I was wondering the very same thing as I wrote the post. Kant and Hegel are the two founders of continental philosophy, and both are difficult to read. Pretty much all 20th century continental philosophers are terribly hard to read.
I would speculate that, while people might not be sure they understand Kant & Hegel, they also can’t be sure they don’t understand them. They require no math; they are analogical enough that reading them is more like reading literature than math. A person reading Kripke either understands it or does not. Reading Heidegger is more like reading Tolstoy; you feel you can always go back to it and discover more.
Perhaps more importantly, they tackle bigger questions. Analytic philosophers start with questions they think they can answer; continental philosophers start with questions they want the answers to.
Also, continental philosophers can never be refuted. The logical positivists made the mistake of stating their claims clearly enough that people could listen to less-precise statements claiming to refute them, and believe they’d been refuted.
Here’s a random excerpt from Kant:
It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even
beyond it, that could be taken to be good without limitation, except a
GOOD WILL. Understanding, wit, judgement and whatever else the talents
of the mind may be called, or confidence, resolve and persistency of
intent, as qualities of temperament, are no doubt in many respects good
and desirable; but they can also be extremely evil and harmful if the
will that is to make use of these gifts of nature, and whose distinctive
constitution is therefore called character, is not good. It is just the same
with gifts of fortune. Power, riches, honour, even health, and the entire
well-being and contentment with one’s condition, under the name of
happiness, inspire confidence and thereby quite often overconfidence as
well, unless a good will is present to correct and make generally
purposive their influence on the mind, and with it also the whole principle
for acting; not to mention that a rational impartial spectator can never
more take any delight in the sight of the uninterrupted prosperity of a
being adorned with no feature of a pure and good will, and that a good
will thus appears to constitute the indispensable condition even of the
worthiness to be happy.
Here’s a random excerpt from Bertrand Russell, an analytic philosopher:
Traditionally, there are two sorts of data, one physical, derived from the
senses, the other mental, derived from introspection. It seems highly
questionable whether this distinction can be validly made among data; it
seems rather to belong to what is inferred from them. Suppose, for the
sake of definiteness, that you are looking at a white triangle drawn on a
black- board. You can make the two judgments: “There is a triangle there”,
and “I see a triangle.” These are different propositions, but neither
expresses a bare datum; the bare datum seems to be the same in both
propositions. To illustrate the difference of the propositions: you might
say “There is a triangle there”, if you had seen it a moment ago but now
had your eyes shut, and in this case you would not say “I see a triangle”;
on the other hand, you might see a black dot which you knew to be due to
indigestion or fatigue, and in this case you would not say “There is a black
dot there.” In the first of these cases, you have a clear case of inference,
not of a datum.
Kant is talking about good and evil, delight, happiness, character, honor, etc., while Russell is talking about looking at triangles. Which one are people going to want to read?
Kant is talking about good and evil, delight, happiness, character, honor, etc., etc, while Russell is talking about looking at triangles. Which one are people going to want to read?
Except Kant also talked quite a bit about triangles and Russell also talked quite a bit about good and evil. And Kant discussed perceptual epistemology a whole lot more than Russell did. The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s most significant work, is about epistemology, not ethics.
Also, while much of twentieth-century continental philosophy does build on Kant (although a lot of it is a reaction against Kant), so does much of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. In many ways, the true heirs of Kant in the twentieth century were the logical positivists. Their epistemology was closer to Kant’s than any prominent continental philosopher’s was. So Kant has just as much claim to being a founder of analytic philosophy as he does to being a founder of continental philosophy.
Kant was not the most lucid writer, but his style was not remotely “analogical” or “literary” (look through Kant’s famous Transcendental Deduction and see whether those descriptors seem apt).. And much of Kantian philosophy is precisely formulated and subject to falsification. In fact, quite a bit of it has been falsified (his contention that space is necessarily Euclidean, for instance).
Indeed. Kant is a poor example for offensive continental philosophy because while he was a very bad writer, but you can reconstruct sensible ideas he was trying to express, at least when it’s not about ethics. The really offensive philosophy is the one where the obscurity of the writing is not accidental in this way, but essential, and where the whole thing falls apart once you try to remove it.
Analytical philosophers also do not routinely scoff at Kant except for 1) his lack of skill as a writer and 2) his ethics.
I don’t know of many analytic philosophers who scoff at his ethics, although there are certainly many who disagree with it. There are also many analytic philosophers who consider his ethics to be a significant advance in moral reasoning. As an example, Derek Parfit, in his recent book, constructs an ethical system that tries to reconcile the attractions of both consequentialism and Kantian deontological ethics.
