"Often people who dismiss philosophy end up going over the same ground philosophers trode hundreds or thousands of years ago."

Really? When I look at Aquinas or Plato or Aristotle, I see people mostly asking questions that we no longer care about because we have found better ways of dealing with the issues that made those questions worth thinking about.

Scholastic discourse about the Bible or angels makes much less sense when you have a historical-critical context to explain how it emerged in the way that it did, and a canon of contemporaneous secular works to make sense of what was going on in their world at the time.

Philosophical atomism is irrelevant once you've studied modern physics and chemistry.

The notion that we have Platonic a priori knowledge looks pretty silly without a great deal of massaging as we learn more about the mechanism of brain development.

Also, not all new perspectives on the world have value. Continental philosophy and post-modernism are to philosophy what mid-20th century art music is to music composition. It is a rabbit hole that a whole generation of academics got sucked into and wasted their time on. It turned out that the future of worthwhile music was elsewhere, in people like Elvis and the Beatles and rappers and Nashville studios and Motown artists and ressurrections of the greats of the classical and romantic periods in new contexts, and the tone poems and dissonant musics and other academic experiements of that era were just garbage. They lost sight of what music was for, just as the continental philosophers and post-modernist philosophers lost sight of what philosophy was for.

The language in impenatrable because they have nothing to say. I know what it is like to read academic literature, for example, in the sciences or economics, that is impenetrable because it is necessarily so, but that isn't it. People who use sophisticated jargon when it is really necessary are also capable of speaking much more clearly about the essence of what is going on - people like Richard Feynman. But, our modern day philosophical sophisticates are known to no one but each other and are not adding to large understanding. Instead, all of the other disciplines are busy purging themselves of all that dreck so that they can get back on solid ground.

Continental philosophy, on the other hand, if you can manage to make sense of it, actually >can provide new perspectives on the world, and in that sense is worthwhile. Don't assume >that just because you can't understand it, it doesn't have anything to say.

It's not that people coming from the outside don't understand the language. I'm not just frustrated the Hegel uses esoteric terms and writes poorly. (Much the same could be said of Kant, and I love Kant.) It's that, when I ask "hey, okay, if the language is just tough, but there is content to what Hegel/Heidegger/etc is saying, then why don't you give a single example of some hypothetical piece of evidence in the world that would affirm/disprove the putative claim?" In other words, my accusation isn't that continental philosophy is hard, it's that it makes no claims about the objective hetero-phenomenological world.

Typically, I say this to a Hegelian (or whoever), and they respond that they're not trying to talk about the objective world, perhaps because the objective world is a bankrupt concept. That's fine, I guess-- but are you really willing to go there? Or would you claim that continental philosophy can make meaningful claims about actual phenomena, which can actually be sorted through?

I guess I'm wholeheartedly agreeing with the author's statement:

You will occasionally stumble upon an argument, but it falls prey to magical categories >and language confusions and non-natural hypotheses.

A few points:

• Philisophy is (by definition, more or less) meta to everything else. By its nature, it has to question everything, including things that here seem to be unuqestionable, such as rationality and reductionism. The elevation of these into unquestionable dogma creates a somewhat cult-like environment.

• Often people who dismiss philosophy end up going over the same ground philosophers trode hundreds or thousands of years ago. That's one reason philosophers emphasize the history of ideas so much. It's probably a mistake to think you are so smart you will avoid all the pitfalls they've already fallen into.

• I agree with the linked post of Eliezer's that much of analytic philosophy (and AI) is mostly just slapping formal terms over unexamined everyday ideas, which is why I find most of it bores me to tears.

• Continental philosophy, on the other hand, if you can manage to make sense of it, actually can provide new perspectives on the world, and in that sense is worthwhile. Don't assume that just because you can't understand it, it doesn't have anything to say. Complaining because they use what seems like an impenetrable language is about on the level of an American traveling to Europe and complaining that the people there don't speak English. That said, Sturgeon's law definitely applies, perhaps at the 99% level.

• I'm recomending Bruno Latour to everyone these days. He's a French sociologist of science and philosopher, and if you can get past the very French style of abstraction he uses, he can be mind-blowing in the manner described above.

Sure. And in that sense, Santa Claus is also real, and it's entirely correct to say that "God is no more real than Santa Claus." Or have I misunderstood you?

And yet, I suspect few theists would agree with that statement.

I live in the Boston area (Arlington) and am moderately skilled in

• woodturning
• blacksmithing
• shooting

I've got the barest hint of skill in metalworking, cabinetmaking, and gunsmithing / ammunition reloading.

Give me a yell at <any address> at tjic.com if I can be of help.

What a great post. Of course, I like it because it undermines the very reason most of you are here. Basically people aren't all that rational, they require something to praise, something to devote themselves to. You guys are trying to make "reason" be the object of devotion, but it's not a great fit to the mental slot (and it's been tried before).

One other note: the advantage of having your praise-object be something remote and universal (like God, or the Tsar (pretty remote for most Rus)) is that if your are expressing your allegiance to Lord Alfred and Lord Bob is in the next town over, Lords Alfred and Bob and their followers might have to have a war to determine who is indeed the deserving one. There's some kind of dynamics going on that favors larger-scale objects of worship and larger-scale social alliances.

This post is based on the (very common) mistake of equating religious practice and religious faith. Religion is only incidentally about what you believe; the more important components are community and ritual practice. From that perspective, it is a lot easier to believe that religion can be beneficial. What you think about the Trinity, for instance, is less important than the fact that you go to Mass and see other members of your community there and engage in these bizarre activities together.

There is an enormous blindspot about society in the libertarian/rationalist community, of which the above is just one manifestation.

Don't ingest words from a poisoned discourse unless you have a concrete reason to think you're immune.

Politics is often poisoned deliberately. Other topics are sometimes poisoned accidentally, by concentrated confusion. Gibberish is toxic; if you bend your mind to make sense of it, your whole mind warps slightly. You see concentrated confusion every time you watch a science fiction show on television; their so-called science is actually made from mad libs. Examples are everywhere; do not assume that there is meaning beneath all confusion.

People wouldn't have a problem with an academic journal that they believed charged a reasonable fee. But consider a typical journal published by Springer-Verlag or Mary Thomas Liebert:

• Subscription fee: $100 per issue, $1200/year
• Cost per article for non-subscribers: $30
• Fee paid by the author of each article: about $3000
• Advertising fee: I'd guess at least $5,000/page, based on the fact that each full-color page in your article usually adds $1000-$2000 to its cost
• Salary paid to reviewers: $0
• Cost of electronic publishing: about $100 per issue, divided among all subscribers

They have a problem with having a small number of subscribers. But many hobbyist groups manage to publish quality journals to equally-small audiences at a cost of under $10/issue.

The fact that people aren't jumping in to compete with lower-costs journals makes me suspect that it isn't that easy. But it's still not at all obvious why academic journals cost so much.

(The big ones, Science and Nature, are relatively inexpensive.))

The Amazon example doesn't seem to be that illustrative of the concept you are trying to get across, mostly because the reason academic institutions don't sell computation is that they aren't set up for it, not that commerce is considered evil. They have no problem charging for other services, such as tuition.

Here's a better one: police, military, and government in general. Everyone in that role has slightly different moral codes than the rest of us, in that they are able to legitimately employ violence in various forms, and for the most part we are willing to cede that role to them. The government is our shabbos goy, although too often a master rather than servant.