Glibly casting off an entire intellectual tradition as a case of the emperor having no clothes is, to me, a really tragic dismissal of an electrifying body of i

Glibly casting off an entire intellectual tradition as a case of the emperor having no clothes is, to me, a really tragic dismissal of an electrifying body of ideas. Where do you get the impression that I'm merely being glib? I'm not being put off by the language. I can make my way through that (though I do a lot better in English translations than the original French). But whenever I make the effort, I find that "there is no there there". And I have the effort on a number of occasions because someone I respected swore that a particular work was particularly important. But the more I did, the more I found myself agreeing with Paul Graham in http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html. And I've found the hard way that whenever there is a topic of interest that both philosophy and science touch on, I always prefer to read what science has to say about it. My reasoning is different than his. Whenever we think of something, our odds of being on the right path are low. We need feedback to steer by. And "applicability" makes feedback much clearer than any other standard that I can think of.