Comment by WHA8m | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WHA8m | Hacker News Reader

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> It is sensible to read other philosophers I guess, but I think people should be encouraged to argue on their own.

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.

Okay, let's consider the things that have been said and argued.

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for most people it is not valuable to read the history of the argument but rather an up to date summary of it - the originally made argument is worth reading if and only if it's the best way to make it, no parts of it have been refuted and no one has found a way to state the same thing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?

> for most people it is not valuable to read the history of the argument but rathar an up to date summary of it

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.

To me that's akin to saying you don't need to understand the history of physics because hey:

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.

> akin to saying you don't need to understand the history of physics

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)

Thanks for the reply! Indeed it brings something to the table that I have not paid enough attention in my previous comment.

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.

I'm probably drawing on the distinction between "making knowledge" and "using knowledge", which is generally done by different people, and with the implied assertion that the added value for any field is only to the extent that it enables the latter.

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.

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