Most of the comments here are completely missing the point of the article.
The article is not about whether the ideas espoused by old philosophers are worth learning about, or about whether old philosophers are worth reading. The article asks the question of why philosophers prefer to read the original works of old philosophers, instead of reading descriptions of these ideas by authors who have demonstrated competence is explaining philosophical ideas. Which is the way that education is handled in most (all?) scientific fields.
Interesting. I was just writing about this yesterday:
If the book's ideas were of lasting consequence, it's a near certainty that more clear statements of them have been produced in the intervening years. You may lose some of the aesthetics of the original—but often times the true aesthetic value is debatable (or at least relative), and if it's truly there it still may not be worth losing the increased clarity and further refinement of ideas found in later works.
I have to disagree with the author of that paragraph. Concepts usually get diluted as they pass from person to person, not more clear. They also mention there is often times a "debatable" aesthetic value - to me, that's all the more reason to at least look at the original work and make your own interpretation.
> Concepts usually get diluted as they pass from person to person, not more clear.
That is only possible if the concept has no practical utility. If the concept is being used, the historical pattern is improving refinement.
The author of the article provides a nice list of reasons why that would be the case (Bob is a modern day expositor of Alice's older, original idea):
Alice’s understanding of the Alice effect is probably the most confused understanding of it in all of history, being the first ‘understanding of the Alice effect’ to set itself apart from ‘confusion and ignorance about the Alice effect’.
In the billions of lifetimes that have passed since Alice’s time, the world has probably thought substantially more about The Alice Effect than Alice managed to in her lifetime, at least if it is important at all.
Alice’s very first account of the effect probably contained imperfections. Bob can write about the theory as it stood after years of adjustment.
Even if Alice’s account was perfectly correct, it was probably not perfectly well explained, unless she happens to have been a great explainer as well as a great physicist.
Physics has made many discoveries since Alice’s time, such as Claire forces, Evan motion and Roger fields. It might be easier to understand all of this by starting with the Roger fields, and explaining the Alice effect as a consequence. However literature from the likes of Alice is constrained to cover topics chronologically by date of discovery.
Bob speaks a similar version of English to me
Bob can be selected for having particular skill at writing and explanation, whereas Alice must be selected for having the scientific prowess to make the discovery.
Bob is actually trying to explain the thing to a 21st Century reader, while Alice is writing to pique the interest of some seventeenth century noblemen who lack modern intellectual machinery and are interested in issues like whether this is compatible with religion. An accurate impression of a 21st Century reader would probably cause Alice to fall over.
Sometimes it's useful to see the original version of an idea: it can be easier to see what line of thought led to it, and what necessity the idea addressed. Further refinements may improve the idea, but obscure the source and original context of the idea, which might make it harder to fully understand or appreciate.
The basic idea there makes sense to me, but I actually think later writers will be better at putting it into context as well, partly because they have more information on the context, and partly because the tendency when someone is first developing a new idea is to just get it working, rather than immediately analyzing where it fits in the history of ideas.
That said, I think it's definitely valuable to go back and look at original sources after starting with a more efficient, contemporary exposition.
I believe it is worth considering also that there is an extremely strong survivorship bias taking place with these works in particular. The works of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle have survived millennia and while most works can likely be successfully summarized, over enough iterations there are bound to be a few that cannot. Reasonable people can disagree of course and this is all subjective anyway.
Plato can be summarized to and extent. Aristotle, however, is so concise in his language that there isn't much that could be removed. His conclusions can be summarized but one would not understand why he said what he said.
I know I understand best what a philosopher says when I no longer feel as though I were reading and instead feel like s/he is talking to me through the pages. I would liken understanding a technical concept to being able to reproduce what another person did. Understanding a philosopher requires something like building up their worldview from their words. I’d liken it to being able to reproduce what the person thought and did.
Because too many people these days are the "school is overrated, vocational schools are all we need" types who don't understand the basic value of going through the old philosophers... the title is case in point. To me it seems so obvious that there are numerous reasons that it just seems click-baity.
You know what they teach at the elite schools (like Eton for example) that most others don't? The trivium and quadrivium. Together, they form the seven liberal arts, and are a vital parts of the preperation for reading the old philosophers. More than that though, they are vital parts of having a well rounded education where knowledge at a base level in areas almost always elevates your ability to think well in others.
It is also extremely important to be able to go back and see how the old philosophers were right and how they were wrong, but also just to see the amount of wisdom they had. I'm a constitutionalist myself, so reading Montesquieu for example is a great way to dig into the meat of the underpinnings of the checks and balances system, for example. I hardly see a modern textbook get half as deep as him on the subject...
There is still vast amounts of wisdom to be gleaned from the old philosophers, and I highly disagree with the assertion of the author about it being more like poetry than knowledge.
It's not a contradiction to love the old philosophers and also think that our society has a schooling problem that teaches too much, too badly, and often on the wrong topics.
Of the many people who have studied those philosophers over the years in schools, how many got anything out of it? I'd wager that a 1% guess would be a bit high. The time spent on that for the other 99% is pure waste. But how will we know which are the 1%? Well, we can't get a more blunt selection mechanism than teaching it to everyone, so any other selection mechanism is likely an improvement.
