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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

What's fascinating to me about philosophy is how self-obsessed it is. When you take a math class you don't spend time learning to compute without the concept of zero or in Roman numerals. You don't have a science lab where you try and capture phlogiston or detect the ether. Yet philosophy education seems pathologically incapable of separating a philosopher's useful work from their utter dreck, or of abandoning philosophies long disproved. For example, they can't teach you about Descartes' epistemology without also getting into his ignorant dualism. This addiction is the reason the entire field sags under an air of uselessness.

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Not sure where to start with this bizarre criticism of philosophy...

You're somehow conflating learning the history of your own field to being self-obsessed. Almost all of social science and humanities education starts with a history introduction - the origin of ideas, the development of the field, etc. Is literature self-obsessed too, because they read Homer? Your analogy with phlogiston completely fails, and not just for that, but because revisiting ancient philosophical ideas is not the same as reconsidering outdated scientific theories. Your source of misunderstanding is captured in your criticism that philosophers are incapable of

>abandoning philosophies long disproved

If you think philosophy can be proved or disproved, then you don't get it. Philosophy produces arguments, and some of those may be stronger than others, but there is very little in philosophy with unanimous agreement. I think _your_ ignorance, ironically, is what makes you believe that certain ideas are ignorant. For example, here you say that philosophers

>can't teach you about Descartes' epistemology without also getting into his ignorant dualism

I say this as a non-dualist - the debate on the philosophy of mind is far from "proved" or "disproved", and moreover your suggestion that Descartes' dualism should somehow be removed from the curriculum is ridiculous. The point is that philosophy students have the opportunity to debate and think about this stuff, rather than just accepting it as dogma. So even if we were to reject an idea entirely we'd still teach it to new students. (Not to mention that separating Descartes' epistemology from his metaphysics would be a terrible pedagogical idea.)

But what's even more bizarre about your comment is that all of this is pretty much irrelevant because in actual philosophy education and literature today the kind of ancient ideas you're attacking are never the core stuff. They might be used as intro or historical material but you're exaggerating the extent to which they take up the curriculum. The whole thing is a strawman to be honest from someone who I doubt has ever studied philosophy in a university.

Right.

To go on, the people attacking philosophy have tended to ignore history. Historically, many topics started out as curiosities of philosophers in academia before branching out into their own areas/departments. (Today's scientists would have all been natural philosophers far back in history, as I recall.) I think the original subjects could be typified as religion, math, and philosophy. It's going to be easy to say philosophy is worthless if you're neglecting the contributions to knowledge it's made in the past through branching off whole areas of study. It's like removing all the fruit from a tree and then saying the tree is useless because there's no fruit on it. It's worse, of course, since without a theory of why things are done or reasoned or calculated the way they are then disciplines like engineering or statistics (for instance) reduce to theory-less plug-and-chug. Enter the world of p-value hacking and other poor, faulty applications of routine sans underlying reasoning.

One of the points I think the grandparent is trying to make is that quite often key ideas are obscured by needing to read vast amounts of literature. For example before I've asked on a forum for some of Kant's key ideas, and all I got in reply was to read several 700 page books, which would be nice, but that isn't what I asked for. I've seen this several times so in certain parts it seems to be a cultural issue for some people. This connects with Orwell's six rules for writing that say when you write you should write to the point.

Philosophy isn't so much about producing conclusions for others to adopt as doctrine, but the process of arriving at conclusions for others to model, which makes trains of thought that lead to contradictory conclusions especially interesting to study.

As long as there has been philosophy, there has been sophistry. The adversarial use of bad (but very convincing) arguments was a problem in ancient Athens, and it's a problem today. If you can't even find the fault in an argument made in good faith, you're absolutely helpless when the faults are made in bad faith.

> What's fascinating to me about philosophy is how self-obsessed it is. When you take a math class you don't spend time learning to compute without the concept of zero or in Roman numerals.

As a former philosophy major and almost math major (ended up taking the minor), I think it would be a good thing if more people were exposed to history of math and philosophy of math, especially in STEM. This is for two reasons (1) too few STEM students are exposed to the historical situatedness of mathematics and alternative constructions to the standard ones and (2) a lot of topics in the history of math provide way more fun terrain for learning to read and write proofs than the stuff that kids in secondary or primary school are exposed to.

And to revisit this:

> When you take a math class you don't spend time learning to compute without the concept of zero or in Roman numerals.

There are classes in math departments where you work in structures that are similar to the numbers you know but where you don't use zero, and there are also sometimes cross-listed courses in math and history where you do things like compute using different numerical notation systems or in different bases.

> For example, they can't teach you about Descartes' epistemology without also getting into his ignorant dualism.

? His dualism is epistemological, idk what you're even picturing here

what facinates me about philosophy is that it has led to science, reason, sanitation and the computer you are typing on. I won't downvote you, philosophy is difficult to understand.

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