What is the most uninteresting philosopher/philosophy?
Anyone who's seen my posts know I am not a fan of Wittgenstein's philosophy as it seems to make common sense notions into philosophical "strokes of genius" (heavy on the quotes). The latest discussion on "Hinge propositions" seems to get at its uninterestingness. I guess certain philosophes can be made more interesting, but only by newcomers asking the right questions, and usually bringing in other philosophies to help it along.
My criteria for uninteresting here:
1) The subject matter is small/pedantic/minutia-mongering
2) The answers to the problem are not new or informative but a rehash of what we already think, or a rehash of previous philosopher but in drag (e.g. We must take for granted certain things like "Other people exist" in order to move on with our language games.. this is already our common sense notion made writ large into a profound statement- Hinge propositions).
Anyways, what are other people's most uninteresting philosopher/philosophy and why?
I'm ready for ya you fanatical Witt-heads:
My criteria for uninteresting here:
1) The subject matter is small/pedantic/minutia-mongering
2) The answers to the problem are not new or informative but a rehash of what we already think, or a rehash of previous philosopher but in drag (e.g. We must take for granted certain things like "Other people exist" in order to move on with our language games.. this is already our common sense notion made writ large into a profound statement- Hinge propositions).
Anyways, what are other people's most uninteresting philosopher/philosophy and why?
I'm ready for ya you fanatical Witt-heads:
Comments (68)
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is going to be a very predictable thread. Those on this site whose only exposure to philosophy is through physics , mathematics or psychology will likely find most actual philosophy to be boring or somewhat pointless. Those hostile to postmodern relativism will likely find uninteresting anyone associated with that orientation (Wittgenstein, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger, Nietzsche). Those , like myself, who are enthusiastic supporters of postmodern relativism will find its philosophical opponents ( Russell, Kripke, Searle) to be stultifying.
Fair enough, but it's more the reasoning, than anything else. Like It's not just that I don't like Wittgenstein because I disagree with him. I actually think what is considered profound is actually not that interesting an insight.
Schopenhauer for example has an extremely interesting philosophy. But I don't agree with all of it.
Uninteresting I guess has many different criteria, so it would have to include the criteria and the reasoning for why it fits that criteria to be an interesting answer :D.
For me, uninteresting can be most captured as "making common sense notions into philosophical insights".
AS IF to rebel against he baroqueness of certain philosophies (19th century idealism for example), going the complete opposite makes it simply "more rigorous" or "correct", when in fact you just reified common notions.
But I do agree with your comments about Witt.
I mean, I knew that one was coming. I don't see antinatalism as uninteresting, as they don't fit the category of "common sense writ large", nor about small topics, but since I don't know your criteria, I can't even comment why it wouldn't fit in yours or any criteria.
Well, at least there's that.
Russell is stultifying. But is he uninteresting?
Quoting schopenhauer1
I agree with that, but I don't find him uninteresting in an absolute sense.
I can't think of philosophers who are uninteresting in an absolute sense, but perhaps Russell comes closest in that his goal seems misguided and naive. Of course, before the demise of Logical Positivism he would not have been so commonly seen to be misguided and naive.
The scholastics can be quite boring and uninteresting at times, given that they were not motivated as much by their own idiosyncratic and subjective interests. Aristotle, too. [Their interest in the totality of all things leaves many complaints for those with idiosyncratic interests.]
Maybe the philosopher is characteristically interested in things that most people find uninteresting or not worth attending to. But are there any who constantly fixed their attention on what is truly uninteresting and not worth attending to?
Can you explain a bit? Is this more the logical positivists "anti-metaphysics" bent?
Quoting Leontiskos
Yeah, when everything serves a religious end-goal, that does make debate sort of uninteresting.
Quoting Leontiskos
Interesting, because I find philosophy to deal with the MOST interesting things.. But others might find it too abstract, for example. They love the minutia- the "certainty" that this drill causes this hole, that causes this screw to join these wood panels, etc..
I don't think so, as that wouldn't fit Aristotle, but I suppose antinatalism could be said to be the most uninteresting philosophy along these sorts of lines. :wink:
It may actually be interesting. I always lapse into a coma before I can find out.
Ditto. A war hero, yes. Otherwise my eyes glaze over quickly. Early in my mathematical career I tried reading him but found little to interest me.
Quoting jgill
We tend to find uninteresting that which we dont understand. Do you think you understand Wittgenstein? This goes for also for [reply="schopenhauer1;931954", and and anyone who claims that they understand him but then go on to disagree with a host of prominent thinkers who find his work profound and radical. Could it be possible they are not understanding him as well as they think, and that is why he appears uninteresting?
