Derrida's writing is dense but much more like that Nietzsche guy you admire from afar. The only bad writer in the Continental tradition is Husserl, not sure what happened there...
The analytic stuff is far worse in terms of style than Derrida... Pick up a text like Gift of Death, Id take that over this analytic, positivist posturing any day.
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.
Let's go back to the days when we all enjoyed false dilemmas like "either person P in world W at time t writes Very Serious and Important Philosophy or we write garbage entertainment."
"If you want to treat an interesting and difficult topic with any depth, then it's probably going to take more than 7500 words"
But that's exactly the point. If the topic is that difficult then it's probably a better candidate for a monograph. Or, hive off one aspect of the problem and write an article on that. There's no necessary trade-off between length and precision if we're careful about scoping.
I agree that there is a good place for short monographs. I've published one myself. But there's a big space between even a short monograph (say, 40,000 words) and an article that's 5000-7500 words.
What does it mean to work? Work in what sense? Let's zoom out. The hard truth is that people's lives aren't impacted by contemporary philosophy. It's a handful of people writing for the same handful of people in a subfield, in a self-justifying loop. I need to stiffen up and take a shot before saying this, but here goes: generally speaking, the field doesn't matter. There's the occasional Peter Singer or Martha Nussbaum. But who impacts people's "philosophy" the most? People like Jordan F'ing Peterson and Deepak F'ing Chopra. (I'm setting aside sectarian religious figures, who have always held sway. Actual theologians don't matter either, but anyway, their level of rigor is generally less than zero.)
"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."
Then improve. Learn to hit better and pitch better. It used to be that Dolph Schayes was a great basketball player. But expectations changed. Hours a day of high-intensity interval training became the norm. The proliferation of children playing the game forced the ones who wanted to excel to work really hard and become really good. The NBA is better now, and Dolph wouldn't last 30 seconds in it. Why won't philosophy do the same? It may be more rigorous today in terms of argumentation, but it doesn't matter that it is.
Your response seems to me to suggest that the post was suggesting we abandon formalism in favor of not giving decent arguments at all. These aren't our only options. We can oppose both excessive formalism and the absence of clear and compelling arguments.
Little value was added by this condescending remark:
"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."
...this struck me as dismissive, and the entire response you've offered here doesn't seem to me to engage with the post in a constructive or helpful way at all.
This is a bit strange given that you object in a follow-up comment to a failure to reply to your actual claims: which one? The false dichotomy, or dismissive and condescending remark I just quoted? What is there to respond to? Your response doesn't provide any clear or compelling objections or much of substance to address.
I don't mean to be disrespectful in saying all this. What I'd like to see is a productive exchange about both the problems and the virtues of contemporary philosophy. Do you think there are any issues with the field at present? Perhaps that'd be a place to find some common ground.
“ Little value was added by this condescending remark:
…
this struck me as dismissive, and the entire response you've offered here doesn't seem to me to engage with the post in a constructive or helpful way at all.”
“ dismissive and condescending remark I just quoted?”
You realize that the OP was “dismissive” and “condescending” of the entire field of modern analytical philosophy, right? Meanwhile, Bryan is at most being dismissive and condescending of a single substack article. The levels of dismissiveness and condescension from the OP are just orders of magnitude higher.
I don't agree that the OP was dismissive and condescending of the entire field of modern analytical philosophy. If you believe they were I'd be up for considering your interpretation of the OP and your explanation of which general points or specific remarks you took to be dismissive/condescending.
FWIW: I am also a critic of much of contemporary analytic philosophy so if you'd like to offer some critiques of my views feel free.
Neither Heraclitus nor Plato nor Marcus Aurelius, Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche Kierkegaard or basically anyone who wrote great philosophy in the past 2,500 years had to make it through peer review to make a living...
Hilarious and brilliant! This is honestly the very reason I decided to not go for academia. I prefer writing essays of Substack, something I feel Nietzsche would have loved to do. By the way, where is that illustration from?
I feel like analytic philosophy might actually be really good as training data for a hypothetical advanced future LLM. Having every possible objection mapped out would be really helpful in that case.
But for the consumption of actual human philosophers, not so much. Seems like a lot of this comes from an overly strong aversion to being not through. Being able to say "Yes, I covered that on pg. 47, subsection 4". Rather than the obviously more optimal way of using the time to respond individually in conversation to the other 5 philosophers that read your work.
