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I argue that studying the history of philosophy is philosophically unhelpful

94 points by dynm 4y ago

raxxorraxor 4y ago
I don't think it is completely useless, but I hate to build any argument in classical philosophy. No, I do not want to start my argument with Aristoteles and follow the whole chain until I can make a case at some point. Aristoteles is a giant that certainly founded a lot of scientific fields, but the basis of an argument is not improved with a whole theoretical foundation that is artificially attached to the point. I believe the affliction is that because your philosophical case needs to be argued, it is expected to have a foundation in some philosophical root. With allegedly gives it more weight than just another thought. It is sensible to read other philosophers I guess, but I think people should be encouraged to argue on their own.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  FYI it is spelled "Aristotle" in English
- SamBam 4y ago
  I agree. My father was a historian and philosopher, and I used to love arguing philosophy as a teen at the dinner table. This was because I hadn't read anything yet, and so was approaching with an entirely naive and empty mind. I then studied a fair bit of philosophy at university, and while I could certainly appreciate the value of actually reading many great thinkers, the idea of spending my life studying them was absurd to me. I could think of nothing more horrifying than being proud to say that someone was one of the world's "top Heidegger scholars." (I recall the movie Little Miss Sunshine where a character was obsessed about his rival being only the "second" highest regarded Proust scholar.) Writing book after book about someone else's philosophy seemed utterly pointless. To (ironically) quote Seneca: "'Hoc Zenon dixit': tu quid?" What do you have to say?
  - greenhearth 4y ago
    Hey, that's quite an impressive piece of autobiography, but some people actually like interpreting great writers and make a life out of it.
- WHA8m 4y ago
  > It is sensible to read other philosophers I guess, but I think people should be encouraged to argue on their own. With your first part of the sentence you already put your second statement in a nuanced context. But I'd argue that "it is sensible" puts too little weight on this side of the argument. We've all been there: You're new to a field and climb the Dunning Kruger Graph. At some point you're standing on the first hill and start "argue on [your] own". Most things have already been said and argued. And most probably so by people more knowledgable and intelligent that me and you. And exactly those arguments are the 'history of philosophy'. We're probably all better off if we learn to move within this tightly knit web of knowledge and be very cautious and conscious every time we leave those trails and 'go on our own'. That being said, it is mandatory to view the history of philosophy not as the whole ball park but jump over the fence occasionally. Whether we hurt ourself by doing so is almost certainly dependent on how comfortable we are with what has been said and argued before, eg. history of philosophy.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    Okay, let's consider the things that have been said and argued. I'd say that in this case for most people it is not valuable to read the history of the argument but rather an up to date summary of it - the originally made argument is worth reading if and only if it's the best way to make it, no parts of it have been refuted and no one has found a way to state the same thing better. Instead of listening to what, for example, Kant had to say originally, the proper resource should be a "steelman Kantian" position which omits anything that has valid refutations, which changes anything which has been disputed because of some nuance by integrating whatever fixes and corrections can be made as a result of the counter-counter-arguments, and prepare a coherent position which is solid even in the face of all the counterarguments which have been said in the centuries afterwards, a "what would Kant say after reading every Kant-influenced philosopher" statement. If some argument made by Aristotle still stands, then readers of philosophy should not be offered the counterarguments without an immediate reference to the counter-counter-arguments that dismiss them. And if some argument made by Aristotle is not perfect, then readers of philosophy should not be presented with that argument without the counterarguments; or (as I said above) in a corrected and augmented form, dismissing and ignoring the flawed original - the original is relevant only as a historical footnote of how the truth was found, but is not really relevant to the truth itself. A product of philosophy should be actual conclusions - okay, out of all the Aristotle's works, which parts are considered settled truth, and which parts are part of an ongoing debate? And if so, what is the current, state of art position in that debate, what are the best irreconcilable arguments on both sides?
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > It is sensible to read other philosophers I guess, but I think people should be encouraged to argue on their own. You should be "arguing your own" much of the time you're reading philosophy, no matter how old it is. It's one of the Three Readings (which can be done all at once, not necessarily in three literal separate passes through the book, if you're a good reader and well-matched to the material you're reading) of Adler's How to Read a Book. You haven't fully engaged with a book—especially a book of philosophy—until you've done it.
ajkjk 4y ago
This has always seemed kinda obvious? But I guess... maybe not to professional philosophers? In college there was this clique of philosophy students who were studying all this ancient thought but were (imo) strangely averse to weighing in on the problems of modernity. Like what they were interested in was 'real' philosophy. Never seemed right to me. That stuff is already baked into the way we think -- that's why it was important back then! Today we can barely perceive what it's like to _not_ think with it; it's "in the water supply", as it were. The interesting philosophy is in the new ideas that aren't settled yet.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  The wisdom of the ancients is timeless. To think that we've moved past that is a mistake. The analytical schools of 20th century philosophy made great strides in solving the problems of language and epistemology. But the fundamental underlying "human" issues that Socrates and Aristotle figured out are just as relevant today as 2000 years ago.
  - ajkjk 4y ago
    "The wisdom of the ancients is timeless." Everyone says this and I don't believe it. Wise people existed then and wise people exist now. The new wise people's wisdom is much more relevant.
    - atypicaluser 4y ago
      > Wise people existed then and wise people exist now. The new wise people's wisdom is much more relevant. Without discussing politics or political topics (e.g. the benefits of diversity in a group of people,) can you give examples of this 'much more relevant' wisdom of today? For example, Aristotle taught metaphysics and aspirational ethics, amongst other topics--can you give examples of today's 'much more relevant' wisdoms that are more relevant than what he had to say? Examples that leave no question as to how much more relevant or, perhaps, more wise those (new vs old) wisdoms are? Thanks.
    - ramesh31 4y ago
tgv 4y ago
So it's just that studying what Aristotle said about (most of) empirical knowledge is useless. It's not terribly productive, I agree, but then again, so is studying what Derrida has said about it. If you want to know about empirical sciences, it's best to study the subject itself.
jovial_cavalier 4y ago
If philosophy is useful (which it may not be), then studying the history of philosophy is useful. This is like saying "Why bother studying Newton? He didn't even know about relativity!" You study Newton because it's a simple model and motivates what comes after.
- sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  The alternative to Philosophy is The Matrix (flawless global alienation). Our thinking is unconsciously molded by philosophers that died hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
  - WHA8m 4y ago
    This is not an alternative to philosophy. This is philosophy. I'm afraid you have not escaped yet, sir.
    - sebastianconcpt 4y ago
      Oh, precisely, I'd never argue that we can escape it. Philosophy is the vehicle we have to make our consciousness able to navigate reality. A point that I'd try to put some light on, is that, among many dangers, we can get lost in false worldviews that trap our consciousness in apparently true realities that are ultimately false by a delicate house of cards/lies/mistakes. The Matrix, or more appropriately, Plato's Cave, made that point infinitely better than I could ever do.
  - im3w1l 4y ago
    You might argue that getting this molding "for free" as it were, is exactly the reason we don't need to study them.
    - sebastianconcpt 4y ago
      That won't work in your best interest. Would be like being a citizen of The Matrix, seeing something suspicious that only agents can do, and opting for staying willfully ignorant about it, or even boycott its investigation. That's exactly what the people in Plato's Cave did. How ironic is that?
sebastianconcpt 4y ago
I think Olavo de Carvalho would agree. Is not completely useless but is kind of like 98% useless.
mikrl 4y ago
The history of philosophy, sure. The history of philosophers, I would disagree. I once saw someone post online that the best way to get into someone’s thought was to read a biography of them. After all, their thought is a reflection of them and the material conditions in which they lived. Their aspirations, tribulations and the potential they saw in a world they wanted to interpret. Sue Prideaux has a good one on Nietzsche and reading about his education really sets the scene for BGE and Zarathustra, which often confused me before. His father’s early death ‘doomed him’ into the mindset that led to his maniacal study of the will to power, and possibly his own early demise. Knowing about Nietzsche’s life makes me appreciate what he was getting at, which is useful if you’re not used to his flowery style. It helped me identify more with him, and against him. I know more of what kind of man he was, and that I am very different.
terkozz 4y ago
I couldn't disagree more. By studying history of philosophy you learn a lot about the process itself, no matter if the conclusions might seem irrelevant or outdated by the current standard enforced by new contributions. After all, I find it quite naive you will not make the very same mistakes that your predecessor did, haven't you been somewhat cognizant of their work and perspective.
- Maursault 4y ago
  This is exactly right and doing so would require each subsequent generation of philosophers to reinvent the wheel Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. But history is not philosophy, so the implicit premise, which boils down to, "history is not necessary to philosophy," is wrong-headed, but it is also assuming the conclusion, which is question begging. History is important to history, understanding how events in the past caused things to be the way they are today. Further, the history of philosophy is not identical to the philosophy in history just as the history of technology is not itself technology. When studying Ancient Philosophy one is not studying the history of ancient philosophy, but the ancient philosophy itself. Conversely, studying history of philosophy is not philosophical study, it is instead studying history, focusing on when and who said in what circumstances, and is not primarily concerned with understanding what was said.
