[jhbadger]

Is it though? Has philosophy actually made any advances in understanding the "great questions" of the meaning of life and what not? Perhaps the reason that people find reading Plato and Aristotle worthwhile is that people are still beating their heads against the same unanswerable questions.

[empath75]

Yes. It’s just that when they do, it becomes known as logic or science and philosophers get less interested in continuing to think about it.

Almost all of the early work in what we’d call computer science was done by philosophers before computers even existed.

[jhbadger]

But that's just because philosophy originally meant all scholarly pursuits. All of science was called "natural philosophy" before it got its own name. That doesn't mean that what we'd call science today is the same as what we call philosophy, even if some ancients like Aristotle did both.

[rwnspace]

I believe the author was referring to work done in reason, logic and 'natural philosophy' from the time of Kant/Hume/Leibniz onwards, so, 18thC+.

One of the reasons philosophy doesn't seem so well these days - I think - is because the value our society places on software engineers is so much higher. The same kinds of natural ability which help with reasoning about the behaviour of some function, help with reasoning about the shape of some concept in philosophy.

I don't particularly lament this shift, as a philosophy grad who is working on becoming a software engineer. I only lament that experimental and multi-disciplinary philosophy is becoming cool and interesting only in the past decade or so.

[goatlover]

Philosophy advances the discussion of the great questions, exploring them from different angles and with different twists. This sometimes leads to new questions.

[navait]

What about Analytic philosophy? It's come up with new ways to discuss and illuminate what we are trying to understand, and starts in the late 1800's.

[jhbadger]

That's a fairly broad field though -- there are some analytic philosophers who were/are practically mathematicians, and who certainly helped advance logic and related fields. On the other hand you have analytical people who are working on the "big questions" like ethics where the same questions from ancient times get asked over and over.

[Bluestrike2]

It's not so much that philosophy has definitely answered the "great questions" that makes the field cumulative, so much as it is that philosophical works are immensely context-dependent. Certain assumptions about the reader's knowledge are implicit, and if you lack that knowledge, it becomes significantly harder for the reader to grasp various arguments. At best, you miss things.

Individual Platonic dialogues aren't self-contained; they all make reference to concepts from other dialogues as well as Plato's contemporaries and pre-Socratics influences. Works by later Platonists along with critiques often make similar assumptions about what you know. Honestly, there's two thousand years directly influenced and shaped by Plato alone. Almost all of which assumes that you've read Plato. Beyond that, both direct and indirect references to various ideas by Plato can be found throughout nearly every philosophical tradition.

Take Plotinus and The Enneads, for instance. When Porphyry edited Plotinus' writings, he ordered them according to a non-chronological principle meant to make them more approachable. As a result, multiple arguments in one treatise will reference arguments made in another. And throughout all of them, Plotinus takes it as a given that you're familiar with Plato's work. If you're not, you'll be almost hopelessly lost. There are plenty of other examples; for many if not most philosophers, their body of work can include extensive seminar notes (Lacan, for example), letters and correspondences, etc. Or look at Nietzsche and how his writings have been distorted and misunderstood by so many. His sister's systematic edits and falsifications of his writings were an attempt to twist Nietzsche's writings into supporting anti-semitism despite the fact that throughout his life he repeatedly denounced anti-semitism and the nationalism he saw it linked to. It took decades to repair Nietzsche's reputation and that was accomplished only by returning to his original writings themselves rather than the bastardized versions his sister put out.

Secondary sources can do an excellent job of highlighting, summarizing, and explaining arguments that might be split across years of different writings or multiple philosophers. They can't replace reading the original philosophers' work, however, because you can't divorce a later exegesis from the source it's attempting to interpret. Later work is tied to the earlier works to which it responds; the latter's value is present even when the former seeks to eviscerate it. Philosophy simply can't escape earlier works, and that's a wonderful thing because it forces us to better understand the ideas and traditions of ideas being discussed in their totality and context.