/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13473029]

do guys recommend studying analytic philosophy? Ive read some of the canonical essays from the analytic tradition and I cant really see the point unless you are a professional philosopher.

[Anonymous No.13473031]

>>13473029
Yes

[Anonymous No.13473056]

Retard, you just answered your own question

[Anonymous No.13473133]

>>13473029
It's technical stuff much of the time and not everyone will be interested in everything. In my view there's two analytic strains for two kinds of people. David Lewis and people like him in metaphysics, and a few in philosophy of mind (the dualists like Nagel and Chalmers), plus the early analytics (they were constructionalist, descriptivist, phenomenalist, before those things went out of style), together form one strain. The rest of the people, mainly dominating between 1940 and 1980, people like Quine or later Wittgenstein, are a second strain. The first strain should appeal to you if you like speculative metaphysics (Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, that sort of thing) or empiricist/empiricist-adjacent foundationalism (Hume, Berkeley, even Descartes). The second strain may appeal to you if you agree with Nietzsche and the postmodernists that we live in a world of signs and truth doesn't really correspond to an out-there world so much as it is determined by us. And lastly, if you like science, you can find both sides appealing, depending on who you are. The thing about science is this: it draws two kinds of people as well, the ones who care about "usefulness" as proof of truth, and the ones who believe truth is out there to be discovered. So based on which thing draws you to science, you'll be drawn to one or the other of the two analytic strains.

[Anonymous No.13473172]

>>13473029
Yes, of course! A well-rounded individual will be familiar with both continental and analytic philosophy. Both are valuable and both have their own strengths and weaknesses.

[Anonymous No.13473347]

>>134731333

Interesting, what are that canonical works of the first strain? Any available online?

[Anonymous No.13474037]

>>13473347
Frege: "Sense and Reference," "The Thought"
Russell: "On Denoting," "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description," The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
Moore: "The Refutation of Idealism"
Carnap: The Logical Structure of the World
Kripke: Naming and Necessity
Lewis: On the Plurality of Worlds
Nagel: "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"
Jackson: "Epiphenomenal Qualia"
Armstrong: Nominalism and Realism, A Theory of Universals

[Anonymous No.13474119]

>>13473029
Analytic philosophy gets rather abstract. I studied it for four years until one day in a graduate seminar on Kripke we were prompted to discuss whether or not a rubber duck is indeed a duck and I decided to rage quit. It's a disipline so far up its own ass it's almost absurd. I miss it though. For all its misgivings it's probably the best way to pursue truth when read in combination with the sciences.

Also fuck Lewis and modal realism. That shit is everything that's wrong with the discipline.

[Anonymous No.13474130]

Jesus christ, no. If you do that, at least study the continental tradition as well. Analytic philosophy looks to a continental philosopher like an engineering BA looks to a theoretical physicist PhD.

[Anonymous No.13474279]

>>13474119
I think the weird ideas and the asking-questions-that-seem-to-have-obvious-answers thing is not that bad though. I actually hate the opposite side of analytic philosophy. Just as there's analytics asking weird questions and others giving weird answers (like Lewisian modal realism), there's another side of the analytic tradition that gets super annoyed at that just like you were. And I find that they're a frustrating bunch: dogmatic and deflationary and often more into "usefulness" than truth. They even tend to define the very concept of 'truth' different than people did for the past 2500 years! And they don't just hate their fellow more-metaphysical-minded analytics, they end up being just as dismissive of continentals and historical philosophers (with their own speculative metaphysical projects) as well. To me that's way more annoying, but I guess who you find annoying more depends on what kind of person you are.

[Anonymous No.13474303]

>>13474130
>Analytic philosophy looks to a continental philosopher like an engineering BA looks to a theoretical physicist PhD.
Yes, because semiotics uninformed by advances in formal logic, and unfalsifiable psychoanalysis, are the key to telling post-irony metaphysicians why their search for mind-independent truth is hopeless, and this is completely comparable to the relationship theoretical physicists have to engineers, right?

[Anonymous No.13474319]

>>13474279
The duck question doesn't have an obvious answer. You mischaracterise my view entirely. My perspective is that when an issue becomes sufficiently abstract there often isn't a truth of the matter. It becomes absurd to debate whether a rubber duck is a duck because it depends entirely on how you want to conceptualise the issue. Then you have all these different camps arguing that their method of conceptualisation is superior which is essentially just intellectual posturing with very little content, with some philosophers proposing conceptual schemes so divorced from reality that they posit that nonexistent worlds literally exist. It's all well and good if you want to spend your life arguing over such things but to the average person what analytic philosophers have to say is of little to no consequence.

[Anonymous No.13474332]

>>13473029
No.

[Anonymous No.13474339]

>>13474279
cope

[Anonymous No.13474370]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUvf3fOmTTk

[Anonymous No.13474374]

>>13473029
the extra pixel in the pic is killing me

[Anonymous No.13474389]

>>13474319
>when an issue becomes sufficiently abstract there often isn't a truth of the matter
But there is, anon. That's what makes you lose your patience with analytics.
>The duck question doesn't have an obvious answer.
I don't know if you mean that there are many answers according to different ways the question is interpreted, or that we can't really decide or "prove" which answer is right among many to one and the same interpretation of the question. Those are two different matters. You know that, I hope. If your problem is with #1, that's unfortunate, because you can usually track the interpretation with enough context and clarification. If your problem is with #2, that's not an issue unique to analytics. Do you have a problem with Plato? Aristotle? How about Spinoza or Leibniz? Hume, Kant? Hegel? Heidegger? Look, I disagree with them on all kinds of things. But do you have the same attitude of "These people are intellectually posturing with very little content"? I hope you do, because at least it would be consistent. But then your problem is with philosophy itself. You don't need analytics to tell you why that's dumb.

