> In the 1950s, the philosopher Mary Midgley did something that, according to philosophical orthodoxy, she wasn’t supposed to do. In a BBC radio script for the Third Programme (the precursor of BBC Radio 3), she dared to point out that almost all the canonical figures in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men. To most, Midgley’s attempt to discuss the relationship status of our most cherished philosophers would have been discarded as irrelevant, even scandalous.
I don't have to rack my brains very hard to recall similar observations that are much older:
> Thus the philosopher abhors marriage, together with all that might per-
suade him to it, – marriage as hindrance and catastrophe on his path to the
optimum. Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus,
Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer – were not;
indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married
philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception,
Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply
in order to demonstrate this proposition. (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality)
I have found this to be a very common motif: a news article presents someone saying something so REVOLUTIONARY it had to be suppressed, that nothing before was ever like this said or done...which is almost never the case; it is very popular for some reason to manufacture these examples of suppression above what really did occur. (I recall a similar HN article about the secret suppressed queen Semiramis, who was proverbially famous until we abandoned classics education.) Although the peculiar anglo attitude towards philosophy probably didn't help, maybe she was just not that interesting: the idea that a philosopher's ideas were really just a distillation of his personality, way of life, and physical health weren't novel.
The article points this out? It describes how this person was outside of the mainstream of a particular time & place, which was noted for being overly restrictive.
Yes, and it makes the implication that it was because of this she wasn’t more famous. It seems more likely that her ideas just weren’t that great.
Another great example is later in the article, where pregnancy is held to refute Cartesian skepticism. Somehow, we are expected to accept that a strong feeling something is true is the same thing as something being true. I am not a Cartesian by any means, but obviously Descartes anticipated this line of argument: this sort of thing is taken care of by his “evil demon” interfering with our feelings and sense perceptions. Even more broadly, we don’t accept this style of argument in general: the testimony of those who have experienced God on acid trips is not taken as confirmation of his existence.
The subject of the article just doesn’t seem to have said much novel or interesting, but the author seems insistent that she deserved more attention anyway, and the only explanation is some sort of deliberate oppression as with the BBC example for malicious reasons. (Which itself is overstated: they would have disdained Nietzsche saying the same thing.)
A bunch of those philosophers and others were probably gay (or at least some kind of not straight) IMO. I get that sense from Wittgensteins letters especially.
I’m not saying that they were wearing eye shadow while writing or anything like that, in fact I think that the burden of being different weighed on them very heavily, hence the philosophy.
Nietzsche believed that a philosopher's philosophy boils down to a reflection of his personality and his daily life, and this article seems to assume the same.
I don't buy this for a second. I think it's easier to swallow the very opposite.
I was married for 12 years. We had a reasonably amicable divorce back in October 23. We have 50/50 custody of our son. He's with me 3 nights one week and 4 nights the following week.
Since our divorce, I haven't spent any energy pursuing another lady, and I'm unsure if I will ever do so.
I have no desire to ever be in a relationship again. I am thriving now career-wise and health-wise.
I cooked better than my ex-wife could ever imagine. I keep a cleaner home than my ex-wife could ever imagine. While married, I handled everything in our house except for her laundry. She wouldn't allow me to do her laundry, or I would have done that too.
I handled all the automobile and home repairs. Now, I can do that all for myself and my son while having the time and freedom to pursue interests without offending someone else.
For a 43-year-old man like myself, I see no benefit in being in a relationship. I spent my formative years running wild in the Caribbean, burning through women as a plow cut through the snow. I'm glad I got all that out of my system as a young man. Now, all I'm focused on is providing my son with all the opportunities and experiences I never had as a child.
My mother was married 4 times, and I was forced to live with 3 different step-fathers. There is no way I would ever put my son through something like that.
Do you think your past has perhaps effected your ability to have a solid relationship? I feel like your post is like someone saying: "I'm never playing basketball again. I have to get new shoes. I have to drive somewhere. I played on a team once and my teammates were assholes. I get tired and sweaty afterwards. I have a lot more time if I don't play basketball". Perhaps basketball could be fun with the right people. I'm not trying to convince you you need a relationship to be happy, but there is a lack of awareness it seems when you say you ar the product of multiple broken relationships and you had a broken relationship of your own and don't connect the dots. I would never want to put my child through what you describe either. There are other options then 3 different step-fathers.
Perhaps. Seeing my mother's inability to keep a spouse certainly doesn't help. And seeing everyone else around me become divorced doesn't help either.
