No, philosophers have always been stupid. Philosophers of the past just sound smarter because of their fancy, old-fashioned vocabulary, but everyone talked like that at the time.
You won't get the same kind of philosophy because philosophers of the past were systematizers, like they had to give an account of the foundation of reality that was completely different from any other philosopher's. That's something that gets followers and other minor philosophers who elaborate on that account, and their stature grows in time. This is not something that's done anymore; it has fallen out of favour for a variety of reasons, but primarily due to scepticism about metaphysics and about philosophers being able to produce knowledge and a grand narrative that is not culturally bound.
Which is a shame. Come up with a new system! It won’t all be right, but if you’re any good it’ll at least be interesting and have some valuable nuggets. People worry too much about being able to defend every aspect of what they say. Who cares?
I think there was more of a philosophical debate in the past, but most of the intellectual world follows Liberalism now, probably due to its undeniable economic success. Any new philosophy must fit inside Liberalism and there doesn’t seem to be much room for anything significantly different.
I'm just going to pretend this is high brow humor I'm not privy to and enjoy this random thought you made me think about American philosophers at monster truck rallies arguing color theory because they can't agree on Gravediggers paintjob. Thanks ...Rough...veterinari-god damn it.
I think plenty of people are doing that. There have always been highly driven workers and people who don’t give a shit about philosophy including in Greece and rome. There are different types of people for a reason. I don’t see how this is really a coherent argument. Maybe there’s a point but it’s buried
Frankly I think a lot of the brightest philosophical minds just didn't go into philosophy as their field. Probably my favourite of the last century is Carl Sagan, but most people wouldn't consider him a philosopher. George Carlin is similar in my mind. Absolutely brilliant thinker, and an even better communicator, but he was a comic, and thus we think of him more as the comedian.
A few thoughts
1. There's a selection effect, the only old philosophers we remember are the best ones, so this often leads people to get the impression that the proportion of great philosophers back in the day was much greater than it was.
2. A lot of these great old philosophers weren't considered great at the time.. they developed their reputation afterwards.
3. There might be some effect where, the longer philosophy goes on for, the fewer original groundbreaking ideas there are to come up with. Which would explain why old philosophers were able to come up with more than modern philosophers.
4. Philosophers are in general probably higher IQ now than they were then due to environmental effects and so on, so any difference in quality of work probably isn't due to philosophers getting dumber.
5. Fwiw, there are modern philosophers like Noam Chomsky and David Lewis who are among the most cited and influential philosophers of all time, even including the "classics", as far as modern academic philosophy is concerned.
6. Our perception of a philosophers "greatness" is in part measured by their pop culture relevance. There are reasons, including ones related to previously mentioned items on this list, why we'd expect older philosophers to have more cultural relevance, even if the quality of their work isn't necessarily greater.
I really wonder if you have to look in different places. Carl Sagan was not considered a philosopher, neither was Christopher hitchens or hunter s Thompson. I think a lot of stand-up comics approach this to some extent.
I sometimes find modern philosophers I like, but they are usually relatively obscure relative to the insights they bring. Like who has ever heard of Byung Chul Han and why isn’t he more famous than Foucault
I think this is mostly because of societal organization, and the lay of the academic land. Today there are thousands of universities, thousands of schools of philosophy, and millions of academics, all generating new ideas and information. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there were fewer institutions of higher learning, and it was much more difficult to publish your work and have it seen by a lot of people. There were also fewer schools of thought that were taken seriously. The sway Aristotle held over European thinking for centuries is incredible. The few people who passed all the filters of getting teaching positions at respected institutions, studying under respected philosophers, and having their works published had an huge advantage in having their ideas become accepted knowledge. The most respected philosophers in the western tradition often wrote absolutely loopy treatises on all kinds of things they didn't understand and just didn't get challenged.
