I don't understand the island analogy. While the external world is disjoint from the island, our world -- with its scientific knowledge of contemporary physics and biology and astronomy and psychology, mathematics and logic and, of course, the internet -- is a product of our history. In other words, while it's true that history didn't have the internet, it is also the reason that we do.
People like Frege and Russell made certain choices in the design of formal logic because they were influenced by Leibniz, who, in turn, arranged things in a certain way because he was influenced by Aristotle. If you don't know what Aristotle said, it's hard to understand Leibniz, and if you don't know Leibniz, it's hard to understand Frege and Russell.
I believe it should be possible to rephrase the philosophical ideas of the past in modern language, instead of requiring study of original texts, similar to how I can read modern textbooks on physics without having to defer to the long line of physicists who developed the theories, and their original papers and exchanges. IMO it is a failure of philosophy as a discipline that it is so path-dependend on an ever-growing corpus and lineage of past philosophers. It seems that one must enjoy interpreting old texts that employ ambiguous language and that require understanding the context of a very different intellectual environment of the past, in order to get into ”serious” philosophy. Although I’m very interested in philosophical thought, that aspect has completely turned me off.
I’d also like to mention the old adage “if you can’t explain it, you don’t really understand it”. The common deferral along the lines of “oh you have to read philosopher X to really understand that” indicates to me that actually there is a generally poor understanding of what those philosophers really meant. Otherwise people should be able to express those ideas with clarity in their own words.
Well said. One of the greatest travesties in popular philosophy is the tendency among otherwise intelligent, well-read people to think that they can “get” philosophy by just reading whatever small slice addresses some particular fancy.
You can learn a great deal that way, but it fundamentally strips the historical dimension away. And philosophy’s greatest ideas are developed over the order of centuries.
The island analogy's misleading crap. A couple tweaks to make it closer to reality (say, if the islanders had been working for millennia and we only cared about a handful of their very best works from that entire time span—instantly less crazy with just that one tweak, no?) and it falls apart. There's almost a hint of an interesting line of argument, buried somewhere in there, but the way it's presented isn't good and is the precise opposite of convincing, on close inspection.
Relying heavily on really bad analogies seems to be a theme in the paper, reading on. There's some hilariously-bad question-begging-laundered-through-analogy in the bit about body-building advice / reasons-to-study-historical-philosophy.
Leading with emphasizing the importance of correctness is also pretty silly when we spend much of a student's training for most other fields teaching them one useful lie or another. That philosophy's lies happen to often come from very old books hardly seems material. Clearly, scaffolding with outright known lies is the norm, so "much of the material is probably wrong" isn't, per se, much of an attack.
I don't think the paper's conclusion's even necessarily wrong (and by calling for some vague "less" focus on the history of philosophy, it defies firm refutation anyway) and some of it does make interesting points, but damn, it's got some seriously off-putting flaws. I especially think it fails to make a strong case against such study as training for philosophers. But maybe there are far more doctors of philosophy out there who spend their careers analyzing historical philosophy, than would be optimal. That seems plausible, but also doesn't seem to be the focus of the paper.
This is called "problem-situation" in philosophy of sciences. One can understand physics, by studying problems in a historical context--and this field is called "history and philosophy of physics". Wrt biology, it is "history and philosophy of biology". We also need to study history of philosophy to understand various philosophical theories: later theories try to account for failures of earlier philosophical theories; etc.
I couldn't disagree more. By studying history of philosophy you learn a lot about the process itself, no matter if the conclusions might seem irrelevant or outdated by the current standard enforced by new contributions. After all, I find it quite naive you will not make the very same mistakes that your predecessor did, haven't you been somewhat cognizant of their work and perspective.
This is exactly right and doing so would require each subsequent generation of philosophers to reinvent the wheel
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
– George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.
But history is not philosophy, so the implicit premise, which boils down to, "history is not necessary to philosophy," is wrong-headed, but it is also assuming the conclusion, which is question begging.
History is important to history, understanding how events in the past caused things to be the way they are today. Further, the history of philosophy is not identical to the philosophy in history just as the history of technology is not itself technology. When studying Ancient Philosophy one is not studying the history of ancient philosophy, but the ancient philosophy itself. Conversely, studying history of philosophy is not philosophical study, it is instead studying history, focusing on when and who said in what circumstances, and is not primarily concerned with understanding what was said.
I'm not going to take it as far as the author, but I will say that philosophy does seem to be particularly unique in organizing its entire subject matter essentially historically by thinker and around original texts, as opposed to the kind of modern taxonomy and conceptual vocabulary employed not just in other sciences, but even social sciences.
