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> A bit weird to use Nietzsche as an example here, considering that he had zero formal education in the discipline called "philosophy" and spent most of his lif
by Amezarak 3y ago
> A bit weird to use Nietzsche as an example here, considering that he had zero formal education in the discipline called "philosophy" and spent most of his life as a hermit writer with nearly-zero readers.
Virtually no philosophers historically had a "formal education in the discipline of called philosophy" and most went unread. He received the sort of classical education that was regarded at the time as a sufficient perquisite and went to the same school Fichte did. He was appointed at a very young age to a professorship of philology.
This reads as the sort of slanderous cope that the "scholarly oxen" Nietzsche refers to engage in as personal attacks against a man who proved most of them to be engaged in useless make-work. There is no philosopher in the 21st century who has contributed a hundredth of what Nietzsche did and many of them still continue to plough fields Nietzsche proved to be without foundation, like moral philosophy.
- keiferski 3y agoWhy do people insist on reading the absolute worst interpretation of every comment on the internet? Honestly. It is so tiresome. If I had to pick a favorite philosopher, it would be Nietzsche. No other thinker has influenced me more, and if you spent half a second searching Nietzsche and my username on HN, you’d see that. But if the man were alive today, he’d be writing a blog with 50 subscribers - because that’s about the level of readership he had during his life. My point was that using Nietzsche as an example of what the philosophy field is like at the public, professional level is not a good example, as the man did most of his work in obscurity to begin with.
- mistermann 3y ago>Why do people insist on reading the absolute worst interpretation of every comment on the internet? Honestly. It is so tiresome. Do you feel similarly about the rigor of the scientific method?
- keiferski 3y agoYou're gonna have to unpack that, because it's not clear to me how it has anything to do with my comment.
- mistermann 3y agoI am sorry to hear of your predicament, best of luck to you.
- Larrikin 3y agoIf you check his comment history, whenever someone calls out one of his not well thought out arguments, he plays the victim and says that the person calling him out should have considered all the points he didn't actually make or say and then leaves it up to other person to imagine them.
- Amezarak 3y agoNietzsche looked with total disdain on academic philosophers. He calls them names like “dwarves” (as opposed to the true philosophers calling to each other across centuries), and “scholarly oxen”, calls the field the “harmless chatter of children and academics” and suggest that if modern man had any courage it would be banned outright. Thousands of papers are still published every year on philosophical subjects Nietzsche believed he proved moot or a mere confusion of ideas. Very few modern academic philosophers are read better than Nietzsche in as in his lifetime. Few older ones were either: Nietzsche mentions the fate of Schoepenhaur and Spinoza. It’s a safe bet none alive now will be read in a hundred years. You mention Sam Harris in another comment and say that he’s “not taken seriously as a philosopher” by academic philosophers. I know nothing about him other than that he’s some pop culture commentator and therefore probably not worth attention, but the idea that someone like Nietzsche or anyone serious would care about what “academic philosophers” think of someone is absolutely ludicrous, not only on its face but when you consider they do take people like John Rawls seriously.