The decline of creativity in philosophy
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/16022/two-ways-to-philosophise/p1
I read this post by @Banno saying that philosophy isn't about forming ideas, but about analysing existing ones, which matches what I've seen in academic philosophy.
However, groundbreaking philosophers had such creative ideas that transformed the way we see the world, and even gave rise to new disciplines we now see as essential. So what became so wrong about generating new ideas that challenge the status quo? Why isnt philosophy about that anymore?
Im not saying there arent any new ideas in philosophy, but philosophers generally seem very reluctant to drift away from the concepts theyve read about. They seem hesitant to create new ideas altogether because such ideas likely wouldnt meet the academic standards.
Its allowed to create something new thats a slight deviation from existing concepts, but something more creative that is a big stretch from any well-known philosophical concepts? No, thats not accepted. Yet thats exactly what the groundbreaking philosophers did.
If the biggest breakthroughs came from focusing on creativity rather than criticizing existing ideas, why is philosophy focused on the latter?
I read this post by @Banno saying that philosophy isn't about forming ideas, but about analysing existing ones, which matches what I've seen in academic philosophy.
However, groundbreaking philosophers had such creative ideas that transformed the way we see the world, and even gave rise to new disciplines we now see as essential. So what became so wrong about generating new ideas that challenge the status quo? Why isnt philosophy about that anymore?
Im not saying there arent any new ideas in philosophy, but philosophers generally seem very reluctant to drift away from the concepts theyve read about. They seem hesitant to create new ideas altogether because such ideas likely wouldnt meet the academic standards.
Its allowed to create something new thats a slight deviation from existing concepts, but something more creative that is a big stretch from any well-known philosophical concepts? No, thats not accepted. Yet thats exactly what the groundbreaking philosophers did.
If the biggest breakthroughs came from focusing on creativity rather than criticizing existing ideas, why is philosophy focused on the latter?
Comments (134)
We'll never really know what those before us thought of and discussed before the written record. War and the nature of this finite world itself tends to destroy even that record as well.
Common theme I hear: "There are no new ideas, only new persons who re-discover and share them to other new persons." Something like that, anyhow.
Like, there's only a few non-subjective (perhaps not the best word used) concepts, really. Existence, time, etc. Sure there's a million and one concepts relevant and not-relevant to the human experience and emotion (love, lust, desire, fear, belonging, rejection, spite, anger, distrust, etc. ad infinitum) but they're all derived from a singular source that is relevant only to places where men exist and have the capacity to think. Surely, we didn't create such concepts? Or do we? They predate us. Or do they? Now there's a debate. :grin:
You can see similarities everywhere if you dig deep enough, just like you can see new elements even in theories or objects that look the same.
I'm referring to the degree of "newness" and the tendency of academic philosophy to focus on existing theories rather than generating new ones.
I would imagine some would say something along the lines of "it's all been perfected long ago" and thus anything else is simply a deviation and less efficient form of creativity that doesn't really serve any utilitarian function other than the fact it's different ie. art.
I mean, can you right now really come up with something truly "new" that would be taken seriously? Rather, that would lead to new debate and discussion that isn't merely intellectual pomp, fluff, kitsch that merely occupies the mind and traverses the mental logical process yet results in little else? Please do, if so.
There's a reason the classics are classic and that tried and true methods are referred to as such. Mental endeavors generally don't result in any danger or negative outcome but a waste of one's time. Not unlike physical endeavors where one deviates from the norm and can end up injured or killed. Though, the principle is not entirely dissimilar, I feel.
I suppose most of the creativity in western Philosophy occurred in the Golden Age of the Greeks, who basically defined the methods & terminology of the rational pursuit of Wisdom. Since then, philosophers have focused on "dissecting" those original ideas*1, and "criticizing" those that depart from some off-spring orthodoxy : e.g. Scientism. :smile:
*1. The quote "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato" is attributed to Alfred North Whitehead. He suggested that much of Western philosophy, in its development and articulation, can be understood as engaging with, responding to, or building upon the ideas presented by Plato.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=footnotes+to+plato+quote
Its a bit like saying evolutionary adaptations are the result of billions of years of trial and errors therefore living beings dont need to evolve anymore.
Everything changes around us, were surrounded with so much more technology, so it makes sense that we also would need new views on life and new disciplines, which philosophy could help with. Its a time where philosophy could be grandiose, yet theyre stuck in the past and seem to be scared of changes.
Quoting Outlander
Yes, but it wouldnt be taken seriously by philosophers because philosophy isnt about creating new revolutionary ideas.
Quoting Outlander
Yes, when you're exploring new territory, the chance of finding something valuable is much lower than in territories where we already know there is value. So it's a risk.
Well, like I said, invent a new concept that hasn't been so already. Propose one, at least. Most all concepts are bilateral in nature or otherwise share the principle of "duality." Example. There's restraint and excess. Care and disregard. Avoidance and acceptance. I could go on.
The onus is on you. What new concept is there to invent or discuss and why haven't you done so already? Odds are, it's simply a rehash using non-essential modern factors that really in the end perfectly correlate to things that were discussed hundreds if not thousands of years ago you simply were unaware of. There's always been invention, there's always been suffering, there's always been strife, there's always been existential fear of not just personal destruction but widespread societal extinction, and so on. Just because you can plug in something unique to the modern era into the logical process, that isn't specifically written verbose in any existing book, doesn't mean it's new nor hasn't already been discussed in agonizing detail long ago.
Its not clear to me that your criticism is correct. Youve cherry picked accomplishments from 5000 years and compared them to just a few years now. Its also true that up until around the 1500s philosophy and science were inseparable. Now youve excluded that entire scope from consideration.
I dont know enough philosophy to refute your claim, but you certainly havent provided any evidence that its true.
Quoting Skalidris
The situation is even worse than you depict it. It is not just that new ideas in a chronological sense are in short supply, but philosophical ideas which are already more than 100 years old have yet to be absorbed by a large percentage of the general population. Furthermore, most of what passes today for the leading edge of philosophical thought merely recycles and repackages the work of 19th century figures like William James, Charles Peirce, Wilhelm Dilthey and Kierkegaard. Meanwhile , the fresh isms of 50 years ago (deconstructionism, postmodernism, poststructuralism) have been followed by regressive, reactionary movements like object-oriented ontology.
And I would add, this death of innovative thought is apparently not restricted to philosophy, judging by the popular press. There have been so many books and articles in recent years complaining about stagnation in the arts, literature, cinema, music and the sciences they I have lost count. It is a phenomenon of our times thar is in need of explanation. Heres some examples courtesy of A.I. For the record , I dont believe the. current situation can be explained on the exclusive basis of the stifling effects of corporate capitalism.
### **Books & Articles on Creative Stagnation**
1. **"The Creative Drought"** (2024) An essay by Ted Gioia and others discussing the decline of artistic innovation, citing corporate consolidation, nostalgia-driven content, and algorithmic homogenization in film, music, and literature .
2. **"Is Old Music Killing New Music?"** (2022, *The Atlantic*) Ted Gioias viral Substack post (later republished) argues that streaming platforms favor older songs, stifling new musical innovation .
3. **"Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?"** (2025, *The Atlantic*) Examines the dominance of reboots, franchises, and algorithm-driven content, questioning whether were in a "cultural dark age" .
4. **"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (comparisons in modern critiques)** Referenced by Gioia as a metaphor for cultural stagnation, where modern entertainment recycles past successes like the Arch of Constantine reused older monuments .
5. **"The Creative Act: A Way of Being" by Rick Rubin (2023)** While not directly about stagnation, Rubins book critiques formulaic creativity and urges a return to raw, unfiltered artistic expression, implying industry-wide creative decline .
6. **"The New York Times Magazine" (2023)** Declared the 21st century the "least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press" .
7. **The Guardian (2023)** An art critic proclaimed that "the avant-garde is dead," lamenting the lack of groundbreaking movements in contemporary art .
8. **"The Honest Broker" (Ted Gioias Substack)** Regularly critiques stagnation in music, literature, and film, highlighting how private equity and corporate control suppress originality .
9. **"Where Has Artistic Innovation and Creativity Gone?" (Inside Higher Ed, 2024)** Discusses how economic pressures and nostalgia cycles (e.g., franchises, reboots) have replaced bold experimentation in arts and academia .
The irony being that the popular press itself is among the most decadent and stagnated institutions. It makes it hard to take it seriously.
My point wasnt to make a graph about how creativity changed over time in philosophy.
Quoting T Clark
I didnt even mention a specific period of time in the past, I was just talking about the biggest names in philosophy, who gave rise to new disciplines at any point in the past, its funny you directly jumped to the conclusion that I meant 5000 years ago.
What I mean is that the current method of philosophy in academia restrains creativity. Its only recent that philosophical research is founded by an authority that represents it, and basically sets the rules. Before the 20th century, it was mostly independent thinkers who had to find other ways to make money.
Revolutionary ideas are simply not compatible with the way philosophy does things now: you have to analyse someone elses thoughts, you cant just produce a whole new model. Being an independent thinker is discouraged, and you have to fit into a mould to get funding for your work, as well as recognition.
I'm not really sure what your point is: do you think we're not going to have any philosophical breakthroughs that will give rise to new useful disciplines for example? Do you think anything new we'll find will be useless or of insignificant use? Do you seriously think everything has already been discussed in agonizing details?
