[HN Gopher] I argue that studying the history of philosophy is p...
___________________________________________________________________
I argue that studying the history of philosophy is philosophically
unhelpful
Author : dynm
Score : 63 points
Date : 2022-09-28 13:16 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tandfonline.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tandfonline.com)
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I didn't get far with this.
|
| 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.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| To be fair to the paper, the author merely calls for "less"
| attention paid to historical philosophy, not none.
|
| You didn't miss much by not continuing. The paper's... rough.
| tgv wrote:
| 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.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| Hegel would've agreed, anyway.
|
| ... whoops.
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| 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.
| ycombinete wrote:
| From the article:
|
| _"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"_
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| 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.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| The alternative to Philosophy is The Matrix (flawless global
| alienation).
|
| Our thinking is unconsciously molded by philosophers that died
| hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
| WHA8m wrote:
| This is not an alternative to philosophy. This is philosophy.
| I'm afraid you have not escaped yet, sir.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| 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.
| im3w1l wrote:
| You might argue that getting this molding "for free" as it
| were, is exactly the reason we don't need to study them.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| 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.
|
| How ironic is that?
| JadeNB wrote:
| > 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.
| WHA8m wrote:
| 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.
| prego_xo wrote:
| > 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.
| WHA8m wrote:
| I agree.
|
| [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.]
| orwin wrote:
| 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.
|
| Not my cup of tea, but worth taking a look at.
| WHA8m wrote:
| Yes I know. No one likes these guys /s
|
| 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.
| orwin wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332781241_De
| velopin...
| pron wrote:
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
|
| Digging to find root causes of common shibboleths and tropes
| is also useful in debunking those same (or so I'd like to
| hope: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=fa
| lse&qu...>).
| keithnz wrote:
| 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.
| ycombinete wrote:
| 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._
| tz18 wrote:
| how about you read the paper?
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| 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.
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| 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.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| I don't need to understand how a fence post evolved in
| order to successfully use fence posts.
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| 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.
| igorkraw wrote:
| Use? No, math is a tool.
|
| 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.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| You don't need to understand the history of monotonicity to
| understand and effectively use the concept.
|
| Will it make you better? yes, of course, but that isn't
| what's being discussed here.
| scythe wrote:
| Nomentatus wrote:
| 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 know 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.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| I think Olavo de Carvalho would agree.
|
| Is not completely useless but is kind of like 98% useless.
| ouid wrote:
| its certainly troublingly quadratic
| JadeNB wrote:
| In what sense?
| ouid wrote:
| 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.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| mikrl wrote:
| The history of philosophy, sure.
|
| The history of philosophers, I would disagree.
|
| 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.
| terkozz wrote:
| 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.
| Maursault wrote:
| 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.
| ThatGeoGuy wrote:
| 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.
| Maursault wrote:
| The author again is question begging all over the place.
| When the conclusion is built-in to the premises, the
| argument is necessarily fallacious.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| This bizarrely conflates understanding or familiarity, with
| believing.
|
| Incidentally, how's the Bohr model doing? Still widely
| taught? Well why's that, since it's wrong?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
|
| <https://poets.org/poem/memoriam-h-h>
|
| 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.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 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
|
| https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2022.01.001 "Harmony in Design: A
| Synthesis of Literature from Classical Philosophy, the Sciences,
| Economics, and Design"
| huetius wrote:
| 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.
| smeagull wrote:
| 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.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > Progress implies amelioration
|
| Progress NOW implies amelioration. Before the XVI century it
| only meant you were going from A to B.
|
| It's a new theology.
| conformist wrote:
| 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?
| spicyusername wrote:
| 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.
| arolihas wrote:
| Philosophy is more than just metaphysics. Is stoicism nonsense?
| spicyusername wrote:
| > Philosophy is more than just metaphysics
|
| Very true.
|
| > Is stoicism nonsense?
|
| As a way to help you feel more in control in your personal
| life, no.
|
| As a pathway to understand what is, humankind's place in what
| is, and what we should do about what is, yes.
| retrac wrote:
| 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.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > 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.
| omeze wrote:
| 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!
| spicyusername wrote:
| > You realize that in 200 years people will be saying the
| same thing about us, right?
|
| Very good point. I 100% agree.
|
| What I'm arguing is that hard sciences are the only pathway
| to real understanding, and the hard sciences only got started
| during the enlightenment.
|
| Anything before then was just somebody grasping at straws
| really convincingly.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > 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.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| > 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.
| ogurechny wrote:
| 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.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Philosophy has more periods when it's useless in the western
| tradition
|
| Remember Hegel? Anyone citing him except to exclusively shit on
| him (as stirner did) is barking up a tree of bullshit.
| [deleted]
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Brains in vats and all that.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > 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.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| > 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| becquerel wrote:
| Sam Harris alt detected.
| spicyusername wrote:
| Hah!
| sdf4j wrote:
| 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.
| spicyusername wrote:
| > doesn't require a petri dish to be studied.
|
| True, that it doesn't require a petri dish, but it does
| require the scientific method.
| pell wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| Bakary wrote:
| 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.
| spicyusername wrote:
| > 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
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| 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.
| more_corn wrote:
| 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.
| ajkjk wrote:
| 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.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| 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.
| ajkjk wrote:
| "The wisdom of the ancients is timeless."
|
| Everyone says this and I don't believe it. Wise people
| existed then and wise people exist now. The new wise people's
| wisdom is much more relevant.
| atypicaluser wrote:
| > _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.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >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.
| brightball wrote:
| The more you study people from thousands of years ago the more
| you realize they were exactly the same as we are now, just in a
| different environment.
|
| You can learn a lot about people that way.
| WHA8m wrote:
| > just in a different environment
|
| 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']
| brightball wrote:
| In most of what I have seen, human nature has been very
| consistent over the years.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| 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.
| im3w1l wrote:
| 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.
| ogurechny wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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._
|
| <https://nitter.kavin.rocks/HistPhilosophy/status/15732353053...>
|
| I'm inclined to think that this is all the response that's
| required.
|
| (I do find several other comments on this thread on point,
| notably those by pron
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008453>, terkozz
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008248>, and ougerechny
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010884>)
| marshray wrote:
| I love a good _reductio ad twitterati_ argument.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| So long as we're stanning Peter:
|
| <https://nitter.kavin.rocks/HistPhilosophy/status/15689571978
| ...>
| freddealmeida wrote:
| 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.
| drb493 wrote:
| 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.
| greenhearth wrote:
| The irony is that the author just uses an "end of history"
| argument, which has been around since German pessimism over a
| century ago.
| alasr wrote:
| 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 what are the contents of the subject of the 'history of
| philosophy' and how they're structured is a different problem.
| And, 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
| mistake of (proverbial) "throwing the baby out with the
| bathwater".
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| 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.
| WHA8m wrote:
| > 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.
| PeterisP wrote:
| 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?
| WHA8m wrote:
| 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.
| PeterisP wrote:
| 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.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > 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.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| 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.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > 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)
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > 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.
| umanwizard wrote:
| FYI it is spelled "Aristotle" in English
| SamBam wrote:
| 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?
| greenhearth wrote:
| Hey, that's quite an impressive piece of autobiography, but
| some people actually like interpreting great writers and make
| a life out of it.
| prego_xo wrote:
| 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?
|
| No.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| 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.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| The term "covered" does a lot of work here.
|
| 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).
| PeterisP wrote:
| 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?
| billfruit wrote:
| 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.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| "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?
| ogurechny wrote:
| 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.
| prego_xo wrote:
| 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.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Read the Newton Leibniz correspondence.
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