Popular Dissing of Philosophers
I will move this here from BC's art thread since it belongs better. I just listened to this video below and it made me quite angry that this "Philosophy MA Student" disses Schopenhauer, after completely mis-representing the latter's philosophy. I can bet that this guy hasn't even read him, much less begin to understand. The great arrogance of people who don't even understand what they read and therefore think it's bullshit just cause they can't get it - stupidity is comical, in a dark sort of way.
Comments (21)
I suppose we are all a bit guilty of dismissing writers without giving them much of a chance. I am reasonably sure that delving into continental philosophy will not reveal anything to me, yet am profoundly annoyed when others dismiss Sam Harris without actually reading his work. I'm not sure I know of a solution, or one that doesn't result in me reading a bunch of rubbish.
The solution is to overcome your prejudices.
That sort of isn't a problem if you are fine with reading something, whether it turns out to be rubbish or not.
If you've got a prejudice against reading anything you don't already know, on the chance you might end-up encountering some rubbish, your reading list of new material is going to be extremely small.
I more or less agree with this but I wonder how much freedom we actually have on this point. Can we really know what judgments of ours are a result of prejudices? And aren't all our judgments prejudiced to some degree just by virtue of who we are?
There is also an ironic dismissal of the obvious, that I think is pretty dumb. Like "sure, we're highly conditioned, but we can realize what conditions us, and escape this", i.e. I'm the exception.
That all said, misunderstanding is a great source of creativity, and novelty. It isn't obvious, or necessary that a misunderstanding will be less correct, interesting, or innovative than the source, it will just not be as representative of the source, but oh well, we rarely quote barers of absolute truth,
This is a curious example to use. You don't necessarily need to actually read his work to understand that he is spouting the same old stuff philosophers have been saying, except it's outdated by over a century. It's embarrassing to call his work philosophy. He's not a philosopher, he's a neuroscientist who dabbles in philosophy and makes a fool of himself when he tries to merge the two domains.
But I think certain philosophers are subject to "dissing" by philosophy departments and apparently graduate students not merely because they're outside the analytic tradition, but also because they claim to divine, as it were, our fundamental nature and perhaps that of the universe through introspection ("Will" in Schopenhauer's case), and there is a tendency to mock those who make such grandiose claims. That kind of claim is not made anymore, it seems, so it appears antiquated and even somewhat silly. But again this may be peculiar to the Anglo-American tradition, which is the only one I have any recent knowledge of, as limited as that may be.
But I suppose the thing to keep in mind is that you can't know whether or not something is rubbish until you read it. Furthermore, the main prejudice to overcome is the idea that anything you dislike or disagree with is rubbish. When we read a work of philosophy according to the principle of charity, we should always come away with an understanding of how a reasonable person might hold the position defended therein. This is particularly true in the case of the "greats." Even if you ultimately disagree with them, failing to understand how they achieved that status is a failure in the reader and not the author. This isn't to say that all frustration will vanish. But understanding breeds at least a certain kind of appreciation.
One of the most important parts of my development as a philosopher was a class I took on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in graduate school. We read the entire work, summarized large portions of it for graded assignments (reducing 50 pages down to three is a nightmarish task that I recommend everyone try sometime), and were forbidden to disagree with Kant on our final exam or in our term paper (because it was a class in the history of philosophy; anyone can take potshots from the future). So we had to understand what Kant wrote and find something good in it (or defend it from some important criticism). Several of us were even assigned paper topics on precisely the issues where we had shown the most disagreement with Kant in class. These days, the students would revolt at this sort of imposition. I was tempted to myself. But it was wonderfully beneficial in the end.
Quoting BadenSure, but we don't need to adopt any sort of radical doxastic voluntarism in order to think that our prejudices can be overcome (or at least mitigated). Slow habituation can do the job, even if we are dragged kicking and screaming all the way. And of course, a good teacher can be rather helpful.
Quoting Ciceronianus the WhiteI realize that you were responding to @The Great Whatever, but for my own part, there's a reason I specified the analytic tradition. Thanks to how ill-defined the term is, we get to include the likes of Plato and Descartes.
Quoting The Great WhateverAlfred North Whitehead comes to mind as well.