I argue that studying the history of philosophy is philosophically unhelpful
tandfonline.com
tandfonline.com
People like Frege and Russell made certain choices in the design of formal logic because they were influenced by Leibniz, who, in turn, arranged things in a certain way because he was influenced by Aristotle. If you don't know what Aristotle said, it's hard to understand Leibniz, and if you don't know Leibniz, it's hard to understand Frege and Russell.
You can learn a great deal that way, but it fundamentally strips the historical dimension away. And philosophy’s greatest ideas are developed over the order of centuries.
Relying heavily on really bad analogies seems to be a theme in the paper, reading on. There's some hilariously-bad question-begging-laundered-through-analogy in the bit about body-building advice / reasons-to-study-historical-philosophy.
Leading with emphasizing the importance of correctness is also pretty silly when we spend much of a student's training for most other fields teaching them one useful lie or another. That philosophy's lies happen to often come from very old books hardly seems material. Clearly, scaffolding with outright known lies is the norm, so "much of the material is probably wrong" isn't, per se, much of an attack.
I don't think the paper's conclusion's even necessarily wrong (and by calling for some vague "less" focus on the history of philosophy, it defies firm refutation anyway) and some of it does make interesting points, but damn, it's got some seriously off-putting flaws. I especially think it fails to make a strong case against such study as training for philosophers. But maybe there are far more doctors of philosophy out there who spend their careers analyzing historical philosophy, than would be optimal. That seems plausible, but also doesn't seem to be the focus of the paper.
Even if the ideas are complete bunkum and red herrings, their cultural ubiquity and influence merit study if only to understand how things went astray. In practice, there are useful concepts to be found, precursors of much present empirically-derived understandings (contrasting with classical Western philosophy's focus on rational thought, as highlighted by of course Kant). And the buried bones and foundations of much present thinking.
Digging to find root causes of common shibboleths and tropes is also useful in debunking those same (or so I'd like to hope: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>).
I’d also like to mention the old adage “if you can’t explain it, you don’t really understand it”. The common deferral along the lines of “oh you have to read philosopher X to really understand that” indicates to me that actually there is a generally poor understanding of what those philosophers really meant. Otherwise people should be able to express those ideas with clarity in their own words.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.
But history is not philosophy, so the implicit premise, which boils down to, "history is not necessary to philosophy," is wrong-headed, but it is also assuming the conclusion, which is question begging.
History is important to history, understanding how events in the past caused things to be the way they are today. Further, the history of philosophy is not identical to the philosophy in history just as the history of technology is not itself technology. When studying Ancient Philosophy one is not studying the history of ancient philosophy, but the ancient philosophy itself. Conversely, studying history of philosophy is not philosophical study, it is instead studying history, focusing on when and who said in what circumstances, and is not primarily concerned with understanding what was said.
Read page 9 in the PDF again - the author goes to good lengths to grapple with this argument and why it is not correct. In particular:
In order to repeat the mistakes of a famous philosopher, one must first
share their beliefs. Now, few people are born with any degree of credence
in the far-fetched propositions embraced by many philosophers. In general,
these kinds of beliefs have to be acquired; and the only way of acquiring
them is to study these authors. It seems that if we wanted to avoid acquir-
ing false beliefs that we would never arrive at except by reading a particu-
lar author, the best thing by far we could do is to avoid reading that
author.Incidentally, how's the Bohr model doing? Still widely taught? Well why's that, since it's wrong?
In practice it fails on multiple grounds:
First, it's not possible to censor all instances of such philosophical works. The historical record is filled with attempts to do so. These can be somewhat successful, and there are in fact philosophers whose names reach us only by reputation, citation, or other mention, but some philosophy has leaked through.
Secondly, a fresh attempt at doing so would amount to one of the most jarring cases of oppressive authoritarian censorship in all history.
Thirdly, the ideas have come to permeate modern culture. One of the joys of reading philosophy (or literature) is recognising the original source of a specific phrase or concept. I can recall one of my own uni lit courses in which we read Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H.", and came across the stanza:
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
A woman in the class exclaimed "Oh, that's where 'Tis better to have loved and lost' comes from?". I'm sure that was a bright day for the lecturer.
Encounters with philosophical history are similar, though often what strikes me is the nuance and context in which even well-known concepts are grounded (say: Pascal's wager, which is far more about expected returns than belief of God's existence).
Fourth, bad ideas seem highly susceptible to arising again and again due to their very simplicity and appeal. This might of course be affected by the third factor, but independent (or at least very distantly related) instances of similar tropes appearing in mythology and sagas suggest that there are ideas which are simply either infinitely regenerative as with Prometheus's liver, or which resist all attempts to kill them, where two new myths grow back for each one that's cut off, as with the hydra's heads.
(Even mythical stories can serve as useful illustrations, itself a factor in their longevity.)