Kant’s discussion of the categorical imperative, especially the first formulation of the imperative (act according to the maxim that you would will to be a universal law), prefigures various contemporary attempts to reformulate decision theory in order to avoid mutual defection in PD-like games, including Hofstadter’s notion of superrationality and Yudkowsky’s Timeless Decision Theory. Essentially, Kantian ethics is based on the idea that ethics stems from nothing more than a commitment to rational decision-making and common knowledge of rationality among interacting agents (although with Kant it’s not so much about knowing that other agents are rational but about respecting them by treating them as rational). I don’t fully agree with this perspective, but I do think it is remarkably astute and ahead of its time.
In my experience, many people hold that when trying to derive the KI in the groundwork, he just managed to confuse himself, and that the examples of its application as motivated reasoning of a rigid Prussian scholar with an empathy deficit.
The crucial failure is not that it is nonsensical to think about such abstract equilibria—it is very much not, as TDT shows. But in TDT terms, Kant’s mistake was this: He thought he could compel you to pretend that everybody else in the world was running TDT. But there is nothing that compels you to assume that, and so you can’t pull a substantial binding ethics out of thin air (or pure rationality), as Kant absurdly believed he could.
I absolutely agree that Kant’s system as represented in the Groundwork is unworkable. But you could say the same about pretty much any pre-20th-century philosopher’s major work. I think the fact that someone was even trying to think about ethics along essentially game-theoretic lines in the 18th century is pretty revolutionary and worthy of respect, even if he did get important things wrong. As far as I’m aware, no one else was even in the ballpark.
ETA: I do think a lot of philosophers scoff (correctly) at Kant’s object-level moral views, not only because of their absurdity (the horrified tone in which he describes masturbation still makes me chuckle) but because of the intellectual contortions he would go through to “prove” them using his system. While I believe he made very important contributions to meta-ethics, his framework was nowhere near precise enough to generate a workable applied ethics. So yeah, Kant’s actual ethical positions are pretty scoff-worthy, but the insight driving his moral framework is not.
My random sample was from his ethics, though I didn’t pull it from there intentionally. I took the first book by Kant that showed up in a search of my computer.
Who were Kant’s contemporary philosophical competitors?
Does anybody like listening to Hegel and other similar obstrusive writing? Being hard to read and not fun to read doesn’t seem a barrier to success.
Hegel was popular lecturer.
I was wondering the very same thing as I wrote the post. Kant and Hegel are the two founders of continental philosophy, and both are difficult to read. Pretty much all 20th century continental philosophers are terribly hard to read.
I would speculate that, while people might not be sure they understand Kant & Hegel, they also can’t be sure they don’t understand them. They require no math; they are analogical enough that reading them is more like reading literature than math. A person reading Kripke either understands it or does not. Reading Heidegger is more like reading Tolstoy; you feel you can always go back to it and discover more.
Perhaps more importantly, they tackle bigger questions. Analytic philosophers start with questions they think they can answer; continental philosophers start with questions they want the answers to.
Also, continental philosophers can never be refuted. The logical positivists made the mistake of stating their claims clearly enough that people could listen to less-precise statements claiming to refute them, and believe they’d been refuted.
Here’s a random excerpt from Kant:
It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be taken to be good without limitation, except a GOOD WILL. Understanding, wit, judgement and whatever else the talents of the mind may be called, or confidence, resolve and persistency of intent, as qualities of temperament, are no doubt in many respects good and desirable; but they can also be extremely evil and harmful if the will that is to make use of these gifts of nature, and whose distinctive constitution is therefore called character, is not good. It is just the same with gifts of fortune. Power, riches, honour, even health, and the entire well-being and contentment with one’s condition, under the name of happiness, inspire confidence and thereby quite often overconfidence as well, unless a good will is present to correct and make generally purposive their influence on the mind, and with it also the whole principle for acting; not to mention that a rational impartial spectator can never more take any delight in the sight of the uninterrupted prosperity of a being adorned with no feature of a pure and good will, and that a good will thus appears to constitute the indispensable condition even of the worthiness to be happy.