From ChatGPT: and
I admit, it's been sixty years since I have read anything by the man. At the time I was most interested in his impact on mathematics. However, this was about the time I was taking my one and only course in foundations (naive set theory), and was rapidly losing interest in the subject.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/928003
coda:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/928725
Scholastics
Ancient Greeks
Postmodernists
You are ignoring the request for the one thing.
You can correct my summation if you want and transform it from common sense insight to brilliant new revelation that shatters all philosophies. I dont think you will. More drivel is spent explaining him than he spent explaining him.
Wittgenstein-scholastics?
G E Moore's 'here is one hand' must come close. (Maybe if he could extemporise on the sound it makes, it might be more interesting.)
Don't know what you mean
Quoting schopenhauer1
Im curious. Who would you name as the 10 most important philosophers born after 1900?
Jordan Peterson. A bumbling, jumbled pile of garbage from what I can tell. No substance whatsoever. Im reluctant to even include him but many consider him a philosopher. Oy.
More classically: I agree about Wittgenstein to a degree. But mostly nearly all the analytic types from the 50s. :yawn:
Awww. :(
Sitting in the library reading "On Denoting" changed my life. It felt like coming home.
"There are a great many qualities one could attribute to the First Gentleman of Europe, but an interest in the law of identity is not among them."
Happy times.
Antinatalism is the poster boy for playing with Big Important Ideas not always leading to wisdom or insight. At least the minutia-mongerers among us aren't so foolish as to think there could be such a thing as an argument against life.
:up: :up:
My initial interest in philosophy was probably philosophy of mind, epistemology and aesthetics. Recent branching out into political philosophy, economics and ethics has been fun.
I think if you find something or someone uninteresting it is just a case of fining a different viewpoint on whatever it is that appeals to you. I find it hard to read any single work/philosopher in isolation and get way more out of combining opposing positions (philosophers/philosophies) which always keeps things dynamic and interesting.
When it comes to what bothers you or what you find uninteresting it is usually a sign that you need to look at that thing a little harder and give it more credit.
But, on the other hand, I can understand people making a choices because there's just a lot of philosophy, so if you get bitten by the bug you'll eventually have to decide what is more or less interesting to you.
But that seems to just come down to preference. I'm not sure there's a reason why this or that is interesting to me outside of my own background or what-have-you.
That is always interesting to me.
And conversely, I never understood how someone could say I am a Hedeggerian, or Im a Platonist or Im a Kantian. None of them said enough that I would place myself under such a narrow bucket. Never understood that.
But to answer your question from the other side, the philosophers who said the most and are the most interesting (to me) are Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche (and existentialism). But you need so many others to really see what they are talking about, and those others said so many things not addressed by these.
The most over-rated, for me, are Wittgenstein and Heidegger. And the most under-appreciated are Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Hegel.
And in the west, eastern thought (Vedanta, Taoism, Buddhism) is under-appreciated. Perfectly interesting metaphysics, epistemology, ontological and empirical observation, and great ethics and even some good politics all over eastern thought.
If one really engages in the questions and the conversation, you become interested in a lot. Schopenhauer is as important as Sextus Empiricus or John Locke if you really are digging.
All of Post-modernism - Derrida, Foucault, Rorty, Lyotard - way over-rated. But interesting. (If find it most interesting that, given the conclusions and dogma of the post-modernists, that they continue speaking at all.)
What else do you want to know about me?
Speaking only for myself ...
Keiji Nishitani, b. 1900
Hannah Arendt, b. 1906
E.M. Cioran, b. 1911
Albert Camus, b. 1913
Philippa Foot, b. 1920
Walter Kaufmann, b. 1921
George Steiner, b. 1929
Clément Rosset, b. 1939
Martha Nussbaum, b. 1947
David Deutsch, b. 1953
Cornel West, b. 1953
Thomas Metzinger, b. 1958
Ray Brassier, b. 1965
Nietzche's Übermensch.
It is uninteresting once you know it is about existentialism and the will to power.
I didn't say you should implicate yourself.
.
Whenever someone offers a sweeping dismissal of the ideas of a philosopher as notable as Heidegger, it is not just an individual writer being critiqued, it is an entire culture of thought. It would be interesting to put together a list of all the philosophers and social scientists who find Heideggers work indispensable. Your indictment of Heidegger is a tacit indictment of them. I would love to hear your summation of Heideggers contribution to philosophy.
