There have been many great female scientists, novelists, artists, etc. But which female philosophers should replace Plato, Aristotle, Erasmus, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, Habermas, or Singer? Serious suggestions welcome.https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/03/14/oxford-university-set-feminise-curriculum-requesting-inclusion/ …
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I like the example of Rand as way of trying to discern whether we’re biased as consumers of philosophy. The large historical problem has been as much that the books were never written, or at least not widely propagated though.
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Helen Taylor Mill maybe illustrative. JS Mill credits her as being the thinker of the important thoughts in his work, but we only know about that because it was relatively recently and we have documentation of his thoughts on the matter.
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Yep. No coincidence that Ayn Rand lived relatively recently. We all need to be wary of recency bias, but my own theory is that if philosophy were a healthy discipline than little more would be said of Plato than of alchemists. Few read Newton's original writings.
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That’s a great point. To the extent plato is important it’s in the history of philosophy rather than his correctness. Although, no-one I’ve read other than Plato seems to have addressed what the best musical modes are for society.
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In The Republic the Dorian mode was preferred so he would have appreciated Miles Davis' ’So What’.
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The Doors did a lot of work in the Dorian too. Coming back to your point
@ESYudkowsky, would it be a good way to characterize things that what we call ‘Philosophy’ as a discipline is much more conflated with it’s own history than in other disciplines (e.g physics)? -
Art and literature have sometimes been likewise conflated with their own history. I see it as a curse of places where objective accomplishment is hard for many to verify and a natural tendency to ancestor-worship and an illusion of scholarship allocates prestige, a la religion.
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It's not that the true accomplishments as they exist beyond human evaluation are somehow more tied to history. It's just that there's a natural kind of fake scholarship and lauding that humans do, which in its unrestrained form is classic religion.
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Ew. We currently live in Nietzsche’s world. Rand had one premise that she beat into the ground repeatedly.
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