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There's something to be said for the notion that, in the modern world, anyone who is a "professional philosopher" is just incapable of doing the kind of "here's
by routerl 6y ago
There's something to be said for the notion that, in the modern world, anyone who is a "professional philosopher" is just incapable of doing the kind of "here's how you should live" work that dominates early Western and Asian philosophy. Among modern professions, the only ones that can bear the legal liability of such a line of inquiry are in the health sciences.
In this sense, philosophy professors cannot be doing what Socrates thought he was doing, except while teaching. But, as a rule, teaching is not considered the "productive work" of any professors. The "serious" work of academics is to produce tomes and articles, and to manage their citations like investments.
- staticman2 6y agoI don't understand where you got the idea that people who tell others how to live have legal liability: if that were the case your local preacher would be in serious trouble.
- routerl 6y agoThere's a thin line between cult and religion, and a lot of it has to do with institutional age. Although, yeah, there are a lot of christian, and buddhist for that matter, cults. Often these do end up breaching legal boundaries, as I've described, but more often they merely offend common morality or decency, which also reveals the problem of trying to tell people how to live, outside of accepted avenues (i.e. health sciences and, as you've pointed out, established religions).
- staticman2 6y agoI highly doubt that they are breaching legal boundries. Doctors only have a monopoly on formal medical advise- they do not have a monopoly on "telling people how to live". Nobody thinks their local preacher or philosopher is giving formal medical advise- so there is unlikely to be any liability at all outside of gratuitously bad behavior like telling people to drink bleach.
- routerl 6y agoThere are mental health doctors as well.
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- wombatmobile 6y ago“The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own” -- Frank Zappa
- faeriechangling 6y agoWouldn't this imply that doctors, perticularly those working in mental health, are practicing philosophy on their patients while not being experts in it?
- smhost 6y agothe wording of your parent comment is ambiguous (maybe on purpose), but the early (western) philosophers weren't so concerned with telling people how to live than they were with raising the question of what it means to lead a good life, which are two different things. mental health professionals today are more concerned with the former than they are with the latter. the ones who do practice the latter are very marginalized in the united states (i heard it's less the case in europe), but they do really interesting political work that might or might not start a flame war if i talk about it here so i won't.
- watwut 6y agoSocrates got executed. Socrates was framed as teacher anyway. You can give advice on how to live, many people do. There are whole booshelves of self-help advice which is literally giving advice on how to live.
- prionassembly 6y agoBut that's really a problem with academia, not philosophy per se? I'm not sure e.g. academic engineers working in materials science are ready to just take the place of an engineer in a construction site. (Then, people like Norvig are a counter-example to this claim. But positions created in MAGFA for top academics like Norvig, Varian, etc. will always have a tailor-made character and defer to celebrity status.)