The wisdom of the times called old is the wisdom of the cradle.
October 6, 2022 10:41 PM Subscribe
Philosophers should stop wasting time on old philosophers. "In this paper, I argue that studying the history of philosophy is philosophically unhelpful. The epistemic aims of philosophy, if there are any, are largely frustrated by engaging with the history of philosophy.
My claim is that we can learn surprisingly little about philosophical problems by studying the works of the ‘great’ historical philosophers such as Aristotle, Hegel, or Wittgenstein. Examples for philosophical problems are: what is knowledge and how do we acquire it? What constitutes a just society? How does the human mind work? What are natural laws? Where does linguistic meaning come from? Becoming acquainted with the history of philosophy contributes very little to improving our understanding of those problems and their potential solutions, so we would be better off doing much less of it."
"It is unlikely that historical authors were right about anything because they lacked the scientific and/or empirical information required for it, since so many philosophical claims or theories depend on scientific and/or empirical propositions.
It is unlikely that historical authors were right about anything because they lacked the theoretical and/or conceptual sophistication required for it, since philosophical competence hinges on at least a basic degree of familiarity with current philosophical debates."
"It is unlikely that historical authors were right about anything because they lacked the scientific and/or empirical information required for it, since so many philosophical claims or theories depend on scientific and/or empirical propositions.
It is unlikely that historical authors were right about anything because they lacked the theoretical and/or conceptual sophistication required for it, since philosophical competence hinges on at least a basic degree of familiarity with current philosophical debates."
This is wrong, completely wrong, but in an interesting way.
The point of studying dead peoples' ideas isn't that they might be righter than us. I mean, they might, but mostly they're past. It's mostly because it's so very hard to separate our own ideas from exactly that context of lived and experienced past, hard as we try. If you want an entirely ahistorical ethics, new and fresh from the baggage of the past, you'd better have a mountain to climb, and tablets to bring down when you get back.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:06 PM on October 6, 2022 [51 favorites]
However, philosophy is not only a humanistic discipline, and as far as the part that focuses on the substantive problems is concerned – how to understand time, or virtue, or God – a striking and frequently noticed asymmetry remains: the history of most scientific disciplines, while interesting, plays little or no role in how those disciplines conduct their business todayThis is true, and I think the author's drawing exactly the opposite normative conclusion, and for the argument, just take a look at the kind of ideas our STEM people put forward into public. (IMO, more technologists and scientists should be aware of the pasts of their own fields, please, if only to save historians and philosophers from having to gesture so often at the file marked 'we tried that in the 20thC and it's bad'!). If you want to do philosophical research into some key questions of philosophy, let's say, 'what is a just society', then you can't get around historical questions of how past societies justified themselves, and how those ideas echo in our own assumptions and values, and precisely in the questions that we ask and the potential solutions we reject. Everything we know came from somewhere.
many philosophical problems on the agenda today only make sense in a particular historical context; many others not on the agenda have simply been forgotten about, often for reasons that are difficult to understand. But we also shouldn’t exaggerate this point.That's a very notable shrugging off of the whole project of history (broader than philosophical history, I mean), being an awareness of intellectual and structural inheritance.
The point of studying dead peoples' ideas isn't that they might be righter than us. I mean, they might, but mostly they're past. It's mostly because it's so very hard to separate our own ideas from exactly that context of lived and experienced past, hard as we try. If you want an entirely ahistorical ethics, new and fresh from the baggage of the past, you'd better have a mountain to climb, and tablets to bring down when you get back.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:06 PM on October 6, 2022 [51 favorites]
This guy sounds like he's so convinced that what he's saying is valuable that he's come up with an entire theory and framework about why no, you can't actually say that this is a solved issue, a waste of time, look, you're the waste of time, history itself is a waste of time!
posted by Dysk at 11:15 PM on October 6, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 11:15 PM on October 6, 2022 [7 favorites]
(Don't get me wrong, there is a tendency - particularly from people outside the field, in my experience - for undue weight and prestige to be put upon specifically Classical philosophy - but history is not just ancient Greeks, and the fact that ancient Greeks are perhaps sometimes overvalued does not mean there is no value there.)
posted by Dysk at 11:17 PM on October 6, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 11:17 PM on October 6, 2022 [8 favorites]
Clavdivs, speaking of the classics; “Whereof one cannot give it up, therefore, one must turn it loose” —Brown, James (Tractatus Hot Pants)
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:21 PM on October 6, 2022 [24 favorites]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:21 PM on October 6, 2022 [24 favorites]
Time wastes us, not the other way around.
posted by jamjam at 11:32 PM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by jamjam at 11:32 PM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]
I will say I'm sympathetic to the argument because save me from modern philosophers who clearly have no understanding of science beyond high school-understanding (at least) and then say, continue to base their arguments about certain ethics of technology based on ... the aristotelian understanding of the atom. it's one thing to cite your sources in building your argument the way legal scholars do but modern philosophy feels so insular, or at least the ones that break into popular understanding. but at least it does illustrate to me how much philosophy and 'natural sciences' diverged over the centuries, especially per Fiasco de Gama's comment, where STEM people on the other hand exhibit no training or discipline in understanding their history.
even political philosophy (ie the less 'hard' sciences) suffers from this - there's been no mainstreaming of current research in the fields of sociology in their arguments, it feels like?
posted by cendawanita at 11:44 PM on October 6, 2022 [7 favorites]
even political philosophy (ie the less 'hard' sciences) suffers from this - there's been no mainstreaming of current research in the fields of sociology in their arguments, it feels like?
posted by cendawanita at 11:44 PM on October 6, 2022 [7 favorites]
This looks, sounds and smells like a thin argument with a lot of padding. I do kind of see the point that we need to focus on solutions to today's problems, not the problems of thousands of years ago, but examining historical philosophies in the context of the problems they were considering at that time can at least tell us what's been tried before and what still works. Trying to apply centuries-old philosophies to modern programs while ignoring the contextual differences would lead to almost certain failure.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, indeed.
posted by dg at 11:45 PM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, indeed.
posted by dg at 11:45 PM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]
"Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests"
-E.H. Carr.
"They can play a bugle call
Like you never heard before
So natural that you want to go to war"
-Ethel Merman, The Ethel Merman Disco Album
posted by clavdivs at 11:59 PM on October 6, 2022 [4 favorites]
-E.H. Carr.
"They can play a bugle call
Like you never heard before
So natural that you want to go to war"
-Ethel Merman, The Ethel Merman Disco Album
posted by clavdivs at 11:59 PM on October 6, 2022 [4 favorites]
"It is said too that the king of the Scythians had a high-quality mare all of whose colts were good; the king, wishing to breed from the best out of the mother, brought it to her to mate; but it refused; but after she had been concealed under a wrap it mounted her in ignorance; and when the mare’s face was uncovered after the mating, at sight of her the horse ran away and threw itself down the cliffs." - Aristotle
Which is to say that I don't think ignoring the history of philosophy is a good thing, but it is certainly also not good to go too far into the weeds with it.
posted by Literaryhero at 12:40 AM on October 7, 2022 [5 favorites]
Which is to say that I don't think ignoring the history of philosophy is a good thing, but it is certainly also not good to go too far into the weeds with it.
posted by Literaryhero at 12:40 AM on October 7, 2022 [5 favorites]
For my money, the best attempt to sum up this debate was the rhetorician Kenneth Burke's Unending Conversation metaphor. Basically, to say there is no value in the history of the discussion is merely to acknowledge the interminableness of it all. To say the discussion of the past has no value is to resign your work at present to the same fate. Which is fine I guess. It's all castles of sand anyways, I suppose.
I don't think we'll ever find a more successful philosopher than Heraclitus, for whom so few fragments remain except for wonderful aphorisms like "Everything Flows." I'm inclined to think he'd be happy to know so little survived except that
posted by Perko at 1:02 AM on October 7, 2022 [9 favorites]
I don't think we'll ever find a more successful philosopher than Heraclitus, for whom so few fragments remain except for wonderful aphorisms like "Everything Flows." I'm inclined to think he'd be happy to know so little survived except that
posted by Perko at 1:02 AM on October 7, 2022 [9 favorites]
MetaFilter: a thin argument with a lot of padding
posted by chavenet at 1:02 AM on October 7, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 1:02 AM on October 7, 2022 [9 favorites]
A good ploy by a clever student but, no, study history nevertheless.