Could you define "got anything out of it" for me? And what is a universal item that literally everyone will use in their life? We could probably stop general education after grade 3 if that was the goal of education.
>Could you define "got anything out of it" for me?
Retained any information that gave them skills or enrichment. Skills we can measure as an increase in human capital. Enrichment is tougher, but for enrichment to take place the information has to be retained, and we have plenty of data on the abysmal state of retention.
> And what is a universal item that literally everyone will use in their life? We could probably stop general education after grade 3 if that was the goal of education.
That was not a requirement I implied needing to set. Literacy and basic mathematics are useful far beyond grade 3 (though their pedagogy and targeting could be drastically improved), but as a rule, most knowledge doesn't need to be taught to everyone. We can come up with selection mechanisms that are better than the crudest imaginable: teaching everyone and hoping that a minuscule fraction get something out of it. Extending/adding recess would be far better than that.
I procrastinated my core courses and took Philosophy my last semester of uni at 22.
I'm so glad I took it that late. It was easily one of the best courses I ever took, of course with the professors to thank for that.
What did I get out of it? It got me thinking about all sorts of concepts, especially concepts I never would've thought about on my own. How do you quantify that? Who knows? I still think about Callicles from the Gorgias and how he'd observe some modern social phenomena and such.
But I think your posts are the sort of overfixation on "getting anything out if it" that the OP is talking about. It's a tempting question because it's usually unanswerable except in the obvious cases. But, for example, learning long division isn't helpful because you do it in the field (I haven't done it since school), rather it's helpful because you're exercising problem solving. Just like philosophy can exercise rationalism.
Congratulations, you're the 1% who got things out of it.
As a former teacher, I can assure you that (optimistically) 90% of what happens in school does not teach any problem-solving skills (and that's backed up by the literature). The 10% that does is in literacy and mathematics up to Algebra (not including Geometry, which almost no one remembers, nearly zero people use, has been demonstrated to make little or no difference in problem-solving skills, and yet is still somehow a required course almost everywhere).
This remind me a bit of my elementary school math teacher who’d usually answer any question or curiosity with a dismissive “you don’t have to understand it you just have to do it”.
That didn’t help spark any particular interest in the field. It’s very difficult to learn something that doesn’t interest me.
I later ended up failing high school math, which made it difficult to get accepted for my college education. I was accepted on the condition that I’d take the math course again, and pass the exam within 6 months.
Incidentally (and fortunately) I studied philosophy and business administration. Philosophy (and particularly the ancient Greeks) got me much more excited about math, and I got an A in my exam shortly after.
Just a personal anecdote, but thought you might find it interesting.
Oh, I'd love for kids to understand it -- it's far more important than doing it, and if we were teaching that understanding it would likely all be worthwhile. I'm saying that we know from the data and qualitative studies that we don't teach kids to understand most things we teach them, and they forget how to do them very quickly.
Is there not value in a basic understanding of, say, history, geography, or political science? Those ideally teach new modes of thought, but at worse they give you a fact or two. Even if they retain 1% of what they learn, they now know that the world isn't as small as it seems, and the world isn't limited to their own experiences.
We know from retention data that we don't actually achieve a basic understanding of history, geography, or political science for the vast majority of students. Is there nothing better that could be done with that time? Should we be content with the structure providing that result? I agree that increasing the size of a student's world is a worthy goal, but there's little to no evidence that we're achieving that for the vast majority of students, and there are costs to achieving those dubious benefits.
I'm not suggesting anything excessive; I'm suggesting (based on a fairly large academic literature) that we know for a fact that a large amount of what is done in our education system does not provide any benefits that we can measure in any way (and not for lack of trying), and that for most of the knowledge that is taught for which we can't find tangible benefits, nearly none of it is retained (which invalidates arguments that it is providing intangible benefits). Most arguments for the educational status quo are based on hand-waving and appeals to magic. Suggesting that this is not an adequate way to justify the apparent waste of billions of hours of children's time is not reactionary Taylorism -- it's pointing out a glaring error that society is making due to the social desirability bias of a fantasy "education" that demonstrably makes people better with no opportunity costs or downsides.
> we know for a fact that a large amount of what is done in our education system does not provide any benefits that we can measure in any way
I strongly disagree here. Unless you can provide conclusive studies separating useful and useless knowledge, my facts tend to show that education is profitable, and my opinion is that the value of any knowledge is largely up to the learner's personal preference.
> Most arguments for the educational status quo [...]
You're starting a debate that is not the one we're having here. I suggest you keep it for someone interested in pursuing it.
> most knowledge doesn't need to be taught to everyone.
Applying vertical and horizontal separation to teaching and the acquisition of knowledge is definitely an extremist view in my opinion.
I highly recommend The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan (https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...). It's one of the more careful social science books I've ever read, and while it comes to controversial conclusions, even if you disagree with them you'll learn a lot about the issues by reading it. The assumption that education can be assumed to be profitable for society simply isn't supported by the evidence.
You know what would be great? A society where people can knowingly disagree on fundamental concepts with one another and remain mutually respectful and cooperative. And studying philosophy is a gateway to that. Students have very few things in common with most philosophers because most philosophers lived hundreds and thousands of years ago. But reading philosophers will show them their points in common, to various extents. I mean the contrast and comparison is against classes where students memorize the exact order of the US presidents and force read books to the point of hating them.