  - ThatGeoGuy 4y ago
    This argument and the point you're saying is "exactly right" is literally covered in the text of the paper. Read page 9 in the PDF again - the author goes to good lengths to grapple with this argument and why it is not correct. In particular: In order to repeat the mistakes of a famous philosopher, one must first share their beliefs. Now, few people are born with any degree of credence in the far-fetched propositions embraced by many philosophers. In general, these kinds of beliefs have to be acquired; and the only way of acquiring them is to study these authors. It seems that if we wanted to avoid acquir- ing false beliefs that we would never arrive at except by reading a particu- lar author, the best thing by far we could do is to avoid reading that author.
spicyusername 4y ago
Pretty much everything pre-enlightenment is really smart sounding nonsense. Understanding pre-enlightenment philosophy is mostly just useful as historical or cultural context for how intellectual people thought at the time, or for understanding the path human civilization took to knowing what we know today. Everything after the enlightenment, but before modern biology / neuroscience / physics, is also really smart sounding nonsense, but is getting closer to something approximating "reality". Once we get to the naturalist philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries (many of whom are biologists, physicists, or neuroscientists by training), we start getting some real meat.
- pell 4y ago
  > Pretty much everything pre-englightenment is really smart sounding nonsense. Understanding it is mostly just useful as historical or anthropological context for how intellectual people thought at the time. Plato's critique of democracy was written long before the period of enlightenment. It stands on its own to this day. There are countless other examples of philosophical works that hold up to scrutiny even when viewed through an analytical lens.
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- 3pt14159 4y ago
  Real meat, with a philosophical hole right at the base of it that cannot be waived away. At some point somewhere something has to be taken by faith. Ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning is one that most modern people take. The existence of God is a different option. Brains in vats and all that.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    > At some point somewhere something has to be taken by faith. Ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning is one that most modern people take. Which, if you're building your philosophy in view of modern biological and neurological knowledge, is not a particularly defensible position.
prego_xo 4y ago
Should we not study old scientists because they had no idea about the concepts we have found recently? Should we no longer study old politics because their climate was different? Should old tactics be disregarded because they used different, weaker weapons than us? Should old art be discarded because they used older theories and didn't understand perspective like we do? No.
- r3trohack3r 4y ago
  To steel man this, in every science class I’ve taken, we read text books. They covered a massive amount of material from an innumerable number of thinkers. In every philosophy class I’ve taken, we read individual books by individual thinkers. Perhaps everyone reading Plato first hand isn’t necessary? The middle ground is probably currant books - that track the evolution of thinking over time. My favorite example is From Atomos to Atom. I’ve never seen anything like that in a science class.
  - davidivadavid 4y ago
    The term "covered" does a lot of work here. The thing with science is that it's generally considered more practical than philosophy, and people are content with learning a bunch of pre-packaged recipes to solve pre-packaged problems (use F = ma to solve that inclined plane problem). But try asking the average student what F = ma actually means a bit deeper than just how they would apply it and you'll see how much the topic is "covered." Consider that the concepts of force and mass themselves are mostly left unexplained. Or that people have no idea what "energy" is. They're models of reality that are not taught as such, because we're happy with teaching future engineers a bunch of recipes to learn by rote as long as they "work". So I remain unconvinced of the proposition that philosophy should be taught the same way. In that respect it's closer to science and the inherent doubt that comes with the scientific method — even though, similarly, there's a lot of dogmatic "philosophy" (think Marxism).
    - r3trohack3r 4y ago
      I think you missed the whole “currents” bit. I’d put reading Plato on par with reading The Skeptical Chymist or John Dalton’s Chemical Philosophy. I think it’s a miss primary sources like that are absent from most undergraduate degrees in science - they reveal a lot about what science really is. But building an entire undergraduate curriculum on nothing but those primary sources? There’s just too much material and so many of those constructs have failed to accurately describe reality. To use Marxism as an example, Main Currents of Marxism is probably on par with From Atomos to Atom. Both Science and Philosophy could benefit from teaching from currents vs. primary sources (philosophy) and compilations of “facts” (science).
hprotagonist 4y ago
Hegel would've agreed, anyway. ... whoops.
pron 4y ago
I don't understand the island analogy. While the external world is disjoint from the island, our world -- with its scientific knowledge of contemporary physics and biology and astronomy and psychology, mathematics and logic and, of course, the internet -- is a product of our history. In other words, while it's true that history didn't have the internet, it is also the reason that we do. People like Frege and Russell made certain choices in the design of formal logic because they were influenced by Leibniz, who, in turn, arranged things in a certain way because he was influenced by Aristotle. If you don't know what Aristotle said, it's hard to understand Leibniz, and if you don't know Leibniz, it's hard to understand Frege and Russell.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Well said. One of the greatest travesties in popular philosophy is the tendency among otherwise intelligent, well-read people to think that they can “get” philosophy by just reading whatever small slice addresses some particular fancy. You can learn a great deal that way, but it fundamentally strips the historical dimension away. And philosophy’s greatest ideas are developed over the order of centuries.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The island analogy's misleading crap. A couple tweaks to make it closer to reality (say, if the islanders had been working for millennia and we only cared about a handful of their very best works from that entire time span—instantly less crazy with just that one tweak, no?) and it falls apart. There's almost a hint of an interesting line of argument, buried somewhere in there, but the way it's presented isn't good and is the precise opposite of convincing, on close inspection. Relying heavily on really bad analogies seems to be a theme in the paper, reading on. There's some hilariously-bad question-begging-laundered-through-analogy in the bit about body-building advice / reasons-to-study-historical-philosophy. Leading with emphasizing the importance of correctness is also pretty silly when we spend much of a student's training for most other fields teaching them one useful lie or another. That philosophy's lies happen to often come from very old books hardly seems material. Clearly, scaffolding with outright known lies is the norm, so "much of the material is probably wrong" isn't, per se, much of an attack. I don't think the paper's conclusion's even necessarily wrong (and by calling for some vague "less" focus on the history of philosophy, it defies firm refutation anyway) and some of it does make interesting points, but damn, it's got some seriously off-putting flaws. I especially think it fails to make a strong case against such study as training for philosophers. But maybe there are far more doctors of philosophy out there who spend their careers analyzing historical philosophy, than would be optimal. That seems plausible, but also doesn't seem to be the focus of the paper.
ycombinete 4y ago
I haven’t read this paper, but instinctively flinch at any kind of dismissal of the past. I would think this comes down to how we define philosophy. On scientific matters sure Aristotle likely has little to offer; but human nature has not changed at all since Plato, or Siddhartha we’re born. After saying the following I feel that it would be hard for them to argue their point very strongly. So I’m definitely going to read the paper: To be perfectly clear: my claim is not that we should not be doing history of philosophy. There are all kinds of reasons why reading and talking about the Critique of Pure Reason or the Republic are worthwhile: studying these seminal texts is an inherently interesting intellectual pursuit; reading them is often tremendously enjoyable; and familiarity with these texts can be very valuable to intellectual historians for the insights into culture, knowledge and morality they may contain. There are thus many excellent reasons to engage with the history of philosophy. Gaining traction on the aforementioned philosophical problems, however, is not one of them. This means that I am not arguing against historians of philosophy and what they do, but against what could be called philosophical historicists, that is, those who seem to think that at least one good method of thinking about knowledge or justice is to study what historical authors have written about knowledge and justice a long time ago. This, I argue, is a mistake.
- tz18 4y ago
  how about you read the paper?
  - ycombinete 4y ago
    There's a sentence in my comment where I literally say, "I'm definitely going to read the paper."
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  Do you believe someone needs to understand the history of math to effectively use math? I don't think anyone is claiming historical context isn't helpful, but these are tools for thinking. This doesn't go anywhere near the 'history repeating itself' mantra. The only way it could get close to that is for someone who is attempting to discover new math (or philosophy), but that's a very small subset of those who benefit from these tools.
ouid 4y ago
its certainly troublingly quadratic
- JadeNB 4y ago
  In what sense?
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  - ouid 4y ago
