Thread 24676581

I believe any concept worth its salt can be explained in gradual levels of complexity. Starting with analogies a child can understand, right up to discourse meant for experts in the field. With each step in between, a topic reveals its complexity and demands more thought.

It seems like most philosophical concepts explained at the most accessible levels, are either entirely intuitive, trivial, or nonsense. Meanwhile many important philosophical works seem to be written almost exclusively at the very top level of complexity, every other sentence being densely crafted in linguistic riddles and esoteric allusions.

Where are all the middle steps for philosophy? Is anyone here able to articulate a single genuinely interesting notion they learned from a philosopher in language I can understand? 2-3 sentences, one step up from your average normie youtube essay?

Please convince me that my suspicions around philosophy are only rooted in ignorance.

>>24676581 (OP)
You take philosophy as something general and really existing 'out there' but it is a personal way of arriving at things. Any instance can lead deeper if you are attentive enough, just keep your watch on the details. But you are correct in being suspicious: chimera of 'philosophy' is one of those apparatuses of capture, it wants you to bow to its authority.

Follow your intuition, which comes from the heart. And so, learn to love wisdom. Which wants you healthy, strong and creative.

>>24676592
I appreciate the sentiment but I take issue with the intimation that philosophies 'non existence' might excuse it from having intermediary levels of depth.

Similarly abstract concepts in music theory, media studies, cultural theory, math etc, are explainable in gradual levels without falling apart in the middle.

>I believe any concept worth its salt can be explained in gradual levels of complexity. Starting with analogies a child can understand, right up to discourse meant for experts in the field.
>It seems like most philosophical concepts explained at the most accessible levels, are either entirely intuitive, trivial, or nonsense.
I think you are the one who is retarded because anyone with even a minimal grasp of philosophy would immediately be able to tell you that any statement given in a way that even a child can understand it would necessarily have to be extremely simplistic and trivial.
>Is anyone here able to articulate a single genuinely interesting notion they learned from a philosopher in language I can understand? 2-3 sentences, one step up from your average normie youtube essay?
"2-3 sentences" is not a step up from YouTube video essays, it is several steps down. It is impossible to give an argument in 2-3 sentences, much less prove it. What you can do is assert something. That's the best that can be done with this. And even here we are assuming that your ability to understand things is sufficient to grasp the value of what is being said, which is not a given.
As a disclaimer, I should note that I only read ancient philosophy.

Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box

>>24676614
I meant that 'intermediary levels' are relative (to your own level of development). You move through gradual levels gradually, from the place where you are -- to the next stage. Let's take Apeiron, the final station, which could never be fully arrived at / or objectified. In relation to it, we are always somewhere 'in the middle', i.e. not yet there, but to move closer we have to make steps from where we are. So, really you need to recreate philosophy on your own, through 'buggering out' old concepts to give birth to new ones that will help you to move further. Philosophy is about armament, as intimated Deleuze.

Either that, if you take Apeiron to be synonymous with your higher Soul, or you allow worldly powers to dictate you gradations of the horizon.

>>24676581 (OP)
I chains

>>24676581 (OP)
>muh why doesn't an entire field cater muh idiocy
>muh hate midwits looka muh norf meme
>muh I just want the smart ones to explain it to me like an idiot but when they do I have to blogpost about whether I'm the idiot
>why did all the midwits start ignoring me after I made fun of them?

You are the reason Wittgenstein incorporated the admission of complete uselessness into his system. It's all useless to you. Move on. Don't fall for the memes and midwit traps. Go back. Just go back.

>>24676621
>you cant introduce complex arguements in 2-3 sentences
Many mathematicians argues that 0.999…=1 because the infinite decimal represents a limit; as the number of 9s grows without bound, the difference from 1 becomes infinitesimal, mathematically indistinguishable from zero. Critics counter that no finite process ever reaches infinity, so 0.999… is conceptually perpetually less than 1, and equality is a formal convenience rather than intuitive truth. Others reconcile the tension by framing real numbers through limits: the equality holds rigorously in standard analysis, even if intuition resists.