> You know what would be great? A society where people can knowingly disagree on fundamental concepts with one another and remain mutually respectful and cooperative.
I agree.
> And studying philosophy is a gateway to that.
For a very, very small number of students. Forcing every student to go through philosophy education because we can't figure out a better way to select out the students that will care about it is at best waste, and at worst torture. The fact that you and I both actually enjoyed philosophy (and at least for me, school in general) doesn't change that; it means that we have a privilege that needs to be checked.
Or maybe experiment with non cruddy ways of teaching people. Weighting a lot of a grade on a test is an excellent way to freak someone out and build resentment. Maximize teacher/student ratios, fund schools better, etc.
There's a lot of experimentation with pedagogy, and the gains are marginal. Student/teacher ratios have a mild effect on academic outcomes, but academic outcomes have very little effect on anything measurable in terms of building human capital or long-term retention.
School funding is similar to the ratio question. Most increases in school funding over the last 50 years get captured by the state and local administrations, which provides even less for outcomes than teacher pay, ratios, or increased resources. Pouring more money into them doesn't usually chance that allocation -- it's like giving money to a homeless family and having one of the parents take the money to buy non-essentials.
In the mean time, kids are wasting away, bored out of their minds. The opportunity costs are massive, and the social returns are negative. We can talk all we want about how we can make the system better, but until it actually gets better, the waste continue and victimizes more kids.
When I was in university, I think the opportunity cost of spending time on the humanities (what my school called their liberal arts program) was too high. There was a lot I needed to learn and not much time to do it.
Then I graduated and started working and over time I've been able to carve out more time to work on the gaps in my education. A couple times a year when Powerball gets huge, I'll buy a ticket and fantasize about being able to retire and immerse myself completely in that pursuit.
The title is a bit click-baity, indeed, but the article is interesting and worth pondering. It made me think about how we learn to think, about learning "by osmosis", about the "meta" in metaphysics, about the fundamental differences between "hard" sciences and "soft" disciplines like philosophy.
In fact I would argue that a version of this should be presented in the first lecture of a philosophy class.
Also, the author specifically mentions and rejects the poetry comparison explanation.
As someone who has finished classes (and was firmly in the STEM camp while taking them), I do wish I had had something of the formal liberal arts that was taught historically. Does anyone have any recommendations for ways of self-teaching the trivium and quadrivium?
I've heard good things about "The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric" [0] but I haven't gone through it yet.
If you start to teach "the trivium and quadrivium" somewhere in poor rural part with no jobs and high social problems, the kids there wont become like elite students from elite families with great prospects and ideal environment.
For that matter, not all kids from great environment ends up in elite school or are even able to follow education with super higher speed and expectations.
You basically repeat that ‘reading the old philosophers is important’ about three times, but give no reason for why that would be important and what exactly you would learn from that.
That they teach it at Eton is not a reason. At most a suggestion there could be a good reason for it.
To realize that ‘they were wise’ is not a reason. Why is that important to realize?
That there are ‘vast amounts of wisdom to be gleaned’ is a restatement, not an argument.
So whatever reading the old philosophers taught you, certainly not argumentation skills.
> More than that though, they are vital parts of having a well rounded education where knowledge at a base level in areas almost always elevates your ability to think well in others.
Is there any evidence of this? Liberal arts majors claim it but I haven't really seen any proof. The philosophy courses I took in college had professors with an air of smug self-righteousness and faux-enlightenment. It seems more likely that the people who study this stuff then backwards rationalize why it was important.
I also think "well rounded education" is a tactic to keep people under the misinformed idea that intelligence can be earned. Wisdom, maybe, but not intelligence. That's pretty well established to be locked in around 7.
> And if philosophy is about having certain experiences, like poetry, but then it would seem to be a kind of entertainment rather than a project to gain knowledge, which is at least not what most philosophers would tell you.
I think all this trouble comes from the perverse desire to make Philosophy "valuable" in the way that sciences are perceived to be, rather than recognizing that it is indeed like poetry.
Not poetry "a kind of entertainment" - which is a gross reduction...but poetry as a means of direct experience and illumination.
Maybe philosophy cannot be "used" to model anything, predict anything or instrumentalize anything...but at the end of time when we have catalogued every atom, it's what we will have left with which to examine the remaining mysteries - which is ultimately a personal journey ... not some kind of utilitarian social achievement.
If I asked you to furnish me with the reasons why Islam has the ultimate answer (rather than Buddhism, or Christianity, or ultimately Philosophy) you would immediately find yourself in the terrain of the philosopher. Sorry.
The only way in which religious thought survives the 21st century is a set of once sacred truths rendered palatable for the secular world. The past belonged to you, the present and future belongs to us.
> The only way in which religious thought survives the 21st century is a set of once sacred truths rendered palatable for the secular world.
The irony is that you've internalized the revealed truths of your worldview to the point that you don't realize you have any. You don't believe that your philosophy and ethics make any assumptions (but they do). And when confronted the only response is that they're not assumptions, they're self-evident truths.
You're no better than a medieval European peasant in that regard.
