, similar to how I can read modern textbooks on physics without having to defer to the long line of physicists who developed the theories, and their original papers and exchanges. IMO it is a failure of philosophy as a discipline that it is so path-dependend on an ever-growing corpus and lineage of past philosophers. It seems that one must enjoy interpreting old texts that employ ambiguous language and that require understanding the context of a very different intellectual environment of the past, in order to get into ”serious” philosophy. Although I’m very interested in philosophical thought, that aspect has completely turned me off.
I’d also like to mention the old adage “if you can’t explain it, you don’t really understand it”. The common deferral along the lines of “oh you have to read philosopher X to really understand that” indicates to me that actually there is a generally poor understanding of what those philosophers really meant. Otherwise people should be able to express those ideas with clarity in their own words.
I think this is possible to an extent, but the saying “oh you have to read philosopher X to really understand that” feels more like “oh you have to listen to band X to really understand their music”. Sure you _could_ explain the music along all the various dimensions, but the actual experience of the music _itself_ is the experience worth having. Same is true of most philosophy in my experience. I mean, you can read all the summaries and theses on Nietzsche's work that you want, but it won't be the same as _reading_ Nietzsche.
Reading the original work is of course its own experience and can be worthwhile for that experience. But it shouldn't be necessary in order to understand the philosophical ideas and arguments, just like for example it absolutely isn't necessary to read Einstein's original papers to understand and discuss relativity. It can give some flavor, or a better understanding of the historical development, but that is non-essential for the actual subject matter. In philosophy, however, there is a sentiment that you have to trace the historical development and debates to be able to understand the subject matter. Whereas the actual philosophical matters of fact, the truths that we are trying to come up with in philosophy, surely shouldn't inherently depend on the happenstances of the historical course of philosophical debate.
Well said. One of the greatest travesties in popular philosophy is the tendency among otherwise intelligent, well-read people to think that they can “get” philosophy by just reading whatever small slice addresses some particular fancy.
You can learn a great deal that way, but it fundamentally strips the historical dimension away. And philosophy’s greatest ideas are developed over the order of centuries.
The island analogy's misleading crap. A couple tweaks to make it closer to reality (say, if the islanders had been working for millennia and we only cared about a handful of their very best works from that entire time span—instantly less crazy with just that one tweak, no?) and it falls apart. There's almost a hint of an interesting line of argument, buried somewhere in there, but the way it's presented isn't good and is the precise opposite of convincing, on close inspection.
Relying heavily on really bad analogies seems to be a theme in the paper, reading on. There's some hilariously-bad question-begging-laundered-through-analogy in the bit about body-building advice / reasons-to-study-historical-philosophy.
Leading with emphasizing the importance of correctness is also pretty silly when we spend much of a student's training for most other fields teaching them one useful lie or another. That philosophy's lies happen to often come from very old books hardly seems material. Clearly, scaffolding with outright known lies is the norm, so "much of the material is probably wrong" isn't, per se, much of an attack.
I don't think the paper's conclusion's even necessarily wrong (and by calling for some vague "less" focus on the history of philosophy, it defies firm refutation anyway) and some of it does make interesting points, but damn, it's got some seriously off-putting flaws. I especially think it fails to make a strong case against such study as training for philosophers. But maybe there are far more doctors of philosophy out there who spend their careers analyzing historical philosophy, than would be optimal. That seems plausible, but also doesn't seem to be the focus of the paper.
Add another proviso: that the island (or those strongly influenced by it) are now filling cultural lore with themes and messages born of those works and ideas. Much as Hollywood, British cinema and broadcasting, etc., have been in the case of Western philosophy.
Even if the ideas are complete bunkum and red herrings, their cultural ubiquity and influence merit study if only to understand how things went astray. In practice, there are useful concepts to be found, precursors of much present empirically-derived understandings (contrasting with classical Western philosophy's focus on rational thought, as highlighted by of course Kant). And the buried bones and foundations of much present thinking.
This is called "problem-situation" in philosophy of sciences. One can understand physics, by studying problems in a historical context--and this field is called "history and philosophy of physics". Wrt biology, it is "history and philosophy of biology". We also need to study history of philosophy to understand various philosophical theories: later theories try to account for failures of earlier philosophical theories; etc.
I couldn't disagree more. By studying history of philosophy you learn a lot about the process itself, no matter if the conclusions might seem irrelevant or outdated by the current standard enforced by new contributions. After all, I find it quite naive you will not make the very same mistakes that your predecessor did, haven't you been somewhat cognizant of their work and perspective.
This is exactly right and doing so would require each subsequent generation of philosophers to reinvent the wheel
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
– George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.
But history is not philosophy, so the implicit premise, which boils down to, "history is not necessary to philosophy," is wrong-headed, but it is also assuming the conclusion, which is question begging.
History is important to history, understanding how events in the past caused things to be the way they are today. Further, the history of philosophy is not identical to the philosophy in history just as the history of technology is not itself technology. When studying Ancient Philosophy one is not studying the history of ancient philosophy, but the ancient philosophy itself. Conversely, studying history of philosophy is not philosophical study, it is instead studying history, focusing on when and who said in what circumstances, and is not primarily concerned with understanding what was said.
This argument and the point you're saying is "exactly right" is literally covered in the text of the paper.
Read page 9 in the PDF again - the author goes to good lengths to grapple with this argument and why it is not correct. In particular:
In order to repeat the mistakes of a famous philosopher, one must first
share their beliefs. Now, few people are born with any degree of credence
in the far-fetched propositions embraced by many philosophers. In general,
these kinds of beliefs have to be acquired; and the only way of acquiring
them is to study these authors. It seems that if we wanted to avoid acquir-
ing false beliefs that we would never arrive at except by reading a particu-
lar author, the best thing by far we could do is to avoid reading that
author.
If the only way of encountering those beliefs were to read the source --- the poisoned tree, so to speak --- this argument might have some legitimacy.
In practice it fails on multiple grounds:
First, it's not possible to censor all instances of such philosophical works. The historical record is filled with attempts to do so. These can be somewhat successful, and there are in fact philosophers whose names reach us only by reputation, citation, or other mention, but some philosophy has leaked through.
Secondly, a fresh attempt at doing so would amount to one of the most jarring cases of oppressive authoritarian censorship in all history.
Thirdly, the ideas have come to permeate modern culture. One of the joys of reading philosophy (or literature) is recognising the original source of a specific phrase or concept. I can recall one of my own uni lit courses in which we read Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H.", and came across the stanza:
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
A woman in the class exclaimed "Oh, that's where 'Tis better to have loved and lost' comes from?". I'm sure that was a bright day for the lecturer.
Encounters with philosophical history are similar, though often what strikes me is the nuance and context in which even well-known concepts are grounded (say: Pascal's wager, which is far more about expected returns than belief of God's existence).
Fourth, bad ideas seem highly susceptible to arising again and again due to their very simplicity and appeal. This might of course be affected by the third factor, but independent (or at least very distantly related) instances of similar tropes appearing in mythology and sagas suggest that there are ideas which are simply either infinitely regenerative as with Prometheus's liver, or which resist all attempts to kill them, where two new myths grow back for each one that's cut off, as with the hydra's heads.
