Damn straight. Wanna give me the gist? 
I’m currently listening to “A History of Western Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell as an audiobook. I start listening when I go to bed, and while it’s quite interesting I never manage to stay awake very long :p. It’s tricky to find the last moment I caught before falling asleep, so it leads to a lot of overlapping listening.
So far I have come to Epicureanism, and it’s starting to make a bit more sense than what came before, but sadly also than what is likely to follow until more modern times. I’m expecting an even stronger religious bend ahead :(.
You really want to mess your brain up? Read Camus.
On second thought, don’t.
I think starting with a modern sense of thought and working backward makes more sense in a lot of ways. Work with enlightenment principles which you are well versed in whether you know it or not, and then work backward trying to figure out how that kind of thought came about. Go back through anselm and aquinas and then get back to the ancient greeks. Generally I find philosophy more compelling when it goes along with the historical story.
A great book on philosophy I have is The Courtier and the Heretic. It makes it all a lot more palatable by making them into human beings, characters in a story. Also for easy reading on the birth of the modern era read ‘The Baroque Cycle’ by Neal Stephenson.
If you think of philosophy as the history of thought then it makes a whole lot more sense IMV.
A warning about Russell: He’s a good writer but very biased, mostly towards atheism and positivism. I’d recommend reading his history after you read one that’s more neutral to opposing viewpoints. Again, I think the books I linked to in my post above are good intros.
Thanks for the heads up.
I do have the same bias though, especially regarding atheism. I can’t take any claims of souls being fire and all that mumbo-jumbo seriously. Even though he might be biased, I think he seems to represent the philosophers’ arguments as factually as possible, then he points out why he thinks they are wrong, and lastly, what the philosopher might have given as an answer to his rebuttal. I am still only rather early into the book, at stoicism.
Do you have any examples of areas where the bias is problematic? Maybe the problem lies in giving less time to philosophers he finds less important?
I’m not saying that I wouldn’t read an opposing view, as that is essential to widening ones mind, but for now my goal is to get a basic overview of the history in general. I think it has been interesting so far.
I have to confess it’s been years since I read Russel’s History, so I’m only remembering a general impression I got from it. I do remember thinking it was more of a “here’s what people thought and here’s why it was wrong” rather than “Here’s what people thought, here are their reasons for thinking it and here’s the effect it had on subsequent thinkers.” I’m an atheist too, but religion played a huge part in the history of thought, and I felt Russell was needlessly snarky and dismissive to religion and to non-emprical philosophies. He is very witty and worth reading, but I’m not sure he doesn’t distort history to suit his biases. Again, it’s been awhile, so I’m afraid I can’t think of any specific examples.
I must say that that some snark has been rather hilarious. I don’t have any examples on hand though; it’s harder to keep references when listening to an unindexed audio book.
Your characterization seems to fit my understanding as well, but so far I don’t think he has been overly condescending (maybe it will be more so as I get into the dark ages), and has given praise to great thinkers and ideas where it is due, even though they are outdated by modern standards.
If I find time and inclination I will expand to other sources. Since I have already started here I will follow it to its conclusion.
It’s a great book, and well worth reading. I just thought it should be brought up that it’s not the most objective history out there. Russell can be very funny.
Maybe because there’s nothing there:
I’m not defending this position. I’m seeing what the philosophers here can do to tear it apart.
At two opposite extremes that take the wind out of a lot of philosophical sail, I find the implications behind Cantor’s transfinite numbers and Gödel’s Proof on the one side and ‘Zen and the art of Motorcycle maintenance’ on the other far more satisfactory. You can take it back to Aristotle’s ‘decree’ that A thing is either A or not-A. Well no, usually it isn’t except at the most trivial level; it ‘is’ many things according to functional relationships with the world around it and how it’s being considered at the time.
By whom? I have a BA in Philosophy, and to the best of my recollection we never spent any time at all on this type of question. It certainly didn’t come up in logic class, where we were busy learning first-order logic and working out proofs.
Some have said that the history of philosophy is the history of dialectic. I would avoid reading any one thinker’s summation of Western philosophy on the grounds that to do so misses the point of the entire enterprise. Also, you’re right, most people with academic training agree that, furthermore, as far as summations, Russell’s is particularly problematic.
You don’t do us the favor of elaborating on what you mean by “Maybe because there’s nothing there,” but if by that you mean “It’s all sophistry,” I’d say you’ve pretty substantially misapprehended the essay-writer’s thesis. After all, he concludes thus, “Philosophy is as young now as math was in 1500. There is a lot more to discover.” That doesn’t seem like a call to stop doing philosophy to me.
I spent quite a bit of time studying logic in college, and it was always tied to my math, science, and engineering curriculum. When I’d chat with the philosophy majors, all of the logic questions I’d raise seemed to have answers, while theirs were more likely to be tied up in semantics. I never took a class with “philosophy” in the name because I didn’t see a practical application for anything they were talking about.
Maybe I’m dragging this too far away from the OP, if you think so or the OP expresses such an opinion, I will happily step down.
Since I am pretty much a complete neophyte at philosophy (much like the OP; coincidentally I am also a programmer ;)), and currently “reading” Russell’s book due to another poster expressing his liking of it, I would appreciate if you would expand that comment a bit more.
As you probably know, I have already been warned by Larry Borgia, but if you have more information I would like to hear it.
Secondly, regarding your next post. Do you agree with the essay-writer’s conclusion that there is a lot more to discover in philosophy? If so, will there likely be some groundbreaking discoveries? Of course I wouldn’t expect anybody to know the future or give accurate predictions, but maybe something about the nature of possible discoveries and what the chances are of some idea coming up that would advance the field significantly. What sort of questions might get answered? What sort of implications could there be? I realize that these might be difficult questions, but I am interested even in very broad answers.
As I am not very philosophically minded (and damn you Plato for putting me in a low societal rank because of it), I am having some problems imagining such changes and discoveries.
I don’t know what you mean by this. Are you saying that in a casual conversation you’d explain a logic problem from your math class and then ask Philosophy majors to offer an example of a logic problem from their classes? That sounds like a pretty awkward conversation to me.
The kinds of problems we worked on in my logic class (PHIL 230) were things like “Everything in the domain of discourse is either a cube or a sphere. All spheres are large. At least one object is not large. Prove that there is at least one cube.” (That would have been something from early in the semester, they got harder.) There was always one and only one correct answer and we were expected to find it.
Other Philosophy courses deal with very different kinds of questions, things like “When is breaking the law justified?” or “Is it right to help a terminally ill person commit suicide?” or even “How does a listener determine the meaning of an ironic statement?”, but these would never be described as logic questions.
*Well, that probably has more to do with young Philosophy students than Philosophy as a discipline.
No, it probably won’t. It helps to have at least some comfort with the basics of social choice theory to be able to understand his remarks on preference relations and his analysis of Amartya Sen, but it won’t kill you if you don’t have it. You should be able to get comfortable with it pretty quickly.
20th century mathematics (and still today) has been dominated by attempts to clear up controversies caused by 19th and early 20th century philosophy. The development of the computer had its roots in these same controversies.
Similarly, even off hand remarks by philosophers have been pretty influential in mathematics. Wittgenstein’s statement “a number is an exponent” motivates Church’s definition of the Church numbers in the lambda-calculus.
The philosophy professor I mentioned upthread thought that was So. Meaningful. that she felt the need to repeat it several times per hour, sometimes stopping more or less randomly to say it.
I’ve always suspected that it’s the ultimate source for the most douchey, annoying, overused phrase in current use: “It is what it is.”