Comment by tucnak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tucnak | Hacker News Reader

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> If people really are interested in philosophy, I strongly suggest studying the more "classical" philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, etc.

Recommending the greeks and Frege in one breath immediately outs you, and shows your philosophy knowledge for what it is, dog shit. You shouldn't be recommending anything about philosophy to anybody. There is absolutely zero reason to study ancient philosophy unless you're interested in HISTORY of philosophy specifically. What Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and other modernists did to 'philosophy' was short of completely reinventing the field from scratch. The connection to antique philosophy is non-existent because there are no tools in Greek discourses relevant to philosophical investigation. It didn't stop even the most stringent analytics to manufacture said connection out of 'romantic' notions, but really there's no geneology to speak of. Plato is closer to Archilochus than Frege, so much so he's almost verging on a joke (philosophically speaking.) It's doubly funny you throwing shade on Nietzsche, who himself was 'romantically' obsessed with the Greeks for no good reason.

You're right that Nietzsche is ultimately, of devil's party, a poet, but that has very little bearing vis-a-vis academic philosophy.

Comments like this just further my bias against analytic philosophy as a system that helps illuminate the path to human flourishing and truth.

Yeah, this is such an entertaining exchange of layering being more "inner" and clued in. Reading the Greeks, Nietzsche or even, oh horror of horrors, Marcus Aurelius (if not "more interesting" earlier authors in his tradition) can make people reflect on their lives. All these can lead you astray in interesting ways but at least you are going somewhere, anywhere. There's always salty people who insist you should struggle through respectable academic philosophers instead, lest you are some kind of a prole.

This is kind of analytic (but also continental) mindset really does feel like wannabe math, just without visible correspondence to reality, like can be observed even with basic arithmetic or geometry. Also curiously you cannot really get the same results independently, without being nurtured by people from the circle. If you're shutting down earlier human curiosity about ethics, epistemology, meaning of language etc. and care only about your short lineage, this feels analogous, I don't know, to something like being a lore "scholar" of some franchise considering ponderous questions of how W40K deities relate to each other. And God help you if you bring up anything outside of approved lore or some other parts of human culture.

> There is absolutely zero reason to study ancient philosophy unless you're interested in HISTORY of philosophy specifically

Try reading Parmenidean Ascent if you get a chance [1]. While not his main thesis, Michael Della Rocca argues why not treating "ancient" philosophy as philosophy proper is in error. Personally, I've studied Aristotle, and Plato, quite a bit and I couldn't disagree with you more.

> What Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and other modernists did to 'philosophy' was short of completely reinventing the field from scratch.

That claim is contestable. I do agree that Frege, for one, was the first person to advance philosophical logic in 2000 years, with the previous advances made by Aristotle himself. Please study Aristotle's Organon. His singular advances in logic were astounding and not much else was done in logic until the likes of Frege appeared on the scene. What Heidegger did in philosophy was extraordinary, but it was built on the shoulders of previous philosophical giants. So what the "modernists" did was really not "from scratch".

[1] https://academic.oup.com/book/32030

I applaud you for not being in the least phased by blunt, needlessly confrontational manner of my writing!

This is how you really convinced me to read Della Rocca's treatment on history of philosophy that you linked to, even though I personally find the idea of great geneology spanning the greeks up to modern-day philosophy PhD students completely laughable. You said it yourself: Frege was not the result of iterative, standing on shoulders of Giants-esque improvement. He just "showed up." Clearly, developments in language and sciences opened the door to new line of inquiry which largely made whole swaths of the so-called philosophy (historically speaking) completely redundant. Wittgenstein knew this intuitively, and it's perhaps the biggest take-away from his body of work (contra logical positivism nonsensia)

I will concede that Aristotle on logic (specifically) is actually not a waste of time, but in general, all the time spent reading the Greeks, dialectics most of all, is the time I'm never getting back. I'm sorry, but the Greeks' command of language is simply too superfluous, or rather ill-equipped, for the purpose of philosophy. Regardless of translation. You could say they were too early... Which is another way to say they were "wrong." I won't go as far. It's kind of important to teach philosophy undergrad students some of it, because so much of their academic life will be spent performatively back-linking to Hellenic tradition to please their cargo-cultist professors. I know academic philosophy is full of this because I sometimes put myself through the pain of reading what they write. If you don't mind me asking, what gets you going with Plato? Did you just pick it up and go with it at some point, or was this a deliberate regression?

> If you don't mind me asking, what gets you going with Plato?

I am definitely no Plato expert, but two texts: Plato's Theaetetus and his Parmenides.

Questions of accurate translations aside, if one can focus on the metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological ideas presented and questions posed, I think one can spend the rest of one's life trying to understand these two texts. As an added incentive to whet your appetite, Wittgenstein was particularly interested in Theaetetus in his later years.

And if I had to recommend two texts from Aristotle, definitely his Physics and his Metaphysics. Here he's dealing with the really deep, and meaty, problems of philosophy.

These four texts definitely get me going, so to speak, although my talking about them bores my wife silly.

[EDIT] And you didn't ask for this, but here goes anyway: the three philosophers that "get me going" and whom I think are the three greatest philosophers are Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. (I know that last one will get me a lot of hate!)

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