10 ms·

Why read old philosophy?

120 points by diodorus 8y ago

clavalle 8y ago
It is interesting to see how we got here. Seeing a long arc of...dismissed ideas, let's say, can give us perspective on the ideas we hold today that are more or less a historical accident and, hopefully, the conceptual room to change them if they don't work. I haven't read the article, but does that about sum it up?
- danarmak 8y ago
  No, that is quite unlike both the problem the article poses and solution answer is proposes. I would explain them here, but I encourage people to read the article instead.
jeremiahwv 8y ago
> An old work of philosophy does not describe the thing you are meant to be learning about. It was created by the thing you are meant to be learning about, much like watching a video from skater-Aristotle’s GoPro. And the value proposition is that with this high resolution Aristotle’s-eye-view, you can infer the motions. tldr; read old philosophy to learn how to reason, read new physics to learn the results of reasoning.
- Raphmedia 8y ago
  So, in a metaphorical way, reading old philosophy isn't about reading a legacy code base. It's about reading the git history and project documentation.
  - jeremiahwv 8y ago
    Hmm, I'd say more like reading the (original) source code of git itself to learn about Linus and his coding"philosophy" [0] vs reading a modern tutorial about how to use git. [0] I haven't done this so not putting any value prop on this specific example.
infodroid 8y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13348502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13348502 (2017)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
byproxy 8y ago
I liked the skateboarding analogy. I might be skewing it, but it hearkens towards evolution of an art-form, maybe.. 60s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pXYTJgxY30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pXYTJgxY30 70s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKC-XBwQ_pA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKC-XBwQ_pA 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA1a21RTFZI90s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA1a21RTFZI90s 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkDSlB7fy8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkDSlB7fy8I 00s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjSx2Xe9pZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjSx2Xe9pZ8 And the idea of summarizing. In many of those videos you may be able to say "skater does a kickflip", but such summarizing is devoid of context.
- SomewhatLikely 8y ago
  Interestingly the biggest difference I see are in the board itself (less flat, wider) and the addition of dedicated environments enabling new styles and tricks. That said I wouldn't be surprised if a skateboarder today could take one of those old boards and ride it very differently today.
JasonFruit 8y ago
I'm not sure that I can agree with her even about reading physics. I've found that the earliest works on scientific topics, as well as in math and philosophy, explain things in a way that is comprehensible to someone with no prior knowledge of the subject. That's probably because nobody had prior knowledge when the work was written. I find I'm very often able to learn topics from the originators' writings that I found otherwise intractable. For me, at least, this is true in general. On the other hand, I have a consistent bias toward the past, and this may be a rationalization after the fact.
- ahtu123 8y ago
  Philosophy is a cumulative field just like programming. If you're only involved with the most modern framework, there is a lot of magic happening underneath the surface. Most of the value to me seems to be in understanding an idea and then reading and understanding someone refute it later. That's basically my whole experience in reading philosophy "chronologically".
  - jhbadger 8y ago
    Is it though? Has philosophy actually made any advances in understanding the "great questions" of the meaning of life and what not? Perhaps the reason that people find reading Plato and Aristotle worthwhile is that people are still beating their heads against the same unanswerable questions.
    - navait 8y ago
      What about Analytic philosophy? It's come up with new ways to discuss and illuminate what we are trying to understand, and starts in the late 1800's.
      - jhbadger 8y ago
        That's a fairly broad field though -- there are some analytic philosophers who were/are practically mathematicians, and who certainly helped advance logic and related fields. On the other hand you have analytical people who are working on the "big questions" like ethics where the same questions from ancient times get asked over and over.
scandox 8y ago
> And if philosophy is about having certain experiences, like poetry, but then it would seem to be a kind of entertainment rather than a project to gain knowledge, which is at least not what most philosophers would tell you. I think all this trouble comes from the perverse desire to make Philosophy "valuable" in the way that sciences are perceived to be, rather than recognizing that it is indeed like poetry. Not poetry "a kind of entertainment" - which is a gross reduction...but poetry as a means of direct experience and illumination. Maybe philosophy cannot be "used" to model anything, predict anything or instrumentalize anything...but at the end of time when we have catalogued every atom, it's what we will have left with which to examine the remaining mysteries - which is ultimately a personal journey ... not some kind of utilitarian social achievement.
- Numberwang 8y ago
  Islam has the ultimate answer to all these personal journey questions. No need for greek philosophy.
  - yellowboxtenant 8y ago
    What?
    - Numberwang 8y ago
      I'm just saying, if you can't quantify it, anything goes.
      - scandox 8y ago
        Ultimately anything does indeed "go" intellectually speaking. You can draw an arbitrary line and say "it is fruitless to step over this boundary" but that is just a matter of shrinking the universe down to what you can manage. Which is fine. It does not invalidate the desire some people have to have internal intellectual experiences that do not have to be validated by you.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
DrNuke 8y ago