Philosophers throw around author-turned-into-adjective terms like Kantian, Hegelian, Aristotelian, Humean, Hobbesian, Benthamite, and so forth as frustratingly vague substitutions for the actual ideas meant. (Kant wrote a lot, which part are you referring to?) Intro biology and political science textbooks are all organized similarly with more or less the same content, while different intro philosophy textbooks often seem like they're covering different fields. (E.g. one author believes the main questions in philosophy are metaphysics and logic, while another gives most space to ethics and religion.) Why? Because there is no widely agreed-upon of what the really important issues in philosophy even are. (Just look at continental vs. analytic philosophy.) So in the absence of any kind of consensus organization/taxonomy and terminology to go with that, it all just reverts to... original texts and author surnames. It's organized by history.
(And even when modern thinkers try to come up with conceptual-sounding names, it turns into a confusing mess. Try to remember which one is "contractualism" and which one is "contractarianism". Or is there a difference between "morals" and "ethics"? Or why do some writers call it "utilitarianism" while others call it "consequentialism"? When you say "resentment", which author's usage of "ressentiment" are you actually referring to? I usually know the answers to these questions, but they sure are confusing when you're learning it as an undergrad. It's actually clearer if you say "Hobbesian" rather than "contractarian", or "Nietszchean" so I can understand which type of "resentment".)
Learning the history of philosophy is helpful... but it does seem somewhat strange that while you can learn math or biology without needing to learn the history or ever read a single "original historical text"... you can't learn philosophy without learning its history. And so that certainly leads to the question... should you be able to? Would that improve the study of philosophy?
I agree. It also seems wildly inefficient to ask every student to read all those originals instead of systematic modern introductions. History is accumulating, so this becomes an impossible task at some point. If the ideas expressed in a text cannot be separated from their "original presentation", maybe they aren't that good after all. Exactly what I had in mind when I wrote this recently: https://verzettelung.com/22/09/10/
Interestingly enough I'd argue that you can't (or shouldn't) learn[0] biology[1] without learning its history, or at least its modern history[2]. To learn that Pasteur proved germ theory is irrelevant, but the who's and what's and why's of CRISPR and pre-CRISPR DNA modification would be hugely informative to the researcher. In psuedo-math terms the history adds a rough direction vector to the state-variable that is the 'state-of-the-art', which probably points in the direction what will become the 'state-of-the-art' tomorrow.
[0]To an expert level, i.e. to create and advance new knowledge in the field.
[1]Insert science here.
[2]Roughly a decade or two worth of papers, by my entirely unscientific estimation
While I share a loathing for everything having to be a study of what someone else said a long time ago, I think it's mainly in the areas where we've not made much definite progress that this phenomenon happens most. Only historians bother with Aristotle's physics today because we have something definitively superior that we can prove is more correct than his model. Same for biology (arguably his key area of interest).
But when it comes to ethics I don't think we can say the same thing. I'm not even sure for some areas of politics. When I read Thomas Hobbes Leviathan I found myself thinking "Wow, at least no thinking person will ever defend that philosophy again" and then a couple of decades later Steven Pinker did just that.
We're really not making much progress in the humanities. I'd like to think we're done (intellectually speaking) with chattel slavery as a concept but who knows. Grant and Sherman made bigger contributions to that argument than a whole swathe of philosophers either way.
I haven’t read this paper, but instinctively flinch at any kind of dismissal of the past.
I would think this comes down to how we define philosophy. On scientific matters sure Aristotle likely has little to offer; but human nature has not changed at all since Plato, or Siddhartha we’re born.
After saying the following I feel that it would be hard for them to argue their point very strongly. So I’m definitely going to read the paper:
To be perfectly clear: my claim is not that we should not be doing history of philosophy. There are all kinds of reasons why reading and talking about the Critique of Pure Reason or the Republic are worthwhile: studying these seminal texts is an inherently interesting intellectual pursuit; reading them is often tremendously enjoyable; and familiarity with these texts can be very valuable to intellectual historians for the insights into culture, knowledge and morality they may contain. There are thus many excellent reasons to engage with the history of philosophy. Gaining traction on the aforementioned philosophical problems, however, is not one of them. This means that I am not arguing against historians of philosophy and what they do, but against what could be called philosophical historicists, that is, those who seem to think that at least one good method of thinking about knowledge or justice is to study what historical authors have written about knowledge and justice a long time ago. This, I argue, is a mistake.
Do you believe someone needs to understand the history of math to effectively use math?
I don't think anyone is claiming historical context isn't helpful, but these are tools for thinking. This doesn't go anywhere near the 'history repeating itself' mantra. The only way it could get close to that is for someone who is attempting to discover new math (or philosophy), but that's a very small subset of those who benefit from these tools.
My first though seeing this was that Peter Adamson, creator of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast and book series should respond.
He has:
Re. Hanno Sauer's article denying the value of the history of philosophy: it turns out he follows me on Twitter, from which I infer that he was just kidding.
