As a fan of both analytic and continental philosophy, I can also confirm that professionally trained analytic philosophers tend to be biased and limited in their arguments. But aren't we all.

I agree: it's essential to expose yourself to broader works of philosophy. I would extend this beyond Europe to Asian works of philosophy, and aboriginal and indigenous stories across the world. Outside the Eurocentric philosophy bubble, it can be harder to disentangle philosophy from religion, culture, and myth, but that's part of the fun.

How idiotic would it be if there was a book called "A Perfectly Complete and Eternally Correct Encyclopedia of Philosophy", and we all read it and called ourselves 'philosophers'.

Here is one very specific recommendation for a place to start: Richard Rorty, and in particular, his book "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature."

I've suffered through the tension between the Continental and Anglican worlds, and I think that Rorty is extremely valuable as a bridge between the two, and potentially an entry point to the one you're not familiar with (or both if you're familiar with neither).

Given the original question (about "mental models"), the Philosophy of the Mind is one of the more universal topics, that tends to be less controversial across the different schools of Philosophy. That Rorty book is a decent entry point to it, which will lead to things like...

A debate between Rorty and John Searle about consciousness (Searle is a mind-is-not-the-brain person):

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/425883

Correspondence between Searle and Dan Dennet about the mind (Dennet is a brain-is-a-computer person):

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-c...

maggie thatcher didn't say "all problems come from outside europe". she said "in my lifetime all our problems have come from mainland europe and all the solutions have come from the english-speaking nations of the world"

i think you're a bit mistaken about the nature of the analytic-continental divide

Also, wow that's an ignorant quote. Let me rephrase it: "We have no internal problems. All of our external problems during a 60 year period have come from our neighboring countries, and all the solutions are the ones we and our allies came up with." Genius. (sorry for the snark). Is your argument that the analytic-continental divide is just Thatcherite Anglocentrism? Because I really don't think it is.

That's my whole disagreement. The analytic-continental divide is a split within the western world. But you present it as if the non-eurocentric world is more conducive to the continental tradition, when even the concept of eurocentrism not only comes from europe, but it comes from the continental tradition through hegel's philosophy of history and his predecessors.

Ah okay, I see the confusion: I mean "western philosophy".

This conversation between Siddhartha and the Buddha is always relevant. Siddhartha must leave because Buddha himself did not achieve enlightenment by reading and studying the Buddha’s teaching. He found his own path there.

I think about this a lot when, say, a Paul Graham essay makes the rounds. There’s a sense that “to become like X, I must read them and do what it says so I might become them.” But of course they didn’t become who they read, were not The Next Steve Jobs. They were the first of themselves.

I think it's unfortunate that so much of the pedagogy is focused on following the history. Of course it's useful for people that plan on continuing with it, but it's a terrible introduction.

OP wants to "develop a personal philosophy." So they will want to learn the state of the art of philosophy. Starting with Plato to learn philosophy is like starting with Archimedes to learn physics. They would be much better off getting a lay of the land from a modern writer. In fact, just as you don't read original research papers to learn physics, I wouldn't recommend OP even read the primary works of any influential philosophers until they've gotten an overview of philosophical thought writ large, a general outline of the specific philosopher's thinking and how it changed over time, and how the philosopher's thinking influenced others. Wikipedia would be a great place to start.

There is simply too much philosophy for any lay person to read thoughtfully in their spare time. And philosophy isn't like math or science, where a small kernel of knowledge and consensus among scholars slowly grew over time. It's more like sculptors shaping clay into pots. Subsequent sculptors may immitate past artists in certain ways, and certain long term trends may emerge, but there is a distinct lack of consensus on almost everything in philosophy.

In my opinion, the reason for this is that philosophy as a means of understanding ourselves and our world beyond what science can tell us is essentially futile. In Plato's time, there was no delineation between science, philosophy and mathematics. The word "philosophy" meant "love of wisdom" in Greek. A philosopher was just someone who wanted to discover knowledge of any kind. Over time, philosophers systematized certain areas of knowledge, giving us math, logic, and science. The areas of knowledge that we were able to systematize are no longer considered to be philosophy. Philosophy today, almost by definition, is the study of problems that have resisted all attempts at systematic understanding for two thousand years. It has no wisdom for us. If you want wisdom, look to math and science.

