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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 id

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).

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).