    Strictly speaking this is a joke, but here is my explanation anyway. If new philosophy requires the study of philosophy, the study of philosophy requires the study of the history of philosophy, and the history of philosophy is increasing linearly with time, so the amount of time required to produce an additional philosophy is proportional the amount of philosophy that exists. The amount of tie to produce X philosophy then is proportional to X^2.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      In practice, the set of historical philisophical works considered vital doesn't grow quickly, and tends to gradually discard works even as it gradually picks up others. Part of the trouble with this paper is that it acts like the only qualities that keep works in the common set that most or all philosophers will study, is that they're old and that they're influential. As if the set is not heavily narrowed by other criteria, including quality of the writing and arguments, and that they've been widely observed to be improving to study over hundreds of years. Works that are simply wrong and have no other redeeming qualities tend to be discarded except by specialists deep-diving into a niche, even if they were very influential. I don't think most philosophers read much more than excerpts of a handful of famous arguments or passages from the whole centuries-long scholastic movement, for instance, unless they're very specifically Christian religious philosophers or apologists. Or the Neo-platonists, et c., et c. The ones that stick around do so because they are repeatedly, generation after generation, found to be useful, having endured through the aforementioned narrowing process while dozens or hundreds of once-vital works have fallen into obscurity.
DharmaPolice 4y ago
While I share a loathing for everything having to be a study of what someone else said a long time ago, I think it's mainly in the areas where we've not made much definite progress that this phenomenon happens most. Only historians bother with Aristotle's physics today because we have something definitively superior that we can prove is more correct than his model. Same for biology (arguably his key area of interest). But when it comes to ethics I don't think we can say the same thing. I'm not even sure for some areas of politics. When I read Thomas Hobbes Leviathan I found myself thinking "Wow, at least no thinking person will ever defend that philosophy again" and then a couple of decades later Steven Pinker did just that. We're really not making much progress in the humanities. I'd like to think we're done (intellectually speaking) with chattel slavery as a concept but who knows. Grant and Sherman made bigger contributions to that argument than a whole swathe of philosophers either way.
freddealmeida 4y ago
I found learning the history of philosophy tied to the history of science was wonderful in helping understand more complex thought. In much the same way as Hume's missing blue or the ontologies of other great minds. I couldn't imagine learning another way but then maybe that is the point.
denton-scratch 4y ago
I didn't get far with this. All philosophy is the history of philosophy, in the sense that you're studying the ideas someone had in the past, whether that's the recent past or the distant past. The only philosophy that isn't history of philosophy is done by a handful of academics, and you can bet they all had a solid grounding in the history of philosophy. I had to do a course on presocratic Greek philosophers. I couldn't understand why we had to study the ideas of these people whose ideas were wrong, wrong, wrong - even barmy. But all the interesting Greek philosophers knew and were influenced by the presocratics; Plato, Aristotle, the sceptics, the stoics. And so-called "modern" philosophers all studied these later Greeks. It's impossible to engage with contemporary philosophy without studying the moderns, and studying the classical Greek philosophers makes it a lot easier to understand the moderns. I'm glad the author mentioned Wittgenstein as a "historical" philosopher to whom attention shouldn't be paid. I don't know how a contemporary philosopher is supposed to approach the philosophy of language and logic without having worked through Wittgenstein and Ayer.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  To be fair to the paper, the author merely calls for "less" attention paid to historical philosophy, not none. You didn't miss much by not continuing. The paper's... rough.
- hnfong 4y ago
  You're basically saying "that's the way things work now, and therefore it is right". In a sense if you define "philosophy" as "whatever is actually happening in philosophy in academia today", then your argument is tautologically correct. I think the author (and incidentally, I, too) has a different definition of philosophy, which, in addition to the activities you describe, also includes people coming up with original ideas without studying all those ancient texts.
im3w1l 4y ago
Humanity has growing approximately exponentially in numbers. Due to the inherent nature of the exponential process it means that a fixed percentage of all people that have ever lived are still alive. This is turn means that the proportional of historical writing to contemporary writing is approximately fixed. With exponential growth, remembering everything or at least everything significant is sort-of viable. But if humanity is about to stabilize in numbers, which would be desirable, at least until we can expand our society beyond Earth, then it means that the proportion of history to contemporary will steadily increase, and a sort of willful amnesia will become more important. With fixed resources we will have a fixed ability to remember and most pick and choose. And that's why we have to colonize space. To post-pone amnesia.
drb493 4y ago
If one's goal is a revolution of thought, than perhaps being immersed in the past process is ultimately constraining. Deference to past authority is an easier road to follow than direct inquiry into one's own experiences. If human society has been plagued throughout its existence by the same innumerable problems then why do we continue on with this current line of reasoning? I don't have any answers, but thank you for posting this thought provoking piece.
greenhearth 4y ago
The irony is that the author just uses an "end of history" argument, which has been around since German pessimism over a century ago.
scythe 4y ago
huetius 4y ago
This is a curious paper, as it seems to come at a time when the philosophical postulate of meliorism has been problematized precisely by the trajectory of historical development, which had previously its own criteria of success. It might interest the author to know that this was basically the prediction of Vico, one of the most valuable (and misunderstood) philosophers of the not-so-distant past.
ogurechny 4y ago
The article doesn't seem to be posted on 1st of April, so I have to conclude that the author does not understand philosophy at all, and swims happily and carelessly in doctrinarianism about “scientific knowledge” instead. A philosopher should be able to see that the linear time and overlaying “progress” is just a transfer of educational imaginary model of physical experiment onto the whole world, and that any thought, no matter what it source is, can only exist in the present moment in someone's head. And even in that primitive linear model, every bit of “knowledge” we have is inherited from those horrible, horrible idiots from the past anyway. It would be funny to read something like that for the first time, but the author doesn't seem to know that the same approach have been proclaimed (and subsequently ridiculed) for at least 200 years. The irony of ignoring history! Also, it is mentioned that studying other sciences doesn't work the same way. Of course it doesn't, as for quite some time students haven't been sharing any state of mind with people whose portraits hang on the walls. They don't even share more than required between themselves, because they are given instant noodle type understanding with famous scientists simply printed on the packaging that results in everything, including theory, becoming applied, and never-ending compartmentalization.
- hnfong 4y ago
  > every bit of “knowledge” we have is inherited from those horrible, horrible idiots from the past anyway. That's only true if you disregard all empirical observations you made yourself while living in this world, and relied 100% on things other people tell you. > It would be funny to read something like that for the first time, but the author doesn't seem to know that the same approach have been proclaimed (and subsequently ridiculed) for at least 200 years. The irony of ignoring history! The fact that some idea has been ridiculed for 200 years doesn't make it wrong. I can entertain the idea that it's pretty good evidence that it's funny though. (Btw, I also find your strawman arguments and flippant attitude to be a bit in poor taste.)
  - ogurechny 4y ago
    You are almost completely what other people have told you, directly or indirectly. You wouldn't even be able to say “empirical observations” without someone teaching you the language, for starters. The tendency to imagine “individual” as a spherical Omnipotent Observer in a vacuum comes from the manner textbook explanations of imaginary model interactions are automatically spread onto the whole world, and from unquestionable individualism affecting most of the reasoning of current era, and so on. It is simply ignorant to present the stitched corpses of vulgar materialism and its company as something “modern” (with a facelift to switch from “mechanistic” to “robotistic” model because engines stopped being cool for the public, computers are cool today). Ignorance can be ridiculed. Dostoevsky smirked at people making lecterns for Vogt, Moleschott, and Buchner, Goethe had fun with dialogues in Faust's study, but hey! We can safely skip all of that if we decide to call it “outdated”!
more_corn 4y ago
This argument has already been made. You’d know it and the potential responses to it if you’d studied the history of philosophy. Just kidding. I haven’t seen it made before. I’m just saying so to present the reason I appreciate studding the history of philosophy. I hate thinking I’ve had a novel idea only to find someone has already had it and furthermore three others have replied.
dredmorbius 4y ago
My first though seeing this was that Peter Adamson, creator of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast and book series should respond. He has: Re. Hanno Sauer's article denying the value of the history of philosophy: it turns out he follows me on Twitter, from which I infer that he was just kidding. <https://nitter.kavin.rocks/HistPhilosophy/status/1573235305305571330 https://nitter.kavin.rocks/HistPhilosophy/status/15732353053...> I'm inclined to think that this is all the response that's required. (I do find several other comments on this thread on point, notably those by pron <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008453>, terkozz <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008248>, and ougerechny <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010884>)
- marshray 4y ago
  I love a good reductio ad twitterati argument.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    So long as we're stanning Peter, his regret on missing a pun opportunity: <https://nitter.kavin.rocks/HistPhilosophy/status/1568957197807226882#m https://nitter.kavin.rocks/HistPhilosophy/status/15689571978...>
smeagull 4y ago
The condition of man hasn't fundamentally changed in the past 5000 years. "[...] we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery – from the time of the war of Secession, for example, until the present moment when one chooses between the M.R.P. [Mouvement Republicain Poputaire] and the Communists." ~ Jean-Paul Sartre.
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
  > Progress implies amelioration Progress NOW implies amelioration. Before the XVI century it only meant you were going from A to B. It's a new theology.
- skybrian 4y ago
  That seems like a crazy thing to say, given that social and material conditions have changed so much. I guess you could say it hasn't fundamentally changed if you ignore everything that's changed as not fundamental, but that's tautological.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
