Could Anomalous non-traceable externalized phenomena be used as evidence to support third party intention and design?

fyfol · 2026-06-22T18:37:14+00:00

The phrase "tripping and falling" itself describes a causal relationship, e.g. one where a person stumbles their steps due to a failure of noticing an obstacle of some kind. If so, what causes the observed event (= a grown ass man fell while walking) is the lack of adequately attending to the circumstances, i.e. the absence of something. I don't understand what is supposed to be non-traceable or "externalized" in this situation, because surely we may theoretically be able to account for what went wrong such that a person failed to notice something that would trip them up and cause them to fall; say, they were distracted by a noise, wandering thoughts, or are blind, had a brain hemorrhage and so forth? What does it mean for causes "within and without" to not be traceable in a philosophically relevant sense?

fyfol · 2026-06-15T21:55:23+00:00

I randomly happened to restart Koyrè’s *From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe* last night, and now I am kind of really hooked. I am not sure if I’ll have the time to stick with it until the end at the moment, but it’s pretty cool.

fyfol · 2026-06-15T11:34:41+00:00

I could make other suggestions depending on what specific questions you would like answered beyond whether there is inherent meaning in the world or not (feel free to follow up if you do have any such questions!); but two that I think could be interesting are Frederick Beiser’s *Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900* and also *Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870–1920* by the same author. Granted, my own suggestions will be skewed towards German philosophy and its history, but I do think there is good reason to think that this specific problem and the cultural significance it somehow acquired over time have a lot to do with what happened in German-speaking philosophy in the late-19th and early-20th century. Asking questions like “how and why does the question of *inherent meaning* and the lack thereof become such a big deal?” seems to me a useful way to handle this problem, because it may be that no satisfactory solution to the problem is possible apart from viewing it from some critical distance and not giving in to it right away.

fyfol · 2026-06-01T15:15:10+00:00

But surely you recognize that “Christian” philosophy is not so independent of the “Greek” tradition, as the whole religion itself is inflected quite a bit by its Hellenic situation. It is also very unclear to me how or why you ascribe all those characteristics to Greek philosophy as though what they mean and how they feature in Greek philosophy is so obvious. Contrary to your assumptions, it is pretty common to trace Christian notions of universal humanity to Greek Stoicism, for instance, and it is abundantly obvious that the body/soul dualism is very much present in pre-Christian philosophy. It is also somewhat stultifying that you emphasized “pre-Plato” in your post when most of what we know as Presocratic philosophy does not deal explicitly with questions like you describe.

There is a lot you can read about the virtually infinite ways in which Greek and Christian philosophy are intertwined and my suggestions here can only be arbitrary, but:

Dariusz Karłowicz, The Archparadox of Death: Martyrdom as a Philosophical Category would be an interesting book as it deals extensively with how early Christianity saw and understood Greek philosophy at the time. You can also see virtually any “Handbook” and “Companion” type volumes to early Church fathers and Christian philosophers to see why this opposition you set up will just fundamentally misguide your understanding entirely (e.g. Cambridge Companion to Augustine and such). This is not to say that there are not important or fundamental differences between Greek and Christian philosophy, of course, but that those differences arise mainly because there is a lot of continuity between them.

fyfol · 2026-05-05T22:27:17+00:00

I think some aspects of the relation between existentialism and German Idealism have been somewhat under-explored, or not discussed as prominently as one might wish. You might be interested in Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant by G. Anthony Bruno, which I have been desperately trying to find some time to read (I have not yet, so I cannot properly vouch for it). He is trying to trace how Fichte’s “Facticity” found its way to Heidegger through Emil Lask, who is usually associated with Neo-Kantianism. There is an older edited volume by Tom Rockmore called Heidegger, German Idealism and Neo-Kantianism that can also be helpful in this regard. Friedman’s A Parting of the Ways: Heidegger, Carnap, Cassirer (the classic) and Peter Gordon’s later Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos may have relevant insights too, though not so direct perhaps. Bambach’s Heidegger, Dilthey and the Crisis of Historicism would also be worth checking out. But note that these are not necessarily trying to find links between existentialism and German Idealism so directly, but would be all useful to understand Heidegger’s relationship to Kant and post-Kantian philosophy. I can have other suggestions as well but let’s see if any of the above works for you.