Quantitative subjects are progressive and new discoveries or technological advancements make past theories obsolete; on the contrary, old philosophy aims at studying the world we are all in from different perspectives and with different methods or goals, so that it is cumulative indeed: past theories go out of fashion never becoming obsolete, still being re-usable in need, at different times or epochs.
jonbarker 8y ago
Old philosophy is fun in the same way old science is fun. Watching someone from thousands of years ago use a process to determine a more accurate or valuable way of thinking about the world, with rudimentary tools, should inspire us to go use the tools we have now better.
willart4food 8y ago
Well, what's your goal? Get your feet wet into Philosophy? See what Philosophy is all about? Do you enjoy Philosophy? If so, you already know the answer (hint: YES). Otherwise Philosophy is not for you and George Pólya is a more suitable reading.
arca_vorago 8y ago
Because too many people these days are the "school is overrated, vocational schools are all we need" types who don't understand the basic value of going through the old philosophers... the title is case in point. To me it seems so obvious that there are numerous reasons that it just seems click-baity. You know what they teach at the elite schools (like Eton for example) that most others don't? The trivium and quadrivium. Together, they form the seven liberal arts, and are a vital parts of the preperation for reading the old philosophers. More than that though, they are vital parts of having a well rounded education where knowledge at a base level in areas almost always elevates your ability to think well in others. It is also extremely important to be able to go back and see how the old philosophers were right and how they were wrong, but also just to see the amount of wisdom they had. I'm a constitutionalist myself, so reading Montesquieu for example is a great way to dig into the meat of the underpinnings of the checks and balances system, for example. I hardly see a modern textbook get half as deep as him on the subject... There is still vast amounts of wisdom to be gleaned from the old philosophers, and I highly disagree with the assertion of the author about it being more like poetry than knowledge.
- Matticus_Rex 8y ago
  It's not a contradiction to love the old philosophers and also think that our society has a schooling problem that teaches too much, too badly, and often on the wrong topics. Of the many people who have studied those philosophers over the years in schools, how many got anything out of it? I'd wager that a 1% guess would be a bit high. The time spent on that for the other 99% is pure waste. But how will we know which are the 1%? Well, we can't get a more blunt selection mechanism than teaching it to everyone, so any other selection mechanism is likely an improvement.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    Could you define "got anything out of it" for me? And what is a universal item that literally everyone will use in their life? We could probably stop general education after grade 3 if that was the goal of education.
forapurpose 8y ago
Why read new philosophy? The old stuff has had the weak ideas weeded out and has a proven track record. "The Yale Report of 1828" -- an influential document written by Jeremiah Day (who was at the time president of Yale), one of his trustees, and a committee of faculty -- distinguished between "the discipline" and "the furniture" of the mind. Mastering a specific body of knowledge -- acquiring "the furniture" -- is of little permanent value in a rapidly changing world. Students who aspire to be leaders in business. medicine, law, government, or academia need "the discipline" of mind -- the ability to adapt to constantly changing circumstances, confront new facts, and find creative ways to solve problems. - Richard C. Levin, President of Yale, in "Top of the Class: The Rise of Asia's Universities", Foreign Affairs, May/June 2010
- Symmetry 8y ago
  I think it's rather the opposite, where modern philosophy benefits from centuries of argument and having had all the weak points removed but they're clearly there for any to see in old philosophy. Reading The Republic recently made me appreciate that there can be such a thing as progress in philosophy.
- nsomaru 8y ago
  Schopenhauer contends that works of genius will scarcely be recognised by the creator's contemporaries simply because understanding genius takes significant intellect, with which the majority of 'living' humanity is not endowed. But over time enough people will exist who can understand a work to raise it to the stature it deserves. This makes time a good filter (but obviously not the only criterion). I tend to agree with Schopenhauer.
igravious 8y ago
I would place this sort of article and the "Why do we need to bother with philosophy at all?" articles within the same pool of thought. That people keep dipping their toes into this murky pool demonstrates to me that one of the things philosophy has spectacularly failed to do is explain itself to itself. Even at this late stage in the game! To address this article directly though: Katja uses the analogy of skateboarding. This is philosophy as craft, philosophy as art. Think of disciplines being divided into the "what" (subject matter) and the "how" (methods). Philosophy cares about thinking correctly. Philosophy cares about what it means to acquire knowledge about something. Philosophy cares about the difference between quantifying and qualifying. Philosophy cares about fallacies. This means that one learns about how concepts works–how to construct a concept, how to take apart a concept–how to trace its history–how to trace its connections and relations over time. Why read old philosophy? (1) Because "how". In philosophy you read clear thinkers from any age in order to learn how to think clearly. (2) Because "what". In philosophy we trace concepts back as far as we can, ideally with an understanding of the culture and language in which they were expressed. Nietzsche and Derrida would have read Aristotle and Plato in the Ancient Greek, do we do that nowadays? How can we be sure we can trust the contemporary translations? Philosophy cannot usefully be compared by way of analogy with any of the sub-disciplines of the sciences or humanities because the domain of philosophy and the methods of philosophy only overlap with those at strategic points.
- j7ake 8y ago
