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They are separate in the sense that one can believe the first and not the second, as you do, but not in the sense that they have no connection. The second is, a
by Emma_Goldman 9y ago
They are separate in the sense that one can believe the first and not the second, as you do, but not in the sense that they have no connection. The second is, albeit crudely put here, a common starting point for reaching the first.
And yes, I think Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is the most profound book that I have ever read. My view of the world was transformed upon reading it, though it took a couple of years to properly digest.
I agree that a lot of the tech community is neither well read in philosophy (or the humanities in general for that matter), nor believes that they should be. Sometimes that creates wonderfully naive attempts to think of philosophy as one would code, but in general, it leads to a really one-dimensional view of the social world.
- libraryofbabel 9y agoIt's true. But I do get the sense that at least the Hacker News community is more curious about and open to philosophy and the humanities than the tech world on average, and certainly more so than other online tech communities that I enjoy not reading (Slashdot, Reddit, etc.). Of course there is the usual subset of people who think all work in the humanities is either gibberish or part of some sort of monolithic vast Stalinist-identity-politics conspiracy, and a much larger number of well-meaning but naive people who seem to think they can resolve big social, historical, and economic questions much as they would debug a piece of Javascript. But time and again I'm genuinely surprised by the kinds of things that make it to the front page, and by how the comments often go deeper than the original article. There was even a sub-thread on this thread where people were bringing up Foucault's The Order of Things. Not bad for comments on a piece of naive pop-philosophy.