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Because there is a good chance that whatever you want to say has already been said by at least a few other people and been refuted counter-argued or otherwise d

Because there is a good chance that whatever you want to say has already been said by at least a few other people and been refuted counter-argued or otherwise discussed. If you are not aware of all that accompanying discussion, you are likely to think you have come up with something profound when you actually haven't. This is why r/im14andthisisdeep/ is a thing. A lot of teens think they have an insight despite the fact that what they thought is neither profound nor novel. Also, a lot of philosophical reading helps set up frameworks or theoretical scaffolding that can serve as a layer of abstraction that you can build upon instead of everyone rediscovering the same ground principles.

duncanawoods 9y ago
All true but I feel as currently taught it is hamstrung as a "historical study of great men / literary study of original sources" instead of teaching the key ideas distilled into the the most efficient and practical form. High school physicists are not ploughing through Principia Mathematica, instead they learn the laws of motion and move on. Physicists pretty much leave behind the original sources until you are at the bleeding edge. Why can't philosophy?
- lg 9y ago
  because philosophical papers can stay 'at the bleeding edge' (under active debate) for a really, really long time.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  Classical mechanics is 'done and dusted'. Aristotle or Plato are not. They can still be discussed and actively debated about today.
- dmreedy 9y ago
  Because fundamentally, every single premise established in Philosophy is rejectable, and in practice, every premise is routinely rejected. Unlike physics, where there is one tower and it is built high by many hands, in Philosophy, there are many towers and many builders, all having made very little progress on what are incredibly hard problems. There are too many different schools and too few means of empirical refutation to achieve the kind of unity you're looking for, unfortunately. Sometimes, however, they do borrow eachother's tools at least.
  - unhammer 9y ago
    > every single premise established in Philosophy is rejectable until it's not, at which point it moves out of the domain of Philosophy and into physics, math, psychology, what have you.
    - msla 9y ago
      Right. What we now call science was once subsumed under "Natural Philosophy", and, as an example, "atomism", or the idea that matter is made of atoms acting under the influence of natural laws, was once a philosophical position, such that different philosophers disagreed on its validity. (No, the "philosophical atoms" of Democritus weren't atoms as we now know them. For one thing, the word "atom" means "uncuttable", as Democritus imagined atoms to be the indivisible units of matter, and, more importantly, he had no larger experimental and explanatory framework to slot his ideas into, so he couldn't come up with ideas like molecules and chemistry that, to us, follow quite naturally from the notion matter is made of atoms.)
- otakucode 9y ago
  The philosophy I studied in college was not a 'historical study of great men' or any sort of literary study. It was study of the ideas, with the various works (usually short works, not big things but excerpts and such) used as clear explanations of them. And then study of what responses were made to those, what their merits were, what the flaws or strengths of the idea are, etc. And philosophers DO consult the original sources. Those would be basic logic and rhetoric. Then they take those and they first build epistemology. Then they use that epistemology to build a framework of metaphysics. Eventually they build the most abstract, highest level piece - ethics. At each step there are varying options, and it is rare that you can point to any of the options as 'clearly true'. We already know mathematics and similar cannot address everything. A 3-body system of perfect sphere interacting solely under universal gravitation is already in itself so sensitive to initial conditions that the error on any prediction you make grows faster than anything computable. So how is humanity to deal with things that happen on the scale of trillions of trillions of entities interacting in non-linear ways constantly? That's the world we actually live in, and the tools to address it won't come from math. And probably not physics (although maybe).
PeterisP 9y ago
The problem I have with modern philosophy is exactly what you say, that for any interesting argument, it "has already been said by at least a few other people and been refuted counter-argued or otherwise discussed". And that is a problem - what I'd expect from the practitioners of philosophy is to give a concise summary of what exactly is the current state of art answer. Given all that discussion, does the argument make sense (and thus the refutations have been found wanting) or do the refutations prevail? Okay, there are some topics that are still highly up for debate, or it's acknowledged that the answer must be subjective (as some of the ethical debates do) - in that sense, just make a summary of the strongest currently known arguments pro and contra. Discussion is a process for getting to results, but the discussion is not a sufficient result by itself - where are the conclusions? Such discussions are a tool for people within a field to produce the results, but the value of the field is limited to what is the outcome of the discussions that can be provided to practicioners of other fields, the final results that they can use in their reasoning. Where is the truth that has been found? Okay, it may be partial, or refuted in future as we obtain more knowledge, but up to our current knowledge, why doesn't the field provide the results of that discussion, removing all the refuted arguments (possibly moving them to a "FAQ list" of "yes, we've thought of that objection and it doesn't matter"), and summarizing (with fine-tuning, improvements and clarification, instead of expanding with more and more comments) the arguments that have been confirmed as irrefutable since Aristotle. Instead of that, the philosophical community tends to provide all the historical discussion and pretend that that's a satisfactory result of research - it's not. We don't read Newton's Principia and comments of other authors on that to understand physics, we have resources that summarize all that's valid in Principia, that remove all that's not valid in it, that augment what could be improved, and make the original work obsolete for study unless you're a historian. The relationship between Principia and Kepler's findings is interesting from a historical perspective, but orthogonal to the actual content. Why then are we reading e.g. Kant's response to Hume instead of producing (Back then! I'm not talking about a textbook for students, but as something the research field would be expected to write for themselves right after Kant's publications) something like "Hume - revised" where all the Hume's opinions are mercilessly edited (because we shouldn't care about all Hume's opinions, but only those of his opinions that happened to be correct), removing the parts that have been refuted, leaving the parts where Kant's response was found insufficient, and replacing the parts which Kant was able to clarify with Kant's words, with a footnote to attribute authorship. If a refutation matters, then the original work should be altered (Where is the "Nicomachean ethics, 114th revised edition"?), and if a refutation doesn't matter, then you shouldn't be ever reading it in serious literature without a preface noting "this is a historically interesting but erroneous argument, counter-refutation in page xyz). The discussion is something that should matter only for those making new philosophy, but not those studying and applying ("consuming"?) the existing philosophy. Instead https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/ states "There is no consensus, of course(!), over whether Kant's response succeeds, but there is no more consensus about what this response is supposed to be". Emphasis on the "of course" is mine, because I find that part informative, illustrative, and outrageous - if this is currently considered a reasonable state of art description, then the field seems to explicitly acknowledge that it's worthless, that it's not even attempting to provide any actual answers out of these discussions.