It’s not as if this were a field like medicine wherein you needn’t study the failed attempts of old white dudes who liked to fuck with unwilling subjects. Au contraire, by their fruits you shall know them, and as old quacks messed up millions, old philosophers have not— and are considered in the main as pretty chill dudes.
posted by BlunderingArtist at 1:04 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
It’s not as if this were a field like medicine wherein you needn’t study the failed attempts of old white dudes who liked to fuck with unwilling subjects. Au contraire, by their fruits you shall know them, and as old quacks messed up millions, old philosophers have not— and are considered in the main as pretty chill dudes.
posted by BlunderingArtist at 1:04 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
As the philosopher David Berlinski said, "However good an argument in philosophy may happen to be, it is generally not good enough." I think Sauer has a point: it may well be that philosophers study old philosophers too much. But most of his analogies are poor arguments. In particular, analogies with mathematics or physics, fields where knowledge advances dramatically and continuously. Linguistics might be a better model: we still cite works from the 1800s because they are still the best scholarship on certain questions.
He maintains that one should look at what other people have said on a topic, but the only requirement is "trying to appreciate what other contemporary thinkers have written about a topic". Now that might well be a good way to write a paper, but shouldn't a philosopher, of all people, ask if modern thinkers are self-evidently and obviously correct? If not, surely you would have trouble discovering their errors if you forbid studying anyone else?
Or to exaggerate his argument slightly, why study philosophers who published before 2000? He's willing to go back to 1987, but 1953 (Wittgenstein) is across some sort of epistemic divide?
He mentions justice as one issue... but he's going for easy pickings by criticizing Aristotle and Plato. Would he call Karl Marx irrelevant, because he's even older than Wittgenstein? I could also point to some Middle Eastern texts, 2000 to 4000 years old, that are concerned with justice in ways very compatible with modern thinking. It's not all defenses of slavery and kings; quite the opposite.
posted by zompist at 1:10 AM on October 7, 2022 [8 favorites]
He maintains that one should look at what other people have said on a topic, but the only requirement is "trying to appreciate what other contemporary thinkers have written about a topic". Now that might well be a good way to write a paper, but shouldn't a philosopher, of all people, ask if modern thinkers are self-evidently and obviously correct? If not, surely you would have trouble discovering their errors if you forbid studying anyone else?
Or to exaggerate his argument slightly, why study philosophers who published before 2000? He's willing to go back to 1987, but 1953 (Wittgenstein) is across some sort of epistemic divide?
He mentions justice as one issue... but he's going for easy pickings by criticizing Aristotle and Plato. Would he call Karl Marx irrelevant, because he's even older than Wittgenstein? I could also point to some Middle Eastern texts, 2000 to 4000 years old, that are concerned with justice in ways very compatible with modern thinking. It's not all defenses of slavery and kings; quite the opposite.
posted by zompist at 1:10 AM on October 7, 2022 [8 favorites]
Hmmm. FdG, you say the paper shrugs off the the whole project of history. But this passage came to mind as I was reading your comment:
When it comes to exploring the genesis of our intuitions, we would expect philosophers to engage with the history of their discipline much less than they actually do, and instead dive deep into psychology, biology, regular history or cultural history. So here, too, the justification we are offered for the history of philosophy ends up recommending that we do something else.
Which I would take as saying that the project of history is indeed very important, but the history of philosophy is a very limited way of understanding how past societies justified themselves, separating contemporary ideas from the past, and so on. More, that if those things are important to us, and they probably should be, we would do different things in philosophy.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:33 AM on October 7, 2022 [4 favorites]
When it comes to exploring the genesis of our intuitions, we would expect philosophers to engage with the history of their discipline much less than they actually do, and instead dive deep into psychology, biology, regular history or cultural history. So here, too, the justification we are offered for the history of philosophy ends up recommending that we do something else.
Which I would take as saying that the project of history is indeed very important, but the history of philosophy is a very limited way of understanding how past societies justified themselves, separating contemporary ideas from the past, and so on. More, that if those things are important to us, and they probably should be, we would do different things in philosophy.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:33 AM on October 7, 2022 [4 favorites]
Why is the history of biology more important than the history of philosophy for the study of philosophy?
I'm just a dilettante and admittedly I don't think justification is the strongest argument for studying the history of philosophy. I do have a growing interest in this subject though (most of my knowledge having been recently acquired by repeated readings of Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization, which does offer a good fairly concise overview up to the Napoleonic era, with a Western bias).
What strikes me is how RELEVANT the history of philosophy is, how ancient thinkers can help to provide a distinct context to reevaluate the limitations of our own frame of reference. THAT is the main value here -- overcoming this mechanistic materialist hubris that our overweening hunger for more and more data is somehow an indication of our superior wisdom, a bias that seems almost universal in contemporary discussions imo.
One key issue which defines the modern crisis of philosophy from my plebian perspective is notable for its omission from the discussion so far, and to me is an issue that resonates strongly throughout the history of philosophy -- from the classics, through the interminable tedium of scholasticism, and of course it's echoed in the rational age as well.
posted by viborg at 1:51 AM on October 7, 2022 [4 favorites]
I'm just a dilettante and admittedly I don't think justification is the strongest argument for studying the history of philosophy. I do have a growing interest in this subject though (most of my knowledge having been recently acquired by repeated readings of Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization, which does offer a good fairly concise overview up to the Napoleonic era, with a Western bias).
What strikes me is how RELEVANT the history of philosophy is, how ancient thinkers can help to provide a distinct context to reevaluate the limitations of our own frame of reference. THAT is the main value here -- overcoming this mechanistic materialist hubris that our overweening hunger for more and more data is somehow an indication of our superior wisdom, a bias that seems almost universal in contemporary discussions imo.
One key issue which defines the modern crisis of philosophy from my plebian perspective is notable for its omission from the discussion so far, and to me is an issue that resonates strongly throughout the history of philosophy -- from the classics, through the interminable tedium of scholasticism, and of course it's echoed in the rational age as well.
posted by viborg at 1:51 AM on October 7, 2022 [4 favorites]
I mainly disagree, but I think there might be some value in integrating history and theory better. On my undergraduate degree there was studying a period or a philosopher on the one hand, and studying topics on the other. It might have been better to do topics, but more thoroughly informed by history/significant philosophers.
It’s true the history sometimes holds us back (personally I think the largely meaningless bitching about dualism is an example, ymmv), but it would be pretty weird to start doing philosophy without taking at least a glance at what had been said previously.
posted by Phanx at 2:05 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
It’s true the history sometimes holds us back (personally I think the largely meaningless bitching about dualism is an example, ymmv), but it would be pretty weird to start doing philosophy without taking at least a glance at what had been said previously.
posted by Phanx at 2:05 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
...Any guesses? Heh.
Anyway before my semi-reflexive defense post my intention was to tie in some other reading I've resorted to lately, inspired by this comment.
For my money, the best attempt to sum up this debate was the rhetorician Kenneth Burke's Unending Conversation metaphor. Basically, to say there is no value in the history of the discussion is merely to acknowledge the interminableness of it all. To say the discussion of the past has no value is to resign your work at present to the same fate. Which is fine I guess. It's all castles of sand anyways, I suppose.
I don't think we'll ever find a more successful philosopher than Heraclitus, for whom so few fragments remain except for wonderful aphorisms like "Everything Flows." I'm inclined to think he'd be happy to know so little survived except that
posted by Perko at 1:02 AM on October 7
Me I will stan all day for Laozi (Lao Tzu) but even Wikipedia plainly states "his historicity is doubtful", I'm not deceiving myself. Someone, or some community, that produced that book had some real insight though, and Heraclitus from what I know often seems tangentially aligned with that worldview. "Everything flows" sounds taoist af.
Apparently Heraclitus was a big influence on one DH Lawrence too, of whom I've been reading Women In Love. I won't necessarily recommend it, maybe we don't need to focus overly on the ruminations of old white dudes but the particular themes of that novel resonate with this discussion. In particular there's a quote from Heraclitus highlighted in the text during one of the interminable discussions of pop-ish philosophy, and apparently some consider this quote the key to unlocking the work's fundamental themes.
"A dry soul is best."
What does this mean? I have to be honest, I did my best to briefly look into it and I have NO FRIGGIN IDEA. But others have thoughts (from Cambridge):
posted by viborg at 2:17 AM on October 7, 2022 [7 favorites]
Anyway before my semi-reflexive defense post my intention was to tie in some other reading I've resorted to lately, inspired by this comment.
For my money, the best attempt to sum up this debate was the rhetorician Kenneth Burke's Unending Conversation metaphor. Basically, to say there is no value in the history of the discussion is merely to acknowledge the interminableness of it all. To say the discussion of the past has no value is to resign your work at present to the same fate. Which is fine I guess. It's all castles of sand anyways, I suppose.
