Open Socrates by Agnes Callard review – a design for life

I also think that philosophy is an extremely valuable human activity worthy of lots of respect, likewise generally with any kind of gymnastics (sports), games or art.

Productivity is not the only reason to live for humans, and many productive people are not driven by productivity. Most scientists and engineers are much more driven by curiosity, mastery, morality or aesthetics (not just visual, but intellectual beauty and elegance). It's generally the same with most ambitious people, sure they may be superficially driven by power or money, but I think it's much more about realizing a certain aesthetic vision of who you want to be as a person.

All of these activities lead to productive outcomes as side-effects. Games are not qualitatively much different, they may just be quantitatively less efficient. And, even if it shouldn't be expected (shouldn't be the reason to do them), they do tend to have some great productive output now-and-then.

Defenders of Socrates are generally enamored with his reputation, retreating into appeals to authority rather than any logical or empirical defense of his ideas.

In a larger sense, my problem with philosophers is generally that they are still talking about outdated figures like Socrates. What little he got right has been refined over the last few millenia, and by continuing to obsess over him we're continuing to propagate his (numerous!) mistakes along with what little good he had to say. Philosophy is a really interesting and even important area of study, but the ideas are what matter, not the people, and the obsession with the people really holds the field back by keeping stupid ideas alive long past their expiration date.

I hate the trend among public intellectuals to pick some ancient figure and then project all modern questions and anxieties onto them. You end up not learning much about Socrates, but much about Agnes Callard.

I'll take modern academic philosophy with all its jargon and impenetrability over the simplistic parables of Callard.

My sense is that people who claim to dislike philosophy either had a bad introduction to it or have been so inculcated with a way of existence reduced to "problem solving"—life viewed as a "great entry examination" or standardized test—that they are no longer capable of actual abstract curiosity and thought and are only able to proceed in spaces that are already highly constrained. Philosophical viewpoints are highly varied and highly entertaining. In some ways it is far closer in kind to art even though it is the matron of all of our sciences.

Sure of course, vibes are enough for operating decently as a human, which is all we need most of the time. But that's a very low bar, we are trying to do much harder things in science, engineering and business.

I agree that there tends to be a lot of pointless discussion on semantics in debate, which is why we tend to rely more on structured languages like maths notation or programming languages to make it practical to operate on really complex ideas. But natural language is all we have for many fields of thought, so some discipline is required to use it properly if you are trying to figure out something serious.

You made an important point though. If we want to do philosophy more seriously we reach for formal logic, at which point it becomes maths, or we do experiments, which is science. To an extent what call philosophy is the attempt to figure out complex truths using ill-defined language and no experimental verification, which is a loosing battle and quite annoying indeed.

It just seems to make me care even less. I wouldn't be surprised if the new techno-oligarchs have similar or even worse wiring.