Also is Nietzsche a great philosopher? I think it depends alot on what you think philosophy is about. But whatever it's merits I don't think "The Gay Science" is really an excellent achievement in the same, largely analytic, project many academic philosophers in the US are engaged in. Indeed, the whole methodology of academic philosophy isn't well suited to whatever Nietsche was trying to do so why force them together?
But if the modern university system with it's peer review and need to appeal to some consensus idea of quality is a bad fit to that project then what's the alternative? We live in an age where anyone can publish their manifestos for free online and if that project isn't best tied to academic promotion maybe the right answer is just to move towards a society with more leisure for everyone so people have the time to self-publish online. I mean if it's not about academic advancement then why should it matter if OUP agrees to publish?
Nietzsche was actually a philosophical writer, not a philosopher. But the first time you accidentally spell Nietzsche correctly is the day you are one.
Would it be better if the writing was better? Sure. But that's not going to happen for free. You are going to have to sacrifice something else. Good writing takes time and effort and academics will optimize for whatever best advances their career.
Assuming you believe that there is value in doing philosophy how much of that value is worth sacrificing to make it more pleasant to read?
Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that usually clarity and good writing are in tension. It may not be impossible to do both but it's certainly hard. I mean look at mathematics, to be sufficently clear one often has to write quite pedantically and i fear that any attempt to increase the writing quality won't turn everyone into amazing writers but instead come at the expense of clarity and that seems like a horrible trade off to me.
I suppose you probably like living in brutalist housing and eating gray food paste as well. Such frippery as decoration and gastronomy would detract from the cheerless pursuit of… something valuable, I’m sure. The idea that all philosophical writing should be modeled on mathematics is precisely what I am criticizing. Fruitful, brilliant, insightful philosophy has been written in a multitude of styles. To think that contemporary analytic style is the pinnacle of philosophical expression is a lack of imagination. And yes, Nietzsche was a great philosopher.
It's the pinnacle of what it is trying to do. I don't see what benefit you get from combining Nietsche and the modern analytic approach -- you'd just make both worse.
I don't care what we call them but it seems like there should be one place the goal is to be as clear, pedantic and precise as possible and the modern system of peer review seems pretty well suited to that. None of that requires we don't value the other stuff but I don't see the benefit from trying to mix them.
I think this response is more revealing than you think. Good writing is a luxury like having a pretty house or a delicious meal. It's also fundamentally a matter of taste -- you can always find someone who is disgusted by what you find aesthetically appealing.
And academic publication is always going to be a very limited audience and I think in exchange for a philosophy job you can put up with some bad writing rather than demand we use more resources to make it more enjoyable for us academics to read our papers.
To the extent that you want aesthic pleasure from reading you can go buy a novel like anyone else. I don't really see why philosophers should get special catering to their aesthetic preferences more than anyone else.
Just to give some context, I'd argue that the distinctive value that academic philosophy offers is helping us figure out what's true in the face of systemic human biases and confusion. Sure, there are other academic disciplines as well but it's noteable that the same kind of bad arguments and poor philosophy seems to get reinvented by people across disciplines and I'd argue the value in philosophy is helping identify and reject those conclusions.
Now that does have two parts. Figuring out what is true and communicating it. But if the first part wasn't hard we wouldn't need philosophy. Indeed, bias and error are so pervasive and easy to make we need all the help we can get and being pedantic and precise is one of the best tools we have to do that. And yes, it may be important to then have someone explain those arguments in a better written form it's just that journals and academic publication are the places optimized for the former not the later. We call the later outreach and do reward it but seperating the two improves both.
And note this is the same system we endorse in the sciences and mathematics. I mean we certainly don't want to demand that journal articles in sciences or math be written in a fun style. Even very boringly written pieces that express valuable insights into math, physics or chemistry are extremely valuable. Indeed, in those areas I'd argue that virtually any loss of clarity for stylistic benefit is a net harm -- at least for primary academic publication which is the place where we focus on clearly expressing the ideas, popularization explaining etc are also valuable but we have other systems for incentivizing popularization and textbooks.
