I totally disagree with this statement, the article looks like something from a cheap business webinar. He talks about Planck, Chomsky, Charlie Munger, Joseph Henrich and even talks about something cringely named “Quantum Thinking” yet he fails to mention a single philosopher born after 400BCE and only makes platitudinous references to Plato and Socrates.

What is always interesting to me is how you can spend a large amount of study in the subject and still end up finding out about a new philosopher (I’m going to read some Deleuze now.). For me, David Lewis has been the most interesting philosopher in the last 50 years. Maybe Thomas Nagel as well.

"On the weekends, he’d take computers apart and put them back together, so he could understand how they work. He rarely reconstructed them in the same way he dismantled them, though. For the joy of play and the pursuit of efficiency gains, he searched for new ways to reconfigure the machines. Every now and then, he’d find a performance improvement that even the designers didn’t consider."

I guess this sounds impressive to some people, but to someone in the field it is absolute nonsense. And it sets the stage for the rest of the article.

Here he gets all gatekeepy:

"Charlie Munger calls this the difference between “real knowledge” and “chauffeur knowledge.” "

Ugh. It just goes on:

"The alternative is Quantum Thinking, which is holding multiple contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. "

Aaaaand I'm done.

This type of writing is better suited to the self-congratulatory content over on Quillette.

I also agree that among many of them, there's an 'impressionistic' approach to presenting their work. Handwavy, you could say. But that's not to say their work isn't the expression of deep and clear philosophical insight.

There are notable continental philosphers whose presentation is tightly-argued; Hegel and Kant come to mind, but there are many others.

One final note: none of the positive or hopeful things that I said about philosophy apply to the postmodern or Continental kinds. As far as I can tell, the latter aren’t really “philosophy” at all, but more like pretentious brands of performance art that fancy themselves politically subversive, even as they cultivate deliberate obscurity and draw mostly on the insights of Hitler and Stalin apologists. I suspect I won’t ruffle too many feathers here at MIRI by saying this.

I have less experience of them than Scott Aaronson does. But what I've seen has not suggested that he is in any way mistaken.

Glibly casting off an entire intellectual tradition as a case of the emperor having no clothes is, to me, a really tragic dismissal of an electrifying body of ideas.

For anyone who's been put off by the language of continental philosophy, I'd recommend Peter Barry's book called Beginning Theory. It's written in very clear English and gives concrete examples of the terms you usually just hear bandied about (deconstruction, semiotics, whatever).

Where do you get the impression that I'm merely being glib?

I'm not being put off by the language. I can make my way through that (though I do a lot better in English translations than the original French). But whenever I make the effort, I find that "there is no there there". And I have the effort on a number of occasions because someone I respected swore that a particular work was particularly important.

But the more I did, the more I found myself agreeing with Paul Graham in http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html. And I've found the hard way that whenever there is a topic of interest that both philosophy and science touch on, I always prefer to read what science has to say about it.

My reasoning is different than his. Whenever we think of something, our odds of being on the right path are low. We need feedback to steer by. And "applicability" makes feedback much clearer than any other standard that I can think of.

It is true that "philosophy" refers to a bunch of apparently-unrelated disciplines. What they share doesn't have a name that I know of; it is that they all depend on how to think, in broad terms (perceive, remember, how to reason etc.).

Paul Graham certainly knows how to think. But I think he doesn't give enough credit for that to his philosophy training.

Did you read e.g. Sokal and Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures, aka Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science?!

Set out to show how numerous key intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly, Sokal and Bricmont intentionally provide considerably lengthy extracts in order to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context. Such extracts pull from such works as those of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard, who—in terms of the quantity of published works, invited presentations, and of citations received—were some of the leading academics of continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and/or the social sciences at the time of publication.

The book provides a chapter to each of the above-mentioned authors, "the tip of the iceberg" of a group of intellectual practices that can be described as "mystification, deliberately obscure language, confused thinking and the misuse of scientific concepts." For example, Luce Irigaray is criticised for asserting that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation" because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us;" and for asserting that fluid mechanics is unfairly neglected because it deals with "feminine" fluids in contrast to "masculine" rigid mechanics. Similarly, Lacan is criticized for drawing an analogy between topology and mental illness that, in Sokal and Bricmont's view, is unsupported by any argument and is "not just false: it is gibberish."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense

Compare Jean Baudrillard's Simulcra to Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. IMO, they both identify the same basic phenomenon--that the reality we inhabit is socially constructed, including much or all of what we consider our physical reality, if only because it's difficult if not impossible (except through contrivances like math) to disentangle socially imbued meaning from even the most mundane of objects and events. But Baudrillard builds an exaggerated philosophical framework with little if any additional descriptive power.

Similarly, Baudrillard's philosophy is often used, including my himself, in an excessively prescriptivist manner, unrestrained by any admission of incompleteness. (Continental philosophers have always loved indulging in supposedly universal philosophies that can be used to explain and dictate everything.) By contrast Anderson's Imagine Communities concept is principally descriptive, emphasizing as it does the emergence and importance of nationalism in particular. That makes it, among other things, more easily analyzed, critiqued, and even falsified. Extrapolating the framework into a more universal philosophy is something you would have to do entirely on your own, and at your own peril. Importantly that makes it much more difficult to weaponize Anderson's concepts, directly or indirectly, in political and cultural rhetoric. Yet, at the end of the day, you can ride Anderson's concept anywhere you might Baudrillard--in the abstract it doesn't limit you; in fact, arguably it can take you more places by being less categorical.

There's a hilarious chapter, "Foreword to Newt Gringrich's Post-structuralism for Republicans: TrumpTruth and How to Make It, By Betsy DeVos" in the book Moving Forward: Real Introductions to Totally Made-up Books. I feel like the author tore the entire story straight from my head; thus, unsurprisingly, I find it hilarious. But in any event it IMO perfectly encapsulates not only the shortcomings in post-structuralism and related philosophies, but the dangers.

FWIW, I don't think all non-analytical philosophies are problematic. I far prefer Camus' writings over Satre's precisely because Camus evinces a laudable restraint. He doesn't emphasize implications; at most he hints at that them. Whether that's because he was just a good storyteller (letting the reader fill in the gaps), or because he was conscious of the inherent incompleteness of his perspectives and was capable of admitting to himself uncertainty, I don't know, but it makes for a far more mature and, ultimately, truthful examination of the human condition.

I've yet to see a claim made by a post-structuralist that I felt had any serious weight. The awful prose just makes it worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy

Also I recommend Blackwell’s Anthology of Analytic Philosophy.

Typically the direction starts with Descartes, then Hume, then Kant, and after that, there is a real break between continental and analytic traditions. So, jumping into Wittgenstein might be a really bad idea for someone without a background, but who knows. The Philosophical Investigations is a fairly approachable book.

You don't need a background, unless you want to read the middle section, which is close to advanced maths.

<Googles "works of Wittgenstein">. Ohh, the Tractatus. Ok. "You don't need a background" is absurd! Sure, you can physically read the words. But you won't have a clue why he's saying what he's saying, or what he meant by it. And Wittgenstein himself within a few years would've told you it's nonsense and not to go anywhere near it.

That's true of (at least) all important philosophy books, isn't it?