  Nice point. The fundamental questions that we wrestle with are universal across time and geography. Questions such as how we should lead our life and how we should function in a society. The ancients are the best source for understanding these questions and their virtue of having survived through generations is a testament of their value to society. We are often too quick to dismiss the ancients, who end up more often than not being right all along.
weichi 8y ago
Most of the comments here are completely missing the point of the article. The article is not about whether the ideas espoused by old philosophers are worth learning about, or about whether old philosophers are worth reading. The article asks the question of why philosophers prefer to read the original works of old philosophers, instead of reading descriptions of these ideas by authors who have demonstrated competence is explaining philosophical ideas. Which is the way that education is handled in most (all?) scientific fields.
- AbrahamParangi 8y ago
  There are other fields where the former approach is taken over the latter— such as painting, sculpture, literature and other kinds of art.
- ianai 8y ago
  I know I understand best what a philosopher says when I no longer feel as though I were reading and instead feel like s/he is talking to me through the pages. I would liken understanding a technical concept to being able to reproduce what another person did. Understanding a philosopher requires something like building up their worldview from their words. I’d liken it to being able to reproduce what the person thought and did.
- westoncb 8y ago
  Interesting. I was just writing about this yesterday: If the book's ideas were of lasting consequence, it's a near certainty that more clear statements of them have been produced in the intervening years. You may lose some of the aesthetics of the original—but often times the true aesthetic value is debatable (or at least relative), and if it's truly there it still may not be worth losing the increased clarity and further refinement of ideas found in later works.
  - Senderman 8y ago
    I have to disagree with the author of that paragraph. Concepts usually get diluted as they pass from person to person, not more clear. They also mention there is often times a "debatable" aesthetic value - to me, that's all the more reason to at least look at the original work and make your own interpretation.
menexenus 8y ago
This post is misguided on so many levels. It never once occurs to the author that the reason we still study the ancients is because they were right. Like 90% of HN readers, the author tacitly assumes that old == wrong/outmoded/bygone/eclipsed. She thus concludes that the only possible reason to read the ancients is to study their methods (e.g., how Aristotle wrote) and not their actual ideas (e.g., what Aristotle wrote). This is the same mindset that plagues the obsession with "critical thinking" in education policy today. Everyone thinks that to think "critically" means to think in a particular way, and so the best way to teach such a thing is to teach techniques of logic, reasoning, etc. Hence, on this view, ancient philosophy provides merely a source of examples of how to think about problems in a certain way. Of course, this argument goes, those problems themselves are no longer relevant (or at least the solutions that the ancients proposed to solve them are not). But it is still worthwhile to see why they were wrong, and how we have improved since then. Hurrah, "critical" thinking! We are so "advanced" in our critique! This perspective is offensive to philosophers everywhere, and should be offensive to most people in general, if they only knew enough to be offended. It leads quickly to a path of historicism, if not relativism. "Philosophy" comes from the Greek words philos and sophia, meaning "love" and "wisdom" respectively. This tells us two important things. First, pace the author, philosophy is a way of life after all -- it "is about having certain experiences," as she puts it. This is indicated by the idea of "love" that is captured in its name. Loving is a way of being. It is not something that you "do" and "stop" and "start," like a conscious process controlled by our ego. Philosophy, accordingly, is much more than a field of academic inquiry -- it is a way of life, a way of being in the world, properly understood. Second, the object of its love -- sophia -- is important as well. Insofar as it is oriented toward wisdom, philosophy aims at something much higher than the author admits. It aims at knowledge of the whole, not simply the part [0]. Thus, it is impossible to divorce the form of philosophy from its content, as the author here wants to do. In other words, it is not merely the "how" of what Aristotle wrote that is ahistorical, transcendental, and thus still useful for readers today -- it is also the "what" that he wrote as well. We therefore must take seriously the actual content Aristotle wrote, and not simply dismiss it as eclipsed by all the "progress" we have experienced in the intervening years. So what, precisely, did the ancients think? This is the ultimate reason to study ancient philosophy. That reason is this: The ancients saw things more clearly than we see them now. The saw the same world that we did (basic nature has not changed in 2000 years), but it disclosed itself to them in a different way, in a way that was perhaps more original and less encumbered by our modern concepts and dispositions. The ancients saw more clearly many of the fundamental problems that we still grapple with today -- for example, the tension between equality and freedom, between the right and the good, between the community and the individual. (To take examples from political philosophy.) Those problems still abide, but they are covered up in modernity and hard to see. By returning to the ancients, we can recover insight into the precise nature of those tensions, the reasons that they exist, and the reasons that they may be unsolvable. (Contra the modern/Enlightenment conceit that all problems are solvable given enough knowledge.) This doesn't mean embracing a sort of nihilism. Quite the contrary -- it means seeking out a kind of "wisdom" that is presently occluded. For a thought experiment (though this may be hard for atheists to stomach), imagine if the author had suggested that the only reason to still read the Bible today was to understand "how" Jesus acted the way he did, or "how" God did what he did. That would be ridiculous. Of course there is more reason to read the original text than that. And Bible is a very old text indeed. [0] For a discussion of the five different ways of knowing (episteme/techne/phronesis/nous/sophia, or science/art/prudence/intellect/wisdom) see Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book 6, Chapter 7.