This paper makes some excellent points, at least directionally - surely the important historical arguments will be representable in a more polished, accessible and condensed form today. And in cases where they aren't perhaps that's a good filter in its own right?
It appears like, maybe vis a vis physical sciences philosophy as an academic discipline has not got quite such a prevalent tradition in producing "tidied up" textbooks?
This has always seemed kinda obvious? But I guess... maybe not to professional philosophers?
In college there was this clique of philosophy students who were studying all this ancient thought but were (imo) strangely averse to weighing in on the problems of modernity. Like what they were interested in was 'real' philosophy. Never seemed right to me. That stuff is already baked into the way we think -- that's why it was important back then! Today we can barely perceive what it's like to _not_ think with it; it's "in the water supply", as it were. The interesting philosophy is in the new ideas that aren't settled yet.
The article doesn't seem to be posted on 1st of April, so I have to conclude that the author does not understand philosophy at all, and swims happily and carelessly in doctrinarianism about “scientific knowledge” instead. A philosopher should be able to see that the linear time and overlaying “progress” is just a transfer of educational imaginary model of physical experiment onto the whole world, and that any thought, no matter what it source is, can only exist in the present moment in someone's head. And even in that primitive linear model, every bit of “knowledge” we have is inherited from those horrible, horrible idiots from the past anyway.
It would be funny to read something like that for the first time, but the author doesn't seem to know that the same approach have been proclaimed (and subsequently ridiculed) for at least 200 years. The irony of ignoring history!
Also, it is mentioned that studying other sciences doesn't work the same way. Of course it doesn't, as for quite some time students haven't been sharing any state of mind with people whose portraits hang on the walls. They don't even share more than required between themselves, because they are given instant noodle type understanding with famous scientists simply printed on the packaging that results in everything, including theory, becoming applied, and never-ending compartmentalization.
"This is an object. Our modern authorities admit they can't explain it. Could it be a power struggle? Ancient critical theorists say 'yes.'" That's the level of rigor in the paper and the in the view of history as progress. A house without a foundation is still a house, and an indistinguishable representation from one that has one, but it's durability and coherence over time that makes one real and the other a representation.
I really don't think the author is the first to try throwing out the past, and there were some odd setups in the essay where he expected the "mighty dead" to make a case for themselves today, instead of it being on him to make the case for what he has to improve on them. The underlying view of history as progress and his implied materialist view of epistemic value, I think, isn't new.
If you substitute ideology for philosophy, then iterate ideological theorems from it, you can produce what are essentially holographic projections of consistent ideas that seem to encompass everything, and the easiest ones are structured like the Ancient Aliens reference above. The genius of that show is that it is as rigorous a critical theory of archeology as any other critical theory, it's just that everyone thinks their fancier version is different. It's as though we needed Ancient Astronaut Theory to convince us that other critical theories are real.
The last century has emphasized some interesting problems that were the consequence of our new ability to simulate and represent much of our experience as artifacts of computation and language, along with critical theories designed as solvents for the artifacts of language, where objects could be decoupled from their meanings, and then re-assigning meaning seemed like just an exercise in power over subjects - but that only works on a certain kind of mind. If you have ever seen an animal react to a magic trick, it's the same slight of hand effect on an intellectual level, I think. You can't navigate without waypoints, and any new philosophical ideas that are not informed by the foundations are just going to be post-hoc moralizations of exigencies in the present.
Pretty much everything pre-enlightenment is really smart sounding nonsense. Understanding pre-enlightenment philosophy is mostly just useful as historical or cultural context for how intellectual people thought at the time, or for understanding the path human civilization took to knowing what we know today.
Everything after the enlightenment, but before modern biology / neuroscience / physics, is also really smart sounding nonsense, but is getting closer to something approximating "reality".
Once we get to the naturalist philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries (many of whom are biologists, physicists, or neuroscientists by training), we start getting some real meat.
> Pretty much everything pre-englightenment is really smart sounding nonsense. Understanding it is mostly just useful as historical or anthropological context for how intellectual people thought at the time.
Plato's critique of democracy was written long before the period of enlightenment. It stands on its own to this day. There are countless other examples of philosophical works that hold up to scrutiny even when viewed through an analytical lens.
This is just absurdly simplistic. The enlightenment did not appear in a vaccuum either. It is predicated on specific philosophical arguments. This becomes immediately apparent when you consider non-Western industrialized nations. The scientific method is one thing, but it is not something that can be used to prescribe a way to live. Plenty of aspects of our society aren't predicated on post-enlightenment thinking.
> Pretty much everything pre-enlightenment is really smart sounding nonsense.
This is like saying that Newtonian physics is really smart sounding nonsense because it makes mispredictions in places and assumes that time behaves like a continuum.
