“One of the annoying things about philosophy is that the dead simply don’t die. Once a philosopher or philosophical doctrine gains some celebrity in the community, it’s very difficult to convince anyone afterward that said philosopher or doctrine was flawed. In other words, the philosophical community tends to have problems with relinquishment. Therefore, there are still many philosophers that spend their careers studying, for example, Plato, apparently not with the intent to determine what parts of what Plato wrote are correct or still applicable, but rather with the intent to defend Plato from criticism. To prove Plato was right.”
I don’t know what kind of background you have in philosophy but in my experience this is just wrong. There is not a single philosopher in my department that fits this description and I have never met anyone who does. I’m not even sure where you get this perception. Its true that past philosophers are routinely referenced but this is just because its sometimes easier to use the concepts of ones predecessors rather than reinvent the wheel. But read any metaphysics written in the last fifty years and and you’ll find dead philosophers are only used to refer to common positions or as less wrong theories that make decent jumping off points for better theories.
This is interesting, because the “dead simply don’t die” problem definitely exists in the popular perception. If you ask a man on the street to name a philosopher, you’re much more likely to get Plato or Socrates than Kant, or Nietzsche, or Dennett. This is in stark contrast to physics, where (I imagine) “name a physicist” would get you Einstein, Hawking, or maybe Newton.
But one might argue that there wasn’t anything properly called ‘physics’ before Newton—Bringing up Newton for Physics is isomorphic to bringing up Socrates for philosophy. Someone calling Aristotle a ‘physicist’ would be off-base, despite his having written a book called ‘physics’.
I used Plato as an example of this because the first example that came to mind was classical philosophy, or at least the parts of it that aren’t more properly philology.
I’m generalizing over my experiences at philosophy conferences, mainly in the Midwestern United States, and my reading of various philosophical journals. I’m basing my claim on, among other things, what seems to be the common practice of classifying some philosophers as for example “Kant scholars”, “Continentals”, etc. It’s possible I’m wrong. I’m not a professional philosopher. I still think many philosophers think this way. That’s where I get this perception.
“One of the annoying things about philosophy is that the dead simply don’t die. Once a philosopher or philosophical doctrine gains some celebrity in the community, it’s very difficult to convince anyone afterward that said philosopher or doctrine was flawed. In other words, the philosophical community tends to have problems with relinquishment. Therefore, there are still many philosophers that spend their careers studying, for example, Plato, apparently not with the intent to determine what parts of what Plato wrote are correct or still applicable, but rather with the intent to defend Plato from criticism. To prove Plato was right.”
I don’t know what kind of background you have in philosophy but in my experience this is just wrong. There is not a single philosopher in my department that fits this description and I have never met anyone who does. I’m not even sure where you get this perception. Its true that past philosophers are routinely referenced but this is just because its sometimes easier to use the concepts of ones predecessors rather than reinvent the wheel. But read any metaphysics written in the last fifty years and and you’ll find dead philosophers are only used to refer to common positions or as less wrong theories that make decent jumping off points for better theories.
This is interesting, because the “dead simply don’t die” problem definitely exists in the popular perception. If you ask a man on the street to name a philosopher, you’re much more likely to get Plato or Socrates than Kant, or Nietzsche, or Dennett. This is in stark contrast to physics, where (I imagine) “name a physicist” would get you Einstein, Hawking, or maybe Newton.
But one might argue that there wasn’t anything properly called ‘physics’ before Newton—Bringing up Newton for Physics is isomorphic to bringing up Socrates for philosophy. Someone calling Aristotle a ‘physicist’ would be off-base, despite his having written a book called ‘physics’.
I used Plato as an example of this because the first example that came to mind was classical philosophy, or at least the parts of it that aren’t more properly philology.
I’m generalizing over my experiences at philosophy conferences, mainly in the Midwestern United States, and my reading of various philosophical journals. I’m basing my claim on, among other things, what seems to be the common practice of classifying some philosophers as for example “Kant scholars”, “Continentals”, etc. It’s possible I’m wrong. I’m not a professional philosopher. I still think many philosophers think this way. That’s where I get this perception.