Ha, I'm thoroughly biased being a lawyer myself, but I really enjoyed this piece. I studied law for my first degree and then continued on my legal education and training and eventually qualified. I am now six years PQE. During the entirety of my legal education, training and practice, I have also been fascinated by the arts, philosophy, theology, and fundamentally, the question of how we can really know what is true. And yet despite this, I've never been really satisfied with any philosophical short course / talk I've ever really tried to grasp. Instead, I I have always found it frustrating when a philosophy discussion eventually descends into what you call "nit picking." I've never understood why I found it so frustrating and useless, and your piece helps to clarify that for more - nit picking past the point of usefulness and the structure / concept distinction is a great way to look at it. And yes, lawyers do nit pick a lot as it is so it really is something if you can out nit-pick a lawyer 😂.
By the way, the degree structure Helen describes in the preamble to the post sounds like a dream. In the UK, the "qualifying law degree" is all pure law although some people can choose to take one other subject with it, e.g Law and a language. I would have loved to study the variety of courses Helen describes!
Interesting article, and I agree with the criticism of the Griffiths paper.
Unfortunately, I have to ask a very cliche but sadly relevant question which always comes up in relation to these types of polemics against philosophy: Is the proposition that we should only engage in ideas which are useful and pertain to structure a scientific, legal, or philosophical position?
Very nicely laid out showing the differences (and why it matters when it comes to understanding how reality operates) between structural and conceptual approaches, why the former reliably and consistently produces knowledge (including a self correcting feature) while the latter too often produces metaphysical nonsense and word games.
Oct 1, 2023·edited Oct 1, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby
Not sure whether it's quite on topic but reading this piece somehow put me in mind of Wittgenstein's "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent".
Enjoyed the piece. Perhaps this is more useless philosophical nit-picking, but I would contest the characterization of England as a non-philosophical society. People often say this but I never understood why. I think it reflects some kind of continental bias, or perhaps the fact that English philosophers didn’t have the most elegant or artful prose. But still, I don’t know how a culture that produced Bacon, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Mill, etc, not to mention all of the English philosophical poetry and literature, could be called non-philosophical.
Maybe it’s because I started out as an engineer, and came around to philosophy later, but much of what passes for recent philosophy is bunk, either incoherent or at odds with observable reality
But then I no longer believe in science as anything but just-so-stories that describe “ this behaves as if”. If you can repeat it, it’s engineering, even if you don’t know WHY it works. If your story for why gives you different results, it’s not reality that’s wrong.
It's understandable that the Athenians eventually tired of Socrates' shtick and hurried him on his journey to Hades. (Everyone hates a philosopher!) Holding various ideas up to the light and examining them, interrogating settled beliefs and customs, wondering how and why it is we believe what we do etc, is vital for intellectual hygiene and cultural vitality, but when it gets excessive, when everything down to the definition of man/woman becomes a food fight of sophistry, you can see how this is socially destabilizing and can lead to nihilism or even aphasia. (Sophists always saw off the branch they're sitting on!)
Strong societies should allow almost unlimited debate but there do need to be some STOP signs and some sacred realms that are best left untouched, as they may just be support beams that when budged bring down the entire social edifice—which is why my favorite philosophical gifts are the Golden Mean or Middle Way, meaning in this case too few questions will make you stupid, but too many questions makes you a neurotic babbling nonsense for nonsense's sake.
But I still wish I lived in an America that took philosophy and philosophers more seriously—imagine Prez Trump or DeSantis demanding that Judith Butler follow her kale salad with a nice Big Gulp of hemlock! A man can dream....
Lorenzo, Rousseau may be your example of philosophical failure (absent any reality check) par excellence. In which case, all that we see today is but a continuation of a long trend.
Oct 5, 2023·edited Oct 5, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby
This is why I steered clear of both Continentalism and queer theory when I was studying philosophy. If I wanted religion or poetry, I’d seek them out, thanks.
Oct 5, 2023·edited Oct 5, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby
Marx stole his ideas from Hegel, anyway. The Hegelian historical dialectic was about a great spiritual awakening that would eventually happen, once humanity worked through the right stages (from serfdom to democracy to socialism, roughly. It’s been a while, so I don’t remember specific terms, forgive me). When I learned about it I loved it, but it was very woo-ish and should never have been presented as anything other than a potential way to frame history, and humankind’s supposed purpose (that last bit being the signal that it’s all conjecture meant to spur deeper thinking, not literally true).
Anyway, Marx took Hegel’s ideas, stripped out the spiritual angle, and apparently pretended it was all true and real. If young people were to read Hegel, instead of Marx, they’d come away with a very different set of ideas, in my opinion. As it is, Marxism offers nothing but struggle for struggle’s sake, indefinitely, with no peace or enlightenment at the end. Again, that’s just my opinion.
More and more, I’m getting the impression philosophy students aren’t being taught proper respect for the hard sciences. Philosophy is ostensibly about questions that science *can’t* answer, like ethics and other intangible concepts. There’s no reason or necessity for philosophy to be opposed to science. How utterly foolish.
