Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Hilarius Bookbinder's avatar

Notice I didn’t even have to bring up Derrida to make these complaints.

Expand full comment
Bryan Frances's avatar

By all means, let's go back to the days when we gave absolute SHIT arguments when we even bothered giving arguments. Let's go back to the times when it was hard to figure out the author's premises or conclusions, because they didn't bother to make them explicit. Let's go back to the days when we freely used terms in crucial claims that were multiply ambiguous even in philosophical discourse. Let's go back to the days when we just ignored objections that some philosophers might think are serious. Let's go back to the days when we offered thumbnail sketches of ideas, arguments, and the rest, instead of bothering to flesh them out to see if they are worthwhile.

Yeah, that will work.

By all means, let's be *entertaining* first, and thorough second. After all, it's not like we're at work here, when doing philosophy.

I like rants too, and I've heard this one, and been amused by it, for the whole 30 years I've been in philosophy. But it's much harder to write enjoyable but worthwhile philosophical prose than the post suggests. "Only articulate and respond to the good objections" is a common thought, but almost no one agrees with which objections are the good ones. If you want to avoid sloppy argumentation, then you're going to have to be precise--and precision will often require signposting and so on. If you want to treat an interesting and difficult topic with any depth, then it's probably going to take more than 7500 words.

Sure, we can point to a few great articles that managed to be relatively short, enjoyable to read, made a worthwhile point, and were pretty convincing. That's like saying we can point to some baseball games in which a player hit four home runs or threw a no-hitter.

Expand full comment
45 more comments...

No posts