It feels like their method of thinking is corrupted in some deep way? It's pretty subtle, but academic philosophers seem to think in ways that lead to *less* clarity, while framing this as virtue. It feels like they're "performing thinking"; doing things that resemble thoughts.
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My less-than-charitable interpretation is they're put into a system that incentivizes for prestige and respect; to be a good philosopher is to 'look like' a good philosopher, and good philosophers have dusty tomes and refer to elaborate concepts mere mortals can't understand.
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Focus is placed on figuring out what older philosophers thought, and using complicated, inaccessible terminology. I distrust this; if your words are complicated and inaccessible, your thoughts must be an absolute mess. Clarity keeps you grounded, but alas, it's not prestigious.
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Ofc I'm being kinda strong-language and hyperbole here, and #notallphilosophers; i know a few academic-background philosophers who seem pretty good at thinking, though *all* from that group had training or exposure to non-academic philosophy.
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That’s weird because that seems like a fairly good description of a lot of rationalist stuff which I imagine is the implicit “good thinking” benchmark you’re comparing this stuff to
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Rationalists regularly ground their thinking in regular tests, like predictions and bets.
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Some of them are pretty bad. But they do know the overly-trodden paths well, which is useful to avoiding trying to reinvent the philosophical wheel, so to speak.
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I don't know how accurate this is, but I read about Einstein's theory of relativity being a pivotal point in philosophy's history as relativistic time encroached on and undermined the unchallenged dominance philosophers enjoyed in that subject.
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David Stove’s “What is Wrong with Our Thoughts?” puts it perfectly: web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthou.
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it's almost as academic philosophers are powerless to question their base premises or go outside their Overton window
look at who's dismissed as a crank and who's accepted without question