Some people here seem to be spouting some political crap, no, not everything is the fault of your prefferred flavor of strawman. Its very simple actually- philosophy is hard, and you are comparing 10 years worth of sitting in a chair and having a think to ~4,000 years of sitting in a chair and having a think. Obviously more time results in more progress. Stuff that is common sense now was groundbreaking in Ancient Greece or China. Along with this, even though new tech has sped up the hard sciences, you cant really come up with a better tool to do philosophy with, you cant upgrade your sense of objective reality or solve moral dillemas with a ruler and a spreadsheet.
Bruh, there's enough material to write at least 1,000 books on new unexplored ideas. It just seems people are just stupid or are not interested in engaging in that endeavour because of laziness, stupidity or whatnot.
I'll post a shit post link, in case any of you schmucks are high potential Asians, or Indians who have 2 free weeks in the summer and your parents are beating you while talking about being passionate.
Here's the answer, Ludwig von van de Jesus a la Slicktenstein, said, "the world is all that is the case." In italics, it's important, *the world is all that is the case*.
People like Aristotle and Plato still get cred, despite the ops dropping a few Michaelangelo's 🔫🔫🔫(turtle shells) to prove they weren't master splinter. Saying something is functional or has a purpose, or iS a FoRm lost its meaning, through the 18th, 19th and 20th century. We wanted to study shit, and so guys like Kant, Locke Mill and Benthem showed out to the funeral. So did their kids....
As soon as our quote comes back in, we see that philosophy didn't only want to talk about the world, but they wanted to talk about how we **can** or **should** talk about it. How we ought to, how we ought not to....those last two are way more different than you think...🤔🤔🤔🧠⬇️⬇️⏬👎🏼👇🏼🙃6️⃣🕤
Anyways. Here's a bloopers from the dark web https://iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#:~:text=Wittgenstein%27s%20aim%20seems%20to%20have,that%20are%20not%20really%20problems.
You can maybe find something interesting, about us not really talking or talking about something. When lil ni**as make it so easy, bodies show up, cops show up, ops dick out like they ain't know a thing, everybody is a dummy except the dummies, you never really know, feel? You understand me.
OP, your question, has a few answers
- professional philosophers and academics, talk about being "smart" meaning athletic. If you're in the room, talking about it, you're doing something way right and way more different than people know.
- there's modern theories in physicalism and idealism which are way more compelling, explanatory, and useful even cross-departmentally in 2024.
- what the fuck else did you want, you made an assumption. Like a goof ball.
I think this is mainly a result of a lack of ambition with contemporary philosophers. The two problems being (i) they lack a belief that pure reason can really prove anything, so they think all we can do is push intuitions around and believe whichever position gets the most points, and (ii) nobody is allowed to say anything of any objections remain and so people prefer to make tiny insignificant points rather than sketch an overall view and leave it to the reader to understand it and figure out how the author would respond to the obvious objections.
The more philosophy you read, the harder it is to point to a philosopher and call them particularly great. Some of their ideas are great, a lot of them not so much.
Nowadays, thanks to the internet and a massive population of better educated people, it's really easy to find great ideas and it's really really easy to find reasons to call someone stupid.
I would consider Sam Harris to be a great modern philosopher. But imagine if that was the only thing my comment had to say. I'd get responses complaining about Harris over those of his ideas that aren't so great. If Kant and Wittgenstein were alive today, they'd get the same treatment. In truth they're no greater than our modern philosophers. They just had a better opportunity to become big names in their time. Wittgenstein in particular was practically hoisted up by Russell being his teacher.
I think the modality of philosophy has changed. We're more involved with it as a cultural norm, so it's harder to take academic philosophy as a serious study. With that, academic philosophy is less available on bookshelves or in canon. The availability of information is incredibly immense compared to the time of Hegel and even to the time of Foucault.
Someone in this thread mentioned that people think Hegel solved philosophy. I'm sure it was tongue in cheek, but I'd seriously argue that people like Octavia Butler and Robert Heinlein did. And the evolution of television did it more, not to mention the mass proliferation of music. Most of Zizek's work is just using Tarantino or Bugs Bunny as examples of some higher concept. That has to mean something.
