Among the many bad arguments this article makes, the most glaring to me is assuming that the "distilled version" of Newton is superior to his original works. Little known fact: Newton had profound insights in the philosophy of science, predicting, among other things, computational complexity,a and if these parts of his thought were heeded, maybe the "Enlightenment" wouldn't have made the terrible mistake of thinking (or willing) the world as a linear, rational place (it isn't.)
"Superior" is meaningless without context. It's all relative to what your goals are. A historian should be reading primary sources. A high school student learning calculus is probably better off with something more modern.
There is a difference between something being subjective and the ability of people to understand it. Subjectivity has nothing to do with how well something is understood.
I want to second the other response seeking elaboration. Will I need to read Newton? That sounds so fascinating.
And to your reasoning for it’s importance, it’s quite optimistic to think it would have made a.difference but nonetheless every bit would have been worth the effort. What a nightmare!
This article leans heavily on an analogy between philosophy and physics and/or economics. This analogy is not generally accepted by most philosophers. Briefly: philosophy is not a science.
>Again this assumes that the job of the distiller is to summarize the original author. A good analysis book doesn’t summarize Newton it digests his insights and presents them as part of a grander theory.
Calculus is certainly part of a more general theory. The works of e.g. Kierkegaard may have relevance to some theories of philosophy, e.g. existentialism, but the best analysis of how Kierkegaard contributed to existentialism is still not a real analysis of Kierkegaard. Philosophy deals with a person's most fundamental beliefs, and because of that we often want to look at the whole actual person whose life grows up around those beliefs. That is not the case in physics or economics.
>This analogy is not generally accepted by most philosophers. Briefly: philosophy is not a science.
Which philosophers are you referring to? I'd agree with "many" but "most" is an empirical claim I'd not be brave enough to make. Do you perhaps mean to say "economics isn't a natural science"?
Case in point: there is tons of kuhnians running around that think of science as a consent-seeking endeavor with agreed upon principles. They recognise that any hard delineation between say econ not being a science but physics being one, usually kicks out a lot of progress in physics as not scientific. Especially those theoretical physics whose predictions are extremely fruitful bbut where experimental data is out of reach right now.
>Imagine Keynes was really a highlander and was still alive and at the height of his intellectual powers. Who would it be more beneficial to read, the 1936 Keynes or the 2010 Keynes?
The "at the height of his intellectual powers" is sort of begging the question.
Imagine Paul McCartney was still alive and active. Who would it be more beneficial to listen to, the 1967 McCartney of The Beatles, or the 2018 McCartney?
Yes, I saw him live last year, he was great :) But it would be daft to think his recent works come anywhere near the importance of what he did in the sixties
IMHO, the archive article makes the better point -- that if a subject wants to advance (e.g. economics, biology, psychology) no scientist today should require the primary teaching texts in academia to be the first ever written on the topic, a century or even a millenium ago. But economics and philosophy, and even parts of cognitive science and psychology still do exactly this.
No, a more productive pedagogy should begin with texts written as recently as possible, perhaps to build on early principles but more importantly to add as much to them as possible while revising all errors and omissions.
Today nobody learning biology or medicine begins with Darwin, Galen, or Hippocrates. But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods.
I disagree, classical philosophy is what sparked the enlightenment, and the fact that so few scholars read those texts today, is probably why we are heading into a new age of stupidity.
Obviously you can get great in the field of physics or mathematics without reading Plato, but you really shouldn’t, because the works and thoughts of Plato are the foundation of our free society. And that’s just Plato, you really should enrich your life by reading classics of your field as well as philosophy, classic literature, arts and history.
In my country we have a word to describe this, it’s called “dannelse”, and I can’t find an English word for it. The closest thing I’ve been able to come up with to describe it is: ”give people a broad, general basis for developing their talents to the maximum and growing into strong, open and multi-faceted individuals who can assume their responsibility in society to the full.”. In my country, you can’t attend the university without a minimum foundation of classical philosophy, because you can’t do science if you don’t understand how knowledge is obtained, but I’ve never met an actual scientist who didn’t actually delve deeper into those aspects of life, because they offer so much in return.
Another example is programming. Who would you rather hire? Someone who is self taught, or someone who’s educated in best practices and patterns? The latter, because they won’t repeat the mistakes of the past 25 years. Every science is like this, and if you don’t educte yourself on the past, you’re really just wasting your time, making someone else’s mistake.
