4 ms·

This is what much of Greco-Roman philosophy, in the Socratic vein, focused on: practical philosophy exploring how we ought to live

anigbrowl 3y ago
Yes, I'm fond of that too. A problem I have with much of modern analytic philosophy is that while it nominally addresses this question, it's often policy advocacy in pseudo-objective wrapping. I've got books which have interesting ideas and whose propositions I largely agree with, but which would have been better off as an earnestly argued 10 page essay instead of a lumbering and tedious 150 page apologia.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  There's a loooong history of philosophy-as-political-advocacy, going back to Plato's Republic, and arguably before. Not just in the Western tradition either --- 孔夫子 (Kǒng Fūzǐ, a/k/a Master Kong, a/k/a Confucius) comes notably to mind. al-Kindi, Avicenna, Averroes, Ibn Khaldun , Machiavelli, Moore, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau. And not just the overt stuff either, but a whole slew of religious philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and more.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    I'm fine with that, it's the turgid pseudoscientific style of argument I have an issue with. I'm tired of reading stuff like 'Question X has been neglected since the Rawlsian turn. In this work I propose a method for inscribing a Zizekian comparator within a Derridiean framework, allowing us to navigate a Bordieu-Bataille field...' That's a pastiche, but I have a shelf's worth of such badly written theory which seems to mistake density for depth.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      Fair enough. Stugeon's Law holds. There's also the whole publishing / academic clique environment which incentivizes such styles. And there are refreshingly clear and accessible authors in philosophy from both the present time and the past. I've been following a number of podcasts for a few years now which tend to be both reasonably high quality and quite listenable: Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy, Stephen West's Philsophize This, a set of podcasts each from Nigel Warburton nd David Edmunds (Philosophy Bites, Philosophy Sites, and a few more) and David Runciman (Talking Politics, History of Ideas, Past Present Future, etc.). Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy and Will Durant's Story of Philosophy are also engaging. A number of these are surveys of philosophy rather principle works, but there's at least work in the genre that's readable.

anigbrowl 3y ago

Yes, I'm fond of that too. A problem I have with much of modern analytic philosophy is that while it nominally addresses this question, it's often policy advocacy in pseudo-objective wrapping. I've got books which have interesting ideas and whose propositions I largely agree with, but which would have been better off as an earnestly argued 10 page essay instead of a lumbering and tedious 150 page apologia.

dredmorbius 3y ago
There's a loooong history of philosophy-as-political-advocacy, going back to Plato's Republic, and arguably before. Not just in the Western tradition either --- 孔夫子 (Kǒng Fūzǐ, a/k/a Master Kong, a/k/a Confucius) comes notably to mind. al-Kindi, Avicenna, Averroes, Ibn Khaldun , Machiavelli, Moore, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau. And not just the overt stuff either, but a whole slew of religious philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and more.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  I'm fine with that, it's the turgid pseudoscientific style of argument I have an issue with. I'm tired of reading stuff like 'Question X has been neglected since the Rawlsian turn. In this work I propose a method for inscribing a Zizekian comparator within a Derridiean framework, allowing us to navigate a Bordieu-Bataille field...' That's a pastiche, but I have a shelf's worth of such badly written theory which seems to mistake density for depth.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    Fair enough. Stugeon's Law holds. There's also the whole publishing / academic clique environment which incentivizes such styles. And there are refreshingly clear and accessible authors in philosophy from both the present time and the past. I've been following a number of podcasts for a few years now which tend to be both reasonably high quality and quite listenable: Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy, Stephen West's Philsophize This, a set of podcasts each from Nigel Warburton nd David Edmunds (Philosophy Bites, Philosophy Sites, and a few more) and David Runciman (Talking Politics, History of Ideas, Past Present Future, etc.). Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy and Will Durant's Story of Philosophy are also engaging. A number of these are surveys of philosophy rather principle works, but there's at least work in the genre that's readable.