Btw, I recognize I’m being kind of mean. I apologize for the snide tone. I do think there should be a reckoning of sorts in the field, as well as in fields like racial and gender theory that have the opposite problem: they’ve influenced the culture without carrying the burden of rigor. (Of course, philosophy has a different kind of rigor challenge, which is the requirement of unprovable assumptions and subjective intuitions. But obviously a commitment to reasoning is foundational to the field today.)
"the distinctive value that academic philosophy offers is helping us figure out what's true in the face of systemic human biases and confusion. "
Who's "us"? Almost no one? A hermit might as well have written it by himself and pasted it to the wall of his shed in Idaho. Circulating it to a few fellow philosophers who probably don't even fully read it is different mainly in that it costs money.
"We call the latter outreach and do reward it but separating the two improves both." If the outreach actually happens -- effectively -- thus influencing behavior on a non-negligible scale, in a way that couldn't have been done without that academic work, fantastic. But what percentage of academic philosophy papers can you say that about? Does it round to a whole number greater than zero? Even giants like John Rawls tend to merely justify approaches that already exist. "Oh my God, this philosopher dude just said to put ourselves in disadvantaged people's shoes when making policy. I totally never thought of that when forging the Great Society six years ago. Change everything!"
I'd put the sciences and math in a different category. If a finding ends up impacting medicine, engineering, crop yields, building insulation, or brake pads, the general public doesn't need to understand it to benefit from it. But if people don't know about and can't apply philosophy, what's the point?
People can benefit from specialist knowledge even held by experts especially when it influences things like what IRB boards decide or how we think about various kinds of arguments in the sciences.
But sure, maybe there isn't much value in philosophy at all but if there is any distinctive value in philosophy (e.g. that isn't present merely in literature) it has to consist of some degree of greater epistemic clarity as a result of the approach/method.
So, to lay my cards on the table, I don't think there is anything of distinctive value about works like those of Nietzsche. Indeed, I tend to think it provides a way for people to convince themselves they have more justification for a belief than they really have.
So maybe we shouldn't bother with philosophy at all but if we should we need to first worry about making sure it helps us think more not less clearly.
This is painfully (and hilariously) accurate. There are so many articles in my own sub-field that blunt the force of their own arguments by padding things out with ever finer distinctions and objections in order to meet the word limit for the journal. More isn't always more, and past a certain point it can be less.
As an outsider looking in from Classics, I couldn't agree more. I find your discipline's literature incomprehensible *and* silly. If you can teach, you can write plain English. Why not try it?
I think philosophical writing has become methodologically too self-conscious in attempting to parallel the clarity and strict impersonality in scientific writing.
I am an outsider interested in philosophy. I have tremendous difficulty navigating texts. So much to read in terms of discrete writings and so frustrating. Just say no to "new" ideas. By far less formidable and more instructive if every philosopher fearlessly provided their own BIASED narrow narrative synopses of the history of philosophy---what strand in the development of ideas fascinates or infuriates them.
In other words if they are to meet and educate their ideal student audience, those who know just enough to engage but no more, in free association. A happy free reportage, a philosophical stand-up comedy routine, because "we must call every truth false if not accompanied by at least one laughter".
Boring, Unimportant and Uninteresting, Navel Gazing. My condolences; but at least you are presumably being paid to read this “stuff”. As a much more interesting writer once wrote, “… full of sound, and fury, signifying, nothing “.
Maybe bad philosophical writing is a rational response to the prevailing incentive structure. When articles get cited (and, presumably, read) an average of zero times, why bother writing them well? Better just to produce something that can get past the Scylla of Reviewer A and the Charybdis of Reviewer B. Before you say that maybe more people would read the articles if they were better written, let me observe that, though good philosophical writing is rare, there is enough of it that gets ignored to suggest that the arrow of causation goes predominantly in the direction I propose. This would also explain why most philosophers who produce bad writing are perfectly lucid in lectures and conversation: there, they know they have a real audience.
Notice I didn’t even have to bring up Derrida to make these complaints.
I did notice! Analytic philosophy is the worst!
Derrida's writing is dense but much more like that Nietzsche guy you admire from afar. The only bad writer in the Continental tradition is Husserl, not sure what happened there...
