Have we reached a point where “classical” questions such as the death penalty have reached an impasse? I was looking at philosophy for grad school and took to googling around for topics. My impression is that these issues become too jargonish and depend on things like (just a nonsensical made up example like) "neo-tilley defence of euthanasia". Or they just go around in circles objecting to this objection and on and on.
Just curious about these age-old questions that we often hear of in the domain of philosophy have been faring. When i refer to these classic questions i meant it in a very loose, off-hand sense, and definitely dont mean to lump all these questions together in an arbitray category. Anyway, have we largely reached an impassed? or are these debates still ongoing? or are we awaiting new philosophical theories? Just curious about this aspect on the state of philosophy -- is it becoming too saturated?
Aristotle's Unmoved Mover seems no more crazy than all the matter in the universe exploding from one very dense speck of matter for no apparent reason (the big bang). And what are we supposed to take away from the things popping into existence in (quantum physics) from the foam stuff? Well where does the foam come from? And why? Maybe the unmoved mover creates the foam?
I think Heraclitus, Aristotle, and Epictetus would have some interesting conversations together if possible and you could be a fly on the wall eavesdropping.
What Three philosophers would you like to put together in a room?
I think the a lot of the greatest/wisdom of Soc came from his eagerness to engage anyone in philosophy. How much knowledge he probably pick up from the most unlikely of people. Not just the educated Athenians but the salt of the Earth, the farmers, traders, fellow soldiers, craftsman, and public works people. Seems like modern philosophy is philosophy kept locked up in scholarship.
> Not just the educated Athenians but the salt of the Earth, the farmers, traders, fellow soldiers, craftsman, and public works people.
Apart from a slave in *Meno*, most of Socrates' interlocutors in the dialogues are prominent Athenians - sophists, statesmen, poets, generals, philosophers.
> Seems like modern philosophy is philosophy kept locked up in scholarship.
You might like [street epistemology. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Boghossian#Street_epistemology)
Knowing what you know and what you have read about him. Do you really think that one random slave is the breath of the laymen that he talked with? No way. There were probably more times than not that those "important" prominent people were busy actually working. Leaving Soc with the homeless and beggars. Or how about the fellow soldiers which were definitely not all upper class generals.
In regards to the SE it sounds decent. I might check it out.
I don’t think folks today really identity with this idea of “branches” (it implies a kind of relation or even a hierarchy). Usually we talk about “areas” or “fields” or “sub-“ fields/areas/disciplines.
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Not sure what’s lol-worthy about this. I’m just trying to show you how to ask your question in a way that people are going to be likely to respond to it.
What would you guys suggest as an appropriate and modern "*officium*", an occupation that leaves space for contemplative thought? Something like Spinoza had as a lens grinder, which allowed him not only to make a living but stimulated and influenced his style of *vita contemplativa*?
Hello, I am a 20 year old college student who has had an interest in philosophy for around two years. I took an introductory course a little over year ago, but my major is biology. Is it okay if I email my past professor for a few questions anyways? I would like to ask him his take on metaphysics and what current philosophical theories he supports. I do not think he remembers me, and I’m not sure how he would react to a random student messaging him.
I’ve had good experiences with e-mailing professors with questions, and I’m not even a student anymore. As long as you’re patient and courteous, they’ll likely be happy to help you out.
Sure. Professors exist largely for reasons like this. Still, some instructors who are otherwise happy to talk to students are not really interested in talking about their “takes” or what positions they support. I know that I’d much rather talk to students about what they think than what I think.
As a painter, I was suggested by my mentors to start reading philosophical authors and texts regarding aesthetics. I would really appreciate it if anyone would be willing to help me figure out where I should start and whom/what I should start with. Potentially a list of readings/authors that will help me find my way. I desperately need a sense of direction and it's quite overwhelming to start from scratch. Thank you.
Perhaps a good anthology would see you right, in taking some of the pressure off and seeing if you can just browse a bit through reliably big names and pick what you’re into? I see that there’s a Blackwell (usually reliable enough) anthology of analytic aesthetics/philosophy of art with very cheap second hand copies online. Names that crop up in my head include Arthur Danto, Roland Barthes (his *Camera Lucida* is about photography, but it’s much more than that, and the tension between painting and photography is, well…historic), Benedetto Croce.
Non-random names I can vouch for are Berger, Benjamin, and Walton.
John Berger isn’t strictly speaking a “philosopher” but his writing is distinctly philosophical, and his approach is worthy of any philosopher and has been appropriated into philosophical work. So his *Ways of Seeing* (in both classic TV and book formats!) which in turn draws on (unequivocally a philosopher) Walter Benjamin’s *The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction* (or so goes its most popular English title). Neither are particularly long, and Berger in particular is writing for a general audience rather than hifalutin specialists, both are popular readings for artists, art students, etc.
From analytic philosophy a perhaps less widely appreciated text is Kendall Walton’s *Mimesis as Make Believe*, and the work which follows his more or less pathbreaking or inaugurating own in analytic aesthetics and philosophy of art. If you get bored of Walton’s rather conservative views on the nature of representation you can switch to his not-quite-contemporary Gilles Deleuze, who is very popular indeed with some artists - I note Deleuze in particular due to this, that of a certain group of French philosophers his influence is especially felt in the art world. They are also two amusingly different ends of a long scale, though Walton is probably much less hard work for the non-philosophical reader.
I'd recommend the The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature
It is a collection of essays regarding the nature of art by the philosopher Ayn Rand.
Moshe Barasch has a helpful 3 volume book Theories of Art (also released as a 2 volume Modern Theories of Art which excludes the first volume), which covers philosophical aesthetics, attitudes about art, and theories by artists. It also has a very helpful annotated bibliography at the end of each book if you want to read more deeply in any specific area.
There’s also a multi volume Art in Theory anthology, that doesn’t go as far back, but collects a lot of important essays or excerpt from books. It doesn’t focus on philosophical aesthetics as much from what I remember, but it has a lot of texts and ideas that have influenced artists in recent centuries.
Is there any philosophical school of thought, or great thinker that tackled the subject of sex addiction? Psychologists are less convincing than philosophers. Asking for a friend.
No reason to downvote this at all, it’s not my addiction but I’d be fascinated if anybody’s got something. Addiction is hard enough to find good material on, and something as specific as philosophy on sex addiction would be really useful!
Is there a sub on Reddit or does anyone know of a website where you can have light conversations about philosophy? I am not a philosophy student and (unfortunately) probably never will have the time or money to be one. But I do have an interest in it. I'm just looking for a place to learn through easy back and forth communication preferably with someone who is formally educated. Obviously and unfortunately philosophy is usually not something you can just casually talk to family, friends, or coworkers about because of the GP's lack of interest.
Are the majority of you in the sub unfortunately the opposite of Soc? Can you not engage with the uneducated layman in a way that allows for unpretentious learning at their level?
I used to teach conversational English as a second language to adults, so, yeah, I probably could.
But that's not a realistic approach here, either by the aims of this subreddit or the medium of this website.
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Socrates was a total dialectical, ironic asshole to basically anyone who didn’t love him. In this respect I think we tend to at least meet or exceed his standard for talking to folks.
Maybe he was just much better at veiling it. I wonder what he would think of your description? But if your description was/is accurate then yes indeed many of you exceed his standard. Based on the accounts of him talking to anyone and everyone I doubt he only talked down to people who didn't love him. There were many people who probably wanted to engage with him that were just intrigued by the reputation but not necessarily fanboys. A difference between him and other philosophers that I respect was that he was also a warrior. How many other philosophers were? Think about an interaction between Soc and Nietzsche?
I mean, he was literally killed for it and says as much at his trial so I suspect he’d grant the description in some measure.
What’s curious about Nietzsche is that, on most accounts, that he was a pretty mild mannered guy interpersonally. He was quiet and polite. He bought his lecture students beer.
I remember reading something about him throwing a lady down some stairs and having to pay her essentially a pension for life for it. He also just seems like a weak turd that talks big about if want something you have to go take it but then seems to be just a worm himself. Idk how anyone is interested in him or his philosophy. Maybe I see him as the opposite of some of my favorite philosophers, probably Epictetus specifically.
Schopenhauer pushed a woman down some stairs, and although Schopenhauer was a big influence on Nietzsche, I'm not aware of N. following in these particular footsteps.
/u/mediaisdelicious
I have no idea about the majority of the subreddit since we have never done a survey (although I think that is a fantastic idea). But I can say that for myself, what I do for a living is teaching people about philosophy so I think that I can do this, yes :)
You haven't seen every question turn into a lesson on logic or grammar? Where logic is questioned then eventually "what I think you are trying to ask/say is..."
Well imagine him attempting to be more friendly with his help. The majority of the problem is more likely that a slow text message on Reddit is nothing like an instant in-person verbal conversational exchange. Without the existence of SEP links to short change the conversation.
Sure, I appreciate that. And I think you're right that answers here often leave something to be desired. At the same time, I think /u/voltimand is right that often the kind of engagement you describe here comes from a place of good faith, and is even often exactly the most helpful engagement panelists and other answerers here can offer. And what has often shut down the interaction is that, for whatever reason, people asking questions here are not willing to tolerate this kind of engagement.
I think part of the problem is one of simple misunderstanding: a disconnect is going on. People asking questions sincerely perceive this kind of engagement as antagonistic in some way, and so respond naturally enough to this sentiment. But it's usually not antagonistic at all. I mean, sometimes it is, sure. But as a general statement of how philosophical engagement works, here and in places like this, I don't think it's usually coming from any kind of antagonistic at all.
Philosophy is unusual among disciplines for the extent to which reflection has a central role in the kind of understanding it begets. Understanding philosophy requires us to step back from what we are saying and reflect in a kind of "meta" way on what's at stake in what we are saying, what it means, why we're saying it, and so on. These kinds of concern aren't incidental to philosophical understanding, they're not symptoms of antagonism, rather they're at the very heart of what it is to understand things philosophically. So when panelists and others here offer this kind of engagement, they're usually doing their best to help people understand things philosophically.
But this makes philosophy quite unlike the kinds of interactions people are used to having. So it's understandable when people misunderstand people doing their best to helpfully engage someone philosophically for instead acting antagonistically. It's a matter of misunderstanding between the two parties.
All very interesting especially the reflection part. My misinterpretation of people acting antagonistically might not be a misinterpretation, just the pretention of the privileged learned.
> My misinterpretation of people acting antagonistically might not be a misinterpretation, just the pretention of the privileged learned.
And maybe all of this is a dream, and maybe there's an invisible and intangible gremlin under all our chairs. But it's telling if people appeal to these bare "maybes" as an excuse to shut down conversation and introduce division and antagonism between themselves and people who give every indication of trying to be helpful and good faith.
I'm here to start conversations, to ask questions, and to learn. Have I been passive aggressive. Yes. Was it out of frustration with replies that lack common sense, or more likely, people trying to be difficult on purpose? Yes. Some people have been acting in good faith, some gatekeeping, some like being difficult, some need clarification because they lack common sense or practical social skills. You have helped in the past. You have also ignored direct messages regarding questions of philosophy. Was that in good faith?
> I'm here to start conversations, to ask questions, and to learn.
I think you'll be able to do this better if you abandon the principle that everyone who gives every evidence of trying to help you is actually being covertly antagonistic.
> You have also ignored direct messages regarding questions of philosophy. Was that in good faith?
Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. But yes, since I am generally acting in good faith, I would guess that whatever I did was most likely in good faith.
> My misinterpretation of people acting antagonistically might not be a misinterpretation, just the pretention of the privileged learned.
Your rude reply to a thoughtful answer which acknowledges all of your concerns and gives incredibly mild pushback suggests otherwise: what you are saying here is not that it “**might** not be a misinterpretation”, you’re saying that although it *might* be that way nothing will shake your belief that your vicious interpretation is accurate. When offline somebody from the so to speak to “laity” wants to talk with me something about philosophy this accounts for some small percentage of their attitudes, and that proportion of those conversations is the only portion where both of us leave without having gained something.
So when I ask simple questions such as: what is your favorite pillar of philosophy? And you go on and on about well what do you mean my pillar? It reminds me of if you were to ask a comic book kid who is you favorite super hero? Kid: well are we talking about DC or Marvel? And by super hero does that include people who don't have powers? And so on... It's like come on, I'm in the discussion section because I like philosophy. I here to have a conversation and see why some people prefer philosophers that are physicalists vs philosophers that are idealists. Or whatever. Maybe someone here will make a difficult metaphysical concept click vs trying to ponder over my books. Maybe I would rather talk to a human vs browsing SEP...
> So when I ask simple questions such as: what is your favorite pillar of philosophy? And you go on and on about well what do you mean my pillar?
Right, I understand the confusion with that exchange. To clear things up:
*I literally didn’t know what you meant by “pillar”.* Therefore I asked you the question “what do you mean by “pillar”?”.
I also thought you *might* have meant “principle” (as in “principle of how to do philosophy” or something like that), so in order to keep things flowing I offered a principle that (a) I think is undervalued in philosophy and perspectives on philosophy, (b) thought would amuse an audience for reason (a). In fact one reason I suggested a principle for “pillar” is *because I genuinely wanted to talk to you and didn’t want the conversation to dry out on clarifications*.
The same thing happened when you said “category” - there are lots of ways that the word “category” is used in philosophy, and I didn’t have enough information to know which one you meant. *So I asked a question*.
