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How Philosophers Think

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Re: How Philosophers Think

#11

Post by jolux »

andagainagain wrote: post #3

Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets. What I've found, from famous books by famous philosophers all the way to pop philosophy books to vague philosophical discussions... is some of the muddiest and most convoluted self-indulgent thinking i've ever seen. I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the…

It really depends who you read. Some philosophers are better writers than others, some philosophical traditions prioritize clarity more, and some translations are really bad. If you’re looking for relatively straightforward thinking, Plato is often where freshman philosophy students start and his work is considered background knowledge for basically all of the rest of western philosophy.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#12

Post by andagainagain »

HKH2 wrote: post #8
andagainagain wrote: post #3

Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets. What I've found, from famous books by famous philosophers all the way to pop philosophy books to vague philosophical discussions... is some of the muddiest and most convoluted self-indulgent thinking i've ever seen. I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the…

Are you willing to prioritize truth above that which is socially acceptable? If you do, your philosophy will probably remain hidden, and if not, your philosophy will probably be irrelevant like what you describe.

why would that be true? Many things that are true are socially uncomfortable and are still known.

History is chock full of examples of things which others in the field (and society) hated but could not disprove, and then became well known. I can think, off the top of my head, examples in math, human biology, plant biology, psychology, and martial arts, (the last one due to the wonders of the internet). It seems to happen all the time.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#14

Post by andagainagain »

jolux wrote: post #11
andagainagain wrote: post #3

Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets. What I've found, from famous books by famous philosophers all the way to pop philosophy books to vague philosophical discussions... is some of the muddiest and most convoluted self-indulgent thinking i've ever seen. I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the…

It really depends who you read. Some philosophers are better writers than others, some philosophical traditions prioritize clarity more, and some translations are really bad. If you’re looking for relatively straightforward thinking, Plato is often where freshman philosophy students start and his work is considered background knowledge for basically all of the rest of western philosophy.

Name me two.

And I've read some Plato some years ago. I would not classify him as a clear thinker by any remotely modern standards.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#15

Post by routerl »

andagainagain wrote: post #3

Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets. What I've found, from famous books by famous philosophers all the way to pop philosophy books to vague philosophical discussions... is some of the muddiest and most convoluted self-indulgent thinking i've ever seen. I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the…

> I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the mud, not the clarity.

As in programming, there's some truth to this, in that needless complexity can afford a certain job security.

But you've ignored another possible interpretation, which is that the subject matter is muddy. Until Frege, Russell, et al, not even mathematicians had a clear notion of "inference" or "proof"; it was always a case of "I can't define it, but recognize it when I see it".

Until, suddenly, we did define it, and all the muddy conversations that came before now seemed misguided. We see this movement very clearly in all sciences, but I especially like examples from the history of mathematics, e.g. when Paul Gordan said, of Hilbert's finiteness theorem, that "This is not Mathematics. This is Theology."

John Searle once said that "philosophy is the asking of questions that come naturally to children, and answering them with methods that come naturally to mathematicians". Once those methods are sufficiently formalized, the problem domain simply leaves philosophy and becomes some part of mathematics, or a new empirical science.

This comes off as extremely self-indulgent, because it is, since almost every school of philosophers is trying to take some muddy conceptual domain and give it shape and structure, to help the subject along the path towards quantitative inquiry.

Think of philosophical schools as analogous to systems architectures: with an eye towards certain desiderata, they're laying foundations for the rest of the system as it is likely to eventually exist.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#16

Post by ebruchez »

andagainagain wrote: post #14
jolux wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends who you read. Some philosophers are better writers than others, some philosophical traditions prioritize clarity more, and some translations are really bad. If you’re looking for relatively straightforward thinking, Plato is often where freshman philosophy students start and his work is considered background knowledge for basically all of the rest of western philosophy.

Name me two. And I've read some Plato some years ago. I would not classify him as a clear thinker by any remotely modern standards.

For amazing clarity, read Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#17

Post by Bishizel »

keiferski wrote: post #5

This article isn’t terrible, but it does illustrate the pitfalls of writing about a field (philosophy) without being intimately familiar with it. Specifically, because you assume that [your culture’s version of] a thing is a universal one. Philosophy is a good example, because even “Western Philosophy” has so many fringe and irregular thinkers (Nietzsche, Deleuze, etc.) that trying to nail down how a “philosopher” th…

I fully agree. Philosophy is full of irregular thinkers whose only common trait seems to be the willingness to go into absurd depth about an idea.

What is always interesting to me is how you can spend a large amount of study in the subject and still end up finding out about a new philosopher (I’m going to read some Deleuze now.). For me, David Lewis has been the most interesting philosopher in the last 50 years. Maybe Thomas Nagel as well.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#18

Post by TchoBeer »

cousin_it wrote: post #2

Good essay, but a little short on examples of how philosophers actually think. Here's a famous example, a paper written by philosophers to poke fun at their profession. A dialogue that opens with "if you believe that only material objects can exist, do holes exist?" and goes to pretty ridiculous depth. http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/metaphysics/readings/Lewis&L... I've read a lot of philosophical reasoning that was…

This is really great, love the dialogue.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#19

Post by arolihas »

andagainagain wrote: post #14
jolux wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends who you read. Some philosophers are better writers than others, some philosophical traditions prioritize clarity more, and some translations are really bad. If you’re looking for relatively straightforward thinking, Plato is often where freshman philosophy students start and his work is considered background knowledge for basically all of the rest of western philosophy.

Name me two. And I've read some Plato some years ago. I would not classify him as a clear thinker by any remotely modern standards.

What of his work have you read that was so unclear?

Re: How Philosophers Think

#20

Post by hashberry »

> Quantum Thinking, which is holding multiple contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. By oscillating between radical extremes, you put ideas at war with each other in the name of truth. By doing so, you stretch each idea to its logical conclusion.

Isn't this the 19th century Hegelian dialectic, not a quantum-whatchamacallit?

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