Who here /brainlet/?

I believe this. I've never really respected philosophy to be honest. Not because I'm dumb, but because it seems, like you said, pointless masturbation over "universal" questions. Interpretations and reinterpretations of philosophers piling up.

On the other hand, my respect for math grows every day. Sadly, I'm too dumb to do real math (not just pregraduate calculus/analysis bullshit.)

Don't reply to this post but I wanted to let you know that you're a juvenile, dilettantic pseud.

Not OP, but try blue-pilling us instead of just insulting. Until you do, you are the juvenile, dilettantic pseud.

I'm not here to educate brainlet positivists, but to get trips (see )

w/r/t math, just keep finding different people to explain specific things you don't understand (which has gotten much easier to find online in the past ten years)

eventually one of them will present you with a metaphor that will make sense for whatever you find hard

You sound like you are a teenager who has barely grasped the nature of his existential crisis let alone dealt with it, therefore you posture to trivialize humanity to your feet to comfort your fragile ego.

boy

if dubs then op never posts again

Welcome to the substance of every conversation between normal people and philosophy majors.

And I find this fact very telling for philosophy's relevance. But maybe relevance isn't the point. And that's fine, nothing wrong with mental exercise.

>can't read Shakespeare
if you're a native english speaker this is evidence of mental problems. It's fucking modern english dude, just peppered with references you won't get which is what footnotes are for.

Sure, nothing wrong with mental exercise, but when this mental exercise becomes the center of your life, the very thing you live for, it inherently means you're contributing nothing to society or to yourself, which means you're either a leech of public resources acquired by people with actual jobs or your parent's work.

Philosophy should, at best, be a field studied as a hobby. Philosophy majors are the literal freeloaders of society, considering none of their 'discoveries' actually translate to anything meaningful for humanity as a whole.

>not using secondary sources
>trying to read great works of philosophy on your own

i'm having a really hard time progressing in lotr
i never had this problem before with any book, but i'm reading like 10 pages (much slower than my usual pace) of description and then i lose all my interest in the book

Not being a brainlet is:

(a) 33% "you're going to have to learn things you don't know :^)" in the traditional sense, just hard work

(b) 33% "your brain will naturally learn a shitload of contextual things without you even trying consciously to learn them"

and

(c) 33% "your brain will naturally learn HOW TO LEARN those contextual things, without you even trying consciously to learn how to do this"

What happens when you read philosophy for a long time is that you work hard at doing (a), and (b) just happens by itself, making (a) proportionately and unconsciously easier as you go along. And if you keep doing this, the (c) also makes (b) easier, making (a) exponentially easier in the process.

This applies to learning philosophy, or a language, or how to read difficult stuff. Just stick with it, and it eventually runs itself.

Kek doesn't come here.

try smoking some pot before reading shakespeare. it helps.

If something is hard to read, in general it's because the writing is poor. It usually means the author is trying to fit too many different concepts into a single term, thus making their statements as vague and expansive as possible.

Many authors do not know how to create concrete images with their words.

>Philosophy majors are the literal freeloaders of society, considering none of their 'discoveries' actually translate to anything meaningful for humanity as a whole.
By extension you must believe the arts are meaningless as well?
If yes, why the fuck are you on Veeky Forums.

what are you're opinion on harry potter

but user, society is a spook

The truth is that the same can be said for a lot of other subjects. Even science & maths are shots in the dark, with discoveries where you wont even know the significance of in your time. Has anyone found uses for weird mathematical objects like Moonshine yet? Is there any practical use to solving the Millenium problems? How many speculative physics systems have been thought up without showing any practical use? How many dead ends are there in medical research?

Yet, it is the opposite. If society were roped into being satisfied with the mere pursuit of knowledge, your 'burden' would not exist. The scholar finds society burdensome to his pursuit. Society is too caught up in delusions of its own importance and anthropocentricism. The scholar has already found meaning in the mind that is accesible to everyone. But they refuse to climb the tower. That is simply their fault.

Humanity has been freeloading on the minds of the true searchers for since the dawn.

Wow. I'm surprised at how much I agree with you.

Actually philosophy has influenced natural sciences, politics, culture, arts, conceptions, etc.