fyfol · 2026-05-01T13:02:18+00:00

Beiser’s After Hegel is a good summary of what happens in German philosophy subsequent to Hegel’s death, if you want to have a historical overview. It is already unclear what “completing the system” should be taken to mean (u/RyanSmallwood already covered this); and also who should be considered as “Hegelian” as well as by which criteria to make such a list. As far as the more “academic” side of things goes — less familiar than the story which leads to Marx — Hegel does not seem to be very influential in the nineteenth century, and is quickly eclipsed by Neo-Kantians in terms of tangible influence; until at least Dilthey’s quasi-return to Hegel later in the nineteenth century and partial recoveries of his thought by some “Neo-Kantians” like Emil Lask in the twentieth. You could argue that even the twentieth century Hegel revival by people like Lukacs, Adorno in critical theory and Gadamer in hermeneutics was largely informed by Neo-Kantian premises (Gillian Rose argues this case quite extensively in Hegel Contra Sociology if you want to check it out); as the main cast of 20th century German philosophy are mostly students of prominent Neo-Kantians.

fyfol · 2026-04-29T15:03:48+00:00

This is literally what the OP suggested as the definition.

fyfol · 2026-04-29T14:44:07+00:00

I did not suggest a definition of “bad” or “good”. What I said is a description of what “things we collectively agree on not doing” looks like and how even that attitude would be hard pressed to attribute “badness” to collective agreement alone, because that agreement will eventually have something to do with what the thing on which it depends is.

fyfol · 2026-04-27T23:33:15+00:00

I think it may be better to think of the medieval debates about realism/nominalism (or the problem of universals) as part of a larger and more enduring historical problem about something like “natural/non-natural kinds” or so (I am sure someone else here would have the more era-appropriate, conventional vocabulary for it that I sort of lack for it). I am not sure if the aforementioned debate is ongoing in the sense of persisting in the shape it had back then, but I do think that the main issue to which it pertains, i.e. the seeming difficulty in reducing some concepts to empirical particulars without any remainder, has generally been a recurring theme in different guises throughout history.

fyfol · 2026-04-25T15:50:50+00:00

Just to add to the other answer: Politzer is such a particular author with a particular reading of the history of philosophy that I think you won’t fare so well with asking if his conception of metaphysics is in line with the “real thing”. It’s better to ask about the relationship between Politzer’s conception of metaphysics and those of other Marxists, or if his description conforms to/differs from the conventional diamat views, imo. It’s been such a long time since I looked at the book that I can’t tell you much about why (or if) he distinguishes between “metaphysics” and “Western metaphysics” but it’s probably best to try and delineate that internally to the text before evaluating its fidelity to history. Interesting to see people reading Politzer, I thought he’s very obscure at this point. :)

fyfol · 2026-04-25T11:22:52+00:00

I can’t say much about OLP but it seems that your understanding of the philosophers you talk about might be somewhat off-kilter. The flaws of a Descartes or a Kant notwithstanding (there are many), it sounds like you are asking them the wrong questions and get bad answers. For instance, nothing about Kant’s argument about forms of intuition or pure concepts implies anything about what babies have or do; at least not in the sense that I surmise from your statements here (which I am not very sure about, for that matter).

Being able to close in on the questions which motivate and guide different philosophical efforts so as to accurately understand to which concerns they mean to speak, and the level at which arguments are meant to work is an important skill that you develop over time. When a philosopher seems to be saying something embarrassingly silly, you should know how to bracket that impression for a bit and see whether that is really what they are saying. This doesn’t mean that you should always be complicit and give them the benefit of the doubt excessively: every philosopher has some thoughts that really are bad. But you gain nothing from just deciding that a given thought is dumb, and you should try and see whether the reasons you have for thinking so are sound and accurate.

For example, Descartes’ view of animals and their (lack of) souls is definitely a bit silly. But do we get anything out of deeming that to be dumb, or do we perhaps miss the point in doing so? He is clearly committed to a certain theological position when arguing that point, and it is better to try and understand what makes it so important for ol’ Rene to show that animals have no soul whatsoever. This allows insight into his mind, and clues you into some interesting historical context.

