583 karma · joined October 28, 2015
Unis are eating themselves alive; you have to be brain-dead to go there (maybe only to pursue a military officer career, as the world war ramps up) when the trades are so hot right now.
The target audience of this post is boomers and, I guess, some millenials not-yet-disu illusioned with, who look fondly back on their education.
Citation needed
Thank you, this made me chuckle!
This is how you really convinced me to read Della Rocca's treatment on history of philosophy that you linked to, even though I personally find the idea of great geneology spanning the greeks up to modern-day philosophy PhD students completely laughable. You said it yourself: Frege was not the result of iterative, standing on shoulders of Giants-esque improvement. He just "showed up." Clearly, developments in language and sciences opened the door to new line of inquiry which largely made whole swaths of the so-called philosophy (historically speaking) completely redundant. Wittgenstein knew this intuitively, and it's perhaps the biggest take-away from his body of work (contra logical positivism nonsensia)
I will concede that Aristotle on logic (specifically) is actually not a waste of time, but in general, all the time spent reading the Greeks, dialectics most of all, is the time I'm never getting back. I'm sorry, but the Greeks' command of language is simply too superfluous, or rather ill-equipped, for the purpose of philosophy. Regardless of translation. You could say they were too early... Which is another way to say they were "wrong." I won't go as far. It's kind of important to teach philosophy undergrad students some of it, because so much of their academic life will be spent performatively back-linking to Hellenic tradition to please their cargo-cultist professors. I know academic philosophy is full of this because I sometimes put myself through the pain of reading what they write. If you don't mind me asking, what gets you going with Plato? Did you just pick it up and go with it at some point, or was this a deliberate regression?
Recommending the greeks and Frege in one breath immediately outs you, and shows your philosophy knowledge for what it is, dog shit. You shouldn't be recommending anything about philosophy to anybody. There is absolutely zero reason to study ancient philosophy unless you're interested in HISTORY of philosophy specifically. What Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and other modernists did to 'philosophy' was short of completely reinventing the field from scratch. The connection to antique philosophy is non-existent because there are no tools in Greek discourses relevant to philosophical investigation. It didn't stop even the most stringent analytics to manufacture said connection out of 'romantic' notions, but really there's no geneology to speak of. Plato is closer to Archilochus than Frege, so much so he's almost verging on a joke (philosophically speaking.) It's doubly funny you throwing shade on Nietzsche, who himself was 'romantically' obsessed with the Greeks for no good reason.
You're right that Nietzsche is ultimately, of devil's party, a poet, but that has very little bearing vis-a-vis academic philosophy.
So what, winters would be no more? Snow will disappear, no more ice-men and christmas trees, and subzero conditions in general, too?
Postgres may introduce a single-file embedded filesystem because what the hell, but the irony is all these guys won't even notice it. The same people that say Postgres backups are too hard.