By going back to fallacious reasoning or conclusions and looking at how the ideas emerged, were adopted, and often explicitly encouraged we can obtain, I'd think, a better understanding of similar such processes in our own time. The divorce of ancient beliefs from current tribalism, politics, and passions serves this purpose all the better, though it does help to consider the ancients not as childlike innocents and naifs or ourselves as beyond their own failings when doing so.
And the trove of ancient philosophy is large enough that a specialisation in its history is required such that mere mortals may benefit from its findings, classifications, and synthesis.
Philosophers throw around author-turned-into-adjective terms like Kantian, Hegelian, Aristotelian, Humean, Hobbesian, Benthamite, and so forth as frustratingly vague substitutions for the actual ideas meant. (Kant wrote a lot, which part are you referring to?) Intro biology and political science textbooks are all organized similarly with more or less the same content, while different intro philosophy textbooks often seem like they're covering different fields. (E.g. one author believes the main questions in philosophy are metaphysics and logic, while another gives most space to ethics and religion.) Why? Because there is no widely agreed-upon of what the really important issues in philosophy even are. (Just look at continental vs. analytic philosophy.) So in the absence of any kind of consensus organization/taxonomy and terminology to go with that, it all just reverts to... original texts and author surnames. It's organized by history.
(And even when modern thinkers try to come up with conceptual-sounding names, it turns into a confusing mess. Try to remember which one is "contractualism" and which one is "contractarianism". Or is there a difference between "morals" and "ethics"? Or why do some writers call it "utilitarianism" while others call it "consequentialism"? When you say "resentment", which author's usage of "ressentiment" are you actually referring to? I usually know the answers to these questions, but they sure are confusing when you're learning it as an undergrad. It's actually clearer if you say "Hobbesian" rather than "contractarian", or "Nietszchean" so I can understand which type of "resentment".)
Learning the history of philosophy is helpful... but it does seem somewhat strange that while you can learn math or biology without needing to learn the history or ever read a single "original historical text"... you can't learn philosophy without learning its history. And so that certainly leads to the question... should you be able to? Would that improve the study of philosophy?
[0]To an expert level, i.e. to create and advance new knowledge in the field.
[1]Insert science here.
[2]Roughly a decade or two worth of papers, by my entirely unscientific estimation
philosophy does seem to be particularly unique in organizing its entire subject matter essentially historically by thinker and around original texts
But when it comes to ethics I don't think we can say the same thing. I'm not even sure for some areas of politics. When I read Thomas Hobbes Leviathan I found myself thinking "Wow, at least no thinking person will ever defend that philosophy again" and then a couple of decades later Steven Pinker did just that.
We're really not making much progress in the humanities. I'd like to think we're done (intellectually speaking) with chattel slavery as a concept but who knows. Grant and Sherman made bigger contributions to that argument than a whole swathe of philosophers either way.
I would think this comes down to how we define philosophy. On scientific matters sure Aristotle likely has little to offer; but human nature has not changed at all since Plato, or Siddhartha we’re born.
After saying the following I feel that it would be hard for them to argue their point very strongly. So I’m definitely going to read the paper:
To be perfectly clear: my claim is not that we should not be doing history of philosophy. There are all kinds of reasons why reading and talking about the Critique of Pure Reason or the Republic are worthwhile: studying these seminal texts is an inherently interesting intellectual pursuit; reading them is often tremendously enjoyable; and familiarity with these texts can be very valuable to intellectual historians for the insights into culture, knowledge and morality they may contain. There are thus many excellent reasons to engage with the history of philosophy. Gaining traction on the aforementioned philosophical problems, however, is not one of them. This means that I am not arguing against historians of philosophy and what they do, but against what could be called philosophical historicists, that is, those who seem to think that at least one good method of thinking about knowledge or justice is to study what historical authors have written about knowledge and justice a long time ago. This, I argue, is a mistake.
I don't think anyone is claiming historical context isn't helpful, but these are tools for thinking. This doesn't go anywhere near the 'history repeating itself' mantra. The only way it could get close to that is for someone who is attempting to discover new math (or philosophy), but that's a very small subset of those who benefit from these tools.
No farmer in existence would ever agree they need to understand the historical context to successfully use a fence post, or that they need it to be able to critically evaluate their specific needs and adjust their usage of fence posts to meet those needs.
I find this attitude amongst software architects a lot as well. The stereotype of the hapless academic didn't come about because there's no truth to it.
Extend? Yes. Math is a tool that came from a context, so there might be implicit assumptions made on choosing that particular notation and definition that might or might not be justified. Appreciating where and idea comes from lets you work with the idea. I also think it helps learning and generalising.
A competent programmer with no knowledge of history can deal with things like e.g. non-monotonicity in time by just writing robust code. But it helps to know where it comes from: clock drift, user modification, error, leap seconds etc. If you know one of these, you can leverage different assumptions.
Will it make you better? yes, of course, but that isn't what's being discussed here.
He has:
Re. Hanno Sauer's article denying the value of the history of philosophy: it turns out he follows me on Twitter, from which I infer that he was just kidding.
