I'm not a fan of overly technical philosophy (I'm also not a fan of radishes, but I'll save that for another post). My problem is this:
- Science can be very technical, and thus hard for the layman to understand, but it makes up for it by being useful.
- The arts tend not to be technical as they are meant to provide some sort of enjoyment to Mr Normal Person.
Technical philosophy fits into neither camp: it is too technical for an average person to get anything out of and it is not useful. This is why I think when philosophy starts to get too technical it has probably lost its way.
Horribly over-simplistic I realise, but I think there's something to be said for such an argument.
4 comments:
I think that what you say can be turned around somewhat. Suppose that philosophy, or one set of problems in philosophy, concerns some genuinely interesting substantive questions. Usefulness may be too much to aim for, but you could probably say the same about something like cosmology. Anyway, once you accept that, the technicality issue has an obvious solution: philosophy should be as technical as it needs to be in order to answer the questions.
I suppose we might disagree about this because we disagree about what you say in your subsequent post i.e. over whether philosophy is aiming at the truth. I think that it is, or at least that it should be.
I do think that what is required is the minimum necessary technicality, and that some philosophers do not respect this.
I was originally going to write this post from the perspective of funding: how can we justify funding for highly technical philosophy as it is not beneficial to the public – it's neither useful nor enjoyable. This may well be true of other subjects also, but I think it is certainly true of philosophy.
That sounds like a good point to me. Plenty of people pay taxes that then fund philosophers of language (say). Many of them don't get anything from it even if the philosophy goes well. This looks bad in comparison to the sciences, where if the research is successful there is some sort of payoff for the person paying somewhere down the line in at least some cases.
Of course there's a parallel claim about something like opera and some people would say that opera is still worth funding. Actually I think it's rather a good point there too.
I suppose with opera it is at least possible for someone to enjoy it without having to know that much. Whereas for some of the more technical philosophy a huge amount of background literature would need to be known in order for it to be understood.
(I'm not sure opera should be funded to be honest, but it does seem to have a few advantages over technical philosophy for the layman)
Post a Comment