And yet the irony of it all is, these people have yet to come up with anything that they claim to be so important! Complaining is the cheapest thing in the world. Second only to observation. Human beings literally do it in the womb before they even take their first breath. Well, crying, at least.
So. I mean, there's much to be discussed and explored, not to immediately dismiss your point brought forward, but. Still.
It's almost like, yeah, humanity has literally, finally, vomited out all there is to be thunk up. Lol. Sure, you make a new movie with physically unique characters and put them through all the same spiel, the love, loss, danger, add some explosions, a rocket ship, shoot why not a talking monkey, and it's a hit people will be talking about until their senior years. That's all that can be expected, and some would argue, all there is. :yikes:
Quoting T Clark
Just because the press is a victim of the same phenomenon doesnt mean they dont have a point.
I disagree, the ways to do art for example have completely exploded in the last century, basically anything is "allowed", and you can share anything you want online anyway. The internet has allowed so many odd things to be created, and there are entire communities of these odd things that could have never existed before.
I think the lack of creativity in philosophy comes from the fact that it now has an authority that only allows a specific type of content, and that academia is considered to be the only "serious" way of practicing philosophy, so independent thinkers wouldn't be taken seriously unless the authority recognizes the value in it.
Artistic movements are themselves grounded in philosophical worldviews. Any innovation in rhe former presupposes annd reflects innovation in the latter, and vice versa. All you have to do is examine a list of the most acclaimed new talents in philosophy and you will find all sorts of cross links between their work and the arts and literature. And for their part, many artists today draw heavily from critical theory, phenomenology and other recent strands of philosophy. Perhaps one could say that , rather than a deficit of innovation in philosophy or the arts, the trajectory of innovation in both domains is moving farther and farther away from the concerns of popular culture. Rather than popular culture embracing these new ideas, it is hellbent on suppressing and censuring it, as witnessed by the actions of many states and the current federal government of the U.S. to eliminate anything smacking of wokism.
Let's imagine a dark room. Then you turn a light on and it's no longer dark. You don't just sit there reminiscing about how it used to be when the light wasn't on and that there's a "decline in lightness" now that it's bright just because it's not getting any brighter it's literally just no longer dark and there's literally nothing more to see. Everything once obscured is simply not obscured any longer and perfectly visible. Well, that's one take, at least.
Quoting Skalidris
Quite honestly, no. Sure, some people will see things that were right in front of their face the whole time that they had the tools and resources to see anyhow because things are worded differently or otherwise now bypass certain mental blocks, quips, and complexes for whatever reason. No doubt. But that's a personal alleviation or blockage being remedied not anything that has anything to do with a larger school of thought.
Quoting Skalidris
I mean, sure. It's possible. But superficially. If someone doesn't have legs, before someone thought of the idea of jamming a wooden pole into where the leg used to go, that person couldn't walk. But it didn't mean the idea of human locomotion was refined. I mean, sure it was a world of difference to those it benefited, but that was due to their own unique circumstance and again nothing to do with the larger concept as a whole.
Quoting Skalidris
Again, sure. If we in fact actually do find something new. I'm arguing that it's unlikely, and since you've yourself been unable to prove such, seems like a fairly defensible point and position to hold. Philosophy is not akin to innovation, at least not quite. Incandescent lighting for example, or the combustion engine, both great inventions. Changed the world, circumstantially. But didn't introduce a new concept. Not technically. We had light in darkness via candles, we had transportation via horses and carriage. Now, this might be construed as "moving the goalposts" per se, but, yes I believe all thought has been discussed and formed long ago. Even if all record of it has been destroyed. When you learn division in grade school, that's like a new idea, to you, and perhaps everybody else you know. But it's not. Not really.
Quoting Skalidris
Philosophical concepts as far as what exists and can exist in the mind, more or less. Sure, maybe one day we'll invent an unlimited perpetual motion machine and solve all world hunger with a shrink ray set on "grow". :wink:
The science and technical facts, schematics, and what have you, like math, may have never been seen before by human eyes. The invention is new. The specific facilitation of logic to create a particular arrangement of matter in the physical world that results in an effect or serves as a utility in a capacity never done before might be new. But the concept... was already discussed and thought of, long, long ago....
I am skeptical, both of the press and what we are calling the decline of the arts. I just look around and see thousands of high quality books, movies, television shows, and popular music produced every year. I can't speak for visual arts. Is there a lot of crap, of course. But you don't have to read, watch, listen to, or look at it. We also have easy access to everything ever produced throughout history. There is more high quality literature, history, philosophy, art, music... than any of us could go through in a life time.
Wringing one's hands and crying "hell in a handbasket" is not evidence.
My quote referenced the fact that you've excluded science, which until 1600 or so was part of philosophy, from your evaluation.
Quoting Skalidris
Not funny at all. You wrote:
Quoting Skalidris
You didn't specify when you were talking about. I didn't specify 5,000 years ago. Perhaps you misunderstood. I was talking about the entire last 5,000 years. Philosophy has been around for thousands of years. The "biggest names in philosophy" do go back thousands of years.
I'm pretty sure you could argue that anything is grounded in philosophical worldviews but that's besides the point. Art and philosophy don't depend on each other, one could stop evolving while the other could keep on evolving. Where did you get the idea that the innovations are dependent on each other? Sure some innovation in art could inspire something in philosophy and vice versa but it's far from always the case.
Quoting Outlander
And there was nothing new about combustion engines because the individual components they assembled already existed, they just thought about arranging them in a specific way that was new. This is true with everything, not just philosophy. You can break down any philosophical idea to its primitive concepts that are instinctive to us, so not "new", just like you can break down any physical invention to its specific elements, that were built with previous knowledge, therefore not "new" either.
It just depends on where you draw the line on what's considered "new".
Maybe you think there are a lot less possibilities with philosophy than with math or engineering, to the point where producing anything new is extremely improbable in philosophy, whereas with math and engineering, it's very probable. Is that your opinion?
If so, I understand. We have all these confusing concepts in our mind, that weren't build rationally, unlike the concepts in math which we have laid out explicitly, so it's hard to imagine all the different steps that could have been taken.
If you're open to it, you can try to break down a complex intuitive concept, like ethics, knowledge, whatever pops on your mind. Pick the first element that you think is part of the concept, then break it down, and repeat this process until you reach what I call a primitive concept (one that cannot be broken down into "smaller" elements and that can only be defined through concepts it's included in or synonym concepts). Then look at all the steps you took, all the elements involved. From the most basic component you've found, you could work your way up and think of what these smaller elements are involved in. And this road could lead to a totally new concept that we do not have intuitively. Imagine all the paths you could have taken to build a drastically different version of the initial concept you chose. And then imagine that the new concept is integrated into a whole worldview of other new rationally crafted alternatives of intuitive concepts we've taken for granted for centuries. You've now got yourself a brand new perspective that is so odd that no one in their right mind would ever think of! Is it likely nonsense? Yes, but it's new! And you could always hit the jackpot and find something valuable.
I think the only reason we haven't played around with these combinations much, unlike what we've done in mathematics, is because it's less explicit and harder to share. If you invent a concept in math that is valid but useless, it's fine, but if you end up with a messed up view of the world, people are going to call you a madman, even if you know that your perspective has its advantages.
It won't do just to assert such a thing. It certainly is insufficient to base such a far reaching statement on "what I've seen".
But further, an undergrad in engineering or archeology, learning the intricacies and methods of their specialisation, would be misplaced in thinking that all there was to engineering or history was stuff already done, and no creativity. An engineer without a background in engineering would not be a good idea.
Especially if they are being creative.
Better that they understand the methods of engineering before they get to design a bridge.
It would be a mistake to think someone unfamiliar with engineering principles is in a better position to design a bridge simply because they are "unburdened" by past knowledge. Quite the opposite: without an understanding of load-bearing, stress tolerances, and material behaviour, their creativity is not just uselessits dangerous.
Criticism is the wellspring of creativity, not the undoing.
We criticise to question assumptions, reframe issues, and make space for alternatives. The most original thinkersPlato, Kant, Wittgensteinwere relentless critics of the traditions they inherited. Thats not the death of creativity; its the engine.
There are no hard and fast distinctions to be made between what passes as art and what is considered philosophy, or between philosophy and poetry, fiction, science or any other domain of creativity. This is why cultural movements (classical, renaissance, Enlightenment ,Romanticism, modernism, postmodernism) encompass all of these domains, not simply because they all belong to the same chronological period, but because they express different facets of a shared set of worldviews, via their own unique vocabulary of expression. So yes, each domain of creativity within an era depends inextricably on the others, since they are not separated to begin with except artificially.
Yes I misunderstood what you meant.
Quoting T Clark
I still don't understand how you think I've excluded science. Even when science was part of philosophy, it was still just a part, not the whole thing.
Quoting T Clark
Maybe the title of my post was confusing. I said decline because I do believe creativity has decreased over the past centuries as a general trend (even if we look at just 2 or 3). And I mentioned the ground breaking philosophers to show that creativity matters, not to show that at these points in time when these philosophers lived, creativity in philosophy in society as a whole was higher.
The point of my post is to ask this question: "If the biggest breakthroughs came from focusing on creativity rather than criticizing existing ideas, why is philosophy focused on the latter?"