(Even mythical stories can serve as useful illustrations, itself a factor in their longevity.)
By going back to fallacious reasoning or conclusions and looking at how the ideas emerged, were adopted, and often explicitly encouraged we can obtain, I'd think, a better understanding of similar such processes in our own time. The divorce of ancient beliefs from current tribalism, politics, and passions serves this purpose all the better, though it does help to consider the ancients not as childlike innocents and naifs or ourselves as beyond their own failings when doing so.
And the trove of ancient philosophy is large enough that a specialisation in its history is required such that mere mortals may benefit from its findings, classifications, and synthesis.
I'm not going to take it as far as the author, but I will say that philosophy does seem to be particularly unique in organizing its entire subject matter essentially historically by thinker and around original texts, as opposed to the kind of modern taxonomy and conceptual vocabulary employed not just in other sciences, but even social sciences.
Philosophers throw around author-turned-into-adjective terms like Kantian, Hegelian, Aristotelian, Humean, Hobbesian, Benthamite, and so forth as frustratingly vague substitutions for the actual ideas meant. (Kant wrote a lot, which part are you referring to?) Intro biology and political science textbooks are all organized similarly with more or less the same content, while different intro philosophy textbooks often seem like they're covering different fields. (E.g. one author believes the main questions in philosophy are metaphysics and logic, while another gives most space to ethics and religion.) Why? Because there is no widely agreed-upon of what the really important issues in philosophy even are. (Just look at continental vs. analytic philosophy.) So in the absence of any kind of consensus organization/taxonomy and terminology to go with that, it all just reverts to... original texts and author surnames. It's organized by history.
(And even when modern thinkers try to come up with conceptual-sounding names, it turns into a confusing mess. Try to remember which one is "contractualism" and which one is "contractarianism". Or is there a difference between "morals" and "ethics"? Or why do some writers call it "utilitarianism" while others call it "consequentialism"? When you say "resentment", which author's usage of "ressentiment" are you actually referring to? I usually know the answers to these questions, but they sure are confusing when you're learning it as an undergrad. It's actually clearer if you say "Hobbesian" rather than "contractarian", or "Nietszchean" so I can understand which type of "resentment".)
Learning the history of philosophy is helpful... but it does seem somewhat strange that while you can learn math or biology without needing to learn the history or ever read a single "original historical text"... you can't learn philosophy without learning its history. And so that certainly leads to the question... should you be able to? Would that improve the study of philosophy?
I agree. It also seems wildly inefficient to ask every student to read all those originals instead of systematic modern introductions. History is accumulating, so this becomes an impossible task at some point. If the ideas expressed in a text cannot be separated from their "original presentation", maybe they aren't that good after all. Exactly what I had in mind when I wrote this recently: https://verzettelung.com/22/09/10/
Interestingly enough I'd argue that you can't (or shouldn't) learn[0] biology[1] without learning its history, or at least its modern history[2]. To learn that Pasteur proved germ theory is irrelevant, but the who's and what's and why's of CRISPR and pre-CRISPR DNA modification would be hugely informative to the researcher. In psuedo-math terms the history adds a rough direction vector to the state-variable that is the 'state-of-the-art', which probably points in the direction what will become the 'state-of-the-art' tomorrow.
[0]To an expert level, i.e. to create and advance new knowledge in the field.
[1]Insert science here.
[2]Roughly a decade or two worth of papers, by my entirely unscientific estimation
Because you need to follow the trajectory of some philosopher in order to fully comprehend what it is about. You don't understand it by just memorizing the summary from some encyclopedia.
While I share a loathing for everything having to be a study of what someone else said a long time ago, I think it's mainly in the areas where we've not made much definite progress that this phenomenon happens most. Only historians bother with Aristotle's physics today because we have something definitively superior that we can prove is more correct than his model. Same for biology (arguably his key area of interest).
But when it comes to ethics I don't think we can say the same thing. I'm not even sure for some areas of politics. When I read Thomas Hobbes Leviathan I found myself thinking "Wow, at least no thinking person will ever defend that philosophy again" and then a couple of decades later Steven Pinker did just that.
We're really not making much progress in the humanities. I'd like to think we're done (intellectually speaking) with chattel slavery as a concept but who knows. Grant and Sherman made bigger contributions to that argument than a whole swathe of philosophers either way.
I haven’t read this paper, but instinctively flinch at any kind of dismissal of the past.
I would think this comes down to how we define philosophy. On scientific matters sure Aristotle likely has little to offer; but human nature has not changed at all since Plato, or Siddhartha we’re born.
After saying the following I feel that it would be hard for them to argue their point very strongly. So I’m definitely going to read the paper:
To be perfectly clear: my claim is not that we should not be doing history of philosophy. There are all kinds of reasons why reading and talking about the Critique of Pure Reason or the Republic are worthwhile: studying these seminal texts is an inherently interesting intellectual pursuit; reading them is often tremendously enjoyable; and familiarity with these texts can be very valuable to intellectual historians for the insights into culture, knowledge and morality they may contain. There are thus many excellent reasons to engage with the history of philosophy. Gaining traction on the aforementioned philosophical problems, however, is not one of them. This means that I am not arguing against historians of philosophy and what they do, but against what could be called philosophical historicists, that is, those who seem to think that at least one good method of thinking about knowledge or justice is to study what historical authors have written about knowledge and justice a long time ago. This, I argue, is a mistake.
Do you believe someone needs to understand the history of math to effectively use math?
I don't think anyone is claiming historical context isn't helpful, but these are tools for thinking. This doesn't go anywhere near the 'history repeating itself' mantra. The only way it could get close to that is for someone who is attempting to discover new math (or philosophy), but that's a very small subset of those who benefit from these tools.
Extend? Yes. Math is a tool that came from a context, so there might be implicit assumptions made on choosing that particular notation and definition that might or might not be justified. Appreciating where and idea comes from lets you work with the idea. I also think it helps learning and generalising.
A competent programmer with no knowledge of history can deal with things like e.g. non-monotonicity in time by just writing robust code. But it helps to know where it comes from: clock drift, user modification, error, leap seconds etc. If you know one of these, you can leverage different assumptions.
Yes. So many things in math, in science, in programming, only make sense if you understand where they came from and in what context. Otherwise things just seem weird and arbitrary and hard to understand.
In math everything can be derived directly from the underlying axioms given enough time. You don't need historical context. You may want the set of previously proven things to save some time, but you don't need it.
To use them well I think you would. People who haven't been exposed to a history of a method or technology often say "I think this is silly; I can think of a better way to do this". Sometimes, extremely rarely, they are right. But more often, what they are thinking of is something that was tried and was found not to work well. Knowing the history of what you are doing, and what things worked and failed prevents you from making the same mistakes your forerunners did.
There's always an odd dichotomy between those who do, and those who do not.