Noam Chomsky b. 1928
Quoting Joshs
Well, fwiw, I'd begin here ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/790451
... and whose "thought" has engendered a few pseudo-intellectual (according to Chomsky et al) generations of "post-truth" p0m0 populism. No doubt, Heidi is very important but, imho, more as a negative example how not to philosophize than anything else. :mask:
Quoting 180 Proof
I would love to hear your summary of Heideggers philosophy, but that link isnt it. It sounds like all youve done there is take the facts of Heideggers involvement with the Nazi party and combine it with a summary of popular fascist philosophies of the time. Pretty much what Richard Wolin did in his Heidegger in Ruins book.
I appreciate the mention. Maybe my local public library will have a copy.
Gladly. Here's some old posts ...
(2020) from a thread titled Martin Heiddeger
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/421047
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/431182
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/427142
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/431469
And from one our an old exchanges which I'm sure you've forgotten. :smirk:
Quoting 180 Proof
Well, these are certainly negative comments on Heidegger, but they consist mainly of references to other authors opinions of him. Theres no actual summary of his philosophy. My summary is embedded in various places, like here:
and here:
https://www.academia.edu/117697814/Heidegger_on_Anxiety_Nothingness_and_Time_How_Not_to_Think_Authenticity_Inauthentically
You're right, just a summary of my objections. Heidegger's philosophy: "Nothing noths". :eyes:
Have you read Derridas deconstruction of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena and his intro to Origin of Geometry?
The guy who said snow is white if and only if snow is white... That's like ... deep ... ya know...
Ahhh 180 proof, bashing Heidegger again?
From your profile:
i. "Why is there anything at all?" Because
(A) 'absence of the possibility of anything at all' nothing-ness is impossible, to wit:
(B1) there is not any possible version of the actual world that is 'the negation of the actual world' (i.e. nothing-ness);
(B2) there is not any possible world in which it is true that 'a possible world is not a possible world' (i.e. nothing-ness);
(C) the only ultimate why-answer that does not beg the question is There Is No Ultimate Why-Answer.
You do realize you are introducing your readers to your thought, via Heidggers' main question? In good German I would say: "was sich liebt das neckt sich" ... :wink:
Some might say that the big concept here is it merely needs to satisfy an object language and meta-language. Id imagine some would say this is just adding more stuff to make things work out. Snow is white is object. Snow is white if and only if snow is white is the meta language that reflects whether the statement satisfies. I mean this all goes back to how does one know? But Im always dismissed that how we know matters not to the logic itself.
Hint: Its probably some verification/falsification theory
"What is the meaning of Being (or [s]Seyn[/s])? I believe is Der Rektor-Führer's "main question" ... At any rate, "why is there anything at all?" on my profile page is just a prompt, or TPF conversation starter dismissal of the Leibnizian (ontotheo) fetish and has never been my aporia¹. :smirk:
(2019)
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/326211 [1]
Quoting I like sushi
:up: :up: Btw, I prefer Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology (and those variations derived from, or influenced by, it e.g. David Abram's ecophenomenology, enactivism, etc) to any other version including Husserl's which is much too Cartesian/idealist for me.
Are you saying Heideggers main question is why is there something rather than nothing?
That said, I would not dismiss either Heidegger nor Derrida out of hand. Heidegger has his uses (negatively) and I suspect Derrida could be of value to from what others have reported but I have not really had the time for a deep dive into Derrida. One day, sooner rather than later, I am likely to have a closer look at him.
Every philosophy is dubious to a degree and a matter of taste too. I like what Husserl was attempting and Heidegger did a pretty decent job (in places) of explicating some of Husserl's ideas, but overall I am still on the fence as to whether Husserlian phenomenology can rightly be labeled as 'idealist' or not. He remains intriguing to me and another I have to dive deeper into to find out more (maybe one day!).
All the people marketing their niche topic (self help, self healing, self improvement etc) as being a way of life, a genuine philosophy. And are marketed thus as philosophers.
They are so uninteresting I don't want to even know anything about them. Believe me, they are out there.
Or the "scientist" that have been disgusted how bad modern philosophy and the humanities are, and then start themselves describing what it should be (which comes down to a rehash of Age of Enlightenment philosophers).
Quoting Agree-to-Disagree
Or the worst philosophers.
And this is the reason why the most hated one's aren't the most uniteresting: Ayn Rand and the postmodernists like Julia Kristeva, Bruno Latour etc. All the crappy things they do, doesn't make them uninteresting because they're a huge army of new philosophy students trying to make sense postmodernism and be in the in-crowd. And with Rand there's a cult following there too.