I don't think we'll ever find a more successful philosopher than Heraclitus, for whom so few fragments remain except for wonderful aphorisms like "Everything Flows." I'm inclined to think he'd be happy to know so little survived except that
posted by Perko at 1:02 AM on October 7
Me I will stan all day for Laozi (Lao Tzu) but even Wikipedia plainly states "his historicity is doubtful", I'm not deceiving myself. Someone, or some community, that produced that book had some real insight though, and Heraclitus from what I know often seems tangentially aligned with that worldview. "Everything flows" sounds taoist af.
Apparently Heraclitus was a big influence on one DH Lawrence too, of whom I've been reading Women In Love. I won't necessarily recommend it, maybe we don't need to focus overly on the ruminations of old white dudes but the particular themes of that novel resonate with this discussion. In particular there's a quote from Heraclitus highlighted in the text during one of the interminable discussions of pop-ish philosophy, and apparently some consider this quote the key to unlocking the work's fundamental themes.
"A dry soul is best."
What does this mean? I have to be honest, I did my best to briefly look into it and I have NO FRIGGIN IDEA. But others have thoughts (from Cambridge):
Summary -- COSMIC FIRESorry for the derail but this is really gripping stuff for me and I'm very interested in learning more about this context. Guess I'll have to make Heraclitus next on my reading list.
Nietzsche existed for Lawrence as a kind of atmospheric presence diffused over many years and absorbed from many directions, a presence to which Lawrence's response was highly ambivalent. Heraclitus provides a complete contrast. We can identify with precision the moment and the place where Lawrence first encountered him, and there is no mistaking the nature of his reaction. The encounter occurred in July of 1915 in the pages of John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, which had been loaned to Lawrence by Bertrand Russell. The effect on Lawrence was electric - a classic instance of what Edmund Wilson called “the shock of recognition.” We have already seen his response: “I shall write out Herakleitos on tablets of bronze,” he exclaimed to Russell in a letter (2: 364). He wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell, “I shall write all my philosophy again. Last time I came out of the Christian camp. This time I must come out of these early Greek philosophers” (2: 367).
Pre-Socratic thought in general struck Lawrence as a new revelation, but, as George A. Panichas observes in his essay on “Lawrence and the Ancient Greeks,” it is clearly Heraclitus of all the Greeks who is “closest in spirit to Lawrence” (341) and who made by far the greatest impression. It is Heraclitus whose influence is discernible in “The Crown”, on which Lawrence was working at the time, and it is Heraclitus whom Lawrence quotes in Women in Love, on which he was also working.
posted by viborg at 2:17 AM on October 7, 2022 [7 favorites]
Remarkable confluence of ideas, from another textual analysis of Women In Love, with this discussion:
posted by viborg at 2:27 AM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
The second disciplinary crisis was in philosophy, which led to the analytic/Continental split. While there are many ways of characterizing this split, I find Richard Rorty's recent formulation insightful and compelling. According to Rorty, analytic philosophers treat theThe analytic/Continental split is mostly beyond my ken but the frame of reference generally offers insight. (Actually if anyone can recommend a worthwhile overview of the history of philosophy after 1800 I'd be indebted.)
concept like an immutable Idea, an ahistorical precept "which philosophical analysis can hope to pin down". According to this view, there exists a concept that is best suited to represent the world aright and this concept is what it is whether humans perceive it or not. The task of the analytic philosopher, therefore, is to create a system of thinking that would enable humans to access this pre-given, mind-independent concept. In the Continental tradition, by contrast, the concept is treated like a person, "never quite the same twice, always developing, always maturing" According to this view, concepts are human creations that evolve in relation to the community of language users. Therefore, what the world is in and of itself is simply an incoherent idea.
posted by viborg at 2:27 AM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
I don't really know much about philosophy to put forward a cogent argument, but two thoughts come to mind which I hope might be sufficiently juicy to justify my comment:
1) Physics tends to teach the structure of the atom as a history lesson, by going through the various models proposed for the atom in the 20th century, and why they were superseded. Depending on your level, this stops in the 60s with whizzing electrons, or extends into the probability clouds of modern quantum thought. This is quite useful as a pedagogical technique, because it reinforces a few things: science is a process, that advancements come from the refinement of earlier ideas, and the ideas you're being taught now will probably be taught in the future as a history lesson.
2) I am reminded that infamous neofeudal dickhead Mencius Moldbug developed his ideas by reading old philosophical treatises digitised on Google Books. The old scholarship, absent the new debunkings, leads one astray; unfortunately, though, the newer ones aren't free.
posted by Merus at 2:42 AM on October 7, 2022 [7 favorites]
1) Physics tends to teach the structure of the atom as a history lesson, by going through the various models proposed for the atom in the 20th century, and why they were superseded. Depending on your level, this stops in the 60s with whizzing electrons, or extends into the probability clouds of modern quantum thought. This is quite useful as a pedagogical technique, because it reinforces a few things: science is a process, that advancements come from the refinement of earlier ideas, and the ideas you're being taught now will probably be taught in the future as a history lesson.
2) I am reminded that infamous neofeudal dickhead Mencius Moldbug developed his ideas by reading old philosophical treatises digitised on Google Books. The old scholarship, absent the new debunkings, leads one astray; unfortunately, though, the newer ones aren't free.
posted by Merus at 2:42 AM on October 7, 2022 [7 favorites]
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Hanno Sauer, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
posted by chavenet at 2:48 AM on October 7, 2022
posted by chavenet at 2:48 AM on October 7, 2022
Physicists do not keep studying Newton’s Principia precisely because of what he has accomplished. The best way of respecting Newton is to ignore him – or, more precisely, to ignore his own writings in favor of the lasting results he produced, the substance of which can be paraphrased and taught – because the progress engendered by his work allows us to.
The cure I am recommending is a healthy dose of historical amnesia to counterbalance the burden imposed by the weight of history.
Well I disagree with this author's final message. The reason this works, why we don't read Newton's writings, in the sciences is because of actual scientific progress. Amnesia as a cure is just fixing the symptom.
posted by polymodus at 2:57 AM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
The cure I am recommending is a healthy dose of historical amnesia to counterbalance the burden imposed by the weight of history.
Well I disagree with this author's final message. The reason this works, why we don't read Newton's writings, in the sciences is because of actual scientific progress. Amnesia as a cure is just fixing the symptom.
posted by polymodus at 2:57 AM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
As a sciency person with very little exposure to philosophy, I find it surprising that there is anything more important about philosophy than its history. Is there any sense in which philosophers today are actually addressing real problems of ethics, knowledge, understanding in a way that will ever have an impact on anyone outside the field?
It seems to me that it’s a subject best studied as an object of inspection rather than a living field: how did contemporary culture and events affect the way these old dudes thought about and write about the subject? How did they build on each other’s ideas over time? What grievous errors did they make and what consequences did they have? How has philosophy been misused to justify evil or rationalize idiocy?
posted by bgribble at 3:51 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
It seems to me that it’s a subject best studied as an object of inspection rather than a living field: how did contemporary culture and events affect the way these old dudes thought about and write about the subject? How did they build on each other’s ideas over time? What grievous errors did they make and what consequences did they have? How has philosophy been misused to justify evil or rationalize idiocy?
posted by bgribble at 3:51 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
The epistemic aims of philosophy, if there are any, are frustrated by engaging with the history of philosophy, because we have little reason to think that the claims made by history’s great philosophers would survive closer scrutiny today.This is because we are all modern and also not dead, which proves that nobody in the Old Times had a clue. Also, ninjas are totally sweet, especially when they flip out and wale on their guitars.
posted by flabdablet at 4:07 AM on October 7, 2022 [3 favorites]
Philosophers should stop wasting time on old philosophers.Because then they might listen to meeeeeeeeeeeee
posted by flabdablet at 4:12 AM on October 7, 2022 [11 favorites]
Existential Comics. The Value of Philosophy. Is Philosophy Useless?
posted by TheophileEscargot at 4:21 AM on October 7, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by TheophileEscargot at 4:21 AM on October 7, 2022 [7 favorites]
In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face. - Diogenes
Which is to say that I do think ignoring the history of philosophy is a good thing, but it is certainly sometimes good to go far into the weeds with it.
posted by Literaryhero at 6:12 AM on October 7, 2022 [3 favorites]
Which is to say that I do think ignoring the history of philosophy is a good thing, but it is certainly sometimes good to go far into the weeds with it.
posted by Literaryhero at 6:12 AM on October 7, 2022 [3 favorites]
Cool. Now do economics.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 6:58 AM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 6:58 AM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
I think this paper is pretty bad in a lot of ways. It's opening thought experiment makes no sense. The past isn't an island, full of weirdos, that we paddle out to when we open up a copy of Plotinus, it's the ground on which we tread, it's the bricks that make up our mental architecture. The history of philosophy lives on in our very language. To ignore it is to assume we can think pure thoughts, divorced from the thousands of years of thought that helped construct them. Arrogance! pure arrogance.
