"But let us never forget, either, as all conventional history of philosophy conspires to make us forget, what the 'great thinkers' really are: proper objects, indeed, of pity, but even more, of horror."
David Stove's "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts" is a critique of philosophy that I can only call epic.
The astute reader will of course find themselves objecting to Stove's notion that we should be catologuing every possible way to do philosophy wrong. It's not like there's some originally pure mode of thought, being tainted by only a small library of poisons. It's just that there are exponentially more possible crazy thoughts than sane thoughts, c.f. entropy.
But Stove's list of 39 different classic crazinesses applied to the number three is absolute pure epic gold. (Scroll down about halfway through if you want to jump there directly.)
I especially like #8: "There is an integer between two and four, but it is not three, and its true name and nature are not to be revealed."
It seems much more likely that the difference in quality between Anglo and Continental philosophy, to the extent that the difference exists, is based on chaotic factors. One (relatively) good philosopher randomly happens to be born in England and then he teaches his students (relatively) good philosophy, and they teach their students, and a whole tradition is born by chance. In continental Europe, that single die roll comes up the other way, and a seductive but (relatively) sinful philosophy is born. This story strikes me as more likely than that English is such a wondrous language out of all the various languages of the world that it alone confers resistance to philosophical sin. I hadn't thought I needed to make an argument for this, I didn't expect the posters here to take the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seriously. That was my mistake, I see.
As for why you find it more comfortable to use English when talking about technical subjects, I would guess that it is because English has a particularly rich technical vocabulary, due to English-speakers recently leading the way in technical progress. I don't speak Russian so I don't know how it works there, but I know that many languages use loan words from English heavily for technical subjects. One might be able to argue that this is a deficiency of these other languages, but it doesn't seem like the sort of deficiency that would lead one into philosophical error, and it is not a deficiency that existed when the Platonists were writing in any case.
I sympathize with your idea of amplification of random differences, but will try to persuade you that "strong Sapir-Whorf", even if false per se, might still contain a grain of merit.
Any language co-evolves with its culture - a sort of definite integral over their historical path up to now. The English language is not wholly determined by its grammar and vocabulary: if you randomly generate many grammatical and meaningful phrases in English, a lot of them will still sound "wrong" because they don't correspond to multi-word frequency pat... (read more)