Are History’s “Greatest Philosophers” All That Great?
dailynous.com
dailynous.com
When it comes to Plato specifically, I did a lot of pre-Socratic and later Plato work in my philosophy degree, and you can basically watch Plato go from reiterating Socrates to becoming a truly great philosopher in his own right. He does it by learning, as we all must, to do good philosophy: to take seriously his forebears on their own terms, and then communicate carefully and thoroughly what's inadequate.
It's funny, because the tools he has are very weak. Logic isn't well developed; they just started grappling with basic concepts like what-is and what-is-not. But eventually, as any truly great philosopher must, Plato builds out his own positive program. The Parmenides is a great example; he finds a way to reconcile the paradoxes the pre-Socratics were obsessed with, and comes out with a richer toolkit and a stronger ontology as a result. Oh, and it's just as rigorous as any modern work of philosophy.
This article, though, seems kinda narrowly concerned about impact and exposure and all that stuff. Like in tech, you don't get to decide your impact, but you can become a really great philosopher by doing just what Plato did back then.
> Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste—a malicious taste, perhaps?—no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of man who is “in a hurry.” For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow—it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of “work,” that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to “get everything done” at once, including every old or new book: this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers . . . My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!
But his reputation was battered for years after his death through no fault of his own. That's nothing new. More than anyone, his proto-Nazi horror of a sister can be blamed for that: she ripped through his writings like a whirlwind, editing and rewriting them to support her own anti-semitism and political beliefs. His work was twisted for a purpose that he abhorred, and railed against in his later life. But that's what Nazis ideologues did: by manipulating the works of others, they were able to use them to give themselves a degree of falsified credibility they never would have had otherwise. With Nietzsche dead, it wasn't like he was going to challenge them on it.
Had he survived longer, there is no doubt that he would have used his every breath to fight against the sickening ideology that arose in Germany and its deliberate manipulations of his work to lend their beliefs credibility. Given the regime that was to come, that would have meant a bullet in the head. But for Nietzsche, that wouldn't have been stopped him from standing the "anti-Semitic canaille." In The Gay Science, he posits a demon who declares "[t]his life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more." A paralyzing, heavy burden, his idea of the eternal return would require no less for him. In Ecce Homo, he states that his "formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it." Amor fati.
In any case, it took decades to repair his reputation. There's a certain popularity to Nietzsche quotes online--what you call the hipster readings--but I think that's largely because Nietzsche's work is life-affirming. There's something incredibly appealing in the challenge that's implicit to his eternal return: to live a good life, one that you would be content to re-live throughout eternity.
Most of the people who blindly quote Nietzsche haven't really engaged his work, but even from that disability, I think it can be argued that they glimpse something appealing to them. Thus the popularity of those tiny quotations. Not to mention that much of his writing style lends itself well to that, even though he'd be apoplectic at the idea of it. One of my favorite professors was Patrick Miller, whose work on Nietzsche really opened a door that I'd left closed for many of the same reasons that most ignore or reject Nietzsche.
Philosophy _is_ a disciple, but it is an unusual one in that the answers to philosophical questions contain the seeds of other disciplines. It is kind of a meta-discipline.
Like any other human practice some are better at it and some are worse, agreed.
Logic is no more central to philosophy than it is to any other human activity. What is central to philosophy is _abstraction_. From that vantage point it more closely resembles software engineering than any other human activity and, I would argue, and this distinction is going to blur over time as the use of computers becomes habitual, as it must, within the activity of philosophy.
I think the counter-argument to this article is -- these great philosophers must be in our midst so why is it that we do not recognise them? That is the question that should have been asked. But to finish with a bit of snark, apologies in advance, the ability to ask that question takes a certain philosophical mindset.
That probably made a bunch of mathematicians smile.
Ethics and political philosophy have contributed to wars and revolutions, and in turn were shaped by them. Epistemology and metaphysics similarly influenced, and were influenced by, the cultural milieu of their times. A philosophical theory that does not respond to the very real needs and sentiments of its listeners is unlikely to gain acceptance at that time, no matter how elegant or self-consistent it might be.
Likewise, in software engineering, you usually don't abstract away in a vacuum. The relationship between entities in your CRUD app must have at least some semblance of the actual things they represent, or your app will become a UX nightmare.
I filled my mandatory philosophy credit hours many years ago, so this might be a very silly question: what happens when a product of philosophy can be demonstrated to logically not follow? It was my impression that such a product would be discarded, making logic extremely important in philosophy - unlike, unfortunately, many other human endeavors.