I have a lot of other thoughts about this but the primary one is: suppose we abandon reading the mighty dead. First, where do we start. There is no "state of the art" in philosophy and we cannot write a textbook called: "Philosophy, 5th Edition" with some chapters on epistemology, metaphysics, metaethics, that have some theses, proofs, lemmas and corollaries, along with some exercises (pull this lever while this train approaches). If the author could come up with just one, ONE single proposition or argument that is widely accepted without any significant, non-fringe challenge in every general area of philosophy, then maybe we'd be ready to go. To bolster their argument, it would help if they could show that this proposition depends on some knowledge from recent science.
(For example, I would argue that there are no natural kinds, that natural kinds are a legacy of aristotelianism, and after Darwin it should be obvious that this is not the case. Now go to google scholar and look up articles on natural kinds. Natural kinds are still going, natürlich)
posted by dis_integration at 7:11 AM on October 7, 2022 [7 favorites]
I have a lot of other thoughts about this but the primary one is: suppose we abandon reading the mighty dead. First, where do we start. There is no "state of the art" in philosophy and we cannot write a textbook called: "Philosophy, 5th Edition" with some chapters on epistemology, metaphysics, metaethics, that have some theses, proofs, lemmas and corollaries, along with some exercises (pull this lever while this train approaches). If the author could come up with just one, ONE single proposition or argument that is widely accepted without any significant, non-fringe challenge in every general area of philosophy, then maybe we'd be ready to go. To bolster their argument, it would help if they could show that this proposition depends on some knowledge from recent science.
(For example, I would argue that there are no natural kinds, that natural kinds are a legacy of aristotelianism, and after Darwin it should be obvious that this is not the case. Now go to google scholar and look up articles on natural kinds. Natural kinds are still going, natürlich)
posted by dis_integration at 7:11 AM on October 7, 2022 [7 favorites]
Another thing is that the first people to think about these issues came up with the most obvious problems and the most obvious solutions. Everybody dealing with these issues since then pretty much has to reference the early philosophers in some way.
Even if the first philosophers got everything about a particular subject absolutely wrong, you're more or less forced to reference them as you explain "here's why the obvious solution to the problem is absolutely wrong."
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:07 AM on October 7, 2022 [4 favorites]
Even if the first philosophers got everything about a particular subject absolutely wrong, you're more or less forced to reference them as you explain "here's why the obvious solution to the problem is absolutely wrong."
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:07 AM on October 7, 2022 [4 favorites]
I found this convincing:
Consider Plato’s or Rousseau’s evaluation of the virtues and vices of democracy. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of evidence and theories that were unavailable to them at the time:
Historical experiences with developed democracies
Empirical evidence regarding democratic movements in developing countries
Various formal theorems regarding collective decision making and preference aggregation, such as the Condorcet Jury-Theorem, Arrow’s Impossibility-Results, the Hong-Page-Theorem, the median voter theorem, the miracle of aggregation, etc.
Existing studies on voter behavior, polarization, deliberation, information
Public choice economics, incl. rational irrationality, democratic realism
The whole subsequent debate on their own arguments
posted by bdc34 at 8:15 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
Consider Plato’s or Rousseau’s evaluation of the virtues and vices of democracy. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of evidence and theories that were unavailable to them at the time:
Historical experiences with developed democracies
Empirical evidence regarding democratic movements in developing countries
Various formal theorems regarding collective decision making and preference aggregation, such as the Condorcet Jury-Theorem, Arrow’s Impossibility-Results, the Hong-Page-Theorem, the median voter theorem, the miracle of aggregation, etc.
Existing studies on voter behavior, polarization, deliberation, information
Public choice economics, incl. rational irrationality, democratic realism
The whole subsequent debate on their own arguments
posted by bdc34 at 8:15 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
I found this convincing:
I would argue that in an academic philosophy setting, it requires a defence of pragmatism at the very least - it isn't obvious that e.g. voting patterns influence what you think is the best way to do things, if you don't necessarily agree that the ends trump the means.
posted by Dysk at 8:24 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
I would argue that in an academic philosophy setting, it requires a defence of pragmatism at the very least - it isn't obvious that e.g. voting patterns influence what you think is the best way to do things, if you don't necessarily agree that the ends trump the means.
posted by Dysk at 8:24 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
Consider Plato’s or Rousseau’s evaluation of the virtues and vices of democracy. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of evidence and theories that were unavailable to them at the time:
Historical experiences with developed democracies
... etc.
What's interesting to me is that this seemed like a precise counterargument to his claim. Our notions of democracy and freedom, embedded in constitutions and other foundational documents, are all basically recapitulations of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Locke Hobbes etc. Reading them *in light of* contemporary evidence and social scientific research on actual democracies is the best way to think critically about them. You can't just read the social science (which frankly is hit or miss). Furthermore, the social scientific research has, embedded in the design of the studies, in what is taken for granted (since in order to move forward one must always take something for granted), ideas of political freedom which directly descend from those philosophers. How can you read the research critically if you're not familiar with its foundations?
posted by dis_integration at 8:31 AM on October 7, 2022 [11 favorites]
Historical experiences with developed democracies
... etc.
What's interesting to me is that this seemed like a precise counterargument to his claim. Our notions of democracy and freedom, embedded in constitutions and other foundational documents, are all basically recapitulations of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Locke Hobbes etc. Reading them *in light of* contemporary evidence and social scientific research on actual democracies is the best way to think critically about them. You can't just read the social science (which frankly is hit or miss). Furthermore, the social scientific research has, embedded in the design of the studies, in what is taken for granted (since in order to move forward one must always take something for granted), ideas of political freedom which directly descend from those philosophers. How can you read the research critically if you're not familiar with its foundations?
posted by dis_integration at 8:31 AM on October 7, 2022 [11 favorites]
All I can say is : Good luck with that.
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:47 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:47 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
In my past existence as a software engineer, I always inwardly laughed in meetings, when someone would suddenly bring up a question, a really deep question, as if making a major discovery. Why was I laughing? Because this major discovery was just an old standard thing in epistemology or ontology dealt with many, many years ago. CS majors in college didn’t take philosophy, history of or otherwise. They were venturing into new areas for themselves, but really just historical philosophy. Science people do this too. I would like to propose that anyone who goes into a career that requires thinking, should have taken at least one course in the history of thinking. Then maybe when problems or questions arise, we would know that they have been dealt with in the past, and then knowing these dealings would then get us to move on. Personally, I think that any college major should include a history of section so people could learn where their present came from.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:07 AM on October 7, 2022 [10 favorites]
posted by njohnson23 at 9:07 AM on October 7, 2022 [10 favorites]
Those who don't understand the history of networking protocols are doomed to reimplement them, badly, over port 80.
posted by flabdablet at 9:15 AM on October 7, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 9:15 AM on October 7, 2022 [11 favorites]
Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must make a video
posted by flabdablet at 10:27 AM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 10:27 AM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
Speaking as a scientist, I think Sauer badly overestimates the extent to which scientific progress proceeds without engaging with and thinking critically about the work of earlier scientists. Like, yes, a lot of practicing scientists don't do much of that, and instead only engage with the contemporary literature, and you can make a perfectly good career that way, and do perfectly good work. But a lot of the really great conceptual advances are made by people who are willing to step back and take a longer view.
Also I don't think philosophy is like (contemporary) science; "progress" in science and "progress" in philosophy are very different things. Sauer kind of acknowledges the idea that philosophy is also a humanistic endeavor, not only a technical one, but I'd argue that that fact is pretty central to understanding why people value the history of philosophy. Sauer seems to conceptualize philosophy as the search for Truth, but one also conceptualize it as an exploration of truths. Like, as a fan of the History of Philosophy Podcast, I've listened to detailed descriptions of the ideas of Neoplatonists and of early Christian thinkers several times over, including many people who aren't on anyone's list of major thinkers from history. I completely reject their worldviews and frequently find their arguments tedious at best, but understanding how intelligent people put together arguments to reason about or rationalize the ideas that shape their understanding of reality gives me insight into how the process of reasoning works, and fuels some humility about my own rational inquiry. Seems like Sauer could benefit from that too.