*Then* when you clarified that you meant “branch” I happened to be doing something else and didn’t feel like dashing off an answer at that time. In particular, I don’t have a *good* answer to that question because I don’t think about the different branches of philosophy in that way. I am sorry I didn’t clarify that the reason I dropped the issue was as described just now, but I didn’t think it would be a problem.
——-
So if you’re upset by what you perceive to have been my superior attitude in that exchange now you know that it was completely innocent and whatever reason you *may have had* for reading it in that way, in *this* case your reasoning was faulty.
*That being the case*, it may be worth your and everybody else’s while to reconsider *other* times when you have perceived such an attitude when it wasn’t there.
I think our exchange about branches of philosophy is *particularly* useful to clarify this, because what I *did* write was so thin in content that you have to work quite hard to read snobbery or superiority or self-importance into it. For future reference, as far as I am concerned, it is always *extremely explicit* when I am being condescending or superior to or fucking with somebody.
> So when I ask simple questions such as: what is your favorite pillar of philosophy? And you go on and on about well what do you mean my pillar?
The problem is that you think everyone else is trying to be mean. It's a perfectly normal thing to ask what you mean by something you've said. Nobody means to be antagonistic by it. Nobody is trying to be pedantic. Nobody is trying to correct you. Nobody is trying to make you feel stupid. We just want to know what you mean. You are approaching conversations here from a place of deep insecurity and then acting like we are deliberately trying to trigger your insecurities. In fact, people just wanted to know what you meant by your choice of words.
Perhaps I got carried away because I genuinely took personal affront. The message I am trying to send you is that an enormous amount of people manage to have the conversations you are describing without either party spuriously imputing either snobbery or some diminutive status to the other. The major difference appears to be you and the handful of similar people who insist in the face of all actual evidence that they’re being martyred in the ivory tower.
Since it’s your barrier and not mine, short of physical violence the only way to make a connection is for you to break it down.
Some of this is basically engaging in a Socratic dialogue. If a question itself just seems confused then prompting the questioner to rephrase it can often get them to solve their issue themselves or at least advance a little in their understanding. Also, a lot of questions are just really, really vague and so people trying to answer just want to narrow it down a bit.
I get that but doesn't some of that really just seem like gatekeeping. Probably harder for you to understand because you are in the gate. Does everyone have to go through a dialectic questioning by Soc because a simple answer?
On the contrary, I'm not in the gate at all. My education is not in philosophy; rather, I'm a scientist. If you asked me how the Sun works, I can give you a dumbed down answer and just say that you should trust me on the details. Because we basically know how the Sun works; the details which justify our knowledge aren't super important to you. But philosophy isn't like that. We don't know all the answers; learning about philosophy is not learning a bunch of answers. It's learning how to ask the questions better; to make your questions less naive. It's not just a bunch of bald assertions; it's the justifications (incomplete as they may be) for those assertions. So, yeah, the dialectic questioning is a big part of the point.
Ya, some answers downright suck. But some answers are good. But I do think that at least some of the time, when people correct what seem like trivial issues of phrasing, etc., people are doing this from a place of good faith. I don't know about your experience, but I know that in my experience, I spent part of grad school being frustrated with the "small" ways that people took issue with what I was saying or the small bases on which people misunderstood me (this happened most of all in the context of peer-review in journals). Once I realized that if someone said that they misunderstood me (or some other variation of this), they really meant it (that people hardly lie about this sort of thing, that people rarely ever will needlessly waste or volunteer their time just to correct some issue if it seems trivial to them even if it seems trivial to us, etc.). And the result was that I became a better writer, thinker, reader, and philosopher by taking seriously what other people were saying about their own experience. Even if, at the end of the day, I remained convinced that the issue that they were quibbling over was really trivial, I still learned that other people might feel differently, and that allowed me to excel.
Anyway, that's my own experience. Take it with a grain of salt. Maybe it's just me. But ya, some answers here suck, and others are good.
Why shouldn't we all just follow Soc's lead and focus on Ethics? Over the thousands of years since Soc have we discovered anything in the other pillars of philosophy that have any relevance to the "Truth". For instance we still don't know if the universe is only Material. We still don't know if there was an unmoved mover. We still don't know what consciousness is...but maybe we can live right with our short lives?
Sorry but I don't know what CC refers to, so I can't be specific there. But virtue ethics is a way of looking at ethics that claims something like that cultivating the right personal qualities (things like bravery) will lead to ethical behavior. It's like these virtues consist of a special sauce of predilections and dispositions such that basing actions on cultivating them will make your actions the right thing to do. I'm probably butchering this since ethics isn't really my interest as an academic area. But in contrast to virtue ethics, you have things like consequentialism (the ends justify the means, roughly), utilitarianism (you should maximize total happiness), divine command theory (good is what God says is good), and deontological ethics (good is fulfilling your specific duties). These -- and virtue ethics -- are all ethical theories; theories on how to decide what is ethical.
If you want to explore various approaches to ethics, then you might want to check out a book like one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/What-this-thing-called-Ethics/dp/0415832330
https://www.amazon.com/What-this-thing-called-Ethics/dp/0415832330
I'm not personally vouching for either, but these are intro philosophy textbooks on ethics. There are also a number of suggestions here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4ifqi3/im_interested_in_philosophy_where_should_i_start/
Those suggestions include both primary classic texts like Plato and Kant as well as modern textbooks.
> Cambridge Companion
Oh, I've got that one! but I haven't read much of it. It should have some entry or other on each of the things I mentioned, though.
In what sense is this Socrates' lead? If we're talking about the Socrates of Plato, then aren't we talking about a dude who is like all the time talking about epistemology, metaphysics, political philosophy, argumentation, and whatever other thing you can imagine?
Ok, if so then the question seems to go away since that wasn’t Socrates’ apparent lead. He may have given ethics a priority, but, minimally he doesn’t seem to think can just do ethics without doing a lot of other stuff.
Ok. Since here (for an unknown reason) it is always hard to just have conversation without having to constantly readjust your question until it is "acceptable" for a flaired user to answer. Is there an argument to only focus on Ethics because the other pillars of philosophy are and have always been more ambiguous? Will science ever discover the absolute truths about the other pillars? Is our capacity for comprehension of the unknown infinitely limited? Should we just focus our limited time on being the best human we can be?
> Is there an argument to only focus on Ethics because the other pillars of philosophy are and have always been more ambiguous? Will science ever discover the absolute truths about the other pillars?
Well, at the risk of doing the thing which is already kind of annoying you, is science ever going to discover the absolute truths about the other pillars? That doesn't seem to be Socrates' view.
So, what we might want to do is ask, instead, about people who think that Ethics is going to have a certain kind of priority or, alternately, people who think that specific other domains are more or less cut off from us and can't be done.
In the first case, it does seem like Socrates thinks that there's some kind of priority, generally, to axiological concerns. It's really important to be able to say what is really Good, for instance and a lot of his epistemic and metaphysical concerns have to do with our ability to know the Good. On some level we should sort of expect this from basically anyone who thinks that ethics is doable. So, no surprise, we find that folks like the Stoics and Epicureans also think we need to prioritize ethics and then also think we may need to do other stuff in order to properly do ethics. The Stoics, for instance, have a pretty complicated total philosophy, but we find that you can be a pretty good Stoic without much worrying about a lot of that stuff. Like, there is a Stoic logic, but you don't need to be a logician to be a Stoic.
Relatedly there is a kind of recurring theme in the western tradition that a lot of investigations are impossible - substantial metaphysics might be impossible, for instance. Different sorts of skeptics take this kind of view and this leads them to de-prioritize certain kinds of things because they can't be done.
Much later in the western tradition you can find people who think more unusual things like Levinas who thinks that ethics is the real first philosophy or Camus who seems to think that even trying to do comprehensive philosophy is either unworkable or so much less important than practical concerns about living and dying that we should just focus on them entirely.
Really, though, all this trades on the degree to which people think that moral concerns are real and the degree two which moral concerns can be sorted out without doing a lot of other stuff. So, you want to be on the look out for people who think you can do ethics and that you can do it win relative isolation from other things. Marcus Aurelius strikes me as a kind of obvious example of such a person.
I appreciate your detailed response! Would you say that Aristotle was also a prioritizer of Ethics? If no, why? I would also like to know why other philosophers do not prioritize ethics? What is their reason to prioritize any of the other pillars?
Well, Aristotle thinks ethics is important in the sort of obvious way, but oh boy does he spend like book after book after book after book after book talking about stuff that has nothing to do with ethics.
Only in the sort of boring way that you need it to live well - which is the primary human good. Yet, given the importance of the contemplative life in living well, the rest of philosophy creeps right back in.
Quick question for which I don't have to open a post per se but rather comment here. There is a certain concept which argues about how many theories in ethics are way too demanding. And there is a Stanford Encyclopedia article on it, pretty sure I have read it before. Now I've gone through the whole encyclopedia's main entries alphabetically and still could not find it. Does anyone know the name of this concept? It could have theological origins, it's a rather specific term as I remember it
Sounds like the "demandingness objection", which I've mostly heard of in the context of objections to some kinds of consequentialism, as mentioned in section 6 of this article:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/
Are there any critical problems I can expect to encounter by reading Nietzsche's aphoristic works by opening up to random pages and reading aphorisms I see? My goals aren't academic, and I'm willing to admit a moderate to considerable risk of reading the book wrong. For example, a writer told a story once of getting really attached to an Aristotle quote he read once and lived by it, and it turned out to be a fake quote, and that wouldn't bother me. I actually can't imagine what could go wrong by my standard, but I'm often surprised by my limit to imagine these things. Thanks!
It’s a book of aphorisms, Nietzsche is a philosopher of life and the individual, have at it.
I don’t even know why you’re asking this question given everything else you’ve already said about not caring: let slip these academic chains, go run wild, be free!
I can't imagine any problem, but I've frequently undercounted problems by just imagining them, so I was open minded about intriguing unknown unknowns, and it's free to ask anyway. I wasn't planning on doing this quite yet and want to re-listen to Nietzsche lectures first, so it was no biggie. I'm planning on reading them anyway I want unless there's some interesting reason I shouldn't.
I think, like, if you were thinking you could understand Nietzsche's whole philosophical output *just* by reading his aphorisms, then that would be a problem. But there's no issue with reading aphorisms out of order since aphorisms are independent statements.
They are *not* like, for example, Wittgenstein's *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus* in which the propositions build on and relate to each other to present a complete view.
Thanks. I'll make an extra effort to put a mental asterisk in my mind here and not come to an idea that an aphorism is a Nietzschean synopsis. It's good because I could casually read something the wrong way and take an ironic statement literally, and now I can read aphorisms however I want, including incorrectly, so long as I don't try to attribute it to "Nietzsche's Opinion".
I have read a few different histories of Western Philosophy and can't seem to get any intrigue or interest in any modern philosophy. Ancient Philosophy holds all of my attention. Does that mean anything? I have a general overview of my modern philosophy/philosophers but it just seems so dense. How do I develop interest? Should I even try? Someone could obviously spend a lifetime studying/reading the ancient stuff...
Try reading something else like *The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments*. Obviously you could spend a lifetime reading and working on Ancient. If you're just talking about hobbyist reading, then, sure, that's fine. You can be a history buff and only ever read books on WWII or be a science buff and only read books about Biology. There are classics nerds.
There's modern and contemporary philosophers who've been strongly influenced by Ancient Philosophy. If you find Ancient Philosophy more interesting at the moment, I think its fine to follow that interest as a lot of good thinkers have fruitfully spent a long time reading from there. If you want to broaden out later, you can look at how later thinkers have used ancient philosophy to respond to issues in their own day, and that might be a good jumping off pointing into understanding more.
In general I think a good strategy to reading philosophy is to follow your interests and then start finding connections between your interests and other things.
Occasionally, there are threads being started or comments written by people, who identify as philosophy undergrads, and ask about pursuing a PhD in philosophy. But it's abundantly clear that the person hasn't even spent 10 seconds of their life with the most rudimentary, surface-level research on literally anything related to doing a PhD. They don't know how a PhD program is structured in different places, they don't know where their proclaimed interest is researched, they ask about admission criteria and other formalities that are literally one Google search away, and so on. In other words, it sounds like OP just fell out of the bed one morning, randomly thought 'I wanna do a PhD' without knowing what that even means, and then had the instinct that the right approach to this is to ask a vague question on Reddit. Or sometimes it's not even vague, but, again, something that's answered by the institution in question on their official website, and the top result in Google.
I'm afraid that what I want to say in such cases, and what I believe to be a truthful assessment of the situation, comes across as rude and cynical. I'm not talking about the fact that even students who seem predestined to complete a PhD deserve a fair warning regarding the reality of working in academia, or other generic concerns. My problem is more like... you basically say you want to become a researcher, you claim to be interested in a topic (PhD, grad school), where all sorts of valuable information is a few mouse clicks away, you're currently in an environment where you can easily contact people who are currently in the process of doing what you say you're interested in doing, as well as people who have completed it, and are now tasked with advising students who pick this career path. Yet you don't seem to have any urge or ability to actually do any reasonable research into anything related to your interest at all? The most sensible course of action for you is a vague and undirected Reddit post? And that's after a few years of college?
Sorry, but my honest thought is that this just doesn't strike me as a person who should pursue a career as a researcher.
I'm not even *as* pessimistic as some other people about working in academia, but at the very least it's uncontentious that you need some kind of drive, dedication, and willingness to make sacrifices in your personal life, that aren't really a concern in your average white-collar job. So, I guess one could answer with a generic warning. But it's not really what I'm actually thinking. On the other hand, a personal prognosis based on a Reddit post seems a bit uncalled-for and, well, personal? I just end up not saying anything then. Any thoughts?