No farmer in existence would ever agree they need to understand the historical context to successfully use a fence post, or that they need it to be able to critically evaluate their specific needs and adjust their usage of fence posts to meet those needs.
I find this attitude amongst software architects a lot as well. The stereotype of the hapless academic didn't come about because there's no truth to it.
My first though seeing this was that Peter Adamson, creator of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast and book series should respond.
He has:
Re. Hanno Sauer's article denying the value of the history of philosophy: it turns out he follows me on Twitter, from which I infer that he was just kidding.
This paper makes some excellent points, at least directionally - surely the important historical arguments will be representable in a more polished, accessible and condensed form today. And in cases where they aren't perhaps that's a good filter in its own right?
It appears like, maybe vis a vis physical sciences philosophy as an academic discipline has not got quite such a prevalent tradition in producing "tidied up" textbooks?
I am instantly skeptical that the first thinker to understand some complex topic produced a book crisply detailing the irreducible core of the idea rather than spending six hundred pages flailing around trying to gesture at the good stuff they only vaguely see and don't have the vocabulary to express. First iterations are rarely good and never sleek.
Maybe. But pop science, pop psychology, and webMD are all things. None of these speak particularly well to the idea that complexity reduces cleanly, or that anything useful is produced by the attempt.
This has always seemed kinda obvious? But I guess... maybe not to professional philosophers?
In college there was this clique of philosophy students who were studying all this ancient thought but were (imo) strangely averse to weighing in on the problems of modernity. Like what they were interested in was 'real' philosophy. Never seemed right to me. That stuff is already baked into the way we think -- that's why it was important back then! Today we can barely perceive what it's like to _not_ think with it; it's "in the water supply", as it were. The interesting philosophy is in the new ideas that aren't settled yet.
This is more than you think. Humans not only evolve through evolution, but also culture. We're able to change culture quickly and it has a huge impact on our being. Culture responses very sensible to the environment. So even though there was not much time for evolution, we 'evolved' quite a bit and might be more different that one might think.
As I said, culture can change quickly. This applies for all directions, so maybe we actually are very similar. Who knows.
[I used 'evolution' as how we use the word in day to day usage. The term 'culture' might be involved in 'evolution']
It is obvious to some professional philosophers, especially the ones who publish in the top analytic philosophy journals, but there is a whole bunch of professional philosophers who primarily work historically. I'd say that at least half of my colleagues work primarily historically. They really just write papers about what another philosopher said or thought (usually long dead ones).
My impression is that it's primarily a way of immunizing yourself against critique and avoiding academic conflicts. If you write a solid, exegetically sound historical paper you can publish it almost for sure in some journal. No reviewer will be offended by it. You won't make it into journals that require real originality such as the Journal of Philosophy, but you can easily build a career by being a "philosopher X" scholar. Publishing original content and making a name for yourself as a defender of a new philosophical thesis or tradition is much harder.
One of my colleagues works among the world's foremost Wittgenstein scholars and he told me ten years ago that it bores him to death. Nothing has changed since then, however, he's still working almost solely on Wittgenstein.
The wisdom of the ancients is timeless. To think that we've moved past that is a mistake. The analytical schools of 20th century philosophy made great strides in solving the problems of language and epistemology. But the fundamental underlying "human" issues that Socrates and Aristotle figured out are just as relevant today as 2000 years ago.
>The new wise people's wisdom is much more relevant.
Sure, but which ones?
The reason we study people from 2,000 years ago is not that no one else is having those same thoughts (or better ones) today. It's because if something survives for 2,000 years, there's a reason for it. Enough cultures over centuries felt that what these people had to say was important enough to be passed down. It's the same reason we don't seriously study philosophers until they are dead. It takes decades to determine if their corpus is even a meaningful contribution to the canon.
> Wise people existed then and wise people exist now. The new wise people's wisdom is much more relevant.
Without discussing politics or political topics (e.g. the benefits of diversity in a group of people,) can you give examples of this 'much more relevant' wisdom of today? For example, Aristotle taught metaphysics and aspirational ethics, amongst other topics--can you give examples of today's 'much more relevant' wisdoms that are more relevant than what he had to say? Examples that leave no question as to how much more relevant or, perhaps, more wise those (new vs old) wisdoms are? Thanks.
The article doesn't seem to be posted on 1st of April, so I have to conclude that the author does not understand philosophy at all, and swims happily and carelessly in doctrinarianism about “scientific knowledge” instead. A philosopher should be able to see that the linear time and overlaying “progress” is just a transfer of educational imaginary model of physical experiment onto the whole world, and that any thought, no matter what it source is, can only exist in the present moment in someone's head. And even in that primitive linear model, every bit of “knowledge” we have is inherited from those horrible, horrible idiots from the past anyway.
It would be funny to read something like that for the first time, but the author doesn't seem to know that the same approach have been proclaimed (and subsequently ridiculed) for at least 200 years. The irony of ignoring history!
Also, it is mentioned that studying other sciences doesn't work the same way. Of course it doesn't, as for quite some time students haven't been sharing any state of mind with people whose portraits hang on the walls. They don't even share more than required between themselves, because they are given instant noodle type understanding with famous scientists simply printed on the packaging that results in everything, including theory, becoming applied, and never-ending compartmentalization.
> every bit of “knowledge” we have is inherited from those horrible, horrible idiots from the past anyway.
That's only true if you disregard all empirical observations you made yourself while living in this world, and relied 100% on things other people tell you.
> It would be funny to read something like that for the first time, but the author doesn't seem to know that the same approach have been proclaimed (and subsequently ridiculed) for at least 200 years. The irony of ignoring history!
The fact that some idea has been ridiculed for 200 years doesn't make it wrong. I can entertain the idea that it's pretty good evidence that it's funny though.
(Btw, I also find your strawman arguments and flippant attitude to be a bit in poor taste.)
You are almost completely what other people have told you, directly or indirectly. You wouldn't even be able to say “empirical observations” without someone teaching you the language, for starters. The tendency to imagine “individual” as a spherical Omnipotent Observer in a vacuum comes from the manner textbook explanations of imaginary model interactions are automatically spread onto the whole world, and from unquestionable individualism affecting most of the reasoning of current era, and so on.
It is simply ignorant to present the stitched corpses of vulgar materialism and its company as something “modern” (with a facelift to switch from “mechanistic” to “robotistic” model because engines stopped being cool for the public, computers are cool today). Ignorance can be ridiculed. Dostoevsky smirked at people making lecterns for Vogt, Moleschott, and Buchner, Goethe had fun with dialogues in Faust's study, but hey! We can safely skip all of that if we decide to call it “outdated”!
"This is an object. Our modern authorities admit they can't explain it. Could it be a power struggle? Ancient critical theorists say 'yes.'" That's the level of rigor in the paper and the in the view of history as progress. A house without a foundation is still a house, and an indistinguishable representation from one that has one, but it's durability and coherence over time that makes one real and the other a representation.