Also, is it really true that people over-value the history of philosophy? I have the impression that aside from some specific individuals, the practice of focusing instead on the work of contemporary philosophers for argumentation and rebuttals is much more the norm within academia today, at least among analytic philosophers. Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't really seem like Sauer is making an argument that most colleagues wouldn't already agree with implicitly, if not explicitly.
posted by biogeo at 10:51 AM on October 7, 2022 [8 favorites]
Also I don't think philosophy is like (contemporary) science; "progress" in science and "progress" in philosophy are very different things. Sauer kind of acknowledges the idea that philosophy is also a humanistic endeavor, not only a technical one, but I'd argue that that fact is pretty central to understanding why people value the history of philosophy. Sauer seems to conceptualize philosophy as the search for Truth, but one also conceptualize it as an exploration of truths. Like, as a fan of the History of Philosophy Podcast, I've listened to detailed descriptions of the ideas of Neoplatonists and of early Christian thinkers several times over, including many people who aren't on anyone's list of major thinkers from history. I completely reject their worldviews and frequently find their arguments tedious at best, but understanding how intelligent people put together arguments to reason about or rationalize the ideas that shape their understanding of reality gives me insight into how the process of reasoning works, and fuels some humility about my own rational inquiry. Seems like Sauer could benefit from that too.
Also, is it really true that people over-value the history of philosophy? I have the impression that aside from some specific individuals, the practice of focusing instead on the work of contemporary philosophers for argumentation and rebuttals is much more the norm within academia today, at least among analytic philosophers. Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't really seem like Sauer is making an argument that most colleagues wouldn't already agree with implicitly, if not explicitly.
posted by biogeo at 10:51 AM on October 7, 2022 [8 favorites]
Philosophy really is not primarily about the accrual of empirical facts. It’s nice to have new information to rub up against, but feeding more expensive or complex fuel into the fire doesn’t change the nature of the fire.
posted by argybarg at 11:10 AM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by argybarg at 11:10 AM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
I did the bad thing of reading the comments before TFA but the good thing of reading it before commenting. So I went in predisposed against it and read it with a skeptical, even jaundiced, eye. And to my surprise I found it rather persuasive, particularly sections three and four which form the meat of the argument. I found myself at several points posing counterexamples to his arguments but quickly found counterexamples to my counterexamples.
It seems to me he's concerned with philosophy as the discipline and practice of posing, understanding, and, one hopes, solving problems. One can approach philosophy differently, I suppose, but that is his choice here. He distinguishes studying philosophy from doing philosophy. He acknowledges that the study of philosophy is a fine thing in itself and doesn't debrudge anyone who seeks to do just that. While studying philosophy is of course necessary to practice it, he specifically questions how best to study philosophy in order to practice it.
Well there's a funny thing about philosophy in that problems that are satisfactorily solved are subtracted from its domain. Isaac Newton certainly considered himself a philosopher and neither Darwin nor Einstein would have objected much to being called one. Increasingly philosophy concerns itself with the residual unsolved and perhaps unsolvable problems. (Which the author acknowledges is rather problematic in itself. Is philosophy asymptotically futile? Maybe!)
Darwin and Einstein are interesting reference points for an analogy in science (um, natural philosophy).
My take is that an evolutionary biologist would not need to study Darwin directly. Studying more recent sources would be better in almost every way to acquire the knowledge and skills to practice in the field. But at the same time someone in the field is almost certainly three because of a deep interest in it. And if you're at all interested, there's nothing more delightful than reading Darwin's work itself. If you don't (I really can't emphasize this enough), you're just missing out.
It hardly needs to be said that Einstein was a remarkable human being. He contributed crucial building-blocks to several fields of physics. And yet! One of Planck's or Boltzmann's successor's would have explained Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect eventually. Poincaré himself or one of his and Lorentz's successors would have discovered special relativity in short order. General relativity too was ripe for discovery. The remarkable thing is that he did all of these things. You wouldn't need to study Einstein's work itself to practice physics; later treatments of the subjects would surely be better for learning it. But you would read it for the quality and clarity of thought.
You don't read Darwin and Einstein to learn what they thought. You read them to learn how they thought.
So in sum, I am persuaded that to learn philosophy to practice it, one could do with a lot less of the historical approach. But if you are genuinely interested in philosophy (why are you here if not?) then you'd probably study it anyway.
I also gather that he really, really dislikes Hegel and Wittgenstein.
posted by sjswitzer at 11:34 AM on October 7, 2022 [7 favorites]
It seems to me he's concerned with philosophy as the discipline and practice of posing, understanding, and, one hopes, solving problems. One can approach philosophy differently, I suppose, but that is his choice here. He distinguishes studying philosophy from doing philosophy. He acknowledges that the study of philosophy is a fine thing in itself and doesn't debrudge anyone who seeks to do just that. While studying philosophy is of course necessary to practice it, he specifically questions how best to study philosophy in order to practice it.
Well there's a funny thing about philosophy in that problems that are satisfactorily solved are subtracted from its domain. Isaac Newton certainly considered himself a philosopher and neither Darwin nor Einstein would have objected much to being called one. Increasingly philosophy concerns itself with the residual unsolved and perhaps unsolvable problems. (Which the author acknowledges is rather problematic in itself. Is philosophy asymptotically futile? Maybe!)
Darwin and Einstein are interesting reference points for an analogy in science (um, natural philosophy).
My take is that an evolutionary biologist would not need to study Darwin directly. Studying more recent sources would be better in almost every way to acquire the knowledge and skills to practice in the field. But at the same time someone in the field is almost certainly three because of a deep interest in it. And if you're at all interested, there's nothing more delightful than reading Darwin's work itself. If you don't (I really can't emphasize this enough), you're just missing out.
It hardly needs to be said that Einstein was a remarkable human being. He contributed crucial building-blocks to several fields of physics. And yet! One of Planck's or Boltzmann's successor's would have explained Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect eventually. Poincaré himself or one of his and Lorentz's successors would have discovered special relativity in short order. General relativity too was ripe for discovery. The remarkable thing is that he did all of these things. You wouldn't need to study Einstein's work itself to practice physics; later treatments of the subjects would surely be better for learning it. But you would read it for the quality and clarity of thought.
You don't read Darwin and Einstein to learn what they thought. You read them to learn how they thought.
So in sum, I am persuaded that to learn philosophy to practice it, one could do with a lot less of the historical approach. But if you are genuinely interested in philosophy (why are you here if not?) then you'd probably study it anyway.
I also gather that he really, really dislikes Hegel and Wittgenstein.
posted by sjswitzer at 11:34 AM on October 7, 2022 [7 favorites]
I disagree, that isn't Sauer's argument and this is clear from two points he already discussed. First, he says we in computer science do not need to read Turing's thesis to engage with current research in theoretical computer science. This is basically accurate. He is accusing philosophers of doing an excessive amount of this kind of original reading which passes for intellectual engagement. It raises questions about philosophical research i.e. academic philosophers.
Second, Sauer admits that science and philosophy may be fundamentally different. But the related reasons offered in defense of this practice are not compelling, they are vague and as he says mostly excuses, not actual reasons. In fact anyone who offers such a defense, including the critical theorists that I often read, ought to be careful about such a potentially self-serving argument.
Look at string theory. It's a field notorious for being criticized for having no progress in physics, just untested or untestable theories and hypotheses propped up with rigorous maths for its own sake. Maybe string theory is what sociologically happens when science and philosophy converge due to a question being too difficult. Maybe philosophy suffers from a similar problem and the evidence for that is its citations do not progress.
Also I remember watching a video in which Judith Butler said in order to start one really should read Plato. And I think Sauer's piece does a good job questioning the assumptions behind that.
posted by polymodus at 11:42 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
Second, Sauer admits that science and philosophy may be fundamentally different. But the related reasons offered in defense of this practice are not compelling, they are vague and as he says mostly excuses, not actual reasons. In fact anyone who offers such a defense, including the critical theorists that I often read, ought to be careful about such a potentially self-serving argument.
Look at string theory. It's a field notorious for being criticized for having no progress in physics, just untested or untestable theories and hypotheses propped up with rigorous maths for its own sake. Maybe string theory is what sociologically happens when science and philosophy converge due to a question being too difficult. Maybe philosophy suffers from a similar problem and the evidence for that is its citations do not progress.