duncanawoods 9y ago

All true but I feel as currently taught it is hamstrung as a "historical study of great men / literary study of original sources" instead of teaching the key ideas distilled into the the most efficient and practical form. High school physicists are not ploughing through Principia Mathematica, instead they learn the laws of motion and move on. Physicists pretty much leave behind the original sources until you are at the bleeding edge. Why can't philosophy?

lg 9y ago
because philosophical papers can stay 'at the bleeding edge' (under active debate) for a really, really long time.
kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
Classical mechanics is 'done and dusted'. Aristotle or Plato are not. They can still be discussed and actively debated about today.
dmreedy 9y ago
Because fundamentally, every single premise established in Philosophy is rejectable, and in practice, every premise is routinely rejected. Unlike physics, where there is one tower and it is built high by many hands, in Philosophy, there are many towers and many builders, all having made very little progress on what are incredibly hard problems. There are too many different schools and too few means of empirical refutation to achieve the kind of unity you're looking for, unfortunately. Sometimes, however, they do borrow eachother's tools at least.
- unhammer 9y ago
  > every single premise established in Philosophy is rejectable until it's not, at which point it moves out of the domain of Philosophy and into physics, math, psychology, what have you.
  - msla 9y ago
    Right. What we now call science was once subsumed under "Natural Philosophy", and, as an example, "atomism", or the idea that matter is made of atoms acting under the influence of natural laws, was once a philosophical position, such that different philosophers disagreed on its validity. (No, the "philosophical atoms" of Democritus weren't atoms as we now know them. For one thing, the word "atom" means "uncuttable", as Democritus imagined atoms to be the indivisible units of matter, and, more importantly, he had no larger experimental and explanatory framework to slot his ideas into, so he couldn't come up with ideas like molecules and chemistry that, to us, follow quite naturally from the notion matter is made of atoms.)
otakucode 9y ago
The philosophy I studied in college was not a 'historical study of great men' or any sort of literary study. It was study of the ideas, with the various works (usually short works, not big things but excerpts and such) used as clear explanations of them. And then study of what responses were made to those, what their merits were, what the flaws or strengths of the idea are, etc. And philosophers DO consult the original sources. Those would be basic logic and rhetoric. Then they take those and they first build epistemology. Then they use that epistemology to build a framework of metaphysics. Eventually they build the most abstract, highest level piece - ethics. At each step there are varying options, and it is rare that you can point to any of the options as 'clearly true'. We already know mathematics and similar cannot address everything. A 3-body system of perfect sphere interacting solely under universal gravitation is already in itself so sensitive to initial conditions that the error on any prediction you make grows faster than anything computable. So how is humanity to deal with things that happen on the scale of trillions of trillions of entities interacting in non-linear ways constantly? That's the world we actually live in, and the tools to address it won't come from math. And probably not physics (although maybe).