I dove into the history of “harmony” in philosophy and it was fascinating. Also somewhat disturbing, because the topic seems “out there” for a modern philosophy dept, despite the connections to CS, neuroscience, psychology, physics, economics, etc https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2022.01.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2022.01.001 “Harmony in Design: A Synthesis of Literature from Classical Philosophy, the Sciences, Economics, and Design”
keithnz 4y ago
He doesn't seem to show anywhere that it is "philosophically unhelpful". I do think philosophical ideas can be taught with zero historical perspective, but it is a whole extra step to say studying the history of philosophy is unhelpful philosophically. That would have to be demonstrated.
conformist 4y ago
This paper makes some excellent points, at least directionally - surely the important historical arguments will be representable in a more polished, accessible and condensed form today. And in cases where they aren't perhaps that's a good filter in its own right? It appears like, maybe vis a vis physical sciences philosophy as an academic discipline has not got quite such a prevalent tradition in producing "tidied up" textbooks?
- forgetfreeman 4y ago
  I don't know the answer here but I am instantly skeptical whenever the notion is put forward that some complex topic or idea is inherently reduceable.
  - solveit 4y ago
    I am instantly skeptical that the first thinker to understand some complex topic produced a book crisply detailing the irreducible core of the idea rather than spending six hundred pages flailing around trying to gesture at the good stuff they only vaguely see and don't have the vocabulary to express. First iterations are rarely good and never sleek.
    - forgetfreeman 4y ago
      Maybe. But pop science, pop psychology, and webMD are all things. None of these speak particularly well to the idea that complexity reduces cleanly, or that anything useful is produced by the attempt.
- masswerk 4y ago
  Mind that any such textbook (of which there are many) would be just yet another interpretation, reflecting mostly the times it was written in.
Nomentatus 4y ago
What is now called and taught as the history of philosophy is not very useful because it's not the actual history of philosophy, academic or otherwise. You learn mostly what little of say, 19th century philosophy we now have respect for regardless of whether that century even knew that thinker was alive. The context, mostly of "greats" that we now think are horse dung, is never given. Knowing how thinkers (and the crowds that love them) went badly wrong would be useful, but is rarely taught. Both the now-highly thought of and then-highly-thought-of are worth some attention.
alasr 4y ago
IMO studying the history of any subject, you're interested in, is really useful as it helps understanding why things are the way they're in the present. Now, regarding the subject of the 'history of philosophy', what are the contents and how they're structured is a different kind of problem. And, unfortunately, it's not limited to the 'history of philosophy' as we face similar kind of challenge when studying other important subjects. This challenge can't be avoided all the times but needs a systematic approach; otherwise, one might easily commit the (proverbial) mistake of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".
eointierney 4y ago
I argue that the study of the story of thought is philosophy.
deleted 4y ago
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jmull 4y ago
> it does not seem unreasonable to hope that people have learned at least something from the past I wonder how that could have happened? I don’t think any of this is serious. The guy is just trolling.
crazygringo 4y ago
I'm not going to take it as far as the author, but I will say that philosophy does seem to be particularly unique in organizing its entire subject matter essentially historically by thinker and around original texts, as opposed to the kind of modern taxonomy and conceptual vocabulary employed not just in other sciences, but even social sciences. Philosophers throw around author-turned-into-adjective terms like Kantian, Hegelian, Aristotelian, Humean, Hobbesian, Benthamite, and so forth as frustratingly vague substitutions for the actual ideas meant. (Kant wrote a lot, which part are you referring to?) Intro biology and political science textbooks are all organized similarly with more or less the same content, while different intro philosophy textbooks often seem like they're covering different fields. (E.g. one author believes the main questions in philosophy are metaphysics and logic, while another gives most space to ethics and religion.) Why? Because there is no widely agreed-upon of what the really important issues in philosophy even are. (Just look at continental vs. analytic philosophy.) So in the absence of any kind of consensus organization/taxonomy and terminology to go with that, it all just reverts to... original texts and author surnames. It's organized by history. (And even when modern thinkers try to come up with conceptual-sounding names, it turns into a confusing mess. Try to remember which one is "contractualism" and which one is "contractarianism". Or is there a difference between "morals" and "ethics"? Or why do some writers call it "utilitarianism" while others call it "consequentialism"? When you say "resentment", which author's usage of "ressentiment" are you actually referring to? I usually know the answers to these questions, but they sure are confusing when you're learning it as an undergrad. It's actually clearer if you say "Hobbesian" rather than "contractarian", or "Nietszchean" so I can understand which type of "resentment".) Learning the history of philosophy is helpful... but it does seem somewhat strange that while you can learn math or biology without needing to learn the history or ever read a single "original historical text"... you can't learn philosophy without learning its history. And so that certainly leads to the question... should you be able to? Would that improve the study of philosophy?
- ckosidows 4y ago
  Just curious, as I'm not a philosopher, but why _can't_ you learn philosophy without learning its history?
nmaley 4y ago
I studied philosophy to postgraduate level before having to go out and get a real job. Now in late middle age, I am nearly recovered to the point where I have to agree with the author. I now understand that most philosophy, of ANY age or period, including the present, is useless. But there are counterexamples. Hume is still worth reading, on almost any subject. Many of his ideas have not aged at all. Reason as the slave of the passions, is vs ought, compatibilism on free will all come to mind, as do his deep insights on the connections between ideas (Resemblance, Contiguity, cause and effect). These positions are still held by scientifically literate people, and some of them, like the idea of connections between ideas, I have have actually found useful as guidelines for research in AI. And that's without mentioning his influence on political philosophy, which was profound. Hume's notion of the social contract continues to shape political debate in ways not many people realise.
motohagiography 4y ago
"This is an object. Our modern authorities admit they can't explain it. Could it be a power struggle? Ancient critical theorists say 'yes.'" That's the level of rigor in the paper and the in the view of history as progress. A house without a foundation is still a house, and an indistinguishable representation from one that has one, but it's durability and coherence over time that makes one real and the other a representation. I really don't think the author is the first to try throwing out the past, and there were some odd setups in the essay where he expected the "mighty dead" to make a case for themselves today, instead of it being on him to make the case for what he has to improve on them. The underlying view of history as progress and his implied materialist view of epistemic value, I think, isn't new. If you substitute ideology for philosophy, then iterate ideological theorems from it, you can produce what are essentially holographic projections of consistent ideas that seem to encompass everything, and the easiest ones are structured like the Ancient Aliens reference above. The genius of that show is that it is as rigorous a critical theory of archeology as any other critical theory, it's just that everyone thinks their fancier version is different. It's as though we needed Ancient Astronaut Theory to convince us that other critical theories are real. The last century has emphasized some interesting problems that were the consequence of our new ability to simulate and represent much of our experience as artifacts of computation and language, along with critical theories designed as solvents for the artifacts of language, where objects could be decoupled from their meanings, and then re-assigning meaning seemed like just an exercise in power over subjects - but that only works on a certain kind of mind. If you have ever seen an animal react to a magic trick, it's the same slight of hand effect on an intellectual level, I think. You can't navigate without waypoints, and any new philosophical ideas that are not informed by the foundations are just going to be post-hoc moralizations of exigencies in the present.
a0zU 4y ago
That's interesting, but there's actually this other philosopher who published a very similar idea sometime around ~1921? I can't remember his reasoning(something about the world being a collection of facts) but I've heard that his thesis actually entirely rejected continental philosophy on similar claims to your own and singlehandedly began the shift towards the analytic philosophy that you seem to be so partial to. I think his name sounded similar to Wittingstein?
GolDDranks 4y ago
This is the exact thing that bothered me in high school philosophy classes – we were taught of great thinkers of the past, and we studied their thoughts, claims, theories, etc... Even if they were OBVIOUSLY false, in the light of present knowledge. But nobody had the guts to say that out loud.
dcanelhas 4y ago
Not weighing in on the conclusions here, merely wanted to say that I don't think the island is as small as the author makes it out to be. The dead outnumber the living by about 15:1.
MonkeyClub 4y ago
OK this is a bombastic paper by design, but if falls short on a few things, least of which is conflating "study of history" with "historiography". Worst of all, he completely misses Gadamer's comment regarding the epistemic fruitlessness of philosophizing at all (and not just of studying past philosophers), so in a sense Sauer unwittingly rehashes and expands upon only a partial aspect of that. But he does express a "popular sentiment", which students of history (and the history of philosophy) will readily discover in any sub-era of modernity (including pomo'ity), but those who turn their backs to history will think it's all new and all of our own devising: namely that "We Know Better". It's the cultural switch: before modernity we considered "the ancients" as unerring sources of truth, after modernity we started seeing through the cracks. All too quick to note how pyramids and parthenons have cracks in them after standing for millennia, but wholly unable to produce something even equally sturdy, if not better. PS: Ah, and by "modernity" I'm referring to the history of this side of the Enlightenment. E.g. I consider Casaubon's 1614 overturning of the presumed antiquity of the Corpus Hermeticum as part of modernity. (But doesn't everyone?)