debt 8y ago
Philosophy presents a methodology for argument. The arguments made by Plato through Wittgenstein need not be objectively true, rather they serve as simply great arguments of history. Many teachers forget to instill the fact that when we as a species infuse reason and language to make persuasive arguments, we call that philosophy.
- nsomaru 8y ago
  Are you referring to the earlier W. or the later W.?
mkempe 8y ago
Knowledge of ancient philosophy, and of its history through the Enlightenment, is necessary to understand and then deliberately change the nature and present course of civilization.
freeduck 8y ago
I think it comes down to the scientific method. In math and physics new theories are proven extensions or replacements of previous theories. In philosophy you do not have the same kind of proof, there is more room for interpretation. And then of cause there is the beauty and concisenes of the old texts
- runesoerensen 8y ago
  There is much less room for interpretation than most people seem to think. Philosophers often go to fairly extreme lengths to define exactly what they mean (e.g. by carefully describing their use of a word or term to avoid confusion/misinterpretation). Also, scientific methods and processes are based on theories and thoughts developed primarily by philosophers.
planetmcd 8y ago
It is usually on sale since it is older. Sometimes it is still perfectly good.
gkya 8y ago
One reason to read old philosophy is that it is way more approachable. Most of the time, the approachability is an inverse function of the date the philosophical material appeared (understandable given our knowledge and thoughts have grown to be more complex throughout history). If you want to get into philosophy, reading a platonic dialogue (except Timaios and those with the Eleian) or one of the simpler texts of Aristotle (like Poetica) is way more easier than say reading Schophenauer, which is in turn easier than Wittgenstein, which in turn is probably easier than reading Derrida. Also, building up on examples of older pieces of philosophy, you have more tools for approaching the new stuff, because, surprise, it's built on not only the concepts, but examples and myths from and references to the old stuff. And the best thing reading philosophy teaches to the non-academician is how to think with structure and method, avoiding dogma and bias, and embracing scepticism. Reading the dialogues has changed my life entirely because of that.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > One reason to read old philosophy is that it is way more approachable I don't think that's really true in general. Sure, Plato is more approachable than Wittgenstein, but I don't think the comparison works the same with, say, Rawls in place of Wittgenstein.
- imaadrashied 8y ago
  > "And the best thing reading philosophy teaches to the non-academician is how to think with structure and method, avoiding dogma and bias, and embracing scepticism. Reading the dialogues has changed my life entirely because of that." Completely agree - I find my philosophy degree being most useful in what you've laid out and also in empathizing (or at least understanding) with what someone else is saying, especially if that person is bad at communication or cannot express themselves as clearly as they'd like. The older philosophers tended to take the reader on a mental journey / through a mental exercise, and not always a clear one, so you're forced to extrapolate what's important from what seems to be nonsensical stream of consciousness. I come across folks at work all the time who can't really explain what they're saying, but I'm able to extrapolate based off a few key words / phrases. It's a valuable skill for product discovery / design. Caveat here is that one can develop the above skills without philosophy so it's not a requirement to read old philosophers, but rather one path among many.
jl2718 8y ago
Actually it’s kind of interesting that primary code is not studied in CS. Given all the Carmack lore going around, I’ll add that I learned quite a bit of x86asm from his Wolf3D release that could not have come from any book. I guess the value was mostly in trying to figure out why he did something instead of having it explained.
bordercases 8y ago
There are two conditions I would want to see fulfilled by explanations of philosophy that would allow me to outmode reading older philosophers: That the explanation adequately creates distinctions between the terms used by the philosopher and other such terms that are similar but must be distinguished. That the viewpoint of the philosopher is contextualized by the diff between various other viewpoints on the same issue. (Ian Hacking is a philosopher of statistics in science which is very good at this, and he didn't even have to invent statistics.) But oftentimes when the explainer caste of writers seeks to summarize philosophy, they do so in a way that focuses on the conclusions and takes for granted the presuppositions that had to be explored in order to reach those conclusions. When asking someone who has taken the summary to unpack each term in a sort of reverse-analysis, I think that they would have a difficult time because they didn't see the struggle that would have motivated the analysis in the first place. The author of the OP is correct that there is resistance that makes philosophical explanations less fungible than, say physics methods. It's because the terms used by philosophers are not mathematical in a way that can be easily copied. Instead they are the thing that constructs the semantics of terms which are eventually reified by mathematical syntax.
woodandsteel 8y ago
Some interesting points in the article, but it misses the most important reason to read old philosophy. This is that, because unlike science, philosophers today are still arguing over many of the same basic points the earlier ones were. In addition, there is the fact that Western Civilization, including modern democracy, science, technology, and economics, is greatly based on ideas from Greek philosophy, so in reading it you are understanding much about our modern world.
Dowwie 8y ago
Economists continue to revere Adam Smith today..