Here’s a random excerpt from Bertrand Russell, an analytic philosopher:
Traditionally, there are two sorts of data, one physical, derived from the senses, the other mental, derived from introspection. It seems highly questionable whether this distinction can be validly made among data; it seems rather to belong to what is inferred from them. Suppose, for the sake of definiteness, that you are looking at a white triangle drawn on a black- board. You can make the two judgments: “There is a triangle there”, and “I see a triangle.” These are different propositions, but neither expresses a bare datum; the bare datum seems to be the same in both propositions. To illustrate the difference of the propositions: you might say “There is a triangle there”, if you had seen it a moment ago but now had your eyes shut, and in this case you would not say “I see a triangle”; on the other hand, you might see a black dot which you knew to be due to indigestion or fatigue, and in this case you would not say “There is a black dot there.” In the first of these cases, you have a clear case of inference, not of a datum.
Kant is talking about good and evil, delight, happiness, character, honor, etc., while Russell is talking about looking at triangles. Which one are people going to want to read?
Except Kant also talked quite a bit about triangles and Russell also talked quite a bit about good and evil. And Kant discussed perceptual epistemology a whole lot more than Russell did. The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s most significant work, is about epistemology, not ethics.
Also, while much of twentieth-century continental philosophy does build on Kant (although a lot of it is a reaction against Kant), so does much of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. In many ways, the true heirs of Kant in the twentieth century were the logical positivists. Their epistemology was closer to Kant’s than any prominent continental philosopher’s was. So Kant has just as much claim to being a founder of analytic philosophy as he does to being a founder of continental philosophy.
Kant was not the most lucid writer, but his style was not remotely “analogical” or “literary” (look through Kant’s famous Transcendental Deduction and see whether those descriptors seem apt).. And much of Kantian philosophy is precisely formulated and subject to falsification. In fact, quite a bit of it has been falsified (his contention that space is necessarily Euclidean, for instance).
Indeed. Kant is a poor example for offensive continental philosophy because while he was a very bad writer, but you can reconstruct sensible ideas he was trying to express, at least when it’s not about ethics. The really offensive philosophy is the one where the obscurity of the writing is not accidental in this way, but essential, and where the whole thing falls apart once you try to remove it.
Analytical philosophers also do not routinely scoff at Kant except for 1) his lack of skill as a writer and 2) his ethics.
I don’t know of many analytic philosophers who scoff at his ethics, although there are certainly many who disagree with it. There are also many analytic philosophers who consider his ethics to be a significant advance in moral reasoning. As an example, Derek Parfit, in his recent book, constructs an ethical system that tries to reconcile the attractions of both consequentialism and Kantian deontological ethics.
Kant’s discussion of the categorical imperative, especially the first formulation of the imperative (act according to the maxim that you would will to be a universal law), prefigures various contemporary attempts to reformulate decision theory in order to avoid mutual defection in PD-like games, including Hofstadter’s notion of superrationality and Yudkowsky’s Timeless Decision Theory. Essentially, Kantian ethics is based on the idea that ethics stems from nothing more than a commitment to rational decision-making and common knowledge of rationality among interacting agents (although with Kant it’s not so much about knowing that other agents are rational but about respecting them by treating them as rational). I don’t fully agree with this perspective, but I do think it is remarkably astute and ahead of its time.
In my experience, many people hold that when trying to derive the KI in the groundwork, he just managed to confuse himself, and that the examples of its application as motivated reasoning of a rigid Prussian scholar with an empathy deficit.
The crucial failure is not that it is nonsensical to think about such abstract equilibria—it is very much not, as TDT shows. But in TDT terms, Kant’s mistake was this: He thought he could compel you to pretend that everybody else in the world was running TDT. But there is nothing that compels you to assume that, and so you can’t pull a substantial binding ethics out of thin air (or pure rationality), as Kant absurdly believed he could.
I absolutely agree that Kant’s system as represented in the Groundwork is unworkable. But you could say the same about pretty much any pre-20th-century philosopher’s major work. I think the fact that someone was even trying to think about ethics along essentially game-theoretic lines in the 18th century is pretty revolutionary and worthy of respect, even if he did get important things wrong. As far as I’m aware, no one else was even in the ballpark.
ETA: I do think a lot of philosophers scoff (correctly) at Kant’s object-level moral views, not only because of their absurdity (the horrified tone in which he describes masturbation still makes me chuckle) but because of the intellectual contortions he would go through to “prove” them using his system. While I believe he made very important contributions to meta-ethics, his framework was nowhere near precise enough to generate a workable applied ethics. So yeah, Kant’s actual ethical positions are pretty scoff-worthy, but the insight driving his moral framework is not.
My random sample was from his ethics, though I didn’t pull it from there intentionally. I took the first book by Kant that showed up in a search of my computer.
Who were Kant’s contemporary philosophical competitors?