Also I remember watching a video in which Judith Butler said in order to start one really should read Plato. And I think Sauer's piece does a good job questioning the assumptions behind that.
posted by polymodus at 11:42 AM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
Reality is a tricky bastard. As B. Russell said ages ago, you cannot disprove the statement that god created the universe five minutes ago. But what about the fossils, what about what I had for breakfast two hours ago? Oh, god just made it with all those things already there. I like to think that science is trying to show what is out there beyond the subjective/objective boundary of our senses, an ontology. Philosophy gives us tools that enables us to talk about it, in as clear a way as possible. One of those tools is logic or reason. Russell tried to generate all of mathematics, a language of science, from logic. It didn’t work out, as it seems that the rigors of logic and mathematics has a few kinks here and there. In my view, philosophy is on the epistemological side, as in how do we know what’s out there. Science is busy drawing maps/models of reality, and to once more throw that useful statement - the map is not the territory - into the mix, philosophy can help us keep the proposed relationships between the maps and the territory clear and hopefully predicate some validity to them. Ptolemy’s map worked to a good extent until Copernicus came along with a much better one. But they are both maps. Einstein refined Newton’s maps. And I suppose that Einstein’s maps will or are being refined. We are all trapped within our heads, wandering through reality, whatever that really is, just using our maps. And depending on the quality of those maps determines how well our wanderings go.
posted by njohnson23 at 12:51 PM on October 7, 2022
posted by njohnson23 at 12:51 PM on October 7, 2022
As a sciency person with very little exposure to philosophy, I find it surprising that there is anything more important about philosophy than its history...It seems to me that it’s a subject best studied as an object of inspection rather than a living field...
Being insusceptible to experimental verification, this is merely your personal philosophy. Granted as philosophies go it's pretty shite since it therefore contradicts its own existence.
posted by viborg at 1:47 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
Being insusceptible to experimental verification, this is merely your personal philosophy. Granted as philosophies go it's pretty shite since it therefore contradicts its own existence.
posted by viborg at 1:47 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
Pfft techbros blindsided by PHILOSOPHY as REALITY COMES UNDER ATTACK.
posted by viborg at 1:52 PM on October 7, 2022
Reality comes under attackhttps://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/what-simulation-hypothesis-why-some-think-life-simulated-reality-ncna913926
The current assault on reality began with a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom. In it, the University of Oxford philosopher laid down some blunt logic: If there are long-lived technological civilizations in the universe, and if they run computer simulations, there must be a huge number of simulated realities complete with artificial-intelligence inhabitants who may have no idea they’re living inside a game — inhabitants like us, perhaps.
posted by viborg at 1:52 PM on October 7, 2022
At MIT philosophy, they teach their PhD students to only cite work written in the past 20 years (source: philosophy lore). From the point of view of professionalization, it's easy enough to appreciate this advice. But in terms of intellectual virtues I think it's insane.
I think the anti-historical orientation is wrong for so many reasons I am loathe to write down any one and seem to exclude the others. I agree with many points in this thread. One other problem with doing things this way is that, although there are probably more working philosophers today than before in the West, we are subject to homogenizing pressures of professional economies, intellectual fashions, and social trends. Because of this, writers from the past can punch above their numerical weight just because they are different from us in interesting ways.
I do sometimes think it would be nice if the ongoing philosophical conversation was more like physics, if we really could losslessly encapsulate past thinking in uncontroversial present terms, the way you can read a nice clear textbook with graphs and equations and get a handle on the things Newton was trying to get across in the Principia (which is an extremely hard read). Regardless of the whys, though, it is empirically obvious that we can't do that in philosophy. There is no textbook that successfully gets across the substance of Kant's moral philosophy, for example. You can give ideas and suggestions and analogies, but for now anyway there's no compact substitute for Kant and the subsequent interpretive tradition.
What are we to make of this empirical fact? It seems to me there are two main options. One, we can conclude that anything that can't be made into a textbook chapter must be bullshit, and so much the worse for Kant. It is not worth trying hard to understand something, we might think, if we can't as a result of that hard work turn it into something easy to understand. Or, alternatively, and this is the option I prefer, we can curse or bless our predicament, that forces us to engage with the originals, and have faith that some genuinely important things are still really hard to understand, even though they are centuries old and have been the subject of continual revision and commentary.
Kant himself wanted there to be a textbook version of his Critiques -- he thought the problems they discussed were problems open to all thinking people, and that they should be accessible to all. I think this is still a wonderful aspiration, albeit one he and all successive interpreters seem to have failed at. I do not think the failure-so-far of this aspiration means Kant and the other strugglers of history should be forgotten.
posted by grobstein at 2:11 PM on October 7, 2022 [12 favorites]
I think the anti-historical orientation is wrong for so many reasons I am loathe to write down any one and seem to exclude the others. I agree with many points in this thread. One other problem with doing things this way is that, although there are probably more working philosophers today than before in the West, we are subject to homogenizing pressures of professional economies, intellectual fashions, and social trends. Because of this, writers from the past can punch above their numerical weight just because they are different from us in interesting ways.
I do sometimes think it would be nice if the ongoing philosophical conversation was more like physics, if we really could losslessly encapsulate past thinking in uncontroversial present terms, the way you can read a nice clear textbook with graphs and equations and get a handle on the things Newton was trying to get across in the Principia (which is an extremely hard read). Regardless of the whys, though, it is empirically obvious that we can't do that in philosophy. There is no textbook that successfully gets across the substance of Kant's moral philosophy, for example. You can give ideas and suggestions and analogies, but for now anyway there's no compact substitute for Kant and the subsequent interpretive tradition.
What are we to make of this empirical fact? It seems to me there are two main options. One, we can conclude that anything that can't be made into a textbook chapter must be bullshit, and so much the worse for Kant. It is not worth trying hard to understand something, we might think, if we can't as a result of that hard work turn it into something easy to understand. Or, alternatively, and this is the option I prefer, we can curse or bless our predicament, that forces us to engage with the originals, and have faith that some genuinely important things are still really hard to understand, even though they are centuries old and have been the subject of continual revision and commentary.
Kant himself wanted there to be a textbook version of his Critiques -- he thought the problems they discussed were problems open to all thinking people, and that they should be accessible to all. I think this is still a wonderful aspiration, albeit one he and all successive interpreters seem to have failed at. I do not think the failure-so-far of this aspiration means Kant and the other strugglers of history should be forgotten.
posted by grobstein at 2:11 PM on October 7, 2022 [12 favorites]
Reality comes under attack
The current assault on reality began with a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom. In it, the University of Oxford philosopher laid down some blunt logic: If there are long-lived technological civilizations in the universe, and if they run computer simulations, there must be a huge number of simulated realities complete with artificial-intelligence inhabitants who may have no idea they’re living inside a game — inhabitants like us, perhaps.
Wow, you mean we could be living in a simulation? Kinda like a dark cave in which we're watching shadows on a wall and mistaking them for reality? What an innovative, high-tech notion. No thinker prior to 2003 could have come up with such an idea, surely...
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:53 PM on October 7, 2022 [18 favorites]
The current assault on reality began with a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom. In it, the University of Oxford philosopher laid down some blunt logic: If there are long-lived technological civilizations in the universe, and if they run computer simulations, there must be a huge number of simulated realities complete with artificial-intelligence inhabitants who may have no idea they’re living inside a game — inhabitants like us, perhaps.
Wow, you mean we could be living in a simulation? Kinda like a dark cave in which we're watching shadows on a wall and mistaking them for reality? What an innovative, high-tech notion. No thinker prior to 2003 could have come up with such an idea, surely...
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:53 PM on October 7, 2022 [18 favorites]
from the article:
"1. A brief history of anti-historicism
The anti-historicist thesis I defend has its own history. Rumor has it that a
sign on Gilbert Harman’s office door at Princeton said: ‘History of philos-
ophy? Just say no!’, borrowing a slogan first championed by Nancy Reagan in the ‘war on drugs’. How many promising young minds, the suggestion seems to be, have succumbed to the devious lure of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, only to find themselves unable to stop and, after years of using, tragically ending up as full-blown Leibniz experts?""
How would I know this if I didn't study Nancy Reagan and the deviant Nietzsche.
posted by clavdivs at 3:17 PM on October 7, 2022 [6 favorites]
"1. A brief history of anti-historicism
The anti-historicist thesis I defend has its own history. Rumor has it that a
sign on Gilbert Harman’s office door at Princeton said: ‘History of philos-
ophy? Just say no!’, borrowing a slogan first championed by Nancy Reagan in the ‘war on drugs’. How many promising young minds, the suggestion seems to be, have succumbed to the devious lure of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, only to find themselves unable to stop and, after years of using, tragically ending up as full-blown Leibniz experts?""
