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Well for me it was an enlightening further education in how even being intelligent doesn't seem to stop people from being monumentally retarded. Most subjects you can study rarely have professors who are obviously wrong, whereas in Philosophy, you can sit and be taught something that is clearly wrong by somebody who has already invested many years of their life into some idiotic cul-de-sac. If you also study morality it throws into sharp relief some pretty weird things people believe that you might never expect from the people who sit around you, as morality isn't a particularly normal topic of conversation. Directly, at least. Academic Philosophy itself is like a killing field where some very smart people go to do die. Moralising objectivists, quasi-autists building a language of logic, and people who devote hundreds/thousands of hours attempting to solve metaphysical issues that in themselves cannot possibly be answered to a satisfactory extent. Nobody I know who was "normal" chose to continue into Academic philosophy. The field has become, unlike how it may appear from the outside, much more akin to a science than a liberal art. Nowadays you will never get an author writing a wide ranging treatise and taken seriously. Instead you find your niche and you inhabit it. Only very few esteemed philosophers potter around in multiple areas. Just as no scientist today will be a Newton or any other pre 20th century fop who dabbled in a little of everything. In an attempt to make rigorous the entire field, everything has become compartmentalised and formalised. That includes turning all your fancy word play into formulae or long very detailed tracts, because writing well is seen as obfuscation or attempting to charm a reader beyond the merits of your own logic. I think you could probably do just fine getting your Philosophy from books, it's more of a question of: what drives you to do that? and what do you get from it other than existential satisfaction? I at least got a degree out of it. If you want to learn though, most of the key Philosophy is already written. There's only a handful of things written in the last 50 years that really have any lasting merit, unless you are very interested in a particular topic.
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Dec 16, 2015 13:34
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:21 |
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