120 points by diodorus 8y ago

It is interesting to see how we got here. Seeing a long arc of...dismissed ideas, let's say, can give us perspective on the ideas we hold today that are more or less a historical accident and, hopefully, the conceptual room to change them if they don't work. I haven't read the article, but does that about sum it up?

danarmak 8y ago
No, that is quite unlike both the problem the article poses and solution answer is proposes. I would explain them here, but I encourage people to read the article instead.

jeremiahwv 8y ago

> An old work of philosophy does not describe the thing you are meant to be learning about. It was created by the thing you are meant to be learning about, much like watching a video from skater-Aristotle’s GoPro. And the value proposition is that with this high resolution Aristotle’s-eye-view, you can infer the motions. tldr; read old philosophy to learn how to reason, read new physics to learn the results of reasoning.

Raphmedia 8y ago
So, in a metaphorical way, reading old philosophy isn't about reading a legacy code base. It's about reading the git history and project documentation.
- jeremiahwv 8y ago
  Hmm, I'd say more like reading the (original) source code of git itself to learn about Linus and his coding"philosophy" [0] vs reading a modern tutorial about how to use git. [0] I haven't done this so not putting any value prop on this specific example.

infodroid 8y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13348502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13348502 (2017)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

byproxy 8y ago

I liked the skateboarding analogy. I might be skewing it, but it hearkens towards evolution of an art-form, maybe.. 60s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pXYTJgxY30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pXYTJgxY30 70s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKC-XBwQ_pA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKC-XBwQ_pA 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA1a21RTFZI90s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA1a21RTFZI90s 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkDSlB7fy8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkDSlB7fy8I 00s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjSx2Xe9pZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjSx2Xe9pZ8 And the idea of summarizing. In many of those videos you may be able to say "skater does a kickflip", but such summarizing is devoid of context.

SomewhatLikely 8y ago
Interestingly the biggest difference I see are in the board itself (less flat, wider) and the addition of dedicated environments enabling new styles and tricks. That said I wouldn't be surprised if a skateboarder today could take one of those old boards and ride it very differently today.

JasonFruit 8y ago

I'm not sure that I can agree with her even about reading physics. I've found that the earliest works on scientific topics, as well as in math and philosophy, explain things in a way that is comprehensible to someone with no prior knowledge of the subject. That's probably because nobody had prior knowledge when the work was written. I find I'm very often able to learn topics from the originators' writings that I found otherwise intractable. For me, at least, this is true in general. On the other hand, I have a consistent bias toward the past, and this may be a rationalization after the fact.

ahtu123 8y ago
Philosophy is a cumulative field just like programming. If you're only involved with the most modern framework, there is a lot of magic happening underneath the surface. Most of the value to me seems to be in understanding an idea and then reading and understanding someone refute it later. That's basically my whole experience in reading philosophy "chronologically".
- jhbadger 8y ago
  Is it though? Has philosophy actually made any advances in understanding the "great questions" of the meaning of life and what not? Perhaps the reason that people find reading Plato and Aristotle worthwhile is that people are still beating their heads against the same unanswerable questions.
  - navait 8y ago
    What about Analytic philosophy? It's come up with new ways to discuss and illuminate what we are trying to understand, and starts in the late 1800's.
    - jhbadger 8y ago
      That's a fairly broad field though -- there are some analytic philosophers who were/are practically mathematicians, and who certainly helped advance logic and related fields. On the other hand you have analytical people who are working on the "big questions" like ethics where the same questions from ancient times get asked over and over.

scandox 8y ago

> And if philosophy is about having certain experiences, like poetry, but then it would seem to be a kind of entertainment rather than a project to gain knowledge, which is at least not what most philosophers would tell you. I think all this trouble comes from the perverse desire to make Philosophy "valuable" in the way that sciences are perceived to be, rather than recognizing that it is indeed like poetry. Not poetry "a kind of entertainment" - which is a gross reduction...but poetry as a means of direct experience and illumination. Maybe philosophy cannot be "used" to model anything, predict anything or instrumentalize anything...but at the end of time when we have catalogued every atom, it's what we will have left with which to examine the remaining mysteries - which is ultimately a personal journey ... not some kind of utilitarian social achievement.