Ultimately anything does indeed "go" intellectually speaking. You can draw an arbitrary line and say "it is fruitless to step over this boundary" but that is just a matter of shrinking the universe down to what you can manage. Which is fine. It does not invalidate the desire some people have to have internal intellectual experiences that do not have to be validated by you.
I'm not sure that I can agree with her even about reading physics. I've found that the earliest works on scientific topics, as well as in math and philosophy, explain things in a way that is comprehensible to someone with no prior knowledge of the subject. That's probably because nobody had prior knowledge when the work was written. I find I'm very often able to learn topics from the originators' writings that I found otherwise intractable. For me, at least, this is true in general.
On the other hand, I have a consistent bias toward the past, and this may be a rationalization after the fact.
Counterpoint: Trying to learn and understand particle physics the way it evolved, before the insight of quarks, is like crossing a quagmire of despair.
Philosophy is a cumulative field just like programming. If you're only involved with the most modern framework, there is a lot of magic happening underneath the surface. Most of the value to me seems to be in understanding an idea and then reading and understanding someone refute it later. That's basically my whole experience in reading philosophy "chronologically".
Is it though? Has philosophy actually made any advances in understanding the "great questions" of the meaning of life and what not? Perhaps the reason that people find reading Plato and Aristotle worthwhile is that people are still beating their heads against the same unanswerable questions.
But that's just because philosophy originally meant all scholarly pursuits. All of science was called "natural philosophy" before it got its own name. That doesn't mean that what we'd call science today is the same as what we call philosophy, even if some ancients like Aristotle did both.
I believe the author was referring to work done in reason, logic and 'natural philosophy' from the time of Kant/Hume/Leibniz onwards, so, 18thC+.
One of the reasons philosophy doesn't seem so well these days - I think - is because the value our society places on software engineers is so much higher. The same kinds of natural ability which help with reasoning about the behaviour of some function, help with reasoning about the shape of some concept in philosophy.
I don't particularly lament this shift, as a philosophy grad who is working on becoming a software engineer. I only lament that experimental and multi-disciplinary philosophy is becoming cool and interesting only in the past decade or so.
Philosophy advances the discussion of the great questions, exploring them from different angles and with different twists. This sometimes leads to new questions.
That's a fairly broad field though -- there are some analytic philosophers who were/are practically mathematicians, and who certainly helped advance logic and related fields. On the other hand you have analytical people who are working on the "big questions" like ethics where the same questions from ancient times get asked over and over.
It's not so much that philosophy has definitely answered the "great questions" that makes the field cumulative, so much as it is that philosophical works are immensely context-dependent. Certain assumptions about the reader's knowledge are implicit, and if you lack that knowledge, it becomes significantly harder for the reader to grasp various arguments. At best, you miss things.
Individual Platonic dialogues aren't self-contained; they all make reference to concepts from other dialogues as well as Plato's contemporaries and pre-Socratics influences. Works by later Platonists along with critiques often make similar assumptions about what you know. Honestly, there's two thousand years directly influenced and shaped by Plato alone. Almost all of which assumes that you've read Plato. Beyond that, both direct and indirect references to various ideas by Plato can be found throughout nearly every philosophical tradition.
Take Plotinus and The Enneads, for instance. When Porphyry edited Plotinus' writings, he ordered them according to a non-chronological principle meant to make them more approachable. As a result, multiple arguments in one treatise will reference arguments made in another. And throughout all of them, Plotinus takes it as a given that you're familiar with Plato's work. If you're not, you'll be almost hopelessly lost. There are plenty of other examples; for many if not most philosophers, their body of work can include extensive seminar notes (Lacan, for example), letters and correspondences, etc. Or look at Nietzsche and how his writings have been distorted and misunderstood by so many. His sister's systematic edits and falsifications of his writings were an attempt to twist Nietzsche's writings into supporting anti-semitism despite the fact that throughout his life he repeatedly denounced anti-semitism and the nationalism he saw it linked to. It took decades to repair Nietzsche's reputation and that was accomplished only by returning to his original writings themselves rather than the bastardized versions his sister put out.
Secondary sources can do an excellent job of highlighting, summarizing, and explaining arguments that might be split across years of different writings or multiple philosophers. They can't replace reading the original philosophers' work, however, because you can't divorce a later exegesis from the source it's attempting to interpret. Later work is tied to the earlier works to which it responds; the latter's value is present even when the former seeks to eviscerate it. Philosophy simply can't escape earlier works, and that's a wonderful thing because it forces us to better understand the ideas and traditions of ideas being discussed in their totality and context.
Interestingly the biggest difference I see are in the board itself (less flat, wider) and the addition of dedicated environments enabling new styles and tricks. That said I wouldn't be surprised if a skateboarder today could take one of those old boards and ride it very differently today.
Why read new philosophy? The old stuff has had the weak ideas weeded out and has a proven track record.
"The Yale Report of 1828" -- an influential document written by Jeremiah Day (who was at the time president of Yale), one of his trustees, and a committee of faculty -- distinguished between "the discipline" and "the furniture" of the mind. Mastering a specific body of knowledge -- acquiring "the furniture" -- is of little permanent value in a rapidly changing world. Students who aspire to be leaders in business. medicine, law, government, or academia need "the discipline" of mind -- the ability to adapt to constantly changing circumstances, confront new facts, and find creative ways to solve problems.
