I’ve always enjoyed(?) studying philosophy. The courses I’ve taken have always been intellectually challenging and have provided some small insight into explaining how we think about ‘stuff and things’. Fast forward to the present – the experience of Philosophy has changed. It is an inward cringe because what philosophy means on the interwebs is usually a dense obscurantist pile of word-guano ostensibly put forward as a “defence” of some vile maxim or another (see all of christian apologetics). Wading through the glitzy word patina to uncover, and then prove, that the author(s) is(are) self-justifying the jebus shaped hole in his heart just isn’t a satisfying intellectual experience.
So I’m with Mary on what she says about philosophers.
“What is wrong is a particular style of philosophising that results from encouraging a lot of clever young men to compete in winning arguments. These people then quickly build up a set of games out of simple oppositions and elaborate them until, in the end, nobody else can see what they are talking about. All this can go on until somebody from outside the circle finally explodes it by moving the conversation on to a quite different topic, after which the games are forgotten. Hobbes did this in the 1640s. Moore and Russell did it in the 1890s. And actually I think the time is about ripe for somebody to do it today.”
A little less word salad and a little more clarity would be a good move for Philosophy. :)
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
11 comments
November 30, 2013 at 9:36 am
myatheistlife
Some might argue that word salad is all philosophy has… it’s been a long time since there was a new idea or paradigm that wasn’t merely playing catch up to hard sciences.
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November 30, 2013 at 10:56 am
Rob F
Reminds me of the joke that a scientist starts with a pencil, stack of paper, and a wastebasket, while a philosopher starts with a pen, a stack of paper, and no need for a wastebasket.
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November 30, 2013 at 11:27 am
The Arbourist
@MAL
Hard to say, there is some very good and lucid stuff out there, just that it is hard to find and often requires extensive reading in the field to make it useful or even approachable to people.
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November 30, 2013 at 11:27 am
The Arbourist
@Rob F
LoL.. :)
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November 30, 2013 at 11:44 am
myatheistlife
A large part of the problem is that many of the words are laid down as fodder in the discussion of what thoughts are, what consciousness is, and so on. Philosophy doesn’t yet have a sound description of what they are trying to study… IMO
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November 30, 2013 at 2:53 pm
Reneta Scian
Do you feel that this “broken philosophy” is the result of “The Meme” generation? AKA, people who believe nonsense because someone made knowledge available to them in bite-sized chunks that required little to no effort on their behalf to obtain? Garbage In Garbage Out, they say? I feel this, along with a lot of things is the product of the intellectual laziness of Western Civilizations, and Westernized Cultures. But it’s obviously more dynamic that that. I see meme, after meme, after memes of nonsense claiming to be knowledge on the Internets, and people without the aptness to think about it critically accepting it wholly as truth, and having their entire worldview distorted as a result.
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November 30, 2013 at 3:30 pm
Marie
I think philosophy can be outrageously pedantic and boring, but, at its best, it can stretch our thinking and develop our capacity for logical thought. I’m most pleased when I’m shown the errors in my arguments, because it’s the first step in a whole new thought process. It forces me to try to develop my ideas more precisely and with a greater depth of thought at a time in which we’re getting used to over-simplifications of ideas thrice removed from the original source and ‘twitterified’ for mass consumption.
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December 1, 2013 at 7:49 am
dingle berry (@dinglesprout)
It depends on the philosophy type. So called analytic philosophy is expressible in more scientific jargon whereas in continental philosophy words alone are sometimes not enough to invoke a concept and writers hope to convey their meaning through form as well as content.
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December 1, 2013 at 7:51 am
The Arbourist
@Reneta Scian
I would have to at least partially agree with you, as currently much of our social energy seems to be focused on social media, and the quick hit stimulation it provides.
Agreed, but also consider that all of the TV media and most of the print media in North America are dedicated to keeping people addled, marginalized and uninterested in the affairs of state. Consider how much play “twerking” has go versus the geopolitics of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt, Palestine etc. How do you know what good food is when all you eat is cornpops 3 times a day?
Critical thinking, as always, is at a premium because like all worthwhile things, thinking is hard. :)
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December 1, 2013 at 8:03 am
The Arbourist
@Marie
Agree on both points Mary. I perhaps should have prefaced my article with the fact that I really enjoy philosophy as a subject and it like history, political science, feminism and general science (et cetera) are the subjects of my various reading binges. The last philosophy book I read was A.C Grayling’s Thinking of Answers: Questions in the Philosophy of Everyday Life – I don’t remember it at all, but I recall I good feeling about the text (second readings are the best). :)
And with practice, it becomes easier. My writing is slowly improving the more I read and the more I write here for general consumption. It’s been a stint here, where I’ve been writing less and quoting more. I’m hoping it is just a phase.
One of the problems is that some ideas are complex and when put through the the twitter-mill are denuded of what makes them such powerful arguments/statements in the first place. 140 characters does not an essay make.
Thank you for stopping by. :)
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December 1, 2013 at 8:11 am
The Arbourist
@dingle berry
Absolutely. But continental philosophy and religious apologetics might be in the same family, but often have different goals. The word bricks being tossed about by those defending the indefensible are trying promulgate their toxic beliefs and give them a veneer of credibility.
Many obscurantist philosophers simply need the word faffage to make their points because the stuff they are dealing with, as you said, is hard to handle.
It could be construed as a question of intent and the religious one bugs me. :>
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