<https://nitter.kavin.rocks/HistPhilosophy/status/15732353053...>
I'm inclined to think that this is all the response that's required.
(I do find several other comments on this thread on point, notably those by pron <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008453>, terkozz <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008248>, and ougerechny <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010884>)
<https://nitter.kavin.rocks/HistPhilosophy/status/15689571978...>
In college there was this clique of philosophy students who were studying all this ancient thought but were (imo) strangely averse to weighing in on the problems of modernity. Like what they were interested in was 'real' philosophy. Never seemed right to me. That stuff is already baked into the way we think -- that's why it was important back then! Today we can barely perceive what it's like to _not_ think with it; it's "in the water supply", as it were. The interesting philosophy is in the new ideas that aren't settled yet.
Everyone says this and I don't believe it. Wise people existed then and wise people exist now. The new wise people's wisdom is much more relevant.
Without discussing politics or political topics (e.g. the benefits of diversity in a group of people,) can you give examples of this 'much more relevant' wisdom of today? For example, Aristotle taught metaphysics and aspirational ethics, amongst other topics--can you give examples of today's 'much more relevant' wisdoms that are more relevant than what he had to say? Examples that leave no question as to how much more relevant or, perhaps, more wise those (new vs old) wisdoms are? Thanks.
Sure, but which ones?
The reason we study people from 2,000 years ago is not that no one else is having those same thoughts (or better ones) today. It's because if something survives for 2,000 years, there's a reason for it. Enough cultures over centuries felt that what these people had to say was important enough to be passed down. It's the same reason we don't seriously study philosophers until they are dead. It takes decades to determine if their corpus is even a meaningful contribution to the canon.
You can learn a lot about people that way.
This is more than you think. Humans not only evolve through evolution, but also culture. We're able to change culture quickly and it has a huge impact on our being. Culture responses very sensible to the environment. So even though there was not much time for evolution, we 'evolved' quite a bit and might be more different that one might think.
As I said, culture can change quickly. This applies for all directions, so maybe we actually are very similar. Who knows.
[I used 'evolution' as how we use the word in day to day usage. The term 'culture' might be involved in 'evolution']
And that seems like a good reason to study history too, to learn about people who thought very differently from us. It's interesting!
Yes, maybe that's an argument that psychology or social science students should study more historical philosophy (or to be pedantic, history only)?
My impression is that it's primarily a way of immunizing yourself against critique and avoiding academic conflicts. If you write a solid, exegetically sound historical paper you can publish it almost for sure in some journal. No reviewer will be offended by it. You won't make it into journals that require real originality such as the Journal of Philosophy, but you can easily build a career by being a "philosopher X" scholar. Publishing original content and making a name for yourself as a defender of a new philosophical thesis or tradition is much harder.
One of my colleagues works among the world's foremost Wittgenstein scholars and he told me ten years ago that it bores him to death. Nothing has changed since then, however, he's still working almost solely on Wittgenstein.
It would be funny to read something like that for the first time, but the author doesn't seem to know that the same approach have been proclaimed (and subsequently ridiculed) for at least 200 years. The irony of ignoring history!
Also, it is mentioned that studying other sciences doesn't work the same way. Of course it doesn't, as for quite some time students haven't been sharing any state of mind with people whose portraits hang on the walls. They don't even share more than required between themselves, because they are given instant noodle type understanding with famous scientists simply printed on the packaging that results in everything, including theory, becoming applied, and never-ending compartmentalization.
That's only true if you disregard all empirical observations you made yourself while living in this world, and relied 100% on things other people tell you.
> It would be funny to read something like that for the first time, but the author doesn't seem to know that the same approach have been proclaimed (and subsequently ridiculed) for at least 200 years. The irony of ignoring history!
The fact that some idea has been ridiculed for 200 years doesn't make it wrong. I can entertain the idea that it's pretty good evidence that it's funny though.
(Btw, I also find your strawman arguments and flippant attitude to be a bit in poor taste.)
It is simply ignorant to present the stitched corpses of vulgar materialism and its company as something “modern” (with a facelift to switch from “mechanistic” to “robotistic” model because engines stopped being cool for the public, computers are cool today). Ignorance can be ridiculed. Dostoevsky smirked at people making lecterns for Vogt, Moleschott, and Buchner, Goethe had fun with dialogues in Faust's study, but hey! We can safely skip all of that if we decide to call it “outdated”!
Yes. "almost".
> Ignorance can be ridiculed.
Yes.
I really don't think the author is the first to try throwing out the past, and there were some odd setups in the essay where he expected the "mighty dead" to make a case for themselves today, instead of it being on him to make the case for what he has to improve on them. The underlying view of history as progress and his implied materialist view of epistemic value, I think, isn't new.
If you substitute ideology for philosophy, then iterate ideological theorems from it, you can produce what are essentially holographic projections of consistent ideas that seem to encompass everything, and the easiest ones are structured like the Ancient Aliens reference above. The genius of that show is that it is as rigorous a critical theory of archeology as any other critical theory, it's just that everyone thinks their fancier version is different. It's as though we needed Ancient Astronaut Theory to convince us that other critical theories are real.