>>24676675
nta. I reckon that critics (who can be placed among the mathematical construtivists, like Kronecker, who argue that all true mathematics has to be computable, and, as you say, 0.99.. is not computable) don't say that 0.999... is not equal to 1, they say that the question is not valid, because 0.999... is not a valid mathematical object.

However, I think that the idea can be understood just by saying that there can't be a real number contiguous to other (contiguity is the relationship between a shoe and the floor, they have extension in space and there is a clear limit between them where they touch each other), so if we endlessly add decimals (which is what constructivists don't accept), we have to imagine that we will get 1, because otherwise we would get a number just next to one with no continuous space in between, which is impossible. Essentially, both stances imply the same, namely, the absence of a contiguous real number to another, with the difference that on one side they negate the contiguity by equating both points and on the other they negate the contiguity by stopping and accepting that there will always be infinite points between the two.

For me it can be solved using the aristotelian frame of actuality and potentiality, which is already implicit in the mathematical definition of a limit. When mathematicians say that 1/x tends to infinity when x approaches infinity, they don't say that 1/x equals to infinity when x=0 (because the function is not defined at 0) but that the number will never stop increasing as we approach 0. So, extrapolating this notion to the 0.99... thing, we can say that it is potentially 1 but never actually 1, and in this context constructivists focus in actuality and intuitionists in potentiality, when in reality both are right and wrong at the same time for opposite reasons.

Maybe a professional mathematician comes to me and completely wrecks what I said with mathematical proof, but these are my layman intuitions based on the Aristotle's physics, which I encourage to read if you have a knack for math and in which he talks about infinity as a potentiality and approaches the continuum problem.

>>24676631
I know what I know if you know what I mean.

>>24676581 (OP)
There was a funny point on a Shermer podcast when some broad researching mind control techniques confessed to having been part of some Lacan cultists in university and how they bent over backwards to derive meaning from the word vomit and then compose their own and pat each others backs or attack other for heresy, ultimately she seemed to think it was all a fart smelling exercise.

Philosophy had a very long time where it was concerned with basic questions about how to live life, how the universe worked and the big why questions. Over time the questions actually got answered and subsumed by other disciplines. Modern philosophy is what’s left, and modern academia long enabled a path to success wherein the most convoluted up its own ass word salad won the game. If you’re incomprehensible your fellows will commend you for radical new ideas. If you bring forth something practical or actually testable you belong in a different discipline. Consciousness for instance is increasingly the realm of neuroscience because it became testable through brain scans.

There are a few philosophers bucking the trend and trying to write something comprehensible if not even practical. Minor hold rush the last 15 years telling people about stoicism and other greek practical philosophy.

It’s not the only field struggling with obscurantism and bizarre incentives. Physics likes to make up untestable theories and the bullshit meter on string physics seems to have tipped but not after people spent their entire careers coming up with fuckall. Psychology had 100 years of taking Freud seriously before people started to question if he was just some nut making shit up about how wanting to fuck your mother was essential to development.

People need to take this shit less seriously not more seriously. If it’s serious make it real science. Otherwise it’s just your mental wank session.

>>24676813
I'm genuinely curious about how you are going to reduce ethics (and by extension, politics) to science, given that even the praxis itself of science is affected by ethics (you can't subdue anyone you want to be part of a experiment, for example), and that implies a whole semantic and cultural context that can't be reproduced by science previously.

>Consciousness for instance is increasingly the realm of neuroscience because it became testable through brain scans.

You got filtered by the hard problem of consciousness, which is probably the hardest problem. Consciousness is not testable because the scientist makes correlations between acts of the subject of study and brain signals, not between the consciousness of the subject and brain signals, since the consciousness of the subject is inaccessible, and the scientist cannot do the experiments with himself and call it science because consciousness is an intimate phenomenon that couldn't be verified nor falsified by other scientists, so for them the experiment wouldn't meet the requirements of science, which include the potential to be published and validated. And even if we accepted that private experiment as valid at least locally for him, we wouldn't have any proof for a causal connection between the correlations, which is always a problem with positivism, but that isn't even the key problem, that is consciousness being intimate.