I really don't think the author is the first to try throwing out the past, and there were some odd setups in the essay where he expected the "mighty dead" to make a case for themselves today, instead of it being on him to make the case for what he has to improve on them. The underlying view of history as progress and his implied materialist view of epistemic value, I think, isn't new.
If you substitute ideology for philosophy, then iterate ideological theorems from it, you can produce what are essentially holographic projections of consistent ideas that seem to encompass everything, and the easiest ones are structured like the Ancient Aliens reference above. The genius of that show is that it is as rigorous a critical theory of archeology as any other critical theory, it's just that everyone thinks their fancier version is different. It's as though we needed Ancient Astronaut Theory to convince us that other critical theories are real.
The last century has emphasized some interesting problems that were the consequence of our new ability to simulate and represent much of our experience as artifacts of computation and language, along with critical theories designed as solvents for the artifacts of language, where objects could be decoupled from their meanings, and then re-assigning meaning seemed like just an exercise in power over subjects - but that only works on a certain kind of mind. If you have ever seen an animal react to a magic trick, it's the same slight of hand effect on an intellectual level, I think. You can't navigate without waypoints, and any new philosophical ideas that are not informed by the foundations are just going to be post-hoc moralizations of exigencies in the present.
Pretty much everything pre-enlightenment is really smart sounding nonsense. Understanding pre-enlightenment philosophy is mostly just useful as historical or cultural context for how intellectual people thought at the time, or for understanding the path human civilization took to knowing what we know today.
Everything after the enlightenment, but before modern biology / neuroscience / physics, is also really smart sounding nonsense, but is getting closer to something approximating "reality".
Once we get to the naturalist philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries (many of whom are biologists, physicists, or neuroscientists by training), we start getting some real meat.
> Pretty much everything pre-englightenment is really smart sounding nonsense. Understanding it is mostly just useful as historical or anthropological context for how intellectual people thought at the time.
Plato's critique of democracy was written long before the period of enlightenment. It stands on its own to this day. There are countless other examples of philosophical works that hold up to scrutiny even when viewed through an analytical lens.
This is just absurdly simplistic. The enlightenment did not appear in a vaccuum either. It is predicated on specific philosophical arguments. This becomes immediately apparent when you consider non-Western industrialized nations. The scientific method is one thing, but it is not something that can be used to prescribe a way to live. Plenty of aspects of our society aren't predicated on post-enlightenment thinking.
> The scientific method is one thing, but it is not something that can be used to prescribe a way to live.
I understand what you're getting at. I agree that much of what is considered "philosophy" isn't just "what is", but "what should we do about it".
I would argue that the answer "what we should do about it" is either:
- So relative that there isn't an answer (or are infinite answers), at which point everyone is welcome to substitute any answer they like.
- Dependent on as-yet-undiscovered information in the physical sciences (biology, cosmology, physics, neuroscience, etc), which is why we're still reliant on incomplete (or incorrect) proxies
The key takeaway is that what you are currently evaluating as a neutral, logical, science-based way of looking at the world is actually based on very specific philosophical and epistemological ideas that are ironically not themselves based on any kind of scientific approach per se. There's only a small portion of our lives that is actually lived on the basis of the scientific method and rigorous experiments, and this is not due to lacking as-of-yet-undiscovered material, so rejecting anything that does not employ the method as a source of knowledge or claiming that it's all relative is already a very curious position.
The STEM-bro/SWE/HN/LessWrong/Sam Harris mindset is hyperspecific in its cultural conclusions and it doesn't come to those through experiments but by making prescriptive claims just like any philosopher. This isn't just an academic problem, but something that has real practical consequences when it comes to living in a society dominated by FAANGs and other such structures.
> Pretty much everything pre-enlightenment is really smart sounding nonsense.
This is like saying that Newtonian physics is really smart sounding nonsense because it makes mispredictions in places and assumes that time behaves like a continuum.
Among Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle alone,
Aristotle developed syllogisms (a fragment of predicate logic), Aristotle developed the notion of scientific disciplines, Socrates made many realize that it's not as easy to refute seemingly obvious nonsense in a watertight manner, Aristotle developed the notion of infinitely divisible time trying to refute Zeno's infinitely divisible distances traveled.
It's important to note that where these people are wrong and have developed insufficiently powerful explanations, it's because they lack the instruments and infrastructure (physical and intellectual) to reliably observe contradictions and deficiencies) to these frameworks that they have developed. To the person living then, it makes little difference, and likely the same to much of our lived experience (consider that religion is still very popular).
Once you note this, you should then begin to realize just how little we know (as a society, in your community, yourself) considering the limits of what we can measure (as a society, in your community, yourself), and how measuring something unexpected can completely upend the framework that you had developed.
On some of the most fundamental questions (e.g. "What is of value?" and "What does it mean to live a good life?") many of the credible answers, were probably first posited, before history even started being written. Consider the Confucians, Mohists and Taoists of China. Or the Epicurians and the Stoics of Western antiquity. They all had attempts to answer such questions. Some of which would sound very similar to what you might hear people say today and some of which would sound very alien. We are still having many of the same debates they did.
> We are still having many of the same debates they did.
You can wander into almost any HN politics thread and find at least one alarmingly-confident and probably-acrimonious post that can act as a prompt to let you walk someone through Plato's dialog on justice from the first few pages of The Republic. They'll have no idea what you're doing. I'm pretty sure most of them are adults, not kids.
You realize that in 200 years people will be saying the same thing about us, right? We have no unified theory of physics and many metaphysical debates on the interpretations of our physics. We have no working theory of intelligence and are random-walking to one as gamers subsidize the hardware needed. We still think neoliberal economics and representative democracy are kind of the best governing systems, but we’re one military leapfrog away from a new authoritarian world order. I think we’re not so different from our predecessors!
> What I'm arguing is that hard sciences are the only pathway to real understanding...
Aristotle said that women had fewer teeth than men. To him, this was logically necessary. He was married twice, but he never bothered to open his wife's mouth and count.
So, yeah. A little actual data can cut short a lot of philosophical nonsense. But I think you go too far the other direction.
Determining morals from science seems to me like either nonsense or the path to disaster, maybe both. Determining aesthetics from science is unlikely to produce anything beautiful. Determining politics from science... well, Marx and those who followed him claimed to be doing exactly that, and it worked out very badly. Determining epistemology from science is putting things exactly backwards.
And even the things that can be determined from science, you have to be careful to not let everything become science. There's a great quote from Hemingway, which I tried and failed to find, where he says that you can count the spines on the dorsal fins of a certain kind of fish simply by getting a specimen and counting. But when that kind of fish hits the end of your fishing line, you get a whole different kind of truth. Then he says that the scientist who counts the spines in the fin has recorded one truth, and experienced many lies. The fish is not that cold, that color, that dead, nor does it smell that way.
Science can tell us useful things. Philosophy that ignores science is likely to wander off into unreality and therefore uselessness. But no, the hard sciences are not the only pathway to real understanding, and trying to make it so will neuter philosophy.
