This is a little meandering so just to focus on one part:
Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example.
Take Plato, for example: He and his also-famous mentor believed knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives, an idea illustrated with an unconvincing geometry lesson in Phaedo (EDIT: It’s Meno).
Sure, it’s worth stepping back to reassess what’s going to increase your “PC” to borrow from seven habits. That could involve leaving behind surface-level achievement in favor of deeper reflection, as the referenced article suggests.
But let’s not overly-romanticize ancient thinkers: Plato and Aristotle held fundamentally different views on knowledge. Even they couldn’t agree; there’s no need to treat any one of them as infallible.
Philosophy is just one of the liberal arts. This idea has declined in popularity in recent years but I still think there's a lot to be said for possessing a liberal arts education. If you have a good one your understanding of the world around you gets broader and deeper. You recognize why things are the way they are. In the long term you may spot opportunities you wouldn't have otherwise, or be able to solve problems that would have seemed intractable. Maybe most importantly you end up developing a sophisticated moral framework that's grounded in history and all the things that eventually led up to you existing and living the life you live.
You don't have to major in a liberal art or even go to college to get one, you can just read books. You also don't have to learn it all in your early 20s. You can just incorporate the great works into what you read throughout your adult life. It's very easy to find lists and recommendations online for what you should read if you want a broad-based liberal education. The general idea is simply to be informed about and understand the foundational concepts in philosophy, economics, political science, psychology, history, sociology, law, and so on. There is no need to go deep in any one them, unless you find it interesting and wish to do so. Someone who reads one or two foundational works in each of these subjects will have a wildly better understanding of the world than someone who doesn't. To me this is what living an intellectually rich life is and it's very rewarding. If nothing else, due to my liberal arts education I will never be bored in retirement, there are thousands of books that I would find it interesting to read.
I don’t have a problem with having a good understanding of classics (liberal arts is a category that far encompasses more than just classical education, though).
I do have a problem with blindly assuming Plato/other ancient philosophers were some sort of omniscient super-intelligence we should blindly follow, which I do see happen with some regularity in my own life.
Plato et al might’ve been the start of our modern understanding of ethics, but the concept of a moral life or epistemology certainly didn’t stop with him!
> Philosophy is just one of the liberal arts. This idea has declined in popularity in recent years but I still think there's a lot to be said for possessing a liberal arts education. If you have a good one your understanding of the world around you gets broader and deeper.
Look no further than all the AI debates on HN: from the perspective of someone with a couple of college classes on philosophy (not even a minor), it’s looks like a bunch of five years olds debating particle physics. Complete ignorance of what the academic precedent is, retreading ideas that philosophers have moved on from hundreds of years ago.
Why shouldnt people on a message forum explore "ideas that philosophers moved on from hundreds of years ago?" It seems to suggest philosophy is more about the conclusions than the process. I cant think of an academic field where that is less true.
Yes, people are going to be ignorant of things they haven't studied previously. So, people exploring the ideas and debating them for the first time might look amateur to you, but why is that a bad thing?
This is a social media site; people can shoot the shit about whatever they want and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But… what’s the point? It’s like going into a thread about modern chemistry and debating about the four basic elements of ancient Greece. Sure you can have fun shooting the shit about what is essentially a historical novelty, but if you really want to debate about chemistry you need to open a high school textbook and get up to speed on at least the first few chapters.
The only difference is that nerds look down at philosophy and not chemistry; and the former is rarely taught in high school after which the arrested development seems to set in. No one blinks an eye telling flat earthers that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
>If you have a good one your understanding of the world around you gets broader and deeper.
The problem is, is it _unique_ to liberal arts? That is what must be true to give it some purpose. If you can just read a bunch of books or study something else with additional positive benefits why do liberal arts?
I am a liberal arts and computer science degree holder. I don't think liberal arts is _worthless_. I do think its a terrible value proposition and that the positive side effects can be achieved while studying something far more marketable. Computer science has made me a much stronger general problem solver and a better critical thinker than liberal arts did. These are the primary skills touted by the liberal arts.
> Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example.
From one translation of Meditations (I forget which), and from memory, so I may have it slightly wrong:
"You can live your life in a calm flow of happiness, if you learn to think the right way, and to act the right way".
The act the right way is the hard part. The frame-of-mind stuff that lots of people focus on is necessary, but not sufficient. On its own it can be of some help, but it can also lead to traps like going too easy on one's own deficiencies of action. The thinking bits that get most of the attention, at least in stoicism, are largely reactive—the acting is proactive, as is the thinking to support it (which gets less attention in popular takes on Stoicism, and is harder).
Meditations is particularly interesting because it’s clearly just Marcus Aurelius’s diary that was doubtfully ever meant to see the light of day.
He spends a fair amount of it repeating mantras to himself over and over again, or even arguing with himself in stream-of-consciousness.
It’s Marcus Aurelius giving himself a written pep talk. He struggles to uphold those stoicism ideals his whole life, failing constantly ant it, and Meditations is an artifact of it.
There's also an awful lot of really boring and silly Stoic physics and metaphysics in there, which topics for some reason people who love the book rarely bring up, LOL.
>But let’s not overly-romanticize ancient thinkers: Plato and Aristotle held fundamentally different views on knowledge.
1) everyone agrees “overly” Romanticizing is wrong. By definition of “overly”.