Essentially, it's not testable because consciousness is an intimate experience which is necessary for testing external and shared perceptions, and consciousness is not one of those external and shared perceptions.

>>24676581 (OP)
Epistomology through lexical precision; truth through specific language. Philosophy is the way it is because of the process. "Mid" tier thoughts were once revolutionary and additional thought expands on it so it suffers from scope creep.

>>24676675
What I actually wrote:
>It is impossible to give an argument in 2-3 sentences, much less prove it. What you can do is assert something. That's the best that can be done with this.
And this is exactly what you have demonstrated. You have interpreted my use of the word "argument" to mean "dispute" (whereas I actually meant making a case for a specific position). Then you briefly summarised some positions in this dispute in a handful of words, without giving too much context and notably without proving any of them.
Not also that for your example you have selected a quantitative science.

>>24676621
You don't understand an idea if you cannot explain it in a simple, clear, and direct way. It's that simple.

OP here
>>24676638
>>24676592
Are you essentially saying its easy to 'understand' philosophy in theory, but harder to appreciate the weight of that understanding?

If learning advanced philosophy is all about introspection and personal experience, how come advanced philosophical texts seem so concerned with depersonalized abstractions?

>>24676852
The simple, clear, and direct way to explain an idea has complexity relative to the nature of the idea. Simple ideas will be much easier to explain simply compared to incredibly complex ideas.

>>24676852
A world class mathematician who, let's say, has solved the Riemann hypothesis, would probably be able to explain his proof in simple terms in an interview, but don't ask him to write the proof itself in simple terms because it would simply be not true. Likewise, a philosopher does not have the duty to dumb down his ideas in a book just to make it easier for laymen, even if he is able to explain it in simpler terms in an interview. The thing is that regular people dismiss philosophy more than math because philosophy is about questions that they think don't entail any complexity and are obvious to them, while math is accepted as another realm they are not even close to breach, so they don't feel entitled to dismiss it.

Philosophy is a nonsense field full of academics sitting around and jerking off while trying to come up with post hoc rationalizations for their retarded beliefs.

>>24676948
IMO engineering and medicine are responsible for the good reputation of empirical science. Thanks to journalist intermediaries, people are vaguely aware that engineering and medicine, which are constantly improving technologically, draw on discoveries made in science. So they think that science is true because spaceships and consumer gadgets exist. If it wasn't for this, I think we would be seeing the same lazy scepticism directed towards science as well.

>>24676888
Not sure If I understand what you mean by 'appreciating the weight of that understanding.' Knowledge was about the return to the divine source: the achievement of Noumenal Power within the human constitution. At the beginning, there was ritual practice and direct experience of the source. Plato codified this, and in doing so, objectified, homogenized, or even ‘jannied’ the doctrines of the mysterial traditions. These were later settled into texts and gate-kept by various priests, along with their control protocols. The so called Philosophers™ are simply the current instance of these same protocols.
>how come advanced philosophical texts seem so concerned with depersonalized abstractions?
You seem to be entranced by the authority of those opinion systems. They are chains on the spirit. Nietzsche is correct. And so is your suspicion.

Relationship with the source is personal. Thus, you have to build (or find) a way to your own conceptual framework (language and practice) in order to work with it. It’s like memes: they must be continually reinvented to properly describe the chaos of the living instance. Only then can you truly be a Lover (Philos) of Wisdom (Sophia).

>>24676845
Fair enough, but I never asked anyone to 'prove' a philosophical theory in 2-3 sentences, so much as to introduce an interesting one with some nuance.
>Not also that for your example you have selected a quantitative science.
Shouldnt really matter. Theres plenty examples of essayists capable of explaining complex ideas in concise, accessible ways. If anything, what anon is saying
>>24676907
applies much more to the sciences than to the humanities.