Real meat, with a philosophical hole right at the base of it that cannot be waived away. At some point somewhere something has to be taken by faith. Ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning is one that most modern people take. The existence of God is a different option.
> At some point somewhere something has to be taken by faith. Ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning is one that most modern people take.
Which, if you're building your philosophy in view of modern biological and neurological knowledge, is not a particularly defensible position.
> in view of modern biological and neurological knowledge
How do we know that our mind is interpreting what this knowledge is in a coherent manner? The researchers themselves are already making a philosophical claim that truth is knowable to get to any meaningful conclusions about what can be learned about the mind. Note that I'm saying this assuming your premise is true, then using it to undermine your own claim so using this logic against me is not coherent.
> is not a particularly defensible position.
Defensibility is defined outside itself. For example: "Is the city defensible?" Is a reasonable question, but without defining the threat vector (comets, horsemen, etc) the statement on its own is meaningless.
So please understand that from your own vantage point this claim may seem indefensible, but you are again assuming the premise; and this is, essentially, the number one problem I see in modern thought.
Thinkers in our era have taken a leap of faith to defend rationality and science then proceed to deny that faith had anything to do with it, or, even worse in the case of Sam Harris, deride faith as "surely the devil's masterpiece" beating out ignorance, hatred, greed.
I find this especially rich in light of the damage that greed and hatred have done to the modern world built upon our technological societies. I'm not anti-technology, in fact I am pro-technology, but without the underpinnings that come with faith that is acknowledged and serviced, I believe we'll end up damaging the world more than we aid it over time.
Let me try this again. If you missed that I'm agreeing with you, then others probably did also.
"Modern biological and neurological knowledge" (wording adopted from spicyusername's post) says that our minds evolved over mega-years, to be good enough fast enough to give us a survival edge. They didn't evolve to be pure logic engines, and they show that in all kinds of ways.
Within that view, it is a contradiction to believe "ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning" (your wording). Within the current framework, you can't trust your mind to reach correct conclusions.
I'm not assuming the premise. I'm pointing out that those who do put themselves in a contradictory position.
One thing to notice is that “Enlightenment” would not be called “Enlightenment” until much later. Simply said, you are sharing some pretty specific ideologized historical view point without knowing it. Analyzing it critically would help.
That's a pretty narrow conception of philosophy. Also a narrow conception of what "reality" entails. From ethics to politics, and pretty much every social phenomena, doesn't require a petri dish to be studied.
I don't think it is completely useless, but I hate to build any argument in classical philosophy. No, I do not want to start my argument with Aristoteles and follow the whole chain until I can make a case at some point. Aristoteles is a giant that certainly founded a lot of scientific fields, but the basis of an argument is not improved with a whole theoretical foundation that is artificially attached to the point.
I believe the affliction is that because your philosophical case needs to be argued, it is expected to have a foundation in some philosophical root. With allegedly gives it more weight than just another thought.
It is sensible to read other philosophers I guess, but I think people should be encouraged to argue on their own.
I agree. My father was a historian and philosopher, and I used to love arguing philosophy as a teen at the dinner table. This was because I hadn't read anything yet, and so was approaching with an entirely naive and empty mind.
I then studied a fair bit of philosophy at university, and while I could certainly appreciate the value of actually reading many great thinkers, the idea of spending my life studying them was absurd to me. I could think of nothing more horrifying than being proud to say that someone was one of the world's "top Heidegger scholars." (I recall the movie Little Miss Sunshine where a character was obsessed about his rival being only the "second" highest regarded Proust scholar.) Writing book after book about someone else's philosophy seemed utterly pointless.
To (ironically) quote Seneca: "'Hoc Zenon dixit': tu quid?" What do you have to say?
> It is sensible to read other philosophers I guess, but I think people should be encouraged to argue on their own.
You should be "arguing your own" much of the time you're reading philosophy, no matter how old it is.
It's one of the Three Readings (which can be done all at once, not necessarily in three literal separate passes through the book, if you're a good reader and well-matched to the material you're reading) of Adler's How to Read a Book. You haven't fully engaged with a book—especially a book of philosophy—until you've done it.
> It is sensible to read other philosophers I guess, but I think people should be encouraged to argue on their own.
With your first part of the sentence you already put your second statement in a nuanced context. But I'd argue that "it is sensible" puts too little weight on this side of the argument.
We've all been there: You're new to a field and climb the Dunning Kruger Graph. At some point you're standing on the first hill and start "argue on [your] own".
Most things have already been said and argued. And most probably so by people more knowledgable and intelligent that me and you. And exactly those arguments are the 'history of philosophy'.
We're probably all better off if we learn to move within this tightly knit web of knowledge and be very cautious and conscious every time we leave those trails and 'go on our own'.
That being said, it is mandatory to view the history of philosophy not as the whole ball park but jump over the fence occasionally. Whether we hurt ourself by doing so is almost certainly dependent on how comfortable we are with what has been said and argued before, eg. history of philosophy.
Okay, let's consider the things that have been said and argued.
I'd say that in this case for most people it is not valuable to read the history of the argument but rather an up to date summary of it - the originally made argument is worth reading if and only if it's the best way to make it, no parts of it have been refuted and no one has found a way to state the same thing better.
Instead of listening to what, for example, Kant had to say originally, the proper resource should be a "steelman Kantian" position which omits anything that has valid refutations, which changes anything which has been disputed because of some nuance by integrating whatever fixes and corrections can be made as a result of the counter-counter-arguments, and prepare a coherent position which is solid even in the face of all the counterarguments which have been said in the centuries afterwards, a "what would Kant say after reading every Kant-influenced philosopher" statement.
If some argument made by Aristotle still stands, then readers of philosophy should not be offered the counterarguments without an immediate reference to the counter-counter-arguments that dismiss them.
And if some argument made by Aristotle is not perfect, then readers of philosophy should not be presented with that argument without the counterarguments; or (as I said above) in a corrected and augmented form, dismissing and ignoring the flawed original - the original is relevant only as a historical footnote of how the truth was found, but is not really relevant to the truth itself.
A product of philosophy should be actual conclusions - okay, out of all the Aristotle's works, which parts are considered settled truth, and which parts are part of an ongoing debate? And if so, what is the current, state of art position in that debate, what are the best irreconcilable arguments on both sides?
Thanks for the reply! Indeed it brings something to the table that I have not paid enough attention in my previous comment.
I acknowledge that more often there are updated versions of previous arguments that hold their content 'better' and put them in meaningful context. I wonder where the line is wether we call that 'history of philosophy' or not. Nevertheless this is how students at universities spent most of their time learning philosophy. They rarely read whole original works, mostly just relevant paragraphs and summaries.
You already touched on this in your last sentences, but it's a stronger point that you seem to make out of it. 'Truth' doesn't really exist in this space. There is no 'right' and 'wrong' that hasn't been proven opposite. What you propose here can, if not cautious, lead to 'philosophy on rails'. People will turn into 'intellectuals' (whatever this is), but not into 'philosophers' (whatever this is). So even though I agree with you, this can't be the only approach to philosophy.