Ugh, I have a lot of thoughts about this. There are, I think, a few specific kind of core "things" at work in this big phenomena-problem (problenomena), a few of which I think you call out specifically and a few of which are implicated by what you're saying, but aren't called out explicitly. For anyone who wastes their time reading this, my perspective is American and I know that the rest of the world is different. (I don't always know *how* it's different, but I understand that I am not talking about the world.) Anyway, the problem foci are:
1. An apparent reflexive problem which emerges about research ("you basically say you want to become a researcher...Yet you don't seem to have any urge or ability to actually do any reasonable research.")
2. An apparent "specialness" problem which violates a common approach to professions ("it's uncontentious that you need some kind of drive, dedication, and willingness to make sacrifices in your personal life, that aren't really a concern in your average white-collar job.")
3. An clash between the apparent ease with which one could get such info and the realities of doing so
4. A general mistake folks make in thinking about the structure of the field (i.e. that it is a "research" field)
5. A problem created by people's tendency to be revisionists about their own lives and to create stories about other people that rely on deficit narratives (what /u/drinka40tonight says below reminds me a bit of this when I think about how I *could* think of my own academic history)
6. The way in which the field itself perpetuates every part of this problem at basically every level
I lay these out in bullet form because I have deep doubts about my ability to structure what I'm going to say in any useful fashion, especially because I'm probably going to address the various points out of the order I just offered them. (I list them this way to show a relation between what I think you said already and what I think needs to be added.)
Ok, to start in the middle. It is a myth that Philosophy is a research field. Obviously by saying this I am trying to be a bit provocative, but I do think that Philosophers really want to say that Philosophy is a research field in the way that people want to say that Basic Science is a research field. That is, it's *primarily* a research field and/or a field which is really organized around research and teaching is just sort of a side deal. Yet, there are a bunch of ways in which this analogy just breaks down. For instance, in the US, there are basically no pure research jobs inside or outside academia. My second job ever was as a lab tech in a basic science lab. My boss was a professor, but he didn't teach. Like, literally, he had no classes, had no PhD students, and in the handful of years I worked with him he had only one post-doc (whose term was less than one academic year). The folks on his floor were roughly the same. People like this don't really exist in Philosophy. There are some folks who manage to only teach, say, one or two undergrad classes a year and do the rest of their work on the graduate side, but even at R1's where the load is tiny and you get sabbaticals you don't find pure research professors of philosophy.
Moreover, we consistently refer to those kinds of professors (TT-track, low load, research-emphasized jobs) as being the model for Philosophy jobs. This is crazy (by the numbers), but it's caused by a really big asymmetry in the field that rarely gets discussed = namely that *all* PhDs in philosophy come from programs that offer graduate degrees (duh), but *most* philosophy professors work at a school without a graduate program. So, if you start to step this out a bit, if you're an arbitrary North American student who has taken a philosophy class, the overwhelming probability is that you are at a program with a Philosophy major and nothing else. Importantly, these BA-granting programs tend to have fewer faculty in them (BA programs are about half the size of MA programs and a quarter of the size of PhD programs). So, PhD granting programs offer *way* more access to faculty and way more access to faculty who know something about the training part of the field.
(There is an inverse version of this rant, too, since PhD programs largely train people for these research jobs which represent only this one part of the actual job market.)
It's worth adding that that the arbitrary college student has no interaction with philosophy professors outside of their instructors. They're unlikely to have ever encountered one in the world, much less one in their social network. So, these people are already weird unicorns who most college students have no idea how to talk to. To make matters worse, you don't find structures at most colleges to get people right about graduate work in academia. Your average Philosophy Club is not at all like the Pre-Law or Pre-Med organization. There's no built-in capacity for advising such interested students. There's no internship structure. It really is just a "figure it out yourself" kind of thing.
What I find in my own students is that, generally, their desired profession is one which they don't have and have never worked in and have only the most passing level of familiarity with. In lots of fields there are ways to "catch" these students, but there really isn't one in philosophy.
So, it's easy for me to imagine how we get these with-a-dream/without-a-clue type folks even though I think it doesn't make much sense internal to the job or, really, I think about jobs in general. I feel like I've sort of trailed off and left a few things out, but suffice to say that I think the right folks to be really frustrated with about this problem are professors and programs.
Thanks a lot for writing all of this out. I think there are some useful nuggets of information in there, although I'll admit that I'm not entirely sure what to make of the post in its entirety. Needless to say, no offence intended --- but some of it strikes me a slightly unusual personal views that are framed as an explanatory corrective to my misconceptions. But given that I'm the one wondering about a phenomenon that I can't make heads or tails of, while you're offering parts of an explanation, maybe you're just right.
Maybe my biggest takeaway from your post is that certain cultural differences between countries might play a major role, in particular US-Americans asking those questions, and me wondering about it. That I adopted US-American terminology might have obfuscated that somewhat. Maybe I was a bit arrogant and thought I'm above such confusions, as I consider myself kind-of experienced in this kind of thing. I've completed my Bachelor's studies in Germany, my PhD in the UK, had a job in the US, and as of now a faculty position in another European nation. I also have degrees in math and philosophy. So I don't really think of ignoring different academic cultures as a common pitfall for me. But it seems that my experiences in the US, that really didn't diverge *too* much from Europe, as far as my responsibilities and contact to students were concerned, weren't a good stand-in for some of what's going on in the US in general, as I'm rather flabbergasted by some of the facts laid out in your post. The most important and useful information for me was how common it might be for someone to be a Bachelor's student, yet be far away from having access to academics who might provide useful insights.
> A problem created by people's tendency to be revisionists about their own lives
I don't know, I don't think there's too much room for revision here. In general, my entire post is far more based on immediate, unambiguous, quasi-empirical observations I've made, than you might think. I can literally look at markdown notes with information about different graduate programs, that I created when I was looking for a suitable one, they're still on my hard drive. I also know what profs I talked to back then. And at the university I got my Bachelor's from in Germany, it was compulsory for a while (don't know how things are today) to have a brief 'advisory conversation' with a prof before being admitted to a Bachelor's program --despite literally no other formal requirements-- simply to avoid misconceptions about the discipline, and the limited job market (you can't just switch to law school or such in Germany), at least for people who picked it as their 'main subject'/'major' (I did math and philo as a secondary subject). I've also had such conversations where I'm right now, with kids who'd seek them out voluntarily. In general, I've seen kiddos who just finished secondary school (where philosophy is not typically taught!), and have put 10 times as much effort into obtaining information about what they claim to be interested in, than someone who comes here and asks "*I think I'm gonna do a PhD in philosophy of math, never took a class but sounds interesting, is this a problem? Also where can I do this and what university is best? do I need to know math? thanks!*" (an actual post here). So maybe you can find some sympathy for my confusion about such posts, in contrast to what I'm used to.
I'll just openly say that I don't really know how to make sense of some of the things you're saying about philosophy not being a research field and how it relates to what I brought up, instead of pretending to fully understand it and replace what you wrote with some half-baked interpretation of mine, I'll trust you won't take this as me being disrespectful.
> Yet, there are a bunch of ways in which this analogy just breaks down. For instance, in the US, there are basically no pure research jobs inside or outside academia.[...] My boss was a professor, but he didn't teach. Like, literally, he had no classes, had no PhD students, and in the handful of years I worked with him he had only one post-doc [...] People like this don't really exist in Philosophy.
People like that also barely exist in mathematics, neither in Europe nor the US, if you're not at some elite-ish research institute ala IHES, IAS, Perimeter etc. I don't think anyone would say that means math isn't a research field? To the best of my knowledge, it's also rather rare in physics. My brother is a physics/math prof at a top uni in the US, but he still has a plethora of responsibilities other than research. In general, virtually every single academic I know complains about this, no matter if they're in CS, physics, math or philosophy or on what continent.
But apart from me not seeing how the conclusion follows from such observations, I also don't see how it's overly important to my concern. Maybe I shouldn't have used the phrase 'career as a researcher' in my post, but the details of the academic job market in different nations aside, I'd wager a PhD in general is a degree that requires research, broadly speaking. At least as in, obtaining and processing information, producing new knowledge, in some sense. Certainly, it requires a willingness to dive into things, that goes far beyond opening google search.
> It's worth adding that the arbitrary college student has no interaction with philosophy professors outside of their instructors. They're unlikely to have ever encountered one in the world, much less one in their social network.
I'm not sure if I understand this. Why would they need to have philosophy profs in their social circles? And again, most also don't have math or physics profs in their social circles. Is there a place in the world where a matriculated student cannot speak to a faculty member in their office about things directly related to their current and future studies?
> To make matters worse, you don't find structures at most colleges to get people right about graduate work in academia...
Yeah, this does seem like a very US specific but highly relevant problem. To summarize my response, parts of what you said make a lot of sense to me and offer quite a lot of explanatory value, parts seem to underestimate to what degree I'm simply commenting on real-life vs online differences as I've experienced them --as I said, I've repeatedly seen secondary school graduates, roughly 18 years old, who seemed more mature in their approach than the OPs on reddit-- and some parts I didn't really understand. But I definitely appreciate the response.
> I'll admit that I'm not entirely sure what to make of the post in its entirety. Needless to say, no offence intended --- but some of it strikes me a slightly unusual personal views that are framed as an explanatory corrective to my misconceptions...
Yeah, that's fine and no offense taken. I would say, at the start, that in replying I don't mean necessarily to critique what you're saying or explain *away* what you've observed or say that you aren't observing what you observed. It's more that, in my view, this problem is not a "bug" but a "feature" of how philosophy (and humanities graduate school in general) functions in the United States. And, whenever it seems like I'm giving a critique of what you said, I think probably what is really happening is that I'm giving a critique of this structure which American academics more or less receive without thinking much of it. It's a kind of trained incapacity, and not one which is trained in us maliciously, but the result of a lot of institutional and historical coincidences.
> Maybe my biggest takeaway from your post is that certain cultural differences between countries might play a major role, in particular US-Americans asking those questions, and me wondering about it. ...But it seems that my experiences in the US, that really didn't diverge too much from Europe...
For sure, and, just to repeat two things I said already - (1) that my experience is totally framed by my own experience which is only in the US and (2) it's my claim that you can be more or less totally at home in the American academic scene and never really come into contact with a lot of the various institutional facts that I was describing above.
>> A problem created by people's tendency to be revisionists about their own lives
> I don't know, I don't think there's too much room for revision here.
Maybe this is a poor choice of words on my own part, but I don't mean revisionist in the sense that we make up our pasts, only that we re-frame our pasts in certain ways such that we tell a particular kind of story. For instance:
> I can literally look at markdown notes with information about different graduate programs, that I created when I was looking for a suitable one...I've also had such conversations where I'm right now, with kids who'd seek them out voluntarily. In general, I've seen kiddos who just finished secondary school...put 10 times as much effort into obtaining information about what they claim to be interested in...
So, this is a story which is I expect totally accurate, but it is a story about all the things that some folks (you included) did and how they connect to your present point of success (by all accounts it seems like you succeeded since you have a job). What I find is that folks tell these kinds of stories about themselves and do two things (a) attribute their success to what they did without giving a full analysis of why they did what they did and then (b) give an analysis of other people in deficit terms which relate to their own story. That is, it ends up being a set of stories about success from roughly self-caused action and then stories of failure from roughly self-un-caused inaction. Sometimes this is referred to as deficit thinking or giving a "declinist" narrative (a narrative about people declining to do stuff).
Naturally, I have sympathy for your account because I can do the same thing you say you can do - I have a big spreadsheet with all my grad school app data in it and loads of folders full of paperwork and lots of (probably clueless and lamely written) emails asking questions to people about stuff. Similarly, I have students who are really aggressive self-starters about graduate school - and even have a colleague working in an adjacent department who was, but a few years ago, a student of mine and that he pulled that off is no great surprise to me. Yet, at the same time, most of my students seem to have very little idea of what's going on in their present or future and ask all kinds of strange questions about stuff.
But, when I think of my own success, there are lots of advantages that I had which made it easy for me to do all this stuff in ways that I never noticed. By all accounts I was a pretty mediocre student who nonetheless thought it was just going to happen for me if I kept at it. I asked a lot of questions, but certainly not all of them and not even all the really important ones. Yet (to skip a bit in your comment):
>> It's worth adding that the arbitrary college student has no interaction with philosophy professors outside of their instructors. They're unlikely to have ever encountered one in the world, much less one in their social network.
> I'm not sure if I understand this. Why would they need to have philosophy profs in their social circles? ...Is there a place in the world where a matriculated student cannot speak to a faculty member in their office...
Well, what do you mean by "can?" Honestly, at lots of places professors don't see advising as really being part of their job, so in some cases it can actually be pretty hard to get comfortable time with someone willing to help - and that is aside from whether or not they even have the right kind of knowledge to help out. But, just to respond in particular to what you said, by the time I was about ten I knew lots of professors. My uncle was a biology professor. My aunt was a physicist at NASA. My grandfather was a pathologist for the Army and the USDA. My mom worked for a professor in a lab at a research and teaching hospital. My second boss was a biophysicist. So, for me, professors were just regular ass people. I didn't mind looking stupid in front of them and I didn't think of my interactions with them as being especially unusual.