Numberwang 8y ago
Islam has the ultimate answer to all these personal journey questions. No need for greek philosophy.
- yellowboxtenant 8y ago
  What?
  - Numberwang 8y ago
    I'm just saying, if you can't quantify it, anything goes.
    - scandox 8y ago
      Ultimately anything does indeed "go" intellectually speaking. You can draw an arbitrary line and say "it is fruitless to step over this boundary" but that is just a matter of shrinking the universe down to what you can manage. Which is fine. It does not invalidate the desire some people have to have internal intellectual experiences that do not have to be validated by you.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

DrNuke 8y ago

Quantitative subjects are progressive and new discoveries or technological advancements make past theories obsolete; on the contrary, old philosophy aims at studying the world we are all in from different perspectives and with different methods or goals, so that it is cumulative indeed: past theories go out of fashion never becoming obsolete, still being re-usable in need, at different times or epochs.

jonbarker 8y ago

Old philosophy is fun in the same way old science is fun. Watching someone from thousands of years ago use a process to determine a more accurate or valuable way of thinking about the world, with rudimentary tools, should inspire us to go use the tools we have now better.

willart4food 8y ago

Well, what's your goal? Get your feet wet into Philosophy? See what Philosophy is all about? Do you enjoy Philosophy? If so, you already know the answer (hint: YES). Otherwise Philosophy is not for you and George Pólya is a more suitable reading.

arca_vorago 8y ago

Because too many people these days are the "school is overrated, vocational schools are all we need" types who don't understand the basic value of going through the old philosophers... the title is case in point. To me it seems so obvious that there are numerous reasons that it just seems click-baity. You know what they teach at the elite schools (like Eton for example) that most others don't? The trivium and quadrivium. Together, they form the seven liberal arts, and are a vital parts of the preperation for reading the old philosophers. More than that though, they are vital parts of having a well rounded education where knowledge at a base level in areas almost always elevates your ability to think well in others. It is also extremely important to be able to go back and see how the old philosophers were right and how they were wrong, but also just to see the amount of wisdom they had. I'm a constitutionalist myself, so reading Montesquieu for example is a great way to dig into the meat of the underpinnings of the checks and balances system, for example. I hardly see a modern textbook get half as deep as him on the subject... There is still vast amounts of wisdom to be gleaned from the old philosophers, and I highly disagree with the assertion of the author about it being more like poetry than knowledge.

Matticus_Rex 8y ago
It's not a contradiction to love the old philosophers and also think that our society has a schooling problem that teaches too much, too badly, and often on the wrong topics. Of the many people who have studied those philosophers over the years in schools, how many got anything out of it? I'd wager that a 1% guess would be a bit high. The time spent on that for the other 99% is pure waste. But how will we know which are the 1%? Well, we can't get a more blunt selection mechanism than teaching it to everyone, so any other selection mechanism is likely an improvement.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  Could you define "got anything out of it" for me? And what is a universal item that literally everyone will use in their life? We could probably stop general education after grade 3 if that was the goal of education.

forapurpose 8y ago

Why read new philosophy? The old stuff has had the weak ideas weeded out and has a proven track record. "The Yale Report of 1828" -- an influential document written by Jeremiah Day (who was at the time president of Yale), one of his trustees, and a committee of faculty -- distinguished between "the discipline" and "the furniture" of the mind. Mastering a specific body of knowledge -- acquiring "the furniture" -- is of little permanent value in a rapidly changing world. Students who aspire to be leaders in business. medicine, law, government, or academia need "the discipline" of mind -- the ability to adapt to constantly changing circumstances, confront new facts, and find creative ways to solve problems. - Richard C. Levin, President of Yale, in "Top of the Class: The Rise of Asia's Universities", Foreign Affairs, May/June 2010

Symmetry 8y ago
I think it's rather the opposite, where modern philosophy benefits from centuries of argument and having had all the weak points removed but they're clearly there for any to see in old philosophy. Reading The Republic recently made me appreciate that there can be such a thing as progress in philosophy.
nsomaru 8y ago
Schopenhauer contends that works of genius will scarcely be recognised by the creator's contemporaries simply because understanding genius takes significant intellect, with which the majority of 'living' humanity is not endowed. But over time enough people will exist who can understand a work to raise it to the stature it deserves. This makes time a good filter (but obviously not the only criterion). I tend to agree with Schopenhauer.

igravious 8y ago

I would place this sort of article and the "Why do we need to bother with philosophy at all?" articles within the same pool of thought. That people keep dipping their toes into this murky pool demonstrates to me that one of the things philosophy has spectacularly failed to do is explain itself to itself. Even at this late stage in the game! To address this article directly though: Katja uses the analogy of skateboarding. This is philosophy as craft, philosophy as art. Think of disciplines being divided into the "what" (subject matter) and the "how" (methods). Philosophy cares about thinking correctly. Philosophy cares about what it means to acquire knowledge about something. Philosophy cares about the difference between quantifying and qualifying. Philosophy cares about fallacies. This means that one learns about how concepts works–how to construct a concept, how to take apart a concept–how to trace its history–how to trace its connections and relations over time. Why read old philosophy? (1) Because "how". In philosophy you read clear thinkers from any age in order to learn how to think clearly. (2) Because "what". In philosophy we trace concepts back as far as we can, ideally with an understanding of the culture and language in which they were expressed. Nietzsche and Derrida would have read Aristotle and Plato in the Ancient Greek, do we do that nowadays? How can we be sure we can trust the contemporary translations? Philosophy cannot usefully be compared by way of analogy with any of the sub-disciplines of the sciences or humanities because the domain of philosophy and the methods of philosophy only overlap with those at strategic points.

j7ake 8y ago
Nice point. The fundamental questions that we wrestle with are universal across time and geography. Questions such as how we should lead our life and how we should function in a society. The ancients are the best source for understanding these questions and their virtue of having survived through generations is a testament of their value to society. We are often too quick to dismiss the ancients, who end up more often than not being right all along.

weichi 8y ago

Most of the comments here are completely missing the point of the article. The article is not about whether the ideas espoused by old philosophers are worth learning about, or about whether old philosophers are worth reading. The article asks the question of why philosophers prefer to read the original works of old philosophers, instead of reading descriptions of these ideas by authors who have demonstrated competence is explaining philosophical ideas. Which is the way that education is handled in most (all?) scientific fields.