The real irony of the original story is that it excludes history from this. History happens to be my field, and unlike most other sciences, our classical works are mostly full of lies. Because they weren’t written to keep track of history, but to further the authors political agenda at the time. We use them only because we have to.
> I disagree, classical philosophy is what sparked the enlightenment
The rediscovery of classical philosophy spurred the Renaissance, the Enlightenment was later and, though it built opon the Renaissance, not really directly stimulated by classical philosophy.
If you read "Africa, Asia and the History of Philosophy" you'll see how this whole story of "Ancient Greeks were great philosophers but then their knowledge was buried during the Dark Ages by Muslim conquerors and when their knowledge was recovered during the Renaissance by Jesuit scholars the torch of wisdom lit bright again and the world found Enlightenment, yada yada" is the same sort of thing as tribal myths of "primitive" cultures
FWIW, I think the standard narrative is that knowledge of the great Greek and Roman works was lost in Europe as a result of the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the immense reduction in civilizational complexity that it entailed, not as a result of Muslim conquest.
And further you'll find the standard narrative is that the Arabic world was responsible for preserving many of the great classical works and for advancing knowledge of mathematics and science during the middle ages.
>Ancient Greeks were great philosophers but then their knowledge was buried during the Dark Ages by Muslim conquerors
Don't be silly. It was Christian Europe that lost and discarded the non-religious philosophical texts, and the Muslim Middle East that preserved them and advanced from them.
Yeah, I mean, that's a even the standard narrative; the idea that they were lost due to Muslim conquest and rediscovered by Jesuits I've never heard before, and it isn't even superficially plausible since there was no general Muslim conquest for them to be lost in, and the Jesuits were formed too late to rediscover them and spark the Renaissance.
In my country we have a word to describe this, it’s called “dannelse”, and I can’t find an English word for it. The closest thing I’ve been able to come up with to describe it is: ”give people a broad, general basis for developing their talents to the maximum and growing into strong, open and multi-faceted individuals who can assume their responsibility in society to the full.”
This sounds like the English term "liberal education."
>Today nobody learning biology or medicine begins with Darwin, Galen, or Hippocrates.
They should. Not to get the technical details, but to understand the spirit and the spiritual adventure that got them their fancy degrees and labs. And also to not be uncultivated technocrats.
>But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods.
The fact they were "white men" doesn't mean anything, except if you're racist. Or anti-racist racist, which is also fashionable.
I'm as anti-colonialism as they come, but in Europe and the US the majority of the population ethnicity-wise and the founders were also "white" so why would they study something else? Those "white men" built their culture. In Africa and Asia, they can (and do) study their own people on those matters (e.g. Confucius, Lao Tse, Zuo Qiuming for China, and so on).
Besides, Philosophy, like literature is not some path towards "progress", as it's not a technical endeavour. It's a collection of ways of thinking about society, culture, ontology, ethics, politics, and so on. Those complement each other, they don't obsolete them. And often the best discoveries come earlier, rather than later. At worst, the philosophy of an era might not fit the cultural fashions of another. But that doesn't make the philosophy obsolete (and those fashions would change themselves with time).
And unlike with Physics, where you can use some random textbook to learn that f=ma without reading Newton, in Philosophy the full wording and context matters as well. What you're left with when you distill it is like Cliff Notes to War and Peace as opposed to the book itself (or "Functional programming for dummies in 24 hours" book as opposed to the "SICP" to use a CS inspired example).
"Today nobody learning biology or medicine begins with Darwin, Galen, or Hippocrates. But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods."
Philosophy is more of a dialogue with great minds of the past and present, rather than some kind of "advance" or "progress" of the kind idealized in some views of science.
If you want to engage in a dialogue, it would be a good idea to try to figure out what the other people in the dialogue thought and said.
If you're trying to make better predictions, create more accurate models of the world, or build better bridges, you might not care what anyone else thought or said except in so far as they help you with your project. But that's usually not what philosophers are after.
Also, if you are ignorant of philosophers of the past, you are likely to reinvent the wheel or get bogged down in issues already covered at length by minds far greater than your own.
Finally, reading, analyzing, and discussing the philosophers of the past is great training in philosophy. It is in some respects analogous to doing exercises in mathematics, or maybe participating in a programming contest.