The last century has emphasized some interesting problems that were the consequence of our new ability to simulate and represent much of our experience as artifacts of computation and language, along with critical theories designed as solvents for the artifacts of language, where objects could be decoupled from their meanings, and then re-assigning meaning seemed like just an exercise in power over subjects - but that only works on a certain kind of mind. If you have ever seen an animal react to a magic trick, it's the same slight of hand effect on an intellectual level, I think. You can't navigate without waypoints, and any new philosophical ideas that are not informed by the foundations are just going to be post-hoc moralizations of exigencies in the present.
Everything after the enlightenment, but before modern biology / neuroscience / physics, is also really smart sounding nonsense, but is getting closer to something approximating "reality".
Once we get to the naturalist philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries (many of whom are biologists, physicists, or neuroscientists by training), we start getting some real meat.
Plato's critique of democracy was written long before the period of enlightenment. It stands on its own to this day. There are countless other examples of philosophical works that hold up to scrutiny even when viewed through an analytical lens.
Brains in vats and all that.
Which, if you're building your philosophy in view of modern biological and neurological knowledge, is not a particularly defensible position.
How do we know that our mind is interpreting what this knowledge is in a coherent manner? The researchers themselves are already making a philosophical claim that truth is knowable to get to any meaningful conclusions about what can be learned about the mind. Note that I'm saying this assuming your premise is true, then using it to undermine your own claim so using this logic against me is not coherent.
> is not a particularly defensible position.
Defensibility is defined outside itself. For example: "Is the city defensible?" Is a reasonable question, but without defining the threat vector (comets, horsemen, etc) the statement on its own is meaningless.
So please understand that from your own vantage point this claim may seem indefensible, but you are again assuming the premise; and this is, essentially, the number one problem I see in modern thought.
Thinkers in our era have taken a leap of faith to defend rationality and science then proceed to deny that faith had anything to do with it, or, even worse in the case of Sam Harris, deride faith as "surely the devil's masterpiece" beating out ignorance, hatred, greed.
I find this especially rich in light of the damage that greed and hatred have done to the modern world built upon our technological societies. I'm not anti-technology, in fact I am pro-technology, but without the underpinnings that come with faith that is acknowledged and serviced, I believe we'll end up damaging the world more than we aid it over time.
"Modern biological and neurological knowledge" (wording adopted from spicyusername's post) says that our minds evolved over mega-years, to be good enough fast enough to give us a survival edge. They didn't evolve to be pure logic engines, and they show that in all kinds of ways.
Within that view, it is a contradiction to believe "ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning" (your wording). Within the current framework, you can't trust your mind to reach correct conclusions.
I'm not assuming the premise. I'm pointing out that those who do put themselves in a contradictory position.
True, that it doesn't require a petri dish, but it does require the scientific method.
I understand what you're getting at. I agree that much of what is considered "philosophy" isn't just "what is", but "what should we do about it".
I would argue that the answer "what we should do about it" is either:
- So relative that there isn't an answer (or are infinite answers), at which point everyone is welcome to substitute any answer they like.
- Dependent on as-yet-undiscovered information in the physical sciences (biology, cosmology, physics, neuroscience, etc), which is why we're still reliant on incomplete (or incorrect) proxies
The STEM-bro/SWE/HN/LessWrong/Sam Harris mindset is hyperspecific in its cultural conclusions and it doesn't come to those through experiments but by making prescriptive claims just like any philosopher. This isn't just an academic problem, but something that has real practical consequences when it comes to living in a society dominated by FAANGs and other such structures.
Very good point. I 100% agree.
What I'm arguing is that hard sciences are the only pathway to real understanding, and the hard sciences only got started during the enlightenment.
Anything before then was just somebody grasping at straws really convincingly.
Aristotle said that women had fewer teeth than men. To him, this was logically necessary. He was married twice, but he never bothered to open his wife's mouth and count.
So, yeah. A little actual data can cut short a lot of philosophical nonsense. But I think you go too far the other direction.
Determining morals from science seems to me like either nonsense or the path to disaster, maybe both. Determining aesthetics from science is unlikely to produce anything beautiful. Determining politics from science... well, Marx and those who followed him claimed to be doing exactly that, and it worked out very badly. Determining epistemology from science is putting things exactly backwards.
And even the things that can be determined from science, you have to be careful to not let everything become science. There's a great quote from Hemingway, which I tried and failed to find, where he says that you can count the spines on the dorsal fins of a certain kind of fish simply by getting a specimen and counting. But when that kind of fish hits the end of your fishing line, you get a whole different kind of truth. Then he says that the scientist who counts the spines in the fin has recorded one truth, and experienced many lies. The fish is not that cold, that color, that dead, nor does it smell that way.