AbrahamParangi 8y ago
There are other fields where the former approach is taken over the latter— such as painting, sculpture, literature and other kinds of art.
ianai 8y ago
I know I understand best what a philosopher says when I no longer feel as though I were reading and instead feel like s/he is talking to me through the pages. I would liken understanding a technical concept to being able to reproduce what another person did. Understanding a philosopher requires something like building up their worldview from their words. I’d liken it to being able to reproduce what the person thought and did.
westoncb 8y ago
Interesting. I was just writing about this yesterday: If the book's ideas were of lasting consequence, it's a near certainty that more clear statements of them have been produced in the intervening years. You may lose some of the aesthetics of the original—but often times the true aesthetic value is debatable (or at least relative), and if it's truly there it still may not be worth losing the increased clarity and further refinement of ideas found in later works.
- Senderman 8y ago
  I have to disagree with the author of that paragraph. Concepts usually get diluted as they pass from person to person, not more clear. They also mention there is often times a "debatable" aesthetic value - to me, that's all the more reason to at least look at the original work and make your own interpretation.

menexenus 8y ago

This post is misguided on so many levels. It never once occurs to the author that the reason we still study the ancients is because they were right. Like 90% of HN readers, the author tacitly assumes that old == wrong/outmoded/bygone/eclipsed. She thus concludes that the only possible reason to read the ancients is to study their methods (e.g., how Aristotle wrote) and not their actual ideas (e.g., what Aristotle wrote). This is the same mindset that plagues the obsession with "critical thinking" in education policy today. Everyone thinks that to think "critically" means to think in a particular way, and so the best way to teach such a thing is to teach techniques of logic, reasoning, etc. Hence, on this view, ancient philosophy provides merely a source of examples of how to think about problems in a certain way. Of course, this argument goes, those problems themselves are no longer relevant (or at least the solutions that the ancients proposed to solve them are not). But it is still worthwhile to see why they were wrong, and how we have improved since then. Hurrah, "critical" thinking! We are so "advanced" in our critique! This perspective is offensive to philosophers everywhere, and should be offensive to most people in general, if they only knew enough to be offended. It leads quickly to a path of historicism, if not relativism. "Philosophy" comes from the Greek words philos and sophia, meaning "love" and "wisdom" respectively. This tells us two important things. First, pace the author, philosophy is a way of life after all -- it "is about having certain experiences," as she puts it. This is indicated by the idea of "love" that is captured in its name. Loving is a way of being. It is not something that you "do" and "stop" and "start," like a conscious process controlled by our ego. Philosophy, accordingly, is much more than a field of academic inquiry -- it is a way of life, a way of being in the world, properly understood. Second, the object of its love -- sophia -- is important as well. Insofar as it is oriented toward wisdom, philosophy aims at something much higher than the author admits. It aims at knowledge of the whole, not simply the part [0]. Thus, it is impossible to divorce the form of philosophy from its content, as the author here wants to do. In other words, it is not merely the "how" of what Aristotle wrote that is ahistorical, transcendental, and thus still useful for readers today -- it is also the "what" that he wrote as well. We therefore must take seriously the actual content Aristotle wrote, and not simply dismiss it as eclipsed by all the "progress" we have experienced in the intervening years. So what, precisely, did the ancients think? This is the ultimate reason to study ancient philosophy. That reason is this: The ancients saw things more clearly than we see them now. The saw the same world that we did (basic nature has not changed in 2000 years), but it disclosed itself to them in a different way, in a way that was perhaps more original and less encumbered by our modern concepts and dispositions. The ancients saw more clearly many of the fundamental problems that we still grapple with today -- for example, the tension between equality and freedom, between the right and the good, between the community and the individual. (To take examples from political philosophy.) Those problems still abide, but they are covered up in modernity and hard to see. By returning to the ancients, we can recover insight into the precise nature of those tensions, the reasons that they exist, and the reasons that they may be unsolvable. (Contra the modern/Enlightenment conceit that all problems are solvable given enough knowledge.) This doesn't mean embracing a sort of nihilism. Quite the contrary -- it means seeking out a kind of "wisdom" that is presently occluded. For a thought experiment (though this may be hard for atheists to stomach), imagine if the author had suggested that the only reason to still read the Bible today was to understand "how" Jesus acted the way he did, or "how" God did what he did. That would be ridiculous. Of course there is more reason to read the original text than that. And Bible is a very old text indeed. [0] For a discussion of the five different ways of knowing (episteme/techne/phronesis/nous/sophia, or science/art/prudence/intellect/wisdom) see Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book 6, Chapter 7.