In sum, we have the better writers, hands down! 😂
The analytic stuff is far worse in terms of style than Derrida... Pick up a text like Gift of Death, Id take that over this analytic, positivist posturing any day.
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.
Let's go back to the days when we all enjoyed false dilemmas like "either person P in world W at time t writes Very Serious and Important Philosophy or we write garbage entertainment."
Let's try replying to my actual claims too.
"If you want to treat an interesting and difficult topic with any depth, then it's probably going to take more than 7500 words"
But that's exactly the point. If the topic is that difficult then it's probably a better candidate for a monograph. Or, hive off one aspect of the problem and write an article on that. There's no necessary trade-off between length and precision if we're careful about scoping.
I agree that there is a good place for short monographs. I've published one myself. But there's a big space between even a short monograph (say, 40,000 words) and an article that's 5000-7500 words.
"Yeah, that will work."
What does it mean to work? Work in what sense? Let's zoom out. The hard truth is that people's lives aren't impacted by contemporary philosophy. It's a handful of people writing for the same handful of people in a subfield, in a self-justifying loop. I need to stiffen up and take a shot before saying this, but here goes: generally speaking, the field doesn't matter. There's the occasional Peter Singer or Martha Nussbaum. But who impacts people's "philosophy" the most? People like Jordan F'ing Peterson and Deepak F'ing Chopra. (I'm setting aside sectarian religious figures, who have always held sway. Actual theologians don't matter either, but anyway, their level of rigor is generally less than zero.)
"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."
Then improve. Learn to hit better and pitch better. It used to be that Dolph Schayes was a great basketball player. But expectations changed. Hours a day of high-intensity interval training became the norm. The proliferation of children playing the game forced the ones who wanted to excel to work really hard and become really good. The NBA is better now, and Dolph wouldn't last 30 seconds in it. Why won't philosophy do the same? It may be more rigorous today in terms of argumentation, but it doesn't matter that it is.
Your response seems to me to suggest that the post was suggesting we abandon formalism in favor of not giving decent arguments at all. These aren't our only options. We can oppose both excessive formalism and the absence of clear and compelling arguments.
Little value was added by this condescending remark:
"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."
...this struck me as dismissive, and the entire response you've offered here doesn't seem to me to engage with the post in a constructive or helpful way at all.
This is a bit strange given that you object in a follow-up comment to a failure to reply to your actual claims: which one? The false dichotomy, or dismissive and condescending remark I just quoted? What is there to respond to? Your response doesn't provide any clear or compelling objections or much of substance to address.
I don't mean to be disrespectful in saying all this. What I'd like to see is a productive exchange about both the problems and the virtues of contemporary philosophy. Do you think there are any issues with the field at present? Perhaps that'd be a place to find some common ground.
Hi Lance. You're right to ask for clarification. I'm working on it.
“ Little value was added by this condescending remark:
…
this struck me as dismissive, and the entire response you've offered here doesn't seem to me to engage with the post in a constructive or helpful way at all.”
“ dismissive and condescending remark I just quoted?”
You realize that the OP was “dismissive” and “condescending” of the entire field of modern analytical philosophy, right? Meanwhile, Bryan is at most being dismissive and condescending of a single substack article. The levels of dismissiveness and condescension from the OP are just orders of magnitude higher.
I don't agree that the OP was dismissive and condescending of the entire field of modern analytical philosophy. If you believe they were I'd be up for considering your interpretation of the OP and your explanation of which general points or specific remarks you took to be dismissive/condescending.
FWIW: I am also a critic of much of contemporary analytic philosophy so if you'd like to offer some critiques of my views feel free.
Neither Heraclitus nor Plato nor Marcus Aurelius, Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche Kierkegaard or basically anyone who wrote great philosophy in the past 2,500 years had to make it through peer review to make a living...
Hilarious and brilliant! This is honestly the very reason I decided to not go for academia. I prefer writing essays of Substack, something I feel Nietzsche would have loved to do. By the way, where is that illustration from?
Thanks! The illustration is a photo of a painting I own.
I feel like analytic philosophy might actually be really good as training data for a hypothetical advanced future LLM. Having every possible objection mapped out would be really helpful in that case.