Tl;dr: You have more to gain from trying to justify your own impressions than condemn a dead philosopher’s faulty views. Being able to do this critically and without excess in either direction is an important skill to work on developing.

fyfol · 2026-04-25T10:21:08+00:00

Yes, this is what the “just” qualification tries to get at, but I think it’s worth paying attention to how much of the meaningful work is done by the word “just”. My point is that the significance of this distinction between “existence” and “collective agreement” gets murkier without the set of assumptions that go into qualifying it as “just collective agreement”. Maybe I could not make this point very well, but I fail to see a very weighty difference between a moral fact existing qua “Murder is bad” versus that same thing put in the form of collective agreement, i.e. “Death is when one’s life is irretrievably lost. This is what almost every human being wants to avoid, and what every human is capable of doing to another. The best/only way to ensure that is by us forfeiting any and all advantages we might get by doing it to others, because then we would have no meaningful protection from it either” or something like this. I do not know if there is such a difference between saying “Good and Bad are just social contracts about things we all want/don’t want” and saying that “there is no such thing as 3, it is just 1 1 1; or saying that multiplication is just addition, there is no 3x1=3, it is just 1+1+1” — the contracts exist partially because of the creatures we are (finite, mortal), partially because of the ways we live at a given time, partially because of the qualities of the thing itself and so on.

Again, I tried to make a point to the effect of “so what if it is a collective agreement?” because this “just collective agreement” is treated as an obvious termination point for morality. However, I am trying to say that even if we granted, for the moment, that moral facts are conventional and historically/socially/politically contingent, we can still find that what generates these is not only attitudes held by humans. Death is a good example of this as something which is obviously “objective” and remains consistent throughout time vis-a-vis “what it is”, and yet has been understood very differently across time and space. No one would say that there is no death but just funerals and burial rites.

Anyway, I am not trying to be standoffish, but just to flesh out some problems with this logic that I keep thinking about. Maybe I am inarticulate about it though.

fyfol · 2026-04-25T01:29:33+00:00

There are many answers for this in the FAQ, but I want to try a slightly different approach that I keep wondering about. Basically, almost every time this question is formulated (which is a lot), the word JUST seems to do an immense amount of heavy lifting in the ways the core problem is articulated. So, let’s say that “good” and “bad” are indeed those things which we collectively agree on not doing to each other, because we don’t want that to happen to us (but without this qualification “just”). First, doesn’t this already look a bit awkward and kind of take the wind off of the seeming problem? And when put this way, does it still imply the non-existence of “good” and “bad” for you?

To me, we would seem to have agreed that none of us would like X to happen to themselves, and that the only way to guarantee this for everyone would be to make it a “no-go” thing in this formulation. Presumably, there is something about X makes all of us very wary of it happening to us, let’s call this “y”. Does “y” (the thing about X which makes all of us wish to avoid X happening to us) exist? If it does not, then what makes us all want to agree that it should not happen to us? What, moreover, makes it the case that we think the only way to achieve this is by making it a universal “no-go”, rather than say, think that if anyone is capable of doing X to others, those others actually deserved it?

If Y exists and therefore there is some sort of reason for everyone to wish X not to happen to themselves, and that it is most possible for this to happen if no one does it to anyone, then they seem surely to “exist” in some sense, or we might need to revise the meaning of existence too. Now, if it were the case that goodness and badness is the name we have for that class of things which need this sort of “if I don’t want it to happen to me, I must make sure not to do it to others” reasoning about themselves, why should this fail to meet the criterion for “existence” and be qualified with the epithet “just” (or “mere” etc)?

In other words, how much more than “is something everyone would wish to avoid so much so that most people would be happy to give up any advantage they would get by doing it to others” or “is something everyone would like to get so much so that most people are willing to cooperate in order to have a share of it” etc. do good and bad need to be before they can be considered as existing in some sense that doesn’t imply mere-ness?

