3 ms·
> a better writer That's highly subjective. I reckon his audience and admirers found him an excellent writer.
by skeledrew 3mo ago
> a better writer
That's highly subjective. I reckon his audience and admirers found him an excellent writer.
- wk_end 3mo agoNah, Kant's considered a notoriously poor writer among philosophers. Obviously opinions may differ, but Derek Parfit [0], for instance, wrote: “It is Kant who made really bad writing philosophically acceptable. We can no longer point to some atrocious sentence by someone else, and say ‘How can it be worth reading anyone who writes like that?’ The answer could always be ‘What about Kant?'” (Kind of relevant to this thread actually! Hah!) In the preface to the second edition of the Critique, Kant himself acknowledges that "a talent for lucid exposition" he "cannot regard [himself] as possessing". FWIW I suppose I am in Kant's audience, as a (long-since graduated) philosophy student. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Parfit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Parfit
- chungusamongus 3mo agoFwiw I am much more impressed with the sophistication of someone's argument than i am their writing style. Kant has contributed much more than parfit depsite the abstract nature of his writing and it's not even close.