My philosophical conversations tend to get worse proportional to the amount my conversational partner has studied philosophy
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I’m sorry - philosophy has always been built on a response to earlier philosophy. If you’re not engaging in those earlier works you may actually be the frustrating partner in the conversation but just not know it.
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I hate this. Often the earlier works are flat out bad and I don't think it's valuable to engage. Also you don't have to study the history of art to produce powerful art.
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That may be the problem; you are interested *in* philosophy, while academic philosophy is mostly *about* philosophy. I suppose it's hard to make genuine progress in philosophy without both a hard formal and a deep humanities education, so they don't have any other choice.
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Agreed. And if the themes from the earlier works are compelling, that will come out in the conversation.
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It's not built on a response to earlier philosophy if you've never studied earlier philosophy.
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Understanding earlier philosophy is critical to doing philosophy well. You're otherwise left inventing the wheel and you'll die well before you get far there.
Name dropping and use of jargon is immature. It's the ideas that matter, not the names or fancy words.
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It's easier to produce a new Chesterton fence than understand why a Chesterton fence may exist. What's worse we become unqualified to determine whether such a fence already existed and if the circumstances were the same or different.
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...and one doesn't HAVE to study the history of art to produce powerful art. But But helps to immerse yourself in craft. In my experience, the best novelists were also the best readers and so on.
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This is how crackpots are born
Crackpots always think they have come up with something new without knowing that someone already did it or there's a fundamental reason why it won't work because they haven't studied it enough
See: Time Cube, Water powered car, C-19 Hoax etc...
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It's all one big moving wheel, the past, the present and the future ...they are in a continuum of friction with eachother.
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