2) why should having a fundamentally different view on knowledge disqualify something from being romanticized? Isnt romanticizing precisely for things that are different?
3) i think its a mischaracterization to say Plato thought “ knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives.” He was not talking about “past lives” but the “soul” (which I think wed both agree is a loaded term). He said the soul knew it before the person was born. This goes to his theory on the forma which I think is a better way to characterize his thoughts on knowledge. In general terms id say he believes truth exists in a timeless, non-empirical realm (the Forms). With the physical reality being an imperfect imitation. Which people have some mediated access to.
The example he gives about geometry is actually quite interesting. It is one of the early highlights of a deep question: is this knowledge, geometry in this case, learned/learnable or is it, somehow, innate? Do we learn this from scratch or do we have innate pre-existing cognitive structures that are “configured” by experience? If the latter, what does “learning” mean? It’s definitely not what we usually mean. If the former, we meet Hume and Kant and have to show how we arrived at space and geometry ex nihilo.
If learning is essentially based on “configuring” innate structures, you can IMO state it is eternal or uncovered or whatever poetic vehicle you desire. I’d say give these pre-modern guys a break.
These are issues being discussed way into the modern era starting (again) with the likes of Hume and Kant and no easy solutions are available. This is not a solved problem.
I think most people’s intuition is that the methodology and conventions are invented but are constrained by some transcendental reality. It seems difficult to argue its instead purely natural or purely convention.
This is very much inline with Platos theory of the forms. I dont really understand the idea that Plato’s ideas are dated.
> I mean, apparently not - this author alone takes Plato’s cave allegory at face value without spending even a moment to criticize it.
Does HE say hes over romanticizing it? No.
He would probably argue hes not over-romanticizing it. So the question isnt if over-romanticizing is improper (which is true by definition of “over”). The question is if he actually is over romanticizing.
>It is not. Read Meno. Socrates thought this, and has a very painful example of trying to prove it. Plato thought the exact same.
Im not contesting that Plato believed in reincarnation. But its not true that he thought knowledge comes from "past lives" (as in when you were previously some other person). He believed the _soul_ had direct access to knowledge. In a past life you would have only had an impression as well. This is all downstream of his actual theory of the forms though. Why not attack that if you want to attack his theory of knowledge.
I like How To Think Like a Roman Emperor's analysis of Meditations but maybe it falls into pop self-help/psychology, it discusses the history around the text and how modern psychology has similarities with some of the techniques and aphorisms.
> Take Plato, for example: He and his also-famous mentor believed knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives, an idea illustrated with an unconvincing geometry lesson in Phaedo (EDIT: It’s Meno).
I find the line of thought in "Meno" extremly impressiv. Let me try to reformulate it in modern terms.
The literary form of a dialogue emphasizes that the thoughts of the participants should not be considered as doctrines, but the whole as an investigation of a problem domain.
The dialogue starts with a distinction between empirical knowledge ("The way to Larisa") and mathematical knowledge. Empirical knowledge is something that I cannot know from introspection. In contrast, the nature of mathematical knowledge comes from inside the mind. This is demonstrated by an uneducated, but smart child (a slave boy). The child is guided to discover a mathematical insight by questions alone. At first the boy does not know the right answer to an initial question. Then Socartes starts again with a simple question the boy is able to answer. Then a sequence of other questions follows each building on the previous answers. Socrates only questions, the boy only answers. Finally the boy arrives at the correct answer of the initial question whose answer he did not know at the start.
This scene should demonstrate the essence of mathematical proof. First we do not know the answer of a mathematical problem. Step-by-step we clarify our understanding, until we arrive at an answer. At this stage we know whether the particular mathematical statement is true or false. We expanded our understanding by only just thinking. In one way it is new knowledge (we now know something we did not, when we looked for a proof), in another way the knowledge was always there, just hidden in our mind.
At this point Socrates hits a limit where he runs out of questions to invistigate this further. This is when he starts to tell a story (the greek word for story is "myth"). Such stories are just tools to further investigate a problem when purely theoretical thoughts come to an end. In the dialogue it is also accompanied by a lot of joking, and "let me speculate" and "don't take it too serious" sort of remarks. So he reminds his fellows about some old stories (that he adapts and decorates a little to match the problem) about reincarnation where one looses the memory of one's past life but has occasionally some sort of flashbacks. This is more or less the whole point of the story: Perhaps we should think of mathematical knowledge as analogous to memory, but in a in a transcendent way.
Our modern doctrins are not very much off: Our ability of mathematical thinking is something that is inherent to us, more specifically to our brains. The blueprint (a sort of memory?) for our brains are in our genes. This way we are a sort of reincarnation of our parents, but in a state were we have to undergo all the mathematical training again.
What Plato lacks is a theory of evolutionary epistemology. But this is a really new development.
Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example.
Take Plato, for example: He and his also-famous mentor believed knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives, an idea illustrated with an unconvincing geometry lesson in Phaedo (EDIT: It’s Meno).
Sure, it’s worth stepping back to reassess what’s going to increase your “PC” to borrow from seven habits. That could involve leaving behind surface-level achievement in favor of deeper reflection, as the referenced article suggests.
But let’s not overly-romanticize ancient thinkers: Plato and Aristotle held fundamentally different views on knowledge. Even they couldn’t agree; there’s no need to treat any one of them as infallible.