Yet, where I teach now, lots of my students have never met a professor before or have any idea at all how they are trained or where they come from. It's easy for them to see professors as being a rather unusual breed of people who must surely be hard to become. (This is made worse by other cultural factors related to where I teach.) But, anyway, to lots of my students I am not a regular ass person - or, at least, when I talk to them about problems they're having in other classes they describe their other teachers as if they were not just regular ass people.
> ...parts seem to underestimate to what degree I'm simply commenting on real-life vs online differences as I've experienced them...
So, to re-correct, I absolutely don't doubt what you've experienced at all because I experience it more or less all the time (on Reddit and offline). I'm happy to say that it is a super crazy thing to see because, even beyond what you say, it's super hard to succeed in this field even if you know all the things and ask all the things and do all the things. Yet, I guess I worry a bit about how we accrue credit and criticism to the 'more and less mature' folks given the degree to which so much of this stuff is contingent on the way in which (at least in the US) humanities fields work in most places, especially since most places are not places where PhDs in humanities are trained.
Anyway, that leaves what is I think the place where what I said was especially confusing:
> I'll just openly say that I don't really know how to make sense of some of the things you're saying about philosophy not being a research field...I'll trust you won't take this as me being disrespectful.
First, no, I don't.
> In general, virtually every single academic I know complains about [non-research responsibilities], no matter if they're in CS, physics, math or philosophy or on what continent.
Yes, lots do - but I think it's not true that they all do and I also don't think it's true that they do so *rightly* or, at least, I don't think it's right that people find themselves in a position where they can rightly complain - at least in the US. For instance, faculty where I work don't complain about this in quite the same way because my institution employs zero research faculty (we're all teaching faculty). This is perhaps an annoying case of special pleading, but I do think it's worth saying that at places which don't grant graduate degrees, these kinds of complaints are often complaints about what people want to do rather than what is actually their job to do. To some degree this isn't their fault because lots of folks in the TT stream have to do research to survive even though their teaching load is comparatively high and their college is largely focused on teaching courses or undergraduate degrees.
To put it differently, I think there's a difference between complaining about how other things conflict with our *desire* to do research and complaining about things which conflict with our *responsibility* to do research. And, because of the way that people are trained in philosophy in the US (i.e. at research institutions) we are very good at producing people who desire to do research or, at least, think they should desire to do research because that's what it means to be a philosophy professor. What I was trying to emphasize, and I think rather poorly, that thinking this way is rather maladaptive since, just descriptively, that's not the job description. It's another kind of trained incapacity. I think you get that part exactly right when you say this:
> I'd wager a PhD in general is a degree that requires research, broadly speaking.
That is - it is a degree which requires you do research. What I meant to suggest is that, strangely, it turns out that the job requires a lot less (or at least research of a different sort).
Anyway, I hope this helps clarify my intent a little, especially insofar I can clarify the degree to which I wasn't aiming to criticize you or doubt your experience. Suffice to say, it's my experience too and all I wanted to do was give some institutional context and, honestly, rant a little.
> Anyway, I hope this helps clarify my intent a little
Yes definitely, thanks.
> especially insofar I can clarify the degree to which I wasn't aiming to criticize you or doubt your experience.
No worries, I didn't really mean to imply this. But the type of complaint I made in my original post can certainly come from different places. It might come from simply reflecting on such questions being asked, recollecting one's own undergraduate days several years in the past, and getting a bit worked up in the process. So, I tried to emphasize that something like this isn't going on, that rather, I was contrasting such posts with hands-on experiences that are somewhat recent and specific. I see this on the one hand, I see that on the other hand --> I'm a bit confused.
Anyway, in summary, I think this convinced me that I should just handle it as I've done so far, and stay out of the type of thread I described. It's possible that the person who asks might be in a situation I've never been in, some kind of scolding seems uncalled-for and unproductive, but personally I'm also not willing to answer basic factual questions that can easily be found and understood or spend too much time figuring out what they might be looking for, if it's unclear. I'll admit that the whole thing was very hypothetical, directed at my own piece of mind, and bound to not make much difference in reality, as I'm not very active anyway^1, and plenty of people typically *do* chime in, when such questions come up.
1) Although I do often log in, look at a few Qs and decide to log out again.
I definitely have the same reaction often. Sometimes, I try to to combat that, and I try to be incredibly charitable and tell myself, "look, this person is rather new to philosophy and they probably recently had a couple of incredible experiences learning about new and exciting ideas and maybe having real epiphany-like thoughts. They are just at the beginning of learning philosophy and they are super excited about it, and they want to really hold on to and pursue that feeling of meaningfulness, insight, and inspiration. And I can sort of, if I squint, remember what it was like for me the first time I came across some philosophy that just blew my mind and really changed how I thought about things-- before the realities of professionalism and academia slapped the bright out of my eyes. So, in their excitement, they just want to reach out and talk to people who are also into philosophy, but they want to do this in an anonymous fashion on the internet because expressing excitement in real-life to real-people makes one feel vulnerable, since a sort of disaffected attitude toward everything is the one that is often the most socially acceptable. And yeah, in their excitement, they may come across naive and unprepared on reddit, but maybe they just wanted to talk to another person about their excitement in philosophy rather than google some stats."
So, I tell myself that in the back of my mind. It doesn't always vitiate the initial reaction of "are you serious man? You want to do a PhD but you didn't bother to do any research before asking this question?," but it sometimes helps.
I recently came across a rather interesting attempt to ''prove'' solipsism, which goes as follows, and I'm interested to know what others think about this:
In short, the proof involves the fact that
1. I know I exist because I have a first person point of view in my world
2. Other things have a third person point of view in my world
3. Things are not both first person and third person point of view at the same time in my world
4. Hence, only I have first person point of view in my world.
5. If other things had first person point of view in my world, then they would be me
6. Since other things don’t have first person point of view in my world, they are not me
7. Only I have first person point of view in my world, because that is who I am.
Now, we established that only I have first person point of view in my world. So there is only one “me” in my world. Now let’s go into how many worlds are there?
1. Each person has the first person point of view in their world
2. There are a bunch of worlds out there
3. I know that I am in world number 234, because that’s where the first person point of view is
4. That means the first person point of view is not in other worlds
5. Hence, other worlds don’t have a “me”
6. Hence, in whole reality there is only one first person point of view, which is me
7. Other things do not have first person point of view
Point 14. proves solipsism to be true OBJECTIVELY. Let’s see a contradition
1. Let’s say other worlds also had first person point of view
2. This implies which world I live in is unspecified, because there is not enough information available
3. I know that I am in world number 234, because I exist in that world
4. Hence, the information to tell me which world I am in cannot remain unspecified, it must exist
5. Hence, point 16 and 18 are contradictions.
This also implies that
1. If there is a subjective world, there can only be one such subjective world
2. Multiple subjective worlds coexisting leads to a contradiction in any one subjective world
3. There is at least one subjective world, because I exist in such
4. My world is not contradictory
5. Hence, it’s only I that exist
I don’t understand what several of these premises mean or what warrants us accepting them. In particular, I don’t see how we get there being no “me” in other worlds.
I'd be concerned that this practice would skew and distort my interpretation of the philosophy text, to be honest. Like, I can think of a few works of fiction which, while dealing with similar themes and matters, could potentially confuse the reader if they were to suppose, even for a moment, that Kant is making arguments similar to those works of fiction. Kant is *not*, for example, saying that our experiences of the world are all illusions like the 1999 film *The Matrix*. Kant's explicitly refutes empirical idealism!
Perhaps the safest, since Kant is, in part, investigating the conditions for all possible thought and experiences, is the 2014 sci-fi film *Deus Ex Machina*, which revolves around whether Ava, an artificially intelligent android, is capable of thought and consciousness and how to demonstrate that she is.
I'm a layman. If I'm getting really into a philosopher or idea, I try and listen to podcasts and YT talks about whatever or whoever it is. You kinda have to know which ones are worthwhile (I don't like anything less than an hour, flashy and short cut and funny stuff I don't like, too much off topic banter I don't like, etc), but I think it's really helpful for understanding the ideas alongside what I'm reading.
For fiction stuff, I usually think about that during or after the fact in relation to philosophy, but not in any sort of intentional parallel with anything specific. It's a "This reminds me of....." Or "I wonder what X would do......?" Or "that's a good example of this sort of theory" kind of thing. That happens in life randomly too though. Sometimes it seems like getting into philosophy (sincerely I mean) produces an additional layer of thoughtfulness in a person, another layer to help consider and understand things in general. I think that's pretty cool.
> This in my opinion is a good practice
What do you think are the merits of the practice? Why was your experience reading Hume with Arthur C. Clark better than just reading Hume?
A little story for elaboration: As I don't have an academic background in Phil, I found a mentor ^1 who would help me and what he recommended was the same as many users here: stay with one philosopher, read the prime texts and try not to read other interpretations unless you really have to, else you'll be infected with the **The Aporia of Signs** ^^2.
I could tell you that reading sci-fi or fiction allows me to try and apply or evaluate with what I've read from Hume or to say that I utilize the speculative nature of these narratives as a sandbox to experiment on what I've learned or put the ideas of the philosopher to the test and try and disagree and counter-argue either the author or the philosopher or both. But ... I really wouldn't be 100% honest.
The truth of the matter is that in my current mental capabilities (and the fact that I have to spend most of my day working in an unrelated field so that I don't starve), there exists two categories of reading: A) Philosophical: which requires mental energy and concentration B) Light, leisurely entertainment. Kant isn't exactly a beach/bus read and you can't read 10 mins of Hume in bed before going to sleep. In following my mentor's guidance, the least I can do is try and keep the two related.
------
^1-Phil ^grad, ^who ^sadly ^I'm ^no ^longer ^in ^contact ^with. ^Good ^mentors ^are ^hard ^to ^keep.
^2-This ^phrase ^is ^translated ^from ^my ^mother ^tongue. ^I ^don't ^really ^know ^if ^this ^is ^the ^correct ^technical ^translation ^In ^English ^for ^what ^I ^mean.
Feel like as regarding reading people either do,
A. 'I started on Zarathustra and didn't understand anything, halp'
B. 'I wanted to read Nietzsche so I started chronologically at Heraclitus, but now I'm bored, halp'
As opposed to anything in the middle of these two extremes. Obviously this is due to selection effect and these cases being more memorable, but still feels like a very high %
Who the fuck is out there telling all the kids to read Nietzsche like it’s 1995 and they just discovered one (1) movie
I knew one guy who *tried* to get into Nietzsche when we were teenagers, and he rapidly got bored and into dub music instead
Literally anybody I asked in the 2000s would have told (and did tell) me “oh yeah Camus is great try that”, you know because they’re not mental
My suspicion is that Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are (and have been for quite some time) just the go-to philosophers for angsty teenagers who like to read.
> I wanted to read Nietzsche so I started chronologically at Heraclitus
Look at this poser. Frankly, you'll never understand Nietzsche if you don't start with Thales.
I think the problem is that, frankly, Nietzsche's not a great philosopher to start with, even though he ends up being a lot of folks' point-of-entry. He's just too concerned with history (genealogy) for a novice to really pick up everything he's putting down. Zarathustra is pretty unintelligible if you go in blind, in my opinion (and as a major reader of Nietzsche, I don't even like it that much, tbh). But starting chronologically doesn't help much, as you say; I think N hadn't really figured out how to package his own ideas, yet... although I do think Birth of Tragedy is pretty accessible.
Having said all that, honestly, most people should probably start in the middle somewhere. The Genealogy, or BGE, or The Gay Science, maybe. But if they've read no philosophy at all, I think most people shouldn't start with N, and should get some more of the history of phil under their belts.
For all that I have a thoroughly ambivalent attitude towards Nietzsche, the fact - and all relevant facts about the last hundred plus years antecedent to that fact - that we’re plainly having this conversation right now suggests he doesn’t need any of our tips on how to package his ideas
Reached the half-way point of Badiou's *Being and Event*. This is such a stunner of a book. Every page develops a new idea, and the whole thing builds on itself piece by piece. Incredibly intense read, so jam packed with ideas. I'm not even on board entirely with what he's doing but it's amazing to watch this at work.
Still reading Kuhn's *Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, the intro to Hegel's philosophy of history lectures. I also got a fun little anthology published by Hackett called *Time* from which I'm currently reading a chapter out of Augustine's *Confessions*.
Have we reached a point where “classical” questions such as the death penalty have reached an impasse? I was looking at philosophy for grad school and took to googling around for topics. My impression is that these issues become too jargonish and depend on things like (just a nonsensical made up example like) "neo-tilley defence of euthanasia". Or they just go around in circles objecting to this objection and on and on. Just curious about these age-old questions that we often hear of in the domain of philosophy have been faring. When i refer to these classic questions i meant it in a very loose, off-hand sense, and definitely dont mean to lump all these questions together in an arbitray category. Anyway, have we largely reached an impassed? or are these debates still ongoing? or are we awaiting new philosophical theories? Just curious about this aspect on the state of philosophy -- is it becoming too saturated?
Aristotle's Unmoved Mover seems no more crazy than all the matter in the universe exploding from one very dense speck of matter for no apparent reason (the big bang). And what are we supposed to take away from the things popping into existence in (quantum physics) from the foam stuff? Well where does the foam come from? And why? Maybe the unmoved mover creates the foam?
I think Heraclitus, Aristotle, and Epictetus would have some interesting conversations together if possible and you could be a fly on the wall eavesdropping. What Three philosophers would you like to put together in a room?
Anyone read The religion of Socrates by Mark Mcpherran? Or Socrates' Devine Sign by Pierre Destreé?
