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Comment by anschwa | Hacker News Reader

> Solomon maintains that “nothing has been more harmful to philosophy than its ‘professionalization,’ which on the one hand has increased the abilities and techniques of its practitioners immensely, but on the other has rendered it an increasingly impersonal and technical discipline, cut off from and forbidding to everyone else.”

> As an addendum, Ho adds that “most of the works on the list are analytic philosophy,”...

Interesting that analytic philosophy is both seen as being the most harmful yet also most prestigious.

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Ironically, I took multiple philosophy courses at the university of Texas taught by both Bob Solomon (one of the “eminent philosophers”) and his wife.

I graduated from the philosophy program with a profound distaste for analytical philosophy, believing it to be pedantic BS that really only shows the limitations of whatever language you’re using for discourse. Hence the abstraction into symbolic logic, but symbolic logic only works as a pure abstraction: any link to the real world becomes limited by the language constructs you can use to describe the world, the subject/object relationships, etc.

There are many languages and writing systems in the world. I expect the peculiarities of each to rear its head when attempting to use them to do “real” philosophy (I honestly view most of the analytical offshoots of philosophy as mathematics; somewhat telling, the university disagreed and forced all CS majors to take logic classes in the philosophy department).

I think that the perceived stiffness of analytic philosphy is really just the true limitations of philosophy made obvious.

>that really only shows the limitations of whatever language you’re using for discourse.

It's not entirely clear that natural languages are more powerful than formal ones (in terms of stating true facts,) but what is easy to see is that English makes it far easier to appear to prove something you haven't. That gives it an illusion of power.

Ironically Neitzsche had something to say about this: you've got the small claims that seem pedantic and insignificant, and the grand claims that explain the meaning of it all, but in the end the small claims can be made so much more certain than the grand ones that they're what you want to base everything off of. Viscosity of water vs. angels on the head of a pin.

Exactly; I’m not saying natural language is better, just that you can’t really do any better without running into the same issues around discourse/rhetoric.

I have to agree. I noticed with more recent philosophy works (including some on this list) it could feel like the philosophers were more interested in arguing with one another than educating the reader.

I also think this is part of the reason why philosophers like John Dewey aren't as well regarded as they should be and/or used to be.

I agree with that. I studied philosophy in college and it was all insider baseball. It was a breath of fresh air when I came across Dewey and William James.

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