Important here is the differentiation between 'doing philosophy' and the 'content of philosophy'. Regarding the second one, this might be a somewhat viable approach. But I highly disagree with phrases like: "philosophy should not be presented/ offered [in a certain way]". This leads to dogmatism. Sure, strong point shall be emphasized and weak spots visible, but implying there is something absolute here surely is to be avoided. But you touched on that in your last sentences anyways.
I'm probably drawing on the distinction between "making knowledge" and "using knowledge", which is generally done by different people, and with the implied assertion that the added value for any field is only to the extent that it enables the latter.
The people who make new physics and the people who learn and apply physics (e.g. engineers) are two separate groups, and physics is valuable mostly because it provides knowledge that enables the latter group of people to do stuff, and we want that knowledge to be packaged in a useful, usable way for those who don't do physics research.
In a similar manner, there are the distinct groups of people who do philosophy and people who apply (or should apply) philosophy, including most scientists of other fields, and in my opinion the value of philosophy as a field is highly contingent on those who do philosophy being able to package the conclusions in a way that is useful and usable for people who are not going to "do philosophy".
Sure, at some point dogmas need to be reviewed and changed - but until they are (by the people who "do philosophy") there should be some reasonable set of the current understanding of philosophy ("current dogma"?) available for the "users of philosophy", and we should be able to compare and see that the current state of this philosophical understanding is better than some centuries ago, that an "user of philosophy" who reads the "content of philosophy" from the era of Nietzsche will be worse off than reading the current "content of philosophy".
It does not need to imply that it's the absolute truth forever, but there needs to be a clear understanding of what is the "closest thing to the truth as far as humanity knows right now"; like in physics we clearly know that the current theories are not the final complete truth (for example, due to incompatibilities of general relativity and quantum physics) and the truth has to be slightly different, but we can and do have an effective dogma which physicists can teach to non-physicists about how physics is to the best of our current understanding - and I'd expect the same from philosophy.
> for most people it is not valuable to read the history of the argument but rathar an up to date summary of it
Agreed. Unless you're studying philosophy academically, it's not usually that helpful to dig out the original papers; instead, you read a contemporary commentary or two. If the commentaries disagree, sure; go back to the original papers, and work it out for yourself.
But somebody has to write those commentaries; and they're written by people who study history of philosophy.
To me that's akin to saying you don't need to understand the history of physics because hey:
F = ma
Is all you need. I mean sure? But then we have a different concept of what "understanding" something means.
The idea that you can ignore history and have some sort objective summary of it is, to me, verging on cargo cult science — the opposite of what scientific (and philosophical) education should be.
> akin to saying you don't need to understand the history of physics
I must have expressed myself badly. I think it's necessary to understand the history of philosophy. I think it's mostly history. Is post-modernism history yet?
Well, unless you are an actual historian (or an academic philosopher), you aren't usually qualified to trace the threads of thought development through time, and across continents and language barriers.
As it happens, the philosophers I focused on for my BA[0] were Nietsche and Wittgenstein. In both cases I read all their published work; then read many commentaries and books on each; then re-read the base works (all in English of course - I had only conversational German).
But I was doing a degree; I had to read all of Nietsche, because I was writing a paper on him. It's perfectly OK to approach the work of philosophers through the commentaries (although it's a shame not to read the base texts[1]).
[0] I scraped a pass. Nietsche wasn't a popular topic where I studied.
[1] Postmodernism crashed in after I studied, so I missed that boat. From what I've read, I wouldn't include that in my remark about base texts)
What is now called and taught as the history of philosophy is not very useful because it's not the actual history of philosophy, academic or otherwise. You learn mostly what little of say, 19th century philosophy we now have respect for regardless of whether that century even knew that thinker was alive. The context, mostly of "greats" that we now think are horse dung, is never given. Knowing how thinkers (and the crowds that love them) went badly wrong would be useful, but is rarely taught. Both the now-highly thought of and then-highly-thought-of are worth some attention.
The condition of man hasn't fundamentally changed in the past 5000 years.
"[...] we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery – from the time of the war of Secession, for example, until the present moment when one chooses between the M.R.P. [Mouvement Republicain Poputaire] and the Communists." ~ Jean-Paul Sartre.
I dove into the history of “harmony” in philosophy and it was fascinating. Also somewhat disturbing, because the topic seems “out there” for a modern philosophy dept, despite the connections to CS, neuroscience, psychology, physics, economics, etc
I studied philosophy to postgraduate level before having to go out and get a real job. Now in late middle age, I am nearly recovered to the point where I have to agree with the author. I now understand that most philosophy, of ANY age or period, including the present, is useless. But there are counterexamples. Hume is still worth reading, on almost any subject. Many of his ideas have not aged at all. Reason as the slave of the passions, is vs ought, compatibilism on free will all come to mind, as do his deep insights on the connections between ideas (Resemblance, Contiguity, cause and effect). These positions are still held by scientifically literate people, and some of them, like the idea of connections between ideas, I have have actually found useful as guidelines for research in AI. And that's without mentioning his influence on political philosophy, which was profound. Hume's notion of the social contract continues to shape political debate in ways not many people realise.
Should we not study old scientists because they had no idea about the concepts we have found recently?
Should we no longer study old politics because their climate was different?
Should old tactics be disregarded because they used different, weaker weapons than us?
Should old art be discarded because they used older theories and didn't understand perspective like we do?
We certainly do not study Newtonian physics based on Newton's writing, and any physics teacher who would use Newton's original argument and Newton's notation would be considered a very bad teacher simply because we have developed far better ways to express the same thing, the original argument is needlessly convoluted and original notation is horribly awkward - future work has improved on that.
This is not because "they had no idea about the concepts we have found recently?" - relativity and other non-Newtonian phyics is a different issue - it's about having the best, most accurate represenation of the same concept, and it is very unlikely that the very first attempt in defining a concept is the best result possible.
We can make (and have made) much better summaries of Newtonian physics than Newton did, better definitions of Newton's principles than those which he wrote, when we teach Newton's laws of motion, we never use the original wording but an improved paraphrase of them. The original has no value for the learner (other than a historical curiosity) because the revised versions are simply better expressions of the same thing. Why don't we require the same thing from philosophy?
This explanation is just a deliberately wrong textbook simplification everyone is expected to simply believe (while also repeating mantras about empiricism and believing nothing). It is as vulgar as, say, the belief that human sacrifice will calm down some Forest God (so please don't ever look down on all those stupid “uneducated” people, everyone is in the same boat).
Newton most certainly did not mean the “same thing” we mean. His context, his models, his metaphysical and spiritual ground were all different from ours. All of that is simply ignored. A student today is presented with appropriated thoroughly mutated cuts, is told that those are Newton's contribution to the glorious building of Science, and never questions that afterwards.
I'm not saying we should use those kinds of old practices as a basis for our modern ones, but rather that it's more healthy for new and developing [scientists/artists/philosophers/etc] to study the history and learn about the steps it took to get to our modern understanding. We can't expect to advance further without knowing the foundation on which our understanding is built. Learning about what it took to advance in the past is how we create a mindset that lets us advance now; we can't begin to think critically without knowing our wrongs and our rights in tandem.
