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Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

Aristotle is notoriously a terrible writer. A lot of these books are thought to just be lecture notes and things like that pieced together. Compare that to something like Plato's and it's a big difference. I imagine nobody will ever beat Kant in the terrible writing department though.

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Many writers are terrible by accident, but Kant elevated it to an artform.

Now I want to really read his writings

Take first Critique, and read it as if a software engineer wrote his ideas now some software might be architected in order order to work as it is working right now: that is the point of Transcendental Argument.

As I understand, he left penning down his philosophical thoughts till a rather late age and wrote the Critique of Pure Reason at a point where he was worried he wouldn’t remember it all and consequently it was done under a lot of haste.

> Aristotle is notoriously a terrible writer.

Is this really uncontroversial? I can't say I've heard that said before, or found Aristotle more difficult than other texts of that time. Obviously there are stylistic differences between this and Plator's dialogues, but I imagine a large part of your impression could be due to the particular translations you read.

I've read Aristotle in two classes, and both times the professors have commented on the writing style to prepare us. In an ancient philosophy class, Aristotle still stood out as densest and dryest.

Pretty incontrovertial. Most of our surviving writings “by Aristotle” are actually lecture notes from his students rewritten later. So it’s got a lot of the hallmarks of being written by committee and coming across as being very dry.

Compare this to Plato, whose writings were actually pretty entertaining even as pure fiction. He’s full of side stories, lurid metaphors, and funny turns of phrase.

Derrida and Foucault are far worse than Kant. At least Kant has substance ;)

I'll second that. After reading the history of sexuality by Foucault in college, I remember coming to the frustrated realization that the point of this jargony disaster of a book could have been made in a couple pages, possibly less. In essence, it says that to be free in one's sexuality, putting words on things which may feel rebellious is actually just trying to define practices and feelings that don't need this to exist. So, talking about sex is actually not rebellious and freeing in any way but rather normative and constraining. This was actually an interesting point to consider as a young adult, and I am glad I encountered this when I did, but a whole book for this is beyond overkill.

What got me is that he spends the very beginning of that book being like "People in the Victorian era thought that they were sexually repressed... They aren't, but let's spend 300+ pages on why they thought that they were sexually repressed."

Between this and his BS explanations for why Leprosy disappeared from Europe I realized that Foucault was a charlatan.

Hmm, I was a philosophy major in college and I always loved Aristotles (and to a lesser degree Thomas Aquinas) writing styles. They're very dense and to the point.

It's the continental philosophers of the enlightenment era that drive me nuts with their meandering arguments.

Other than the structuring, moving from topic to topic without explanation (e.g. Categories), I actually agree. Maybe terrible isn't the right word. He's a lot more like reading modern math.

Oh, Hegel is surely an even more terrible writer than Kant: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/302

Oh, but they are just lecture notes. I am quite a bad lecture-note writer (and, honestly, anything else) but for lecture notes, the Nichomachean Ethics is splendid.

Ironically, I find Kant's notes to be very easy reading and informative, relative to his prepared pieces.

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