What do math and science study? What is the proper subject of chemistry or physics? That question such questions are not something math or science can answer.

When you've got some knowledge (say from science), what do you do with it? That question, again, is not something science can answer.

Which course of action is right or wrong? Again, science can not do otherwise than to be silent here.

Mathematics is widely considered to be the foundation of and one of the most useful tools that science has, yet it itself is based largely (if not completely) on logic. Logic is part of philosophy. The foundation of mathematics (as distinct from logic) is also a branch of philosophy.

If you look at the deepest, most critical questions that science tries to answer, at the core of them is often a philosophical question that at least up to now has been intractable to scientific study. I'm talking about things such as the nature of consciousness or the mind, deep questions in physics also blend almost seamlessly in to philosophy -- things such as the nature of time and causality.

Now, it may be the case that at some point in the future science will have some convincing answers and explanations to these questions, but the belief that it will is a form of faith in science that is often termed scientism -- something which is distinct from science itself, and is not subject to scientific inquiry.

Also, when you say that "If you want wisdom, look to math and science", do you know what you mean by the word "wisdom"? Are math and science sources of wisdom or merely of knowledge, and what's the difference? All philosophical questions.

How about whether science helps us to get closer to truth? And what is truth anyway? Again, all philosophical questions which science can not answer.

I would argue that the most important questions for most people are not scientific or mathematical questions, but philosophical ones -- such as:

- "what should I do with my life?"

- "what is the purpose of my life or of the world?"

- "should I help someone in need or help myself?"

- "what subject (including mathematical or scientific subject) should I study or work on?"

- "who should live or die, be punished or rewarded?"

- "how should we structure our society?"

- "how should we as a society or as individuals spend our money?"

Science can offer no tools to help us answer any of these most pressing and practical of questions. At best it can give us some indication of what has happened or would happen if we chose a certain course of action, but is silent on what we actually should do or what the purpose or meaning of anything is.

Even the question of how science itself should be conducted is not open to scientific inquiry.

Usually people answer these questions for themselves in some ad-hoc way, usually without recognizing that they are philosophical questions, and usually unconsciously adopting some many-hundred-year-old philosophical position which has be passed down to them through the culture around them by osmosis. If they studied, read and thought about these questions, they might actually make more informed decisions.

GP is fundamentally right that those questions have proven intractable to philosophy. Philosophy is a standing list of all the theses put forward as solutions to those questions. But even people who are fully engaged with, have a stake in and spend their whole lives wrestling with such questions can come to diametrically or orthogonally opposed answers.

Shrug?

Philosophy offers lots of frameworks, tools, prior art, etc. to tackle such questions with. But it can offer you no sure answers and no means of mediating between potential answers.

Science, while it has huge blindspots and terminal unanswered questions, can goddamn perform in the areas that are well-trodden.

There are plenty of philosophers (and non-philosophers) who've thought they did in fact answer such questions, so they would not agree with you that these questions have been intractable.

What philosophy lacks is the broad consensus that science has, there's also arguably no way to "objectively" tell who is right in philosophy, as what that even means or what standards we use is itself open to debate.

"it can offer you no sure answers and no means of mediating between potential answers"

If you agree with someone about the ground rules and assumptions, then you can judge and by some such standards there have been "objectively" provable answers and "progress".

But is philosophy's function to find answers?

Many would say that it's actually more about helping you to find questions.

I've heard that in science finding the right questions is often the harder and more important thing than finding the answers, which are often a pretty straightforward process after you know the questions to ask.

If philosophy can help to ask the right questions, then it can be useful even if it doesn't help you find answers that will convince everyone no matter what assumptions they have or are willing to grant.

People involved in the sciences (and believers in scientific ideals) often pride themselves as being open to questioning everything, and greatly value such openness.

First, this itself is a philosophical position, so if such a position is useful to science then philosophy is useful to science.

Second, while such openness is often claimed as an ideal, in practice it's common for people involved in the sciences (and their fans) not to be so open after all. Philosophical training can help them to be more questioning and see their own assumptions where they might be blind to them otherwise. So this too makes philosophy useful to science (or at least the ideals of science that so many aspire to).

Next, philosophy, like math, is useful for training the mind. You can become a more rigorous thinker by studying philosophy -- this I believe is one reason that people with a philosophy degree are the ones most commonly admitted to law school.