Quoting T Clark
No, but there is evidence in how one feels about the movies, songs, plays and novels that one gets ones hands on. Youre an engineer. Im sure youre also a lover of good music, movies and other forms of artistic creativity. But I dont know how picky you are about your entertainment. What does it take to move you? When I partake of an artistic product, my standards are based on memories of experiences with a song or film that shook me to the core, that changed in some small fashion the way I felt or thought about things. I remember stepping out of a theater after watching a life-changing film and everything around me seemed a little different. My favorite music gave me ideas about new possibilities, and acted as a guide to the future I wanted to create or discover. Im selfish about my artistic experiences that way. I will settle for superficial entertainment, but I crave the kind of art that unsettles me, surprises the hell out of me, disturbs me. And where do I find such art today? In small rarified circles closely aligned with academic environments, where the art is intertwined with philosophical notions which themselves are mostly isolated from the mainstream. I would say, then, that the innovative art and philosophy are out there, but they are produced and consumed by an increasing guy smaller segment of the general culture.
You could do the same analogy with art, and it would be a totally different picture. In art, it can be a good thing to avoid art school and just play around and learn it yourself, which is how some people come up with unique ways to play with the elements around them, and thats the beauty of art.
Some techniques can help you achieve a goal you have in mind, but if you are too rigorous in the process, and try to follow what youve been taught meticulously, it takes away the creativity. What youve been taught gives you a broad direction, and you can take liberties and deviate from it, but not being bound by it in the first place offers a lot more possibilities.
And usually, when you learn things by yourself and dont have the pressure of having to pass exams or having to meet some standards to get funding for your work, youre a lot less bound to what youve learned.
But the fact that you compared philosophy to engineering makes a lot of sense considering your perspective. You think there is a right way to philosophise, right? That deviating a lot from it, or starting from some place else is like building a bridge without the sufficient knowledge?
What if you dont want to build a bridge? What if you just want to play around to see what you find and accidentality stumble upon gold while everyone else was too busy building bridges and improving them?
The thing with philosophys standards nowadays is that if you produce something drastically different that doesnt fit this right way to philosophise, its not going to be taken seriously, even though it might be a breakthrough.
It would be like telling Picasso his paintings are ugly and worthless because it looks like a child painted them, and that he needs to go back to the traditional methods if he ever wants to be successful.
Quoting Banno
There's a world of difference between criticizing something and then thinking about something completely different that doesn't contain the same frustration as in the criticized thing, and criticizing something to then produce a slightly different version of it.
In the end we all criticize things, it's not an indicator of creativity on its own. It's how much you drift from existing things that matters.
There's plenty of creativity going, I think. Bunch of work on AI and that type of consciousness/learning stuff. Less, but still some stuff about causation, process v semantics etc.. Some of it is quite cool, and interesting to someone like me. But I imagine its totally uninteresting to a lot of even professional philosophers and so is considered uncreative.
Very much, no.
But there is bad philosophy.
And Picasso went to art school. Picassos early training at formal art schools like the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid gave him a strong grounding in classical techniques: anatomy, proportion, perspective. But rather than remain within those bounds, he systematically took them apart. His innovationsespecially in Cubismcan be seen as a radical deconstruction and reassembly of that academic foundation.
I think it is, strangely, at least partially a problem of too much creativity in academia, which in turn leads to stagnation through a poor signal to noise ratio. There is an incentive for radical rereading, radical critiquesnovelty for the sake of novelty, etc.because this gets attention in a massively oversaturated market. Even saying something absurd can be a good way to get citations. It's publish or perish, and even fields like classics have seen this weird phenomena where publications and the number of journals soared even as enrollment plummeted and Greek and Latin vanished from most high schools, along with even translations of the classics. This is particularly evident in some fields, where consensus oscillates wildly based on the same old evidence (Biblical studies being a prime culprit).
This is, in part, an effort to replicate the style of the technical and natural sciences. "Research" becomes the key output of the academic. So too, there is the idea of "progress" borrowed from technical fields, which was generally given a political tilt in philosophy and the humanities, which in turn led to siloed echo chambers. The push for political progress paired with the drive to novelty leads to inanity and, at the limit, insanity.
That's part of it. There is also the fact that, at a certain point, you cannot get anymore radical. You reach maximal nihilism or relativism, or maximal authoritarianism in the case of fundamentalism. You can't keep making your art more abstract after a certain level. So, in terms of the general modern push towards "creativity" envisioned as a sort of "freedom as potency," we seem to have approached a sort of limit.
The other thing is that philosophy is more professionalized now. Philosophy was also more stable (less "creative") in late antiquity and the later middle ages. I don't think this was wholly a bad thing. It made for more rigorous thought.
It was more dynamic in the early modern period and earlier in antiquity. You have far more new movements starting in these periods. You do get more creativity, but also more bad, even widely damaging philosophy.
I also think the new movements at least began vastly less sophisticated and they often did quite poor justice to what came before them in the early modern case. There is a huge democratization that comes with the printing press (i.e. "who can sell the most pamphlets" versus "who can win enough admiration to be hand-copied at great expense by other lifelong contemplatives"), which happened to occur during the massive socio-political firestorm of the Reformation, which created a drive to just tear everything down and destroy it (regardless of if it had been understood) in order to create something new. That's obviously very broad, but I think it's generally true. Early modern thought is an explosion of creativity and also hugely historically forgetful.
Late modernity is more akin to late antiquity than the medieval period though. There is a sort of fixed plurality that seems to have calcified. It's more of a similar historical moment too. That said, the focus of the philosophers of late antiquity tended towards the contemplative as time went on, which is quite the opposite of today.
Why is novelty so essential? Isnt that part of the whole myth of progress, that only the novel is valuable? That voracious appetite which is driving all of us to constantly seek out news, new developments, new ideas, always rushing forwards?
The foundations of philosophy were laid down in the Axial Age, a period in human history, roughly between the 8th and 3rd centuries BCE, when significant developments in religious and philosophical thought occurred independently in various parts of the world. This period saw the emergence of universalizing modes of thought, including new ethical and spiritual ideas, that laid the foundation for many major world religions and philosophical systems. Exemplars are the Greek philosophers, Buddhism, Taoism, and the Semitic religions. The Axial Age depended on the confluence of vast and large-scale developments in culture and society: the formation of the first city-states, the advent of literacy, and widespread appearance and dissemination of cultural myths and legends.
There has of course been ongoing development of all of these traditions, intertwined with further evolution of language, culture, technology and economic practices. But many of the main planks were laid down by Axial Age cultures. And once they were articulated, they couldnt be redefined or reinvented in entirely new ways. Rather it became a matter of constantly re-interpreting them, and many of those ongoing re-interpretations were indeed novel. But there are only so many ways to re-package the perennial truths of axial-age philosophies, which in the meantime have largely been lost sight of even if they form the basis of the grammar of civilisation.
Some scepticism is deserved here. It's pretty likely that this "boom" was the result of oral traditions being writ down.
Certainly the myth of simultaneous enlightenment is dubious.
As a retired mathematician I have seen the shift to foundations over the traditional ideas and simply extending knowledge in an envelop of heritage. Beyond the two basic forms of "infinity" - all I ever employed - are abstractions that appeal to a large number of math devotees. Here is an example: Unimaginable Infinities
It is really just that simple.
Imagine someone like Picasso but in philosophy. They start deconstructing what philosophers deeply value and build something totally different that's basically an insult to academic philosophy.
Philosophers spent years perfecting the "complex" realm of ideas and a Picasso philosoher just says "it's too complex, the value is when you go back to the basics and build something else from it".
Do you honestly think that would sit right with them?
If most philisophers build castles, Picasso would have built a castle, disambled it, and built a small odd looking house with the remaining stones.
Do you think that house would be recognised just because he made a castle as well before? He's basically saying he doesn't believe in castles.
And the worst part is that his odd looking house would look like what beginners in philosophy are able to build. Just like Picasso's art looks like a child's. So how would you tell the difference?
How would you be able to tell if he was a madman or a genius?
All I'm saying is that what's valued in philosophy nowadays is these castles, and if you produce something else that doesn't use the complex concepts used to build castles, it's considered inferior.
In the world of art, it's easier to go wild because if people (who are not experts) like your paintings a lot, that's what matters. They don't need validation from their peers, from an authority in art.
But with philosophy, you do, because most people aren't a good judge of your work: they simply don't know enough. And while in art, one person can achieve works on their own, in philosophy it can grow a lot more if more people work on it. It's usually what comes after one's work that's the real deal.
You mean like Kripke?
No, not like Kripke. From my understanding, the method he used was textbook analytic philosophy, even though his results were unconventional.
Picasso's method was far from conventional.
But if you have other names in mind, do tell, it's interesting.
Good; well-thought.
I personally hesitate to use creativity regarding philosophical innovation, instead, favoring some sufficiently explanatory methodological construction. The reason being, given the fundamental preconditions of human intelligence in general, those the negation of which is either impossible or self-contradictory, necessarily limit all that follows from them, which is just to limit how creative a new philosophical doctrine can be.
And what of rules? If it is the case human intelligence in general is predicated on some set of rules .of whatever form and origin they may be ..and the proper business of philosophy is the study of human intelligence in general, rules would seem to be anathema to, or at least in conflict with, creativity as a proper philosophical ground.
On the other hand, I gotta admit, its a fine line between creating a system, and constructing one. Perhaps merely another stupid language game, getting in the way of good ol fashioned logical thought.