>>24676976
>Fair enough, but I never asked anyone to 'prove' a philosophical theory in 2-3 sentences
But you did say this:
>It seems like most philosophical concepts explained at the most accessible levels, are either entirely intuitive, trivial, or nonsense.
Which made me think you are looking for something more.
But if your intentions are genuine, perhaps we are getting too much into hair splitting here.
Both of those posts are me, by the way. This one also >>24676964. And I stand by it. Quantitative fields of study are actually far more simplistic because they offer easy and obvious supports for reasoning. Doing the humanities well is much, much harder than doing "science" well. This is also why the average humanities scholar is much less interesting than the average scientist. But a layman is equally unqualified to evaluate either of those people.
You may also be interested to learn that empirical science is a branch of philosophy. It is not a competitor to philosophy, nor is it of similar breadth as philosophy. It is a small branch of philosophy. The scientific method established by Descartes is philosophical and was first produced in response to contemporary philosophy - obsession with the purely practical side of this philosophy is a modern phenomenon and a sign of intellectual decline through the centuries.

>>24676581 (OP)
If you really have to ask then it's definitely you.

>>24677133
On the contrary. Plado put it well; the more you know you dont know the more you actually really know.

>>24676581 (OP)
Byung-Chul Han is probably what you're looking for. He uses the philosophical jargon words like "the Other" but he defines them precisely so you can follow his ideas. Philosophy originated as a pastime between a small group of individuals so it makes sense that it has kept its essence of gatekeeping outsiders whether intentional or not.

>>24676581 (OP)
>is this millennia-old, supermassive, incessantly shifting field of knowledge too complex for me to immediately understand?
>no, it must be some kind of hoax
Why are zoomers like this?

>>24677159
Thanks anon, appreciate the recommendation.

>>24677173
>too complex for me to immediately understand?
that or its too easily intuited. my point is there seems to be a chasm between whats accessible and whats not, a gap i'm open to filling.

>>24676581 (OP)
Yes, most great philosophy is nothing but trying to think through and understand ordinary experience. You're not going to get many wacky, exciting conclusion, except in shit philosophy. As Hegel said "What is familiar is what is least known". When you sum up the basic results and lines of argument in philosophers and they often sound pretty banal. But the process of thinking is what makes philosophy interesting, not the conclusions or results. So you're just not thinking like a philosopher yet, you seem to think of philosophy as a way to acquire new information about life and reality but a philosophy that's seeks its essence outside of itself is not a philosophy. In other words, because philosophy is the universal science, it structurally cannot do what you think it ought to do. It's reflective and immanent, not transitive and self-externalizing. You're a pseud for dismissing philosophy after such a lazy, thoughtless reading of it.

>>24677236
I like your perspective anon, well said
however im not dismissing it, no need to be mean :(

>>24677246
Think of it like this - what is physics? If you talked to a physicist about the night sky and kept asking him to simplify his explanations you get something like "the planets move in a certain way because of gravity" and you could say "that's it?! That's so simple! You can practically see that for yourself just by looking at the sky!" So philosophy, like physics, is prior to ordinary reality; and so it can't say anything extraordinary because it's the account of the ordinary.

>>24677175
No problem, the Agony of Eros would be my specific recommendation if any.

You are reacting badly (and correctly) to modern academic philosophy, which is just 120-135 IQ people gasping for breath and with relief that they managed to achieve journeyman status in some philosophical walled garden ("I'm a Leibniz specialist - wait, actually, I'm a specialist in this one idiosyncratic school of interpreting Leibniz and I really only know the literature of that (retarded) school because my advisor is the second doyen of that school and made me read it for 4 years and I sort of mostly did the readings and wrote a dissertation he mostly accepted and two other people mostly sort of read," "I'm a mereology specialist, I basically do pseudo-math no one cares about, even other people who do the same pseudo-math but apply it to slightly different topics in my same department," etc.), without ever aspiring to master or grandmaster status. They finish grad school and then go "phew!" and turn into jobhunt Gollum, looking for a cock to suck to get a sinecure.

The middle steps you seek are not in these people. These people don't want to talk like an apprentice or talk to apprentices anymore. What they want is to over the heads of the apprentices as pathetic journeymen in their local subguild, and talk past the lay public (another form of cocksucking: "please admire me, I have a PhD, can't you see I have a PhD?? hello??? it's in my twitter bio!!").

