[n72]

You know how, when your opinionated uncle reads a very high level description of some tech thing you know a lot about and then tells you how it will or won't work, you kind of sigh and don't even bother to try to explain just how much he doesn't know about the subject? Engineers who've taken a few philosophy undergrad courses should keep that in mind when drawing broad conclusions about philosophy. I'm not saying you shouldn't opine, but I'd suggest doing so with the appropriate amount of humility.

[defen]

I felt like the author was kind of getting at the difference between know-how and know-what, although perhaps was not aware of those terms/concepts. I would summarize her point as: you can learn the what of science and philosophy via modern books, but to learn the how of science requires practice (ideally in the lab of a Nobel prize winner), and that the point of reading old philosophy is to attempt to learn the how of those philosophers.

Whether that is actually the point of reading old philosophers, or whether that is a good way to learn the how, I do not know the answer to.

[mattmanser]

Having done a philosophy degree and been a programmer, in my opinion you're adding far too much weight to what is a very easy domain to understand. All the complicated bits became their own discipline (maths/physics/chemistry/social science/psychology).

Philosophy's not particularly complicated to someone who understands basic logic.

In some ways it's not a real subject as there's nothing to study as it's all thought experiments. There's no weird data mucking up elegant theories, or strange earth movements, or bizarre lights patterns.

These days philosophy tends to be just an argument about what a word actually means.

It's certainly nothing like a programmer dabbling in maths and claiming they've solved p v np.

[adjkant]

> "Philosophy's not particularly complicated to someone who understands basic logic."

As with what others have said, you're completely missing the point if all you got from philosophy was logic. Logic is a prerequisite, not philosophy itself.

Philosophy is about exploring big, unanswerable questions. As soon as a field becomes objectively answerable, it splits from philosophy into a subfield usually.

My guess is that you find philosophy to be not a subject and uncomplicated because you don't care about the questions being asked by it, and parse them out, leaving you with the logical structure. If I was left with that, I would think it's a useless field too. But ignoring the interesting parts of a subject doesn't make them disappear from the field itself.

> "there's nothing to study as it's all thought experiments."

Very, very far from it. Is communism a thought experiment? Seemed pretty real to me. What about theory of law and ethics? What about politics? The most effective role of government for human happiness? Is happiness what humans need? All of these are centrally tied to philosophy, in particular ethics. It seems like your philosophy focused so much on logic that you lost most of the subject.

[n72]

This is one of those moments when you sigh and don't bother. If you've done an undergrad in philosophy and still don't think there are parts which aren't very sophisticated and difficult, we'll... Sigh.

[dcre]

> Philosophy's not particularly complicated to someone who understands basic logic.

Yes, of course — modus ponens has a lot to say about how we should live.

[coldtea]

>Having done a philosophy degree and been a programmer, in my opinion you're adding far too much weight to what is a very easy domain to understand. All the complicated bits became their own discipline (maths/physics/chemistry/social science/psychology).

That's the kind of thing somebody who doesn't understand philosophy would say.

The "complicated bits" (physical philosophy) were never much of what's important about philosophy in the first place.