But for the consumption of actual human philosophers, not so much. Seems like a lot of this comes from an overly strong aversion to being not through. Being able to say "Yes, I covered that on pg. 47, subsection 4". Rather than the obviously more optimal way of using the time to respond individually in conversation to the other 5 philosophers that read your work.
Also is Nietzsche a great philosopher? I think it depends alot on what you think philosophy is about. But whatever it's merits I don't think "The Gay Science" is really an excellent achievement in the same, largely analytic, project many academic philosophers in the US are engaged in. Indeed, the whole methodology of academic philosophy isn't well suited to whatever Nietsche was trying to do so why force them together?
But if the modern university system with it's peer review and need to appeal to some consensus idea of quality is a bad fit to that project then what's the alternative? We live in an age where anyone can publish their manifestos for free online and if that project isn't best tied to academic promotion maybe the right answer is just to move towards a society with more leisure for everyone so people have the time to self-publish online. I mean if it's not about academic advancement then why should it matter if OUP agrees to publish?
Nietzsche was actually a philosophical writer, not a philosopher. But the first time you accidentally spell Nietzsche correctly is the day you are one.
Would it be better if the writing was better? Sure. But that's not going to happen for free. You are going to have to sacrifice something else. Good writing takes time and effort and academics will optimize for whatever best advances their career.
Assuming you believe that there is value in doing philosophy how much of that value is worth sacrificing to make it more pleasant to read?
Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that usually clarity and good writing are in tension. It may not be impossible to do both but it's certainly hard. I mean look at mathematics, to be sufficently clear one often has to write quite pedantically and i fear that any attempt to increase the writing quality won't turn everyone into amazing writers but instead come at the expense of clarity and that seems like a horrible trade off to me.
I suppose you probably like living in brutalist housing and eating gray food paste as well. Such frippery as decoration and gastronomy would detract from the cheerless pursuit of… something valuable, I’m sure. The idea that all philosophical writing should be modeled on mathematics is precisely what I am criticizing. Fruitful, brilliant, insightful philosophy has been written in a multitude of styles. To think that contemporary analytic style is the pinnacle of philosophical expression is a lack of imagination. And yes, Nietzsche was a great philosopher.
It's the pinnacle of what it is trying to do. I don't see what benefit you get from combining Nietsche and the modern analytic approach -- you'd just make both worse.
I don't care what we call them but it seems like there should be one place the goal is to be as clear, pedantic and precise as possible and the modern system of peer review seems pretty well suited to that. None of that requires we don't value the other stuff but I don't see the benefit from trying to mix them.
I think this response is more revealing than you think. Good writing is a luxury like having a pretty house or a delicious meal. It's also fundamentally a matter of taste -- you can always find someone who is disgusted by what you find aesthetically appealing.
And academic publication is always going to be a very limited audience and I think in exchange for a philosophy job you can put up with some bad writing rather than demand we use more resources to make it more enjoyable for us academics to read our papers.
To the extent that you want aesthic pleasure from reading you can go buy a novel like anyone else. I don't really see why philosophers should get special catering to their aesthetic preferences more than anyone else.
If it can’t be expressed clearly *and* well, why does it need to be published? Who benefits?
Just to give some context, I'd argue that the distinctive value that academic philosophy offers is helping us figure out what's true in the face of systemic human biases and confusion. Sure, there are other academic disciplines as well but it's noteable that the same kind of bad arguments and poor philosophy seems to get reinvented by people across disciplines and I'd argue the value in philosophy is helping identify and reject those conclusions.
Now that does have two parts. Figuring out what is true and communicating it. But if the first part wasn't hard we wouldn't need philosophy. Indeed, bias and error are so pervasive and easy to make we need all the help we can get and being pedantic and precise is one of the best tools we have to do that. And yes, it may be important to then have someone explain those arguments in a better written form it's just that journals and academic publication are the places optimized for the former not the later. We call the later outreach and do reward it but seperating the two improves both.
And note this is the same system we endorse in the sciences and mathematics. I mean we certainly don't want to demand that journal articles in sciences or math be written in a fun style. Even very boringly written pieces that express valuable insights into math, physics or chemistry are extremely valuable. Indeed, in those areas I'd argue that virtually any loss of clarity for stylistic benefit is a net harm -- at least for primary academic publication which is the place where we focus on clearly expressing the ideas, popularization explaining etc are also valuable but we have other systems for incentivizing popularization and textbooks.