Ha, I'm thoroughly biased being a lawyer myself, but I really enjoyed this piece. I studied law for my first degree and then continued on my legal education and training and eventually qualified. I am now six years PQE. During the entirety of my legal education, training and practice, I have also been fascinated by the arts, philosophy, theology, and fundamentally, the question of how we can really know what is true. And yet despite this, I've never been really satisfied with any philosophical short course / talk I've ever really tried to grasp. Instead, I I have always found it frustrating when a philosophy discussion eventually descends into what you call "nit picking." I've never understood why I found it so frustrating and useless, and your piece helps to clarify that for more - nit picking past the point of usefulness and the structure / concept distinction is a great way to look at it. And yes, lawyers do nit pick a lot as it is so it really is something if you can out nit-pick a lawyer 😂.
By the way, the degree structure Helen describes in the preamble to the post sounds like a dream. In the UK, the "qualifying law degree" is all pure law although some people can choose to take one other subject with it, e.g Law and a language. I would have loved to study the variety of courses Helen describes!
Interesting article, and I agree with the criticism of the Griffiths paper.
Unfortunately, I have to ask a very cliche but sadly relevant question which always comes up in relation to these types of polemics against philosophy: Is the proposition that we should only engage in ideas which are useful and pertain to structure a scientific, legal, or philosophical position?
Very nicely laid out showing the differences (and why it matters when it comes to understanding how reality operates) between structural and conceptual approaches, why the former reliably and consistently produces knowledge (including a self correcting feature) while the latter too often produces metaphysical nonsense and word games.
Not sure whether it's quite on topic but reading this piece somehow put me in mind of Wittgenstein's "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent".
Enjoyed the piece. Perhaps this is more useless philosophical nit-picking, but I would contest the characterization of England as a non-philosophical society. People often say this but I never understood why. I think it reflects some kind of continental bias, or perhaps the fact that English philosophers didn’t have the most elegant or artful prose. But still, I don’t know how a culture that produced Bacon, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Mill, etc, not to mention all of the English philosophical poetry and literature, could be called non-philosophical.
Maybe it’s because I started out as an engineer, and came around to philosophy later, but much of what passes for recent philosophy is bunk, either incoherent or at odds with observable reality
But then I no longer believe in science as anything but just-so-stories that describe “ this behaves as if”. If you can repeat it, it’s engineering, even if you don’t know WHY it works. If your story for why gives you different results, it’s not reality that’s wrong.
It's understandable that the Athenians eventually tired of Socrates' shtick and hurried him on his journey to Hades. (Everyone hates a philosopher!) Holding various ideas up to the light and examining them, interrogating settled beliefs and customs, wondering how and why it is we believe what we do etc, is vital for intellectual hygiene and cultural vitality, but when it gets excessive, when everything down to the definition of man/woman becomes a food fight of sophistry, you can see how this is socially destabilizing and can lead to nihilism or even aphasia. (Sophists always saw off the branch they're sitting on!)
Strong societies should allow almost unlimited debate but there do need to be some STOP signs and some sacred realms that are best left untouched, as they may just be support beams that when budged bring down the entire social edifice—which is why my favorite philosophical gifts are the Golden Mean or Middle Way, meaning in this case too few questions will make you stupid, but too many questions makes you a neurotic babbling nonsense for nonsense's sake.
But I still wish I lived in an America that took philosophy and philosophers more seriously—imagine Prez Trump or DeSantis demanding that Judith Butler follow her kale salad with a nice Big Gulp of hemlock! A man can dream....
Lorenzo, Rousseau may be your example of philosophical failure (absent any reality check) par excellence. In which case, all that we see today is but a continuation of a long trend.
https://www.glibertarians.com/2023/04/reviewing-rousseau/
The Left didn’t march through the Institutions-meaning academia.
Academia has been the Left since Socrates.
🔥🔥🔥
🔥 all
This is why I steered clear of both Continentalism and queer theory when I was studying philosophy. If I wanted religion or poetry, I’d seek them out, thanks.
Marx stole his ideas from Hegel, anyway. The Hegelian historical dialectic was about a great spiritual awakening that would eventually happen, once humanity worked through the right stages (from serfdom to democracy to socialism, roughly. It’s been a while, so I don’t remember specific terms, forgive me). When I learned about it I loved it, but it was very woo-ish and should never have been presented as anything other than a potential way to frame history, and humankind’s supposed purpose (that last bit being the signal that it’s all conjecture meant to spur deeper thinking, not literally true).
Anyway, Marx took Hegel’s ideas, stripped out the spiritual angle, and apparently pretended it was all true and real. If young people were to read Hegel, instead of Marx, they’d come away with a very different set of ideas, in my opinion. As it is, Marxism offers nothing but struggle for struggle’s sake, indefinitely, with no peace or enlightenment at the end. Again, that’s just my opinion.
More and more, I’m getting the impression philosophy students aren’t being taught proper respect for the hard sciences. Philosophy is ostensibly about questions that science *can’t* answer, like ethics and other intangible concepts. There’s no reason or necessity for philosophy to be opposed to science. How utterly foolish.