Can someone tell me why philosophy often seems like a left-wing circlejerk? I hate to use such a buzzword, but I can't think of anything more appropriate. They all jerk off to the idea that all human beings have near equal capability and that any difference in wealth or achievement is due to oppression. They are terrified to consider that no, maybe we are not all equally capable. And when someone suggests otherwise they react with a smug "oh how cute the capitalist is trying to justify his unearned wealth"

You're thinking of all the disciplines with chicks in them

Modern academic philosophy is not nearly as infected by this as the rest of the humanities even though most professors are varying degrees of milquetoast liberals generally speaking

Even actual leftist philosophers who thought that the self doesn't exist and we should all have radical postmodern orgies are still less faggy than the fucking faggots who currently work in anthropology and social theory departments. Most actual philosophy people are too literally autistic to enjoy the social aspects of modern cuck leftism.

Holy actual fuck these numbers are beautiful

check'd

Arts is entertainment, an important part of life. If philosophy majors agreed philosophy is simply entertainment, I'd be ok with it.

Shakespeare doesn't give me much trouble but philosophy hurts my brain. Maybe it's because I don't know all the jargon but most of it makes little sense to me unless it's super practical like stoicism.

so learn spanish then...

frankly, i don't understand what the big deal is dumdum

Kinda weird, philosophy just comes to me.
Maybe try just, like, thinking hard about things for extended periods of time.
I would always be inspired by something, like music, then I would think about it, why I like it, whether or not my liking it matters, and if it does, where do its qualities come from, what is the relation between being and goodness, metaphysics and art etc. That's always my angle of incidence, by sheer habit.

>not being a genius polymath autiste that make pointless arguments in the literary journal you started with your autiste friends, solely for the purpose of stroking your own ego, impressing your autiste friends and writing beautiful prose to approach the sublime
Tip top kek

Ugh, these kinds of people.
How about nobody cares about your stupid apartment full of shit ikea furniture, or your shit PC, or your shit brainlet opinions you got from other brainlets at uni.
It's not that you don't like philosophy per se, you just don't give a shit, not enough to lose any sleep over it, at the very least. Different thing altogether, and also the stuff of brainlets. Adieu.

But user, philosophy is not meant to be just read, it's meant to be studied. It's supposed to be slow and painful.

this is the truth

brainlets think they're "above philosophy yo!!!!!!" because they're too stupid to understand it's importance

Same

Dogmatic hubris is the sign of a true brainlet, truly you must stand on top of the world to be able to trivialize the entirety of philsophy oh anonymous Veeky Forums poster.

Why don't you just read more slowly?

All I hear is talk about the "importance" of it, but none of you people defending philosophy tried to tell us 'brainlets' what's so important about it. You're literally proving our point. Please, tell us why you feel philosophy is important.

>Bohmian quantum mechanics
A beautiful pipe dream, but a pipe dream nonetheless.

this

Everything you engage in has philosophical implications. Choosing to 'philosophize' or study philosophy is just to pull these implications to the core of awareness and choose to render them as objects of investigation. Living a meaningful life and making decisions for the course of that life presupposes 'philosophy.' Demanding an answer to the importance of philosophy is paradoxical; it's a question that means nothing. Inquiry into the nature of existence and its ethical, legal, and social, you name it, properties is the substrate of what it means to be alive. 'Philosophy' is just a term to throw on the investigation into these areas and positively define it as an inquiry.

It isn't for everyone and probably better that it isn't - philosophy requires leisure and time. But if you pick up a copy of Being and Time and think, because you cannot understand it, that it is simply nonsense, it is evident of malnourished study: it is not indicative of it lacking intellectual integrity or rigor.

>Man in order to live, needs a view of life, a guide where he can judge and choose his actions. He needs to know:

where he is standing, the kind of universe he lives in. In short what is the world (metaphysics)

A code that he uses to know what is good and what is wrong (morality), and the reason he needs to know it and the validation of that code (ethics)

He needs to know how to live among man in communities and what is the kind of system that allows it (politics)

He needs to know integrate all of this, which is his view of life and how to express it (art)

All of the above relay in the foundation, which is metaphysics and build up from there, each branch based and worked in the one before

