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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

This has always seemed kinda obvious? But I guess... maybe not to professional philosophers?

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.

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The more you study people from thousands of years ago the more you realize they were exactly the same as we are now, just in a different environment.

You can learn a lot about people that way.

> just in a different environment

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']

In most of what I have seen, human nature has been very consistent over the years.

Exactly the same, except for all the ways it was profoundly different.

And that seems like a good reason to study history too, to learn about people who thought very differently from us. It's interesting!

> You can learn a lot about people that way.

Yes, maybe that's an argument that psychology or social science students should study more historical philosophy (or to be pedantic, history only)?

It is obvious to some professional philosophers, especially the ones who publish in the top analytic philosophy journals, but there is a whole bunch of professional philosophers who primarily work historically. I'd say that at least half of my colleagues work primarily historically. They really just write papers about what another philosopher said or thought (usually long dead ones).

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.

The wisdom of the ancients is timeless. To think that we've moved past that is a mistake. The analytical schools of 20th century philosophy made great strides in solving the problems of language and epistemology. But the fundamental underlying "human" issues that Socrates and Aristotle figured out are just as relevant today as 2000 years ago.

"The wisdom of the ancients is timeless."

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.

> 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.

>The new wise people's wisdom is much more relevant.

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.

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