Among Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle alone,
Aristotle developed syllogisms (a fragment of predicate logic), Aristotle developed the notion of scientific disciplines, Socrates made many realize that it's not as easy to refute seemingly obvious nonsense in a watertight manner, Aristotle developed the notion of infinitely divisible time trying to refute Zeno's infinitely divisible distances traveled.
It's important to note that where these people are wrong and have developed insufficiently powerful explanations, it's because they lack the instruments and infrastructure (physical and intellectual) to reliably observe contradictions and deficiencies) to these frameworks that they have developed. To the person living then, it makes little difference, and likely the same to much of our lived experience (consider that religion is still very popular).
Once you note this, you should then begin to realize just how little we know (as a society, in your community, yourself) considering the limits of what we can measure (as a society, in your community, yourself), and how measuring something unexpected can completely upend the framework that you had developed.
On some of the most fundamental questions (e.g. "What is of value?" and "What does it mean to live a good life?") many of the credible answers, were probably first posited, before history even started being written. Consider the Confucians, Mohists and Taoists of China. Or the Epicurians and the Stoics of Western antiquity. They all had attempts to answer such questions. Some of which would sound very similar to what you might hear people say today and some of which would sound very alien. We are still having many of the same debates they did.
You realize that in 200 years people will be saying the same thing about us, right? We have no unified theory of physics and many metaphysical debates on the interpretations of our physics. We have no working theory of intelligence and are random-walking to one as gamers subsidize the hardware needed. We still think neoliberal economics and representative democracy are kind of the best governing systems, but we’re one military leapfrog away from a new authoritarian world order. I think we’re not so different from our predecessors!
Real meat, with a philosophical hole right at the base of it that cannot be waived away. At some point somewhere something has to be taken by faith. Ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning is one that most modern people take. The existence of God is a different option.
One thing to notice is that “Enlightenment” would not be called “Enlightenment” until much later. Simply said, you are sharing some pretty specific ideologized historical view point without knowing it. Analyzing it critically would help.
That's a pretty narrow conception of philosophy. Also a narrow conception of what "reality" entails. From ethics to politics, and pretty much every social phenomena, doesn't require a petri dish to be studied.
I don't think it is completely useless, but I hate to build any argument in classical philosophy. No, I do not want to start my argument with Aristoteles and follow the whole chain until I can make a case at some point. Aristoteles is a giant that certainly founded a lot of scientific fields, but the basis of an argument is not improved with a whole theoretical foundation that is artificially attached to the point.
I believe the affliction is that because your philosophical case needs to be argued, it is expected to have a foundation in some philosophical root. With allegedly gives it more weight than just another thought.
It is sensible to read other philosophers I guess, but I think people should be encouraged to argue on their own.
I agree. My father was a historian and philosopher, and I used to love arguing philosophy as a teen at the dinner table. This was because I hadn't read anything yet, and so was approaching with an entirely naive and empty mind.
I then studied a fair bit of philosophy at university, and while I could certainly appreciate the value of actually reading many great thinkers, the idea of spending my life studying them was absurd to me. I could think of nothing more horrifying than being proud to say that someone was one of the world's "top Heidegger scholars." (I recall the movie Little Miss Sunshine where a character was obsessed about his rival being only the "second" highest regarded Proust scholar.) Writing book after book about someone else's philosophy seemed utterly pointless.
To (ironically) quote Seneca: "'Hoc Zenon dixit': tu quid?" What do you have to say?
> It is sensible to read other philosophers I guess, but I think people should be encouraged to argue on their own.
You should be "arguing your own" much of the time you're reading philosophy, no matter how old it is.
It's one of the Three Readings (which can be done all at once, not necessarily in three literal separate passes through the book, if you're a good reader and well-matched to the material you're reading) of Adler's How to Read a Book. You haven't fully engaged with a book—especially a book of philosophy—until you've done it.
> 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.
What is now called and taught as the history of philosophy is not very useful because it's not the actual history of philosophy, academic or otherwise. You learn mostly what little of say, 19th century philosophy we now have respect for regardless of whether that century even knew that thinker was alive. The context, mostly of "greats" that we now think are horse dung, is never given. Knowing how thinkers (and the crowds that love them) went badly wrong would be useful, but is rarely taught. Both the now-highly thought of and then-highly-thought-of are worth some attention.
The condition of man hasn't fundamentally changed in the past 5000 years.
"[...] we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery – from the time of the war of Secession, for example, until the present moment when one chooses between the M.R.P. [Mouvement Republicain Poputaire] and the Communists." ~ Jean-Paul Sartre.