Science can tell us useful things. Philosophy that ignores science is likely to wander off into unreality and therefore uselessness. But no, the hard sciences are not the only pathway to real understanding, and trying to make it so will neuter philosophy.
Very true.
> Is stoicism nonsense?
As a way to help you feel more in control in your personal life, no.
As a pathway to understand what is, humankind's place in what is, and what we should do about what is, yes.
You can wander into almost any HN politics thread and find at least one alarmingly-confident and probably-acrimonious post that can act as a prompt to let you walk someone through Plato's dialog on justice from the first few pages of The Republic. They'll have no idea what you're doing. I'm pretty sure most of them are adults, not kids.
This is like saying that Newtonian physics is really smart sounding nonsense because it makes mispredictions in places and assumes that time behaves like a continuum.
Among Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle alone,
Aristotle developed syllogisms (a fragment of predicate logic), Aristotle developed the notion of scientific disciplines, Socrates made many realize that it's not as easy to refute seemingly obvious nonsense in a watertight manner, Aristotle developed the notion of infinitely divisible time trying to refute Zeno's infinitely divisible distances traveled.
It's important to note that where these people are wrong and have developed insufficiently powerful explanations, it's because they lack the instruments and infrastructure (physical and intellectual) to reliably observe contradictions and deficiencies) to these frameworks that they have developed. To the person living then, it makes little difference, and likely the same to much of our lived experience (consider that religion is still very popular).
Once you note this, you should then begin to realize just how little we know (as a society, in your community, yourself) considering the limits of what we can measure (as a society, in your community, yourself), and how measuring something unexpected can completely upend the framework that you had developed.
I believe the affliction is that because your philosophical case needs to be argued, it is expected to have a foundation in some philosophical root. With allegedly gives it more weight than just another thought.
It is sensible to read other philosophers I guess, but I think people should be encouraged to argue on their own.
I then studied a fair bit of philosophy at university, and while I could certainly appreciate the value of actually reading many great thinkers, the idea of spending my life studying them was absurd to me. I could think of nothing more horrifying than being proud to say that someone was one of the world's "top Heidegger scholars." (I recall the movie Little Miss Sunshine where a character was obsessed about his rival being only the "second" highest regarded Proust scholar.) Writing book after book about someone else's philosophy seemed utterly pointless.
To (ironically) quote Seneca: "'Hoc Zenon dixit': tu quid?" What do you have to say?
With your first part of the sentence you already put your second statement in a nuanced context. But I'd argue that "it is sensible" puts too little weight on this side of the argument.
We've all been there: You're new to a field and climb the Dunning Kruger Graph. At some point you're standing on the first hill and start "argue on [your] own".
Most things have already been said and argued. And most probably so by people more knowledgable and intelligent that me and you. And exactly those arguments are the 'history of philosophy'.
We're probably all better off if we learn to move within this tightly knit web of knowledge and be very cautious and conscious every time we leave those trails and 'go on our own'.
That being said, it is mandatory to view the history of philosophy not as the whole ball park but jump over the fence occasionally. Whether we hurt ourself by doing so is almost certainly dependent on how comfortable we are with what has been said and argued before, eg. history of philosophy.
I'd say that in this case for most people it is not valuable to read the history of the argument but rather an up to date summary of it - the originally made argument is worth reading if and only if it's the best way to make it, no parts of it have been refuted and no one has found a way to state the same thing better.
Instead of listening to what, for example, Kant had to say originally, the proper resource should be a "steelman Kantian" position which omits anything that has valid refutations, which changes anything which has been disputed because of some nuance by integrating whatever fixes and corrections can be made as a result of the counter-counter-arguments, and prepare a coherent position which is solid even in the face of all the counterarguments which have been said in the centuries afterwards, a "what would Kant say after reading every Kant-influenced philosopher" statement.
If some argument made by Aristotle still stands, then readers of philosophy should not be offered the counterarguments without an immediate reference to the counter-counter-arguments that dismiss them.
And if some argument made by Aristotle is not perfect, then readers of philosophy should not be presented with that argument without the counterarguments; or (as I said above) in a corrected and augmented form, dismissing and ignoring the flawed original - the original is relevant only as a historical footnote of how the truth was found, but is not really relevant to the truth itself.
A product of philosophy should be actual conclusions - okay, out of all the Aristotle's works, which parts are considered settled truth, and which parts are part of an ongoing debate? And if so, what is the current, state of art position in that debate, what are the best irreconcilable arguments on both sides?
Agreed. Unless you're studying philosophy academically, it's not usually that helpful to dig out the original papers; instead, you read a contemporary commentary or two. If the commentaries disagree, sure; go back to the original papers, and work it out for yourself.
But somebody has to write those commentaries; and they're written by people who study history of philosophy.
F = ma
Is all you need. I mean sure? But then we have a different concept of what "understanding" something means.
The idea that you can ignore history and have some sort objective summary of it is, to me, verging on cargo cult science — the opposite of what scientific (and philosophical) education should be.
