Peter Jones wrote: ↑Fri Mar 19, 2021 11:12 am
Well spotted. I regularly rant on this topic.
If only folks realised how completely they are being misled by the philosophy department.
Perhaps an over generalisation, but also at least partially accurate from what I can tell. Society funds the likes of philosophy, which is a good thing - history and philosophy are surely vital for any healthy society. Ignoring the new postmodernist, retrospective route history seems to be going down now, mainstream Philosophy is stuck in an absurdist cul-de-sac, like an “abomination that causes desolation”. The average person funding it wouldn’t accept most of their core axioms, and so it’s debatable what value they are providing society. There seem to be broadly two camps, the physicalists who are essentially just reinforcing the assumed ontology of scientism, and the postmodern relativists who seem to be driving large scale social revolutions as part of a kind of ‘global petri dish’ experiment. If the route this latter group were taking was true, then fair enough, but even they can’t imagine how they could ever find a way to approach truth from where they are.
That said, there are also many great philosophers. I’ve been listening to podcasts of classical, scholastic and now moving on to Indian philosophy, and there are clearly brilliant people who understand the philosophies of the time, and how we could improve them with modern understanding. When you get to the last 100 years or so, real philosophy seems to have gone underground, restricted mostly to a few individuals seen as “religious” or “spiritual”.
Of course I say all of that as someone completely ignorant of philosophy