[cess11]

"Philosophy was the first and will be the last academic subject."

Hard no. Theology was first, and will forever be.

Where was Plato's Akademia? In a chapel of Athena, goddess of wisdom. In Aristotle you'll often find that philosophy is actually a method of theology, it's a way to figure out the divine, and what is most or least divine.

[Wissenschafter]

I mean, theology and philosophy could be argued endlessly to be interchangeable, go ask Wittgenstein. He just argues that things that are 'truly argued' with language are philosophy, while things that are bullshit is more or less theology.

I usually stick to the analytical stuff, the continental stuff was pretty traumatizing honestly, reading through Being-and-Time in a couple days on Adderall fried some brain cells and my perception of reality permanently.

[cess11]

If you're referring to the finale in the Tractatus, then I'd recommend you spend some time with the late Wittgenstein, like On Certainty or perhaps some of his letters to Drury, e.g. https://externalword.blog/2013/10/19/ludwig-wittgenstein-let... .

Infamously analytical philosophy quickly turned out to be a dead end and led them to metaphysics to try and salvage their community.

Being and Time has a lot of interesting material but it is ill advised to approach it without having spent quite some time studying the philosophical tradition from Plato up until Heidegger himself, including Nietzsche. The old nazi presupposes a firm grasp of this history of ideas and makes an attempt at a 'reboot', which unsurprisingly turns out rather inscrutable without this background.

As for traumatising, in my experience Heidegger just lays down some groundwork for Derrida and Baudrillard. They're seriously efficient at questioning the foundations of language, thinking and society. Though I'd sooner recommend Merleu-Ponty, whose phenomenological achievements are more accessible and more easily applied in everyday life.

One could make the claim that some knowledge and experience does not fit into language and writing, the primary vehicles of philosophy. Here theology is a long tradition of approaches to such knowing and experience, which tends to be more foundational than the problem domains of philosophy.

[gowld]

A PhD is a doctor of philosophy. Science is a natural philosophy.

Philosophy is a broad, vague category.

[port11]

I like the notion that religions prescribe a philosophy of life. That’s really all they are, with 1+ deities to justify the basis for it. Or, you know, you pick a philosophy that makes sense without the fear of god(s).

[jhanschoo]

Religious traditions tend to hold that certain claims or parts of their canon are infallible, whereas academic philosophy is more welcoming of the critical and argumentative process.

[rendx]

I would think they're on opposite ends: philosophy teaches you autonomous experiential thinking, religion asks you to follow some third party authority.

[metalspot]

this is a modernist misconception. ancient religions are philosophical frameworks and the texts are internally coherent arguments for those frameworks. They are just expressed in language that modern audiences without formal training don't understand.

[rendx]

I use "religion" to mean organized forms of spirituality, governed by "truths" you are supposed to "believe" in as member of the religion. Any such belief is a "third party truth": You do not know whether it is true or not. One may argue that this violates what "true" spirituality entails, which is experiental and not organized. For such spirituality, you can obviously read spiritual literature from whatever religion you please, like other philosophical works, but you read between the lines and don't follow some other person's interpretation (= third party authority).

[amanaplanacanal]

Which texts are internally coherent? The religion I grew up with certainly wasn't.

[metalspot]

How would you know? Are you an expert in the language and culture that its texts were originally written in? Even an expert would qualify their interpretation by saying that it is only an educated guess. Look at how easy it is for humans to misunderstand each other, even in direct verbal communication, then extend that to the level of misunderstanding in email and text messages. Now tell me how well you think modern people actually understand the meaning of something written thousands of years ago.