- Richard C. Levin, President of Yale, in "Top of the Class: The Rise of Asia's Universities", Foreign Affairs, May/June 2010
I think it's rather the opposite, where modern philosophy benefits from centuries of argument and having had all the weak points removed but they're clearly there for any to see in old philosophy. Reading The Republic recently made me appreciate that there can be such a thing as progress in philosophy.
Schopenhauer contends that works of genius will scarcely be recognised by the creator's contemporaries simply because understanding genius takes significant intellect, with which the majority of 'living' humanity is not endowed. But over time enough people will exist who can understand a work to raise it to the stature it deserves. This makes time a good filter (but obviously not the only criterion).
I would place this sort of article and the "Why do we need to bother with philosophy at all?" articles within the same pool of thought.
That people keep dipping their toes into this murky pool demonstrates to me that one of the things philosophy has spectacularly failed to do is explain itself to itself. Even at this late stage in the game!
To address this article directly though: Katja uses the analogy of skateboarding. This is philosophy as craft, philosophy as art. Think of disciplines being divided into the "what" (subject matter) and the "how" (methods).
Philosophy cares about thinking correctly. Philosophy cares about what it means to acquire knowledge about something. Philosophy cares about the difference between quantifying and qualifying. Philosophy cares about fallacies.
This means that one learns about how concepts works–how to construct a concept, how to take apart a concept–how to trace its history–how to trace its connections and relations over time.
Why read old philosophy? (1) Because "how". In philosophy you read clear thinkers from any age in order to learn how to think clearly. (2) Because "what". In philosophy we trace concepts back as far as we can, ideally with an understanding of the culture and language in which they were expressed. Nietzsche and Derrida would have read Aristotle and Plato in the Ancient Greek, do we do that nowadays? How can we be sure we can trust the contemporary translations?
Philosophy cannot usefully be compared by way of analogy with any of the sub-disciplines of the sciences or humanities because the domain of philosophy and the methods of philosophy only overlap with those at strategic points.
Nice point. The fundamental questions that we wrestle with are universal across time and geography. Questions such as how we should lead our life and how we should function in a society. The ancients are the best source for understanding these questions and their virtue of having survived through generations is a testament of their value to society.
We are often too quick to dismiss the ancients, who end up more often than not being right all along.
> An old work of philosophy does not describe the thing you are meant to be learning about. It was created by the thing you are meant to be learning about, much like watching a video from skater-Aristotle’s GoPro. And the value proposition is that with this high resolution Aristotle’s-eye-view, you can infer the motions.
tldr; read old philosophy to learn how to reason, read new physics to learn the results of reasoning.
So, in a metaphorical way, reading old philosophy isn't about reading a legacy code base. It's about reading the git history and project documentation.
Hmm, I'd say more like reading the (original) source code of git itself to learn about Linus and his coding"philosophy" [0] vs reading a modern tutorial about how to use git.
[0] I haven't done this so not putting any value prop on this specific example.
One reason to read old philosophy is that it is way more approachable. Most of the time, the approachability is an inverse function of the date the philosophical material appeared (understandable given our knowledge and thoughts have grown to be more complex throughout history). If you want to get into philosophy, reading a platonic dialogue (except Timaios and those with the Eleian) or one of the simpler texts of Aristotle (like Poetica) is way more easier than say reading Schophenauer, which is in turn easier than Wittgenstein, which in turn is probably easier than reading Derrida. Also, building up on examples of older pieces of philosophy, you have more tools for approaching the new stuff, because, surprise, it's built on not only the concepts, but examples and myths from and references to the old stuff.
And the best thing reading philosophy teaches to the non-academician is how to think with structure and method, avoiding dogma and bias, and embracing scepticism. Reading the dialogues has changed my life entirely because of that.
> "And the best thing reading philosophy teaches to the non-academician is how to think with structure and method, avoiding dogma and bias, and embracing scepticism. Reading the dialogues has changed my life entirely because of that."
Completely agree - I find my philosophy degree being most useful in what you've laid out and also in empathizing (or at least understanding) with what someone else is saying, especially if that person is bad at communication or cannot express themselves as clearly as they'd like.
The older philosophers tended to take the reader on a mental journey / through a mental exercise, and not always a clear one, so you're forced to extrapolate what's important from what seems to be nonsensical stream of consciousness.
I come across folks at work all the time who can't really explain what they're saying, but I'm able to extrapolate based off a few key words / phrases. It's a valuable skill for product discovery / design.
Caveat here is that one can develop the above skills without philosophy so it's not a requirement to read old philosophers, but rather one path among many.
> One reason to read old philosophy is that it is way more approachable
I don't think that's really true in general. Sure, Plato is more approachable than Wittgenstein, but I don't think the comparison works the same with, say, Rawls in place of Wittgenstein.
There are two conditions I would want to see fulfilled by explanations of philosophy that would allow me to outmode reading older philosophers:
That the explanation adequately creates distinctions between the terms used by the philosopher and other such terms that are similar but must be distinguished.
That the viewpoint of the philosopher is contextualized by the diff between various other viewpoints on the same issue.
(Ian Hacking is a philosopher of statistics in science which is very good at this, and he didn't even have to invent statistics.)
