[walterk]

FWIW, PG's thoughts on philosophy are largely confined to "analytic philosophy", which I agree suffers from the problems he talks about. There is a whole other tradition of sorts (sometimes referred to as "continental philosophy"), taking a different path from Kant, including Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Badiou, etc. This side of philosophy tends to suffer from being extremely difficult to understand, but yields much genuine insight for those who take the time to study it.

There's also the pragmatic tradition, as DanielBMarkham notes. I'm less familiar with it, but many have seen commonalities between Heidegger and the Pragmatists.

Ayn Rand's writing can be inspirational, but her philosophy was poorly conceived.

[gwenhwyfaer]

If Rand's fans accepted that she was worthless as a philosopher, but half a century ahead of the self-help curve, they'd be a lot less annoying.

[voidstar]

i think it's precisely the opposite. analytic philosophers try to say clear and precise (yet admittedly, often trivial) things while continental philosophers take on grandiose-sounding concepts and discuss them nonsensically (but with FEELING). And so I think pg's arguments don't apply to highly-regarded philosophy done in the past 30-odd years (highly-regarded, that is, by other philosophers). I don't think Lewis was confused about how he used words when he developed functionalism, or modal realism in On the Plurality of Worlds. Nor was Kripke in Naming and Necessity, carefully separating epistemology from metaphysics in his theory of reference. I don't think searle was confused about words in his Chinese Room argument, and I don't think Parfit is confused about words in stating his ethical paradoxes and reductionist account of personal identity in Reasons and Persons. Nearly all of these arguments are terribly controversial, indicating that their conclusions actually matter to people, yet they are considered paradigms of good philosophy, and all were written in the past 30-odd years. Chinese Room was in fact a direct response of sorts to john mccarthy's argument that his thermostat can have beliefs. So the point is that there is good philosophy being done out there, even if it may be too recent for pg to have been exposed to it in college, and may be more cautious and exact (and therefore, far less grandiose) than the old "proofs of god's existence."

[soundsop]

This side of philosophy tends to suffer from being extremely difficult to understand, but yields much genuine insight for those who take the time to study it.

Insights such as?