94 points by dynm 4y ago

I don't think it is completely useless, but I hate to build any argument in classical philosophy. No, I do not want to start my argument with Aristoteles and follow the whole chain until I can make a case at some point. Aristoteles is a giant that certainly founded a lot of scientific fields, but the basis of an argument is not improved with a whole theoretical foundation that is artificially attached to the point. I believe the affliction is that because your philosophical case needs to be argued, it is expected to have a foundation in some philosophical root. With allegedly gives it more weight than just another thought. It is sensible to read other philosophers I guess, but I think people should be encouraged to argue on their own.

School-Cotton 4y ago
FYI it is spelled "Aristotle" in English
SamBam 4y ago
I agree. My father was a historian and philosopher, and I used to love arguing philosophy as a teen at the dinner table. This was because I hadn't read anything yet, and so was approaching with an entirely naive and empty mind. I then studied a fair bit of philosophy at university, and while I could certainly appreciate the value of actually reading many great thinkers, the idea of spending my life studying them was absurd to me. I could think of nothing more horrifying than being proud to say that someone was one of the world's "top Heidegger scholars." (I recall the movie Little Miss Sunshine where a character was obsessed about his rival being only the "second" highest regarded Proust scholar.) Writing book after book about someone else's philosophy seemed utterly pointless. To (ironically) quote Seneca: "'Hoc Zenon dixit': tu quid?" What do you have to say?
- greenhearth 4y ago
  Hey, that's quite an impressive piece of autobiography, but some people actually like interpreting great writers and make a life out of it.
WHA8m 4y ago
> It is sensible to read other philosophers I guess, but I think people should be encouraged to argue on their own. With your first part of the sentence you already put your second statement in a nuanced context. But I'd argue that "it is sensible" puts too little weight on this side of the argument. We've all been there: You're new to a field and climb the Dunning Kruger Graph. At some point you're standing on the first hill and start "argue on [your] own". Most things have already been said and argued. And most probably so by people more knowledgable and intelligent that me and you. And exactly those arguments are the 'history of philosophy'. We're probably all better off if we learn to move within this tightly knit web of knowledge and be very cautious and conscious every time we leave those trails and 'go on our own'. That being said, it is mandatory to view the history of philosophy not as the whole ball park but jump over the fence occasionally. Whether we hurt ourself by doing so is almost certainly dependent on how comfortable we are with what has been said and argued before, eg. history of philosophy.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Okay, let's consider the things that have been said and argued. I'd say that in this case for most people it is not valuable to read the history of the argument but rather an up to date summary of it - the originally made argument is worth reading if and only if it's the best way to make it, no parts of it have been refuted and no one has found a way to state the same thing better. Instead of listening to what, for example, Kant had to say originally, the proper resource should be a "steelman Kantian" position which omits anything that has valid refutations, which changes anything which has been disputed because of some nuance by integrating whatever fixes and corrections can be made as a result of the counter-counter-arguments, and prepare a coherent position which is solid even in the face of all the counterarguments which have been said in the centuries afterwards, a "what would Kant say after reading every Kant-influenced philosopher" statement. If some argument made by Aristotle still stands, then readers of philosophy should not be offered the counterarguments without an immediate reference to the counter-counter-arguments that dismiss them. And if some argument made by Aristotle is not perfect, then readers of philosophy should not be presented with that argument without the counterarguments; or (as I said above) in a corrected and augmented form, dismissing and ignoring the flawed original - the original is relevant only as a historical footnote of how the truth was found, but is not really relevant to the truth itself. A product of philosophy should be actual conclusions - okay, out of all the Aristotle's works, which parts are considered settled truth, and which parts are part of an ongoing debate? And if so, what is the current, state of art position in that debate, what are the best irreconcilable arguments on both sides?
yamtaddle 4y ago
> It is sensible to read other philosophers I guess, but I think people should be encouraged to argue on their own. You should be "arguing your own" much of the time you're reading philosophy, no matter how old it is. It's one of the Three Readings (which can be done all at once, not necessarily in three literal separate passes through the book, if you're a good reader and well-matched to the material you're reading) of Adler's How to Read a Book. You haven't fully engaged with a book—especially a book of philosophy—until you've done it.

ajkjk 4y ago

This has always seemed kinda obvious? But I guess... maybe not to professional philosophers? In college there was this clique of philosophy students who were studying all this ancient thought but were (imo) strangely averse to weighing in on the problems of modernity. Like what they were interested in was 'real' philosophy. Never seemed right to me. That stuff is already baked into the way we think -- that's why it was important back then! Today we can barely perceive what it's like to _not_ think with it; it's "in the water supply", as it were. The interesting philosophy is in the new ideas that aren't settled yet.

ramesh31 4y ago
The wisdom of the ancients is timeless. To think that we've moved past that is a mistake. The analytical schools of 20th century philosophy made great strides in solving the problems of language and epistemology. But the fundamental underlying "human" issues that Socrates and Aristotle figured out are just as relevant today as 2000 years ago.
- ajkjk 4y ago
  "The wisdom of the ancients is timeless." Everyone says this and I don't believe it. Wise people existed then and wise people exist now. The new wise people's wisdom is much more relevant.
  - atypicaluser 4y ago
    > Wise people existed then and wise people exist now. The new wise people's wisdom is much more relevant. Without discussing politics or political topics (e.g. the benefits of diversity in a group of people,) can you give examples of this 'much more relevant' wisdom of today? For example, Aristotle taught metaphysics and aspirational ethics, amongst other topics--can you give examples of today's 'much more relevant' wisdoms that are more relevant than what he had to say? Examples that leave no question as to how much more relevant or, perhaps, more wise those (new vs old) wisdoms are? Thanks.
  - ramesh31 4y ago

tgv 4y ago

So it's just that studying what Aristotle said about (most of) empirical knowledge is useless. It's not terribly productive, I agree, but then again, so is studying what Derrida has said about it. If you want to know about empirical sciences, it's best to study the subject itself.

jovial_cavalier 4y ago

If philosophy is useful (which it may not be), then studying the history of philosophy is useful. This is like saying "Why bother studying Newton? He didn't even know about relativity!" You study Newton because it's a simple model and motivates what comes after.

sebastianconcpt 4y ago
The alternative to Philosophy is The Matrix (flawless global alienation). Our thinking is unconsciously molded by philosophers that died hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
- WHA8m 4y ago
  This is not an alternative to philosophy. This is philosophy. I'm afraid you have not escaped yet, sir.
  - sebastianconcpt 4y ago
    Oh, precisely, I'd never argue that we can escape it. Philosophy is the vehicle we have to make our consciousness able to navigate reality. A point that I'd try to put some light on, is that, among many dangers, we can get lost in false worldviews that trap our consciousness in apparently true realities that are ultimately false by a delicate house of cards/lies/mistakes. The Matrix, or more appropriately, Plato's Cave, made that point infinitely better than I could ever do.
- im3w1l 4y ago
  You might argue that getting this molding "for free" as it were, is exactly the reason we don't need to study them.
  - sebastianconcpt 4y ago
    That won't work in your best interest. Would be like being a citizen of The Matrix, seeing something suspicious that only agents can do, and opting for staying willfully ignorant about it, or even boycott its investigation. That's exactly what the people in Plato's Cave did. How ironic is that?

sebastianconcpt 4y ago

I think Olavo de Carvalho would agree. Is not completely useless but is kind of like 98% useless.

mikrl 4y ago

The history of philosophy, sure. The history of philosophers, I would disagree. I once saw someone post online that the best way to get into someone’s thought was to read a biography of them. After all, their thought is a reflection of them and the material conditions in which they lived. Their aspirations, tribulations and the potential they saw in a world they wanted to interpret. Sue Prideaux has a good one on Nietzsche and reading about his education really sets the scene for BGE and Zarathustra, which often confused me before. His father’s early death ‘doomed him’ into the mindset that led to his maniacal study of the will to power, and possibly his own early demise. Knowing about Nietzsche’s life makes me appreciate what he was getting at, which is useful if you’re not used to his flowery style. It helped me identify more with him, and against him. I know more of what kind of man he was, and that I am very different.

terkozz 4y ago

I couldn't disagree more. By studying history of philosophy you learn a lot about the process itself, no matter if the conclusions might seem irrelevant or outdated by the current standard enforced by new contributions. After all, I find it quite naive you will not make the very same mistakes that your predecessor did, haven't you been somewhat cognizant of their work and perspective.