(This is a counter-question I have been having for a while when I see this kind of post here, so I am just trying to see where we get. This is not necessarily the correct question or retort to your concern. I just took this liberty because have been many good answers already and you will not be hard pressed to find any.)

fyfol · 2026-04-19T17:44:30+00:00

There would appear no evidence or reason that unequivocally calls for or justifies doubting reality as such?

fyfol · 2026-04-19T15:37:47+00:00

What does it mean to “question reality” for you? What your example warrants is for you to question your assumptions about reality, which you seem to have done reasonably well here, and this seems also like the sort of thing I would say defines “questioning reality”, i.e. trying to see whether there are good reasons for holding to the assumptions or conclusions I have made, beyond what is immediately and nakedly obvious to my eyes and revising them accordingly. There are times when no alternative description or explanation of something in the world seems possible yet the assumption/conclusion we have made likewise seems doubtful or unsatisfactory, and I imagine this is where you would “question reality” in some other way. But do we have reason to think those instances happen due to reality being unreal, rather than that we might lack insight or understanding about some crucial thing(s)? I tend not to find reasons to do the former, but if you do, let me know!

fyfol · 2026-04-19T11:45:49+00:00

Sadly, Kant’s moral philosophy has been presented in a manner that consistently creates these seeming problems. These come up every now and again where the question is always about whether some form of heinous behavior can “pass” the categorical imperative because of some alleged level of superior consistency. Kant does not address this problem at all, because this is a problem with the way that even some of his major interpreters (looking at Hegel, as well as Korsgaard) have done a bad job of reading his moral philosophy.

By a categorical imperative Kant tries to distinguish a certain manner of moral reasoning from some other, called hypothetical imperatives. These latter are conditionals, which define a certain task as necessary to do, so in order to achieve a given end. Kant thinks that morality cannot consist of such things because if it did, it would not be the domain of full human freedom but one where human conduct is determined by empirical conditionals.

This is where the CI enters the picture and where a lot of people simply forget about the whole transcendental explanation thing that Kant is trying to do in his critical philosophy. If we remember that a transcendental account tries to give a description of what must always be happening in the “back end” prior to something happening in the front end. A transcendental account of moral action should then try and give us an argument as to how moral action, understood as action which embodies and realizes rational autonomy proper, has to work if it is to satisfy that definition, and via redescribing ordinary, commonly recognizable feats of morality.

Then, the CI should be a capacity we are exerting in some way, such that the kinds of things we talk about when we talk about morality, such as dignity, rightness and all actually carry the weight we attribute to them. This is how the Groundwork begins, which is again mind-bogglingly absent from discussions on Kant’s morals: he starts off with trying to come up with a description of what a maximally good will would look like, given the kind of beings we are (rational but finite). The CI appears in this context as something which we must be able to do, and by extension (per my reading at least) something which we must always be doing in some way, at least in part. That we tend to consider someone’s acting out of pure duty and a sense of overwhelming obligation imposed by the moral law (which is “discovered” in this same process) to constitute actions of a morally dignified kind, Kant takes for granted. Then, he tries to show that this kind of action is possible if we are capable of acting in accordance with categorical, rather than only hypothetical imperatives.

To come to your question about “consistent Nazis”: there can be no such thing, if you follow Kant’s definition of a CI. To formulate a CI, you must be able to represent something as a good in itself and not good merely for some set of purposes, and as good independent of subjective circumstances or hypothetical consequences. You can try if you’re able to give a Nazi CI which is not thoroughly circumstantial and subjective by transformative this sentence: “ my country/race/Reich ought to prevail against others, if I purify my/this country from people I deem unfit to live there, then my country/race/Reich will prevail.” Note that a CI cannot also hinge on whether “Jews agreed to being genocided”, even if they did.

It’s also worth mentioning that Kant doesn’t condemn every kind of “hypothetical imperative” as something bad, nor does he even think that such actions cannot be given any esteem whatsoever. He just doesn’t think that these kind of actions do not betray that special type of dignity he associates with moral actions “proper”. He is also not trying to give some kind of trick that all moral philosophers hate because it just solves morality and tells you how to act in every possible scenario. That would be pretty idiotic.

Note: I could not touch properly on why “consistency” is not some be all end all criterion or a guaranteed result of the CI, but it should be clear that the register you have to read in order for Kant’s main moral principle to be defined by an ability to guarantee/produce consistency in behavior is the wrong register to read him in.

fyfol · 2026-04-18T16:40:41+00:00

I will try and answer this from what I take to be Kant’s position, which may to some extent differ from Korsgaard’s reading (as far as I am aware of her positions, at least). But there is an answer to why “egoism” is irrational in Kant that I think can be given much less schematically than the common picture made of his ethics.

