Why is contemporary philosophy so inaccessible and obfuscatory?

That's like asking why contemporary physics is so inaccessible and obfuscatory. How are you supposed to understand it if you don't have the requisite skill set and background knowledge to do so? You think philosophy is just a bunch of aphorisms about ethics?

Both of these. Nothing can be stated simply anymore cause everything that can be already has been. And so you're left with elaborating upon older ideas with ever more circuitous and disorienting twists in logic. As somebody who had to write philosophy papers in college, there were times when I lost track of my own reasoning even as I was writing out my arguments. I would later read these nigh-incomprehensible essays and wonder at the A+ scrawled at the bottom of the last page.

I have a strong suspicion none of you have ever read Foucault.

So does that mean that, somewhere along the history of philosophy, somebody got it completely right, and now in the present day all that's left to quibble over is particulars?

Because philosophy went from being the straightforward confidence that basic shitty logic directly accessed the mind of God, to thinking that we needed to figure out the underlying magical conditions of our own thinking, to realizing that the underlying conditions of our own thinking might just be a confused shitshow of unconscious currents and flows and weird sea monsters determining and limiting our thoughts, to a fuckload of weird attempts to get around that, to the realization that all those attempts had failed, to attempts to show that not only do you realize the problem AND that understand all the attempts that were made AND understand how they failed and only fell prey to the problem even worse while also thinking they avoided it, YOU aren't going to fall prey to the problem because YOU have the real slippery dippery tricky dick method for establishing your res cogitans as the crystal clear pure chalice of thought, even though of course you deny the res cogitans exists because you're not so naive that you don't realize it's an historical artefact, in fact none of these words I'm using right now even exist, nothing exists, but to prove that none of them exist I have to master the entire philosophical traditions leading up to all of them to show that nothing that I am saying is actually happening right now and this is all just an amorphous haze of particles

If you assume there's anything as simple as a single right answer for life then sure whatever makes you feel happy.

I have a strong suspicion he isn't worth reading

So you go from defending deliberately obfuscating texts to dismissing them when it suits you.

Because you're illiterate.

Foucault literally reads like a novel. If you have trouble with him, you're an irredeemable retard.

Contemporary philosophy is dominated primarily by the analytic school, Zizek's star power notwithstanding. I'm defending technical analytic works, not neomarxist french frog continental faggotry like Fougay that deserves to be tossed into the trash

analytic tradition is hegemonic bc its useful for shining the shafts of physicists and set theorists, not because its good, interesting, or enriching for an understanding of self, world, etc.

>Contemporary philosophy is dominated primarily by the analytic school,

This is like an ESP researcher on Ghost Hunters saying "contemporary science is dominated primarily by ectoplasmic studies"

How clueless can you possibly be to think that your pathetic non-philosophy wasn't left behind two generations ago, after a generation or two, tops, of no one caring about it anyway

You are pathetic, analyticfag. You've wasted your life.

>everything that can be already has been

what did he mean by this

no, he's right. there are remarkably few schools that will teach you continental at any level of instruction. German Idealism and French Structuralism never happened in most Anglo philosophy departments, and if they did, they are hand-waived as obscurantist anti-foundationalism which some vaguely conceived and unrigorous concept of "every day language" manages to paper over. if you want to study Foucault, Derrida, Hegel... you're much better off doing French or German, or Comp. Lit. specializing in those languages.

Not really. Analytic school focuses more on the metaphysical structure of the "world" and the nature of the "self" than any continental sewage that's been floating out there since at least Merleau-Ponty. It's fine that you don't like it and want to insult it because you don't understand it or its value, but its overlap with physics and mathematics only occurs in light of its preoccupation with their philosophical foundations, not as a structural character of the tradition itself. It deals with its own set of issues faggot

here's one way to think of it: continental phil is the big picture, analytic phil is the nuts and bolts. that's in the case of good philosophers ofc. no doubt one has a tendency to fly off into outer space, and the other has a tendency to be autistic af, but they can work together. like a house and its foundations.

That's a very arbitrary division, Hegel for example is very concerned with metaphysical minutiae. In fact that's where he is at his best, and not his philosophy of history.

I don't know about analytical philosophy, but I'd guess they probably go beyond that division as well.

Because if you're an academic bidding for funding, you have to disguise the fact that your work is completely pointless.

seconded

because if communists talked like normal people, everyone would realize their ideas are fucking retarded and they would be laughed out of town.