I know 180, it was meant in jocular fashion. The aversion against 'onto-theology' you actually share with Heidegger. And yes, his view on authenticity you do not. Yet I think, Heidegger and you are not that far off in thinking, but are in writing and fortunately, in political belief... What Heidegger tried to do was to root thinking in practice, which is a rather modern idea. The way he did it... well, we will not quibble there I think.
Quoting Joshs
I do not know if it is 'the question'... it is his opener in his 'einführung in die Metaphysik" I believe...
I would say, based on contemplating neuroscience and life experience, that dramatic changes in a person's worldview is something that takes a considerable amount of time to occur.
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm skeptical.
Quoting Tobias
Indeed it is. What many dont realize, though, is that he isnt simply repeating Leibnitzs question, he is deconstructing it. What he is really asking is , why do we exclusively associate the copula is with the notion of something, of presence, and not also the Nothing?
I actually like Wittgenstein and find that his thinking has helped me clarify my own. I took a course on him years ago. I still find it helpful to think of e.g. inter-religious discussion as discussion between essentially different self-contained 'language games.' Christian theology, Jewish theology, Buddhist, etc. -- just their own language games. Similarly, the atheist partakes in the same way by stomping his foot down and insisting that divinity does not exist. In the same way the atheist declares the rules of his language game.
EDIT: Within a given language game, certain "moves" are correct or incorrect -- but this is dependent on the language game. The goal of much inter-religious discussion is finding which "moves" (statements) are acceptable within both systems which facilitates harmony.
As far as the general idea of language games, that's fine. I think it might be perhaps the project of turning philosophy into "philosophy of language" that I'm not a fan of. It would have been more interesting to get an actual epistemology and metaphysics, but you see, he insulated himself because he made the idea seem legitimate that "One must be silent whereof.." and/or we can never really reveal anything beside constructed games from communities. Also these notions like "language games" and "hinge propositions" seem like common sense "writ large". Perhaps he was the first to write it "explicitly" as philosophy, but I think in some sense we all have these notions of language games and meaning as use and that we take for granted certain concepts when we use language (so-called hinge propositions).
The Tractatus is also a program without a foundation and so lacks the metaphysics and epistemology that the correspondence theory supposedly shows. It needs the psychology that is lacking. In fact, as far as I see, all these debates around logic, correspondence, truth statements, etc. are missing the "how" foundations. People in PoL want to tell me that you don't need that to discuss the logic itself, but it seems like pointless twiddle twaddle if you remove the epistemic and metaphysical questions from the supposed language that is conveying the meaning and content of sentences. They want to separate them, but it's like doing something with half the necessary tools. Oh well. But I'm sure I'll be "schooled" about how great PoL is without epistemology, metaphysics, and psychology. I will surely be told that truth statements can be simply derived by parsing the logic itself.
I agree that we only derive from a philosophy what already accords with our worldview to a large degree. But that philosophy can still have a legitimately profound effect on our thinking , and its a testament to the richness and fecundity of great philosophy that it can have this effect, in different ways with different people, like the blind men and the elephant. In a way, most of us who are influenced by a set of philosophical ideas are in a similar position to guys in their twenties who discover and misinterpret Nietzsche to bolster the radicalisation of their own arrogance.
PS But yeah, antinatalism for sure.
:up:
Quoting Tobias
Oh yes, he "tried" this "modern idea" like a few others, iirc: Laozi-Zhuangzi, Heraclitus, Socrates, Pyrrho, Epicurus-Lucretius, Seneca-Epictetus, Sextus Empiricus ... Montaigne, Spinoza, Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche, Peirce-Dewey, Wittgenstein et al.
Why? How unphilosophical to assert. That in itself is a hefty claim. Not sophisti-cated.
Hmm, I think there is a difference. I do not know about Heraclitus, Epicurus, Seneca. The ancients are interesting, but this sweeping comparison I dare not make because it may well be anachrinistic. I do think he does something different from Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and something very similar to Merleau Ponty, Gadamer and even Foucault. I think Nietzsche is his closest predecessor. He does not ground his phenomenology in logic and thought. He decenters res cogitans in favour of res extensa. Akin to Spinoza, but Spinoza held on to a geometric method. I do think he tried to overcome dualism, while putting practice ahead of logos.
I am a historical person and, of course, he owes a lot to others. Moreover, I do not share his craving for authenticity. I think philosophy took a wrong turn in that respect. A wrong turn with which it still wrestles, considering how many words thought is spend on the notion of 'identity' and not in a logical sense. I do think his influence on modern thought is undeniable and for that alone he deserves study.
Thanks! I did start reading it once, (never finished) so I must have read this passage. Apparently it did not stick with me as it should have. :)