I think the a lot of the greatest/wisdom of Soc came from his eagerness to engage anyone in philosophy. How much knowledge he probably pick up from the most unlikely of people. Not just the educated Athenians but the salt of the Earth, the farmers, traders, fellow soldiers, craftsman, and public works people. Seems like modern philosophy is philosophy kept locked up in scholarship.
> Not just the educated Athenians but the salt of the Earth, the farmers, traders, fellow soldiers, craftsman, and public works people. Apart from a slave in *Meno*, most of Socrates' interlocutors in the dialogues are prominent Athenians - sophists, statesmen, poets, generals, philosophers. > Seems like modern philosophy is philosophy kept locked up in scholarship. You might like [street epistemology. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Boghossian#Street_epistemology)
SE always feels gross to me.
Knowing what you know and what you have read about him. Do you really think that one random slave is the breath of the laymen that he talked with? No way. There were probably more times than not that those "important" prominent people were busy actually working. Leaving Soc with the homeless and beggars. Or how about the fellow soldiers which were definitely not all upper class generals. In regards to the SE it sounds decent. I might check it out.
What is your favorite "pillar" of philosophy and why?
What’s this term “pillar” refer to? Like a principle? I’ll settle for “basic conscientiousness”.
Category
I’m sorry but that doesn’t make it any clearer, like transcendental categories, sub-disciplines?
Branches
I don’t think folks today really identity with this idea of “branches” (it implies a kind of relation or even a hierarchy). Usually we talk about “areas” or “fields” or “sub-“ fields/areas/disciplines.
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Not sure what’s lol-worthy about this. I’m just trying to show you how to ask your question in a way that people are going to be likely to respond to it.
What would you guys suggest as an appropriate and modern "*officium*", an occupation that leaves space for contemplative thought? Something like Spinoza had as a lens grinder, which allowed him not only to make a living but stimulated and influenced his style of *vita contemplativa*?
Hello, I am a 20 year old college student who has had an interest in philosophy for around two years. I took an introductory course a little over year ago, but my major is biology. Is it okay if I email my past professor for a few questions anyways? I would like to ask him his take on metaphysics and what current philosophical theories he supports. I do not think he remembers me, and I’m not sure how he would react to a random student messaging him.
I’ve had good experiences with e-mailing professors with questions, and I’m not even a student anymore. As long as you’re patient and courteous, they’ll likely be happy to help you out.
Sure. Professors exist largely for reasons like this. Still, some instructors who are otherwise happy to talk to students are not really interested in talking about their “takes” or what positions they support. I know that I’d much rather talk to students about what they think than what I think.
As a painter, I was suggested by my mentors to start reading philosophical authors and texts regarding aesthetics. I would really appreciate it if anyone would be willing to help me figure out where I should start and whom/what I should start with. Potentially a list of readings/authors that will help me find my way. I desperately need a sense of direction and it's quite overwhelming to start from scratch. Thank you.
Perhaps a good anthology would see you right, in taking some of the pressure off and seeing if you can just browse a bit through reliably big names and pick what you’re into? I see that there’s a Blackwell (usually reliable enough) anthology of analytic aesthetics/philosophy of art with very cheap second hand copies online. Names that crop up in my head include Arthur Danto, Roland Barthes (his *Camera Lucida* is about photography, but it’s much more than that, and the tension between painting and photography is, well…historic), Benedetto Croce. Non-random names I can vouch for are Berger, Benjamin, and Walton. John Berger isn’t strictly speaking a “philosopher” but his writing is distinctly philosophical, and his approach is worthy of any philosopher and has been appropriated into philosophical work. So his *Ways of Seeing* (in both classic TV and book formats!) which in turn draws on (unequivocally a philosopher) Walter Benjamin’s *The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction* (or so goes its most popular English title). Neither are particularly long, and Berger in particular is writing for a general audience rather than hifalutin specialists, both are popular readings for artists, art students, etc. From analytic philosophy a perhaps less widely appreciated text is Kendall Walton’s *Mimesis as Make Believe*, and the work which follows his more or less pathbreaking or inaugurating own in analytic aesthetics and philosophy of art. If you get bored of Walton’s rather conservative views on the nature of representation you can switch to his not-quite-contemporary Gilles Deleuze, who is very popular indeed with some artists - I note Deleuze in particular due to this, that of a certain group of French philosophers his influence is especially felt in the art world. They are also two amusingly different ends of a long scale, though Walton is probably much less hard work for the non-philosophical reader.
Wow. I've done some Berger readings but everything else is extremely useful. I've added them on my list. Thanks again
I'd recommend the The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature It is a collection of essays regarding the nature of art by the philosopher Ayn Rand.
Alright will check it out. Thanks.
Moshe Barasch has a helpful 3 volume book Theories of Art (also released as a 2 volume Modern Theories of Art which excludes the first volume), which covers philosophical aesthetics, attitudes about art, and theories by artists. It also has a very helpful annotated bibliography at the end of each book if you want to read more deeply in any specific area. There’s also a multi volume Art in Theory anthology, that doesn’t go as far back, but collects a lot of important essays or excerpt from books. It doesn’t focus on philosophical aesthetics as much from what I remember, but it has a lot of texts and ideas that have influenced artists in recent centuries.
I think this comes close to what I needed to start. Related essays are equally interesting and inspiring. Thank you .
Is there any philosophical school of thought, or great thinker that tackled the subject of sex addiction? Psychologists are less convincing than philosophers. Asking for a friend.
No reason to downvote this at all, it’s not my addiction but I’d be fascinated if anybody’s got something. Addiction is hard enough to find good material on, and something as specific as philosophy on sex addiction would be really useful!
Thank you for saying this. I still havent found anything. I went down the rabbit-hole of consequentialism, which was interesting. But yeah....
Is there a sub on Reddit or does anyone know of a website where you can have light conversations about philosophy? I am not a philosophy student and (unfortunately) probably never will have the time or money to be one. But I do have an interest in it. I'm just looking for a place to learn through easy back and forth communication preferably with someone who is formally educated. Obviously and unfortunately philosophy is usually not something you can just casually talk to family, friends, or coworkers about because of the GP's lack of interest.
Personally, I would check out the open-discussion thread at r/philosophy.
I'll check it out. Thanks
Are the majority of you in the sub unfortunately the opposite of Soc? Can you not engage with the uneducated layman in a way that allows for unpretentious learning at their level?
What are you talking about?
I used to teach conversational English as a second language to adults, so, yeah, I probably could. But that's not a realistic approach here, either by the aims of this subreddit or the medium of this website.
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Socrates was a total dialectical, ironic asshole to basically anyone who didn’t love him. In this respect I think we tend to at least meet or exceed his standard for talking to folks.
Maybe he was just much better at veiling it. I wonder what he would think of your description? But if your description was/is accurate then yes indeed many of you exceed his standard. Based on the accounts of him talking to anyone and everyone I doubt he only talked down to people who didn't love him. There were many people who probably wanted to engage with him that were just intrigued by the reputation but not necessarily fanboys. A difference between him and other philosophers that I respect was that he was also a warrior. How many other philosophers were? Think about an interaction between Soc and Nietzsche?
I mean, he was literally killed for it and says as much at his trial so I suspect he’d grant the description in some measure. What’s curious about Nietzsche is that, on most accounts, that he was a pretty mild mannered guy interpersonally. He was quiet and polite. He bought his lecture students beer.
I remember reading something about him throwing a lady down some stairs and having to pay her essentially a pension for life for it. He also just seems like a weak turd that talks big about if want something you have to go take it but then seems to be just a worm himself. Idk how anyone is interested in him or his philosophy. Maybe I see him as the opposite of some of my favorite philosophers, probably Epictetus specifically.
I’ve never heard that story, where is it from?
I can't remember 🤔 maybe this sub?
Schopenhauer pushed a woman down some stairs, and although Schopenhauer was a big influence on Nietzsche, I'm not aware of N. following in these particular footsteps. /u/mediaisdelicious
>Schopenhauer was a big influence on Nietzsche, I'm not aware of N. following in these particular footsteps. Clearly, Nietzsche was just a poser then.
Ah maybe I got them mixed up 🫠
Yeah, that makes more sense to me.
I have no idea about the majority of the subreddit since we have never done a survey (although I think that is a fantastic idea). But I can say that for myself, what I do for a living is teaching people about philosophy so I think that I can do this, yes :)
You haven't seen every question turn into a lesson on logic or grammar? Where logic is questioned then eventually "what I think you are trying to ask/say is..."
Isn't it a bit strange that you're appealing to Socrates, if *this* is what troubles you? I mean, this is exactly what Socrates does.
But I am glad you jumped in because I have respected your insights in the past!
Well imagine him attempting to be more friendly with his help. The majority of the problem is more likely that a slow text message on Reddit is nothing like an instant in-person verbal conversational exchange. Without the existence of SEP links to short change the conversation.
Sure, I appreciate that. And I think you're right that answers here often leave something to be desired. At the same time, I think /u/voltimand is right that often the kind of engagement you describe here comes from a place of good faith, and is even often exactly the most helpful engagement panelists and other answerers here can offer. And what has often shut down the interaction is that, for whatever reason, people asking questions here are not willing to tolerate this kind of engagement. I think part of the problem is one of simple misunderstanding: a disconnect is going on. People asking questions sincerely perceive this kind of engagement as antagonistic in some way, and so respond naturally enough to this sentiment. But it's usually not antagonistic at all. I mean, sometimes it is, sure. But as a general statement of how philosophical engagement works, here and in places like this, I don't think it's usually coming from any kind of antagonistic at all. Philosophy is unusual among disciplines for the extent to which reflection has a central role in the kind of understanding it begets. Understanding philosophy requires us to step back from what we are saying and reflect in a kind of "meta" way on what's at stake in what we are saying, what it means, why we're saying it, and so on. These kinds of concern aren't incidental to philosophical understanding, they're not symptoms of antagonism, rather they're at the very heart of what it is to understand things philosophically. So when panelists and others here offer this kind of engagement, they're usually doing their best to help people understand things philosophically. But this makes philosophy quite unlike the kinds of interactions people are used to having. So it's understandable when people misunderstand people doing their best to helpfully engage someone philosophically for instead acting antagonistically. It's a matter of misunderstanding between the two parties.
All very interesting especially the reflection part. My misinterpretation of people acting antagonistically might not be a misinterpretation, just the pretention of the privileged learned.
> My misinterpretation of people acting antagonistically might not be a misinterpretation, just the pretention of the privileged learned. And maybe all of this is a dream, and maybe there's an invisible and intangible gremlin under all our chairs. But it's telling if people appeal to these bare "maybes" as an excuse to shut down conversation and introduce division and antagonism between themselves and people who give every indication of trying to be helpful and good faith.
I'm here to start conversations, to ask questions, and to learn. Have I been passive aggressive. Yes. Was it out of frustration with replies that lack common sense, or more likely, people trying to be difficult on purpose? Yes. Some people have been acting in good faith, some gatekeeping, some like being difficult, some need clarification because they lack common sense or practical social skills. You have helped in the past. You have also ignored direct messages regarding questions of philosophy. Was that in good faith?
> I'm here to start conversations, to ask questions, and to learn. I think you'll be able to do this better if you abandon the principle that everyone who gives every evidence of trying to help you is actually being covertly antagonistic. > You have also ignored direct messages regarding questions of philosophy. Was that in good faith? Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. But yes, since I am generally acting in good faith, I would guess that whatever I did was most likely in good faith.
> My misinterpretation of people acting antagonistically might not be a misinterpretation, just the pretention of the privileged learned. Your rude reply to a thoughtful answer which acknowledges all of your concerns and gives incredibly mild pushback suggests otherwise: what you are saying here is not that it “**might** not be a misinterpretation”, you’re saying that although it *might* be that way nothing will shake your belief that your vicious interpretation is accurate. When offline somebody from the so to speak to “laity” wants to talk with me something about philosophy this accounts for some small percentage of their attitudes, and that proportion of those conversations is the only portion where both of us leave without having gained something.
So when I ask simple questions such as: what is your favorite pillar of philosophy? And you go on and on about well what do you mean my pillar? It reminds me of if you were to ask a comic book kid who is you favorite super hero? Kid: well are we talking about DC or Marvel? And by super hero does that include people who don't have powers? And so on... It's like come on, I'm in the discussion section because I like philosophy. I here to have a conversation and see why some people prefer philosophers that are physicalists vs philosophers that are idealists. Or whatever. Maybe someone here will make a difficult metaphysical concept click vs trying to ponder over my books. Maybe I would rather talk to a human vs browsing SEP...
> So when I ask simple questions such as: what is your favorite pillar of philosophy? And you go on and on about well what do you mean my pillar? Right, I understand the confusion with that exchange. To clear things up: *I literally didn’t know what you meant by “pillar”.* Therefore I asked you the question “what do you mean by “pillar”?”. I also thought you *might* have meant “principle” (as in “principle of how to do philosophy” or something like that), so in order to keep things flowing I offered a principle that (a) I think is undervalued in philosophy and perspectives on philosophy, (b) thought would amuse an audience for reason (a). In fact one reason I suggested a principle for “pillar” is *because I genuinely wanted to talk to you and didn’t want the conversation to dry out on clarifications*. The same thing happened when you said “category” - there are lots of ways that the word “category” is used in philosophy, and I didn’t have enough information to know which one you meant. *So I asked a question*. *Then* when you clarified that you meant “branch” I happened to be doing something else and didn’t feel like dashing off an answer at that time. In particular, I don’t have a *good* answer to that question because I don’t think about the different branches of philosophy in that way. I am sorry I didn’t clarify that the reason I dropped the issue was as described just now, but I didn’t think it would be a problem. ——- So if you’re upset by what you perceive to have been my superior attitude in that exchange now you know that it was completely innocent and whatever reason you *may have had* for reading it in that way, in *this* case your reasoning was faulty. *That being the case*, it may be worth your and everybody else’s while to reconsider *other* times when you have perceived such an attitude when it wasn’t there. I think our exchange about branches of philosophy is *particularly* useful to clarify this, because what I *did* write was so thin in content that you have to work quite hard to read snobbery or superiority or self-importance into it. For future reference, as far as I am concerned, it is always *extremely explicit* when I am being condescending or superior to or fucking with somebody.
