Whenever I want to feel completely stupid, I just open a Wikipedia page on some philosophical term/idea and go down a rabbit hole of links that it's a concept in/argument against/etc.
Just completely impenetrably baffling to me in a way that other fields like chemistry or microbiology or physics or whatever (despite also not being my own) aren't. Not that I understand them, but they're penetrable, I can read more and more and form some kind of understanding.
Is it just me? I don't know what it is, can it really be as simple as philosophy not being taught at school (compulsorily, or young) so I don't have that kind of rough overview of the landscape I do for other broad subjects? (I did take one course in 'contemporary philosophy' at university, which I enjoyed, but we covered only what we covered I suppose - I might be able to hold a (very) basic conversation about Sartre or Wittgenstein, but that page on post-structuralism.. no idea!)
It can be a grand number of things, but lack of the highschool curriculum is unlikely to be one of them, in my opinion. Rest assured, you're far from the only one struggling, I'd say most people I've encountered in academic philosophy tend to struggle a tad more with it than (their) other fields of studies. It is what it is, really, it sort of comes with the territory.
Of course there are just some that are less accessible than others, due to writing style or size of their philosophical project (Hegel is an example of both of those qualities). A lot of French philosophy since the second world war, Baudrillard being no exception, is generally characterized as such as well amongst the anglo audience, although I don't think that this is entirely fair.
I'd say the best thing you can do is never attempt to understand it through Wikipedia, but pick up a full book instead and read it a second time if the argument doesn't make sense the first time. Of course there are some authors I would avoid as a beginner, but someone like Kant is fine for even your first philosopher, and is amongst the biggest names in modern philosophy. Prolegomena and Critique of Pure Reason are two books of his about the same thing written in two opposite ways, the former from easy to difficult, the latter vice versa, I always recommend those.
Sartre and Wittgenstein are both somewhat odd for a contemporary philosophy course. I'm curious why they chose that arrangement. Nevertheless, being able to hold a conversation about either of them is already quite solid, plus you get three philosophers for the price of two! :)
- https://philpapers.org/archive/KAMCYB.pdf which made me realize an intuition i had sonce reading the first book (i think the writing is better and clearer, but it might be because the author isn't USian/english and doesn't try to much)
More than likely it is "just you", the page on post-structuralism seems clear enough to me (as far as I can tell, the post-structuralists are criticising structuralism because they don't think the structures are sufficiently powerful). What that means in detail is unclear - understanding a position and thinking it is obviously silly is a completely valid stance when dealing with philosophers. Or just having no interest in the questions philosophers often ask (for example, if structuralism seems to be fundamentally invalid then bothering to take a post-structuralist stance to criticise it it requires a certain type of pedantic and argumentative mind). Or the easy explanation which is misunderstanding [0].
I liked the Barthes example on the post-structuralist page - if a text's author doesn't necessarily have the authority to assert the meaning of a text, then the idea that they text is necessarily part of some identifiable structure is open to question. I assume that means that the same text might fit into multiple contexts with different meanings and trying to fit it with one static meaning based on its initial context is doomed, and that suggests structuralist critique is either insufficient or overly reductive.
[0] Although arguably all of philosophy is people misunderstanding each other; otherwise it may as well be a settled field.
Ah, sorry. The intended parsing turned out badly. That is meant to be "More than likely it is "just you". What that means in detail is unclear." Ie, what it means for it to be "just him" is not clear.
In hindsight I like the irony that the statement was also unclear, for all that it doesn't do my comment any favours.
One is basically stochastic parottism, and the other is dealing with reality.
Philosophy has no end-game or practical applications. You can make anything up, and so long as enough souls latch onto it via pattern recognition, you have achieved memetic reproduction.
With hard sciences, you can talk all you want, but if your hypotheses are consistently disproven, only the untrained and deranged will latch onto your ideas.
There is nothing to penetrate in philosophy. It's not a reflection of reality, but a reflection of the people it captivates.
It's very little different than music, or any other sort of entertainment. Dare I call it an art. In that case, I would say its recent interpretations are lacking.
A personal aside: much of this era's approach to philosophy reminds me of Fabianism -- wretched, cowardly, and completely superfluous to living an integrated life.
Just completely impenetrably baffling to me in a way that other fields like chemistry or microbiology or physics or whatever (despite also not being my own) aren't. Not that I understand them, but they're penetrable, I can read more and more and form some kind of understanding.
Is it just me? I don't know what it is, can it really be as simple as philosophy not being taught at school (compulsorily, or young) so I don't have that kind of rough overview of the landscape I do for other broad subjects? (I did take one course in 'contemporary philosophy' at university, which I enjoyed, but we covered only what we covered I suppose - I might be able to hold a (very) basic conversation about Sartre or Wittgenstein, but that page on post-structuralism.. no idea!)