Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

Some days Steven Brust does a brilliant job of charmingly and knowingly talking a lot of bunk. Hell, I’ve seen him do it in a costume with a cheesy, fake accent, and that’s like the black diamond trail of bunk-talkin’.

Today is not one of those days. Today he hits it straight down the middle with precision. He’s good at that too.

I know it’s kind of outside of netiquette to quote a whole post, but you need to see it all, and it’s short. From Steve’s LJ:

I hope I never reach the point of saying, or believing, that there is something wrong with someone merely because he doesn’t undertake a serious study of philosophy.

But.

In my post last week in which I was joking about philosophy, there were a couple replies that reflected the too-common attitude that anyone who studies this stuff is wasting his time. Let me try to be as clear about this as possible: You, whoever you are, have a method for analyzing data and a set of assumptions. If you have never seriously studied the history of philosophy, and examined epistemology carefully, that means you are not aware of what yours is. In that case, odds are close to 100% that if you were confronted with your method and assumptions, you would find that you didn’t agree with them; that the way you are looking at the world is one that, in fact, you would think was wrong if it were explained to you. Which leaves you in an oddly embarrassing position, doesn’t it?

Does that mean I think everyone needs to study this stuff? Fuck no. What it means is that not studying philosophy is nothing to be smug about.

There are also some telling exchanges down in the comments, of which my favourite bit is this:

If you were to say that you’re not convinced that a person that hadn’t studied physics was capable of introducing important advances into physics, well, people would laugh. It’s be funny.

The philosophical techniques that can be brought to bear on questions are far, far superior to ancient techniques. Philosophy, like all endeavors humans stick at, has improved.

So, by the way, have the indoctrination techniques of society, requiring an ever more sophisticated system of thought to understand and defend oneself against them. So muddied have the waters of our education and perception become, due to the massive increase of data (much of it propaganda) that we take in that, yeah, if you haven’t studied philosophy you probably have no clue what your epistemology is.

Yeah, that whole “on the shoulders of giants” thing wasn’t just a height joke, you know?

(At times like this it occurs to me just how lucky I have been in that I was exposed both academically, and in my fun reading, to a view of the history of philosophy as an ongoing debate, with each new position or major figure needing to be understood not just on their face, but also in relation to all that had come before.)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Smart Things. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.