To call Hippocrates "white" is to be deeply ignorant of the history of racial divisions in societies -- which is forgivable for the average person, but not in someone making a specific argument about racial divisions.
> But economics and philosophy, and even parts of cognitive science and psychology still do exactly this.
Economics absolutely does not do this. Philosophy might, depending on the program, approximate it for a very loose understanding of “primary teaching text”. But philosophy isn't even in principal a discovery-of-the-correct-in-a-falsifiable-domain process (it once included that, but that part since had been split out of philosophy as empirical science.)
> But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods.
No, they don't; economics doesn't usually expect neophytes to read non-current texts at all, and philosophy might have you read ancient texts (or excerpts therefrom) early on, but only explicitly critically, not “as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods.”
> But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods.
My understanding is that economics programs rarely bother to require a student to dive much into history anymore. There's little time spent understanding the many schools, their development, what they get right/wrong, or how they continue to provide helpful models of understanding reality. Instead, they seek to present economics as a science with an obtainable universal theory/model of everything, free of subjective value judgments--but a half-decent study of the history of the development of political economy would, much to the chagrin of the neoclassicalists who changed the term to economics, would quickly disabuse the students of such a notion.
As a former student who studied philosophy 20 years ago, there was zero suggestion that the dead white men's words were written on clay tablets by the gods. There was vociferous debate on those dead white men's words, none of which were divine, and then more debate when we found out what the next dead white man said to counter the first, and so on, until we started encountering notable dead (and sometimes not-dead!) white (and not-white!) men (and women!). Reading contemporary thinkers first would have been a rather frustrating and utterly counterproductive pedagogy because students wouldn't understand what newer thinkers were reacting and responding to if they didn't already understand what came before. I've never personally encountered a philosophy professor--or philosopher, for that matter--who even suggested anything in philosophy was written as if by the gods themselves (who very frequently are doubted to even exist, or don't figure prominently in notable works).
"Today nobody learning biology or medicine begins with Darwin, Galen, or Hippocrates"
I don't think those three (or all dead white men in general) exist on an equal footing. An educated person should read Darwin, even though modern evolutionary theory has moved beyond. I think Galen and Hippocrates are less important, although I must admit I say that out of ignorance, as I know little about them besides their names, the existence of the Hippocratic Oath, and the general sense that Galen is not at all relevant to modern medicine.
The thing about reading historical stuff is that in trying to learn something, it is useful to know how the first human who understood it learned it, as well as how some people think you should approach it today.
Some things developed in the past have been completely overturned and are clearly obsolete, but some have not - calculus, Newtonian mechanics, etc.
I think you're ignoring the point of the article. In science you generally only want to build upon something when you are certain, beyond any reasonable doubt, that what you're assuming is correct. Otherwise it is, at best, a waste of time. At worst it's something that could severely mislead people and undermine your entire field. For instance first let's consider physics. I can explain to you the math of acceleration, gravity, friction, conservation of energy, or other basic aspects of nature. In 30 minutes you can setup an experiment and confirm for yourself with practically 100% accuracy that this is all correct. This, these sort of first principles, can be very safely built upon. But then as you build new ideas upon these first principles and then new ideas upon these new ideas, you run ever greater risk of fundamental mistake. And so going back to the original sources is critical to understand how they came to their conclusions and where the risks might be.
Now let's consider psychology. Psychology itself lacks any real first principles. Different people, and sometimes even the same people, will act in different ways in the same scenario. At best it's a probabilistic science which introduces major and complex issues, when done perfectly. And it's not done perfectly. Outside of flawed logic, these sort of sciences also seem to attract unusually flawed scientists. For instance it's now completely clear that the Stanford Prison Experiment was literally fake. The students were coached on how to behave by the 'researcher', and saw the experiment as literally playing improv with one another. The 'mental breakdown' that caused the experiment to be cancelled after 6 days was fake. And we've now been teaching that experiment to kids for some 50 years, and ongoing. And it's not just older experiments of course. Recent research has shown that some 50-60% of major psychological studies in reputable journals cannot be replicated. You simply cannot build upon this in any meaningful way and to try to do so would turn the field into an even greater mockery of anything that purports to be science.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100307015535/http://www.infini...