Old Post I saved for this question

1.) All people act according as what they think they ought to do
2.) What they think they ought to do depends on -reason-, doesn't matter if it's good reason, bad reason, or altogether illogical, as reason does not imply logic, point is that any action requires a motive, a logos
3.) If you are to say that your reason for doing or thinking something is good, then you must say that it regards being. Perennially incomplete utilitarian "good" will not suffice, as the good there subsists in utility, and what is of good utility to one thing is useless to another.
If you are to really say -anything- and preserve its truth beyond mere ad-hoc notions of material co-operation, then you must apply some metaphysics; you have to ground it in something absolute, otherwise you are just screaming into a void.
Even the notion of utility relies upon logic, logical things regard being in as much as they have a shape and termination without which they would be illogical, not regarding being (think about the word "logi").
Hence a hammer without a head is useless. because it can not drive a nail. And if 2 + 2 had equaled 4 then our buildings wouldn't stand.
Reason, structure, logic etc fights entropy, hence by architecture the forces of gravity are pacified, meaning the structure can remain as it is (that is, a structure). Likewise biological mechanisms maintain homeostasis via rapid change at the cellular level, thus allowing you and I to remain as we are; as people.
If you're not a philosopher, you're a mass man. If you don't see the truth then you don't see anything at all.

If 2 + 2 -hadn't- equaled 4* smdh

All can be 'learned' / perceived by simply being a functional human being with empathy for other humans and an eye for history. The philosophy field is useless.

I never said I didn't understand philosophy. On the contrary, it's a subject that increasingly frustrates me precisely because I voraciously read about it when I was in college and now read it in my free time. I don't understand philosophy's IMPORTANCE and I think a cult was created around most of the grand authors of the past that prevents any kind of criticism to be pointed in their direction.

I used to separate the author from his body of work, but as I get older and the responsabilities of life are instilled in me more and more, I can't help but think that continental philosophy, for instance, is mostly written BY people with too much free time on their hands FOR people with too much free time on their hands. Literally debating for the sake of debating, which can be fun, as a hobby. It shouldn't be lumped together with real studies that can have an impact on people's lives, short-term and long-term, though, in my honest opinion.

See this post . I bet the user posted it with good intention, but all the points are the subjects of study of many other fields that have much more of an impact on a man than pure philosophy does. Hell, anyone can be a philosopher, you don't have to dedicate your whole life to the study of the grand authors to be one. You don't even have to read a single philosophy book to be a philosopher.

Philosophy should be an ancillary study, never the primary one of a person. If you call yourself primarily a "philosopher", there's a high chance you're just a freeloader.

Philosophy is a mere shadow of what it once was because of specialization. What happened to the times when everything was bound together under the Natural Sciences & philosophers were expected to be engaged in all areas?

You don't know enough about what you are talking about to even begin to know how wrong you are.

Underrated post, wish more people shared this view.

...

Another non-answer that can be used in any kind of argument if you don't want or can't actually come up with a reasonable reply.

Ive seen one brilliant use of Continental Philosophy so far. That comes from Complex Emergencies, which is a book that uses Foucault as a foundation mixed with bountiful clear examples and grounded all his abstract theories of language manipulation and whatnot into a very clear picture of politics.

Hubert Dreyfus also used Heidegger in his critique of AI at a time when scientists were overhyped about the possibilities. They shunned him because of that, and it was later proved how many of his criticisms held water.

Sometimes a big picture theory that doesnt try to be reductive or strictly planned out from micro is needed to be able to see certain things. But obscurantism is really a great sin out there.

>all the points are the subjects of study of many other fields that have much more of an impact on a man than pure philosophy does
You probably think that linguistics is one such subject, it's not.
There's NO subject that deals AT ALL with the same subjects as metaphysics besides philosophy, much less more effectively. Because these fields of study are incapable of adjudicating those topics even in principle.
Hence mathematics can't deal with ontology because ontology precludes mathematics, mathematics itself being an application of ontology and thus existing solely within its boundaries, as abstraction from matter.

With the same topics* smdh

I'll give somewhat of a more real answer. If you honestly believe that understanding history, reality, and people is that simple, you are severely lacking in the self-awareness that philosophy can often provide. Quite a bit of philosophy is about the flaws and limitations of one's perspective and peeking behind the curtain of hidden assumptions and blindspots in one's perspective. The human brain is in many ways designed to hide these blind spots to give you false belief in an "all" that you have learned. You might as well be a reddit-bro saying "don't be a dick" is sufficient for moral philosophy (and if you honestly believe that is sufficient you might as well stop reading).