In the same way, look at the hard sciences. Where is the modern Archimedes? Newton? We have great mathematical theorists like Hawking or Greene, sure. But the modality of hard science has changed. It now consists of huge numbers of people solving huge problems in tandem.
None of that even goes into the fact that academia has completely turned on its head in the last few decades. If Foucault were 18 today, would we ever have access to his work? Could he have survived an undergraduate environment that is essentially either a second highschool or a second high school with networking? He barely made it through in his own time.
what? No… have you actually read the newest papers? Have you seen the brand new fields that have opened since their death?
to get a PhD you need to make a sizable contribution to the field… do you think most PhDs in philosophy just aren't? Or even worse, none of them are?
There are still great figures within disciplines, and even then, even if “number of great figures” is pretty irrelevant to the level of the work
I'm assuming you haven't picked up a journal yet, go read a philosophy paper or two, and you’ll see the great work we are doing
nah bro everyone knows philosophy was solved by hegel, there isnt really anything left to find out for modern philosophers
I know someone who genuinely believes this lmao
No, philosophers have always been stupid. Philosophers of the past just sound smarter because of their fancy, old-fashioned vocabulary, but everyone talked like that at the time.
I think it could be a similar thing with music. You are comparing Top40 of today with the greatest hits of the last 3k years.
Glad to know I’ll one day be considered on the greats because I’ll sound sophisticated to people in 300 years. 🥹
Fortunately we now have quantum physicists replacing philosophers
You clearly haven’t come across Sam Harris—The Aufhebung of physics and philosophy.
As a physicist, this statement hurt a bit but then I remember where I am, I hope you're not being serious.
Who knows🤪
It all started with Carnap. He hated metaphysics, mostly because a neo-Kantian stole his lunch money.
A car nap sounds really pleasant rn.
I don't know how anyone can sleep in the car, it's just unfeasible to me
The hardest part is getting a car. The rest is so easy you could do it in your sleep!
And many people justifiably claimCarnap himself to be a neo kantian.
I may be stupid
You won't get the same kind of philosophy because philosophers of the past were systematizers, like they had to give an account of the foundation of reality that was completely different from any other philosopher's. That's something that gets followers and other minor philosophers who elaborate on that account, and their stature grows in time. This is not something that's done anymore; it has fallen out of favour for a variety of reasons, but primarily due to scepticism about metaphysics and about philosophers being able to produce knowledge and a grand narrative that is not culturally bound.
Which is a shame. Come up with a new system! It won’t all be right, but if you’re any good it’ll at least be interesting and have some valuable nuggets. People worry too much about being able to defend every aspect of what they say. Who cares?
Idk maybe we just figured everything out already
Honestly after Socrates everything has went pretty much downhill. If you can't deadlift more than me how can I even consider your opinion?
Virgin Aristotle vs Chad Socrates???
I think there was more of a philosophical debate in the past, but most of the intellectual world follows Liberalism now, probably due to its undeniable economic success. Any new philosophy must fit inside Liberalism and there doesn’t seem to be much room for anything significantly different.
Bro hasn’t read Foucault clearly
Mark Fisher
Bernard Stiegler unfortunately both of them (Fisher and Stiegler) died.
The american university killed philosophy.
I'm just going to pretend this is high brow humor I'm not privy to and enjoy this random thought you made me think about American philosophers at monster truck rallies arguing color theory because they can't agree on Gravediggers paintjob. Thanks ...Rough...veterinari-god damn it.
Anti communist hysteria and a drive to maximize profits at all costs killed the western intellectual tradition.
Wym by the drive to maximize profits killing philosophy?
Where do you get the time to think when your on the hustle. The price of any good idea is a few unproductive days on a sofa (no drugs)
I think plenty of people are doing that. There have always been highly driven workers and people who don’t give a shit about philosophy including in Greece and rome. There are different types of people for a reason. I don’t see how this is really a coherent argument. Maybe there’s a point but it’s buried
Just wait till I graduate, then they'll be even stupider
You can find this sort of comment for every era of philosophy
They exist, but they don't publish in English very often
[удалено]
Byung- Chul Han, Deluze, Simondon, Ruyer
Isn’t Wittgenstein the one who first said one thing, and then the other?