I see it this way. Logic is a method. It is one of the ways _how_ philosophy does what it does. (You could argue it is the only way, and many would not disagree with you.) However, consider what other disciplines do not require logically coherent inferences. Most, no? Art is one of the few which does not. Therefore logic is not central to philosophy because it is central to practically all disciplines! What is central to philosophy is, as I said, _abstraction_. The willingness to go meta-, to stand back from what you're looking at and questions the conditions of its possibilities. Do you see where I'm coming from? To make a stronger point, and to not at the same time denigrate your position, philosophers go astray when they focus on logic. :)
Though people are used to ambiguity and love extracting meaning from arbitrary stories, so it's not all that obvious of an issue. At its core philosophy is not about extracting meaning through analysis it's about conveying what someone has already desided to be true.
I think the field strives for a little more than that, at the very least discussion is preferred to rote learning. Logic provides a common language for that discussion.
Personally, I think the means of abstraction and logical reasoning we take for granted today are the direct result of thousands of years of philosophy!
B) Randomly trying things for thousands of years is likely to produce some interesting results. That does not mean doing so is a good idea.
In terms of public figures, I enjoyed a Ted Talk from Janna Levin who holds a Philosophy concentration amongst her physics credentials. I believe that Paul Graham may have been a philosophy major too.
Also, the above ideals make the platform difficult for any investor to support, because it is in contrast to the normal "grow!!!!!!!" direction that most startups want to take.
Hacker news, of course :)
I think an interesting way to structure a book would be a moderate sized section on ideas and then a larger accompanying manual explaining where the ideas come from.
It would certainly be weird to study in the way you speak of while ignoring history.
I'd say philosophy is more than either an accumulation of argument or discipline. It something like a dialogue with history.
The rightness or wrongness of Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Popper or similar figures is still "in play" given that the development of our society is far from over.
One can say a given philosopher is a great exemplar of a given historical current (capitalism, socialism, Christianity, etc) but absolute greatness is going to depend on the fate of that current.
If someone today solves an obscure problem of similar difficulty to Dijkstra's graph search, they won't be called great anything. It is the impact that matters, not the difficulty of the problem or the IQ of the inventor. Great scientists, philosophers and artists had the foresight, luck, and ability to develop something that subsequently had a massive impact on the world.
A point in the article that I agree with is that great philosophers shouldn't be treated as flawless geniuses. Great people of the past made massively impactful contributions, but that doesn't make them the ultimate authority on their field. Answers to today's problems aren't going to be found by disecting footnotes of Aristotle, Turing or Einstein, but in work of people who will make contributions today that will shape the future.
Asking out of ignorance. What tangible impact did Plato's work have on the world?
I can list how all the ways people that you listed made an impact on the world.
He also was Aristotle's teacher, and Aristotle was the philosopher who more or less created the entire scientific project (via people like Galen and Avicenna).
It's almost impossible to imagine what the world would be like today without them.
Aristotle took this framework and developed it further with the idea of inheritance. He classified things into tree structures (with great success) across many fields including biology, zoology, geology, psychology, politics, physics, and so on.
If anything, I would consider it an early version of "Signs and Signifiers".
Semiology is perhaps among the farthest removed from information theory, and computer science in general.
I don't understand this statement. Aren't the people at the forefront of a technological revolution (or anything else) always alive (otherwise how can they be at the forefront ?).
Luke (interviewer):
[...]
I’ve previously called philosophy a “diseased discipline[2],” for many reasons. For one thing, people working in philosophy-the-field tend to know strikingly little about the philosophical progress made in other fields, e.g. computer science or cognitive neuroscience. For another, books on the history of philosophy seem to be about the musings of old dead guys who were wrong about almost everything because they didn’t have 20th century science or math, rather than about actual philosophical progress, which is instead recounted in books like The Information[3].
[...]
Scott:
[...]
You’re right that these “old dead guys” didn’t know all the math and science we know today, but then again, neither did Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky! I mean, sure, the central questions of philosophy have changed over time, and the human condition has changed as well: we no longer get confused over Zeno’s paradoxes or the divine right of kings, and we now have global telecommunications and the Pill. I just don’t think either human nature or human philosophical concerns have changed quickly enough for great literature on them written centuries ago to have ceased being great.
[...]
[1] https://intelligence.org/2013/12/13/aaronson/
[2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/4zs/philosophy_a_diseased_discipline...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Information-History-Theory-Flood-ebook...
On the other hand it is entirely typical of a subset of researchers in fields like CS to think that 20th century science gives them all the answers and to demean anybody who wants them to think about whether they are even asking the right questions.
And they tend to mangle it by inserting rigorous scientific results into a nonrigorous framework that often ends up being a game of word association played using misunderstandings of basic science.
