Re:Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship with her readers
by jfengel on Friday October 23, 2020 @03:05PM
(#24872715)
Perhaps especially HN. The language of philosophy isn't just unfamiliar, it's specific to particular authors. You can't discuss de Beauvoir without reading de Beauvoir herself, and the things that de Beauvoir was reading.
HN readers tend to be inspired by the model of science, which is more settled in its vocabulary, and concepts are less immediately tied to the speaker. That is, you can study relativity without knowing a word of German. It would sound absurd to tell somebody to read Einstein in the original in order to understand it. Quite the contrary: later re-formulations are preferred, as they benefit from later developments in framing the questions. The numbers it yields are identical and therefore at least as good.
This is a challenge for anybody studying any philosophy. HN readers are generally smart enough to understand it and even be interested in in it, but the way discussions are framed tends to put them off.
HN readers tend to be inspired by the model of science, which is more settled in its vocabulary, and concepts are less immediately tied to the speaker. That is, you can study relativity without knowing a word of German. It would sound absurd to tell somebody to read Einstein in the original in order to understand it. Quite the contrary: later re-formulations are preferred, as they benefit from later developments in framing the questions. The numbers it yields are identical and therefore at least as good.
This is a challenge for anybody studying any philosophy. HN readers are generally smart enough to understand it and even be interested in in it, but the way discussions are framed tends to put them off.