I dove into the history of “harmony” in philosophy and it was fascinating. Also somewhat disturbing, because the topic seems “out there” for a modern philosophy dept, despite the connections to CS, neuroscience, psychology, physics, economics, etc
I studied philosophy to postgraduate level before having to go out and get a real job. Now in late middle age, I am nearly recovered to the point where I have to agree with the author. I now understand that most philosophy, of ANY age or period, including the present, is useless. But there are counterexamples. Hume is still worth reading, on almost any subject. Many of his ideas have not aged at all. Reason as the slave of the passions, is vs ought, compatibilism on free will all come to mind, as do his deep insights on the connections between ideas (Resemblance, Contiguity, cause and effect). These positions are still held by scientifically literate people, and some of them, like the idea of connections between ideas, I have have actually found useful as guidelines for research in AI. And that's without mentioning his influence on political philosophy, which was profound. Hume's notion of the social contract continues to shape political debate in ways not many people realise.
Should we not study old scientists because they had no idea about the concepts we have found recently?
Should we no longer study old politics because their climate was different?
Should old tactics be disregarded because they used different, weaker weapons than us?
Should old art be discarded because they used older theories and didn't understand perspective like we do?
I once saw someone post online that the best way to get into someone’s thought was to read a biography of them. After all, their thought is a reflection of them and the material conditions in which they lived. Their aspirations, tribulations and the potential they saw in a world they wanted to interpret.
Sue Prideaux has a good one on Nietzsche and reading about his education really sets the scene for BGE and Zarathustra, which often confused me before. His father’s early death ‘doomed him’ into the mindset that led to his maniacal study of the will to power, and possibly his own early demise.
Knowing about Nietzsche’s life makes me appreciate what he was getting at, which is useful if you’re not used to his flowery style. It helped me identify more with him, and against him. I know more of what kind of man he was, and that I am very different.
OK this is a bombastic paper by design, but if falls short on a few things, least of which is conflating "study of history" with "historiography".
Worst of all, he completely misses Gadamer's comment regarding the epistemic fruitlessness of philosophizing at all (and not just of studying past philosophers), so in a sense Sauer unwittingly rehashes and expands upon only a partial aspect of that.
But he does express a "popular sentiment", which students of history (and the history of philosophy) will readily discover in any sub-era of modernity (including pomo'ity), but those who turn their backs to history will think it's all new and all of our own devising: namely that "We Know Better".
It's the cultural switch: before modernity we considered "the ancients" as unerring sources of truth, after modernity we started seeing through the cracks.
All too quick to note how pyramids and parthenons have cracks in them after standing for millennia, but wholly unable to produce something even equally sturdy, if not better.
PS: Ah, and by "modernity" I'm referring to the history of this side of the Enlightenment. E.g. I consider Casaubon's 1614 overturning of the presumed antiquity of the Corpus Hermeticum as part of modernity. (But doesn't everyone?)
All philosophy is the history of philosophy, in the sense that you're studying the ideas someone had in the past, whether that's the recent past or the distant past. The only philosophy that isn't history of philosophy is done by a handful of academics, and you can bet they all had a solid grounding in the history of philosophy.
I had to do a course on presocratic Greek philosophers. I couldn't understand why we had to study the ideas of these people whose ideas were wrong, wrong, wrong - even barmy. But all the interesting Greek philosophers knew and were influenced by the presocratics; Plato, Aristotle, the sceptics, the stoics. And so-called "modern" philosophers all studied these later Greeks.
It's impossible to engage with contemporary philosophy without studying the moderns, and studying the classical Greek philosophers makes it a lot easier to understand the moderns.
I'm glad the author mentioned Wittgenstein as a "historical" philosopher to whom attention shouldn't be paid. I don't know how a contemporary philosopher is supposed to approach the philosophy of language and logic without having worked through Wittgenstein and Ayer.
[+] [-] pron|3 years ago|reply
People like Frege and Russell made certain choices in the design of formal logic because they were influenced by Leibniz, who, in turn, arranged things in a certain way because he was influenced by Aristotle. If you don't know what Aristotle said, it's hard to understand Leibniz, and if you don't know Leibniz, it's hard to understand Frege and Russell.
[+] [-] layer8|3 years ago|reply
I’d also like to mention the old adage “if you can’t explain it, you don’t really understand it”. The common deferral along the lines of “oh you have to read philosopher X to really understand that” indicates to me that actually there is a generally poor understanding of what those philosophers really meant. Otherwise people should be able to express those ideas with clarity in their own words.
[+] [-] woodruffw|3 years ago|reply
You can learn a great deal that way, but it fundamentally strips the historical dimension away. And philosophy’s greatest ideas are developed over the order of centuries.
[+] [-] yamtaddle|3 years ago|reply
Relying heavily on really bad analogies seems to be a theme in the paper, reading on. There's some hilariously-bad question-begging-laundered-through-analogy in the bit about body-building advice / reasons-to-study-historical-philosophy.
Leading with emphasizing the importance of correctness is also pretty silly when we spend much of a student's training for most other fields teaching them one useful lie or another. That philosophy's lies happen to often come from very old books hardly seems material. Clearly, scaffolding with outright known lies is the norm, so "much of the material is probably wrong" isn't, per se, much of an attack.
