Sometimes it seems like many philosophy students, learners etc. are obsessed more with a philosopher then their ideas, it's weird, like a sort of cult of personality
I seen more people obsess over Neitzsche here, then talk about the ideas of Neitzsche
STEM really don't do that, at least not to the same level, you don't see physicists just talk about Einstein the whole time, they might celebrate him at some anniversary event or something, but they generally just go into the details and work
Other urls found in this thread:
um, stem does it far more often
Maybe we have different experiences.
Not really.....most scientists don't really give a shit about who discovered something, if its right its right...
philosophers tend to care more about the personal life of philosophers, that might be because the personal life of a philosopher tends to influence his/her work more so than a scientist, but still
You've clearly never heard a STEMfag talk about Feynman. Or von Neumann or Turing or Knuth or Tesla or Stallman.
Cult of personality is just part of people man.
And its not even a bad thing in moderation either, all those dudes are fucking fascinating people.
isn't it a bad thing in both STEM and philosophy to have Cults of Personalities...
it buys into this idea of the "lone genius"
People tend to do this with philosophers who were genuine characters. Neitzsche, your only example, was certainly this. I think people tend to to this with fringe personalities regardless of whether or not they are philosophers and philosophy tends to attract lots of fringe personalities. Just as simple as that. Doesn't mean that philosophy students/enthusiasts/etc. don't engage with the ideas of those philosophers.
>STEM really don't do that, at least not to the same level,
youtube.com
I don't know if that's true.
Everybody here should read Deleuze's What Is Philosophy for the answer to OPs question.
Philosophy is fundementally about building ideas and concepts right? Essentially all philosophers are building on or reacting against the thought of somebody who has come before them, as Whitehead says 'The history of philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato'. Well a Philosopher's name essentially becomes a shorthand for the essence of their thought, when Engles says 'Marx took Hegel and flipped him on his head' he isn't literally referring to Hegel the man but rather 'Marx reinvented the dialectic to ground it in the physical world, thus switching dialectical idealism into dialectic materialism'. Just like in a scientific paper you cite your sources, you include a summary of work done on the topic in your introduction in order to contextualized your study, in philosophy you cite the originator of the idea which you are using, just the name becomes symbolic for their system.
And also I'd say that all disciplines are like this probably. I imagine that everybody who is heavily invested in a field comes to see themselves as part of a larger tradition and from doing so become interested in the personalities involved in the history of said discipline.
I'd say I probably know more about the lives of Tycho Brache, Kepler, Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Helmholtz, Euler, Couchy, Einstein, Mendel, Francis and Crick, etc. Then I do about Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Marx, or Husserl.
I have not met a single vocal STEM person who hasn't brought up that Richard Feynman played the bongos and went to strip clubs. The cult of personality is deeply entrenched in STEM culture, otherwise there wouldn't be such a strange obsession with defending Neil DeGrasse Tyson at all cost, whose sole contribution to science is happening to be famous.
no one that is serious in STEM considers NDT a serious scientist, they value him as a communicator though
I was actually just thinking about this.
I think it stems from just reading the guys philosophies and ideas and liking them a lot.
So they start looking into him and they end up liking him as a person.
Buying into a philosophers philosophies and ideas, kinda makes him 'apart of you'
At least I feel that way.
If you think about it this way.
The person asking has to make the conscious decision on who he's going to ask.
Because he even knows he's likely going to get the wrong OPINION of the person if he asks someone who doesn't like him.
So what's the opposite? A bunch of people giving the 'correct' opinion of Neitzsche which includes his ideas.
And what you get is this "cult of personality" or what have you.
You rarely get the correct information on the philosopher from either side.
because most philosophy students are fucking idiots, and just fucking LOOOOVE to namedrop so they seem smart to their liberal faggot peers
this is why I dropped my philosophy classes. I thought we'd be debating and discussing ideas, learning new concepts etc. But it was basically just x said y then z reacted to x by saying a and then bla and bla
So our lectures on say metaphysics were not about you know, metaphysics, but rather about what xyz philosophers said about metaphysics. As in, we weren't learning or discussing about the nature of reality, rather we just studied what some faggot said about it
it's like the idealism/realism debate. when you try and debate it, it just immediately dissolves into Kant said this but blabla said this but then soapandshower said y and then bla bla
I think it's because people are not confident enough to have their own ideas, or intelligent enough to do anything other than subscribe to someone else's thought system
to the point where people literally start identifying as the last name of the persons thought system eg I am a 'marxist', I am a 'kantian' etc
I think most people are just stupid idiots
because on an image board its easier to post the philosopher than lay down their beliefs which are usually expected that you at least know of them
why u do this to me user
The guy is a pop-scientist, public educator/intellectual. Hardly a scientist.
I think this is the correct answer, but at the undergraduate level I think the humanities succumb more to hero-worship than the sciences/mathematics. The reason is probably that most original ideas of mathematics/science have been translated into "modern" mathematical/science language for reasons of pedagogy and thus the author's primacy is diminished.
There is nothing intelligent you could say about the nature of reality which is why you discuss the insights of other people.
Because philosophers cannot get girls, they content themselves with men of the past.
>college republican takes a class on metaphysics
>has to actually read philosophical texts
>doesn't understand why he can't just talk about weed and space, maaaan
Okay yeah most people are idiots I agree
You obsess to Explore and unerstand the ideas of the philosopher. Obsess over enough of them and you'll begin to develop your own Genuine opinion of what it means to be.
I have that with Kant. It's very hard to get rid of without tossing all the ideas good and bad.
>yfw Pythagoras had a cult following for 1000 years
Scientists' lives are mundane and tied to their place of work
Philosophers aren't usually much better, but they have more room to move I guess
But shouldn't you already be at least familiar with metaphysics if you're taking a philosophy class? What you describe seems like what I'd want out of an actual class. I can go and read the primary texts on my own, but the context and how it influenced later philosophers is where I'd like a teacher to come in. Philosophy class shouldn't be people sitting around and talking about "what is there" and "how do we live well"