The Death of Expertise

[untermensche]

To another philosopher, about thirty seconds of conversation would establish the basics. Apparently there are exams and everything. I assume they grade them randomly.

Not true.

Nietzsche was almost entirely dismissed in his day. Very few took him seriously once he stopped teaching.

Many others from history.

If a philosopher is really a philosopher the herd doesn't see it.

Try again.

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Actually, I assumed it was common knowledge and you'd just need reminding. My bad. Is it logic you don't believe in, or the assertion that philosophers are constrained by it?

Logic is the only way of moving from true premises to true conclusions. It's a way of preserving a truth value across an argument and allows those who have been trained in it to think, write and evaluate more clearly. I'd rather assume that's enough.

I believe that when humans invent games they invent rules for the games.

Yes there are rules to the game called "logic" some people play.

Logic is a game like football or Old Maid or Go Fish.

It can be played over and over without end.

Is football a constraint on sports?

There are quicker ways of professing one's ignorance. Logic is a formal way of ensuring that true premises lead to true conclusions. It's what allows your computer to run, giving the extrinsic rules that tell the computer what to do next. For a start.

I know the rules of the game you like to play.

You are failing to tell me anything I do not know.

You are failing to prove anything.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Not true.

Nietzsche was almost entirely dismissed in his day. Very few took him seriously once he stopped teaching.

That's quite true. The reason is that he was suffering from the symptoms of tertiary syphilis and went mad. I know it's a minor detail, but i think it's worth mentioning.

Many others from history.

Please feel free to share.

If a philosopher is really a philosopher the herd doesn't see it.

My point above is that you wouldn't expect people who are not trained in critical thinking to be able to judge the quality of philosophy terribly well.

Try again.

Why? you picked someone who went mad and then agreed with my point. Oh, in case you were worrying, you are refreshingly free of any philosophical training.

I know the rules of the game you like to play.

Clearly not.

You are failing to tell me anything I do not know.

That's one way of thinking about it.

You are failing to prove anything.

Well, to you anyway. but as you say, you are arguing using the rules of Go Fish rather than logic. Your mileage may vary.

 

[untermensche]

That's quite true. The reason is that he was suffering from the symptoms of tertiary syphilis and went mad. I know it's a minor detail, but i think it's worth mentioning.

No. He wrote for years before he went mad suddenly. And very few in his day saw any merit to his work.

Sheep are unable to see much.

They can learn what they are told to learn. Not much more.

You have no argument.

 

[fromderinside]

..another untermenche RIP thread.

Sine die

 

[untermensche]

You mean another thread that is not a bore fest.

 

[Subsymbolic]

That's quite true. The reason is that he was suffering from the symptoms of tertiary syphilis and went mad. I know it's a minor detail, but i think it's worth mentioning.

No. He wrote for years before he went mad suddenly. And very few in his day saw any merit to his work.

Really?

From 1865 to he studied theology and philology. Neither of these disciplines are philosophy, in case you are unsure. He was so highly regarded as a philologist that, four years later, he was given honorary teaching qualifications (at the age of 24) and immediately offered the chair in classical philology at Basle and, just over a year later, he was offered tenure as a full professor. He taught, and published, philology there until 1879 when he retired due to ill health. Now quite what the nature of that ill health was is the subject of much spilled ink. Personally I like the syphilis hypothesis because anyone who writes that 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger' and then spends a couple of decades rotting from the inside out has hit comedy gold. The fact is that he was clearly suffering from a degenerative disorder that rendered him near blind, bipolar, often suffering from suicidal depression even before he resigned. Even he thought he was mad as early as 1883. As a result the period of almost all of his philosophical writing was a period during which even he thought he was mad and he suffered rather a lot of the symptoms of a degenerative mental illness.

Or perhaps you have a better idea about why he was forced to resign a tenured chair?

Sheep are unable to see much.

They can learn what they are told to learn. Not much more.

You have no argument.

And here is where that bane of the internet, the online disinhibition effect, rears its ugly head once again.