I don't think the paper's conclusion's even necessarily wrong (and by calling for some vague "less" focus on the history of philosophy, it defies firm refutation anyway) and some of it does make interesting points, but damn, it's got some seriously off-putting flaws. I especially think it fails to make a strong case against such study as training for philosophers. But maybe there are far more doctors of philosophy out there who spend their careers analyzing historical philosophy, than would be optimal. That seems plausible, but also doesn't seem to be the focus of the paper.
[+] [-] raincom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] terkozz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maursault|3 years ago|reply
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.
But history is not philosophy, so the implicit premise, which boils down to, "history is not necessary to philosophy," is wrong-headed, but it is also assuming the conclusion, which is question begging.
History is important to history, understanding how events in the past caused things to be the way they are today. Further, the history of philosophy is not identical to the philosophy in history just as the history of technology is not itself technology. When studying Ancient Philosophy one is not studying the history of ancient philosophy, but the ancient philosophy itself. Conversely, studying history of philosophy is not philosophical study, it is instead studying history, focusing on when and who said in what circumstances, and is not primarily concerned with understanding what was said.
[+] [-] crazygringo|3 years ago|reply
Philosophers throw around author-turned-into-adjective terms like Kantian, Hegelian, Aristotelian, Humean, Hobbesian, Benthamite, and so forth as frustratingly vague substitutions for the actual ideas meant. (Kant wrote a lot, which part are you referring to?) Intro biology and political science textbooks are all organized similarly with more or less the same content, while different intro philosophy textbooks often seem like they're covering different fields. (E.g. one author believes the main questions in philosophy are metaphysics and logic, while another gives most space to ethics and religion.) Why? Because there is no widely agreed-upon of what the really important issues in philosophy even are. (Just look at continental vs. analytic philosophy.) So in the absence of any kind of consensus organization/taxonomy and terminology to go with that, it all just reverts to... original texts and author surnames. It's organized by history.
(And even when modern thinkers try to come up with conceptual-sounding names, it turns into a confusing mess. Try to remember which one is "contractualism" and which one is "contractarianism". Or is there a difference between "morals" and "ethics"? Or why do some writers call it "utilitarianism" while others call it "consequentialism"? When you say "resentment", which author's usage of "ressentiment" are you actually referring to? I usually know the answers to these questions, but they sure are confusing when you're learning it as an undergrad. It's actually clearer if you say "Hobbesian" rather than "contractarian", or "Nietszchean" so I can understand which type of "resentment".)
Learning the history of philosophy is helpful... but it does seem somewhat strange that while you can learn math or biology without needing to learn the history or ever read a single "original historical text"... you can't learn philosophy without learning its history. And so that certainly leads to the question... should you be able to? Would that improve the study of philosophy?
[+] [-] ouija|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thereisnospork|3 years ago|reply
[0]To an expert level, i.e. to create and advance new knowledge in the field.
[1]Insert science here.
[2]Roughly a decade or two worth of papers, by my entirely unscientific estimation
[+] [-] slim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stewbrew|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ckosidows|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] DharmaPolice|3 years ago|reply
But when it comes to ethics I don't think we can say the same thing. I'm not even sure for some areas of politics. When I read Thomas Hobbes Leviathan I found myself thinking "Wow, at least no thinking person will ever defend that philosophy again" and then a couple of decades later Steven Pinker did just that.
We're really not making much progress in the humanities. I'd like to think we're done (intellectually speaking) with chattel slavery as a concept but who knows. Grant and Sherman made bigger contributions to that argument than a whole swathe of philosophers either way.
[+] [-] ycombinete|3 years ago|reply
I would think this comes down to how we define philosophy. On scientific matters sure Aristotle likely has little to offer; but human nature has not changed at all since Plato, or Siddhartha we’re born.
After saying the following I feel that it would be hard for them to argue their point very strongly. So I’m definitely going to read the paper:
To be perfectly clear: my claim is not that we should not be doing history of philosophy. There are all kinds of reasons why reading and talking about the Critique of Pure Reason or the Republic are worthwhile: studying these seminal texts is an inherently interesting intellectual pursuit; reading them is often tremendously enjoyable; and familiarity with these texts can be very valuable to intellectual historians for the insights into culture, knowledge and morality they may contain. There are thus many excellent reasons to engage with the history of philosophy. Gaining traction on the aforementioned philosophical problems, however, is not one of them. This means that I am not arguing against historians of philosophy and what they do, but against what could be called philosophical historicists, that is, those who seem to think that at least one good method of thinking about knowledge or justice is to study what historical authors have written about knowledge and justice a long time ago. This, I argue, is a mistake.
