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

61–70 of 87 posts

Re: How Philosophers Think

#61

Post by denton-scratch »

fjfaase wrote: post #46

There are some things that software engineering and philosophy have in common. One is that they are both about (abstract) concepts and their relationships. Another is that they are based on languages. Just like software engineers have the tendency to develop new programming language, philosophers of all ages, have come up with new words to represent certain ideas. Thus there must be some similarities between how phil…

"Yet, I get the impression that many software engineers are rather suspicious about philosophy."

I did my degree in philosophy, and was hired immediately by a seven-dwarfs mainframe company. No CS - a degree was enough in those days. I eventually graduated into "software enineering".

Re: How Philosophers Think

#62

Post by denton-scratch »

btilly wrote: post #57
becquerel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to see a claim of obscurantism leveled against a post-structuralist that I felt had any serious weight. They're mostly just awful prose writers (and even worse, French). Glibly casting off an entire intellectual tradition as a case of the emperor having no clothes is, to me, a really tragic dismissal of an electrifying body of ideas. For anyone who's been put off by the language of continental philosophy, I'…

Glibly casting off an entire intellectual tradition as a case of the emperor having no clothes is, to me, a really tragic dismissal of an electrifying body of ideas. Where do you get the impression that I'm merely being glib? I'm not being put off by the language. I can make my way through that (though I do a lot better in English translations than the original French). But whenever I make the effort, I find that "th…

I followed the Paul Graham link.

It is true that "philosophy" refers to a bunch of apparently-unrelated disciplines. What they share doesn't have a name that I know of; it is that they all depend on how to think, in broad terms (perceive, remember, how to reason etc.).

Paul Graham certainly knows how to think. But I think he doesn't give enough credit for that to his philosophy training.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#63

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

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…

> I have a really really really hard time taking Hegel seriously

I really enjoyed Schopenhauer 80+ pages rant in "Parerga & Paralipomena" on Hegel and why he considered him a fraud. Nothing in philosophy is as consistent as Schopenhauer's "Hegel bashing" or using the term "Hegelian" only in a dismissive way.

Maybe I ought to read Hegel since he is a central figure in Western philosophy. My excuse so far has been that he is only needed if I want to understand and keep up with what influenced thinkers like Marx, the "Frankfurt School", etc. So far I haven't felt not reading Hegel is a problem. It might have even shielded me from a lot of pretentious texts but idk.

Agreeing and emphasizing with Schopenhauer was perhaps my reason for why Hegel now feels like a waste of time. Putting the effort needed into fully understanding him will be pure uphill struggle. This limits my understanding on Hegel to how Schopenhauer understood and interpreted him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parerga_and_Paralipomena

Re: How Philosophers Think

#64

Post by denton-scratch »

scoofy wrote: post #49
mistermann wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the previous poster is being a bit heavy handed about the analytic tradition being the jumping off point. You'll get some mileage with some of Bertrand Russell's non-technical stuff, but there are lots of conversations going on that have to do with historical ideas. Typically the direction starts with Descartes, then Hume, then Kant, and after that, there is a real break between continental and analytic tradi…

I think some of the TLP can be approached almost as a poem. I havn't read it in German, but in translation I think the poetic parts are expressive language, organised into stanzas. That's close to poetry.

You don't need a background, unless you want to read the middle section, which is close to advanced maths.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#65

Post by keiferski »

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.

I find Nietzsche to be an extremely clear writer, but only if you have an understanding of his background and the topics he’s engaging with.

Kierkegaard plays a lot of games in his writings, but I think his ideas themselves are very straightforward.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#66

Post by jfengel »

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…

Yes, philosophers love the mud. That's why they're philosophers.

Everything we call "science" is something that has been separated out, cleaned up, and polished. Darwin and Newton both considered themselves "philosophers", because they looked in the mud and took out a nice, separable piece of it.

What's left as "philosophy" is the mud, the stuff that we haven't taken away from the philosophy department by giving it a new name. We continue to take philosophy's successes: linguistics, economics, even cognitive science were originally done under the remit of a philosophy department.

You can't tell the serious work from the people just being self-indulgent until after the fact. Especially from the outside: a lot of the serious work looks ridiculous until it's successful. Getting to the point where you can tell requires more effort than most people are willing to put out -- which is fine, because it's not actually important whether you judge it well or not.

But in the interests of intellectual honesty, you'd do well not to judge a discipline with only a cursory understanding of it. And before you object to me describing your understanding as cursory, let me assure you that questions like "do we REALLY see the same color" are precisely not what real philosophy looks like. It's the same kind of red flag that "Can we use dark matter to go faster than light?" signals as not serious physics.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#67

Post by BlueTemplar »

jfengel wrote: post #66
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…

Yes, philosophers love the mud. That's why they're philosophers. Everything we call "science" is something that has been separated out, cleaned up, and polished. Darwin and Newton both considered themselves "philosophers", because they looked in the mud and took out a nice, separable piece of it. What's left as "philosophy" is the mud, the stuff that we haven't taken away from the philosophy department by giving it a…

Case in point, these days the question "Do we REALLY see the same color ?", is much more one about physics, signal processing and (neuro)biology.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#68

Post by BlueTemplar »

neonological wrote: post #22
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…

> How do these things exist on the same level?

Through Mathematics ?

Re: How Philosophers Think

#69

Post by HKH2 »

andagainagain wrote: post #12
HKH2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

There are many examples in history of people who have risked their reputations or even lives to say certain things. I've no doubt the memory and works of some have been wiped out completely; humans are awfully petty at times.

It's all too easy to dismiss one's critics out of hand, yet if you want a relevant argument you at least have to consider some criticism dispassionately. I'm not sure that we as a society have got better at doing that.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#70

Post by NikolaeVarius »

jfengel wrote: post #66
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…

Yes, philosophers love the mud. That's why they're philosophers. Everything we call "science" is something that has been separated out, cleaned up, and polished. Darwin and Newton both considered themselves "philosophers", because they looked in the mud and took out a nice, separable piece of it. What's left as "philosophy" is the mud, the stuff that we haven't taken away from the philosophy department by giving it a…

I'm having a pretty hard time trying to figure out why people are so quick to toss out philosophy without trying to understand it.

The principles of liberal democracy, separation of church and state, and all that feel-good stuff is not something that "really exists". Its a bunch of stuff that a bunch of philosophers spent years observing society to create stuff to try and make a coherent framework for humans to live by.

I still think to this day that my philosophy of science course in college was one of the most defining classes of my life. It really changed how I look at existence and modes of thought

Post reply on HN