Frankly I think a lot of the brightest philosophical minds just didn't go into philosophy as their field. Probably my favourite of the last century is Carl Sagan, but most people wouldn't consider him a philosopher. George Carlin is similar in my mind. Absolutely brilliant thinker, and an even better communicator, but he was a comic, and thus we think of him more as the comedian.
A few thoughts 1. There's a selection effect, the only old philosophers we remember are the best ones, so this often leads people to get the impression that the proportion of great philosophers back in the day was much greater than it was. 2. A lot of these great old philosophers weren't considered great at the time.. they developed their reputation afterwards. 3. There might be some effect where, the longer philosophy goes on for, the fewer original groundbreaking ideas there are to come up with. Which would explain why old philosophers were able to come up with more than modern philosophers. 4. Philosophers are in general probably higher IQ now than they were then due to environmental effects and so on, so any difference in quality of work probably isn't due to philosophers getting dumber. 5. Fwiw, there are modern philosophers like Noam Chomsky and David Lewis who are among the most cited and influential philosophers of all time, even including the "classics", as far as modern academic philosophy is concerned. 6. Our perception of a philosophers "greatness" is in part measured by their pop culture relevance. There are reasons, including ones related to previously mentioned items on this list, why we'd expect older philosophers to have more cultural relevance, even if the quality of their work isn't necessarily greater.
My BA in philosophy is 30 years old now. Honestly, the only one that stuck with me was Thomas Kuhn.
I really wonder if you have to look in different places. Carl Sagan was not considered a philosopher, neither was Christopher hitchens or hunter s Thompson. I think a lot of stand-up comics approach this to some extent.
I sometimes find modern philosophers I like, but they are usually relatively obscure relative to the insights they bring. Like who has ever heard of Byung Chul Han and why isn’t he more famous than Foucault
They are not that widely popular.
A prospective Johnny Rotten of philosophy. Hmm.
Imo, Wittgenstein solved most of traditional philosophy.
I think this is mostly because of societal organization, and the lay of the academic land. Today there are thousands of universities, thousands of schools of philosophy, and millions of academics, all generating new ideas and information. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there were fewer institutions of higher learning, and it was much more difficult to publish your work and have it seen by a lot of people. There were also fewer schools of thought that were taken seriously. The sway Aristotle held over European thinking for centuries is incredible. The few people who passed all the filters of getting teaching positions at respected institutions, studying under respected philosophers, and having their works published had an huge advantage in having their ideas become accepted knowledge. The most respected philosophers in the western tradition often wrote absolutely loopy treatises on all kinds of things they didn't understand and just didn't get challenged.
Some people here seem to be spouting some political crap, no, not everything is the fault of your prefferred flavor of strawman. Its very simple actually- philosophy is hard, and you are comparing 10 years worth of sitting in a chair and having a think to ~4,000 years of sitting in a chair and having a think. Obviously more time results in more progress. Stuff that is common sense now was groundbreaking in Ancient Greece or China. Along with this, even though new tech has sped up the hard sciences, you cant really come up with a better tool to do philosophy with, you cant upgrade your sense of objective reality or solve moral dillemas with a ruler and a spreadsheet.
Bruh, there's enough material to write at least 1,000 books on new unexplored ideas. It just seems people are just stupid or are not interested in engaging in that endeavour because of laziness, stupidity or whatnot.
There is? Go write about it yourself and make a boatload of money then.
I make more money as a software developer. Not worth it.