> simply because we have developed far better ways to express the same thing
To be fair, the main reason we don't study Newton's ideas in their original form is that he wrote in Latin. The second is that he went to rather extreme lengths to make his writing obscure; he was very possessive of his ideas, and didn't want other philosophers pinching them.
"The original has no value for the learner (other than a historical curiosity) because the revised versions are simply better expressions of the same thing."
I mean, how would we decide that? Do modern learners understand Newtonian physics better than Newton did? By what metric?
Making predictions within a framework, however extrapolated from the beginning, and coming up with a framework is precisely the qualitative difference that separates them and that is not being taught when people ask for recipes instead of understanding.
"At age ten, he stumbled across a Latin copy of Euclid; and at twelve he studied Newton's Arithmetica Universalis. He moved on to read the Principia, and by age 16 he had covered much of it, as well as some more recent works on analytic geometry and the differential calculus." (from the Wikipedia article about Hamilton).
At the same time there is value in reading the Principa, much of it is said to be very elegant and it is instructive to see some of the geometric reasoning that Newton uses.
Similarly in another field, Economics, I hear undergraduates are still urged to read Wealth of Nations.
To steel man this, in every science class I’ve taken, we read text books. They covered a massive amount of material from an innumerable number of thinkers. In every philosophy class I’ve taken, we read individual books by individual thinkers. Perhaps everyone reading Plato first hand isn’t necessary?
The middle ground is probably currant books - that track the evolution of thinking over time. My favorite example is From Atomos to Atom. I’ve never seen anything like that in a science class.
The thing with science is that it's generally considered more practical than philosophy, and people are content with learning a bunch of pre-packaged recipes to solve pre-packaged problems (use F = ma to solve that inclined plane problem).
But try asking the average student what F = ma actually means a bit deeper than just how they would apply it and you'll see how much the topic is "covered."
Consider that the concepts of force and mass themselves are mostly left unexplained. Or that people have no idea what "energy" is.
They're models of reality that are not taught as such, because we're happy with teaching future engineers a bunch of recipes to learn by rote as long as they "work".
So I remain unconvinced of the proposition that philosophy should be taught the same way. In that respect it's closer to science and the inherent doubt that comes with the scientific method — even though, similarly, there's a lot of dogmatic "philosophy" (think Marxism).
I’d put reading Plato on par with reading The Skeptical Chymist or John Dalton’s Chemical Philosophy. I think it’s a miss primary sources like that are absent from most undergraduate degrees in science - they reveal a lot about what science really is.
But building an entire undergraduate curriculum on nothing but those primary sources? There’s just too much material and so many of those constructs have failed to accurately describe reality.
To use Marxism as an example, Main Currents of Marxism is probably on par with From Atomos to Atom. Both Science and Philosophy could benefit from teaching from currents vs. primary sources (philosophy) and compilations of “facts” (science).
I once saw someone post online that the best way to get into someone’s thought was to read a biography of them. After all, their thought is a reflection of them and the material conditions in which they lived. Their aspirations, tribulations and the potential they saw in a world they wanted to interpret.
Sue Prideaux has a good one on Nietzsche and reading about his education really sets the scene for BGE and Zarathustra, which often confused me before. His father’s early death ‘doomed him’ into the mindset that led to his maniacal study of the will to power, and possibly his own early demise.
Knowing about Nietzsche’s life makes me appreciate what he was getting at, which is useful if you’re not used to his flowery style. It helped me identify more with him, and against him. I know more of what kind of man he was, and that I am very different.
OK this is a bombastic paper by design, but if falls short on a few things, least of which is conflating "study of history" with "historiography".
Worst of all, he completely misses Gadamer's comment regarding the epistemic fruitlessness of philosophizing at all (and not just of studying past philosophers), so in a sense Sauer unwittingly rehashes and expands upon only a partial aspect of that.
But he does express a "popular sentiment", which students of history (and the history of philosophy) will readily discover in any sub-era of modernity (including pomo'ity), but those who turn their backs to history will think it's all new and all of our own devising: namely that "We Know Better".
It's the cultural switch: before modernity we considered "the ancients" as unerring sources of truth, after modernity we started seeing through the cracks.
All too quick to note how pyramids and parthenons have cracks in them after standing for millennia, but wholly unable to produce something even equally sturdy, if not better.
PS: Ah, and by "modernity" I'm referring to the history of this side of the Enlightenment. E.g. I consider Casaubon's 1614 overturning of the presumed antiquity of the Corpus Hermeticum as part of modernity. (But doesn't everyone?)
All philosophy is the history of philosophy, in the sense that you're studying the ideas someone had in the past, whether that's the recent past or the distant past. The only philosophy that isn't history of philosophy is done by a handful of academics, and you can bet they all had a solid grounding in the history of philosophy.
I had to do a course on presocratic Greek philosophers. I couldn't understand why we had to study the ideas of these people whose ideas were wrong, wrong, wrong - even barmy. But all the interesting Greek philosophers knew and were influenced by the presocratics; Plato, Aristotle, the sceptics, the stoics. And so-called "modern" philosophers all studied these later Greeks.
It's impossible to engage with contemporary philosophy without studying the moderns, and studying the classical Greek philosophers makes it a lot easier to understand the moderns.
I'm glad the author mentioned Wittgenstein as a "historical" philosopher to whom attention shouldn't be paid. I don't know how a contemporary philosopher is supposed to approach the philosophy of language and logic without having worked through Wittgenstein and Ayer.
You're basically saying "that's the way things work now, and therefore it is right".
In a sense if you define "philosophy" as "whatever is actually happening in philosophy in academia today", then your argument is tautologically correct.
I think the author (and incidentally, I, too) has a different definition of philosophy, which, in addition to the activities you describe, also includes people coming up with original ideas without studying all those ancient texts.
This is a curious paper, as it seems to come at a time when the philosophical postulate of meliorism has been problematized precisely by the trajectory of historical development, which had previously its own criteria of success.
It might interest the author to know that this was basically the prediction of Vico, one of the most valuable (and misunderstood) philosophers of the not-so-distant past.
He doesn't seem to show anywhere that it is "philosophically unhelpful". I do think philosophical ideas can be taught with zero historical perspective, but it is a whole extra step to say studying the history of philosophy is unhelpful philosophically. That would have to be demonstrated.
Humanity has growing approximately exponentially in numbers. Due to the inherent nature of the exponential process it means that a fixed percentage of all people that have ever lived are still alive. This is turn means that the proportional of historical writing to contemporary writing is approximately fixed. With exponential growth, remembering everything or at least everything significant is sort-of viable. But if humanity is about to stabilize in numbers, which would be desirable, at least until we can expand our society beyond Earth, then it means that the proportion of history to contemporary will steadily increase, and a sort of willful amnesia will become more important. With fixed resources we will have a fixed ability to remember and most pick and choose.