[Anonymous No.13474408]

>>13474389
Pretentious pseud. This is exactly the kind of ignorant intellectual posturing I was describing.

[Anonymous No.13474410]

>>13474389
Analytics take it on faith that there are truths regarding concepts themselves which is patently absurd. We define concepts, we don't discover them.

[Anonymous No.13474416]

>>13474389
>you can usually track the interpretation of the concept with enough context and clarification
Which is why so much consensus in philosophy I suppose?

[Anonymous No.13474448]

>>13474408
That's simply awesome anon. I guess people who disagree with you and give their side of the argument must be doing 'intellectual posturing'. It can't possibly be sincere, and you're definitely not going to engage them right back in good faith, are you now? If you couldn't keep composure and track the Kripke discussion (regardless of your own agreement/disagreement), which is honestly really easy to do, why the fuck aren't you the pseud?
>>13474410
And you're no better.
>>13474416
There's at least consensus about the difference between rigid designation (where a rubber duck will simply not be what 'duck' rigidly designates) and the nonrigidity of the signifier token "duck" itself (it's clearly contingent what the signifier picks out). Pseuds can't wrap their heads around the former. At least everyone wraps their heads around the latter though. Pseuds think that proves that you can answer the rubber duck question by saying "Oh but it COULD be a duck if you define it as such, right?" This is true only when you're focused on the signifier (the word "duck"), and nobody will deny it.

[Anonymous No.13474457]

>>13474303
Revealing you know nothing about continental philosophy but still presume to comment on it is exactly why you're an analytic. You can't read anything outside of glossy laminated textbooks published in the last five years.

>advances in formal logic

"Advances in phrenology" don't interest me either. Wittgenstein blew formal logic out half a century after Husserl already did, while in dialogue and correspondence with Frege, through the hallmark method of all continental philosophy: inquiring into the ontological, hermeneutic, phenomenal, and linguistic bases of any formal system.

[Anonymous No.13474461]

>>13474448
Why argue with someone in good faith when their responses are dripping in condescension.

[Anonymous No.13474469]

>>13474448
I got an A for the Kripke course your brainlet.

[Anonymous No.13474477]

>tfw kripke literally fails to understand the private language argument

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAH A FUCKING UNDEGRADUATE CAN LITERALLY UNDERSTAND IT AND KRIPKE CAN'T GET IT EVEN AFTER PEOPLE EXPLAIN IT TO HIM A DOZEN TIMES

[Anonymous No.13474487]

If you are interested in
Analytical philosophy
Be sure to take some higher level mathematics.

But honestly
Theorical physictsrs do the same fuckin thing and get more exposure for it.

Logic needs a combitronics similar to calculus or something.
I think we have been operating at an algebraic level of logic for a while.
We need to see if there's any "deriviative" equivalent of logic.

[Anonymous No.13474493]

>>13474457
This isn't true. I finished Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism and Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation this month. I quite enjoy German idealism in general. I was being facetious because the other side is clearly dismissive of things they know little about. Still, I'm not really wrong here about psychoanalysis and semiotics. Psychoanalysis and semiotics matter a ton to continental philosophy today. I really do value continental critiques grounded in the structures guiding thought (cultural, social, subconscious-psychological, etc), I don't plan on throwing the baby out with bathwater. I happen to disagree with them about the usual moral (radical anti-realism or deflationism about our knowledge of truth or our access to mind-independent reality). Just like I disagree with a ton of analytics and pre-divide philosophers. I value them all though. You are dogmatic about being in the right to the point of devaluing the disagreeing side, considering the case closed, and refusing to engage them much, and this is why you have low patience for them. Which dogmatism honestly feels completely counter to the well-known continental critical suspicion of dogma, but you're not the first time a continental has sounded more dogmatic than the dogmatics they want to critique.

[Anonymous No.13474495]

>>13474469
You shouldn't get anything below an A for philosophy courses unless you're not cut out for philosophy in general dude. This isn't a challenge.

[Anonymous No.13474551]

>>13474461
>Why bring myself down to your level if you're not up to my standards
This is literally the definition of condescension, to patronize the fuck out of someone

[Anonymous No.13474900]

>>13473029
I study analytic philosophy and find it interesting (more so the tradition prior to 1970 or so than after), but no, I wouldn't recommend it unless you have some professional reason to get into it.

A large portion of it strikes me as confused, for reasons that >>13474319 says -- it's mostly questions that lack answers, due to the fundamental underdetermination of the language in which they're asked.

In fact I wouldn't recommend studying philosophy in general without a professional reason, unless you're really dedicated and have some serious immunization against bad thinking going in (which philosophy can also provide you if you know where to look). If you're not careful, a little bit of philosophy can actually make you worse at thinking, because the tradition is a huge mess.

[Anonymous No.13475106]

>>13473172
no 20th- or 21st-century philosophy is "valuable". It's a hobby with no value or utility.

[Anonymous No.13475126]

>>13473029
Study computer science (not brogramming), which is applied analytic philosophy

[Anonymous No.13475383]

>>13473029
There is little to it other than exchanging words with symbols and occasional math, so I would rather get an introductory book and doing it in my spare time or as a hobby.