I must have expressed myself badly. I think it's necessary to understand the history of philosophy. I think it's mostly history. Is post-modernism history yet?
Well, unless you are an actual historian (or an academic philosopher), you aren't usually qualified to trace the threads of thought development through time, and across continents and language barriers.
As it happens, the philosophers I focused on for my BA[0] were Nietsche and Wittgenstein. In both cases I read all their published work; then read many commentaries and books on each; then re-read the base works (all in English of course - I had only conversational German).
But I was doing a degree; I had to read all of Nietsche, because I was writing a paper on him. It's perfectly OK to approach the work of philosophers through the commentaries (although it's a shame not to read the base texts[1]).
[0] I scraped a pass. Nietsche wasn't a popular topic where I studied.
[1] Postmodernism crashed in after I studied, so I missed that boat. From what I've read, I wouldn't include that in my remark about base texts)
I acknowledge that more often there are updated versions of previous arguments that hold their content 'better' and put them in meaningful context. I wonder where the line is wether we call that 'history of philosophy' or not. Nevertheless this is how students at universities spent most of their time learning philosophy. They rarely read whole original works, mostly just relevant paragraphs and summaries.
You already touched on this in your last sentences, but it's a stronger point that you seem to make out of it. 'Truth' doesn't really exist in this space. There is no 'right' and 'wrong' that hasn't been proven opposite. What you propose here can, if not cautious, lead to 'philosophy on rails'. People will turn into 'intellectuals' (whatever this is), but not into 'philosophers' (whatever this is). So even though I agree with you, this can't be the only approach to philosophy.
Important here is the differentiation between 'doing philosophy' and the 'content of philosophy'. Regarding the second one, this might be a somewhat viable approach. But I highly disagree with phrases like: "philosophy should not be presented/ offered [in a certain way]". This leads to dogmatism. Sure, strong point shall be emphasized and weak spots visible, but implying there is something absolute here surely is to be avoided. But you touched on that in your last sentences anyways.
The people who make new physics and the people who learn and apply physics (e.g. engineers) are two separate groups, and physics is valuable mostly because it provides knowledge that enables the latter group of people to do stuff, and we want that knowledge to be packaged in a useful, usable way for those who don't do physics research.
In a similar manner, there are the distinct groups of people who do philosophy and people who apply (or should apply) philosophy, including most scientists of other fields, and in my opinion the value of philosophy as a field is highly contingent on those who do philosophy being able to package the conclusions in a way that is useful and usable for people who are not going to "do philosophy".
Sure, at some point dogmas need to be reviewed and changed - but until they are (by the people who "do philosophy") there should be some reasonable set of the current understanding of philosophy ("current dogma"?) available for the "users of philosophy", and we should be able to compare and see that the current state of this philosophical understanding is better than some centuries ago, that an "user of philosophy" who reads the "content of philosophy" from the era of Nietzsche will be worse off than reading the current "content of philosophy".
It does not need to imply that it's the absolute truth forever, but there needs to be a clear understanding of what is the "closest thing to the truth as far as humanity knows right now"; like in physics we clearly know that the current theories are not the final complete truth (for example, due to incompatibilities of general relativity and quantum physics) and the truth has to be slightly different, but we can and do have an effective dogma which physicists can teach to non-physicists about how physics is to the best of our current understanding - and I'd expect the same from philosophy.
You should be "arguing your own" much of the time you're reading philosophy, no matter how old it is.
It's one of the Three Readings (which can be done all at once, not necessarily in three literal separate passes through the book, if you're a good reader and well-matched to the material you're reading) of Adler's How to Read a Book. You haven't fully engaged with a book—especially a book of philosophy—until you've done it.
"[...] we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery – from the time of the war of Secession, for example, until the present moment when one chooses between the M.R.P. [Mouvement Republicain Poputaire] and the Communists." ~ Jean-Paul Sartre.
Progress NOW implies amelioration. Before the XVI century it only meant you were going from A to B.
It's a new theology.
I guess you could say it hasn't fundamentally changed if you ignore everything that's changed as not fundamental, but that's tautological.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2022.01.001 “Harmony in Design: A Synthesis of Literature from Classical Philosophy, the Sciences, Economics, and Design”
No.
The middle ground is probably currant books - that track the evolution of thinking over time. My favorite example is From Atomos to Atom. I’ve never seen anything like that in a science class.
The thing with science is that it's generally considered more practical than philosophy, and people are content with learning a bunch of pre-packaged recipes to solve pre-packaged problems (use F = ma to solve that inclined plane problem).
But try asking the average student what F = ma actually means a bit deeper than just how they would apply it and you'll see how much the topic is "covered."
Consider that the concepts of force and mass themselves are mostly left unexplained. Or that people have no idea what "energy" is.
They're models of reality that are not taught as such, because we're happy with teaching future engineers a bunch of recipes to learn by rote as long as they "work".