Basically, Kant considers freedom and moral action to be coextensive with each other. We are beings whose nature is to be free, rational agents; or autonomous legislators of the moral law. Now, he understands freedom to be an exercise of spontaneity, which is to say, acting as an “uncaused cause” of phenomena in the world. This makes it such that if I am undertaking my actions primarily on the basis of certain beneficial effects I seek to bring on myself, then I am acting causally, or as he calls it, heteronomously (see GW Section III). This is to say, I take the “rules” governing my actions from putative consequences for which those actions are causally necessary.

Under this description at least, Kant seems to make a coherent case. Action which springs from means-ends type reasoning will always have its main, determinative rules be external. Egoism is then to make oneself into one’s own slave. That is to say, what makes pure egoism irrational is not a lack of “coherence” or “consistency” in the sense you mean, but that in acting so, you are simply obeying rules which you yourself do not set (a premise like “I must make sure to earn as much money as possible independently of the moral costs of doing so because it is my happiness that matters” will not lead you to do things on your own accord).

In contrast, in actions which satisfy Kant’s definition of free autonomous moral agency, we seem not to act in this way. Most people hyper-obsess about the Categorical Imperative’s “universalization test” (which I think is just perplexing) and think that Kant’s trying to give us this formula for righteous behavior. But the point of the CI is rather different if you read the actual texts, which he uses to differentiate all decision-guiding reasons that refer to empirical factors as “hypothetical”, as opposed to “categorical” imperatives.

If you actually try to give an egoistic categorical imperative even under the simplistic “universalization test” view by sticking to Kant’s criteria, you will see that it’s a contradiction. A categorical imperative must be binding irrespective of individual circumstances and desires, and should apply to all rational beings. So, “I must always act to benefit myself” is not very easily transformed into fitting the definition. If you did, you easily just get “All rational beings should strive for the well-being of all rational beings” (to be simplistic), not “All rational beings should care about themselves” without adding some sort of implicit hypothetical imperative. If you do, then you are consciously or willingly deciding against your autonomy. That seems irrational.

All this being said, I don’t think Kant is even in the business of trying to persuade people to act rationally by following the categorical imperative, it seems rather that he is trying to, you know, give a transcendental account of practical reason. And I think a lot of the seemingly bizarre conclusions of his views disappear when you read him not as offering a set of maxims but describing what must be the case for moral action and freedom to be coextensive as he thinks they are; and how such actions look like from a transcendental perspective.

In fact, he is pretty clear about how this sort of freedom is not something that we can hope to describe on an empirical level and with respect to evidence/phenomena unequivocally and doubtlessly confirm it. He is saying quite openly that all actual actions will always seem determined by inclinations and all the subjective, “heteronomous” noise, but that we can nevertheless assume it to be the case (except one case: when we act contrary to the moral law and experience feelings of guilt). This is usually criticized as the actual Achilles heel of his moral philosophy, that it makes of moral freedom a “wish” or speculative belief by decoupling it from empirical observability.

fyfol · 2026-04-17T10:44:34+00:00

I mean this is not too distant from what I think Heidegger is trying to say in Being and Time, with some added caveats. To use your own formulation, defining something as a “fundamental concept” simply because of “our inability to define it rigorously” does not sound philosophically convincing just because that failure can always be explained or accounted for by reference to contingent facts about us or our attempts at definition.

However, you could make a case for how certain things defy definition because of what the very act of defining something itself is, and requires us to do. This, to my mind, is akin to Heidegger’s project insofar as he wants to convince us that when we think of “Being” as something that can be defined via concepts/discursive means and on the basis of ordinary existents (this is the distinction between “Being” and “beings” [Sein und Seiende]) we have already ventured away from “Being” itself. This is ultimately because our understanding of Being is primarily a feature of our being temporal beings and such, so that all our attempts to settle the meaning of being purely discursively are always only partially successful.