But really I don't give a fuck if you understand it. I think part of the problem we have today is that too many brainlets half understand some philosophy without being smart enough to respect and handle the power that comes with that understanding. It's like watching babies fumble with hand grenades. So I'm pretty happy to give you non-answers and make fun of you without explaining myself. I don't want you to understand.

>ontology precedes mathematics
Prove it.

Kindly name some of those philosophers and ideas that have revealed to you this True Knowledge

>True Knowledge

>So I'm pretty happy to give you non-answers and make fun of you without explaining myself. I don't want you to understand.

Congratulations, you're proving the point of everyone that thinks people into philosophy are freeloaders. This is the most selfish, edgy thing I've read in this board today. First of all, you don't live in a bubble, his and others 'lack of understanding' may bite you in the ass someday. Secondly, the idea of deconstructing one's perspective with philosophy is great, as long as you're trying to 'construct' something else in its place. Often, though, what I see is that philosophers want to deconstruct every aspect of life and never build anything in its place, which is childish at best and disingenuous at worst. When this "deconstruction" becomes the center of your life, when you live for the "deconstruction" of the universe, you're missing out on life, which is finite, by the way. I guess my point is that there are better uses of your time on Earth than philosophy for the sake of philosophy.

there's nothing wrong with philosophy's relevance, imo. A lot of people just aren't going to wrap their heads around it, and that's fine.
If you look at philosophy through the lens of history, its really never been """"relevant"""" outside of a purely scholastic standpoint. The prevalence of authors in the Enlightenment era gives the impression that philosophy was this widely accepted and discussed field, when in reality it was really only studied and expanded on by elite intellectuals.
The idea that philosophy should be relevant to our society, from the point of view of the average man, really only comes to bear in the Postmodern era, when people like Foucault and Derrida gain significant traction within research, especially in history. People start understanding the importance of questioning where their knowledge comes from etc. and before long this means making the classics required reading for people who can't seem to grasp its import.

>Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

Even elite intellectuals don't need philosophy to understand the universe.

Precludes.
Ontology deals with the nature of being, mathematics is a thing which has being and is thus posterior to ontology.
Saying that mathematics is prior to ontology is like saying you can drive a pineapple, or that circles are square, or that you'll get laid during your lifetime etc etc.

I didn't say anything other than prove it.
You use logical inference (or attempt to) in your first line. You are using "logic" to speak about ontology, seems to me logic is "prior".

I honestly haven't read enough to fully refute this, but I took a class in educational psychology and its pretty astounding how the methodology in a semi-hard science like that is derived from philosophic principles. Theoretical physics, even, is entirely interwoven with post-modernist thought. Hence """laws"""" like gravity are questioned within the field when just 150 years ago they weren't.

Not that poster

I agree about the misappropriation of ideas by people who dont understand them. You can see this in theory crazy SJWs for example.

But the 'you're missing out on life' is just plain rude. When Kant came up with his beautifully dense system of philosphy, was that a waste of life to him? When countless mathematicians or scientists have worked at their proofs in humility, pushed forward by nothing other than intellectual pleasure, was that a waste of life to them? Was it a waste of life for Wittgenstein to spend his entire life dealing with the question of Logic and Language with such intensity? Was it a waste of life for Foucault to pour through thousands of historical texts to try and conceive of his system of power relations?

The fact that you choose to judge the lives of others by some standard shows that you merely do not understand the chase, and you are irritated with yourself for not being at one with it - thus you view it a waste of time. The life of the mind is also a life, humbler, and more elegant. Whether one is a Napoleonic or a Platonic does not matter, because in the end this falls down to a difference of wills. Although you are 'freer' than some of the above, you are 'shackled' to other conceptions. Life is finite, but man's potential conception for meaning within finitude is vaster. One can climb mountains, the other solves equations - everything within that is a flavor of life.

this

It's not useful to me so I don't bother.

You logically end up at evo-psych/evo-biology and then there really is little point in fucking around with "forms" or "does the tree make a noise" bullshit.

All the answers you need to be happy are in evo-psych. You can't know anything else, these are the only objective truths when it comes to the mind.