Maursault 4y ago
This is exactly right and doing so would require each subsequent generation of philosophers to reinvent the wheel Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. But history is not philosophy, so the implicit premise, which boils down to, "history is not necessary to philosophy," is wrong-headed, but it is also assuming the conclusion, which is question begging. History is important to history, understanding how events in the past caused things to be the way they are today. Further, the history of philosophy is not identical to the philosophy in history just as the history of technology is not itself technology. When studying Ancient Philosophy one is not studying the history of ancient philosophy, but the ancient philosophy itself. Conversely, studying history of philosophy is not philosophical study, it is instead studying history, focusing on when and who said in what circumstances, and is not primarily concerned with understanding what was said.
- ThatGeoGuy 4y ago
  This argument and the point you're saying is "exactly right" is literally covered in the text of the paper. Read page 9 in the PDF again - the author goes to good lengths to grapple with this argument and why it is not correct. In particular: In order to repeat the mistakes of a famous philosopher, one must first share their beliefs. Now, few people are born with any degree of credence in the far-fetched propositions embraced by many philosophers. In general, these kinds of beliefs have to be acquired; and the only way of acquiring them is to study these authors. It seems that if we wanted to avoid acquir- ing false beliefs that we would never arrive at except by reading a particu- lar author, the best thing by far we could do is to avoid reading that author.

spicyusername 4y ago

Pretty much everything pre-enlightenment is really smart sounding nonsense. Understanding pre-enlightenment philosophy is mostly just useful as historical or cultural context for how intellectual people thought at the time, or for understanding the path human civilization took to knowing what we know today. Everything after the enlightenment, but before modern biology / neuroscience / physics, is also really smart sounding nonsense, but is getting closer to something approximating "reality". Once we get to the naturalist philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries (many of whom are biologists, physicists, or neuroscientists by training), we start getting some real meat.

pell 4y ago
> Pretty much everything pre-englightenment is really smart sounding nonsense. Understanding it is mostly just useful as historical or anthropological context for how intellectual people thought at the time. Plato's critique of democracy was written long before the period of enlightenment. It stands on its own to this day. There are countless other examples of philosophical works that hold up to scrutiny even when viewed through an analytical lens.
- deleted 4y ago
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3pt14159 4y ago
Real meat, with a philosophical hole right at the base of it that cannot be waived away. At some point somewhere something has to be taken by faith. Ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning is one that most modern people take. The existence of God is a different option. Brains in vats and all that.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  > At some point somewhere something has to be taken by faith. Ones own mind being a coherent arbiter of logical reasoning is one that most modern people take. Which, if you're building your philosophy in view of modern biological and neurological knowledge, is not a particularly defensible position.

prego_xo 4y ago

Should we not study old scientists because they had no idea about the concepts we have found recently? Should we no longer study old politics because their climate was different? Should old tactics be disregarded because they used different, weaker weapons than us? Should old art be discarded because they used older theories and didn't understand perspective like we do? No.

r3trohack3r 4y ago
To steel man this, in every science class I’ve taken, we read text books. They covered a massive amount of material from an innumerable number of thinkers. In every philosophy class I’ve taken, we read individual books by individual thinkers. Perhaps everyone reading Plato first hand isn’t necessary? The middle ground is probably currant books - that track the evolution of thinking over time. My favorite example is From Atomos to Atom. I’ve never seen anything like that in a science class.
- davidivadavid 4y ago
  The term "covered" does a lot of work here. The thing with science is that it's generally considered more practical than philosophy, and people are content with learning a bunch of pre-packaged recipes to solve pre-packaged problems (use F = ma to solve that inclined plane problem). But try asking the average student what F = ma actually means a bit deeper than just how they would apply it and you'll see how much the topic is "covered." Consider that the concepts of force and mass themselves are mostly left unexplained. Or that people have no idea what "energy" is. They're models of reality that are not taught as such, because we're happy with teaching future engineers a bunch of recipes to learn by rote as long as they "work". So I remain unconvinced of the proposition that philosophy should be taught the same way. In that respect it's closer to science and the inherent doubt that comes with the scientific method — even though, similarly, there's a lot of dogmatic "philosophy" (think Marxism).
  - r3trohack3r 4y ago
    I think you missed the whole “currents” bit. I’d put reading Plato on par with reading The Skeptical Chymist or John Dalton’s Chemical Philosophy. I think it’s a miss primary sources like that are absent from most undergraduate degrees in science - they reveal a lot about what science really is. But building an entire undergraduate curriculum on nothing but those primary sources? There’s just too much material and so many of those constructs have failed to accurately describe reality. To use Marxism as an example, Main Currents of Marxism is probably on par with From Atomos to Atom. Both Science and Philosophy could benefit from teaching from currents vs. primary sources (philosophy) and compilations of “facts” (science).

hprotagonist 4y ago

Hegel would've agreed, anyway. ... whoops.

pron 4y ago

I don't understand the island analogy. While the external world is disjoint from the island, our world -- with its scientific knowledge of contemporary physics and biology and astronomy and psychology, mathematics and logic and, of course, the internet -- is a product of our history. In other words, while it's true that history didn't have the internet, it is also the reason that we do. People like Frege and Russell made certain choices in the design of formal logic because they were influenced by Leibniz, who, in turn, arranged things in a certain way because he was influenced by Aristotle. If you don't know what Aristotle said, it's hard to understand Leibniz, and if you don't know Leibniz, it's hard to understand Frege and Russell.

woodruffw 4y ago
Well said. One of the greatest travesties in popular philosophy is the tendency among otherwise intelligent, well-read people to think that they can “get” philosophy by just reading whatever small slice addresses some particular fancy. You can learn a great deal that way, but it fundamentally strips the historical dimension away. And philosophy’s greatest ideas are developed over the order of centuries.
yamtaddle 4y ago
The island analogy's misleading crap. A couple tweaks to make it closer to reality (say, if the islanders had been working for millennia and we only cared about a handful of their very best works from that entire time span—instantly less crazy with just that one tweak, no?) and it falls apart. There's almost a hint of an interesting line of argument, buried somewhere in there, but the way it's presented isn't good and is the precise opposite of convincing, on close inspection. Relying heavily on really bad analogies seems to be a theme in the paper, reading on. There's some hilariously-bad question-begging-laundered-through-analogy in the bit about body-building advice / reasons-to-study-historical-philosophy. Leading with emphasizing the importance of correctness is also pretty silly when we spend much of a student's training for most other fields teaching them one useful lie or another. That philosophy's lies happen to often come from very old books hardly seems material. Clearly, scaffolding with outright known lies is the norm, so "much of the material is probably wrong" isn't, per se, much of an attack. I don't think the paper's conclusion's even necessarily wrong (and by calling for some vague "less" focus on the history of philosophy, it defies firm refutation anyway) and some of it does make interesting points, but damn, it's got some seriously off-putting flaws. I especially think it fails to make a strong case against such study as training for philosophers. But maybe there are far more doctors of philosophy out there who spend their careers analyzing historical philosophy, than would be optimal. That seems plausible, but also doesn't seem to be the focus of the paper.

ycombinete 4y ago

I haven’t read this paper, but instinctively flinch at any kind of dismissal of the past. I would think this comes down to how we define philosophy. On scientific matters sure Aristotle likely has little to offer; but human nature has not changed at all since Plato, or Siddhartha we’re born. After saying the following I feel that it would be hard for them to argue their point very strongly. So I’m definitely going to read the paper: To be perfectly clear: my claim is not that we should not be doing history of philosophy. There are all kinds of reasons why reading and talking about the Critique of Pure Reason or the Republic are worthwhile: studying these seminal texts is an inherently interesting intellectual pursuit; reading them is often tremendously enjoyable; and familiarity with these texts can be very valuable to intellectual historians for the insights into culture, knowledge and morality they may contain. There are thus many excellent reasons to engage with the history of philosophy. Gaining traction on the aforementioned philosophical problems, however, is not one of them. This means that I am not arguing against historians of philosophy and what they do, but against what could be called philosophical historicists, that is, those who seem to think that at least one good method of thinking about knowledge or justice is to study what historical authors have written about knowledge and justice a long time ago. This, I argue, is a mistake.

tz18 4y ago
how about you read the paper?
- ycombinete 4y ago
  There's a sentence in my comment where I literally say, "I'm definitely going to read the paper."
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
Do you believe someone needs to understand the history of math to effectively use math? I don't think anyone is claiming historical context isn't helpful, but these are tools for thinking. This doesn't go anywhere near the 'history repeating itself' mantra. The only way it could get close to that is for someone who is attempting to discover new math (or philosophy), but that's a very small subset of those who benefit from these tools.

ouid 4y ago

its certainly troublingly quadratic

JadeNB 4y ago
In what sense?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ouid 4y ago
  Strictly speaking this is a joke, but here is my explanation anyway. If new philosophy requires the study of philosophy, the study of philosophy requires the study of the history of philosophy, and the history of philosophy is increasing linearly with time, so the amount of time required to produce an additional philosophy is proportional the amount of philosophy that exists. The amount of tie to produce X philosophy then is proportional to X^2.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    In practice, the set of historical philisophical works considered vital doesn't grow quickly, and tends to gradually discard works even as it gradually picks up others. Part of the trouble with this paper is that it acts like the only qualities that keep works in the common set that most or all philosophers will study, is that they're old and that they're influential. As if the set is not heavily narrowed by other criteria, including quality of the writing and arguments, and that they've been widely observed to be improving to study over hundreds of years. Works that are simply wrong and have no other redeeming qualities tend to be discarded except by specialists deep-diving into a niche, even if they were very influential. I don't think most philosophers read much more than excerpts of a handful of famous arguments or passages from the whole centuries-long scholastic movement, for instance, unless they're very specifically Christian religious philosophers or apologists. Or the Neo-platonists, et c., et c. The ones that stick around do so because they are repeatedly, generation after generation, found to be useful, having endured through the aforementioned narrowing process while dozens or hundreds of once-vital works have fallen into obscurity.