[+] [-] P5fRxh5kUvp2th|3 years ago|reply
I don't think anyone is claiming historical context isn't helpful, but these are tools for thinking. This doesn't go anywhere near the 'history repeating itself' mantra. The only way it could get close to that is for someone who is attempting to discover new math (or philosophy), but that's a very small subset of those who benefit from these tools.
[+] [-] tz18|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|3 years ago|reply
He has:
Re. Hanno Sauer's article denying the value of the history of philosophy: it turns out he follows me on Twitter, from which I infer that he was just kidding.
<https://nitter.kavin.rocks/HistPhilosophy/status/15732353053...>
I'm inclined to think that this is all the response that's required.
(I do find several other comments on this thread on point, notably those by pron <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008453>, terkozz <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008248>, and ougerechny <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010884>)
[+] [-] marshray|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conformist|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajkjk|3 years ago|reply
In college there was this clique of philosophy students who were studying all this ancient thought but were (imo) strangely averse to weighing in on the problems of modernity. Like what they were interested in was 'real' philosophy. Never seemed right to me. That stuff is already baked into the way we think -- that's why it was important back then! Today we can barely perceive what it's like to _not_ think with it; it's "in the water supply", as it were. The interesting philosophy is in the new ideas that aren't settled yet.
[+] [-] ogurechny|3 years ago|reply
It would be funny to read something like that for the first time, but the author doesn't seem to know that the same approach have been proclaimed (and subsequently ridiculed) for at least 200 years. The irony of ignoring history!
Also, it is mentioned that studying other sciences doesn't work the same way. Of course it doesn't, as for quite some time students haven't been sharing any state of mind with people whose portraits hang on the walls. They don't even share more than required between themselves, because they are given instant noodle type understanding with famous scientists simply printed on the packaging that results in everything, including theory, becoming applied, and never-ending compartmentalization.
[+] [-] motohagiography|3 years ago|reply
I really don't think the author is the first to try throwing out the past, and there were some odd setups in the essay where he expected the "mighty dead" to make a case for themselves today, instead of it being on him to make the case for what he has to improve on them. The underlying view of history as progress and his implied materialist view of epistemic value, I think, isn't new.
If you substitute ideology for philosophy, then iterate ideological theorems from it, you can produce what are essentially holographic projections of consistent ideas that seem to encompass everything, and the easiest ones are structured like the Ancient Aliens reference above. The genius of that show is that it is as rigorous a critical theory of archeology as any other critical theory, it's just that everyone thinks their fancier version is different. It's as though we needed Ancient Astronaut Theory to convince us that other critical theories are real.
The last century has emphasized some interesting problems that were the consequence of our new ability to simulate and represent much of our experience as artifacts of computation and language, along with critical theories designed as solvents for the artifacts of language, where objects could be decoupled from their meanings, and then re-assigning meaning seemed like just an exercise in power over subjects - but that only works on a certain kind of mind. If you have ever seen an animal react to a magic trick, it's the same slight of hand effect on an intellectual level, I think. You can't navigate without waypoints, and any new philosophical ideas that are not informed by the foundations are just going to be post-hoc moralizations of exigencies in the present.
[+] [-] spicyusername|3 years ago|reply
Everything after the enlightenment, but before modern biology / neuroscience / physics, is also really smart sounding nonsense, but is getting closer to something approximating "reality".
Once we get to the naturalist philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries (many of whom are biologists, physicists, or neuroscientists by training), we start getting some real meat.
[+] [-] pell|3 years ago|reply
Plato's critique of democracy was written long before the period of enlightenment. It stands on its own to this day. There are countless other examples of philosophical works that hold up to scrutiny even when viewed through an analytical lens.
[+] [-] Bakary|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhanschoo|3 years ago|reply
This is like saying that Newtonian physics is really smart sounding nonsense because it makes mispredictions in places and assumes that time behaves like a continuum.
Among Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle alone,
Aristotle developed syllogisms (a fragment of predicate logic), Aristotle developed the notion of scientific disciplines, Socrates made many realize that it's not as easy to refute seemingly obvious nonsense in a watertight manner, Aristotle developed the notion of infinitely divisible time trying to refute Zeno's infinitely divisible distances traveled.
It's important to note that where these people are wrong and have developed insufficiently powerful explanations, it's because they lack the instruments and infrastructure (physical and intellectual) to reliably observe contradictions and deficiencies) to these frameworks that they have developed. To the person living then, it makes little difference, and likely the same to much of our lived experience (consider that religion is still very popular).
Once you note this, you should then begin to realize just how little we know (as a society, in your community, yourself) considering the limits of what we can measure (as a society, in your community, yourself), and how measuring something unexpected can completely upend the framework that you had developed.
[+] [-] retrac|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omeze|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3pt14159|3 years ago|reply
Brains in vats and all that.