And that's why we have to colonize space. To post-pone amnesia.
I found learning the history of philosophy tied to the history of science was wonderful in helping understand more complex thought. In much the same way as Hume's missing blue or the ontologies of other great minds. I couldn't imagine learning another way but then maybe that is the point.
So it's just that studying what Aristotle said about (most of) empirical knowledge is useless. It's not terribly productive, I agree, but then again, so is studying what Derrida has said about it. If you want to know about empirical sciences, it's best to study the subject itself.
If philosophy is useful (which it may not be), then studying the history of philosophy is useful.
This is like saying "Why bother studying Newton? He didn't even know about relativity!" You study Newton because it's a simple model and motivates what comes after.
I agree. Even though I think the comparison to physics doesn't fully found what you want to say.
Physics is an empirical science with a rather neutral language to communicate its content. Arguments (much more 'findings') can be translated to this language and be understood on their own.
The language of philosophy isn't so clear (or it is, but everyone has their own). Therefore an argument might not be fully understood on its own. The author/ philosopher might have tried to do so, but eventually it is easier to understand an arguments if you know what the state of the art was back then.
My point basically is, that this goes beyond 'motivation' - which is hard to illustrate if we look at physics for comparison.
-
Unrelated: What's better: "My point basically is, [...]" or "My point is basically, [...]". If I knew how to ask this, I'd google it.
You know there is a field of philosophy that study languages and meta-languages. It is now tightly tied to linguistic (maybe because of Noam Chomsky) but you have still logicians who publish in philosophical papers on this subject.
I agree. As I've just stated in another comment, it's hard to say something with substance about philosophy in general. There are just a lot of different fields with individual axioms and scientific methods.
That said, if these 'languages and meta-languages' fields would have found something viable (usage and usability), eg. a good tool to use, we would already use it.
I think they did, i've read an article about that with my previous job, when i was mostly working with EU and universities: they created a meta-language to convey ideas fast between scientists of different fields and talking different languages, but with a common culture.
I dont' have the paper but i found this [0] which might refer to the paper i read.
> Physics is an empirical science with a rather neutral language to communicate its content. Arguments (much more 'findings') can be translated to this language and be understood on their own.
I agree, but it should be taken into account that much of philosophy is based on science (namely psychology/sociology) and a lot of ideas are discarded if they're missing some morsel of empirical evidence.
[I overlooked the "much of" in your first sentence. This would have been my reply:
Yes with limitations. As I implied there are more kind of sciences. Philosophy itself has very diverse fields which have their own sets of scientific methods. So it's hard to say something with substance about the general field of philosophy.
The philosophy I was talking about is more compared to math than empirical evidence based sciences.]
“Physics is not taught or practiced by reading and interpreting Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis, Geometry is not done by studying Euclid’s Elements, and so on”
But it is. Especially for the last one. Graduate level geometry courses still go back to the elements at the beginning of the semester. I know, because I've taken them.
> If philosophy is useful (which it may not be), then studying the history of philosophy is useful.
I'm not sure this follows, though nor can I think of any counterexamples where it is uncontroversially absolutely useless to study the history of a useful subject. But I think that one can, e.g., be a successful professional mathematician without being much interested in the history of mathematics.
Oh, precisely, I'd never argue that we can escape it. Philosophy is the vehicle we have to make our consciousness able to navigate reality.
A point that I'd try to put some light on, is that, among many dangers, we can get lost in false worldviews that trap our consciousness in apparently true realities that are ultimately false by a delicate house of cards/lies/mistakes.
The Matrix, or more appropriately, Plato's Cave, made that point infinitely better than I could ever do.
That won't work in your best interest. Would be like being a citizen of The Matrix, seeing something suspicious that only agents can do, and opting for staying willfully ignorant about it, or even boycott its investigation.
That's exactly what the people in Plato's Cave did.
IMO studying the history of any subject, you're interested in, is really useful as it helps understanding why things are the way they're in the present.
Now, regarding the subject of the 'history of philosophy', what are the contents and how they're structured is a different kind of problem. And, unfortunately, it's not limited to the 'history of philosophy' as we face similar kind of challenge when studying other important subjects.
This challenge can't be avoided all the times but needs a systematic approach; otherwise, one might easily commit the (proverbial) mistake of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".
That's interesting, but there's actually this other philosopher who published a very similar idea sometime around ~1921? I can't remember his reasoning(something about the world being a collection of facts) but I've heard that his thesis actually entirely rejected continental philosophy on similar claims to your own and singlehandedly began the shift towards the analytic philosophy that you seem to be so partial to. I think his name sounded similar to Wittingstein?
If one's goal is a revolution of thought, than perhaps being immersed in the past process is ultimately constraining.
Deference to past authority is an easier road to follow than direct inquiry into one's own experiences. If human society has been plagued throughout its existence by the same innumerable problems then why do we continue on with this current line of reasoning?
I don't have any answers, but thank you for posting this thought provoking piece.
This argument has already been made. You’d know it and the potential responses to it if you’d studied the history of philosophy.
Just kidding. I haven’t seen it made before. I’m just saying so to present the reason I appreciate studding the history of philosophy. I hate thinking I’ve had a novel idea only to find someone has already had it and furthermore three others have replied.
This is the exact thing that bothered me in high school philosophy classes – we were taught of great thinkers of the past, and we studied their thoughts, claims, theories, etc... Even if they were OBVIOUSLY false, in the light of present knowledge. But nobody had the guts to say that out loud.
Strictly speaking this is a joke, but here is my explanation anyway.
If new philosophy requires the study of philosophy, the study of philosophy requires the study of the history of philosophy, and the history of philosophy is increasing linearly with time, so the amount of time required to produce an additional philosophy is proportional the amount of philosophy that exists. The amount of tie to produce X philosophy then is proportional to X^2.
In practice, the set of historical philisophical works considered vital doesn't grow quickly, and tends to gradually discard works even as it gradually picks up others.
Part of the trouble with this paper is that it acts like the only qualities that keep works in the common set that most or all philosophers will study, is that they're old and that they're influential. As if the set is not heavily narrowed by other criteria, including quality of the writing and arguments, and that they've been widely observed to be improving to study over hundreds of years. Works that are simply wrong and have no other redeeming qualities tend to be discarded except by specialists deep-diving into a niche, even if they were very influential. I don't think most philosophers read much more than excerpts of a handful of famous arguments or passages from the whole centuries-long scholastic movement, for instance, unless they're very specifically Christian religious philosophers or apologists. Or the Neo-platonists, et c., et c. The ones that stick around do so because they are repeatedly, generation after generation, found to be useful, having endured through the aforementioned narrowing process while dozens or hundreds of once-vital works have fallen into obscurity.
People like Frege and Russell made certain choices in the design of formal logic because they were influenced by Leibniz, who, in turn, arranged things in a certain way because he was influenced by Aristotle. If you don't know what Aristotle said, it's hard to understand Leibniz, and if you don't know Leibniz, it's hard to understand Frege and Russell.