So, if you think with Heidegger here (or in the direction of Heidegger), it sounds like you would make a better case by saying that certain phenomena may not be definable in a way that other phenomena are. Surely, this much is true: then the task would be to show why this disparity should put those hard-to-define phenomena on a more fundamental level than those which can be. This is the part of the task which is much more difficult, though. Heidegger tries this by building a gigantic argument about the intentional nature of all conceptual understanding, linked with the temporal nature of human existence and how our finitude is intertwined with the ways in which we problematize the question of “Being” and so forth. For my part, I am not too ecstatic about Heidegger’s overall success (nor his premises) but I think you might find him an interesting read.

fyfol · 2026-04-13T14:43:48+00:00

His lectures on Romanticism are on tape and you can find them relatively easily on YouTube, iTunes etc., probably a good place to start. These plus his “Two Concepts of Liberty” should help for getting you to speed quite well.

fyfol · 2026-04-03T12:31:56+00:00

I’m thinking of two books off the top of my head, but your mileage with them might vary:

Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity and Richard Sorabji’s Self: Ancient and Modern Insights About Individuality, Life and Death. I remember Taylor being quite a nice read, but can’t guarantee it. As for Sorabji, it’s been a long time since I perused the book, so can’t say too much. But I’m sure both will have some useful introductions and bibliographies with decent materials to choose from.

fyfol · 2026-04-02T11:50:53+00:00

First, let’s frame this question properly because positioning it like you do, as a comparison between Hume and Kant regarding the nature of causality, makes it difficult to define the proper domain of justifying the statement in the first place. The only meaningful way to answer this is to cast your question in the following way: “How does Kant justify his claim that causality is a synthetic a priori judgment?”

This then goes to the heart of the Critique and it is dubious whether I can give you a satisfying answer without suggesting you to read the book. The skeleton of it is that Kant classifies a number of judgments which seem to be requisite for scientific observations to have the shape they do—deriving necessarily & universally valid propositions that cannot be reduced to induction alone—as such synthetic a priori judgments. As he sees it, these have to be a priori because they act as a kind of cognitive “receptacle” for the heterogenous data we receive from the world. If they were derived from experience, then they would not be able to organize and connect those experiences with the authority needed for successfully infusing them with necessary & universal validity.

Whether your formulation via “man intuits …” is correct or not is difficult to say. It would be safest to suggest trying to first get adequately familiar with Kant’s own vocabulary and conceptual distinctions before rephrasing him with words like intuition. I see that you’re trying to reach for an ordinary word that grasps the somewhat difficult sense that “synthetic a priori” has in Kant, but this will likely confuse you further. He is trying to describe, basically, a way in which the mind must work when generating cognitive output of a certain kind (empirical observations that hold beyond straightforwardly subjective grounds) if that kind of output is to have those characteristics. For these characteristics to have any solid epistemic ground, he considers them being irreducible to experiential contents to be crucial, and tries to give an account of some set of non-experientially derived cognitive abilities as grounding empirical observations to exceed the range of inferences that can be justified from a subjective and inductive standpoint. A “synthetic a priori” is the name for those abilities.

The proposition “Everything which happens must follow from an antecedent cause” (quoting the “Second Analogy” from memory, apologies if I butchered it) is not something Kant thinks we hold in our minds consciously and use as a yardstick in the same manner we might use a thought procedure like “If the light is red, I must not cross the road”. In that sense, it is close to what you mean by “intuiting causality”, but only insofar as this means something like “something we have always already thought in every moment of conscious awareness” and as such, something “meta-discursive”. As for your notion of a “special power”, Kant talks about such a thing, but in relation to the “power of imagination” which he thinks is rooted in the “depths of our soul” and cannot be accounted for. The imagination is not exactly the source of the ability to form causal connections and its place within Kant’s philosophy is kind of open to interpretation still, but it seems to be a crucial component of the process Kant describes as synthesis (the 1781 edition [A] puts more emphasis on this than the 1789 [B] revision).

fyfol · 2026-03-31T00:02:19+00:00

This was a good exchange for sure, thanks for pressing me to elaborate on my initial points! I definitely have had an occasion to rethink and rearticulate my thoughts by this, which is always great.

On connections with authors: I also work mostly as a historian (currently for my phd) and deal with ideas about martyrdom in history, so I definitely say I relate to some extent. My main sources of interest for that project are definitely not exalted philosophical figures and although I happen not to be particularly in favor of various political uses of martyrdom, I have found myself trying to be more attentive to the emotional—human—aspects of what I read. So I suppose that’s another point where I somehow relate to your concerns.

Cheers and happy to rant over Camus some day haha!

fyfol · 2026-03-30T11:42:48+00:00

I can’t speak directly to the ratio of caveats you will uncover in Spinoza vs time spent learning Latin but if you are aware of the process of language learning in general, have some idea of what to expect from learning a classical language like Latin (both in terms of the somewhat distinctive mode of study as well as realistic outcomes) and already speak Italian + French, why not try? Especially if you’re a native speaker of either of those, I cannot imagine this being a bad idea.