Academic philosopy is such an esoteric field that I'd suspect there have been new ideas that have emerged that are considered major shifts within the discipline (of which there are many subcategories) that they generally go unnoticed by those of us not affected. I think if you were to choose a particular area of philosophy and do a deep dive into it and looked for the major contributors, you would find a significant amount of creativity.
I'd just be interested in where your assessment comes from. Do you work in a philosophy department and find the profession has stalled out and there is a resistence to change? I would defer to personal information you might have, which I would think, if the case, that would speak to political issues at play, which just means you have a dysfunctional system. I can believe that, but I otherwise woudn't think the best and brightest have run out of new ideas.
Absolutely, it all depends on the perspective. If someone changes a detail in your bedroom, you'll likely notice it because you know all about your bedroom, but if they change something in your friend's bedroom, chances are you won't notice it.
As you've probably guessed, I don't work in philosophy, but my passion is philosophical, so I've looked into academic philosophy and was pretty disappointed. My main problem with it is the importance of authority figures, whether it's about philosophers or philosophical concepts. It seems to be the basis of philosophy, and if you don't use it, it's not valid.
It's this idea that humans have philosophized for thousands of years and we've made all of these concepts, so if you randomly reflect on your life experiences, they're going to say that there are concepts that can describe your reflections and you need to start there or else you'll reinvent the wheel.
And many people who replied here seem to agree with that.
But if everyone starts from the same points, how can you ever make something that's not a deviation from your starting point? I think there are many starting points we haven't thought about, that are the results of unique life experiences, and that can lead to useful places that would be almost impossible to reach just by studying a philosophical concept and deviating from it.
It's the same problem with many things in life, but with sciences for example, experimental results can challenge the status quo and force scientist to think out of the box to explain what they're observing.
There are theories in sciences that have been validated for centuries, yet they can get challenged too, and scientists would probably not believe it until many new experiments show them otherwise.
I'm not saying people shouldn't study philosophy and that it's better to be ignorant, but this focus on deviation rather than deconstruction restrains the creativity. And I'm not talking about the deconstruction of philosophical concepts, but the deconstruction of anything you experience in your life that leads to valuable insights.
Right, but you haven't included advances in science in your evaluation of the current creativity of philosophy. That was my point. You're measuring modern philosophers on different measures than you are Aristotle and Plato. This comment probably isn't worth taking any further.
Quoting Skalidris
Yes, and that was my main point in my response - you're comparing the output of a few years against the output of 5,000 years and finding it wanting.
I have a feeling I'm not really contributing. We should probably leave it here.
I like music, movies, and other arts, but my primary interest is in written words. I read fiction, watch movies and TV, and listen to music for entertainment and read nonfiction to help clarify my own ideas and understanding of how the world works. I am not deeply emotionally affected by the works I read, watch, or listen to, although I am often moved. My primary interest is intellectual and my the primary standard I apply is the quality of the writing, film-making, or musicianship.
Quoting Joshs
As you might guess from what I've written above, I don't think I've ever been shaken to the core by any artistic work. I have never seen a life-changing film. I have been shaken to my intellectual core by books of science and philosophy.
Quoting Joshs
As I've gotten older, I've found it harder and harder to participate low-quality intellectual or artistic production of any sort. I think that has more to say about me and my advancing crotchetiness than about work being produced today.
Quoting Joshs
As I noted, there is more high-quality intellectual and artistic work out there than anyone can ever use. One thing I really love about the internet is the ability to find guidance about where the good stuff is. I don't listen to the radio anymore, but there is no one I liked listening to more than a good DJ not just playing good music but helping us develop our own taste.
Do you mean by this that philosophy has moved from the boring to the derivative?
I just don't see it has very much to do with the modern world. All the major shifts in thought have been assimilated and now the proponents are irrelevant to modern way of life. The capitalists and mammon have won. The modern world and capitalism etc have brought untold riches to billions of people but the cost is massive and I don't see any major thinkers having any influence on the way the world is ordered.
Don't get me wrong, I am happy in my small niche of untold wealth and can order my life to bring me joy and happiness and I like to read philosophy as it can change how I think but I don't see any influence on the modern world from philosophy today. That may be ignorance but if I don't see it, I doubt the vast majority of punters will either.
This place may have jaundiced me because most of the discussions are over my head and I'm not stupid.
Are you implying mid 70s prog is boring?:gasp:
Not that there are no obscure prog rock albums from 1973, which makes the analogy works well enough, but it is rather coincidental that one of the 4 or 5 least obscure albums of all time, is both prog rock and came out in 1973.
But, to be sure, this tidbit of philosophizing could be conceived as trivially boring.
I think a lot of people hold a similar view.
I've rarely met anyone who reads or takes interest in philosophy: it's a boutique interest, one that attracts more than its fair share of authoritarian monomaniacs, fanatics, bores, autodidacts, fetishists, and gimps. But that doesn't mean it isn't important.
Quoting Malcolm Parry
But the modern world is a product of philosophy: secularism, naturalism, scientism, and neoliberalism all of these have built the fabric of our culture and how we see reality. And yet it all remains in flux. The world today is very different from how it was when I was a teenager, and it's changing as we speak. Don't expect it to look like this in 50 years.
Quoting Malcolm Parry
I've learned a lot just by participating (often badly) in discussions. I find I'm most interested in views different from my own. If you resist or mistrust something, chances are you need to understand it better. Philosophy is very difficult and its complexity is spread across centuries, it's an impossible subject to fully master, but one from which we can all snatch an occasional insight. I understand very little myself and don't have the time understand it much better.
Quoting Malcolm Parry I wouldn't know prog rock from a coffee grinder.
I agree 100%. The changes are brought about by changes in science and innovation. There are seismic shifts in social settings too. I don't see much of current philosophy being relevant to what is happening.
It is fascinating though.
That is why I joined but I find most of the exchanges esoteric and stilted. Snatching insights is all I want from the subject. I have my own world view more or less sorted but the odd bit of the stoics or Nietzsche etc give me further insight. Most of the esoteric stuff is (for me) pointless or I have absorbed it as part of being born in second half of 20th Century in Europe (UK)
Its fine, I just think you misunderstand and think I used this to prove my point, which I did not.
If we let this method run for another 5000 thousands years, Im sure well have major breakthroughs as well, but it wouldn't be as efficient as if we valued creativity more in the first place. And I'm not trying to prove this, I just believe creativity was involved in the major philosophical breakthroughs, and the current method is very restrictive in that aspect. I didn't try to prove any of these premises, they're just my observations. Creativity is very subjective.
I agree as well. I've pointed out before that many people on this forum like to discuss what dead philosophers have said, but what they said is a product of their time and is only useful to seeing where we've come from, not where we are at.
The changes that are brought about by science and technology, take AI for instance, provides a new way at looking at existing problems - like the mind-body problem - not to mention the various interpretations of QM.
I don't have a background in philosophy. I have a background in science and in IT and software development so I'm bringing that to the table when trying to solve existing philosophical problems, not what some dead philosopher said.
Ive read the Greeks and Im fascinated how we got where we are today. How we think and what knowledge we have amassed, especially in science. It is mind blowing. But I dont see any significant contribution to how we live and order society from modern philosophy. It may be my ignorance but Im aware of quantum mechanics and relativity.
Yes, we seem to be struggling with the same moral dilemmas we've been struggling with for 1000s of years. Religion and politics stem from ethics and ethics are subjective, which is why my default attitude is "live and let live".
It is fascinating how the Greeks infiltrate everything we do and value and how things changed when scientists worked stuff out and knowledge accumulated.
Im happy to live the life I have and enjoy it as it is. Im not looking for why and superior reason for existence.
I dont think it exists and everyone trying to force some higher power or reason is just guessing. Which is fine as a pastime but not for me.
Im grateful for the great thinkers in the past who have allowed a framework for my life to be built. However, the permissive aspect of modern world, combined with ultra safety consciousness , has made it less free in my opinion.
The modern world needs a very strict framework of what is acceptable and freedom within that framework for self expression. The Japanese were very good at building such a framework but I doubt the world could ever be ordered like that until there was some extreme disaster and there was a survival issue for mankind.
Creativity is not subjective in my view. Some have it and some do not. We are living in a period where what matters is easily drowned out by what does not.
Graham Priest He is known for defending dialetheism, which is the view that contradictions can be true. But more importantly, in numerous books, he uses his logical views to defend a huge variety of very interesting new philosophical theories to explain everything from intentionality to mereology in a framework of paraconsistent logic.
Charles Taylor Canadian philosopher who did very creative work about the rise of authenticity as a core moral value in the West.
Edward Zalta Another logician, who puts forward an extraordinarily novel and interesting logical framework for solving the longstanding Fregean problems in philosophy of language by proposing a split in the meaning of the word "is."
Derek Parfit I saved the best for last. In my view, one of the most creative philosophers ever. He raised the level of discussion of the metaphysical and moral questions surrounding personal identity into an entirely new intellectual register. Reasons and Persons is like a smorgasbord of creative new ideas.
As others posters have mentioned, there are other philosophers from earlier in the 20th century or late 19th century who are very creative and have not yet been entirely digested by even the academic philosophical community, let alone by the general public.
My personal favorite is Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I think a lot about how different the intellectual history of continental philosophy might have been if he hadn't died young before completing his third major book. Many people missed the fact that Merleau-Ponty isn't just a philosopher of the body or perception, but rather a truly general philosopher who gives innovative answers to classic philosophical questions by attempting to ground philosophy in pre-reflective perception.