Btw, I recognize I’m being kind of mean. I apologize for the snide tone. I do think there should be a reckoning of sorts in the field, as well as in fields like racial and gender theory that have the opposite problem: they’ve influenced the culture without carrying the burden of rigor. (Of course, philosophy has a different kind of rigor challenge, which is the requirement of unprovable assumptions and subjective intuitions. But obviously a commitment to reasoning is foundational to the field today.)
"the distinctive value that academic philosophy offers is helping us figure out what's true in the face of systemic human biases and confusion. "
Who's "us"? Almost no one? A hermit might as well have written it by himself and pasted it to the wall of his shed in Idaho. Circulating it to a few fellow philosophers who probably don't even fully read it is different mainly in that it costs money.
"We call the latter outreach and do reward it but separating the two improves both." If the outreach actually happens -- effectively -- thus influencing behavior on a non-negligible scale, in a way that couldn't have been done without that academic work, fantastic. But what percentage of academic philosophy papers can you say that about? Does it round to a whole number greater than zero? Even giants like John Rawls tend to merely justify approaches that already exist. "Oh my God, this philosopher dude just said to put ourselves in disadvantaged people's shoes when making policy. I totally never thought of that when forging the Great Society six years ago. Change everything!"
I'd put the sciences and math in a different category. If a finding ends up impacting medicine, engineering, crop yields, building insulation, or brake pads, the general public doesn't need to understand it to benefit from it. But if people don't know about and can't apply philosophy, what's the point?
People can benefit from specialist knowledge even held by experts especially when it influences things like what IRB boards decide or how we think about various kinds of arguments in the sciences.
But sure, maybe there isn't much value in philosophy at all but if there is any distinctive value in philosophy (e.g. that isn't present merely in literature) it has to consist of some degree of greater epistemic clarity as a result of the approach/method.
So, to lay my cards on the table, I don't think there is anything of distinctive value about works like those of Nietzsche. Indeed, I tend to think it provides a way for people to convince themselves they have more justification for a belief than they really have.
So maybe we shouldn't bother with philosophy at all but if we should we need to first worry about making sure it helps us think more not less clearly.
This is painfully (and hilariously) accurate. There are so many articles in my own sub-field that blunt the force of their own arguments by padding things out with ever finer distinctions and objections in order to meet the word limit for the journal. More isn't always more, and past a certain point it can be less.
As an outsider looking in from Classics, I couldn't agree more. I find your discipline's literature incomprehensible *and* silly. If you can teach, you can write plain English. Why not try it?
I think philosophical writing has become methodologically too self-conscious in attempting to parallel the clarity and strict impersonality in scientific writing.
I am an outsider interested in philosophy. I have tremendous difficulty navigating texts. So much to read in terms of discrete writings and so frustrating. Just say no to "new" ideas. By far less formidable and more instructive if every philosopher fearlessly provided their own BIASED narrow narrative synopses of the history of philosophy---what strand in the development of ideas fascinates or infuriates them.
In other words if they are to meet and educate their ideal student audience, those who know just enough to engage but no more, in free association. A happy free reportage, a philosophical stand-up comedy routine, because "we must call every truth false if not accompanied by at least one laughter".
Boring, Unimportant and Uninteresting, Navel Gazing. My condolences; but at least you are presumably being paid to read this “stuff”. As a much more interesting writer once wrote, “… full of sound, and fury, signifying, nothing “.
Maybe bad philosophical writing is a rational response to the prevailing incentive structure. When articles get cited (and, presumably, read) an average of zero times, why bother writing them well? Better just to produce something that can get past the Scylla of Reviewer A and the Charybdis of Reviewer B. Before you say that maybe more people would read the articles if they were better written, let me observe that, though good philosophical writing is rare, there is enough of it that gets ignored to suggest that the arrow of causation goes predominantly in the direction I propose. This would also explain why most philosophers who produce bad writing are perfectly lucid in lectures and conversation: there, they know they have a real audience.
You don't need any of that, here's most of the answers: https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/metaphysics-in-a-nutshell
Experimental History has been doing great work in this general area.
Agreed.
I'm begging you to stop reading contemporary analytic philosophy
I'll try.