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

Now, if you really do mumble passive voiced insults during many of your IRL interactions then I guess this isn't you, but if you don't then you might want to have a bit of a think about it. It doesn't help your case, such as it is, and I really can't see why you are doing it, even if it does manage to technically not breach the rules here, which I suppose is the intention.

 

[untermensche]

You seem to have trouble doing the most basic research.

He became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24.[11] He resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life, and he completed much of his core writing in the following decade.[12]

From 1879, when he retires from teaching, to his death he publishes:

The Dawn, 1881
The Gay Science, 1882, 1887
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883–5
Beyond Good and Evil, 1886
On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887
The Case of Wagner, 1888
Twilight of the Idols, 1888
The Antichrist, 1888
Ecce Homo, 1888

Now considered genius and important philosophical insights.

In his day ignored by the sheep who claimed to understand what philosophy is.

 

[beero1000]

Wait, is there a serious argument that the philosophers of his time didn't consider Nietzche a philosopher? They may have harshly criticized his work and they might have thought he was wrong and/or insane, but they didn't think he was unqualified. Academics don't generally take the time to write and publicize their in-depth critiques of the treatises of the amateur Joe Shmoe.

 

[untermensche]

Wait, is there a serious argument that the philosophers of his time didn't consider Nietzche a philosopher?

If you have some actual evidence to the contrary you might have a point.

What do you have?

Besides your opinion?

After severing his philosophical ties with Schopenhauer (who was long dead and never met Nietzsche) and his social ties with Wagner, Nietzsche had few remaining friends. Now, with the new style of Zarathustra, his work became even more alienating and the market received it only to the degree required by politeness. Nietzsche recognized this and maintained his solitude, though he often complained about it. His books remained largely unsold. In 1885, he printed only 40 copies of the fourth part of Zarathustra and distributed only a fraction of these among close friends, including Helene von Druskowitz.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Wait, is there a serious argument that the philosophers of his time didn't consider Nietzche a philosopher?

If you have some actual evidence to the contrary you might have a point.

What do you have?

Besides your opinion?

After severing his philosophical ties with Schopenhauer (who was long dead and never met Nietzsche) and his social ties with Wagner, Nietzsche had few remaining friends. Now, with the new style of Zarathustra, his work became even more alienating and the market received it only to the degree required by politeness. Nietzsche recognized this and maintained his solitude, though he often complained about it. His books remained largely unsold. In 1885, he printed only 40 copies of the fourth part of Zarathustra and distributed only a fraction of these among close friends, including Helene von Druskowitz.

His biggest problem was that they considered him a whiny, flakey burned out atheist with embarrassing mental health problems and the tendency to shit and vomit at random. Some people are just bitches.

Technically he wasn't a philosopher, he was qualified as classical philologist. He was certainly no logician.

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

Certainly, most modern analytic philosophers would dump him in with the continentals with all that that implies.

Now, why did he lose tenure?

 

[untermensche]

He resigned.

And you have been proven wrong.

No so-called philosophers, who are mostly ignorant sheep, in his day gave a damn about Nietzsche.

Now he is taught in probably every philosophy department on the planet.

 

[Subsymbolic]

He resigned.

And did he have a choice about that? What exactly would have happened if he didn't? Come on, I've looked, even wikipedia is clear he was forced, but can you find out exactly what happened?

And you have been proven wrong.

Have I now?

No so-called philosophers, who are mostly ignorant sheep, in his day gave a damn about Nietzsche.

I would imagine few of them had heard of him qua philosopher and few had read him qua philologist.

Now he is taught in probably every philosophy department on the planet.

I can assure you that he isn't. Continental departments possibly, but analytics? Not so much.

 

[untermensche]

What is a philosophy department?

It is every course taught.

You can't even make your petty arguments count.

 

[beero1000]

Wait, is there a serious argument that the philosophers of his time didn't consider Nietzche a philosopher?

If you have some actual evidence to the contrary you might have a point.