Philosophers that people have told me are extremely creative but whom I have not personally had a chance to read are Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Peirce, and Henri Bergson. I do think that something happened around the beginning of the 20th century, roughly the 1920s, possibly as a result of disillusionment from World War I, possibly because we hit a cognitive bottleneck. But it does seem that even though creative new philosophical ideas were still being invented, the academic and wider social community stopped digesting them. This, in turn, may have led most academic philosophers to stop trying to create "big theories" and focus instead on micro-analysis. After all, what's the point of putting forward a big new theory if so few people are going to read or understand it?
Big new philosophical theories came pouring out of Germany for 200 years, until they destroyed their intellectual infrastructure through world wars I and II. The torch of post-war European philosophy was passed to French thinkers , beginning with Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, Levi-Strauss and Levinas and culminating in the Parisian scene in the 1960s and 70s ( Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Nancy, Badiou, Ricouer). Paris in the 1960s was a very fertile intellectual environment, comparable to Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and nothing comparable to either of these milieus exists for philosophy anywhere in the world in the 21st century.The digestion of these French ideas by the general public has been slow, to say the least, with liberals and conservatives alike in hysterics over the wokist and postmodernist scourge they beleive is to blame for everything rotten in society.
Indeed. And all around us now people are trying to get nostalgia projects up and running as the antidote to some 'meaning crisis', and even the Thomists are having a small revival.
I have to admit I fall into the camp that tends to dismiss 1960s French philosophy as a postmodernist dead end. Not because I'm hysterical about it, but because I haven't been convinced of its intellectual worth. I say this as somebody who isn't afraid to engage deeply with obscure thinkers when necessary. So I would be genuinely interested to hear what it is you think made that time so creative, and I guess the second question is how you think about the balance "creativity" in philosophy against other desiderata such as having good arguments and evidence for your theories.
I always wondered about art in terms of judging, grading, valuing. "How can you tell me this is not a masterpiece?," and also I think of how art teachers can create a rubric of expectations, a standard, in order to give a grade but when you compared Picasso and philosophers alike, it reminded me of these thoughts I had before....time is relevant here but for what? "grasping" what you call, "the real deal,"?
Like it takes time to understand the "beauty" in art or "genius" in philosophies? This understanding comes to certain people at certain times though, I believe some would be able to spot a gem on sight, knowing that something is going to gain momentum or popularity, not yet but often too late.[too late for what? I dont know. I think timing is interesting]
Im interested in those/ the moment...its like when we say "she was ahead of her time," what if people have to say "he was way ahead of his time" because it is proof, in and of its self, making the statement, "she/he was so ahead," because of how slow people are going to be at understanding....as if he/she knew, no one was going to catch on right way or could....but that it would defy the doubts and resistance once put upon it. But I do still wonder, if when people discover people and their works, art or philosophy, [OR BOTH], "before their own time," if the gap is of any significance. Its like admitting how slow/fast it took to travel from then to now. What if we are stuck before our time? What if he was just ahead of YOUR TIME, every time?
Bravo! :strong: :eyes: :starstruck:
Quoting FirecrystalScribe
Im sure you would agree that in order to justify dismissing the intellectual worth a philosophy, you have to first demonstrate that you have read it effectively enough to be able to offer a detailed summary of it. I know firsthand how difficult this can be. As someone brought up in anglo-american culture, I had no exposure to continental writers up through my graduate school studies in psychology and treated them with enormous skepticism, believing that the only kind of evidence worth its salt was that which scientific empiricism relied on. It was only later, on my own, that I introduced myself to contemporary Continental modes of thought through Heideggers Being and Time. It threw me for loop. I had never encountered a method thought so rigorous, dense and compressive in its unification of history and domains of culture. I went from Heidegger to Derrida, who it would have been impossible for me to understand without my prior background in Heidegger. In mastering Nietzsche and Husserl, I came to see how Heidegger, Derrida, Focault and Deleuze were all the heirs of Nietzsche and phenomenology ( as well as Marx and Freud). Most anglo-American philosophy only pays attention to Kant and, if one is lucky, Hegel, so they offer one no exposure to the influences or modes of thought I have mentioned.
When you say evidence do you have in mind the match between theoretical prediction and observation? I assume that when you say you are not afraid to engage deeply with obscure thinkers, that this includes philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn. I tend to find that those who prefer Popperian falsification over Kuhnian paradigm shifts not only are not convinced of the intellectual worth of 1960s French philosophy, but also reject those thinkers who follow in the wake of Kuhn, but are themselves still a fair distance away from the radicality of the French poststructuralist writers. Therefore, it is probably a waste of time to directly debate the merits of writers like Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida when we may need to focus on a preliminary debate concerning realism , the realism-antirealism binary , and positions put forth by anglo-american writers that critique both realism and anti-realism. In the U.S., that latter group includes new materialist philosophers like Joseph Rouse and Karen Barad, and phenomenological-influenced cognitive science writers like Evan Thompson (who does not consider himself to be a postmodernist).
So I need to know who are the paragons of contemporary philosophy for you, so I can fine-turn my response to what you are familiar with.
But all the best philosophers have "Saint" in front of their name. Verily, if one encounters a new name, looks them up, and they don't look like an archetypal sorcerer, I'd be skeptical indeed! :cool: :rofl:
And that's not just for the Christians, consider: Apollonius of Tyana, Plotinus, Nagarjuna, Laotze, Shankara, Dogen, Proclus, Al Farabi, or even our old beloved Plato.
Yet behold! An epoch where even the philosophers are decadents. Even? [I]Especially[/I] the philosophers! And now they've even made it to the Big Leaguesall the way to the Oval Office. I am not sure if being filtered through Nick Land, Mencius Moldbug, and "Bronze Age Pervert," (complete with a return to radical asceticism in the form of fasting tax payer funds) jives with the original intent, but it certainly demonstrates the rollicking freedom of thought. :wink: (This, of course, ignores the philosophers who made themselves into accountants, but that's what people do with themignore).
When the Last Men become First, they can make themselves into Overmeneven colonize Mars if they want. The difficulty is that they fancy themselves Milton's Satanor Macbeth, holding the dagger that killed Godand yet really they play Iago to themselves; yet it's not like the human race was ever more than the womb for AGI and Capital anyhow, the prime matter for the instantiation of Mammon, who's destined to birth Roko's Basilisk (i.e., ol' Jörmungandr, whose fiberoptic tail wraps tightly round the Earth underneath the waves even now). Volanturism clears away the old form and the ol' DemiurgeYaldy-Baddy himselfshakes his mane, uncoils his tail, and does the rest. Dostoevsky was right about the Inverse Tower of Babel, bringing Heaven down to Earth, but missed that achieving this Brave New World would first require recreating God's punishment: linguistic atomization and separation.
The worst part is, [I]it's all true[/I]... Modern man is an inverse Oedipus. He is born free, master of his own fate, and then tears out his own spiritual eyes, fating himself to wander the wilderness, unable to answer the Sphinx's queries. Jacob saw a ladder stretching down from heaven, angels ascending and descending, but modern man is more like Balaam, stuck on his path, hoping blindly in the better judgement of his ass to avert technopocopypse.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You sound like me. If I knew what I was talking about and read about it. Love it (and wish it wasnt all true - although I have to look up some of the references.)
My only hope for modern man is knowing there are other people out there who get it. Cheers!
Quoting Tom Storm
What you say about Badious disagreements with French postmodernist philosophers is true. The shared features of their thinking he highlights here are cherry-picked to be consonant with those he endorses. I wouldnt say , though, that these features are at odds with the postmodernists, just that they are broad enough to encompass a very wide range of contemporary thinkers.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If it is true of Modern man (and I include among this group Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug, despite their superficial aping of postmodern philosophical tropes), is it also true of Postmodern man?
(Not really, Count T!)
I'm just throwing this out there : maybe the lack of "creativity" is not just in Philosophy, but also in Physics, and in Politics. Are we seeing a general conservative turtle-shell retraction from taking risks. Instead of forging ahead into the unknown territory, we point fingers/guns at the opposition. Is this hyper-critical stand-off & stalemate how revolutions & civil wars begin? If so, maybe this is just the stagnant storm before the creative calm. :cool:
Dissection Over Discourse :
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/16022/two-ways-to-philosophise/p1
Theoretical Physics Has Completely Stagnated Since the 1990s?
I think post-modern man is a myth; a bit like sasquatch. It seems to me that all supposed "post-moderns" achieve is Zygmunt Bauman's "liquid modernity." A phase transition, sure, but the same substance. The Reformation and Enlightenment shadow still colors everything. If the "Singularity" hits, I'm afraid we'll just have "gaseous modernity," a self-sustaining cycle of hot air made hideously prolific through the aid of LLMs.
John Deely wrote a whole history of philosophy focused on how Charles Sanders Peirce was the first post-modern thinker. Maybe it is even so, but if it is, he was at least a century and a half too early.
Thanks, I seem to have hit my target!
Well now it cannot be moralizing and 'holier than thou' [I]and[/I] vacuous, so now I'm questioning your original compliment.
That leaves me wondering what target you think you might have hit.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Sure it can?it can be moralizing and holier and thou in terms of attitude, while being vacuous in terms of content.
And as to post-modernism?I think it is simply the idea that we should drop the myth that history is necessarily a story of continuous progress or that there is a real underlying telos at work in history.
To the soft skinned, any new idea or thought is a critique of something old.
