Great piece! I was reminded of Kurt Vonnegut in Cats Cradle, defining RESEARCH..(I paraphrase) as 'Looking for something they had known before and lost'
Oddly, I am currently reading Leibniz, Spinoza, and Bergson because I was trying to work out Deleuze. And everywhere I turn seems to point back to Heraclitus.
I think folks believe that the work of a philosopher is an “answer”, and that if it is old that answer has been superseded by a better answer, or by science. They seem to miss that any philosophical work is a mode of exploration, and old works provide tools and perspectives, not facts, and the better works have better quality of thinking, regardless of their era.
Rawls knew many things, Hedgehog that he was. But he didn't credit Wordsworth or even put "natural piety" in quotes. (I guess natural piety can go only so far....)
Thank you. Often people come up with the new names because they're not aware of the old. That's why philosophy needs to pay attention to its history. "Continental" philosophers are usually better at this side of things than analytic ones are.
A truly new Philosophy has not appeared in the West since the time of Plato, and even his philosophy did not (could not) take into account the totality of the human body-mind-complex..
That having been said please find an introduction to the all-inclusive Philosophy of Avatar Adi Da Samraj.
http://www.integralworld.net/reynolds6.html The Seven Stages of Life - with very rare exception all of the Western philosophical chit-chat is confined to the first three stages of life
if you’re going to throw Adi Da in here, might as well throw Sri Aurobindo too. And the modern Western study of poetry is seriously missing out by not studying his poetics and his 1000+ line epic, Savitri. He spoke perfect English, don’t worry.
It seems to me that Western philosophers used to do the Eastern thing and style their own philosophies with the names of prominent forebearers, as the Neo-Platonists did with Plato and the schoolmen did with Aristotle, but the revolution in textual criticism in the Renaissance humiliated the scholastics by proving that what they taught and what Aristotle taught were very different. All the more nowadays, when it's probably easier to just say what you think instead of trying to invoke an authority and risking exposing yourself to merely textual objections.
I think you make an excellent point. 3 things came to mind as I read:
1) As Mikael mentions in a comment above, surely the current culture of publishing is part of the problem, especially since any article submitted to a journal needs to say something truly *new*. In some fields, of course, this may make sense. But in philosophy...it may prevent articles from actually talking about what is most important, as it's always easier to say something new about a topic or thinker no one else has felt is all that important.
2) Continental philosophy does seem better on this score than analytic (again, as someone else mentions above) but I would also say that philosophy's sister discipline, theology, is even better still. Dare I suggest philosophers have something to learn from theology? (I do dare!)
3) I will say there are pleasant exceptions. I took 3 classes with Peter Ochs at UVA about 10 years ago. Although our focus was on recent thinkers (and by recent I mostly mean C.S. Peirce in the latter 19th century) but in the course of discussing Peirce's semiotics, Ochs had us reading Suarez, Augustine, and the Stoics too. Such a historical context was definitely helpful in developing a deeper appreciation for semiotics as an approach to philosophy.
There's probably a bit of prisoners' dilemma in this. Everybody wishes there was less focus on publishing papers all the time, but no one wants to be among those who stop publishing.
Great piece! I was reminded of Kurt Vonnegut in Cats Cradle, defining RESEARCH..(I paraphrase) as 'Looking for something they had known before and lost'
Thank you for this.
Thank you. I love that paraphrase from Vonnegut!
Spot on!
Oddly, I am currently reading Leibniz, Spinoza, and Bergson because I was trying to work out Deleuze. And everywhere I turn seems to point back to Heraclitus.
I think folks believe that the work of a philosopher is an “answer”, and that if it is old that answer has been superseded by a better answer, or by science. They seem to miss that any philosophical work is a mode of exploration, and old works provide tools and perspectives, not facts, and the better works have better quality of thinking, regardless of their era.
Thank you! I completely agree.
Rawls called it "natural piety," the attitude you recommend (TJ 15).
Aha! Rawls knew his Wordsworth!
Rawls knew many things, Hedgehog that he was. But he didn't credit Wordsworth or even put "natural piety" in quotes. (I guess natural piety can go only so far....)
Thank you. Often people come up with the new names because they're not aware of the old. That's why philosophy needs to pay attention to its history. "Continental" philosophers are usually better at this side of things than analytic ones are.
Yes, “Continental” philosophers seem to be significantly better at this!
A truly new Philosophy has not appeared in the West since the time of Plato, and even his philosophy did not (could not) take into account the totality of the human body-mind-complex..
That having been said please find an introduction to the all-inclusive Philosophy of Avatar Adi Da Samraj.
http://www.adidaupclose.org/Adidam_In_Perpetuity/dawnhorse.html#ashvamedha The Ashvamedha Horse Sacrifice
http://www.adidam.in
http://www.dabase.org/gnos-foreward.htm an introduction to The Gnosticon - check out the table of contents too
http://www.integralworld.net/reynolds6.html The Seven Stages of Life - with very rare exception all of the Western philosophical chit-chat is confined to the first three stages of life
http://www.dabase.org/up-1-3.htm The Western Prohibition Against Higher (yogic) Knowledge & Realization
if you’re going to throw Adi Da in here, might as well throw Sri Aurobindo too. And the modern Western study of poetry is seriously missing out by not studying his poetics and his 1000+ line epic, Savitri. He spoke perfect English, don’t worry.
Great read. Thank you for this!
It seems to me that Western philosophers used to do the Eastern thing and style their own philosophies with the names of prominent forebearers, as the Neo-Platonists did with Plato and the schoolmen did with Aristotle, but the revolution in textual criticism in the Renaissance humiliated the scholastics by proving that what they taught and what Aristotle taught were very different. All the more nowadays, when it's probably easier to just say what you think instead of trying to invoke an authority and risking exposing yourself to merely textual objections.
Channeling Plato here as best I can, from my own cobweb recollections: We can only seem to remember the truth, never to create it.
I think you make an excellent point. 3 things came to mind as I read:
1) As Mikael mentions in a comment above, surely the current culture of publishing is part of the problem, especially since any article submitted to a journal needs to say something truly *new*. In some fields, of course, this may make sense. But in philosophy...it may prevent articles from actually talking about what is most important, as it's always easier to say something new about a topic or thinker no one else has felt is all that important.
2) Continental philosophy does seem better on this score than analytic (again, as someone else mentions above) but I would also say that philosophy's sister discipline, theology, is even better still. Dare I suggest philosophers have something to learn from theology? (I do dare!)
3) I will say there are pleasant exceptions. I took 3 classes with Peter Ochs at UVA about 10 years ago. Although our focus was on recent thinkers (and by recent I mostly mean C.S. Peirce in the latter 19th century) but in the course of discussing Peirce's semiotics, Ochs had us reading Suarez, Augustine, and the Stoics too. Such a historical context was definitely helpful in developing a deeper appreciation for semiotics as an approach to philosophy.
There's probably a bit of prisoners' dilemma in this. Everybody wishes there was less focus on publishing papers all the time, but no one wants to be among those who stop publishing.