don't think they have to be clearly foreseeable as long as they're still iterated refinements of base ideas that were laid out in the 1700s. we have QM, relativity & mature non-euclidian geometry now but lots of problems are still solved in euclidian or newtonian domains
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"you don't really *have* to read anything after 18c to get a handle on this" is to philosophy as solving problems you've measured out the scope of and know quantitatively you can do without having to account for relativity is to physics, roughly
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I tend to have the opposite bias. I haven’t read Hobbes or Plato or anyone like that. Everything I need to know about political science I learned from Francis Fukuyama, James Scott, and Wikipedia.
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eh, tbqh my bias is a lot of contemporary political writing is ... distinctly unimpressive when you know what wheel they're reinventing and know the original well enough to notice all the ways the reinvention is rougher
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I’ll take views informed by more data everytime, since political science/philosophy isn’t a field with prodigy/genius talents imo. Above basic competence/diligence, thinkers seem comparable in skill but not in data and perspective breadth they can enjoy
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basically agree but that's not as relevant to how or what to read as it might seem, ime -- I don't think genius is much of a factor in how canonical a philosopher becomes anyway, actually, but European philosophy's tendency to operate on a tacit "great man" theory definitely is
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there are big names you kind of do *have* to read, not bc "genius" but more bc almost *everyone else* you've heard of who wrote on the same topics encountered them and is being influenced by them consciously or unconsciously, so they become canon by a kind of path-dependence
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there are oddballs like Wittgenstein who at least imo genuinely earn some kind of "genius" title, when you read them -- I mean an idea compressed down to a single sentence that just sits in your mind for years and gradually but radically rewiring it, *mostly* for the better
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but they're not as influential bc they're *too* original. there's just not much you can do with Wittgenstein in academic philosophy other than straight-up become a "Wittgenstein scholar" bc he's just too orthogonal to the rest
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or Spinoza -- hugely important but there's not much room for a secondary literature bc the flow of logical implication is too irresistible. open the book at all & you just fall straight thru to the conclusions & land going "yep, he's completely right abt absolutely everything"
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