Philosophy is mostly indexed by the names of philosophers, so they are more focused on creating recognizable brands than thinkers from other fields, and even refrain from revising their ideas, to remain recognizable. The best ideas are unrecognizable, because they are ubiquitous.
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Replying to @Plinz
Frankly, I think this is bullshit. It ignores the sheer effort that involved in compressing, decompressing, and recompressing the whole history of conceptual innovation required to understand and debate ideas that remain contentious, while these debates are in process.
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Replying to @deontologistics @Plinz
I teach philosophy, and I can tell you that the dependence on names you deride is often the best way of mapping the dialectical terrain and allowing students to address points within it, by learning to recognise proximity to certain prototypical positions.
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Replying to @deontologistics
I don’t doubt any of that. Yet when rediscovering the primary sources later in life, I often found that the secondary interpretations that mapped them into distorted similes were wrong. I don’t presume to have a solution.
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Replying to @Plinz
This is the awkward truth of philosophy: that we keep rewriting its history from the perspective of the present, as we find new truths reflected in old writings. I don’t think there is a way to solve it per se, but I do think it’s possible to study what we’re doing here and why.
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Replying to @deontologistics @Plinz
For instance, I have a love/hate relationship with Kant scholarship, as I both appreciate the (de dicto) urge to keep alive careful readings of the text, and yet have a (de re) concern with showing how new logic, maths, and compsci allow us to better see what it is talking about.
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Replying to @deontologistics @Plinz
I think much research and teaching in the history of philosophy (and ideas more generally) is something like the maintenance of intellectual infrastructure, keeping various conceptual flames burning just in case they can be returned to and burn anew in different contexts.
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Replying to @deontologistics @Plinz
However, I am interested to see if the logic of this process can be usefully abstracted. For instance, could we see the evolution of important concepts as something like a version control system? How do we model retroactive modification and recompression of the dialectic?
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I don’t know how to improve the institutional process. Perhaps the only way to do that is to attract different kinds of minds. If large groups of philosophers succumb to politics, the field is broken.
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