Now go read Descartes. Descartes was steeped in a philosophical education that presumed you had read enough textbook digests of Aristotelian and Christian-Platonic concepts that you'd know precisely what he means by "concurrence" and "substance" when he says them casually just to set up an argument. The same goes for any other philosopher, even notoriously difficult ones. Heidegger is presuming that his audience is steeped in neo-Kantian philosophy of science and hermeneutics and shares the same philosophical concerns as him, so when he foists Husserl's phenomenological thinking on them they instantly have the "leg up" into understanding why it can take the neo-Kantian paradigm to the next level and in fact transcend it.

When YOU read Heidegger you see "Man is fallen into beings" and go "what the fuck am I supposed to do with this?," but when THEY read Heidegger they are already post-Kantian subjective idealists who have followed Heidegger's introductory etymology and breakdown of the Greek terms logos and ta phainomena to explain the value of phenomenology for a better neo-Kantian hermeneutics, and had multiple "ohhhh!" moments, and so when he gradually introduces his special vocabulary (being, beings etc.), they follow it without problems, and "fallen into beings" appears to them as what it really means: "taking as self-evident certain understandings of the 'natural' entities and terms that make up the world, in certain cultural-historical moments."

>>24677305
The thing is, Descartes' use of those terms is actually quite simple and I could explain them to you or to a moderately interested autistic teenager with 7 minutes and a whiteboard. After a while building your vocabulary of such terms, which everybody interested in philosophy for a thousand years understood in the same way that everybody studying math understood basic Euclidean geometry because it was THE BOOK that you read if you want to do math, you could then understand Heidegger's creative use of them, against the backdrop of Kant's creative use of them and principled repudiation of some of them, and so on.

But no one is willing to do this for you because as soon as you show up saying "I want to understand Descartes" they think "This man will be willing to suck my cock for 6 years if I only drip-feed him my own idiosyncratic half-understanding of Descartes that I was drip-fed by my advisor in the '70s," or worse, they are THAT guy's student, and they think "This man is a potential Twitter follower and admirer, I need groupies, I need a purpose in life since I can't even get a postdoc this year."

Start with the Greeks isn't a meme. They established the vocabulary on which everybody else built. It's only a meme if you take it as a ban on reading anything post-Greek until you perfectly understand the Greeks.

>Is anyone here able to articulate a single genuinely interesting notion they learned from a philosopher in language I can understand? 2-3 sentences
If I knew you in real life I'd suggest we read something complex but short like Sellars' "The Manifest and the Scientific Image" so I could then explain it to you in 5-10 minutes and you'd have a moment of "oh, this isn't actually that complex at all." Then we could read The Myth of the Given, which is a longer form essay but still manageable, and you'd be totally baffled at first but I'd explain that in simple terms too and you'd have the "click" moment that technical density doesn't always mask conceptual poverty. You'd also see that part of the reason Sellars is writing the way he does is that he really really cares about this argument he's making but that it's difficult to work it out, so he's getting at it in any way he can, which requires a kind of conceptual meandering and building of the ship as he sails it, and that there's value in this.

I'd recommend reading something that doesn't presuppose knowledge of many technical terms, like Poincare on mathematical intuition or Duhem's "Physical Theory and Experiment." In general, avoid contemporary pseudo-philosophers (Gollum cocksuckers on Twitter) unless you know for a fact their book will help you understand something actually good.

>>24677309
In our whiteboard chats I'd never recommend you go read Krell's Daimon Life or even Dreyfus or Sheehan on Heidegger, let alone Blattner's Heidegger's Temporal Idealism. I'd recommend you read Heidegger with someone who understands it and dip into books like those to rip through them for assistance in understanding Heidegger if and only if you suspect they'll help. Nobody is going to read Blattner in 30 years even if was a big deal when he wrote that book, and ain't nobody ever going to read Blattner's students books, which are probably 350 pages and 90% responses to some other student of Blattner arguing about a single paragraph of Heidegger, and the "point" of the book is incredibly small and parochial ("Heidegger may or may not have been inspired by Kant's doctrine of the imagination," "No, he definitely wasn't" - wow, that was definitely worth reading 600 pages that are infinitely more difficult than Heidegger himself because they aren't even a coherent system of philosophy but meta-meta-critique that presupposes you're in the 1995 Heidegger Industry).