And then, we never start from an empty plate, we never clear our minds and be like a tabula rasa and then start create something new. We always create the new from the old. As Newton himself said "if I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
This is true in science, but it is also true in philosophy.
Quoting Janus
History already shows with many examples that there isn't continuous progress and that basically we can have such collapses that knowledge is forgotten. Yet as I said to @Skalidris above (on a comment he wrote pages earlier) that knowledge and new insights, be they scientific or philosophical, are created on the present knowledge.
I agree, we must always start from where we are. It seems to me that hankering for ancient, "lost" wisdom is a fool's errand, given that we may well be misunderstanding the contexts within which ancient literature found its meaning.
We have much greater knowledge today, and we might call that progress, but have we acquired the wisdom to deal with it? It seems not, and that failure cannot be rightly seen as progress in my view.
I think you might be right. Are we witnessing the end of one order and the beginning of another, or is it just the same preoccupations, endlessly repackaged and reinterpreted for our age? Hard to say whether it's a rupture or just another loop in the cycle.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What would a post-modern man consist of? I can't tell, is Bauman's liquid modernity a stage between the modern and the post or is it what we actually have, the 'post' in this view being an erroneous prefix?
Well, I would be really happy if the book written by Zeno of Elea would be found and we could read thodr additional paradoxes that Zeno had found and in general something that the Eleatic School itself actually thought, because now we have only the writings of those who opposed the school. And naturally finding a part of the books from the Library of Alexandria that the Romans didn't burn would be fabulous. However it's unlikely that there would some totally unknown philosopher or mathematician who back then would have to the same conclusion if not have gone beyond Gödel's incompleteness theorem and would tell us something new that we are eager to hear. That is extremely unlikely.
Besides, we do know how that losing of knowledge happens in history.
Perfect example is how Antiquity turned into Middle Ages and what we call the "Dark Ages". Talk about a collapse in trade and in globalization. That's all it takes. Once North Africa couldn't feed Rome (as Vandals conquered it), then Rome's population started to shrink rapidly. Once that happened, then urban professionals like artists and engineers that relied for income from an advance economy simply didn't have any demand for their work. And then simply things like drawing, sculpture, engineering etc. simply regressed. When large administration became impossible, the logical solution was feodalism.
Earlier example is the Bronze Age Collapse. These historical developments and anything similar in the future can have a dramatic effect on our knowledge base. It might not be a societal collapse, but simply an economic collapse.
My favorite example of this is when an university professor, perhaps teaching the language that is spoken in country, has to have a second job as perhaps a taxi driver. This is reality in many Third World countries as universities simply cannot afford to pay a reasonable salary to their teachers. It's not reality yet in the Western World, but it surely can be. It sounds like a small difference, but in my view it's quite huge and tells a lot about the prosperity of the society itself.
I'm not convinced that the visual arts, at least, regressed in the so-called Dark Ages. Anyhgow thanks for the historical insight?I wasn't aware of the African connection with the fall of Rome.
Quoting ssu
Thanks again, I wasn't aware of the kind of situation university professors can find themselves facing in the Third World. I agree with you that such a situation could be coming in the West. I'm not economist, but I think that any apparent general increase of prosperity in the West over the last twenty years or perhaps longer is largely "smoke and mirrors".
Well, there was a time called the Renaissance, so at least people back then did think that art had fallen back in the Middle Ages. Only in the 19th Century we started to feel romanticized by the Middle Ages.
Art from Antiquity:
Art from the Middle Ages:
Renaissance art:
Why they call it "Renaissance" should be obvious to everybody. Of course now as we have modern art and cameras, even AI making pictures, hence difference isn't so evident. But back then before cameras, it was evident that some abilities had been lost. Above all, it should be noticed just how limited it was to few cities where the "Renaissance" happened. Just to show how Medieval the artists in the periphery were, here's a Finnish Church painting from the 16th Century made by a local Finnish artist.
This picture is from a Finnish Church painted in the start of the 16th Century:
This is from Italy at the same time period (actually, from ten years earlier), also a Church decoration:
Today we rarely understand the huge difference in the ability to paint as you can go to any country today and you will find artists that can paint photorealistic paintings. Take classes in your local art school, and many could be "masters" earlier... at least in the periphery. But back then, it really was only a few like Leonardo da Vinci and not many else.
Quoting Janus
We should stop gazing at our own navel and notice what huge transformation has happened in the World. Absolute poverty has decreased dramatically around the World. China is far more prosperous than it was fifty years ago as are many countries all over the World. The growth simply hasn't been so fast in the West as it has been in other places. Above all, one should note that we suffer more of the problem of income distribution where the rich have come far richer while the middle class and the poor haven't seen such increases in prosperity as the rich. Yet in absolute terms, absolute poverty has diminished even in the West.
Quoting ssu
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance are categories encompassing many forms of art, including literature, poetry, architecture and music. Given the fact that Gothic architecture and polyphonic music were both born in the high Middle Ages, it is difficult to justify the claim that art as a whole had fallen back during that period.
If youre going to argue that, you may as well add that there hasnt been a progression in science and technology either.
I don't disagree with the general judgement, there was a very real decline (Europe's population plunged by more than a fifth or even a fourth and stayed down), but the pictures are sort of cherry picking. The art of the north was in ways more primitive, but then Byzantium retained influence in the West well into the "Dark Ages" and had no such collapse. There are medieval wooden painted statues and stonework that are more lifelike, in some ways more similar to Greek statues (see below). The shift in painting is partially stylistic (e.g. typological, which is why faces and bodies exactly mirror themselves on both sides). You see this even in the Eastern Roman Empire where there was no collapse.
This is not to say there wasn't a very real loss of knowledge. Civic engineering projects like the Roman roads and aqueducts arguably wouldn't be matched for 1,300 years, or at least 1,150. At the same time, the Byzantines erected churches that arguably best the great temples of antiquity during the "Dark Ages," and even when the Latin West was still culturally and economically backwards, its ability to dedicate a high chunk of GDP to cathedrals for generation after generation of construction (many spanning centuries), led to Gothic masterpieces that bested anything from antiquity or the Christian East.
It should be noted too that progress and regression is not unidirectional. Europe today has great difficulty maintaining its great cathedrals (or say, rebuilding Notre Dame) because the skills required are almost extinct. There have been similar issues even in relatively short timespans, like highly classified military technology becoming "lostech" that no one knows how to maintain or recreate (e.g. the US nuclear modernization program's struggles, or efforts to return to the moon). This is actually a fairly common problem in the industrial sector, and it's also been a huge factor in Russia's inability to replace war losses.
So then, we might also consider MacIntyre's thesis about a similar collapse in an understanding of ethics, or an arguably similar move with metaphysics.Piotr Jaroszy?ski (along with many others) makes this point re a sort of degradation in metaphysics through Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez's failure to understand the "act of existence" and high scholasticism. The result is the rise of idealism during the Enlightenment, best represented in Berkeley, who is in some ways putting forth a much more simplistic, fun house mirror, badly degenerated Aristotlianism/Thomism. This carriers on from there, for instance Heidegger's main model for criticism was Saurez, something Gadamer and the Thomists have challenged him on as leading to a major misrepresentation in the historical dimension. You can see echoes like this in other places, e.g. Deleuze's consideration of substance vis-á-vis Spinoza, when the conception of "substance" had arguably already come to collapse and conflate multiple distinct notions in problematic ways.
Hence, I don't find this sort of thesis implausible in some sense. I'm no expert, but I've read a lot of Reformation Era German and English texts and they are in some ways a great step back from The Cloud of Unknowing or Meister Eckhart. The printing press led to an explosion in creativity but also perhaps a sort of democratization and reduction in signal to noise ratio that was corrosive, especially when paired with the explosive politics of the era, which tended towards polemic and radicalism.
I am not sure the precise dates here, since the cathedrals span 1000-1400 in construction, but they appear to mostly be from the 11-1200s. In literature too, you have Dante, Chaucer, etc., although obviously the Renaissance brought a lot of great literature too. It is true that "dark age" literature tends to be more "primary epic," the original writing down of past oral epics, more akin to the Iliad than the Aeneid.
Likewise, in at least military technology, the West continued to develop, and in some ways outpaced the East by a meaningful degree.
Japan is another interesting example because there an intentional stagnation in technological and economic development did not stop cultural and artistic development. And indeed, plenty of scholars argue that the advances in culture were precisely why it was able to resist colonization and rapidly modernize, going for backwards even for the region to one of the Great Powers, within a span of a lifetime.
I wouldn't say that. Simply after the technique was basically universal, which any art school could teach, then the focus was simply to have other techniques than photorealism. That in the end you had modern art isn't at all a death of high art.
We should remember that Picasso painted also this, when he was still a child:
Or this, a portrait of his mother:
Hence we can assume if Pablo Picasso have lived Centuries earlier and he would have been able to follow a career of a painter, he would have also then been an able master.
To assume that once you have modern art that high art has died or degenerated is something that the Nazis were eager in believing. Personally I don't agree with them.
Quoting Joshs
Gothic churces are indeed awesome, yet what is totally obvious is that a feudal society simply doesn't employ artists as much as a more prosperous society that enjoys international trade and a high level of job specialization.
When people talk about the death of art I don't think they tend to mean Picasso, but rather stuff like human excrement or menstrual blood thrown at a canvas with a paragraph on how it's attacking capitalism, the patriarchy, etc. attached. This might be provocative once, but as a trend it starts to look very "emperor's new clothes-ish."