debt 8y ago

Philosophy presents a methodology for argument. The arguments made by Plato through Wittgenstein need not be objectively true, rather they serve as simply great arguments of history. Many teachers forget to instill the fact that when we as a species infuse reason and language to make persuasive arguments, we call that philosophy.

nsomaru 8y ago
Are you referring to the earlier W. or the later W.?

mkempe 8y ago

Knowledge of ancient philosophy, and of its history through the Enlightenment, is necessary to understand and then deliberately change the nature and present course of civilization.

freeduck 8y ago

I think it comes down to the scientific method. In math and physics new theories are proven extensions or replacements of previous theories. In philosophy you do not have the same kind of proof, there is more room for interpretation. And then of cause there is the beauty and concisenes of the old texts

runesoerensen 8y ago
There is much less room for interpretation than most people seem to think. Philosophers often go to fairly extreme lengths to define exactly what they mean (e.g. by carefully describing their use of a word or term to avoid confusion/misinterpretation). Also, scientific methods and processes are based on theories and thoughts developed primarily by philosophers.

planetmcd 8y ago

It is usually on sale since it is older. Sometimes it is still perfectly good.

gkya 8y ago

One reason to read old philosophy is that it is way more approachable. Most of the time, the approachability is an inverse function of the date the philosophical material appeared (understandable given our knowledge and thoughts have grown to be more complex throughout history). If you want to get into philosophy, reading a platonic dialogue (except Timaios and those with the Eleian) or one of the simpler texts of Aristotle (like Poetica) is way more easier than say reading Schophenauer, which is in turn easier than Wittgenstein, which in turn is probably easier than reading Derrida. Also, building up on examples of older pieces of philosophy, you have more tools for approaching the new stuff, because, surprise, it's built on not only the concepts, but examples and myths from and references to the old stuff. And the best thing reading philosophy teaches to the non-academician is how to think with structure and method, avoiding dogma and bias, and embracing scepticism. Reading the dialogues has changed my life entirely because of that.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> One reason to read old philosophy is that it is way more approachable I don't think that's really true in general. Sure, Plato is more approachable than Wittgenstein, but I don't think the comparison works the same with, say, Rawls in place of Wittgenstein.
imaadrashied 8y ago
> "And the best thing reading philosophy teaches to the non-academician is how to think with structure and method, avoiding dogma and bias, and embracing scepticism. Reading the dialogues has changed my life entirely because of that." Completely agree - I find my philosophy degree being most useful in what you've laid out and also in empathizing (or at least understanding) with what someone else is saying, especially if that person is bad at communication or cannot express themselves as clearly as they'd like. The older philosophers tended to take the reader on a mental journey / through a mental exercise, and not always a clear one, so you're forced to extrapolate what's important from what seems to be nonsensical stream of consciousness. I come across folks at work all the time who can't really explain what they're saying, but I'm able to extrapolate based off a few key words / phrases. It's a valuable skill for product discovery / design. Caveat here is that one can develop the above skills without philosophy so it's not a requirement to read old philosophers, but rather one path among many.

jl2718 8y ago

Actually it’s kind of interesting that primary code is not studied in CS. Given all the Carmack lore going around, I’ll add that I learned quite a bit of x86asm from his Wolf3D release that could not have come from any book. I guess the value was mostly in trying to figure out why he did something instead of having it explained.

bordercases 8y ago

There are two conditions I would want to see fulfilled by explanations of philosophy that would allow me to outmode reading older philosophers: That the explanation adequately creates distinctions between the terms used by the philosopher and other such terms that are similar but must be distinguished. That the viewpoint of the philosopher is contextualized by the diff between various other viewpoints on the same issue. (Ian Hacking is a philosopher of statistics in science which is very good at this, and he didn't even have to invent statistics.) But oftentimes when the explainer caste of writers seeks to summarize philosophy, they do so in a way that focuses on the conclusions and takes for granted the presuppositions that had to be explored in order to reach those conclusions. When asking someone who has taken the summary to unpack each term in a sort of reverse-analysis, I think that they would have a difficult time because they didn't see the struggle that would have motivated the analysis in the first place. The author of the OP is correct that there is resistance that makes philosophical explanations less fungible than, say physics methods. It's because the terms used by philosophers are not mathematical in a way that can be easily copied. Instead they are the thing that constructs the semantics of terms which are eventually reified by mathematical syntax.

woodandsteel 8y ago

Some interesting points in the article, but it misses the most important reason to read old philosophy. This is that, because unlike science, philosophers today are still arguing over many of the same basic points the earlier ones were. In addition, there is the fact that Western Civilization, including modern democracy, science, technology, and economics, is greatly based on ideas from Greek philosophy, so in reading it you are understanding much about our modern world.

Dowwie 8y ago

Economists continue to revere Adam Smith today..