This is going to bother some of you, but it's true no matter how angry it makes you.
Consider these two ideas:
1. Plato's Theory of Recollection (Phaedo), which posits that when we learn something, we're just remembering it (he ultimately tries to use this to prove that the soul exists, but ignore this part).
2. Wittgenstein's "proof" (Tractatus) of the incompatibility of language with thought and reality. More generally, I'm referring to the limitations of language.
Now a thought experiment: pick a philosophy text that is considered challenging (like Being and Time), then summarise it in a paragraph using plain English. Suddenly, the premise becomes not only comprehensible to the layman, but mundanely boring and obvious.
Philosophers hate this thought experiment because it makes others think that all there is to philosophy are these truisms and that anyone could understand a lifetime of reading in five minutes.
Question: what is within the details of these philosophical works, that is not present in the summary? These are not science books, they don't contain more data, proofs, or empirical findings, so what would is the reading missing out on?
Answer: written or spoken philosophy is simply an attempt at overcoming the constraints of language (point 1) to represent simple thoughts that are already present in every mind (point 2).
Example: everyone knows what suffering feels like, but only a philosopher could describe it with language in a compelling enough way to bring people to "recollect" loose memories of suffering and tie them together with a structured approach.
In conclusion, reading or writing philosophy is an exercise which AT BEST brings out extremely simple ideas that already exist in the minds of 84.2% of the population. This is inefficient. I suggest that we focus our attention to thinking for ourselves in solitude.
makes simple ideas real. you're likely right that after a few readings of the critique of pure reason i might not be able to express much more than the wiki summary, but having spent a long time with it - on rainy days and sunny days; on happy days and sad days; on busy days and lazy days; on days when i talked to my boss and days when i talked to my partner and days when i talked to a homeless person - i connect that idea with a wider sphere and allow it greater room to alter my perception. do you think knowing how a table is built and knowing how to build a table are the same?
Logan Nelson
both of those ideas are wrong, though, so, what then?
Landon Sullivan
That is also how I "apply" most of the things I read, it's just a change in state of mind: certain ideas are made more available. This isn't to say they were introduced by the texts. So in some sense philosophy has a useful psychological effect but it doesn't result in anything profound that isn't already there.
>do you think knowing how a table is built and knowing how to build a table are the same?
Knowing how a table is built is analogous to reading something prematurely -- imagine trying to describe middle-age to a teenager, or love to an autistic person incapable of feeling it. The words are there, and to you, they make sense, however, their lack of experience makes it impossible for them to understand it to the same extent.
Knowing how to build a table is ultimate form of knowledge, the thing that language tries to represent.
Refer to the thought experiment of an AI that knows everything there is to know about colour -- it can recognise it and describe it -- but it has no "eyes". It also knows everything about love (its chemical structure, the way people express it) but it can never feel it. It can know how the table is built, but not how to build it.
Ryder Thomas
>Now a thought experiment: go be eistein on sci
Camden Campbell
Read the preface of The Phenomenology of Spirit. He addresses your point exactly.
Lincoln Gomez
HOW DOES HE KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT?!
Ryder Parker
I can't really respond to someone who views things in reductive, naive terms of right or wrong. It's also especially ironic considering this is about the inadequacies of language...
The first has some truth in it. Socrates wasn't literally making people remember ideas from a past life, he was merely getting them to recollect memories and form new ones.
The second isn't "wrong" by any stretch of the imagination, there really are limitations of what language can and can't describe.
Blake Ross
I'll never understand what drives people to make posts like these. I wish the captcha took a whole 60 seconds to solve so that people would pause and think "is it really worth a whole minute of my life to say this?"
Well let's apply the principle here. PoS is notoriously obscure text that has spun into several schools of thought based on its interpretation. Tell me how you think the preface relates to this.
William James
>A: I'm very intelligent and knowledgable – basically a genious! >B: but your knowledge of philosophy, for example, is superficial at most >A: *invents a half-assed excuse for not being fluent in philosophy which most likely boils down to "DAE LE PHILOSPHY USELES xD"* every fucking time
Ethan Young
The whole preface is about how people have reduced philosophy to points that can be either agreed with or disagreed with while not understanding the difficult nature of where great works of philosophy have originated.