But oftentimes when the explainer caste of writers seeks to summarize philosophy, they do so in a way that focuses on the conclusions and takes for granted the presuppositions that had to be explored in order to reach those conclusions.
When asking someone who has taken the summary to unpack each term in a sort of reverse-analysis, I think that they would have a difficult time because they didn't see the struggle that would have motivated the analysis in the first place.
The author of the OP is correct that there is resistance that makes philosophical explanations less fungible than, say physics methods. It's because the terms used by philosophers are not mathematical in a way that can be easily copied. Instead they are the thing that constructs the semantics of terms which are eventually reified by mathematical syntax.
Quantitative subjects are progressive and new discoveries or technological advancements make past theories obsolete; on the contrary, old philosophy aims at studying the world we are all in from different perspectives and with different methods or goals, so that it is cumulative indeed: past theories go out of fashion never becoming obsolete, still being re-usable in need, at different times or epochs.
Old philosophy is fun in the same way old science is fun. Watching someone from thousands of years ago use a process to determine a more accurate or valuable way of thinking about the world, with rudimentary tools, should inspire us to go use the tools we have now better.
Knowledge of ancient philosophy, and of its history through the Enlightenment, is necessary to understand and then deliberately change the nature and present course of civilization.
Some interesting points in the article, but it misses the most important reason to read old philosophy. This is that, because unlike science, philosophers today are still arguing over many of the same basic points the earlier ones were.
In addition, there is the fact that Western Civilization, including modern democracy, science, technology, and economics, is greatly based on ideas from Greek philosophy, so in reading it you are understanding much about our modern world.
Actually it’s kind of interesting that primary code is not studied in CS. Given all the Carmack lore going around, I’ll add that I learned quite a bit of x86asm from his Wolf3D release that could not have come from any book. I guess the value was mostly in trying to figure out why he did something instead of having it explained.
Philosophy presents a methodology for argument. The arguments made by Plato through Wittgenstein need not be objectively true, rather they serve as simply great arguments of history.
Many teachers forget to instill the fact that when we as a species infuse reason and language to make persuasive arguments, we call that philosophy.
I think it comes down to the scientific method. In math and physics new theories are proven extensions or replacements of previous theories. In philosophy you do not have the same kind of proof, there is more room for interpretation. And then of cause there is the beauty and concisenes of the old texts
There is much less room for interpretation than most people seem to think. Philosophers often go to fairly extreme lengths to define exactly what they mean (e.g. by carefully describing their use of a word or term to avoid confusion/misinterpretation).
Also, scientific methods and processes are based on theories and thoughts developed primarily by philosophers.
This post is misguided on so many levels. It never once occurs to the author that the reason we still study the ancients is because they were right. Like 90% of HN readers, the author tacitly assumes that old == wrong/outmoded/bygone/eclipsed. She thus concludes that the only possible reason to read the ancients is to study their methods (e.g., how Aristotle wrote) and not their actual ideas (e.g., what Aristotle wrote).
This is the same mindset that plagues the obsession with "critical thinking" in education policy today. Everyone thinks that to think "critically" means to think in a particular way, and so the best way to teach such a thing is to teach techniques of logic, reasoning, etc. Hence, on this view, ancient philosophy provides merely a source of examples of how to think about problems in a certain way. Of course, this argument goes, those problems themselves are no longer relevant (or at least the solutions that the ancients proposed to solve them are not). But it is still worthwhile to see why they were wrong, and how we have improved since then. Hurrah, "critical" thinking! We are so "advanced" in our critique!
This perspective is offensive to philosophers everywhere, and should be offensive to most people in general, if they only knew enough to be offended. It leads quickly to a path of historicism, if not relativism. "Philosophy" comes from the Greek words philos and sophia, meaning "love" and "wisdom" respectively. This tells us two important things. First, pace the author, philosophy is a way of life after all -- it "is about having certain experiences," as she puts it. This is indicated by the idea of "love" that is captured in its name. Loving is a way of being. It is not something that you "do" and "stop" and "start," like a conscious process controlled by our ego. Philosophy, accordingly, is much more than a field of academic inquiry -- it is a way of life, a way of being in the world, properly understood. Second, the object of its love -- sophia -- is important as well. Insofar as it is oriented toward wisdom, philosophy aims at something much higher than the author admits. It aims at knowledge of the whole, not simply the part [0]. Thus, it is impossible to divorce the form of philosophy from its content, as the author here wants to do. In other words, it is not merely the "how" of what Aristotle wrote that is ahistorical, transcendental, and thus still useful for readers today -- it is also the "what" that he wrote as well. We therefore must take seriously the actual content Aristotle wrote, and not simply dismiss it as eclipsed by all the "progress" we have experienced in the intervening years.
So what, precisely, did the ancients think? This is the ultimate reason to study ancient philosophy. That reason is this: The ancients saw things more clearly than we see them now. The saw the same world that we did (basic nature has not changed in 2000 years), but it disclosed itself to them in a different way, in a way that was perhaps more original and less encumbered by our modern concepts and dispositions. The ancients saw more clearly many of the fundamental problems that we still grapple with today -- for example, the tension between equality and freedom, between the right and the good, between the community and the individual. (To take examples from political philosophy.) Those problems still abide, but they are covered up in modernity and hard to see. By returning to the ancients, we can recover insight into the precise nature of those tensions, the reasons that they exist, and the reasons that they may be unsolvable. (Contra the modern/Enlightenment conceit that all problems are solvable given enough knowledge.) This doesn't mean embracing a sort of nihilism. Quite the contrary -- it means seeking out a kind of "wisdom" that is presently occluded.