How would I know this if I didn't study Nancy Reagan and the deviant Nietzsche.
posted by clavdivs at 3:17 PM on October 7, 2022 [6 favorites]
Those who don't understand the history of networking protocols are doomed to reimplement them, badly, over port 80.
25
But it does seem like many ideas are in common use, or base understanding by the communal zeitgeist. No one uses Newtons notation or exact methods for calculus, it's been refined and make much clearer. Shouldn't learning epistemology not require the equivalent of starting with an abacus?
posted by sammyo at 3:34 PM on October 7, 2022
25
But it does seem like many ideas are in common use, or base understanding by the communal zeitgeist. No one uses Newtons notation or exact methods for calculus, it's been refined and make much clearer. Shouldn't learning epistemology not require the equivalent of starting with an abacus?
posted by sammyo at 3:34 PM on October 7, 2022
But it does seem like many ideas are in common use, or base understanding by the communal zeitgeist. No one uses Newtons notation or exact methods for calculus, it's been refined and make much clearer. Shouldn't learning epistemology not require the equivalent of starting with an abacus?
Yeah I think the answer is, To the extent possible, yes (but not more).
posted by grobstein at 5:22 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
Yeah I think the answer is, To the extent possible, yes (but not more).
posted by grobstein at 5:22 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
Having given this a bit of thought there’s one sense I completely agree with the author, and in political philosophy especially the historicist strain, the tendency to revere the Mighty Dead, has been & continues to be disastrous. And there’s a key distinction to be made here between reading classically and reading historically.
If you’re interested in the history of philosophical thought you can’t escape reading Marx, it’s just impossible. Imagine the pretence of doing political philosophy without some appreciation of Marxism in it! But the strain of latter day thought that tries to use works by this beardy tedious German journalist as a contemporary lens to interpret current day political philosophy, is boring and generally not useful—just the number of hours otherwise intelligent people squander, relitigating the Second International or the European interwar or the Tendency Of The Rate Of Profit To Fall in occult groupscules with pretentious names, is enough to make anyone an anti-historicist.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:17 PM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
If you’re interested in the history of philosophical thought you can’t escape reading Marx, it’s just impossible. Imagine the pretence of doing political philosophy without some appreciation of Marxism in it! But the strain of latter day thought that tries to use works by this beardy tedious German journalist as a contemporary lens to interpret current day political philosophy, is boring and generally not useful—just the number of hours otherwise intelligent people squander, relitigating the Second International or the European interwar or the Tendency Of The Rate Of Profit To Fall in occult groupscules with pretentious names, is enough to make anyone an anti-historicist.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:17 PM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
But it does seem like many ideas are in common use, or base understanding by the communal zeitgeist. No one uses Newtons notation or exact methods for calculus, it's been refined and make much clearer. Shouldn't learning epistemology not require the equivalent of starting with an abacus?
Returning to this cuz I think it's a very good question that helps us see what is distinctive about philosophy. When the community develops a level of understanding of a philosophical subject such that its questions can be regularized and addressed with known-reliable methods, its career as a philosophical subject is coming to an end. Philosophers still do work in Bayesian statistics, but I think it's both pretty technical (looking over from the philosophy side) and pretty abstracted from daily business (from the statistics side). Something similar can be said about central topics in semantics and pragmatics, where philosophers continue to contribute but a lot of more straightforwardly scientific work is going forward without philosophical intervention. There are also areas of epistemology where you mostly spend your time proving minor measure theory facts.
The surviving ancient philosophical questions are the ones that have resisted being incorporated into something like a normal science. It's possibly the coolest thing about the field, but it also means our work is not uncomplicatedly cumulative in the way that the sciences are. And, that's, like, sad, because the magic of the scientific organization of knowledge is how easy it makes it to stand on the shoulders of giants. That's why we live in the world we live in. But for better and worse philosophy is a different enterprise.
posted by grobstein at 6:25 PM on October 7, 2022 [7 favorites]
Returning to this cuz I think it's a very good question that helps us see what is distinctive about philosophy. When the community develops a level of understanding of a philosophical subject such that its questions can be regularized and addressed with known-reliable methods, its career as a philosophical subject is coming to an end. Philosophers still do work in Bayesian statistics, but I think it's both pretty technical (looking over from the philosophy side) and pretty abstracted from daily business (from the statistics side). Something similar can be said about central topics in semantics and pragmatics, where philosophers continue to contribute but a lot of more straightforwardly scientific work is going forward without philosophical intervention. There are also areas of epistemology where you mostly spend your time proving minor measure theory facts.
The surviving ancient philosophical questions are the ones that have resisted being incorporated into something like a normal science. It's possibly the coolest thing about the field, but it also means our work is not uncomplicatedly cumulative in the way that the sciences are. And, that's, like, sad, because the magic of the scientific organization of knowledge is how easy it makes it to stand on the shoulders of giants. That's why we live in the world we live in. But for better and worse philosophy is a different enterprise.
posted by grobstein at 6:25 PM on October 7, 2022 [7 favorites]
the tendency to revere the Mighty Dead, has been & continues to be disastrous
Don't know about to today but my History 101 teacher went to U. of Chicago. Dispelling the mighty dead became a sport. Though she like John Adams.
And there’s a key distinction to be made here between reading classically and reading historically.
In a sense, it's the what's more confusing: Philosophy of History or History of Philosophy. I vote Historicity. Though I "saw" this distinction while studying the French Revolution. Lots of Philosophy, lots of politics but history, essentially asking the question, how did revolutionary France view history. I suppose the easy answer would be that they tried to erase it slowly and then with haste but it's way more complicated than that. History could get you killed while sticking with philosophy, however misconstrued, might land you a seat in the directory. classical philosophers, while they had their place, were not as relevant as say The Philosophes. Thier work literally fueled the revolution.
finally the distinction is if you're reading Plato for example, study the history of that time as much as possible without it there's not much of an analysis.
no doubt about Marx.
the number of hours otherwise intelligent people squander, relitigating the Second International or the
Agreed but "The Marx-Bakunin Conflict in the First International: A Confrontation of Political Practices" is a real barn burner.
posted by clavdivs at 7:07 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
Don't know about to today but my History 101 teacher went to U. of Chicago. Dispelling the mighty dead became a sport. Though she like John Adams.
And there’s a key distinction to be made here between reading classically and reading historically.
In a sense, it's the what's more confusing: Philosophy of History or History of Philosophy. I vote Historicity. Though I "saw" this distinction while studying the French Revolution. Lots of Philosophy, lots of politics but history, essentially asking the question, how did revolutionary France view history. I suppose the easy answer would be that they tried to erase it slowly and then with haste but it's way more complicated than that. History could get you killed while sticking with philosophy, however misconstrued, might land you a seat in the directory. classical philosophers, while they had their place, were not as relevant as say The Philosophes. Thier work literally fueled the revolution.
finally the distinction is if you're reading Plato for example, study the history of that time as much as possible without it there's not much of an analysis.
no doubt about Marx.
the number of hours otherwise intelligent people squander, relitigating the Second International or the
Agreed but "The Marx-Bakunin Conflict in the First International: A Confrontation of Political Practices" is a real barn burner.
posted by clavdivs at 7:07 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
philosophy can help us keep the proposed relationships between the maps and the territory clear
Or it can lock us into a worldview that insists that
We are all trapped within our heads, wandering through reality, whatever that really is
Thanks, René! Ya fucked it up for everyone! :-)
If a proposition isn't making you laugh then it's probably further from truth and beauty and utility than its author and fanbois would have you believe. There's philosophy and then there's posturing, and it seems to me that the trouble with modern philosophy is not too much old philosophy but too much modern posturing... same as it ever was.
posted by flabdablet at 7:21 PM on October 7, 2022
Or it can lock us into a worldview that insists that
We are all trapped within our heads, wandering through reality, whatever that really is
Thanks, René! Ya fucked it up for everyone! :-)
If a proposition isn't making you laugh then it's probably further from truth and beauty and utility than its author and fanbois would have you believe. There's philosophy and then there's posturing, and it seems to me that the trouble with modern philosophy is not too much old philosophy but too much modern posturing... same as it ever was.
posted by flabdablet at 7:21 PM on October 7, 2022
Nancy Reagan and the deviant Nietzsche
Drat, I always had this particular Nancy Drew on the nightstand to read but kept picking up my Copleston instead.
posted by riverlife at 9:40 PM on October 7, 2022 [4 favorites]
Drat, I always had this particular Nancy Drew on the nightstand to read but kept picking up my Copleston instead.
posted by riverlife at 9:40 PM on October 7, 2022 [4 favorites]
Marginalia: Samuel Loncar Interviews Carlos Fraenkel and Peter Adamson (2018)
posted by dougfelt at 11:57 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by dougfelt at 11:57 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
Wow, you mean we could be living in a simulation? Kinda like a dark cave in which we're watching shadows on a wall and mistaking them for reality? What an innovative, high-tech notion. No thinker prior to 2003 could have come up with such an idea, surely...