PeterisP 9y ago

The problem I have with modern philosophy is exactly what you say, that for any interesting argument, it "has already been said by at least a few other people and been refuted counter-argued or otherwise discussed". And that is a problem - what I'd expect from the practitioners of philosophy is to give a concise summary of what exactly is the current state of art answer. Given all that discussion, does the argument make sense (and thus the refutations have been found wanting) or do the refutations prevail? Okay, there are some topics that are still highly up for debate, or it's acknowledged that the answer must be subjective (as some of the ethical debates do) - in that sense, just make a summary of the strongest currently known arguments pro and contra. Discussion is a process for getting to results, but the discussion is not a sufficient result by itself - where are the conclusions? Such discussions are a tool for people within a field to produce the results, but the value of the field is limited to what is the outcome of the discussions that can be provided to practicioners of other fields, the final results that they can use in their reasoning. Where is the truth that has been found? Okay, it may be partial, or refuted in future as we obtain more knowledge, but up to our current knowledge, why doesn't the field provide the results of that discussion, removing all the refuted arguments (possibly moving them to a "FAQ list" of "yes, we've thought of that objection and it doesn't matter"), and summarizing (with fine-tuning, improvements and clarification, instead of expanding with more and more comments) the arguments that have been confirmed as irrefutable since Aristotle. Instead of that, the philosophical community tends to provide all the historical discussion and pretend that that's a satisfactory result of research - it's not. We don't read Newton's Principia and comments of other authors on that to understand physics, we have resources that summarize all that's valid in Principia, that remove all that's not valid in it, that augment what could be improved, and make the original work obsolete for study unless you're a historian. The relationship between Principia and Kepler's findings is interesting from a historical perspective, but orthogonal to the actual content. Why then are we reading e.g. Kant's response to Hume instead of producing (Back then! I'm not talking about a textbook for students, but as something the research field would be expected to write for themselves right after Kant's publications) something like "Hume - revised" where all the Hume's opinions are mercilessly edited (because we shouldn't care about all Hume's opinions, but only those of his opinions that happened to be correct), removing the parts that have been refuted, leaving the parts where Kant's response was found insufficient, and replacing the parts which Kant was able to clarify with Kant's words, with a footnote to attribute authorship. If a refutation matters, then the original work should be altered (Where is the "Nicomachean ethics, 114th revised edition"?), and if a refutation doesn't matter, then you shouldn't be ever reading it in serious literature without a preface noting "this is a historically interesting but erroneous argument, counter-refutation in page xyz). The discussion is something that should matter only for those making new philosophy, but not those studying and applying ("consuming"?) the existing philosophy. Instead https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/ states "There is no consensus, of course(!), over whether Kant's response succeeds, but there is no more consensus about what this response is supposed to be". Emphasis on the "of course" is mine, because I find that part informative, illustrative, and outrageous - if this is currently considered a reasonable state of art description, then the field seems to explicitly acknowledge that it's worthless, that it's not even attempting to provide any actual answers out of these discussions.