{"id":3120,"date":"2020-05-29T14:38:31","date_gmt":"2020-05-29T14:38:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/05\/29\/the-most-boring-philosophers\/"},"modified":"2020-05-29T14:38:31","modified_gmt":"2020-05-29T14:38:31","slug":"the-most-boring-philosophers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/05\/29\/the-most-boring-philosophers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Most Boring Philosophers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nowadays philosophy so absorbs me in all its branches and movements that I find no philosopher boring. Indeed,  no subject is boring except to the bored who make it  so. Dry texts, like dry wines, are often delightfully subtle and simply require an educable and educated palate. Although no philosophers now bore me, here is a list of philosophers who bored me, or would have bored me, when I was one and twenty:<\/p>\n

   1. G. E. Moore
   2. Elizabeth Anscombe
   3. Paul Ziff
   4. Norman Malcolm
   5. John Wisdom
   6. Roderick Chisholm<\/p>\n

Philosophers who excited my 21-year-old self:<\/p>\n

   1. Nicholas Berdyaev
   2. Miguel de Unamuno
   3. Karl Jaspers
   4. Friedrich Nietzsche
   5. Martin Heidegger
   6. Jean-Paul Sartre<\/p>\n

Now imagine a philosophy department composed of the twelve aforementioned. Do you think it would split into two factions? What, if anything, do they have in common that justifies subsuming them under the rubric, philosophers<\/em>?<\/span><\/p>\n

I have become in many ways more analytic and less Continental over the years. I tend to think that this is a lot like becoming less liberal and more conservative, as these terms are popularly understood. One becomes more cautious, careful, precise, piece-meal, rigorous, attentive to details and differences and empirical data, less romantic, more patient, more logical, less impressionistic, less sanguine about big sweeping once-and-for-all solutions. . . .<\/span><\/p>\n

In sum, and in a manner to elicit howls of protest:  In philosophy, the trajectory of maturation is from Continental to analytic.  In politics, from liberal to conservative.<\/span><\/p>\n

Howl on, muchachos<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nowadays philosophy so absorbs me in all its branches and movements that I find no philosopher boring. Indeed,  no subject is boring except to the bored who make it  so. Dry texts, like dry wines, are often delightfully subtle and simply require an educable and educated palate. Although no philosophers now bore me, here is … Continue reading “The Most Boring Philosophers”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-metaphilosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}