Now think really hard about what constitutes logical inference. Probably brain matter, which exists and is thus after ontology since existent things have being in as much as they exist.
Don't get smart with me pls, you want to talk formal logic we can talk formal logic, but understand that philosophical reason proceeds from intuition and first principles, not axioms, because axioms and axiomatic-symbolic systems such as mathematics are an abstractive construction, which means they are abstracted from something real and observable, and as such have limited domains.
You can structure your philosophy in an axiomatic way literally speaking (proposition 1 etc), but the content of any philosophical submission from one man to another must be of a primarily poetical extraction.
Not to say that that type of knowledge is any less valuable than strict axiomatic rigor, on the contrary the opposite is true.

I urge you to read the posts that preceded that one. Maybe my words weren't clear enough, to which I apologize. English is not my first language, after all. I never said it was a waste of time and ended it there, I said that if that is the only purpose of your life THEN you're wasting your life, just like a gamer is wasting his life if he lives only for games and nothing else. I said Philosophy is fine as an ancillary field of study, but if you're dedicating yourself only or primarily to it, someone, be it your parents, the government or a patron, is paying for your "deconstruction" of the universe, which often doesn't lead anywhere, it's just there to amuse yourself and, with luck, a few others that also have too much free time on their hands.

Formal logic has little to do with it, mathematics as an abstraction by definition does not have an ontological status.
Ontology and metaphysics are dead, all that remains is logic and the natural science/mathematics.

>be kid
>get duped into catholicism by parents
>lose faith as teen
>become obsessed with mythology and theology and history and archaeology and anthropology to fill void of faith
>discover and major in philosophy in college
>learn lots of fascinating intellectual history
>enrich appreciation of humanities and classics
>achieve liberation through the acts of reading, inquiring, discussing, and meditating
>graduate with girlfriend in business of four years
>open up hand-curated esoteric bookshop together
>meet lots of cool artist and musician types
>perform pagan rituals in basement
>live comfortably with wife and cat
>working on my own book of philosophy
>initiated deeply into the mysteries and yet still experiencing new breakthroughs daily
kinda disproves your whole "freeloader" theory...

Congratulations not understanding shit.

>mystery school philosopher
I'll be praying for you brother

...

And for 95% of your life at least (I don't wanna be rude and assume you're still depending on people, which could be the case), you only managed to do all that because someone else was paying for your 'enlightenment' with their mundane jobs.

From you I will take that as a compliment.
Sour grapes because naturalism can resolve all philosophical "problems"?
The only people with sour grapes are the metaphysicians who can no longer speak of reality for they have been put out of a job by the scientist.

So what kind of activities should someone peruse in order to achieve 'purpose'? If someone settles down, works a functional but not particularly important job, has a fairly happy marriage and a couple of kids, occasionally goes on holidays but otherwise pursues nothing of great ambition, can they be said to have had meaningful purpose in your view?

And I will pray for you as well!
More like 67%. But kids shouldn't be expected to work. And I paid my way through college selling acid, shrooms, mdma, mescaline, and research chems. But yes, it's a shame that few people experience such opportunities. I will try to raise my kid philosophically even if it not taught often in early schoolyears.

>From you I will take that as a compliment.
Oh pls, I will rape you in any subject, from math to yodeling. You just name the time and place bub.

You're talking about the normal life as if it was 'boring', but yes, their lives would have had meaningful purpose, for they were functioning members of society and not leeches of resources, even if they didn't pursue anything of great ambition. What's the purpose of someone who lives primarily 'in their mind' or 'outside earthly bounds' through philosophy? Is that pursuing something of great ambition? They might be enjoying their time thinking outside of the box, but why should someone have to pay for it with their sweat? That's why I said it should be a field studied as a hobby at best, something to do in your free time, after or before you're actually contributing to society, considering we don't live in bubbles where we're only affecting ourselves with our life choices.

Most of life is a shot in the dark. Above, I noted examples of how those broad theories segued into other fields, but to create a broad system requires a synthesis of a lot of ideas in the first place - and those require a lifetime's worth of work.