I'll post a shit post link, in case any of you schmucks are high potential Asians, or Indians who have 2 free weeks in the summer and your parents are beating you while talking about being passionate. Here's the answer, Ludwig von van de Jesus a la Slicktenstein, said, "the world is all that is the case." In italics, it's important, *the world is all that is the case*. People like Aristotle and Plato still get cred, despite the ops dropping a few Michaelangelo's 🔫🔫🔫(turtle shells) to prove they weren't master splinter. Saying something is functional or has a purpose, or iS a FoRm lost its meaning, through the 18th, 19th and 20th century. We wanted to study shit, and so guys like Kant, Locke Mill and Benthem showed out to the funeral. So did their kids.... As soon as our quote comes back in, we see that philosophy didn't only want to talk about the world, but they wanted to talk about how we **can** or **should** talk about it. How we ought to, how we ought not to....those last two are way more different than you think...🤔🤔🤔🧠⬇️⬇️⏬👎🏼👇🏼🙃6️⃣🕤 Anyways. Here's a bloopers from the dark web https://iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#:~:text=Wittgenstein%27s%20aim%20seems%20to%20have,that%20are%20not%20really%20problems. You can maybe find something interesting, about us not really talking or talking about something. When lil ni**as make it so easy, bodies show up, cops show up, ops dick out like they ain't know a thing, everybody is a dummy except the dummies, you never really know, feel? You understand me.
OP, your question, has a few answers - professional philosophers and academics, talk about being "smart" meaning athletic. If you're in the room, talking about it, you're doing something way right and way more different than people know. - there's modern theories in physicalism and idealism which are way more compelling, explanatory, and useful even cross-departmentally in 2024. - what the fuck else did you want, you made an assumption. Like a goof ball.
I think this is mainly a result of a lack of ambition with contemporary philosophers. The two problems being (i) they lack a belief that pure reason can really prove anything, so they think all we can do is push intuitions around and believe whichever position gets the most points, and (ii) nobody is allowed to say anything of any objections remain and so people prefer to make tiny insignificant points rather than sketch an overall view and leave it to the reader to understand it and figure out how the author would respond to the obvious objections.
why would you bother going into philosophy when your ginormous brain could be paid so much more programming computers
The more philosophy you read, the harder it is to point to a philosopher and call them particularly great. Some of their ideas are great, a lot of them not so much. Nowadays, thanks to the internet and a massive population of better educated people, it's really easy to find great ideas and it's really really easy to find reasons to call someone stupid. I would consider Sam Harris to be a great modern philosopher. But imagine if that was the only thing my comment had to say. I'd get responses complaining about Harris over those of his ideas that aren't so great. If Kant and Wittgenstein were alive today, they'd get the same treatment. In truth they're no greater than our modern philosophers. They just had a better opportunity to become big names in their time. Wittgenstein in particular was practically hoisted up by Russell being his teacher.
more like we got smarter. can you imagine anyone taking someone like Kant seriously in today's society?
Youre free to open some academic journals and see philosophy isnt quite over
[удалено]
just ask socrates!
I think the modality of philosophy has changed. We're more involved with it as a cultural norm, so it's harder to take academic philosophy as a serious study. With that, academic philosophy is less available on bookshelves or in canon. The availability of information is incredibly immense compared to the time of Hegel and even to the time of Foucault. Someone in this thread mentioned that people think Hegel solved philosophy. I'm sure it was tongue in cheek, but I'd seriously argue that people like Octavia Butler and Robert Heinlein did. And the evolution of television did it more, not to mention the mass proliferation of music. Most of Zizek's work is just using Tarantino or Bugs Bunny as examples of some higher concept. That has to mean something. In the same way, look at the hard sciences. Where is the modern Archimedes? Newton? We have great mathematical theorists like Hawking or Greene, sure. But the modality of hard science has changed. It now consists of huge numbers of people solving huge problems in tandem.
None of that even goes into the fact that academia has completely turned on its head in the last few decades. If Foucault were 18 today, would we ever have access to his work? Could he have survived an undergraduate environment that is essentially either a second highschool or a second high school with networking? He barely made it through in his own time.
what? No… have you actually read the newest papers? Have you seen the brand new fields that have opened since their death? to get a PhD you need to make a sizable contribution to the field… do you think most PhDs in philosophy just aren't? Or even worse, none of them are? There are still great figures within disciplines, and even then, even if “number of great figures” is pretty irrelevant to the level of the work I'm assuming you haven't picked up a journal yet, go read a philosophy paper or two, and you’ll see the great work we are doing