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:53 PM on October 7 [12 favorites +]
It seems we agree, in principle. I was making a somewhat low effort attempt to respond to the techbro perspective of "what are actual examples of philosophy's relevance today?" Much of the overall discussion here has largely focused on the weaknesses of academic philosophy -- as I said IANAP but I can think of plenty of examples of popular philosophy's relevance, I'm not so familiar with major developments in academic philosophy tho. So if ANYONE wants to step up and give us more than the laziest knee jerk sarcasm in response to the question of philosophy's actual relevance outside the ivory tower, by all means please do. (God Mefi needs threaded comments so badly.)
It's like there are really two parallel discussions going on here, with very little actual engagement at all between them.
posted by viborg at 3:35 AM on October 8, 2022
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:53 PM on October 7 [12 favorites +]
It seems we agree, in principle. I was making a somewhat low effort attempt to respond to the techbro perspective of "what are actual examples of philosophy's relevance today?" Much of the overall discussion here has largely focused on the weaknesses of academic philosophy -- as I said IANAP but I can think of plenty of examples of popular philosophy's relevance, I'm not so familiar with major developments in academic philosophy tho. So if ANYONE wants to step up and give us more than the laziest knee jerk sarcasm in response to the question of philosophy's actual relevance outside the ivory tower, by all means please do. (God Mefi needs threaded comments so badly.)
It's like there are really two parallel discussions going on here, with very little actual engagement at all between them.
posted by viborg at 3:35 AM on October 8, 2022
You know that thing that happens when someone is so wrong, in so many different ways, about something you know, and which is important to you? That thing where you're so annoyed you feel compelled to respond, but you don't even know where to begin because there's so much to chose from; and you're worried that if you begin, your response will be far more effort than is deserved ... so you just grumble and throw up your hands?
That.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:55 AM on October 8, 2022 [8 favorites]
That.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:55 AM on October 8, 2022 [8 favorites]
Perhaps the true philosophy is all the Wrong On The Internet we ignored along the way.
posted by flabdablet at 4:55 AM on October 8, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 4:55 AM on October 8, 2022 [2 favorites]
‘Just what is history, dearie?’
posted by rudster at 5:01 AM on October 8, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by rudster at 5:01 AM on October 8, 2022 [1 favorite]
Marginalia: Samuel Loncar Interviews Carlos Fraenkel and Peter Adamson (2018)
posted by dougfelt at 11:57 PM on October 7
Enjoyable interview and now I got a couple of books to look for (I already enjoy Adamson's podcast immensely). And it drills into the angle that i clumsily tried to communicate in my first comment when I said I found value in the general argument of TFA:
Carlos: You’re right. I have a problem with “analytic” history of philosophy when it suggests a false continuity—as if contemporary philosophers were basically wrestling with the same questions Plato and Aristotle wrestled with. On this view, philosophy is a kind of perennial quest for true answers to fundamental and unchanging philosophical questions—metaphysical, epistemological, moral, etc. I think this is false. I think the meaning of foundational concepts such as rationality, for example, have so radically changed that we can only speak of continuity from ancient to contemporary philosophy at the price of equivocation. I think glossing over these discontinuities can lead to a pretty distorted picture of the history of philosophy. One example that comes to mind is the 1982 Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy that doesn’t have a single chapter on philosophical theology, but no less than 15 on logic (and 5 on “philosophy of mind and action”).
Consider rationality. A contemporary philosopher who is committed to what is sometimes called “Einstein’s god” will say that the universe is rationally ordered. So will Plato. But they mean completely different things by this. For the contemporary philosopher it means that the universe is intelligible, that human reason, at least in principle, is able to explain it, that nothing random occurs in it, nothing that isn’t determined by the system of causes and effects. For Plato it means that the universe is ordered in view to what is best by divine reason: the nature and place of each thing serves to maximize the universe’s goodness. For Plato (and for Aristotle and the Stoics) the concepts of rationality and teleology are inseparable. For something to be rationally ordered—a life, a society, the universe—means for it to be teleologically ordered. A universe ordered by Einstein’s god wouldn’t be rationally ordered according to Plato. And conversely, a universe ordered by Plato’s god wouldn’t be rationally ordered according to most contemporary philosophers.
Anyone who seeks specialization would be remiss to not study their discipline's history of course, but to draw a better view of the context on why certain developments happened, imo, not to use the previous intellectual work as the basis for argument especially when so much of that world no longer functions the same.
posted by cendawanita at 9:50 AM on October 8, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by dougfelt at 11:57 PM on October 7
Enjoyable interview and now I got a couple of books to look for (I already enjoy Adamson's podcast immensely). And it drills into the angle that i clumsily tried to communicate in my first comment when I said I found value in the general argument of TFA:
Carlos: You’re right. I have a problem with “analytic” history of philosophy when it suggests a false continuity—as if contemporary philosophers were basically wrestling with the same questions Plato and Aristotle wrestled with. On this view, philosophy is a kind of perennial quest for true answers to fundamental and unchanging philosophical questions—metaphysical, epistemological, moral, etc. I think this is false. I think the meaning of foundational concepts such as rationality, for example, have so radically changed that we can only speak of continuity from ancient to contemporary philosophy at the price of equivocation. I think glossing over these discontinuities can lead to a pretty distorted picture of the history of philosophy. One example that comes to mind is the 1982 Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy that doesn’t have a single chapter on philosophical theology, but no less than 15 on logic (and 5 on “philosophy of mind and action”).
Consider rationality. A contemporary philosopher who is committed to what is sometimes called “Einstein’s god” will say that the universe is rationally ordered. So will Plato. But they mean completely different things by this. For the contemporary philosopher it means that the universe is intelligible, that human reason, at least in principle, is able to explain it, that nothing random occurs in it, nothing that isn’t determined by the system of causes and effects. For Plato it means that the universe is ordered in view to what is best by divine reason: the nature and place of each thing serves to maximize the universe’s goodness. For Plato (and for Aristotle and the Stoics) the concepts of rationality and teleology are inseparable. For something to be rationally ordered—a life, a society, the universe—means for it to be teleologically ordered. A universe ordered by Einstein’s god wouldn’t be rationally ordered according to Plato. And conversely, a universe ordered by Plato’s god wouldn’t be rationally ordered according to most contemporary philosophers.
Anyone who seeks specialization would be remiss to not study their discipline's history of course, but to draw a better view of the context on why certain developments happened, imo, not to use the previous intellectual work as the basis for argument especially when so much of that world no longer functions the same.
posted by cendawanita at 9:50 AM on October 8, 2022 [1 favorite]
The very first comment to this thread basically nails it - Philosophy is an activity. Studying its history is one avenue of many, but I'd argue it's the most important. The reason is learning the history of the subject is the practice field where students learn how arguments are formed and communicated. Once out in working life, it turns out understanding those things is really, really useful. We could ignore that history, and look instead at contemporary science, but we'd likely just end up asking the same 2000 year old questions without even realizing it - but now we'd be poorly equipped to form and communicate answers that make sense in the modern context.
posted by elwoodwiles at 12:13 PM on October 8, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by elwoodwiles at 12:13 PM on October 8, 2022 [1 favorite]
Viborg, I hope you didn't take my allusion to Plato's cave as a criticism of you or your post. It was not meant as such.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:50 PM on October 8, 2022
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:50 PM on October 8, 2022
The most obvious problem for this line of argument (and only the *most* obvious) is that all philosophy is past philosophy. So what is actually being suggested is that philosophers no longer read or engage with other philosophy at all. In other words, this is no more or less than a full endorsement of philosophical (and by extension, personal) solipsism.
posted by macross city flaneur at 4:36 AM on October 11, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by macross city flaneur at 4:36 AM on October 11, 2022 [2 favorites]
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-Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
posted by clavdivs at 10:48 PM on October 6, 2022 [10 favorites]