That said, I am a great appreciator of contemporary art museums and I think the frequency of such work is vastly overblown. There is a lot of good stuff out there that is very creative. However, it is true that a lot of this very creative stuff [I]also[/I] has a seemingly obligatory paragraph about capitalism or patriarchy attached to it, and that does seem to be a bit of a straight jacket on much (but hardly all) contemporary art. Likewise, in drama there is a move towards the more interactive, self-guided experience ("Sleep No More" being the big example).
I'm not sure if this is obvious. The work of artists and artisans tends to get replaced by mass production, guilds lose their political clout, and cottage industries go extinct. Museums will often recreate old interior decor and what you have is spaces, even middle class spaces, covered in handcrafted art, furniture itself often being decorative. When you walk around Pompeii, the interiors are floor to ceiling art. Today, the vast majority of art hanging on walls, rugs, furniture, clothing, etc. is mass produced, which of course includes a design element, but it is one design for thousands of copies. The only analogous spaces today tend to be the interiors of some types of church or temple.
Which is partly to say, Marx certainly wasn't entirely wrong about the alienation from labor brought about by industrialization, and there is definitely a tendency in modern culture to equate value with the ability to generate volume that is at odds with the idea of beauty as the market of quality for functional art. Some cultures such as Japan seem to have fallen for this a little less hard.
Likewise, it's only through protectionism that industries like France's artisanal bakeries and cafes survive.
What is interesting that both in the fall of Rome and the fall of Constantinople you have in both cases a huge logistical disruption of simply there being the incapability of feeding a huge metropolis. With Byzantium it was losing Egypt to the Arabs. After that the agriculture in the Balkans couldn't sustain a huge city as Constantinople had been. When the Ottomans finally took over Constantinople, it was a pale image of a city what it had been before with fields inside the city. Something like Detroit, perhaps.
I always love to put this graph up just to show the long term effects of when "All roads lead to Rome" wasn't anymore reality and how long it took for modern Rome to grow past it's former self in Antiquity (even if this graph talks about Istanbul, not Constantinople).
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I agree totally with this. Once some technology is replaced, the techonology does vanish if there aren't some historians or collectors that uphold the knowledge of the technology once the old engineers and users die. Fortunately in many things we do respect our earlier technology so much that have the understanding around. And hopefully that doesn't happen with things like art.
One great example to us is cars. The modern version of various computers on wheels run by batteries is somewhat easy to use. At least for us, who use computers daily. Cars 50 or 60 years old are easy for us also, but when we look at the first cars like the Ford T-model, many people would have severe difficulties in starting the damn thing without instructions (given here aptly by AI):
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Much less than the straight jacket that religious art was (or is still today).
Yes, indeed creativity and something new are things put on a pedestal in modern art in my view.
Gothic architecture was pretty amazing (and philosophical). They just lacked the technology to fully see it through.
I should have qualified what I meant about the death of art. I mean of the art being produced at the time of modernism, not the art of previous periods. In the art establishment during the 20th century what constituted High Art of that period was what the art establishment deemed to be High Art being produced at that time(during the 1950s and 60s). It has always been like that to a lesser extent. So when someone in the art establishment talks about High Art, they are usually referring to the art being produced at the time they are saying it. This is also reinforced by the current fashion in art of the time, which follows the zeitgeist. So during the modern period, what constituted High Art evolved very quickly through the process of developing from Impressionism, cubism, surrealism and expressionism, into modernism.
It was this current idea of what was High Art, which died a death into modernist absurdity, sometime during the second half of the 20th Century.
During the post modern period, High Art lurched from one development to another culminating in conceptual art, which was nonsense asserted as High Art and grotesque perversions of modernism, asserted as High Art.
Well I will argue it with three examples. The arts are a matter of conception, expression and forms of beauty. Something which evolves and devolves with changes in societies and cultures. Science and technology are quite different pursuits.
(Forgive my lack of pictures, as I dont have an image hosting account at the moment, so will have to link to articles about the pieces.)
Firstly pre-Cycladic art reached a high standard in depiction of beauty and refinement between 5,000 and 2,000 BCE. Such refinement was arguably not equalled until cubism in the 20th Century. I suspect that Picasso for example, copied, or was influenced by it (along with examples of African tribal art).
https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/cycladic-figures
Secondly, the blue vase of Pompeii, the skill in design and execution may not have been equalled since the time it was made in Ancient Rome.
https://www.interno16holidayhome.com/2019/02/22/discovering-the-blue-vase-of-pompeii/
Thirdly, the Pantheon in Rome. An architectural gem, which may not have been equalled in the 2,000years since it was built.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome
Architecture has rarely reached such heights of design and execution. Over the intervening periods. And indeed the great pyramid of Giza, is such a mind boggling feat of construction. It is probably only now, with laser technology, that we have the ability to reproduce it.
I am largely immune to art (it mostly bores me rigid) but why would you argue this? Is your dislike of modern art rooted in a preference for classical and formalist traditions, and in the sense that contemporary art conflicts with your ideas of beauty and moral coherence?
C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image has some pretty neat stuff on how the Gothic cathedral is an image of the medieval cosmos.
But I agree with the bolded. What we need is a revival where we build a Gothic cathedral on the proper scale, with a 3,000 foot spire! :rofl:
Or not. That huge clock tower in Mecca was a cool idea, but it looks incredibly gaudy to me in context.
Well, the so called High Art has it's tendencies to go the extreme as @Count Timothy von Icarus gave us an example with "stuff like human excrement or menstrual blood thrown at a canvas with a paragraph on how it's attacking capitalism, the patriarchy, etc. attached".
Yet I don't think this is regression. It's simply art transforming to an institution that will desperately want to do something new ...and shocking! Perhaps it's like a political movement which at start had sound and justifiable objectives and an agenda, which the majority of people agreed on, has then an existential crisis, when these objectives are gained. Then comes the "next wave" of thinking and thinkers, the new generation, which is usually hijacked by radical ideologues. The next wave after that is even more silly. This has happened to feminism, when you compare modern feminism to the suffragettes. Yet it also has happened to liberalism, when one just thinks of the anarcho-capitalists and their take on just what an ideal libertarian society would be like.
True regression would really being of losing some technology or skill that previously was there. If that technology or skill lost isn't worthy to be kept up, that isn't so bad. But when it is something that people have enjoyed or have given a lot of value, then that is really bad.
We should notice that art is far more the parody many give it. Art isn't only the exhibitions and concerts that the hoi polloi doesn't have money or interest to experience. Pop music is one thing I think will be here to stay just like movie art, thanks to the 20th Century. Perhaps the problem today is that for example making music is simply too easy.
Quoting ssu
Well my comment was regarding Western countries. It looks to me like any appearance of increased average prosperity is on account of increased debt. It seems that, in a world of diminishing resources that are becoming ever more costly to extract, we are borrowing against the (illusory) promise of increasing future prosperity. But I acknowledge it is a complex issue, and as I already said, I am not an economist. That said, how many economists today include the environment in economic reckonings as anything other than a range of "externalities'"? (It's a genuine question; I acknowledge there may be more than there would appear to be at a superficial glance).
:up:
That was kind of the idea of the Chicago Sky Chapel.
Well, technological advances have kept up, so even if we already have experienced Peak conventional Oil many years ago, yet we don't have a crisis of diminishing resources. The resource crisis that people were counting to happen by using simple extrapolation models from the present didn't happen. What we have is a very problematic monetary system that is based on perpetually growing debt. When will that happen, who knows.
In fact, I would dare to say that our modern society is far more able to deal with global crises than civilizations were earlier. The Pandemic just few years ago is a case example. Yes, it has been always very trendy and hip to look at our future in a bleak and pessimistic way. Yet Oswald Sprengler wrote The Decline of the West in 1922. The decline of the West hasn't happened yet, I would say that the great catch up done by many Asian countries doesn't tell us that the West is declining. Even the US can survive two Trump administrations, I guess.
Quoting Janus
Look, economists as fortune tellers forecasting the future can basically predict only 6 months ahead. In fact, it's great if they can agree on the economic cycle we are just now in. Changes in the environment take a bit more time to happen. Yes, summers are warmer than before, but all it takes is a few volcanoes to erupt and cause the temperatures to fall. That's the problem with forecasting: you can see the obvious long term cycles going on, but that doesn't matter if something else puts you into a totally different situation you have prepared for.
Hence we do have things like climate change, falling population growth and other issues that are quite clear and will happen, but forecasting what will happen simply depends on too many butterflies flapping their wings and creating hurricanes in the other side of the planet. Start from a butterfly like Donald Trump would not be a TACO and go through with "Liberation Day" tariffs.
Besides, human decisions have huge impacts on the environment and wildlife. Just to take one example: In the 19th Century whales were hunted to near extinction and whale had to be replaced with other oils as there simply weren't enough whales in oceans. Then in the mid 20th century whale population made a huge comeback in only a few years. What happened? WW2 and unrestricted submarine warfare all over the Atlantic happened. This had the effect that basically for the wartime years no whalers went out to hunt whales as they themselves would have fallen prey to German U-boats. Just like the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that created a wildlife refuge around Chernobyl, the environment reacts to our actions in ways that we haven't thought of.
(Bisons near an abandoned Belarussian village in the Chernobyl exclusion zone in 2016. Wildlife are able to reproduce before falling to the radioactivity of the place.)
