Comment by mykowebhn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mykowebhn | Hacker News Reader

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> 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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