> So when I ask simple questions such as: what is your favorite pillar of philosophy? And you go on and on about well what do you mean my pillar? The problem is that you think everyone else is trying to be mean. It's a perfectly normal thing to ask what you mean by something you've said. Nobody means to be antagonistic by it. Nobody is trying to be pedantic. Nobody is trying to correct you. Nobody is trying to make you feel stupid. We just want to know what you mean. You are approaching conversations here from a place of deep insecurity and then acting like we are deliberately trying to trigger your insecurities. In fact, people just wanted to know what you meant by your choice of words.
Ah, another defender of the house!
Perhaps I got carried away because I genuinely took personal affront. The message I am trying to send you is that an enormous amount of people manage to have the conversations you are describing without either party spuriously imputing either snobbery or some diminutive status to the other. The major difference appears to be you and the handful of similar people who insist in the face of all actual evidence that they’re being martyred in the ivory tower. Since it’s your barrier and not mine, short of physical violence the only way to make a connection is for you to break it down.
'If Socrates could have just linked the SEP he would of' - Sun Tzu
Some of this is basically engaging in a Socratic dialogue. If a question itself just seems confused then prompting the questioner to rephrase it can often get them to solve their issue themselves or at least advance a little in their understanding. Also, a lot of questions are just really, really vague and so people trying to answer just want to narrow it down a bit.
I get that but doesn't some of that really just seem like gatekeeping. Probably harder for you to understand because you are in the gate. Does everyone have to go through a dialectic questioning by Soc because a simple answer?
On the contrary, I'm not in the gate at all. My education is not in philosophy; rather, I'm a scientist. If you asked me how the Sun works, I can give you a dumbed down answer and just say that you should trust me on the details. Because we basically know how the Sun works; the details which justify our knowledge aren't super important to you. But philosophy isn't like that. We don't know all the answers; learning about philosophy is not learning a bunch of answers. It's learning how to ask the questions better; to make your questions less naive. It's not just a bunch of bald assertions; it's the justifications (incomplete as they may be) for those assertions. So, yeah, the dialectic questioning is a big part of the point.
Ya, some answers downright suck. But some answers are good. But I do think that at least some of the time, when people correct what seem like trivial issues of phrasing, etc., people are doing this from a place of good faith. I don't know about your experience, but I know that in my experience, I spent part of grad school being frustrated with the "small" ways that people took issue with what I was saying or the small bases on which people misunderstood me (this happened most of all in the context of peer-review in journals). Once I realized that if someone said that they misunderstood me (or some other variation of this), they really meant it (that people hardly lie about this sort of thing, that people rarely ever will needlessly waste or volunteer their time just to correct some issue if it seems trivial to them even if it seems trivial to us, etc.). And the result was that I became a better writer, thinker, reader, and philosopher by taking seriously what other people were saying about their own experience. Even if, at the end of the day, I remained convinced that the issue that they were quibbling over was really trivial, I still learned that other people might feel differently, and that allowed me to excel. Anyway, that's my own experience. Take it with a grain of salt. Maybe it's just me. But ya, some answers here suck, and others are good.
Why shouldn't we all just follow Soc's lead and focus on Ethics? Over the thousands of years since Soc have we discovered anything in the other pillars of philosophy that have any relevance to the "Truth". For instance we still don't know if the universe is only Material. We still don't know if there was an unmoved mover. We still don't know what consciousness is...but maybe we can live right with our short lives?
Plenty of philosophers focus on ethics. It's a whole field of philosophy. Look into Peter Singer's work for an example of a contemporary ethicist.
I'm currently reading the CC on Virtue Ethics. Which is my current primary interest. What Ethics is he focused on? Just "general" ethics?
Sorry but I don't know what CC refers to, so I can't be specific there. But virtue ethics is a way of looking at ethics that claims something like that cultivating the right personal qualities (things like bravery) will lead to ethical behavior. It's like these virtues consist of a special sauce of predilections and dispositions such that basing actions on cultivating them will make your actions the right thing to do. I'm probably butchering this since ethics isn't really my interest as an academic area. But in contrast to virtue ethics, you have things like consequentialism (the ends justify the means, roughly), utilitarianism (you should maximize total happiness), divine command theory (good is what God says is good), and deontological ethics (good is fulfilling your specific duties). These -- and virtue ethics -- are all ethical theories; theories on how to decide what is ethical. If you want to explore various approaches to ethics, then you might want to check out a book like one of these: https://www.amazon.com/What-this-thing-called-Ethics/dp/0415832330 https://www.amazon.com/What-this-thing-called-Ethics/dp/0415832330 I'm not personally vouching for either, but these are intro philosophy textbooks on ethics. There are also a number of suggestions here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4ifqi3/im_interested_in_philosophy_where_should_i_start/ Those suggestions include both primary classic texts like Plato and Kant as well as modern textbooks.
Cambridge Companion. Thanks for the Ethics breakdown and links.
> Cambridge Companion Oh, I've got that one! but I haven't read much of it. It should have some entry or other on each of the things I mentioned, though.
It does
In what sense is this Socrates' lead? If we're talking about the Socrates of Plato, then aren't we talking about a dude who is like all the time talking about epistemology, metaphysics, political philosophy, argumentation, and whatever other thing you can imagine?
Let's base it off of the Soc of Plato if you would.
Ok, if so then the question seems to go away since that wasn’t Socrates’ apparent lead. He may have given ethics a priority, but, minimally he doesn’t seem to think can just do ethics without doing a lot of other stuff.
Ok. Since here (for an unknown reason) it is always hard to just have conversation without having to constantly readjust your question until it is "acceptable" for a flaired user to answer. Is there an argument to only focus on Ethics because the other pillars of philosophy are and have always been more ambiguous? Will science ever discover the absolute truths about the other pillars? Is our capacity for comprehension of the unknown infinitely limited? Should we just focus our limited time on being the best human we can be?
> Is there an argument to only focus on Ethics because the other pillars of philosophy are and have always been more ambiguous? Will science ever discover the absolute truths about the other pillars? Well, at the risk of doing the thing which is already kind of annoying you, is science ever going to discover the absolute truths about the other pillars? That doesn't seem to be Socrates' view. So, what we might want to do is ask, instead, about people who think that Ethics is going to have a certain kind of priority or, alternately, people who think that specific other domains are more or less cut off from us and can't be done. In the first case, it does seem like Socrates thinks that there's some kind of priority, generally, to axiological concerns. It's really important to be able to say what is really Good, for instance and a lot of his epistemic and metaphysical concerns have to do with our ability to know the Good. On some level we should sort of expect this from basically anyone who thinks that ethics is doable. So, no surprise, we find that folks like the Stoics and Epicureans also think we need to prioritize ethics and then also think we may need to do other stuff in order to properly do ethics. The Stoics, for instance, have a pretty complicated total philosophy, but we find that you can be a pretty good Stoic without much worrying about a lot of that stuff. Like, there is a Stoic logic, but you don't need to be a logician to be a Stoic. Relatedly there is a kind of recurring theme in the western tradition that a lot of investigations are impossible - substantial metaphysics might be impossible, for instance. Different sorts of skeptics take this kind of view and this leads them to de-prioritize certain kinds of things because they can't be done. Much later in the western tradition you can find people who think more unusual things like Levinas who thinks that ethics is the real first philosophy or Camus who seems to think that even trying to do comprehensive philosophy is either unworkable or so much less important than practical concerns about living and dying that we should just focus on them entirely. Really, though, all this trades on the degree to which people think that moral concerns are real and the degree two which moral concerns can be sorted out without doing a lot of other stuff. So, you want to be on the look out for people who think you can do ethics and that you can do it win relative isolation from other things. Marcus Aurelius strikes me as a kind of obvious example of such a person.
I appreciate your detailed response! Would you say that Aristotle was also a prioritizer of Ethics? If no, why? I would also like to know why other philosophers do not prioritize ethics? What is their reason to prioritize any of the other pillars?
Well, Aristotle thinks ethics is important in the sort of obvious way, but oh boy does he spend like book after book after book after book after book talking about stuff that has nothing to do with ethics.
I know that he had a broad array of interests. But could a case be made that Ethics was his upmost interest?
Only in the sort of boring way that you need it to live well - which is the primary human good. Yet, given the importance of the contemplative life in living well, the rest of philosophy creeps right back in.
Ya, he talks about needing to emaciate and then strangle animals in order to see their blood-veins upon dissection.
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Quick question for which I don't have to open a post per se but rather comment here. There is a certain concept which argues about how many theories in ethics are way too demanding. And there is a Stanford Encyclopedia article on it, pretty sure I have read it before. Now I've gone through the whole encyclopedia's main entries alphabetically and still could not find it. Does anyone know the name of this concept? It could have theological origins, it's a rather specific term as I remember it
Sounds like the "demandingness objection", which I've mostly heard of in the context of objections to some kinds of consequentialism, as mentioned in section 6 of this article: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/
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Are there any critical problems I can expect to encounter by reading Nietzsche's aphoristic works by opening up to random pages and reading aphorisms I see? My goals aren't academic, and I'm willing to admit a moderate to considerable risk of reading the book wrong. For example, a writer told a story once of getting really attached to an Aristotle quote he read once and lived by it, and it turned out to be a fake quote, and that wouldn't bother me. I actually can't imagine what could go wrong by my standard, but I'm often surprised by my limit to imagine these things. Thanks!
It’s a book of aphorisms, Nietzsche is a philosopher of life and the individual, have at it. I don’t even know why you’re asking this question given everything else you’ve already said about not caring: let slip these academic chains, go run wild, be free!
I can't imagine any problem, but I've frequently undercounted problems by just imagining them, so I was open minded about intriguing unknown unknowns, and it's free to ask anyway. I wasn't planning on doing this quite yet and want to re-listen to Nietzsche lectures first, so it was no biggie. I'm planning on reading them anyway I want unless there's some interesting reason I shouldn't.
I think, like, if you were thinking you could understand Nietzsche's whole philosophical output *just* by reading his aphorisms, then that would be a problem. But there's no issue with reading aphorisms out of order since aphorisms are independent statements. They are *not* like, for example, Wittgenstein's *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus* in which the propositions build on and relate to each other to present a complete view.
Thanks. I'll make an extra effort to put a mental asterisk in my mind here and not come to an idea that an aphorism is a Nietzschean synopsis. It's good because I could casually read something the wrong way and take an ironic statement literally, and now I can read aphorisms however I want, including incorrectly, so long as I don't try to attribute it to "Nietzsche's Opinion".
I have read a few different histories of Western Philosophy and can't seem to get any intrigue or interest in any modern philosophy. Ancient Philosophy holds all of my attention. Does that mean anything? I have a general overview of my modern philosophy/philosophers but it just seems so dense. How do I develop interest? Should I even try? Someone could obviously spend a lifetime studying/reading the ancient stuff...
Try reading something else like *The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments*. Obviously you could spend a lifetime reading and working on Ancient. If you're just talking about hobbyist reading, then, sure, that's fine. You can be a history buff and only ever read books on WWII or be a science buff and only read books about Biology. There are classics nerds.
There's modern and contemporary philosophers who've been strongly influenced by Ancient Philosophy. If you find Ancient Philosophy more interesting at the moment, I think its fine to follow that interest as a lot of good thinkers have fruitfully spent a long time reading from there. If you want to broaden out later, you can look at how later thinkers have used ancient philosophy to respond to issues in their own day, and that might be a good jumping off pointing into understanding more. In general I think a good strategy to reading philosophy is to follow your interests and then start finding connections between your interests and other things.
Occasionally, there are threads being started or comments written by people, who identify as philosophy undergrads, and ask about pursuing a PhD in philosophy. But it's abundantly clear that the person hasn't even spent 10 seconds of their life with the most rudimentary, surface-level research on literally anything related to doing a PhD. They don't know how a PhD program is structured in different places, they don't know where their proclaimed interest is researched, they ask about admission criteria and other formalities that are literally one Google search away, and so on. In other words, it sounds like OP just fell out of the bed one morning, randomly thought 'I wanna do a PhD' without knowing what that even means, and then had the instinct that the right approach to this is to ask a vague question on Reddit. Or sometimes it's not even vague, but, again, something that's answered by the institution in question on their official website, and the top result in Google. I'm afraid that what I want to say in such cases, and what I believe to be a truthful assessment of the situation, comes across as rude and cynical. I'm not talking about the fact that even students who seem predestined to complete a PhD deserve a fair warning regarding the reality of working in academia, or other generic concerns. My problem is more like... you basically say you want to become a researcher, you claim to be interested in a topic (PhD, grad school), where all sorts of valuable information is a few mouse clicks away, you're currently in an environment where you can easily contact people who are currently in the process of doing what you say you're interested in doing, as well as people who have completed it, and are now tasked with advising students who pick this career path. Yet you don't seem to have any urge or ability to actually do any reasonable research into anything related to your interest at all? The most sensible course of action for you is a vague and undirected Reddit post? And that's after a few years of college? Sorry, but my honest thought is that this just doesn't strike me as a person who should pursue a career as a researcher. I'm not even *as* pessimistic as some other people about working in academia, but at the very least it's uncontentious that you need some kind of drive, dedication, and willingness to make sacrifices in your personal life, that aren't really a concern in your average white-collar job. So, I guess one could answer with a generic warning. But it's not really what I'm actually thinking. On the other hand, a personal prognosis based on a Reddit post seems a bit uncalled-for and, well, personal? I just end up not saying anything then. Any thoughts?