For a thought experiment (though this may be hard for atheists to stomach), imagine if the author had suggested that the only reason to still read the Bible today was to understand "how" Jesus acted the way he did, or "how" God did what he did. That would be ridiculous. Of course there is more reason to read the original text than that. And Bible is a very old text indeed.
[0] For a discussion of the five different ways of knowing (episteme/techne/phronesis/nous/sophia, or science/art/prudence/intellect/wisdom) see Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book 6, Chapter 7.
> For a thought experiment (though this may be hard for atheists to stomach), imagine if the author had suggested that the only reason to still read the Bible today was to understand "how" Jesus acted the way he did, or "how" God did what he did. That would be ridiculous. Of course there is more reason to read the original text than that. And Bible is a very old text indeed.
The Bible is not a philosophical text in any way remotely like Nicomachean Ethics. The Bible is a series of stories, genealogy and poetry, not an argument, or a dialogue that attempts to illuminate the truth, or at least points of disagreement over the truth. The Bible is not about how Jesus or God did anything in the way that the Ethics is about how you think about what is good. The Bible is why. If you believe that the reason to live a righteous life is that there is a righteous God and his son was born, died and rose again the Bible is that story. It does not tell you how, except in the very barest details. That's what the Church is for, the community of believers.
Interesting point, but I don't think you give the Bible enough credit. (For the record, I am not a believer, but I take religion quite seriously.)
First, I don't think any Christian would agree with you that "The Bible is a series of stories, genealogy and poetry, not an argument, or a dialogue that attempts to illuminate the truth, or at least points of disagreement over the truth." Of course the Bible is an illumination of truth -- that is its very foundation! The reason that the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) are also called the "revelatory" religions is that they are predicated on the idea that God reveals something true about the world, something that merely human knowledge would otherwise never be able to obtain. This is what makes religion so attractive in the first place -- it promises us a truth we could not know ourselves.
Second, this revelation of truth encompasses both the "why" and the "how," to use your terms. You are correct to say that it gives a story for "why" one might want to live a righteous life (i.e., to achieve salvation and be judged in heaven). But it also gives a explanation for "how" one should live such a life. The most obvious example of this is the Ten Commandments, but also consider other popular maxims like the ones contained in Jesus's Sermon on the Mount. Or think about how Aquinas writes an entire treatise about the differences between natural and divine law, and how the latter is given by God and instructs us on the proper way to live. The Church doesn't just make this stuff up out of thin air -- most of it is grounded in the Scripture.
So, finally, is the Bible so different from a text of ancient philosophy after all? You say that it is not remotely like the Nicomachean Ethics, but insofar as both teach something about both the "why" and the "how" to live a good life, I am not so sure. (To use your criteria of evaluation.) If you're unconvinced, perhaps consider either Plato's Republic or the Gorgias instead. In both those texts, Plato presents elaborate reasons for "why" to live in a particular way, but then concludes with an elaborate myth at the end (the Myth of Er and the Judgment of the Naked Souls). Why does he do this? Perhaps because he knows that, for many, reasoned arguments are not enough to convince. Something like a religion (i.e., a myth) is necessary to compel the masses into living in a way that is good for them. Is that so different from Christianity?
Thinking there's anything wrong with relativism is perverse, and a disgrace to philosophy as a whole. Trying to discredit relativism means you think there's one, and only one, standard of right and wrong, and that our ethics can never improve based on philosophical thinking. It's anti-progress and, therefore, utterly anti-philosophy.
Isn't your statement itself an absolutist statement? (I.e., that trying to discredit relativism "means" something, as a matter of fact?) If you're being ironic here, well played.
Responding to your basic thesis that the ancients (by which I assume you mean the Presocratics through Plato and Aristotle) were right, what do you make of the numerous problems for which they proposed different answers? For instance:
- Plato's ideal government is radically communist, Aristotle prefers something more in line with contemporary common sense
- Plato's universals (i.e., ideals) are objects in a super-real universe, Aristotle's universals don't have such a privileged reality, and are debatably socially constructed
This is to say nothing of the various physical and cosmological theories that these philosophers had: each was (exaggerating slightly) fantastic, incompatible with any other, and impossible to reconcile with what we know about science in the 21st century.
These philosophers are incredible for their originality and intellectual vitality, but I don't know how wise it is to say that philosophy ended with them. I think the SEP's opening remarks on Aristotle's logic are representative of the attitude one ought to have for a lot of ancient philosophy:
> Aristotle’s logical works contain the earliest formal study of logic that we have. It is therefore all the more remarkable that together they comprise a highly developed logical theory, one that was able to command immense respect for many centuries: Kant, who was ten times more distant from Aristotle than we are from him, even held that nothing significant had been added to Aristotle’s views in the intervening two millennia.