So I remain unconvinced of the proposition that philosophy should be taught the same way. In that respect it's closer to science and the inherent doubt that comes with the scientific method — even though, similarly, there's a lot of dogmatic "philosophy" (think Marxism).
I’d put reading Plato on par with reading The Skeptical Chymist or John Dalton’s Chemical Philosophy. I think it’s a miss primary sources like that are absent from most undergraduate degrees in science - they reveal a lot about what science really is.
But building an entire undergraduate curriculum on nothing but those primary sources? There’s just too much material and so many of those constructs have failed to accurately describe reality.
To use Marxism as an example, Main Currents of Marxism is probably on par with From Atomos to Atom. Both Science and Philosophy could benefit from teaching from currents vs. primary sources (philosophy) and compilations of “facts” (science).
This is not because "they had no idea about the concepts we have found recently?" - relativity and other non-Newtonian phyics is a different issue - it's about having the best, most accurate represenation of the same concept, and it is very unlikely that the very first attempt in defining a concept is the best result possible.
We can make (and have made) much better summaries of Newtonian physics than Newton did, better definitions of Newton's principles than those which he wrote, when we teach Newton's laws of motion, we never use the original wording but an improved paraphrase of them. The original has no value for the learner (other than a historical curiosity) because the revised versions are simply better expressions of the same thing. Why don't we require the same thing from philosophy?
To be fair, the main reason we don't study Newton's ideas in their original form is that he wrote in Latin. The second is that he went to rather extreme lengths to make his writing obscure; he was very possessive of his ideas, and didn't want other philosophers pinching them.
Read the Newton Leibniz correspondence.
Similarly in another field, Economics, I hear undergraduates are still urged to read Wealth of Nations.
I mean, how would we decide that? Do modern learners understand Newtonian physics better than Newton did? By what metric?
We can tell because they can make predictions within that framework which he could not.
Newton did not know e.g. the formulation of stuff in terms of Hamiltonians, even though it is still in a sense in the same framework.
I don’t think studying the Latin is helpful in coming up with reformulations of physics things.
"At age ten, he stumbled across a Latin copy of Euclid; and at twelve he studied Newton's Arithmetica Universalis. He moved on to read the Principia, and by age 16 he had covered much of it, as well as some more recent works on analytic geometry and the differential calculus." (from the Wikipedia article about Hamilton).
Newton most certainly did not mean the “same thing” we mean. His context, his models, his metaphysical and spiritual ground were all different from ours. All of that is simply ignored. A student today is presented with appropriated thoroughly mutated cuts, is told that those are Newton's contribution to the glorious building of Science, and never questions that afterwards.
The history of philosophers, I would disagree.
I once saw someone post online that the best way to get into someone’s thought was to read a biography of them. After all, their thought is a reflection of them and the material conditions in which they lived. Their aspirations, tribulations and the potential they saw in a world they wanted to interpret.
Sue Prideaux has a good one on Nietzsche and reading about his education really sets the scene for BGE and Zarathustra, which often confused me before. His father’s early death ‘doomed him’ into the mindset that led to his maniacal study of the will to power, and possibly his own early demise.
Knowing about Nietzsche’s life makes me appreciate what he was getting at, which is useful if you’re not used to his flowery style. It helped me identify more with him, and against him. I know more of what kind of man he was, and that I am very different.
Worst of all, he completely misses Gadamer's comment regarding the epistemic fruitlessness of philosophizing at all (and not just of studying past philosophers), so in a sense Sauer unwittingly rehashes and expands upon only a partial aspect of that.
But he does express a "popular sentiment", which students of history (and the history of philosophy) will readily discover in any sub-era of modernity (including pomo'ity), but those who turn their backs to history will think it's all new and all of our own devising: namely that "We Know Better".
It's the cultural switch: before modernity we considered "the ancients" as unerring sources of truth, after modernity we started seeing through the cracks.
All too quick to note how pyramids and parthenons have cracks in them after standing for millennia, but wholly unable to produce something even equally sturdy, if not better.
PS: Ah, and by "modernity" I'm referring to the history of this side of the Enlightenment. E.g. I consider Casaubon's 1614 overturning of the presumed antiquity of the Corpus Hermeticum as part of modernity. (But doesn't everyone?)
All philosophy is the history of philosophy, in the sense that you're studying the ideas someone had in the past, whether that's the recent past or the distant past. The only philosophy that isn't history of philosophy is done by a handful of academics, and you can bet they all had a solid grounding in the history of philosophy.
I had to do a course on presocratic Greek philosophers. I couldn't understand why we had to study the ideas of these people whose ideas were wrong, wrong, wrong - even barmy. But all the interesting Greek philosophers knew and were influenced by the presocratics; Plato, Aristotle, the sceptics, the stoics. And so-called "modern" philosophers all studied these later Greeks.
It's impossible to engage with contemporary philosophy without studying the moderns, and studying the classical Greek philosophers makes it a lot easier to understand the moderns.