Dylan Bell
If it's so "easy" and "simple" then why don't you do it?
Samuel Ross
Could you offer me a one paragraph example that would satisfy a person that all sufficient work and detail is given, say of Aristotle? I feel like you could perhaps explain what the entailment of the claims are, and it may seem intuitive enough to cause a person to say 'of course!', but then I would contend you are putting explicitness and argumentation to the side with a misguided sense of familiarity with something that has already widely been disseminated within the public consciousness.
Further, could you offer me an argument as to why I should take Plato's Theory of Recollection to be the case? I think you give a false impression of how neatly one can sever Recollection in the Platonic sense from his metaphysics. Knowledge at that point is the intermixing of ideas, forms and the actual world mediated by the soul and you make it unclear, to myself at least, as to whether you agree with this claim or not. If you do not hold the soul to exist, how do we possess all possible knowledge such as it is just a matter of recollection and if we do possess a soul, how can we speak of it?
Jordan Foster
I agree that it is possible to extract the basic ideas but you wouldn't get all th eimplications and neither would be convinced by the idea
Thomas Russell
isn't that what wittgenstein did lmao
Carson Moore
fuck off back to r*ddit
Isaac Torres
You misread something because I never said anything was easy, I said the concepts were simple.
Imagine if I have the most profound idea in the universe in my head, but this my best attempt at expressing it. All I'm lacking is the language, which is fundamentally not appropriate for representing the thought.
Even if I could describe it, it would take me a long time, perhaps thousands of pages.
I made these two arguments in the post itself. 1) language is inadequate for expressing complex ideas and 2) summarising that language, where it does exist, leads to gibberish, which is why you can't even understand what I'm thinking here.
Samuel Barnes
Nietzsche said similar things. This isn't about continental vs analytic, which I think is the road you're leading me down. Continental philosophers can feel free to write about life like novelists do, at least it makes for entertaining literature, and analytic philosophers can work on things like logic. The problem that Hegel hints at is trying to argue ethics with logic - this doesn't work, and I agree with him, and I think Wittgenstein extends this argument to say that it's nonsense to try to talk about thoughts with language.
Thomas Hill
Ask a layman why free will exists and he'll tell you something along the lines of "it just does", ask a philosopher and he'll be able to spit out a 500 page essay nswering your question. Both believe in free will, yet one obviously knows more about it than the other.
Adrian Gomez
>Could you offer me a one paragraph... Good point, here is my first constraint. Aristotle wouldn't work. This process of abstraction, i.e. condensing many details into general ideas, only works in certain environments. I might be tempted to try to condense all books on evolution into the sentence "Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations" (first line of Wikipedia) and yes, a biology student might indeed say "I know" because of his familiarity, whereas 200 years ago he'd have no idea.
You are right, the intuition is already there. Now my point is that in fields like epistemology, we all inherently posses the intuition required to understand the philosophical ideas, and if we don't, then you cannot possibly transfer that intuition to a reader. Example: someone who sees Heidegger's ideas as obvious will not benefit from reading them, and someone who doesn't think aren't will not understand him.
>Further, could you offer me an argument as to why I should take ... Very similar to above, the constraint is that the theory only holds in matters where intuition is inherent. Another example is ethics: we all have some intuition as to why something is right or wrong but can't articulate, and those who do have struggled to present ideas without contention and without disagreement. If you took two peasants and injected them with the vocabulary of Kant and Bentham I'm sure they'd be able to have an argument as intricate and deep as Kant and Bentham themselves.
Thomas Hill
>yet one obviously knows more about it than the other Does he though, or is the philosopher simply a better writer? And by writer, I mean the act of putting ideas down in language, not fancy prose.
Jason Wood
Wittgensteinposter who hasn't even read wittgenstein.. easy on the drugs
Jack Nguyen
>These are not science books, they don't contain more data, proofs, or empirical findings