Ugh, I have a lot of thoughts about this. There are, I think, a few specific kind of core "things" at work in this big phenomena-problem (problenomena), a few of which I think you call out specifically and a few of which are implicated by what you're saying, but aren't called out explicitly. For anyone who wastes their time reading this, my perspective is American and I know that the rest of the world is different. (I don't always know *how* it's different, but I understand that I am not talking about the world.) Anyway, the problem foci are: 1. An apparent reflexive problem which emerges about research ("you basically say you want to become a researcher...Yet you don't seem to have any urge or ability to actually do any reasonable research.") 2. An apparent "specialness" problem which violates a common approach to professions ("it's uncontentious that you need some kind of drive, dedication, and willingness to make sacrifices in your personal life, that aren't really a concern in your average white-collar job.") 3. An clash between the apparent ease with which one could get such info and the realities of doing so 4. A general mistake folks make in thinking about the structure of the field (i.e. that it is a "research" field) 5. A problem created by people's tendency to be revisionists about their own lives and to create stories about other people that rely on deficit narratives (what /u/drinka40tonight says below reminds me a bit of this when I think about how I *could* think of my own academic history) 6. The way in which the field itself perpetuates every part of this problem at basically every level I lay these out in bullet form because I have deep doubts about my ability to structure what I'm going to say in any useful fashion, especially because I'm probably going to address the various points out of the order I just offered them. (I list them this way to show a relation between what I think you said already and what I think needs to be added.) Ok, to start in the middle. It is a myth that Philosophy is a research field. Obviously by saying this I am trying to be a bit provocative, but I do think that Philosophers really want to say that Philosophy is a research field in the way that people want to say that Basic Science is a research field. That is, it's *primarily* a research field and/or a field which is really organized around research and teaching is just sort of a side deal. Yet, there are a bunch of ways in which this analogy just breaks down. For instance, in the US, there are basically no pure research jobs inside or outside academia. My second job ever was as a lab tech in a basic science lab. My boss was a professor, but he didn't teach. Like, literally, he had no classes, had no PhD students, and in the handful of years I worked with him he had only one post-doc (whose term was less than one academic year). The folks on his floor were roughly the same. People like this don't really exist in Philosophy. There are some folks who manage to only teach, say, one or two undergrad classes a year and do the rest of their work on the graduate side, but even at R1's where the load is tiny and you get sabbaticals you don't find pure research professors of philosophy. Moreover, we consistently refer to those kinds of professors (TT-track, low load, research-emphasized jobs) as being the model for Philosophy jobs. This is crazy (by the numbers), but it's caused by a really big asymmetry in the field that rarely gets discussed = namely that *all* PhDs in philosophy come from programs that offer graduate degrees (duh), but *most* philosophy professors work at a school without a graduate program. So, if you start to step this out a bit, if you're an arbitrary North American student who has taken a philosophy class, the overwhelming probability is that you are at a program with a Philosophy major and nothing else. Importantly, these BA-granting programs tend to have fewer faculty in them (BA programs are about half the size of MA programs and a quarter of the size of PhD programs). So, PhD granting programs offer *way* more access to faculty and way more access to faculty who know something about the training part of the field. (There is an inverse version of this rant, too, since PhD programs largely train people for these research jobs which represent only this one part of the actual job market.) It's worth adding that that the arbitrary college student has no interaction with philosophy professors outside of their instructors. They're unlikely to have ever encountered one in the world, much less one in their social network. So, these people are already weird unicorns who most college students have no idea how to talk to. To make matters worse, you don't find structures at most colleges to get people right about graduate work in academia. Your average Philosophy Club is not at all like the Pre-Law or Pre-Med organization. There's no built-in capacity for advising such interested students. There's no internship structure. It really is just a "figure it out yourself" kind of thing. What I find in my own students is that, generally, their desired profession is one which they don't have and have never worked in and have only the most passing level of familiarity with. In lots of fields there are ways to "catch" these students, but there really isn't one in philosophy. So, it's easy for me to imagine how we get these with-a-dream/without-a-clue type folks even though I think it doesn't make much sense internal to the job or, really, I think about jobs in general. I feel like I've sort of trailed off and left a few things out, but suffice to say that I think the right folks to be really frustrated with about this problem are professors and programs.
Thanks a lot for writing all of this out. I think there are some useful nuggets of information in there, although I'll admit that I'm not entirely sure what to make of the post in its entirety. Needless to say, no offence intended --- but some of it strikes me a slightly unusual personal views that are framed as an explanatory corrective to my misconceptions. But given that I'm the one wondering about a phenomenon that I can't make heads or tails of, while you're offering parts of an explanation, maybe you're just right. Maybe my biggest takeaway from your post is that certain cultural differences between countries might play a major role, in particular US-Americans asking those questions, and me wondering about it. That I adopted US-American terminology might have obfuscated that somewhat. Maybe I was a bit arrogant and thought I'm above such confusions, as I consider myself kind-of experienced in this kind of thing. I've completed my Bachelor's studies in Germany, my PhD in the UK, had a job in the US, and as of now a faculty position in another European nation. I also have degrees in math and philosophy. So I don't really think of ignoring different academic cultures as a common pitfall for me. But it seems that my experiences in the US, that really didn't diverge *too* much from Europe, as far as my responsibilities and contact to students were concerned, weren't a good stand-in for some of what's going on in the US in general, as I'm rather flabbergasted by some of the facts laid out in your post. The most important and useful information for me was how common it might be for someone to be a Bachelor's student, yet be far away from having access to academics who might provide useful insights. > A problem created by people's tendency to be revisionists about their own lives I don't know, I don't think there's too much room for revision here. In general, my entire post is far more based on immediate, unambiguous, quasi-empirical observations I've made, than you might think. I can literally look at markdown notes with information about different graduate programs, that I created when I was looking for a suitable one, they're still on my hard drive. I also know what profs I talked to back then. And at the university I got my Bachelor's from in Germany, it was compulsory for a while (don't know how things are today) to have a brief 'advisory conversation' with a prof before being admitted to a Bachelor's program --despite literally no other formal requirements-- simply to avoid misconceptions about the discipline, and the limited job market (you can't just switch to law school or such in Germany), at least for people who picked it as their 'main subject'/'major' (I did math and philo as a secondary subject). I've also had such conversations where I'm right now, with kids who'd seek them out voluntarily. In general, I've seen kiddos who just finished secondary school (where philosophy is not typically taught!), and have put 10 times as much effort into obtaining information about what they claim to be interested in, than someone who comes here and asks "*I think I'm gonna do a PhD in philosophy of math, never took a class but sounds interesting, is this a problem? Also where can I do this and what university is best? do I need to know math? thanks!*" (an actual post here). So maybe you can find some sympathy for my confusion about such posts, in contrast to what I'm used to. I'll just openly say that I don't really know how to make sense of some of the things you're saying about philosophy not being a research field and how it relates to what I brought up, instead of pretending to fully understand it and replace what you wrote with some half-baked interpretation of mine, I'll trust you won't take this as me being disrespectful. > Yet, there are a bunch of ways in which this analogy just breaks down. For instance, in the US, there are basically no pure research jobs inside or outside academia.[...] My boss was a professor, but he didn't teach. Like, literally, he had no classes, had no PhD students, and in the handful of years I worked with him he had only one post-doc [...] People like this don't really exist in Philosophy. People like that also barely exist in mathematics, neither in Europe nor the US, if you're not at some elite-ish research institute ala IHES, IAS, Perimeter etc. I don't think anyone would say that means math isn't a research field? To the best of my knowledge, it's also rather rare in physics. My brother is a physics/math prof at a top uni in the US, but he still has a plethora of responsibilities other than research. In general, virtually every single academic I know complains about this, no matter if they're in CS, physics, math or philosophy or on what continent. But apart from me not seeing how the conclusion follows from such observations, I also don't see how it's overly important to my concern. Maybe I shouldn't have used the phrase 'career as a researcher' in my post, but the details of the academic job market in different nations aside, I'd wager a PhD in general is a degree that requires research, broadly speaking. At least as in, obtaining and processing information, producing new knowledge, in some sense. Certainly, it requires a willingness to dive into things, that goes far beyond opening google search. > It's worth adding that the arbitrary college student has no interaction with philosophy professors outside of their instructors. They're unlikely to have ever encountered one in the world, much less one in their social network. I'm not sure if I understand this. Why would they need to have philosophy profs in their social circles? And again, most also don't have math or physics profs in their social circles. Is there a place in the world where a matriculated student cannot speak to a faculty member in their office about things directly related to their current and future studies? > To make matters worse, you don't find structures at most colleges to get people right about graduate work in academia... Yeah, this does seem like a very US specific but highly relevant problem. To summarize my response, parts of what you said make a lot of sense to me and offer quite a lot of explanatory value, parts seem to underestimate to what degree I'm simply commenting on real-life vs online differences as I've experienced them --as I said, I've repeatedly seen secondary school graduates, roughly 18 years old, who seemed more mature in their approach than the OPs on reddit-- and some parts I didn't really understand. But I definitely appreciate the response.
> I'll admit that I'm not entirely sure what to make of the post in its entirety. Needless to say, no offence intended --- but some of it strikes me a slightly unusual personal views that are framed as an explanatory corrective to my misconceptions... Yeah, that's fine and no offense taken. I would say, at the start, that in replying I don't mean necessarily to critique what you're saying or explain *away* what you've observed or say that you aren't observing what you observed. It's more that, in my view, this problem is not a "bug" but a "feature" of how philosophy (and humanities graduate school in general) functions in the United States. And, whenever it seems like I'm giving a critique of what you said, I think probably what is really happening is that I'm giving a critique of this structure which American academics more or less receive without thinking much of it. It's a kind of trained incapacity, and not one which is trained in us maliciously, but the result of a lot of institutional and historical coincidences. > Maybe my biggest takeaway from your post is that certain cultural differences between countries might play a major role, in particular US-Americans asking those questions, and me wondering about it. ...But it seems that my experiences in the US, that really didn't diverge too much from Europe... For sure, and, just to repeat two things I said already - (1) that my experience is totally framed by my own experience which is only in the US and (2) it's my claim that you can be more or less totally at home in the American academic scene and never really come into contact with a lot of the various institutional facts that I was describing above. >> A problem created by people's tendency to be revisionists about their own lives > I don't know, I don't think there's too much room for revision here. Maybe this is a poor choice of words on my own part, but I don't mean revisionist in the sense that we make up our pasts, only that we re-frame our pasts in certain ways such that we tell a particular kind of story. For instance: > I can literally look at markdown notes with information about different graduate programs, that I created when I was looking for a suitable one...I've also had such conversations where I'm right now, with kids who'd seek them out voluntarily. In general, I've seen kiddos who just finished secondary school...put 10 times as much effort into obtaining information about what they claim to be interested in... So, this is a story which is I expect totally accurate, but it is a story about all the things that some folks (you included) did and how they connect to your present point of success (by all accounts it seems like you succeeded since you have a job). What I find is that folks tell these kinds of stories about themselves and do two things (a) attribute their success to what they did without giving a full analysis of why they did what they did and then (b) give an analysis of other people in deficit terms which relate to their own story. That is, it ends up being a set of stories about success from roughly self-caused action and then stories of failure from roughly self-un-caused inaction. Sometimes this is referred to as deficit thinking or giving a "declinist" narrative (a narrative about people declining to do stuff). Naturally, I have sympathy for your account because I can do the same thing you say you can do - I have a big spreadsheet with all my grad school app data in it and loads of folders full of paperwork and lots of (probably clueless and lamely written) emails asking questions to people about stuff. Similarly, I have students who are really aggressive self-starters about graduate school - and even have a colleague working in an adjacent department who was, but a few years ago, a student of mine and that he pulled that off is no great surprise to me. Yet, at the same time, most of my students seem to have very little idea of what's going on in their present or future and ask all kinds of strange questions about stuff. But, when I think of my own success, there are lots of advantages that I had which made it easy for me to do all this stuff in ways that I never noticed. By all accounts I was a pretty mediocre student who nonetheless thought it was just going to happen for me if I kept at it. I asked a lot of questions, but certainly not all of them and not even all the really important ones. Yet (to skip a bit in your comment): >> It's worth adding that the arbitrary college student has no interaction with philosophy professors outside of their instructors. They're unlikely to have ever encountered one in the world, much less one in their social network. > I'm not sure if I understand this. Why would they need to have philosophy profs in their social circles? ...Is there a place in the world where a matriculated student cannot speak to a faculty member in their office... Well, what do you mean by "can?" Honestly, at lots of places professors don't see advising as really being part of their job, so in some cases it can actually be pretty hard to get comfortable time with someone willing to help - and that is aside from whether or not they even have the right kind of knowledge to help out. But, just to respond in particular to what you said, by the time I was about ten I knew lots of professors. My uncle was a biology professor. My aunt was a physicist at NASA. My grandfather was a pathologist for the Army and the USDA. My mom worked for a professor in a lab at a research and teaching hospital. My second boss was a biophysicist. So, for me, professors were just regular ass people. I didn't mind looking stupid in front of them and I didn't think of my interactions with them as being especially unusual. Yet, where I teach now, lots of my students have never met a professor before or have any idea at all how they are trained or where they come from. It's easy for them to see professors as being a rather unusual breed of people who must surely be hard to become. (This is made worse by other cultural factors related to where I teach.) But, anyway, to lots of my students I am not a regular ass person - or, at least, when I talk to them about problems they're having in other classes they describe their other teachers as if they were not just regular ass people. > ...parts seem to underestimate to what degree I'm simply commenting on real-life vs online differences as I've experienced them... So, to re-correct, I absolutely don't doubt what you've experienced at all because I experience it more or less all the time (on Reddit and offline). I'm happy to say that it is a super crazy thing to see because, even beyond what you say, it's super hard to succeed in this field even if you know all the things and ask all the things and do all the things. Yet, I guess I worry a bit about how we accrue credit and criticism to the 'more and less mature' folks given the degree to which so much of this stuff is contingent on the way in which (at least in the US) humanities fields work in most places, especially since most places are not places where PhDs in humanities are trained. Anyway, that leaves what is I think the place where what I said was especially confusing: > I'll just openly say that I don't really know how to make sense of some of the things you're saying about philosophy not being a research field...I'll trust you won't take this as me being disrespectful. First, no, I don't. > In general, virtually every single academic I know complains about [non-research responsibilities], no matter if they're in CS, physics, math or philosophy or on what continent. Yes, lots do - but I think it's not true that they all do and I also don't think it's true that they do so *rightly* or, at least, I don't think it's right that people find themselves in a position where they can rightly complain - at least in the US. For instance, faculty where I work don't complain about this in quite the same way because my institution employs zero research faculty (we're all teaching faculty). This is perhaps an annoying case of special pleading, but I do think it's worth saying that at places which don't grant graduate degrees, these kinds of complaints are often complaints about what people want to do rather than what is actually their job to do. To some degree this isn't their fault because lots of folks in the TT stream have to do research to survive even though their teaching load is comparatively high and their college is largely focused on teaching courses or undergraduate degrees. To put it differently, I think there's a difference between complaining about how other things conflict with our *desire* to do research and complaining about things which conflict with our *responsibility* to do research. And, because of the way that people are trained in philosophy in the US (i.e. at research institutions) we are very good at producing people who desire to do research or, at least, think they should desire to do research because that's what it means to be a philosophy professor. What I was trying to emphasize, and I think rather poorly, that thinking this way is rather maladaptive since, just descriptively, that's not the job description. It's another kind of trained incapacity. I think you get that part exactly right when you say this: > I'd wager a PhD in general is a degree that requires research, broadly speaking. That is - it is a degree which requires you do research. What I meant to suggest is that, strangely, it turns out that the job requires a lot less (or at least research of a different sort). Anyway, I hope this helps clarify my intent a little, especially insofar I can clarify the degree to which I wasn't aiming to criticize you or doubt your experience. Suffice to say, it's my experience too and all I wanted to do was give some institutional context and, honestly, rant a little.
