Another justification of "Philosophistry"

by phil on Thursday Aug 16, 2007 1:13 AM

To those who are upset at my indictment against many philosophers as being merely sophists, here's what I have to say

Mention the word philosophy to anybody on the street, and they'll tell you it's a complete waste of time. Philosophers are lost in their language syntax. Wittgenstein figured this out early on.

If a philosopher says, "time is not quite real" then he's an idiot.

But if he said, "Time-A is-B not-C quite-D real-E" and then defined his own variants of his usage of those words, then maybe I could take him seriously. Instead, everybody's just talking past each other. They're just good at creating really good hooks for each other to grapple onto.

I cannot take philosophy seriously enough because when you open a philosophy book or read a treatise, there's a stunning lack of charts, graphs, and formula. This is yet again, another reason I love Wittgenstein's Tractatus... has tons of formulae.

By the way, this is of course somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I love philosophy, but it's a very nuanced love.

Comments

rmxplay said on April 18, 2008 7:58 PM:

Hey dude, have you read a book called "Think". thats the first philosophy book I read, and thank God it had a practical theme to it. Keep up the interesting articles. It's always good to get a balance.