First is low-hanging fruit. In fields like science and mathematics, one may suggest it is easier to make earlier breakthroughs versus subsequent ones
If it's low-hanging fruit, then do it, pick some of that fruit, astound us with your ideas, and we'll remember you as a genius who picked a lot of fruit, instead of forgetting you as a lame blogger who can't even pick sour grapes.
Because to me it seems a lot easier to build on someone else's ideas than to come up with something truly original.
That's why those older philosophers were great thinkers.
Because at those times, while they could be off in physical sciences (although they made great headstarts into that too), at least they didn't trivialize their thinking with such crude quantity based analysis...
He also says "it is difficult to think of many factors which favor Plato’s time versus our own", when even in what he counts, the fact for example that the quantity of the work might not merely a factor of population, but depend on things such as a society (and an era) encouraging such inquiry from individuals, or even giving them the necessary leisure to pursuit it, doesn't seem to cross his mind.
Of course there are a lot more possible explanations (including the combination of all of them) that the three lame ones given, starting with some simple ones:
(1) The modern era has less individuals with the leisure time required for philosophy.
(2) Even for those with leisure, there are too many distractions in the modern era.
(3) Philosophy getting out of of favor in certain eras, including ours. Even in a place such as France, it was much more favorable (in vogue) to being a philosopher in the early-mid 20th century than it has been after the nineties.
(4) He conveniently forgets the whole backslash against philosophy in favor of theology that last most of the 3 to 15th century.
(5) There's the "low hanging fruit" thing, in which, the most basic and core inquiries are made by the first (or near) that examine a given field, and the rest are just "footnotes to Plato" (as Whitehead IIRC put it). That's not 100% accurate, of close, but it's close to what happened.
(6) Philosophy, like poetry, does not sell. And the modern era is all about selling stuff and making a profession out of everything. Modern "philosophers" are academic careerists with a degree in philosophy.
And lots of others beside.
I don't think you are being entirely consistent when you say both that the modern era has fewer individuals with the leisure time for philosophy, and that modern philosophers are academic careerists: the modern opportunity provided by academic careers seems to have benefitted science, for example, by giving a lot of time to people who would otherwise never have the leisure for it.
While enumerating those times when philosophy has been out of favor, the execution of Socrates comes to mind, as do the events that forced Aristotle to flee Athens.
I think your point 4 is insightful. From that era, only Aquinas makes the cut. That time, however, belongs to the 'then', rather than the 'now' of vastly larger population. Also, the theological backlash occurred primarily or only in christian Europe and the Levant, which points to another bias in this list...
For science, this scheme works, because science is a collaborative effort (so more working on the same thing, the better), and it also has practical results which are pursued and compensated because they can be worth millions and billions.
Whereas a philosophical grant can be given equally well to a great pioneering work or to some tired derivative mumbling, and it's even more convenient to give grants to the latter, as those who write those works don't make waves and keep everybody happy.
>* While enumerating those times when philosophy has been out of favor, the execution of Socrates comes to mind, as do the events that forced Aristotle to flee Athens.*
I'd say that those were rather philosophers that went out of favor (as opposed to philosophy, which the polis valued still).
That is, it wasn't some widespread disinterest in philosophy, nor a widespread persecution of philosophers -- numerous others carried over at the same time Socrates was executed, including Socrates own student, Plato (and Xenophon), and later Plato's students, including Aristotle.
There were exceptions to the rule, but the rule was that theology ruled the day. William of Ockham was a theologian himself (and not a "top" philosopher anyway).
Regarding the respect for Aristotle by a large number of medieval philosophers, too much of it was another thing that held philosophy back at the time -- scholasticism didn't move the field as forward as it was moving in ancient Greek centuries.
That alone would account for some portion of Plato's influence, but that does a great disservice to his work. In every sense of the word, it was revolutionary. The word "great" gets bandied around a lot, and this article seems to struggle with it, but if you consider it in terms of influence, then Plato's position/ranking is unassailable. Nearly every western philosopher since has been influenced--directly or indirectly--by Plato's legacy. Just as you can't read Plotinus without a thorough understanding of Plato, even today there's an implicit assumption in philosophy that you have a pretty decent familiarity with Platonism.