NO good philosophy trades in riddles or vagueness deliberately, although some is vague and that can be part of the excitement and challenge. Cusa's doctrine of docta ignorantia is very obvious and even "catchy" once you understand it, and his reasons for articulating it are actually simple and it has a very obvious resonance with Christian-Platonic apophatic philosophy and even with passages in Augustine's Confessions that basically contain the whole doctrine in embryo. But the book itself De docta ignorantia is notoriously insanely difficult. Cusa wasn't trying to trick people. Like Sellars and Heidegger he was autistic and trying to articulate something to an audience he knew already knew 80-90% of what he was "getting at."

The question is: Does this excite you or repel you? Does knowing that these people are saying real shit, but that you will have to learn a language similar in difficult and time-consumption to math, remove the discouraging suspicion of "what if it's all just a bunch of bullshit?" and make you want to engage with it, or (as with math) do you still think "why the fuck would I want to do that much work just to understand minor disagreements over how to model tensors in Kronecker-Sneed space?" Again, there are two types of people who can do the latter: retards who can do just enough of it to sometimes get a job, and people who think they absolutely must learn it because it's the key to some huge breakthrough in physics they think they can make.

Guys, I tried reading a high-level physics paper and I didn't understand very much of it. Why does it use so much unnecessary and esoteric jargon? Is it intellectual posturing? Disguising what are in reality simple and banal insights? Anything which can not be dumbed down for me to understand in a few sentences is fraudulent.

>>24677148
Ok kid, very honest of you.

>>24677305
>>24677309
thank you for your considered response anon
>I'd recommend reading something that doesn't presuppose knowledge of many technical terms, like Poincare on mathematical intuition or Duhem's "Physical Theory and Experiment."
im definitely attracted to the prospect of getting a taste for modern philosophy, figuring out if it truly interests me before committing to centuries of prerequisite reading. but perhaps im underestimating how interesting the greeks etc are.

>In general, avoid contemporary pseudo-philosophers (Gollum cocksuckers on Twitter) unless you know for a fact their book will help you understand something actually good.
I dont use twitter. Does Byung-Chul fall in this category?

>>24677305
>>24677309
>>24677314
Ok but have you actually been to grad school and/or studied philosophy academically?

>>24677322
>Start with the greeks, continue through Copernicus, then Kepler, Newtown, dont skip Einstein, eventually you will understand that high level physics paper anon

>>24676581 (OP)
I am not an academic by any stretch of the imagination, but I have been reading various philosophy books since high school. It might seem trivial, but what really helped me with understanding more generally what was being talked about, or "understanding the problems" philosophers are dealing with, was when I started reading histories of philosophy. The first one I read was "From Socrates to Sartre" by Stumpf, which I always recommend as the most concise and accessible for any beginner. There is also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is an invaluable resource. If you want an exhaustive collection, there is "A History of Philosophy" by Copleston (I haven't read all of this, but I reference it sometimes). I wish that I had started reading the histories first, and then gone into what interested me afterwards. Maybe this advice will help you.

>>24676581 (OP)
>Is anyone here able to articulate a single genuinely interesting notion they learned from a philosopher in language I can understand? 2-3 sentences
Sure, let's try with aristobro. Three sentences by question.

How does one achieve happiness?
According to him, by being virtuous. It's not enough to know how to be virtuous, you need to practice it.

What is virtue?
Everything has a purpose to exist, virtue is the correct functioning of something, for example the purpose for an eye is to see; and eye that doesn't see is not virtuous.
According to him, human virtues are always a balance between a defect and an excess.
For example, being brave is a virtue and something we consider the correct functioning of somebody, the defect would be being coward, the excess would be being temerary.

Do all of virtues apply to that?
There is one weird virtue, which is justice, which means to act with virtue to others.
There are three types of justice: General, Distributive, and one more that I don't remember, Commutative or smthing like that. Google it up because I don't remember exactly, but they were quite simple.