DharmaPolice 4y ago

While I share a loathing for everything having to be a study of what someone else said a long time ago, I think it's mainly in the areas where we've not made much definite progress that this phenomenon happens most. Only historians bother with Aristotle's physics today because we have something definitively superior that we can prove is more correct than his model. Same for biology (arguably his key area of interest). But when it comes to ethics I don't think we can say the same thing. I'm not even sure for some areas of politics. When I read Thomas Hobbes Leviathan I found myself thinking "Wow, at least no thinking person will ever defend that philosophy again" and then a couple of decades later Steven Pinker did just that. We're really not making much progress in the humanities. I'd like to think we're done (intellectually speaking) with chattel slavery as a concept but who knows. Grant and Sherman made bigger contributions to that argument than a whole swathe of philosophers either way.

freddealmeida 4y ago

I found learning the history of philosophy tied to the history of science was wonderful in helping understand more complex thought. In much the same way as Hume's missing blue or the ontologies of other great minds. I couldn't imagine learning another way but then maybe that is the point.

denton-scratch 4y ago

I didn't get far with this. All philosophy is the history of philosophy, in the sense that you're studying the ideas someone had in the past, whether that's the recent past or the distant past. The only philosophy that isn't history of philosophy is done by a handful of academics, and you can bet they all had a solid grounding in the history of philosophy. I had to do a course on presocratic Greek philosophers. I couldn't understand why we had to study the ideas of these people whose ideas were wrong, wrong, wrong - even barmy. But all the interesting Greek philosophers knew and were influenced by the presocratics; Plato, Aristotle, the sceptics, the stoics. And so-called "modern" philosophers all studied these later Greeks. It's impossible to engage with contemporary philosophy without studying the moderns, and studying the classical Greek philosophers makes it a lot easier to understand the moderns. I'm glad the author mentioned Wittgenstein as a "historical" philosopher to whom attention shouldn't be paid. I don't know how a contemporary philosopher is supposed to approach the philosophy of language and logic without having worked through Wittgenstein and Ayer.

yamtaddle 4y ago
To be fair to the paper, the author merely calls for "less" attention paid to historical philosophy, not none. You didn't miss much by not continuing. The paper's... rough.
hnfong 4y ago
You're basically saying "that's the way things work now, and therefore it is right". In a sense if you define "philosophy" as "whatever is actually happening in philosophy in academia today", then your argument is tautologically correct. I think the author (and incidentally, I, too) has a different definition of philosophy, which, in addition to the activities you describe, also includes people coming up with original ideas without studying all those ancient texts.

im3w1l 4y ago

Humanity has growing approximately exponentially in numbers. Due to the inherent nature of the exponential process it means that a fixed percentage of all people that have ever lived are still alive. This is turn means that the proportional of historical writing to contemporary writing is approximately fixed. With exponential growth, remembering everything or at least everything significant is sort-of viable. But if humanity is about to stabilize in numbers, which would be desirable, at least until we can expand our society beyond Earth, then it means that the proportion of history to contemporary will steadily increase, and a sort of willful amnesia will become more important. With fixed resources we will have a fixed ability to remember and most pick and choose. And that's why we have to colonize space. To post-pone amnesia.

drb493 4y ago

If one's goal is a revolution of thought, than perhaps being immersed in the past process is ultimately constraining. Deference to past authority is an easier road to follow than direct inquiry into one's own experiences. If human society has been plagued throughout its existence by the same innumerable problems then why do we continue on with this current line of reasoning? I don't have any answers, but thank you for posting this thought provoking piece.

greenhearth 4y ago

The irony is that the author just uses an "end of history" argument, which has been around since German pessimism over a century ago.

scythe 4y ago

huetius 4y ago

This is a curious paper, as it seems to come at a time when the philosophical postulate of meliorism has been problematized precisely by the trajectory of historical development, which had previously its own criteria of success. It might interest the author to know that this was basically the prediction of Vico, one of the most valuable (and misunderstood) philosophers of the not-so-distant past.

ogurechny 4y ago

The article doesn't seem to be posted on 1st of April, so I have to conclude that the author does not understand philosophy at all, and swims happily and carelessly in doctrinarianism about “scientific knowledge” instead. A philosopher should be able to see that the linear time and overlaying “progress” is just a transfer of educational imaginary model of physical experiment onto the whole world, and that any thought, no matter what it source is, can only exist in the present moment in someone's head. And even in that primitive linear model, every bit of “knowledge” we have is inherited from those horrible, horrible idiots from the past anyway. It would be funny to read something like that for the first time, but the author doesn't seem to know that the same approach have been proclaimed (and subsequently ridiculed) for at least 200 years. The irony of ignoring history! Also, it is mentioned that studying other sciences doesn't work the same way. Of course it doesn't, as for quite some time students haven't been sharing any state of mind with people whose portraits hang on the walls. They don't even share more than required between themselves, because they are given instant noodle type understanding with famous scientists simply printed on the packaging that results in everything, including theory, becoming applied, and never-ending compartmentalization.

hnfong 4y ago
> every bit of “knowledge” we have is inherited from those horrible, horrible idiots from the past anyway. That's only true if you disregard all empirical observations you made yourself while living in this world, and relied 100% on things other people tell you. > It would be funny to read something like that for the first time, but the author doesn't seem to know that the same approach have been proclaimed (and subsequently ridiculed) for at least 200 years. The irony of ignoring history! The fact that some idea has been ridiculed for 200 years doesn't make it wrong. I can entertain the idea that it's pretty good evidence that it's funny though. (Btw, I also find your strawman arguments and flippant attitude to be a bit in poor taste.)
- ogurechny 4y ago
  You are almost completely what other people have told you, directly or indirectly. You wouldn't even be able to say “empirical observations” without someone teaching you the language, for starters. The tendency to imagine “individual” as a spherical Omnipotent Observer in a vacuum comes from the manner textbook explanations of imaginary model interactions are automatically spread onto the whole world, and from unquestionable individualism affecting most of the reasoning of current era, and so on. It is simply ignorant to present the stitched corpses of vulgar materialism and its company as something “modern” (with a facelift to switch from “mechanistic” to “robotistic” model because engines stopped being cool for the public, computers are cool today). Ignorance can be ridiculed. Dostoevsky smirked at people making lecterns for Vogt, Moleschott, and Buchner, Goethe had fun with dialogues in Faust's study, but hey! We can safely skip all of that if we decide to call it “outdated”!

more_corn 4y ago

This argument has already been made. You’d know it and the potential responses to it if you’d studied the history of philosophy. Just kidding. I haven’t seen it made before. I’m just saying so to present the reason I appreciate studding the history of philosophy. I hate thinking I’ve had a novel idea only to find someone has already had it and furthermore three others have replied.

dredmorbius 4y ago

My first though seeing this was that Peter Adamson, creator of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast and book series should respond. He has: Re. Hanno Sauer's article denying the value of the history of philosophy: it turns out he follows me on Twitter, from which I infer that he was just kidding. <https://nitter.kavin.rocks/HistPhilosophy/status/1573235305305571330 https://nitter.kavin.rocks/HistPhilosophy/status/15732353053...> I'm inclined to think that this is all the response that's required. (I do find several other comments on this thread on point, notably those by pron <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008453>, terkozz <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008248>, and ougerechny <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010884>)

marshray 4y ago
I love a good reductio ad twitterati argument.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  So long as we're stanning Peter, his regret on missing a pun opportunity: <https://nitter.kavin.rocks/HistPhilosophy/status/1568957197807226882#m https://nitter.kavin.rocks/HistPhilosophy/status/15689571978...>

smeagull 4y ago

The condition of man hasn't fundamentally changed in the past 5000 years. "[...] we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery – from the time of the war of Secession, for example, until the present moment when one chooses between the M.R.P. [Mouvement Republicain Poputaire] and the Communists." ~ Jean-Paul Sartre.