[+] [-] ogurechny|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdf4j|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arolihas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raxxorraxor|3 years ago|reply
I believe the affliction is that because your philosophical case needs to be argued, it is expected to have a foundation in some philosophical root. With allegedly gives it more weight than just another thought.
It is sensible to read other philosophers I guess, but I think people should be encouraged to argue on their own.
[+] [-] SamBam|3 years ago|reply
I then studied a fair bit of philosophy at university, and while I could certainly appreciate the value of actually reading many great thinkers, the idea of spending my life studying them was absurd to me. I could think of nothing more horrifying than being proud to say that someone was one of the world's "top Heidegger scholars." (I recall the movie Little Miss Sunshine where a character was obsessed about his rival being only the "second" highest regarded Proust scholar.) Writing book after book about someone else's philosophy seemed utterly pointless.
To (ironically) quote Seneca: "'Hoc Zenon dixit': tu quid?" What do you have to say?
[+] [-] yamtaddle|3 years ago|reply
You should be "arguing your own" much of the time you're reading philosophy, no matter how old it is.
It's one of the Three Readings (which can be done all at once, not necessarily in three literal separate passes through the book, if you're a good reader and well-matched to the material you're reading) of Adler's How to Read a Book. You haven't fully engaged with a book—especially a book of philosophy—until you've done it.
[+] [-] WHA8m|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] umanwizard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nomentatus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smeagull|3 years ago|reply
"[...] we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery – from the time of the war of Secession, for example, until the present moment when one chooses between the M.R.P. [Mouvement Republicain Poputaire] and the Communists." ~ Jean-Paul Sartre.
[+] [-] skybrian|3 years ago|reply
I guess you could say it hasn't fundamentally changed if you ignore everything that's changed as not fundamental, but that's tautological.
[+] [-] B1FF_PSUVM|3 years ago|reply
Progress NOW implies amelioration. Before the XVI century it only meant you were going from A to B.
It's a new theology.
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|3 years ago|reply
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2022.01.001 “Harmony in Design: A Synthesis of Literature from Classical Philosophy, the Sciences, Economics, and Design”
[+] [-] nmaley|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prego_xo|3 years ago|reply
No.
[+] [-] mikrl|3 years ago|reply
The history of philosophers, I would disagree.
I once saw someone post online that the best way to get into someone’s thought was to read a biography of them. After all, their thought is a reflection of them and the material conditions in which they lived. Their aspirations, tribulations and the potential they saw in a world they wanted to interpret.
Sue Prideaux has a good one on Nietzsche and reading about his education really sets the scene for BGE and Zarathustra, which often confused me before. His father’s early death ‘doomed him’ into the mindset that led to his maniacal study of the will to power, and possibly his own early demise.
Knowing about Nietzsche’s life makes me appreciate what he was getting at, which is useful if you’re not used to his flowery style. It helped me identify more with him, and against him. I know more of what kind of man he was, and that I am very different.
[+] [-] MonkeyClub|3 years ago|reply
Worst of all, he completely misses Gadamer's comment regarding the epistemic fruitlessness of philosophizing at all (and not just of studying past philosophers), so in a sense Sauer unwittingly rehashes and expands upon only a partial aspect of that.
But he does express a "popular sentiment", which students of history (and the history of philosophy) will readily discover in any sub-era of modernity (including pomo'ity), but those who turn their backs to history will think it's all new and all of our own devising: namely that "We Know Better".
It's the cultural switch: before modernity we considered "the ancients" as unerring sources of truth, after modernity we started seeing through the cracks.
All too quick to note how pyramids and parthenons have cracks in them after standing for millennia, but wholly unable to produce something even equally sturdy, if not better.
PS: Ah, and by "modernity" I'm referring to the history of this side of the Enlightenment. E.g. I consider Casaubon's 1614 overturning of the presumed antiquity of the Corpus Hermeticum as part of modernity. (But doesn't everyone?)
[+] [-] denton-scratch|3 years ago|reply
All philosophy is the history of philosophy, in the sense that you're studying the ideas someone had in the past, whether that's the recent past or the distant past. The only philosophy that isn't history of philosophy is done by a handful of academics, and you can bet they all had a solid grounding in the history of philosophy.
I had to do a course on presocratic Greek philosophers. I couldn't understand why we had to study the ideas of these people whose ideas were wrong, wrong, wrong - even barmy. But all the interesting Greek philosophers knew and were influenced by the presocratics; Plato, Aristotle, the sceptics, the stoics. And so-called "modern" philosophers all studied these later Greeks.
It's impossible to engage with contemporary philosophy without studying the moderns, and studying the classical Greek philosophers makes it a lot easier to understand the moderns.
I'm glad the author mentioned Wittgenstein as a "historical" philosopher to whom attention shouldn't be paid. I don't know how a contemporary philosopher is supposed to approach the philosophy of language and logic without having worked through Wittgenstein and Ayer.