91–99 of 99 posts
I'm not sure that I can agree with her even about reading physics. I've found that the earliest works on scientific topics, as well as in math and philosophy, explain things in a way that is comprehensible to someone with no prior knowledge of the subject. That's probably because nobody had prior knowledge when the work was written. I find I'm very often able to learn topics from the originators' writings that I foun…
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Sometimes it's useful to see the original version of an idea: it can be easier to see what line of thought led to it, and what necessity the idea addressed. Further refinements may improve the idea, but obscure the source and original context of the idea, which might make it harder to fully understand or appreciate.
The basic idea there makes sense to me, but I actually think later writers will be better at putting it into context as well, partly because they have more information on the context, and partly because the tendency when someone is first developing a new idea is to just get it working, rather than immediately analyzing where it fits in the history of ideas. That said, I think it's definitely valuable to go back and l…
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I highly recommend The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan ( https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d... ). It's one of the more careful social science books I've ever read, and while it comes to controversial conclusions, even if you disagree with them you'll learn a lot about the issues by reading it. The assumption that education can be assumed to be profitable for society simply isn't suppo…
So, by pointing out this book, are you saying that your only metric for education is economic value and wage marketability?
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> You know what would be great? A society where people can knowingly disagree on fundamental concepts with one another and remain mutually respectful and cooperative. I agree. > And studying philosophy is a gateway to that. For a very, very small number of students. Forcing every student to go through philosophy education because we can't figure out a better way to select out the students that will care about it is a…
Or maybe experiment with non cruddy ways of teaching people. Weighting a lot of a grade on a test is an excellent way to freak someone out and build resentment. Maximize teacher/student ratios, fund schools better, etc.
School funding is similar to the ratio question. Most increases in school funding over the last 50 years get captured by the state and local administrations, which provides even less for outcomes than teacher pay, ratios, or increased resources. Pouring more money into them doesn't usually chance that allocation -- it's like giving money to a homeless family and having one of the parents take the money to buy non-essentials.
In the mean time, kids are wasting away, bored out of their minds. The opportunity costs are massive, and the social returns are negative. We can talk all we want about how we can make the system better, but until it actually gets better, the waste continue and victimizes more kids.
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Philosophy is a cumulative field just like programming. If you're only involved with the most modern framework, there is a lot of magic happening underneath the surface. Most of the value to me seems to be in understanding an idea and then reading and understanding someone refute it later. That's basically my whole experience in reading philosophy "chronologically".
Is it though? Has philosophy actually made any advances in understanding the "great questions" of the meaning of life and what not? Perhaps the reason that people find reading Plato and Aristotle worthwhile is that people are still beating their heads against the same unanswerable questions.
Individual Platonic dialogues aren't self-contained; they all make reference to concepts from other dialogues as well as Plato's contemporaries and pre-Socratics influences. Works by later Platonists along with critiques often make similar assumptions about what you know. Honestly, there's two thousand years directly influenced and shaped by Plato alone. Almost all of which assumes that you've read Plato. Beyond that, both direct and indirect references to various ideas by Plato can be found throughout nearly every philosophical tradition.
Take Plotinus and The Enneads, for instance. When Porphyry edited Plotinus' writings, he ordered them according to a non-chronological principle meant to make them more approachable. As a result, multiple arguments in one treatise will reference arguments made in another. And throughout all of them, Plotinus takes it as a given that you're familiar with Plato's work. If you're not, you'll be almost hopelessly lost. There are plenty of other examples; for many if not most philosophers, their body of work can include extensive seminar notes (Lacan, for example), letters and correspondences, etc. Or look at Nietzsche and how his writings have been distorted and misunderstood by so many. His sister's systematic edits and falsifications of his writings were an attempt to twist Nietzsche's writings into supporting anti-semitism despite the fact that throughout his life he repeatedly denounced anti-semitism and the nationalism he saw it linked to. It took decades to repair Nietzsche's reputation and that was accomplished only by returning to his original writings themselves rather than the bastardized versions his sister put out.
Secondary sources can do an excellent job of highlighting, summarizing, and explaining arguments that might be split across years of different writings or multiple philosophers. They can't replace reading the original philosophers' work, however, because you can't divorce a later exegesis from the source it's attempting to interpret. Later work is tied to the earlier works to which it responds; the latter's value is present even when the former seeks to eviscerate it. Philosophy simply can't escape earlier works, and that's a wonderful thing because it forces us to better understand the ideas and traditions of ideas being discussed in their totality and context.
In addition, there is the fact that Western Civilization, including modern democracy, science, technology, and economics, is greatly based on ideas from Greek philosophy, so in reading it you are understanding much about our modern world.
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The basic idea there makes sense to me, but I actually think later writers will be better at putting it into context as well, partly because they have more information on the context, and partly because the tendency when someone is first developing a new idea is to just get it working, rather than immediately analyzing where it fits in the history of ideas. That said, I think it's definitely valuable to go back and l…
I believe it is worth considering also that there is an extremely strong survivorship bias taking place with these works in particular. The works of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle have survived millennia and while most works can likely be successfully summarized, over enough iterations there are bound to be a few that cannot. Reasonable people can disagree of course and this is all subjective anyway.
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Thinking there's anything wrong with relativism is perverse, and a disgrace to philosophy as a whole. Trying to discredit relativism means you think there's one, and only one, standard of right and wrong, and that our ethics can never improve based on philosophical thinking. It's anti-progress and, therefore, utterly anti-philosophy.
Isn't your statement itself an absolutist statement? (I.e., that trying to discredit relativism "means" something, as a matter of fact?) If you're being ironic here, well played.