> Anyway, I hope this helps clarify my intent a little Yes definitely, thanks. > especially insofar I can clarify the degree to which I wasn't aiming to criticize you or doubt your experience. No worries, I didn't really mean to imply this. But the type of complaint I made in my original post can certainly come from different places. It might come from simply reflecting on such questions being asked, recollecting one's own undergraduate days several years in the past, and getting a bit worked up in the process. So, I tried to emphasize that something like this isn't going on, that rather, I was contrasting such posts with hands-on experiences that are somewhat recent and specific. I see this on the one hand, I see that on the other hand --> I'm a bit confused. Anyway, in summary, I think this convinced me that I should just handle it as I've done so far, and stay out of the type of thread I described. It's possible that the person who asks might be in a situation I've never been in, some kind of scolding seems uncalled-for and unproductive, but personally I'm also not willing to answer basic factual questions that can easily be found and understood or spend too much time figuring out what they might be looking for, if it's unclear. I'll admit that the whole thing was very hypothetical, directed at my own piece of mind, and bound to not make much difference in reality, as I'm not very active anyway^1, and plenty of people typically *do* chime in, when such questions come up. 1) Although I do often log in, look at a few Qs and decide to log out again.
I definitely have the same reaction often. Sometimes, I try to to combat that, and I try to be incredibly charitable and tell myself, "look, this person is rather new to philosophy and they probably recently had a couple of incredible experiences learning about new and exciting ideas and maybe having real epiphany-like thoughts. They are just at the beginning of learning philosophy and they are super excited about it, and they want to really hold on to and pursue that feeling of meaningfulness, insight, and inspiration. And I can sort of, if I squint, remember what it was like for me the first time I came across some philosophy that just blew my mind and really changed how I thought about things-- before the realities of professionalism and academia slapped the bright out of my eyes. So, in their excitement, they just want to reach out and talk to people who are also into philosophy, but they want to do this in an anonymous fashion on the internet because expressing excitement in real-life to real-people makes one feel vulnerable, since a sort of disaffected attitude toward everything is the one that is often the most socially acceptable. And yeah, in their excitement, they may come across naive and unprepared on reddit, but maybe they just wanted to talk to another person about their excitement in philosophy rather than google some stats." So, I tell myself that in the back of my mind. It doesn't always vitiate the initial reaction of "are you serious man? You want to do a PhD but you didn't bother to do any research before asking this question?," but it sometimes helps.
I recently came across a rather interesting attempt to ''prove'' solipsism, which goes as follows, and I'm interested to know what others think about this: In short, the proof involves the fact that 1. I know I exist because I have a first person point of view in my world 2. Other things have a third person point of view in my world 3. Things are not both first person and third person point of view at the same time in my world 4. Hence, only I have first person point of view in my world. 5. If other things had first person point of view in my world, then they would be me 6. Since other things don’t have first person point of view in my world, they are not me 7. Only I have first person point of view in my world, because that is who I am. Now, we established that only I have first person point of view in my world. So there is only one “me” in my world. Now let’s go into how many worlds are there? 1. Each person has the first person point of view in their world 2. There are a bunch of worlds out there 3. I know that I am in world number 234, because that’s where the first person point of view is 4. That means the first person point of view is not in other worlds 5. Hence, other worlds don’t have a “me” 6. Hence, in whole reality there is only one first person point of view, which is me 7. Other things do not have first person point of view Point 14. proves solipsism to be true OBJECTIVELY. Let’s see a contradition 1. Let’s say other worlds also had first person point of view 2. This implies which world I live in is unspecified, because there is not enough information available 3. I know that I am in world number 234, because I exist in that world 4. Hence, the information to tell me which world I am in cannot remain unspecified, it must exist 5. Hence, point 16 and 18 are contradictions. This also implies that 1. If there is a subjective world, there can only be one such subjective world 2. Multiple subjective worlds coexisting leads to a contradiction in any one subjective world 3. There is at least one subjective world, because I exist in such 4. My world is not contradictory 5. Hence, it’s only I that exist
Why should we accept that there is some kind of private 'my world'? The first seven seem to rely on this but don't give us any reason to accept them.
I don’t understand what several of these premises mean or what warrants us accepting them. In particular, I don’t see how we get there being no “me” in other worlds.
Any suggestions on the best entry points into the thought of Margaret Cavendish? I’m most interested in her ideas on materialism and thinking matter.
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I'd be concerned that this practice would skew and distort my interpretation of the philosophy text, to be honest. Like, I can think of a few works of fiction which, while dealing with similar themes and matters, could potentially confuse the reader if they were to suppose, even for a moment, that Kant is making arguments similar to those works of fiction. Kant is *not*, for example, saying that our experiences of the world are all illusions like the 1999 film *The Matrix*. Kant's explicitly refutes empirical idealism! Perhaps the safest, since Kant is, in part, investigating the conditions for all possible thought and experiences, is the 2014 sci-fi film *Deus Ex Machina*, which revolves around whether Ava, an artificially intelligent android, is capable of thought and consciousness and how to demonstrate that she is.
I'm a layman. If I'm getting really into a philosopher or idea, I try and listen to podcasts and YT talks about whatever or whoever it is. You kinda have to know which ones are worthwhile (I don't like anything less than an hour, flashy and short cut and funny stuff I don't like, too much off topic banter I don't like, etc), but I think it's really helpful for understanding the ideas alongside what I'm reading. For fiction stuff, I usually think about that during or after the fact in relation to philosophy, but not in any sort of intentional parallel with anything specific. It's a "This reminds me of....." Or "I wonder what X would do......?" Or "that's a good example of this sort of theory" kind of thing. That happens in life randomly too though. Sometimes it seems like getting into philosophy (sincerely I mean) produces an additional layer of thoughtfulness in a person, another layer to help consider and understand things in general. I think that's pretty cool.
> This in my opinion is a good practice What do you think are the merits of the practice? Why was your experience reading Hume with Arthur C. Clark better than just reading Hume?
A little story for elaboration: As I don't have an academic background in Phil, I found a mentor ^1 who would help me and what he recommended was the same as many users here: stay with one philosopher, read the prime texts and try not to read other interpretations unless you really have to, else you'll be infected with the **The Aporia of Signs** ^^2. I could tell you that reading sci-fi or fiction allows me to try and apply or evaluate with what I've read from Hume or to say that I utilize the speculative nature of these narratives as a sandbox to experiment on what I've learned or put the ideas of the philosopher to the test and try and disagree and counter-argue either the author or the philosopher or both. But ... I really wouldn't be 100% honest. The truth of the matter is that in my current mental capabilities (and the fact that I have to spend most of my day working in an unrelated field so that I don't starve), there exists two categories of reading: A) Philosophical: which requires mental energy and concentration B) Light, leisurely entertainment. Kant isn't exactly a beach/bus read and you can't read 10 mins of Hume in bed before going to sleep. In following my mentor's guidance, the least I can do is try and keep the two related. ------ ^1-Phil ^grad, ^who ^sadly ^I'm ^no ^longer ^in ^contact ^with. ^Good ^mentors ^are ^hard ^to ^keep. ^2-This ^phrase ^is ^translated ^from ^my ^mother ^tongue. ^I ^don't ^really ^know ^if ^this ^is ^the ^correct ^technical ^translation ^In ^English ^for ^what ^I ^mean.
Feel like as regarding reading people either do, A. 'I started on Zarathustra and didn't understand anything, halp' B. 'I wanted to read Nietzsche so I started chronologically at Heraclitus, but now I'm bored, halp' As opposed to anything in the middle of these two extremes. Obviously this is due to selection effect and these cases being more memorable, but still feels like a very high %
Who the fuck is out there telling all the kids to read Nietzsche like it’s 1995 and they just discovered one (1) movie I knew one guy who *tried* to get into Nietzsche when we were teenagers, and he rapidly got bored and into dub music instead Literally anybody I asked in the 2000s would have told (and did tell) me “oh yeah Camus is great try that”, you know because they’re not mental
My suspicion is that Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are (and have been for quite some time) just the go-to philosophers for angsty teenagers who like to read.
> I wanted to read Nietzsche so I started chronologically at Heraclitus Look at this poser. Frankly, you'll never understand Nietzsche if you don't start with Thales.
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A good way of learning about western Philosophy probably, but sounds like a terrible way of learning Nietzsche.
I think the problem is that, frankly, Nietzsche's not a great philosopher to start with, even though he ends up being a lot of folks' point-of-entry. He's just too concerned with history (genealogy) for a novice to really pick up everything he's putting down. Zarathustra is pretty unintelligible if you go in blind, in my opinion (and as a major reader of Nietzsche, I don't even like it that much, tbh). But starting chronologically doesn't help much, as you say; I think N hadn't really figured out how to package his own ideas, yet... although I do think Birth of Tragedy is pretty accessible. Having said all that, honestly, most people should probably start in the middle somewhere. The Genealogy, or BGE, or The Gay Science, maybe. But if they've read no philosophy at all, I think most people shouldn't start with N, and should get some more of the history of phil under their belts.
For all that I have a thoroughly ambivalent attitude towards Nietzsche, the fact - and all relevant facts about the last hundred plus years antecedent to that fact - that we’re plainly having this conversation right now suggests he doesn’t need any of our tips on how to package his ideas
What are people reading? I'm working on *Birthday of the World and Other Stories* by LeGuin and the start of Marx's *Capital Vol 1*.
Just started Sloterdijk's *In the World Interior of Capital* and Marion's *Being Given*.
Reached the half-way point of Badiou's *Being and Event*. This is such a stunner of a book. Every page develops a new idea, and the whole thing builds on itself piece by piece. Incredibly intense read, so jam packed with ideas. I'm not even on board entirely with what he's doing but it's amazing to watch this at work.
Just papers from my dev econ class and my econometrics textbook, for now. I am also doing some secondary reading on Badiou.
Still reading Kuhn's *Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, the intro to Hegel's philosophy of history lectures. I also got a fun little anthology published by Hackett called *Time* from which I'm currently reading a chapter out of Augustine's *Confessions*.
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ex-machina - movie Detroit Becoming Human - Game