Philosophy could also expand your mind or your horizons, and let you see things from another perspective that you otherwise might have been blind to. That's been one of its most valuable uses for me.

You're moving the goal posts. Why did you just say that philosophy can help us address a long list of questions if you're willing to concede that maybe philosophy isn't for answering questions at all.

OP wants answers. They want to develop a personal philosophy. They are not looking to "expand their horizons" or "question everything."

> there's also arguably no way to "objectively" tell who is right in philosophy, as what that even means or what standards we use is itself open to debate.

Then it's not going to be very useful to OP, is it? It's like using a random number generator to predict the Powerball. "One of these numbers will win. Can't say which, though."

Because I was answering people who insisted that philosophy was has to be useful. I'm not moving the goal posts so much as questioning their assumption that philosophy must have a use to be of value.

"OP wants answers"

But this sub-thread is not about the OP's wants. It's a reply to people challenging the value of philosophy.

"Then it's not going to be very useful to OP, is it?"

Again, you're assuming that philosophy has to be useful to be of value. And, again, it can be, for the reasons I stated before, but it can still be valuable even if it isn't.

> - "what should I do with my life?"

> - "what is the purpose of my life or of the world?"

> - "should I help someone in need or help myself?"

> - "what subject (including mathematical or scientific subject) should I study or work on?"

> - "who should live or die, be punished or rewarded?"

> - "how should we structure our society?"

> - "how should we as a society or as individuals spend our money?"

And yet philosophy offers no practical help to the student seeking answers to these questions today. Sure, a philosopher will happily produce a mountain of pages addressing any one of these questions, but you will be no wiser for having read them.

You might not be any wiser after having read them, but that doesn't mean no one is.

> "what should I do with my life?"

Try to improve body and spirit. Shape and obey the rules of he society you live in, be thankful and respectful of the liberties society has produced. Obey the laws of the city above everything else. Live by them, die by them.

> "what is the purpose of my life or of the world?"

The meaning of life is to reach happiness. To do, one most attain knowledge. Knowledge is virtue.

> - "should I help someone in need or help myself?"

You should help someone in need of help, because this way you help your spirit and the society (in Socrates parlance, you help the "city/neighbourhood/etc".) Acting in a selfish way will hurt your soul.

> - "what subject (including mathematical or scientific subject) should I study or work on?"

You should study them all, do your best to gain knowledge because knowledge is virtue. Know thyself, realise you know nothing.

> - "how should we structure our society?"

See Plato's "Republic", it's pretty detailed. Of course is utopian yet many ideas could be adopted easily.

> - "how should we as a society or as individuals spend our money?"

Wisely :-)

I could make another such list for Aristotle, Spinoza or Nietzsche and they'll most likely collide. So my take is that what you're looking for is a "rulebook" to tell you that Nietzsche (or Gorgias in Plato's dialogues) is right and Socrates is wrong.

If that's what you're looking then you're out of luck, not only in philosophy which is the highest form of education IMO but in science too, as science is equally ambiguous. There's literally NOTHING out there that can definitely prove that 2+2=4.

IMO philosophy guides someone from the land of certainty to the land of uncertainty where he can make his own choices and decide what kind of person one wants/needs to be.

While we are shaped by our culture to a long extend, philosophy can help us choose the answers to these questions. Then we are able to accept the good and the bad part of our choices and live a life without remorse, second thoughts and regrets.

I'd suggest the opposite, do start from the Socratic dialogues if you are really interested in philosophy.

On the other hand, if you want to be a tech guy with the common tech preconceptions about philosophy, feel free to skip Plato and his ilk.

And to answer my immediate parent, first, there's no "state of the art" in philosophy. Same way there's no "state of the art" in actual art (ancient art can be as good or better as modern art, and Bach e.g. can be as good or better than a modern composer, and in any case as relevant and enjoyable).

The concept of "state of the art" exists for engineering not art (and is within an engineering/tech context where the term first appeared in the 19th century, not in an art or philosophical context).

While technology can be accumulated, philosophy is a discourse and exchange of ideas. And, like in art, the formulation matters, and more often than not the best formulation is the original (because its closer to their source, the thinker who came up with those ideas). Plus, the main questions haven't changed the last 5000 years, to make answers outdated. Smartphones or cars change messaging methods and habbits, not philosophy.