B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
> Progress implies amelioration Progress NOW implies amelioration. Before the XVI century it only meant you were going from A to B. It's a new theology.
skybrian 4y ago
That seems like a crazy thing to say, given that social and material conditions have changed so much. I guess you could say it hasn't fundamentally changed if you ignore everything that's changed as not fundamental, but that's tautological.

dr_dshiv 4y ago

I dove into the history of “harmony” in philosophy and it was fascinating. Also somewhat disturbing, because the topic seems “out there” for a modern philosophy dept, despite the connections to CS, neuroscience, psychology, physics, economics, etc https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2022.01.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2022.01.001 “Harmony in Design: A Synthesis of Literature from Classical Philosophy, the Sciences, Economics, and Design”

keithnz 4y ago

He doesn't seem to show anywhere that it is "philosophically unhelpful". I do think philosophical ideas can be taught with zero historical perspective, but it is a whole extra step to say studying the history of philosophy is unhelpful philosophically. That would have to be demonstrated.

conformist 4y ago

This paper makes some excellent points, at least directionally - surely the important historical arguments will be representable in a more polished, accessible and condensed form today. And in cases where they aren't perhaps that's a good filter in its own right? It appears like, maybe vis a vis physical sciences philosophy as an academic discipline has not got quite such a prevalent tradition in producing "tidied up" textbooks?

forgetfreeman 4y ago
I don't know the answer here but I am instantly skeptical whenever the notion is put forward that some complex topic or idea is inherently reduceable.
- solveit 4y ago
  I am instantly skeptical that the first thinker to understand some complex topic produced a book crisply detailing the irreducible core of the idea rather than spending six hundred pages flailing around trying to gesture at the good stuff they only vaguely see and don't have the vocabulary to express. First iterations are rarely good and never sleek.
  - forgetfreeman 4y ago
    Maybe. But pop science, pop psychology, and webMD are all things. None of these speak particularly well to the idea that complexity reduces cleanly, or that anything useful is produced by the attempt.
masswerk 4y ago
Mind that any such textbook (of which there are many) would be just yet another interpretation, reflecting mostly the times it was written in.

Nomentatus 4y ago

What is now called and taught as the history of philosophy is not very useful because it's not the actual history of philosophy, academic or otherwise. You learn mostly what little of say, 19th century philosophy we now have respect for regardless of whether that century even knew that thinker was alive. The context, mostly of "greats" that we now think are horse dung, is never given. Knowing how thinkers (and the crowds that love them) went badly wrong would be useful, but is rarely taught. Both the now-highly thought of and then-highly-thought-of are worth some attention.

alasr 4y ago

IMO studying the history of any subject, you're interested in, is really useful as it helps understanding why things are the way they're in the present. Now, regarding the subject of the 'history of philosophy', what are the contents and how they're structured is a different kind of problem. And, unfortunately, it's not limited to the 'history of philosophy' as we face similar kind of challenge when studying other important subjects. This challenge can't be avoided all the times but needs a systematic approach; otherwise, one might easily commit the (proverbial) mistake of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".

eointierney 4y ago

I argue that the study of the story of thought is philosophy.

deleted 4y ago

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jmull 4y ago

> it does not seem unreasonable to hope that people have learned at least something from the past I wonder how that could have happened? I don’t think any of this is serious. The guy is just trolling.

crazygringo 4y ago

I'm not going to take it as far as the author, but I will say that philosophy does seem to be particularly unique in organizing its entire subject matter essentially historically by thinker and around original texts, as opposed to the kind of modern taxonomy and conceptual vocabulary employed not just in other sciences, but even social sciences. Philosophers throw around author-turned-into-adjective terms like Kantian, Hegelian, Aristotelian, Humean, Hobbesian, Benthamite, and so forth as frustratingly vague substitutions for the actual ideas meant. (Kant wrote a lot, which part are you referring to?) Intro biology and political science textbooks are all organized similarly with more or less the same content, while different intro philosophy textbooks often seem like they're covering different fields. (E.g. one author believes the main questions in philosophy are metaphysics and logic, while another gives most space to ethics and religion.) Why? Because there is no widely agreed-upon of what the really important issues in philosophy even are. (Just look at continental vs. analytic philosophy.) So in the absence of any kind of consensus organization/taxonomy and terminology to go with that, it all just reverts to... original texts and author surnames. It's organized by history. (And even when modern thinkers try to come up with conceptual-sounding names, it turns into a confusing mess. Try to remember which one is "contractualism" and which one is "contractarianism". Or is there a difference between "morals" and "ethics"? Or why do some writers call it "utilitarianism" while others call it "consequentialism"? When you say "resentment", which author's usage of "ressentiment" are you actually referring to? I usually know the answers to these questions, but they sure are confusing when you're learning it as an undergrad. It's actually clearer if you say "Hobbesian" rather than "contractarian", or "Nietszchean" so I can understand which type of "resentment".) Learning the history of philosophy is helpful... but it does seem somewhat strange that while you can learn math or biology without needing to learn the history or ever read a single "original historical text"... you can't learn philosophy without learning its history. And so that certainly leads to the question... should you be able to? Would that improve the study of philosophy?

ckosidows 4y ago
Just curious, as I'm not a philosopher, but why _can't_ you learn philosophy without learning its history?

nmaley 4y ago

I studied philosophy to postgraduate level before having to go out and get a real job. Now in late middle age, I am nearly recovered to the point where I have to agree with the author. I now understand that most philosophy, of ANY age or period, including the present, is useless. But there are counterexamples. Hume is still worth reading, on almost any subject. Many of his ideas have not aged at all. Reason as the slave of the passions, is vs ought, compatibilism on free will all come to mind, as do his deep insights on the connections between ideas (Resemblance, Contiguity, cause and effect). These positions are still held by scientifically literate people, and some of them, like the idea of connections between ideas, I have have actually found useful as guidelines for research in AI. And that's without mentioning his influence on political philosophy, which was profound. Hume's notion of the social contract continues to shape political debate in ways not many people realise.

motohagiography 4y ago

"This is an object. Our modern authorities admit they can't explain it. Could it be a power struggle? Ancient critical theorists say 'yes.'" That's the level of rigor in the paper and the in the view of history as progress. A house without a foundation is still a house, and an indistinguishable representation from one that has one, but it's durability and coherence over time that makes one real and the other a representation. I really don't think the author is the first to try throwing out the past, and there were some odd setups in the essay where he expected the "mighty dead" to make a case for themselves today, instead of it being on him to make the case for what he has to improve on them. The underlying view of history as progress and his implied materialist view of epistemic value, I think, isn't new. If you substitute ideology for philosophy, then iterate ideological theorems from it, you can produce what are essentially holographic projections of consistent ideas that seem to encompass everything, and the easiest ones are structured like the Ancient Aliens reference above. The genius of that show is that it is as rigorous a critical theory of archeology as any other critical theory, it's just that everyone thinks their fancier version is different. It's as though we needed Ancient Astronaut Theory to convince us that other critical theories are real. The last century has emphasized some interesting problems that were the consequence of our new ability to simulate and represent much of our experience as artifacts of computation and language, along with critical theories designed as solvents for the artifacts of language, where objects could be decoupled from their meanings, and then re-assigning meaning seemed like just an exercise in power over subjects - but that only works on a certain kind of mind. If you have ever seen an animal react to a magic trick, it's the same slight of hand effect on an intellectual level, I think. You can't navigate without waypoints, and any new philosophical ideas that are not informed by the foundations are just going to be post-hoc moralizations of exigencies in the present.

a0zU 4y ago

That's interesting, but there's actually this other philosopher who published a very similar idea sometime around ~1921? I can't remember his reasoning(something about the world being a collection of facts) but I've heard that his thesis actually entirely rejected continental philosophy on similar claims to your own and singlehandedly began the shift towards the analytic philosophy that you seem to be so partial to. I think his name sounded similar to Wittingstein?

GolDDranks 4y ago

This is the exact thing that bothered me in high school philosophy classes – we were taught of great thinkers of the past, and we studied their thoughts, claims, theories, etc... Even if they were OBVIOUSLY false, in the light of present knowledge. But nobody had the guts to say that out loud.

dcanelhas 4y ago

Not weighing in on the conclusions here, merely wanted to say that I don't think the island is as small as the author makes it out to be. The dead outnumber the living by about 15:1.

MonkeyClub 4y ago

OK this is a bombastic paper by design, but if falls short on a few things, least of which is conflating "study of history" with "historiography". Worst of all, he completely misses Gadamer's comment regarding the epistemic fruitlessness of philosophizing at all (and not just of studying past philosophers), so in a sense Sauer unwittingly rehashes and expands upon only a partial aspect of that. But he does express a "popular sentiment", which students of history (and the history of philosophy) will readily discover in any sub-era of modernity (including pomo'ity), but those who turn their backs to history will think it's all new and all of our own devising: namely that "We Know Better". It's the cultural switch: before modernity we considered "the ancients" as unerring sources of truth, after modernity we started seeing through the cracks. All too quick to note how pyramids and parthenons have cracks in them after standing for millennia, but wholly unable to produce something even equally sturdy, if not better. PS: Ah, and by "modernity" I'm referring to the history of this side of the Enlightenment. E.g. I consider Casaubon's 1614 overturning of the presumed antiquity of the Corpus Hermeticum as part of modernity. (But doesn't everyone?)