Am I just too much of a brainlet to understand it, or is there something just dumb about it? Here is my impression of every philosophy text I've read:
>author makes up their own definitions >proceeds to make an argument with those definitions >act like they've proven something with their argument, but in reality they haven't, because they were just arguing with definitions they themselves came up with
It all feels so circular to me. I have never really read a philosophy text and felt like I have actually learned anything new, because so much of it is just the author defining their own terms. The only times I feel like I learn something are when it's combined with science, say, how our sense of disgust influences our political leanings. But most of the time I get absolutely nothing out of it.
Logan Flores
>It all feels so circular to me. I used to think the same, but if you look closely every author has different methods in order to reach their concusions, for example compare Plato's dialectic with Hegel's synthesis. Philosophy is better read as "learning to think" rather than "proof about stuff", me thinks.
Angel Bell
>A term is not a word— at least, not just a word without further qualifications. If a term and a word were exactly the same, you would only have to find the important words in a book in order to come to terms with it. But a word can have many meanings, especially an important word. If the author uses a word in one meaning, and the reader reads it in another, words have passed between them, but they have not come to terms. Where there is unresolved ambiguity in communication, there is no communication, or at best communication must be incomplete.
Hudson Long
Not all philosohphy is so insular. You would probably (unironically) appreciate the analytic tradition, and contemporary philosophy in general. But the best stuff is insular. I don't see how defining terms lessens the work. All terms in a philosophical work should be defined, and if your usage of a term is specific, even better. If you try and read Hegel with only the traditional understanding of the words being, notion, science, ect. you will be absolutely hamstrung; if you know the terms definitions though the work becomes infinitely more deep and complex. it takes work, but its worth it.
Cooper Martinez
Well, science is a type of philosophy in itself. There are a lot of different types, often the definitions people are making up haven't been made up before, so they're whacking around in fresh intellectual territory explaining things people feel but don't fully understand. There are also philosophers who do that so hard they end up invalidating concepts people already took for granted. To someone who isn't invested in the investigation already philosophy probably splits into incomprehensible wordplay in one corner and religious self-help in the other. If this is you i recommend reading a variety of short, very dissimilar works, like The Analects or ideological pieces by trashy American writers. Unlike scientific inquiry, raw philosophy can whet your critical thinking skills for their own sake and not toward a discipline in particular. The average person will get a lot more compared Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein than they would sweltering in a medical publication - even if the medical publication is much more "applicable" to real problems.
Noah Davis
That's your utilitarian upbringing speaking (which is not meant as an insult, most of us are raised as blatant utilitarians). Take for example this part:
> The only times I feel like I learn something are when it's combined with science, say, how our sense of disgust influences our political leanings.
Like most of us, you conflate reason with motive, and unite action with purpose. Most philosophy sets out to think about the very act of thinking. When you say science does "something" because it progresses from one point to another, and philosophy does "nothing" because it closes a full circle, you are already imbuing yourself with many philosophical implications such as "going from A to B is objectively better than surrounding A in every direction", and you are only so certain and unwilling to question these statements because a sense of "accomplishing utility" has been burned onto your retina. I'd say you could start with Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations because reading about language is the most accessible layer of philosophy to an utilitarian, in a certain sense at least. But really, you lose nothing from keeping your thoughts as they are. Do not push yourself into it if it does not make you curious, because you have already correctly identified it's not necessarily going to take you anywhere.
Jackson Ortiz
>Am I just too much of a brainlet
Yes.
Jackson Allen
No. This is how philosophy works. >Find a set of principles by whatever means. >Use the principles in a representation such as language. >Make predictions about reality from manipulation of the representations. >Test accuracy of prediction with reality.
Most shitty philosophers tend to ignore the last step. For example Communists tend to ignore the Stalin, Mao, Kim, and so on, regimes which is the end results of their socialist principles.
Jace Gomez
But even how they define terms feels totally arbitrary. When they define a term just based on an abstraction, does it really illuminate anything? For instance, here is something written about the stoics that is incomprehensible to me
>With respect to language, the Stoics distinguish between the signification, the signifier and the name-bearer. Two of these are bodies: the signifier which is the utterance and the name-bearer which gets signified. The signification, however, is an incorporeal thing called a lekton, or ‘sayable,’ and it, and neither of the other two, is what is true or false (Sextus Empiricus, 33B). They define a sayable as “that which subsists in accordance with a rational impression.” Rational impressions are those alterations of the commanding faculty whose content can be exhibited in language. Presumably ‘graphei Sôkratês’ and ‘Socrates writes’ exhibit the contents of one and the same rational impression in different languages. At first glance, this looks very like a modern theory of propositions. But propositions (axiômata) are only one subspecies of sayables. Sayables also include questions and commands on the one hand, and, in a category of sayables called ‘incomplete,’ the Stoics include predicates and incomplete expressions like ‘graphei’ (he or she writes) (Diog. Laert., 33F). An incomplete sayable like ‘writes’ gets transformed into a proposition by being attached to a nominative case (ptôsis, Diog. Laert., 33G). Here a ‘nominative case’ seems to mean the signification of the inflected word, ‘Sôkratês’ or ‘ho anthrôpos’—the latter being the nominative case (as we would say) of the Greek word ‘man’—not that inflected word itself. The Stoic doctrine of case is one of those areas where there is as yet little consensus. Stoic propositions are unlike propositions in contemporary theories in another way too: Stoic sayables are not timelessly true or false. If it is now daytime, the lekton corresponding to an utterance of ‘it is day’ is true. Tonight, however, it will be false (cf. Alex. Aph. in Simplicius, 37K). Finally, the Stoic theory gives a certain kind of priority to propositions involving demonstratives. ‘This one is writing’ is definite, while ‘someone is writing’ is indefinite. Strikingly, ‘Socrates is writing’ is said to be intermediate between these two. When there is a failure of reference, the Stoics say that the lekton is destroyed and this is supposed to provide the reason why ‘this one is dead’ (spoken in relation to poor deceased Dion) is impossible (necessarily false).
Xavier Richardson
What predictions by Marx did Kim test? I am willing to draw a red line between Marx and Lenin, Stalin and Mao, but I don't see what Marxist hypothesis got tested by North Korea or the Khmer Rouge. Pic related is empirical data backing up one of Marx' theories.