Plato's legacy isn't just one of ideas; it rightly includes the very field of philosophy as we understand it today. For that reason alone, he is considered a titan of the field.
it's statistically unlikely that plato and aristotle were that good, ay? and they simply picked off low hanging fruit? okay, show me 13 modern day publish-or-perish professors whose thought and work are as sweeping, insightful, or profound as plato or aristotle. show me the last person since wittgenstein or frege or kant about whom we could write something like woodbridge's "aristotle's vision of nature." they certainly write down as much as plato or aristotle. show me the thinker with that much quality work.
the point here is that this is always how philosophy has been, and how it always should be: yes, we need to question our assumptions; yes, we need to listen to any voices that have been historically locked out of our discourse for biased reasons... but if you want to do either of those, you show me the damn proof of it, and you explain it really, really well.
edit: in other words, an explanation of why we just can't appreciate the current 13 platos in athens is worth exactly nothing. show them to me, and prove to me that they're as good as plato. that's how philosophy works. giving an abstract argument trying to explain why you can't give me a good argument just is giving me a shitty argument.
As for the role that ancient philosophers still play, perhaps philosophy could do a better job of separating people from their ideas.
Lets think of flight, the Wright Brothers where the first to get an heavier-than-air machine to fly (fancy way of saying airplane). And yet aeronautics students don't have courses on the Wright Brother's. Because aeronautics has managed to separate the people from the ideas. Perhaps it would make some sense for philosophy to do the same.
The other reason is that many of the "great philosophers" wrote in systematic form. Furthermore, many of their writings are collections--often compiled after the fact--that pull together notes from lectures, debates, treatises, etc. They cross-reference one another, and sometimes, they aren't chronological. Plotinus's Enneads are a good example of this in my opinion, as you wind up bouncing around chronologically a lot because of how Porphyry compiled them.
All of that makes it almost impossible to divorce specific ideas from the writer or the writer's other ideas and works. Attempting to do so, rather than simplifying study, only makes it more difficult.
The other thing is that oral tradition still held sway for centuries. Heck, it still does in some ways. I remember a guest lecturer we had who talked about an Iranian student of his. They were discussing Avicenna (a very well-known and influential Islamic philosopher), and the student corrected him about something. He wasn't sure where in Avicenna's writings he was referring to, and when asked, the student said something pretty shocking. He wasn't referring directly to his writings, but oral tradition passed on to him by his professor in an unbroken chain dating back over a thousand years to Avicenna himself. I can only imagine how much was lost over time, and how things might get distorted, but that story was pretty jaw-dropping.
My point is, history and the authors themselves are inextricably linked to their work in philosophy. For both good and bad.
Do away with history and authors both. Keep the ideas and arguments, but in modern form, and on a modern foundation.
There may be the equivalent of 13 Platos in Athens right now, but we won't know whether they have anything worth adding until enough time has gone by to show whether their ideas are worth anything or not.
I'm not the first person to realize this point, BTW.
If you want to condense 2000+ years of history down to something that fits in an education, you're going to have to cut almost everything. What people generally do is cover people or events that had great influence on what came after.
You're not getting "greatest", "best", or even "most correct"; You're getting people who stood out as having influence.
John Searle's Chinese room has occupied my thoughts for years. Now Convolutional Neural Net's that translate Chinese to English and answer questions lead me to believe that the guy in the Searle's Chinese room is redundant.
My musical tribute: http://www.upload.ee/files/5775110/allthingsarenothing.mp3.h...
There probably are 13 platos in Attica, they aren't famous because they weren't the first to say what Plato did.
It's not about who is the greatest thinker or who has more raw brainpower. It's certainly not just about learning the history of philosophy. How can you understand any modern philosopher without understanding what context they are writing in and what arguments they are critiquing, without understanding the world they lived in and the world they were responding to (of which history is a big part but certainly not all)? Why would we have philosophers now that just rehash old ideas? Unlike in science, it would only make those ideas less clear, not more. Reading a modern synopsis of ancient philosophers will help with the history part but I doubt it would spark much interest in students or ideas and discussion. It'd probably confuse people unnecessarily as many ancient ideas have no place in modernity. Not to mention robbing them of the pleasure of reading original philosophy and understanding it.
All that just to get a muddied, unclear version that misses a lot of the subtleties that make those philosophies great. No one would be able to build on ancient philosophers anymore because now we'd be interpreting a limited interpretation of the original texts that captured a fraction of the original meaning, not the original texts. We'd be unable to find new meanings in those original texts. This last part would indeed be a crime against philosophers--true lovers of knowledge--everywhere. What the author suggests that we do is indeed, truly monstrous and incredibly stupid:
"we should expect the scholarship of Plato or Aristotle (or any ‘great philosopher’) to improve our understanding into the history of ideas, but not to excavate some hidden philosophical insight relevant to modern discussions"
Thankfully Nietzche, Derrida, and [insert your favorite non-ancient philosopher here] did not subscribe to this stupidity and small-mindedness or they probably would never have written anything.