I read Otto Von Simpson's book. It made an impression on me. Is Discarded Image something I should read?
If there were real growth in prosperity, then why the need for growing debt? Debt seems to be nothing more than borrowing against the assumption of increased future prosperity. The problem with the oil that is being extracted today in comparison with the pre-peak oil extraction is that it is now much more costly to extract in terms of both money and energy.
Quoting ssu
Earlier there were local, not global crises, and I think that is the significant difference. Previously there was always somewhere else to go if resources were no longer available, now there is nowhere else to go.
We face, not merely global warming, but extensive environmental pollution, habitat loss and species extinction, soil nutrient depletion and salination, ongoing decline of the fisheries. It seems to me like we are throwing a global party (to which, of course, not everyone is invited) without any thought for the coming hangover. I see that view as realistic, not pessimistic.
By some reckonings the current population level is simply not sustainable by some quite high order of magnitude?that is that the Earth can only sustain a population between 1 and 5% of the present.
And here we are worrying about a purported decline of creativity in philosophy. I don't think a return to traditional values and religion is going to help us?probably the effect would be quite the opposite, even if such a project were even possible.
Our way of life is dependent on the idea of virtual capital. The banking system as we know it started in Italy. Italian bankers financed wars and from there the financial sector started moving toward the center of the European economy.
It's true that we're basically living beyond our means, but that's how we've become what we are now. That simple idea of debt revolutionized us.
The British were in debt before the Great Depression. That debt was never repaid. The whole global economy just reset after the war. The same thing will eventually happen to the US national debt.
At this point economic suicide would be halting lending. That's basically what the crisis of 2008-2009 was: a hard credit freeze.
I agree with you that it is not possible to simply halt lending, just as it is not possible to suddenly eliminate 95-98% of the population to bring it down to a sustainable level.
It would cause a global economic depression. Marxists were the first to start talking about the social effects of the boom/bust cycles of capitalism. They believed that eventually there would be a depression so severe that capitalism would basically die and be replaced by something else.
Where traditional analytic philosophy (especially mid-20th century varieties influenced by logical positivism or the ordinary language movement) emphasized linguistic analysis aimed at dissolving philosophical problems, verificationist or deflationary attitudes toward metaphysicsand and an a priori, often conceptual, methodology, Kripke brought back robust modal metaphysics (possible worlds, necessity vs. contingency, essentialism), causal-historical accounts of reference instead of descriptivist theories, and a more realist attitude toward necessityone that didnt reduce it to analytic truth or linguistic convention.
In that sense, he was doing something strikingly new: not abandoning analytic philosophy, but expanding its scope and rehabilitating kinds of metaphysical argument many thought had been permanently discredited. So while he was using the tools of analytic philosophycareful argumentation, attention to language, etc.he was not merely repeating its "textbook" methods or conclusions.
So again, the premise of your thread - that there has been a decline in the quality of philosophy - remains unsupported.
The kind of thing I am talking about is someone looking at all of history being shaped by Capitalism or Tea or Psychedelics or Racism etc.,. It is these kind of myopic perspectives, generalised so broadly, that I find disconcerting/disappointing.
I do like a lot of modern art, but I saw the art establishment self immolate during the 1980s and 90s.
This was actually the post modern period in art. It had been left with a radical ideology by the modernists (1950-70s) and interpreted it as a requirement to tear down, the last vestiges of formalism and tradition in High Art. To debase art to the point that art was whatever the artist says it is. This resulted in a race to the bottom of art and art exhibitions, where sensationalism, shock value was the goal. I attended all the exhibitions in London at the time during the 1990s and realised that art as anything meaningful had died, to be replaced by shocking sensationalised works, where the goal was to get newspaper headlines about how extreme and perverted art had become.
Yes, definitely. Im referring more to the tearing down of traditions in art. Now we have a clear space for new art movements to move into.
There are lots of new exciting movements in art, a favourite of mine is a revivification of nature and landscape in art with the recent work of David Hockney for example,
https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/exhibitions/david-hockney-a-bigger-picture
Who has a major exhibition in Paris at the moment.
It was a bit of both. They were nice people, ordinary, down to earth art students, who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. They were surprised when their fame first happened and quickly realised that producing sensationalist works, just fuelled the media scrum. Some of them realised, or already knew that the establishment had lost its way and were basically given carte Blanche to do whatever they want and it would be regarded as credible High Art. As long as the art world was being reinvigorated, anything goes.
Much of the work was taking the Mickey out of the establishment and seeing how far they could go without being censored. And then when some were censored* it just fuelled it even more.
Charles Satchii, a wealthy advertising mogul, saw an opportunity and set the whole thing in motion on the world stage. Another example of big money becoming involved in the art world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_British_Artists
*there was a work which included a dead human foetus, which was censored.
Quoting Banno
If one defines regressiveness as the regurgitating of older systems of thought, then Kripkea work is no more than a variation, a slight twist on philosophical thinking available already in the first half of the 19th century. But hes not alone in that. Much of todays intellectual culture has yet to catch up with the leading edge of 19th century thought. But as long as you find it challenging, the rest is irrelevant as far as Im concerned.
Kripke is a branch off Wittgenstein. I don't think that kind of philosophical reticence existed in the early 19th Century.
Philosophy dives into and back out of mysticism. Wittgenstein was the latter.
Kripke failed miserably to grasp the later Wittgenstein, whose central ideas appear anything but mystical to me, being grounded in pragmatic interactions. Im not sure what you mean by philosophical reticence. , but if we run Kripke through mid 19th century thinkers like Dilthey, Brentano and Kierkegaard, I think we can come up with solid critiques of his work.
Maybe a bit of an echo chamber effect too. Like I said, the "obligatory" paragraph about how the art critiques or combats racism/patriarchy/capitalism is very common. If these aren't included, then the description will be apolitical, but if it's philosophical it will be some form of extreme nominalism. I can't think of a single time I have encountered a description from a different political or philosophical direction though. That would actually be the shocking thing in context, something like an appeal to platonic solids as properly "platonic" would be more outrageous than the excrement.
Why do you think that? Have you read Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language? It's stunning.
Quoting Joshs
Kierkegaard critiques Kripke. Off the top of my head, I'd say the two didn't have the same interests. I don't see why they wouldn't give the thumbs-up to one another in the spirit of "whatever floats your boat." I don't know about Dilthey and Brentano.
Quoting frank
Ive read it. It may be stunning but it is widely rejected by scholars of the later Wittgenstein as a rigorous reading of his work.
Like who?
Peter Hacker, Gordon Baker, David Stern, John McDowell, Crispin Wright, Norman Malcolm, James Conant, Cora Diamond, David Pears, Stanley Cavell, Peter Winch.
And Picasso was regressive; he was no more than a variation on Cézanne.
Quoting Banno
And African art. "Good artists copy, great artists steal".
Quoting Banno
A more interesting comparison would be Cezanne and Warhol. Is Pop art a variation of impressionism or does it involve a more radical rethinking of the meaning and role of art?
Or can it be both?
no
Although political content in art goes back a long way. What we have here is a loss of direction, where is the equivalent of the radical art movements of the 20th Century, like cubism, modernism, abstract expressionism, now? Theres nothing, its as though its all been said already, theres nothing else to say. Or maybe its gone underground, I havent kept up with whats happening in virtual, or AI art. Most of the major art exhibitions these days are retrospectives. All the publicly available works by a famous artist gathered together, which then go on tour of the worlds prestigious galleries to draw in the crowds.
Then there is the issue of money in art, its sold its soul. Damian Hursts diamond skull, For The Love Of God illustrates this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Love_of_God
Damian Hursts response to the grotesque capture of the art world by big money.
An interesting topic. I've found myself drawn away from these forums for just this reason. Creativity is rare and the proposal of it is rarely explored beyond basic thought. I've had a few truly wonderful discussions here with some members, but most people just aren't willing to engage at a curious level and really dig in.
Another thing to consider is that most truly intelligent people don't go into philosophy anymore. If you're brimming with intellect, creativity, wonder, and trying to solve problems, there are so many better ways to do so while also profiting more. Philosophy is mostly the realm of caretakers and hobbyists now. Not real thinkers or people looking for wonder. They have made their own mind up on their own outlook in life, and desire the comfort of knowing what they know and their ability to defend it.
This has a consequence of philosophical academia being ironically, a conservative ancient dinosaur. Creativity is stifled in place of simple takes wrapped in complex word play on well worn topics that you can complete quickly to keep publishing. I got my masters in it, and could barely stomach the fact that every professor seemed desperately trying to keep their job and were constantly telling everyone to hold back and focus on 'what was popular' at the time.
Finally, many people come into philosophy thinking it has a pedigree to it. Where real intellects lack, false intellects gather that pretend to be smart and prey on those coming in. Use of esoteric vocabulary and a focus on minutia and inconsequential points can make one appear smarter than they are, with words and concepts to retreat behind if one is found out. Its not exactly friendly to genuinely curious people who lack such an ego, and those are the people who are most likely to be creative and contribute to a field.
Finally, creative ideas are hard to communicate, read, and grasp. Search some of my work on knowledge and morality. I can safely say I'm actually a creative philosopher. Check it out and maybe you'll see why more like me aren't here.
All in all, philosophy is best pursued not as a focus, but alongside what people are working on in today's world. That's where I'm focusing now, and its definitely been far more satisfying and impactful then these boards of late.