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PhilGoetz comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong
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Comments (153)
Curious about the WW2 comment. Trouble parsing it. Do you think pre-WW2, or post-WW2, philosophers are more worthwhile?
I would say pre-Nietzsche philosophers are no longer very worthwhile for helping you solve contemporary problems of philosophy, although some (like Berkely, Hume, and Spinoza) were worthwhile for a time. (This is partly because I think causation and epistemology are not as important as issues like values, ethics, categorization, linguistic meaning, and self-identity.) Some, like Kant, provide definitions that may help clarify things for you, and that you will need if you want to talk to philosophers.
Ancient Greek and Roman poets and orators are worthwhile, because they describe an ethical system that contrasts dramatically with ours. But I read (pre-20th century) Native American speeches for the same reason, and lend them the same credence.
Really? Who is 'ours'? I've agreed with most of what I've seen of Greek ethical philosophy, and I thought most Less Wrong people would too. (I'm thinking of arete, eudaimonia, et cetera... their ethical ontology always seemed pretty reasonable to me, which is to be expected since we're all pretty Greek memetically speaking.)
Classical Greek ethicists propounded values that were in many ways similar to modern ones. Ancient Greece is the time period in which works like the Illiad were put to writing, and those demonstrate some values that are quite foreign to us.
Nietzsche gives one take on this distinction, when he contrasts "good vs. bad" or "master" moralities with "good vs. evil" or "slave" moralities. An evil man is one with evil goals; a bad man is one who is inept at achieving his goals.
Another contrast is that if the Greeks or the Romans had been utilitarians, they would never have been average utilitarians, and I don't think they would even have been total utilitarians. They might have been maximum utilitarians, believing that a civilization's measure was the greatness of its greatest achievements and its greatest people. Americans must have at least briefly believed something like this when they supported the Apollo program.
(I must be overgeneralizing any time I am speaking of the morals of both Athens and Sparta.)