I'm glad the author mentioned Wittgenstein as a "historical" philosopher to whom attention shouldn't be paid. I don't know how a contemporary philosopher is supposed to approach the philosophy of language and logic without having worked through Wittgenstein and Ayer.
You didn't miss much by not continuing. The paper's... rough.
In a sense if you define "philosophy" as "whatever is actually happening in philosophy in academia today", then your argument is tautologically correct.
I think the author (and incidentally, I, too) has a different definition of philosophy, which, in addition to the activities you describe, also includes people coming up with original ideas without studying all those ancient texts.
And that's why we have to colonize space. To post-pone amnesia.
This is like saying "Why bother studying Newton? He didn't even know about relativity!" You study Newton because it's a simple model and motivates what comes after.
Our thinking is unconsciously molded by philosophers that died hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
A point that I'd try to put some light on, is that, among many dangers, we can get lost in false worldviews that trap our consciousness in apparently true realities that are ultimately false by a delicate house of cards/lies/mistakes.
The Matrix, or more appropriately, Plato's Cave, made that point infinitely better than I could ever do.
That's exactly what the people in Plato's Cave did.
How ironic is that?
Physics is an empirical science with a rather neutral language to communicate its content. Arguments (much more 'findings') can be translated to this language and be understood on their own.
The language of philosophy isn't so clear (or it is, but everyone has their own). Therefore an argument might not be fully understood on its own. The author/ philosopher might have tried to do so, but eventually it is easier to understand an arguments if you know what the state of the art was back then.
My point basically is, that this goes beyond 'motivation' - which is hard to illustrate if we look at physics for comparison.
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Unrelated: What's better: "My point basically is, [...]" or "My point is basically, [...]". If I knew how to ask this, I'd google it.
Not my cup of tea, but worth taking a look at.
I agree. As I've just stated in another comment, it's hard to say something with substance about philosophy in general. There are just a lot of different fields with individual axioms and scientific methods.
That said, if these 'languages and meta-languages' fields would have found something viable (usage and usability), eg. a good tool to use, we would already use it.
I dont' have the paper but i found this [0] which might refer to the paper i read.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332781241_Developin...
I agree, but it should be taken into account that much of philosophy is based on science (namely psychology/sociology) and a lot of ideas are discarded if they're missing some morsel of empirical evidence.
[I overlooked the "much of" in your first sentence. This would have been my reply:
Yes with limitations. As I implied there are more kind of sciences. Philosophy itself has very diverse fields which have their own sets of scientific methods. So it's hard to say something with substance about the general field of philosophy.
The philosophy I was talking about is more compared to math than empirical evidence based sciences.]
“Physics is not taught or practiced by reading and interpreting Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis, Geometry is not done by studying Euclid’s Elements, and so on”
I'm not sure this follows, though nor can I think of any counterexamples where it is uncontroversially absolutely useless to study the history of a useful subject. But I think that one can, e.g., be a successful professional mathematician without being much interested in the history of mathematics.
Now, regarding the subject of the 'history of philosophy', what are the contents and how they're structured is a different kind of problem. And, unfortunately, it's not limited to the 'history of philosophy' as we face similar kind of challenge when studying other important subjects.
This challenge can't be avoided all the times but needs a systematic approach; otherwise, one might easily commit the (proverbial) mistake of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".
Deference to past authority is an easier road to follow than direct inquiry into one's own experiences. If human society has been plagued throughout its existence by the same innumerable problems then why do we continue on with this current line of reasoning?
I don't have any answers, but thank you for posting this thought provoking piece.
Just kidding. I haven’t seen it made before. I’m just saying so to present the reason I appreciate studding the history of philosophy. I hate thinking I’ve had a novel idea only to find someone has already had it and furthermore three others have replied.
... whoops.
The dead outnumber the living by about 15:1.
I wonder how that could have happened?
I don’t think any of this is serious. The guy is just trolling.
Is not completely useless but is kind of like 98% useless.
If new philosophy requires the study of philosophy, the study of philosophy requires the study of the history of philosophy, and the history of philosophy is increasing linearly with time, so the amount of time required to produce an additional philosophy is proportional the amount of philosophy that exists. The amount of tie to produce X philosophy then is proportional to X^2.
Part of the trouble with this paper is that it acts like the only qualities that keep works in the common set that most or all philosophers will study, is that they're old and that they're influential. As if the set is not heavily narrowed by other criteria, including quality of the writing and arguments, and that they've been widely observed to be improving to study over hundreds of years. Works that are simply wrong and have no other redeeming qualities tend to be discarded except by specialists deep-diving into a niche, even if they were very influential. I don't think most philosophers read much more than excerpts of a handful of famous arguments or passages from the whole centuries-long scholastic movement, for instance, unless they're very specifically Christian religious philosophers or apologists. Or the Neo-platonists, et c., et c. The ones that stick around do so because they are repeatedly, generation after generation, found to be useful, having endured through the aforementioned narrowing process while dozens or hundreds of once-vital works have fallen into obscurity.