Philosophy as a public service

Not sure what happened in the 2nd half of your post, it kind of went off the rails. But the in the 1st half, you're basically getting at the ordinal numbers. Now just drop the "philosophy" from it (which is just a placeholder, since you could replace it with anything else whatsoever and still get the same chains) and focus on the underlying structure---infinite chains of infinite chains, etc.---and you're actually standing on the threshold of some very interesting material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number

I have a degree in philosophy, and I agree with you. I don't see what this article has to do with philosophy as it's understood academically, and I'm also pretty unsure what the (rather self-aggrandizing) title (the site uses the title Philosophy Is a Public Service) has to do with the contents, since there's very little there to defend that claim or even talking about philosophy's role in the public sphere at all.

A more apt title would be "How I Developed Several Public Art Projects".

I hate to be a downer, but there are good reasons[0] to avoid getting your starting ideas from the Crash Course series of videos. I think a better approach would be either to (1) start actually reading Descartes or Plato, or (2) use the Crash Course video titles as to what you should be looking up on SEP. Similarly, a lot of introductory text on many important philosophers is off the mark; Peter Singer's Marx in the "Short Introduction to" series is known to be pretty poor, for example.

Please try and rely on expert resources, and not just people who are experts in some other area, or even sometimes in another area of philosophy. Experts on philosophy are just as capable as anyone else skilled in an area to explain ideas without too much jargon (or if there is, explanations of it!)

Some philosophers you can start reading primary material. For others it's more difficult. University textbooks should also be worth considering, at least. But the Crash Course videos may be the wrong approach. If you're looking for videos, I'd recommend Wireless Philosophy pretty much always.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/4de95h/why_d...

>In no other field that I have studied have people suggested that my first introduction to the field must be a book written decades ago, forget two millennia ago.

No other field is philosophy. Philosophy, in some respects, is special - at least according to Socrates as relayed by Plato. As Socrates says, each science (or even activity) has its object, but what of the science which has science as its object? The trouble with many future reformulations of key ideas is that they can miss the intricacies and highly abstract arguments of the original texts. For that reason, it may be more appropriate to read Newton than it is to read Einstein, because Newton used much more natural language than equations. I would very heavily disagree with the idea that introductory textbooks necessarily have better contents and presentation than original texts, and any serious philosopher will tell you that too.

>If you are telling me that in the twenty centuries, no one has taken what Pythagoras/Plato said and has rewritten it in a better way, with modern exposition and examples and graphics and what not, I fail to believe you.

What do you mean by "a better way"? Is Plato really so difficult or obtuse or obscure that one needs to express Socrates' ideas in "a better way"? The text is perfectly readable to a modern audience, which is precisely why starting with Plato's actual dialogues is the hallmark of any good university philosophy programme.

>Because that would mean philosophy as a discipline is not improving by building upon the works of those past

No; you have it backwards. Many philosophers have agreed with or disagreed with Plato, but the point of a text on Plato's ideas should represent what he wanted to represent in those ideas, not say "well, that's what Plato said, here's my idea now!". Philosophy (according to some accounts, at least) does progress, but it's dubious that rewriting and "simplifying" texts is the hallmark of progress.

You end with the assumption that books written since 2000 are necessarily better than Plato. I fail to see why this is the case. If you want an overview of philosophy since Plato, then by all means, only the most up-to-date book will do. If you want to know Plato's (or Socrates') ideas yourself, there is no better source than Plato himself.

Philosophy explanations and short introductions (Peter Singer's one on Marx comes to mind) are riddled with errors, and for any such text you will find at least ten philosophers ready to lambast an "introductory" interpretation because it misses out on the intricacies of that thought. I'm not joking. Look at any intro book on Hegel, Kant, Marx, Pythagoras. Then look at the reviews published in philosophy journals.

"Progress" in philosophy does not and cannot mean shortening, rewriting and "simplifying" ideas.

When I was in college, my friends/housemates and I took out an ad in the yellow pages under 'Philosophers'. We were 'Murvanowski & Associates, Philosophers at Large'. Each of us specialized in a philosophy, spanning Realism, Epicureanism, Daoism and of course, Hedonism.

Every couple of weeks, we'd get a call from a student who had stumbled on us when trying to reach the Pharmacy, while simultaneously struggling with their Philosophy course. We liked to think we did provide a valuable public service.