Where Philosophers Go Wrong
Great philosophers are important because they bring some new perspective, a new way of looking at things. They realize some new fact or feature that helps to clarify and bring in to focus prior knowledge, or to create a whole new way of looking at things. The problem comes when they take that new discovery and try to create a whole new philosophy from it. They try to reduce everything down to a central concept, which inevitably leads to errors which the next new eye-opening philosopher comes out to fix.
posted by Derek at 7:48 PM
2 Comments:
That's a good thing. I don't think that reducing everything down to a central concept creates the errors, I think it exposes errors that were already there.
Of course. Much of the great progress in philosophy is negative, i.e. someone realizes a flaw in a current way of looking at things, and thus a whole new possibility arises. As much as people like to think philosophy is all about grand pictures, the real stuff is all in the details.
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