Nobody can decisively say whats best for the development of knowledge. Kuhn theorized paradigm shifts where scientists of lower ilk would beat their head against a barrier until a decisive change came that toppled over the foundations of the previous paradigm. All those previous scientists that were chasing the wrong paths can thus be considered as invalidated

Cosma Shallizi, a statistician, cites Manuel Delanda as one of the people who may be able to set the foundations for a theory of networks and relations, but lamented how he was influenced by a weirdo philosopher like Deleuze. Einstein fell in love with Schopenhauer, citing him in a speech. Oppenheimer dived into Sanskrit texts to gain a stable hold on his rather psychotic disposition.

There are the Global Warming deniers and advocates. There are those, like Nassim Taleb, that write about how all economic models are highly flawed due to black swan scenarios. People chase one path, another, and try to gain their foothold on the world. There is no easy way to say something is definitely an amusement or not, since everything segues into everything else. Furthermore, we are limited by the short term view and we do not know where our chase will lead us. Especially with the ridiculously growing world population, misinformation is easily spread all over the place.

So why bother trying to define the type of life that should be lead? Certainly, theres a lot of bullshit and snake oil in the world, but you should be making it into your own palette for your own work. Trusting unilaterally in your own conception of life as applicable to everyone is one of the most things that philosophy tells us to avoid. Going from the very start with the Socratic 'lack of knowledge'.

Basically, stop being a bitch and accept it.

git gud

many do.

Let me share with you that Einstein Schopenhauer quote.

"In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they
that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to
science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is
their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the
satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who
have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely
utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the
people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage
would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both
present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is
why we love him.

"I am quite aware that we have just now light-heartedly expelled in
imagination many excellent men who are largely, perhaps chiefly,
responsible for the building of the temple of science; and in many cases
our angel would find it a pretty ticklish job to decide. But of one thing I
feel sure: if the types we have just expelled were the only types there
were, the temple would never have come to be, any more than a forest can
grow which consists of nothing but creepers. For these people any sphere of
human activity will do, if it comes to a point; whether they become
engineers, officers, tradesmen, or scientists depends on circumstances. Now
let us have another look at those who have found favor with the angel. Most
of them are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less
like each other, in spite of these common characteristics, than the hosts
of the rejected. What has brought them to the temple? That is a difficult
question and no single answer will cover it. To begin with, I believe with
Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless
dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever shifting desires. A finely
tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of
objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the
townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped
surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges
freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful
contours apparently built for eternity."

The guy who created Buzzfeed wrote papers in college about how capitalism deliberately creates fluctuating identities for its subjects, an idea based on Deleuze & Guattari and Jameson's theories on the postmodern.

An Israeli commando created urban warfare tactics based on the "Nomadology" chapter in A Thousand Plateaus:

>“Several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaus became instrumental for us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise explained. It problematized our own paradigms. […] Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space […] [which accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the ‘war machine’ and the ‘state apparatus.’ […] In the IDF we now often use the term ‘to smooth out space’ when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. We try to produce the operational space in such a manner that borders do not affect us. Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as ‘striated,’ in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roadblocks and so on. […] We want to confront the ‘striated’ space of traditional, old-fashioned military practice [the way most military units presently operate] with smoothness that allows for movement through space that crosses any borders and barriers. Rather than contain and organize our forces according to existing borders, we want to move through them.”

Heidegger's conception of "Dwelling" has been pretty influential in architecture for a while.

Plenty of examples of continental thought being "implemented," but most of the time it's subtle and you don't hear about it.

but we do ornithology because we're smarter than the birds

Theres also war theorist Boyd, who is known for his conception of 'postmodern' warfare, although he took loosely from Heisenberg and Godel rather than any continental theorist.

But the main point is a differing practical area such as military warfare can be influenced by a conception of reality totally not related to that field.

The true scholar does not dismiss, but steals what he can use.

Ok, I'm happy you cleared that up. I'd agree that, at the very least, run of the mill philosophizers who are unable to make any substantial contribution to any field and limit themselves to contemplation of philosophy over any other pursuit anyway, are living a life that is less meaningful than the average person. The degree to which this is unethical is another question though, as while society might collapse if everyone just ran off to pursue whatever without responsibility, we have such wealth of resources that it is worthwhile to let part of the population partake in wild and occasionally careless interests (which might produce a one in a thousand advance, or not) rather than have everyone flood the 'practical' job market or create yet another failed business.

Im sure those run-of-the-mill philosphers are having a great life at university cocktail parties or have sex with young easily manipulable humanities students