> In the last century, Aristotle’s reputation as a logician has undergone two remarkable reversals. The rise of modern formal logic following the work of Frege and Russell brought with it a recognition of the many serious limitations of Aristotle’s logic; today, very few would try to maintain that it is adequate as a basis for understanding science, mathematics, or even everyday reasoning. At the same time, scholars trained in modern formal techniques have come to view Aristotle with new respect, not so much for the correctness of his results as for the remarkable similarity in spirit between much of his work and modern logic. As Jonathan Lear has put it, “Aristotle shares with modern logicians a fundamental interest in metatheory”: his primary goal is not to offer a practical guide to argumentation but to study the properties of inferential systems themselves.
Excellent point, thank you. You are right to say that we should not conflate the "ancients" into one monolithic category. Plato and Aristotle certainly disagreed on many key points, to say nothing of their divergence from other ancient traditions beyond the geographic West (e.g., ancient Chinese or Indian philosophy).
So when I argue that "the ancients were right," it would be more correct to say "some of the ancients were right." They cannot all have been right, since they disagreed with each other! Thank you for pushing me to clarify on this point. My deeper argument, though, is that it is impossible to arbitrate who is right from the perspective of the present. That is, it would be wrong to say that Aristotle or Plato is more correct merely on the basis of what is "in line with contemporary common sense." Of course, contemporary common sense could be right, but it could also be deeply flawed. Stepping beyond the confines of the present, and looking back to the ideas of the ancients, provides a helpful counterfactual for our modern way of thinking about things. It is precisely because the ancients were arguing about problems in a way that is different than the way we think about them today that they are worth studying. Not, again, to see who is more in line with the latest advances in our current understanding of physical, cosmological, scientific theory, but rather to help reframe the very terms of debate in which those theories work.
You hit the nail on the head when you observe that there are "bizarre passages" in ancient philosophy that "make us wonder what could have motivated the question at hand." Exactly! Your very confusion on this point proves that the whole question that Plato was addressing in the Cratylus has been forgotten in modern times. Of course, from the perspective of contemporary linguistics, obviously Plato is wrong to suggest that onomatopoeia has a conceptual basis. But is that all Plato is arguing in that text? It is precisely the framing of his inquiry in the terms of modern linguistics that does a disservice to his original thought. Indeed, the very fact that the exact nature of his question has been lost, as you point out, suggests that he may have been exploring a whole separate area of inquiry.
To be sure, by returning to such an area of inquiry I don't mean to say that "philosophy ended with" the ancients. Not at all! Philosophy is not something that has an end [0]. It is, rather, a way of living in the world -- a way of being perpetually open to ideas and therefore living the best life possible. But even if it did end in some fashion, I would never argue that it ended with the Greeks. It may have started there (though this is debatable), but the Greeks only represent a sort of waypoint -- certainly not the end all, be all. The goal of the student of ancient philosophy is never to return to Plato in order to, say, reinstitute the Athenian polis today. That would be stupid. Rather, the goal in returning to Plato (for example) is to understand the precise nature of the problems he encountered, in order to then return to that point and make progress from there. This is necessary because that starting point has been covered up by modern philosophy -- it has taken a wrong turn, as it were, and has closed down other avenues worth exploring. In order to recover those avenues it is necessary to return to their original point of departure, and to take them seriously as viable alternative, not simply as wrong paths that have been "proven" erroneous by contemporary advances.
Finally, since we are talking about Plato and Aristotle, I would also just mention that it is dangerous to say "Plato said this" or "Aristotle said that." This is because Plato wrote dialogues, and always presented his apparent positions through the mouthpieces of his characters. Aristotle, too, wrote is a dialogical fashion, often couching his apparent arguments in a response to the prevailing doxa (opinions) of the time. It is difficult, therefore, to ascertain precisely what Plato (the person) or Aristotle (the person) really believed. They also contradict themselves all the time -- Plato, for example, presents his political teaching in two texts (the Republic and the Laws), which are quite different. So while he may (may) have advocated for a communist regime in the Republic, he does not do so in the Laws. Obviously this provokes confusion on the part of the reader. What did they really think then?!? However, I would say that, again, it is precisely this frustration that points back toward another way of "doing" philosophy. Today, contemporary philosophers only ever write treatises, with precise, logical arguments. (Especially in the analytic school.) But Plato shows that there are other ways to seek and present knowledge. Remembering that is itself a worthwhile reason to return to the ancients as well. (And, incidentally, the reason that the author of this post gives, though on a slightly different rationale.)
[0] Though this claim is highly debatable, I should say. Hegelians would disagree. (In this vein consider the popularized "end of history" thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama.)
It is interesting to see how we got here. Seeing a long arc of...dismissed ideas, let's say, can give us perspective on the ideas we hold today that are more or less a historical accident and, hopefully, the conceptual room to change them if they don't work.
I haven't read the article, but does that about sum it up?
No, that is quite unlike both the problem the article poses and solution answer is proposes. I would explain them here, but I encourage people to read the article instead.
The article is not about whether the ideas espoused by old philosophers are worth learning about, or about whether old philosophers are worth reading. The article asks the question of why philosophers prefer to read the original works of old philosophers, instead of reading descriptions of these ideas by authors who have demonstrated competence is explaining philosophical ideas. Which is the way that education is handled in most (all?) scientific fields.