>In my opinion, the reason for this is that philosophy as a means of understanding ourselves and our world beyond what science can tell us is essentially futile.

Restricting ourselves and our understanding to "what science can tell us" is absolutely futile, like trapped in a tautology (science is a closed system explaining what is, not what should be, as by itself it has no value, morals, aesthetics, and so on. You can be a scientist and a Nazi - and many were, without anything being problematic in that scientifically as long as you perform your experiments with the scientific method. The only objections to that would be moral and thus, the realm of philosophy).

Science is a tool, we don't ask tools for their opinions or for our goals or for what to do with them. We use them to make things or to examine things, no to think about what we want to make, or to think about what is best to make. That's for philosophy.

I also personally don't like Plato (he always creates these absolute strawmen as opponents), but that's more personal. I agree though that it's valuable to read at least some of it and to see whether it speaks to you or whether you find the method of inquiry interesting.

You don't read Plato for empirical science though (or Aristotle for that matter). You read him for the philosophical ideas.

Whether language is X or Y for example is still debated, and while a modern linguist might know X research results or new theories, Plato still sets off many questions that are still dividing sides and are under debate. E.g. from a Stanford website breakdown:

"The positions of Hermogenes and Cratylus have come to be known to modern scholarship as ‘conventionalism’ and ‘naturalism’ respectively. An extreme linguistic conventionalist like Hermogenes holds that nothing but local or national convention determines which words are used to designate which objects. The same names could have been attached to quite different objects, and the same objects given quite different names, so long as the users of the language were party to the convention. Cratylus, as an extreme linguistic naturalist, holds that names cannot be arbitrarily chosen in the way that conventionalism describes or advocates, because names belong naturally to their specific objects. If you try to speak of something with any name other than its natural name, you are simply failing to refer to it at all. For example, he has told Hermogenes to the latter’s intense annoyance, Hermogenes is not actually his name".

Generally, I don't think that philosophical ideas exist in a vacuum, they are informed by the real world and by science (hence why e.g. quantum mechanics plays such an important role). Plato bases his ideas off of specific premises (that's the whole point of the socratic dialogues), but I find the premises often very flawed. For example, how does Platonism and the idea that there is "an ideal horse" make sense in the context of evolution? It doesn't, IMHO, and cognitive science seems to give much better answers to such question as how we can recognise the concept of "horse".

So, it's ultimately a question of why do you even want to study philosophy in first place. I suspect that for most usual purposes, Plato is perfectly okay.

Same way people that studied science X (including linguistics and CS), but are philosophically naive, can have a coarsed-grained view of very nuanced situations, and adhere to naive assumptions...

As an American philosopher noted, "An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing".

This is true for a scientist with expertise in whatever X.

Philosophy and epistemology (along with history and art) are ways to not be a simpleton with a narrow field of view who can't put together two coherent sentences outside their field (and doesn't even understand the second and third order implications of what he studies, its possible societal impact, its relevance and so on), but to get a wider picture.

Whch is not the same as "impressing others", except in the sense that intelligence and education do impress others sometimes...

This is sometimes true, but I think it depends on who you're reading. The skill of philosophizing, and of carrying on a discourse with other philosophers, is very different from the skill of bringing a novice up to speed. Not everyone who's great at one is great at the other. There's also value in what the grandparent post mentioned about establishing historical and biographical context before jumping into primary sources. It helps you understand what you're reading and what the community thinks is important about it.

That said, I definitely agree that primary sources are valuable to read, and to appreciate as works of art in their own right. Yes Wikipedia can give you the big ideas, but it's just not the same. But hitting Wikipedia first can give you context to get more out of the primary.

> The concept of "state of the art" exists for engineering not art

I don't understand this. Yes philosophy is not a linear progression of ideas, but the iterative process of people building on one another's ideas is definitely present, as it is in music or mathematics or poetry. Philosophy responds to current events, to art, to science, and to itself.

To put it another way, it's totally valid to ask "what was up with philosophy in X decade". You can look at the ideas that were floating around, how they interacted with each other, how they built on the past and led to future ideas. As I see it, that's the "state of the art". It's more a question of "what were top minds in the field working on", or maybe "what ideas were most influential", than anything else, but that's true if you ask that question of technology too.