How does this apply to politics?
The most stable democratic governments are those who find a balance between oligarchy and demogagy. Oligarchy is a government for the rich, demagogy is a government for the poor, both cause gigantic problems, and both solve the other's problem. This still happens today, nowadays we call it "Capitalism vs Socialism".

Didn't they have slavery back then?
Yes, Aristotle argues that slavery is a need, he also takes whoever's not greek as a subhuman.
But he does argue that if someday humans create machines that can work on their own, then slavery wouldn't be a need anymore.
When did slavery ended almost globally? Some decades after the industrial revolution.

Correct me if I said anything wrong. This is all from memory.

>>24677305
>When YOU read Heidegger you see "Man is fallen into beings" and go "what the fuck am I supposed to do with this?," but when THEY read Heidegger they are already post-Kantian subjective idealists who have followed Heidegger's introductory etymology and breakdown of the Greek terms logos and ta phainomena to explain the value of phenomenology for a better neo-Kantian hermeneutics, and had multiple "ohhhh!" moments, and so when he gradually introduces his special vocabulary (being, beings etc.), they follow it without problems
Isn't this exactly why the analytical philosophers despised continentals?

>>24677514
>Isn't this exactly why the analytical philosophers despised continentals?
No.

>>24677514
Midwits hate to be made to feel stupid.

>>24677514
What's the difference between having to learn post-Fregean logical notation as a self-consistent metalanguage and having to have a mind supple enough to induct into the metalanguage of a given philosopher? Wittgenstein writes in "plain German" but has inspired mostly idiotic misinterpretations (Kripke) because they tried to slot his views into their own logical metalanguage instead of patiently taking the time to do exactly what Wittgenstein is actually advocating, namely, learn the metalinguistic assumptions of whatever you want to understand.

Is it really any different from having to learn what "illocutionary force" is, or what syncategorematic expressions are? These are simple ideas but required neologisms for clarity and convenience.

Russell himself in his essay on Cantor does an analysis of the concept of infinity and how we basically have to do hermeneutics to deprogram our instinctive, culturally contingent, muddled assumptions about it and induct into Cantor's more interesting ones.

>>24677309
>I'd recommend reading something that doesn't presuppose knowledge of many technical terms, like Poincare on mathematical intuition or Duhem's "Physical Theory and Experiment." In general, avoid contemporary pseudo-philosophers (Gollum cocksuckers on Twitter) unless you know for a fact their book will help you understand something actually good.

Just like you aren't suppossed to understand Poincare mathematical proofs without knowing all of graduate mathematical knowledge, you aren't suppossed to understand Kant without knowing most of scholasticism. The difference is that the mathematical language is completely inaccessible even signifier-wise, while philosophy and literature make you believe that you understand because you understand the signifiers and the discussed matters are involved in daily life, so people are tempted to dismiss them as meaningless and overthinking.

What you say ultimately leads you to just reading divulgative content and not where the true problems are being discussed. Of course, philosophy is not as rigorous as math so ending in a semantic rabbit hole of pseudo problems generated by a wobbling grounding which dependant on the school of thought, but to discuss and refute the very grounding of such school you probably have to understand their petty problems too, and that may be called endogenous critique.

>>24677735
so you can end*

>>24676948
What about simple, clear and direct means dumbing down?

And some subjects have vast, complex, technical measurements yes. In these cases, you would not be "explaining" the objective information, but just presenting it, so the aphorism stands.

In philosophy that does not apply, as there is no complex objective information involved. If you disagree then please give me three examples. To be clear, I am not saying that facts are not referenced in ethical philosophy.

>>24676907
Absolutely. More importantly though, many ridiculous ideas of the abstract philosophers would not be able to flourish as successfully in the modern day, if expressed in simple clear direct terms. People are gullible beyond belief, many people treat important philosophical questions like they're reading a postmodern novel.
How would people respond to Hegel if he wrote in a simple clear direct way?

>>24677322
>He thinks philosophy is a real subject
King of the Pseuds