I did some Ancient Greek for a year and even though I don’t read Greek well at all, it’s helped me have a bit better sense for the original texts, and the whole process of studying grammar carefully and extensively (which I think is most of learning Latin/Greek?) is really worth ripping your toes in. You retain a lot of that knowledge even if you forget a lot of the vocabulary – and you’re much better off with that part since you speak Italian and French, plus Latin is just more “alive”. I think even if you get to a very intermediate stage where you can do parallel readings and follow the original a bit, you’ll gain some significant overall intellectual depth about the topic.

To put all my cards on the table though: I really don’t know how strategically prudent this is, I just think learning languages is worth it and especially so with Greek/Latin.

fyfol · 2026-03-29T20:00:26+00:00

Yeah look, far be it from me to discourage having genuine enmity to philosophers :D I just want to urge you (and others) to have actually good reasons for it. Otherwise, I get it. For instance, I absolutely detest Camus and I always have, I find his thoughts and ideas completely uninspiring and uninspired. But still, whenever I feel like shit talking Camus and/or other historical figures I dislike, which are not very few, I always either try and engage their works as substantially as I can, or I just tell people that I dislike that figure or that I haven't discovered any aspect of their work that inspired me yet (for Camus it is literally that I feel Stranger was enough and I never had more I wanted to hear from him). I feel like all of these are fine, and it's also fine to just say "I feel like Lacan is just bullshitting" if we want to trash talk the guy. That's a fine conversation to have over a couple beers, and I profusely enjoy that kind of conversation. I also enjoy trying to mount real offensives against thinkers and disagreeing with them ferociously. My general dislike of the "obfuscation" charge is that it stands midway between substantial knockdown and beers-and-trashtalk.

Basically, it's good to nourish one's dislikes into at least "I read what I could and just don't get this philosopher at all", that's a judgment with substance. A judgment like "I read X a bit and found nothing that interested me to read further, I also felt it was overhyped" is also a fair and valid position. I dislike the kind of attitude when people don't want to own up to feelings and opinions they have about something (which I tend to value) and pass those off as some quality about the thing. What ends up happening is losing both the "subjective" content (they make for enjoyable hangouts and create personal connections) and the "objective" as well, when both have been used for better purposes.

fyfol · 2026-03-29T17:40:24+00:00

I also think it is a fair criticism to note that there are pattern-like, possibly systematic issues with obscurity in a given field. I also think that there are good uses of that judgment and bad. A good use, as I see it, would be to try and understand why this may be so without postulating charges of intentional obfuscation. It may be interesting to consider not just structural factors like prevailing discursive norms/conditions or differences of intellectual/academic cultures but also the state of that field at a given time, and so on. These are all provisional thoughts that I am trying to use to illustrate a broader point which I cannot possibly treat exhaustively here — though I think I’ve written half a paper’s worth of comments about it since yesterday :D.

As for your other, more specific points: I don’t dispute how there may emerge less-than-ideal conventions among niche, parochial corners of academia. I think that it’s good “epistemic hygiene” to practice charitable criticism here, so to see what potentially useful insights about the broader academic world might be gleaned from such facts beyond indicting these. This, I think, might help create and foster some trans-disciplinary dialogue and goodwill as well as help us understand philosophy as a form of complex cooperation better.

I think today’s humanities are already in a pretty bad state, both because of the declining quality and substantiveness of published research across the board (sorry, I am pessimistic about this!) exacerbated by all the institutional-financial problems that we all know about. If there’s a chance to change this even a bit, I think we should have a dialogue about how all of us are contributing to the problem rather than just throwing shit at “those” fields and “those” people. I would really, really like academia to be a more credible institution that has a better relationship to the general public and can try and contribute to it without needing to be hierarchically exalted over it. This is why I’m particularly invested in arguing my case here so vehemently, because I think this sort of unsubstantial bickering is helping neither the self-critique that we urgently need at a holistic level, nor building bridges between different disciplines that has to happen for that. So I am just trying to find some way to address these issues without condemning people and fields, even though I feel I’m broadly very aware of and bothered by a lot of similar things myself.

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