> Smartphones or cars change messaging methods and habbits, not philosophy.

Philosophy (or philosophers) respond to what's around them. The conversation around whether the brain is a computer, for example, is very different today (and probably more interesting to most people) than it would have been 200 years ago.

Have a look at Adam Neely on Youtube.

And yet philosophy is utterly incapable of telling us what to make or do. People often come to philosophy with the hope that studying philosophy will help them live a better life or help them make sense of life. The truth is, it won't. They can devote their life to studying philosophy and they won't squeeze a single drop of utility from that parched rock.

Actually it is perfectly capable.

In fact, nothing has been made or done without a philosophy guiding it.

It's just that for most people this is usually a self-made, uninformed, ad-hoc (and usually bad and unfit for the purpose) philosophy, or some low-tier second hand pop philosophy.

If you mean "philosophy can't tell what X exactly everybody should make or do" that's true. But that's also true for science and everything else. We are individuals, in different situations, different problems, and different goals.

Philosophy teaches us how to think about our problems, goals, etc, and how to put them in perspective, value them, examine them, etc.

It doesn't hand them out to us. Philosophy is not an oracle telling you what to do and absolving you from thinking (and that's true whether some philosophers treated theirs as such or not).

In its totality, philosophy is the exact opposite, a set of prior observations, discussions, hypotheses, thinking tools and approaches, to make you think better and to give you the benefit of the insight of others.

You get that insight on technical matters from science.

You get that insight on meta-matters (thinking about thinking, morals, etc) from philosophy.

Take a look at the enormous popularity of Stoicism on HN. I think quite a few people here would disagree with you about philosophy being "utterly incapable of telling us what to make or do".

You're moving the goal posts.

First you said:

"philosophy is utterly incapable of telling us what to make or do"

I gave you an example how philosophy is in fact capable of doing that, and it does so for many people (philosophers and non-philosophers alike).

Instead of granting the point, you move the goal posts.

Suddenly, philosophy being capable of telling us what to make or do is no longer good enough for you. Now you want answers to satisfy "most philosophers".

"You can ask a dozen physicists and they will all give you the same answer. Philosophy only tells you how to live if you ask exactly one philosopher. Ask a second, and you will be no better off than when you started."

Philosophy is not physics. There is no consensus on many of the problems that concern it.

Philosophy, by the way, is far from the only academic discipline that lacks such a consensus.

Harry Truman said "If you laid every economist in the country end to end, they would all point in different directions."

There are also many disagreements on fundamental issues in psychology, and probably many if not most other "soft sciences".

But philosophy is not a science, so why are you holding it up to scientific standards?

Art and music aren't sciences either, but most people recognize they have tremendous value anyway.

By the way, I've noticed that you're laser-focused on this consensus issue, while completely being unable to acknowledge that philosophy has value apart from the issue of whether it gives you answers that everyone can agree on.

How about philosophy's value in training the mind?

Please answer if you find that valuable.

How about philosophy's value in letting people question their own assumptions?

Do you find that valuable?

Or philosophy's value in letting you see things from a different perspective?

Can you specifically address these points instead of endlessly returning to the one point of philosophy not having answers that everyone can agree on?

I will make this one concession on reflection. It may help immunize one from simplistic explanations and just-so stories. It will not give one truth, but perhaps it will reveal the lie. The study of philosophy is a great way, for example, to disabuse someone of religious faith.

You are a person who desperately needs philosophy, yet you seen incapable of understanding why you would need it. Science seems to have ruined you.

This canard has been raised several times in this thread. Yes, who will teach the physicists how to think? Who will teach the engineers how to put two and two together?

> Apparently you expect everything to be 1+1=2, which really is kind of sad.

If by this you mean I reject irrational thought, then yes, guilty as charged. This has nothing to do with my views on philosophy, though. Philosophy is a type of rational inquiry.

> Science seems to have ruined you.

Or perhaps math has ruined me, expecting everything to be 1+1=2? But isn't math an extension of logic, and logic a part of philosophy? Maybe philosophy has ruined me.

This is a very interesting thought. Is this something you came up with, or are you quoting any specific philosopher? I’d love to read more about this topic.

Scientistm being to science what nationalism is to patriotism.

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/science-versus-scie...