What do you have?

Besides your opinion?

After severing his philosophical ties with Schopenhauer (who was long dead and never met Nietzsche) and his social ties with Wagner, Nietzsche had few remaining friends. Now, with the new style of Zarathustra, his work became even more alienating and the market received it only to the degree required by politeness. Nietzsche recognized this and maintained his solitude, though he often complained about it. His books remained largely unsold. In 1885, he printed only 40 copies of the fourth part of Zarathustra and distributed only a fraction of these among close friends, including Helene von Druskowitz.

What is a philosophy department?

It is every course taught.

You can't even make your petty arguments count.

Yay, reading comprehension?

 

[untermensche]

Thanks for the bump.

I see you still have no evidence.

 

[beero1000]

Technically he wasn't a philosopher, he was qualified as classical philologist. He was certainly no logician.

Yes, but I believe that the academic fields hadn't quite solidified into their modern forms by that point. At the time, I think the main classical 'philosophical' fields were philosophy, philology, and theology, with a great deal of interplay between them. While some specialized, many (most?) were still interested or active in multiple fields, including Nietzsche.

Most of Nietzsche’s university work and his early publications were in philology, but he was already interested in philosophy, particularly the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Albert Lange. Before the opportunity at Basel arose, Nietzsche had planned to pursue a second Ph.D. in philosophy, with a project about theories of teleology in the time since Kant.

He didn't get that second PhD but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to call him reasonably qualified in philosophy. The fact that not many were interested in his work or agreed with it doesn't mean they would have thought he was unqualified to write philosophy. And despite untermensche's repeatedly asserted opinions, his book sales numbers don't say that much about contemporary opinions of his qualifications.

 

[Kharakov]

A motorcycle mechanic can easily prove their expertise.

Any practical expertise can easily be proven.

But people that are experts at bullshitting; priests, lawyers, salesman, some teachers, especially philosophy teachers, may only be experts at bullshitting.

Quantum mechanics are expert bullshitters. "Ohh, yeah, you've got plenty of space to go through that layer of atoms, see, you're on the other side". Meanwhile, your clone is on the one side of the barrier feeling like they just got hustled. Again.

By another quantum mechanic.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Technically he wasn't a philosopher, he was qualified as classical philologist. He was certainly no logician.

Yes, but I believe that the academic fields hadn't quite solidified into their modern forms by that point. At the time, I think the main classical 'philosophical' fields were philosophy, philology, and theology, with a great deal of interplay between them. While some specialized, many (most?) were still interested or active in multiple fields, including Nietzsche.

Most of Nietzsche’s university work and his early publications were in philology, but he was already interested in philosophy, particularly the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Albert Lange. Before the opportunity at Basel arose, Nietzsche had planned to pursue a second Ph.D. in philosophy, with a project about theories of teleology in the time since Kant.

He didn't get that second PhD but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to call him reasonably qualified in philosophy. The fact that not many were interested in his work or agreed with it doesn't mean they would have thought he was unqualified to write philosophy. And despite untermensche's repeatedly asserted opinions, his book sales numbers don't say that much about contemporary opinions of his qualifications.

I don’t think there’s much in the way of grounds to call him qualified at all. He earned his batchelor status, but both his MA equivalent and Doctorate were honorary, the doctorate from a university he hadn’t studied at. What he clearly was was a gifted autodidact. Apart from that, I broadly agree with you.

 

[Subsymbolic]

What is a philosophy department?

It is every course taught.

You can't even make your petty arguments count.

And yet, oddly, lists like this are necessary.

http://www.spep.org/resources/graduate-programs/

Even if the definition of a department was ‘every course taught’ then the fact remains that some universities don’t teach continental philosophy or teach it through the English department. Others, mainly in Continental Europe (that’s a clue) don’t teach analytic philosophy at all.

 

[fromderinside]

Should we imitate a motor boat here?

but, but, but, but .....

I rather think not. Language is structured mostly for purposes of communication.