Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Philosophers Think

perell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 87 posts

Re: How Philosophers Think

#21

Post by jfarmer »

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.

You might like American Pragmatism: CS Peirce, FP Ramsey, CI Lewis, William James, John Dewey, etc.

Peirce's "How to Make Our Ideas Clear": https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Peirce%20187...

Re: How Philosophers Think

#22

Post by neonological »

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…

>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 find philosophy to be highly irrational. It studies topics that are uniquely different yet it categorizes these topics as the same thing.

Aesthetics aka beauty is a philosophy, and so is logic. How do these things exist on the same level? Aesthetics is a human attribute and a human opinion and made up concept, logic is an observable phenomenon fundamental to the universe.

The infinite regressions are also pointless paths to explore. By induction we know it's infinite already so why continue to explore?

Re: How Philosophers Think

#23

Post by idolaspecus »

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…

> 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.

This expresses an approach to philosophy that I think is, at its roots, ineffective. It treats "philosophy" as "Philosophy", as some thing, some well-defined corpus that deals with truth and can be explored top-down systematically, something that you can "look at" or "come to" or whatever. But that's not really what "philosophy" is or, rather, there is no "philosophy" in that sense. There's just people in the world trying to understand it and to communicate their understanding. There's just questions and people all the way down, nothing else. We use the name "philosophy" because it's convenient but I'd say it's maybe the least useful name for anything we've ever come up with.

Philosophy is ultimately personal, it's the most personal, and most of the most famous philosophers can only be appreciated if you go out of your way to read them from a deeply psychological and empathetic perspective. At least this is my experience. It's not easy and takes a lot of work to get into the headspace of whoever you're reading, but once you get there you'll feel the lightbulb go off. This is especially important when you read older philosophers or philosophers who have a fundamentally different metaphysics from yourself. Of course, sometimes you just can't get there with certain thinkers. For example, I have a really really really hard time taking Hegel seriously.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#24

Post by morgangalvin »

belugacat wrote: post #6
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…

Wittgenstein came to the same conclusion. Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent. And he’s just paraphrasing the Buddhists/Taoists (and a bunch of other lesser known religious orders) who had that same insight a few thousand years earlier. Most people aren’t interested in silence though. The mud keeps humans entertained and hungry. Those humans build the societies we live in, monks living in silence in mona…

In the Tractatus (TLP), which you quoted, Wittgenstein came to a conclussion about language, not about philosophy itself. He rejected many of the major themes of the TLP in his later work, Philosophical Investigations (even jokingly calling the person who wrote the TLP an idiot)

Wittgensteins metaphilosophical thoughts are best captured in the Blue Book (a series of lecture notes) and Philosophical Investigations.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#25

Post by jolux »

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.

Two what?

I'm also curious what defines your standard for clear thinking. Philosophy is at a level of abstraction higher than any other intellectual discipline, and to a certain extent it's not possible to discuss philosophy in the way we discuss engineering, for example. It's the difference between relying on assumptions to communicate effectively and attempting to analyze the assumptions themselves.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#26

Post by idolaspecus »

xenophon wrote: post #10
mistermann wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For analytic philosophy, where should one go, specific philosophers, or...?

Try Derek Parfit. His book "Reasons and Persons" touches on some fascinating questions (identity) with clear thought experiments that actually reach the level of clarity this article suggests.

I would definitely not say "Reasons and Persons" is clear. It might be precise (I personally don't think so, I think he makes tons of subtle mistakes), but it's at least not clear. It's full of ideas like "rational irrationality" which is at best a poor choice of naming, IMO.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#27

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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…

Continental (non-analytic) philosophers seem to me to be somewhat like impressionist painters. (Does anyone else see that similarity?) And the absence of this "clarity of thought" focus might be why it feels that way to me.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#28

Post by iraphael »

idolaspecus wrote: post #23
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…

> 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. This expresses an approach to philosophy that I think is, at its roots, ineffective. It treats "philosophy" as "Philosophy", as some thing, some well-defined corpus that deals with truth and can be explored top-down systematically, something that you can "look…

+1 to this point.

I also find it easier to read certain philosophers than others because they themselves seem to be empathetic in the way they write their thinking. Almost as if they know that they could be wrong about the conclusions they're coming to, and that the truths they uncover aren't necessarily absolutes but instead, at least to a certain degree, subjective and personal.

Reading phenomenology for instance doesn't get me feeling like the author is self-indulgent. I find it easier to empathize with the philosopher because the philosopher is trying to empathize with me.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#29

Post by idolaspecus »

hashberry wrote: post #20

> 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?

Hegel was quantum before quantum was cool.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#30

Post by jolux »

idolaspecus wrote: post #23
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…

> 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. This expresses an approach to philosophy that I think is, at its roots, ineffective. It treats "philosophy" as "Philosophy", as some thing, some well-defined corpus that deals with truth and can be explored top-down systematically, something that you can "look…

Have you read Kant? I've had a lot of trouble with Hegel as well, and everyone tells me it's because he's responding to or building on arguments that Kant makes that seem to be pulled from whole cloth without that context (Kantext?).

We're certainly not the only ones though, a lot of famous philosophers think Hegel is bullshit. I don't know how much respect the Hegelian lineage has outside of continental philosophy circles these days. I suppose Fukuyama is pretty Hegelian.

Post reply on HN