Comment by samdoesnothing
4 days ago
Why would they need formal training? Can't they just read Plato, Socrates, etc, and classical lit like Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka etc? That would be far better than whatever they're doing now.
4 days ago
Why would they need formal training? Can't they just read Plato, Socrates, etc, and classical lit like Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka etc? That would be far better than whatever they're doing now.
Philosophy postgrad here, my take is: yeah, sorta, but it's hard to build your own curriculum without expertise, and it's hard to engage with subject matter fully without social discussion of, and guidance through texts.
It's the same as saying "why learn maths at university, it's cheaper just to buy and read the textbooks/papers?". That's kind of true, but I don't think that's effective for most people.
I'm someone who has read all of that and much more, including intense study of SEP and some contemporary papers and textbooks, and I would say that I am absolutely not qualified to produce philosophy of the quality output by analytic philosophy over the last century. I can understand a lot of it, and yes, this is better than being completely ignorant of the last 2500 years of philosophy as most rationalists seem to be, but doing only what I have done would not sufficiently prepare them to work on the projects that they want to work on. They (and I) do not have the proper training in logic or research methods, let alone the experience that comes from guided research in the field as it is today. What we all lack especially is the epistemological reinforcement that comes from being checked by a community of our peers. I'm not saying it can't be done alone, I'm just saying that what you're suggesting isn't enough and I can tell you because I'm quite beyond that and I know that I cannot produce the quality of work that you'll find in SEP today.
Oh I don't mean to imply reading some classical lit prepares you for a career producing novel works in philosophy, simply that if one wants to understand themselves, others, and the world better they don't need to go to university to do it. They can just read.
I think you are understating how difficult this is to do. I suspect there are a handful of super-geniuses who can read the philosophical canon and understand it, without some formal guidance. Plato and Dostoevsky might be possible (Socrates would be a bit difficult), but getting to Hegel and these newer more complex authors is almost impossible to navigate unless you are a savant.
I suspect a lot of the rationalists have gotten stuck here, and rather than seek out guidance or slowing down, changed tack entirely and decided to engage with the philosophers du jour, which unfortunately is a lot of slop running downstream from Thiel.
Trying to do a bit of formal philosophy at University is really worth doing.
You realise that it's very hard to do well and it's intellectual quicksand.
Reading philosophers and great writers as you suggest is better than joining a cult.
It's just that you also want to write about what you're thinking in response to reading such people and ideally have what you write critiqued by smart people. Perhaps an AI could do some of that these days.
I took a few philosophy classes. I found it incredibly valuable in identifying assumptions and testing them.
Being Christian, it helped me understand what I believe and why. It made faith a deliberate, reasoned choice.
And, of course, there are many rational reasons for people to have very different opinions when it comes to religion and deities.
Being bipolar might give me an interesting perspective. Everything I’ve read about rationalists misses the grounding required to isolate emotion as a variable.
Rationalists have not read or understood David Hume.
You cannot work out what out to be from what is.
To want to be alive is irrational.
Nietzsche and the Existentialists understood that.
Arguably religions too.
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> It's just that you also want to write about what you're thinking in response to reading such people and ideally have what you write critiqued by smart people. Perhaps an AI could do some of that these days.
An AI can neither write about what you are thinking in your place nor substitute for a particularly smart critic, but might still be useful for rubber-ducking philosophical writing if used well.
Errrf. That was poor writing on my part.
I meant use the AI to critique what you have written in response to reading the suggested authors.
Yes, a particularly smart critic would be better. But an LLM is easily available.
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This is like saying someone who wants to build a specialized computer for a novel use should read the turing paper and get to it. A lot has of development has happened in the field in the last couple hundred years.
I don't think that is similar at all. People want to understand the world better, they don't want to learn how to build it from first principles.