All of the fun I had as a young man served as a constant reminder that my marriage was a downgrade from my life as a single man.
Being married to someone means that you have to take their baggage and their family's baggage.
I grew tired of being the only competent man for five women to rely on. Not only did I have to solve my wife's problems, but I had to solve her mother's problems. And her single-mom sister's issues. And the issues of her two best friends.
Life as a single man in his 20’s is very different from a single man in his 60’s.
Not sure why you thought you had to solve all these other people’s problems, but it seems to be a strong reason why you divorced - unrealistic expectations on you without them taking any accountability for themselves.
I’m going through a divorce right now, just a couple years older than you. My family is very collectivist, hers individualist. They are so individualistic in fact that they literally don’t see a problem with getting pregnant by other men (gay friend for example) because “her body, her choice”, even when married.
That said, I refuse to believe this is the large majority. Billions of females in the world, millions of potential matches. The chances that there aren’t many many good ones I can match with are vanishingly small. Granted, the effort in finding them … that’s another story.
>I’m going through a divorce right now, just a couple years older than you. My family is very collectivist, hers individualist. They are so individualistic in fact that they literally don’t see a problem with getting pregnant by other men (gay friend for example) because “her body, her choice”, even when married.
I'm confused, perhaps I'm just having a stroke. You mean her family doesn't see a problem with your ex-Wife cheating and becoming pregnant with her supposedly gay male friend? Or they don't see a problem with your ex-Wife gay friend (female) which is married to another woman, becoming pregnant by a third party.
> They are so individualistic in fact that they literally don’t see a problem with getting pregnant by other men (gay friend for example) because “her body, her choice”, even when married.
Sounds worse than individualistic. Perhaps avoidant or narcissistic.
This type of behaviour is eventually going to lead to mandatory DNA testing at birth.
Agreed. My attitude may change. But I think I'm doing everything correctly during these first few years out of marriage. I didn't want to be one of those who jump right into another relationship. That isn't healthy for anyone, particularly my son.
I don't think this even needs to be gendered. I'm not insinuating any kind of bias in your comment, it just got me thinking that this is more "people" than a gender divide where women need more self reflection and men need lower standards.
People are selfish, self interested, & caught up in their own lives. Many people suck at consistently thinking about someone other than themselves, and are not good at sacrifice or compromise. It's truly a special thing when you find someone willing to put in equal effort.
At least where I live men work more hours than women at almost any point in life if you include everything like household chores etc. Women still say men should do more, so them asking for that doesn't mean they actually do more.
This is very prone to cultural differences so could be different where you live.
These generalizations make no sense person-wise. Everyone has their own set of shoulds, don’ts and do-it-myselves. There’s no single law with all the bullet points.
That said, your usual selection contains [too] many people’s shoulds and don’ts, on both sides.
Root comment in this light basically boils down to I do everything myself and don’t need anyone to break this perfect system. Which is reasonable, imo. If there’s no synergy by design and a person is okay alone, that’s reasonable.
Many have this perception that they are contributing far more than they actually are, and they come up with narratives like this to justify that false perception.
I think men who decide to feel this way instead of having a bit of humility and working on becoming better partners will find themselves stuck in miserable relationships or going down the incel pipeline. Their loss, I suppose...?
This is an outcome of a very narcissistic approach to life which is completely disconnected to the lived reality of another that you are supposed to love. That approach to life will lead to very dissatisfying relationships, though it will also lead to a generally miserable and frustrating life, so I'd recommend working to grow out of it if you can figure out a way.
On a separate note, generalizing about half the human population isn't going to result in the reliable insights you imagine, you'll mostly find your own projections. If you don't like what you see, chances are it's a you problem.
Well, if we're sharing completely unsourced bollocks, this is exactly the opposite of my own experience. A good number of men in my community seem to live like slobs, take poor care of their health, have zero emotional intelligence, throw tantrums at the slightest provocation, and support brain-dead politics for purely selfish reasons, yet expect their partners to be perfect little sex maids who tend to their every need. Their value on the dating market is not nearly as high as they seem to think it is.
His insights come from having eyes and ears, and knowing men and women in relationships. Anecdote for anecdote, your reply applies to you as well. For my own datapoint, I'm a youngish man who wasn't interested in anything long-term until I met my SO.
I've seen the lack of awareness/maturity in both my dates (women), friends (male & female), and in what people say about their exes in my circle. Of course, I'm excluding cheaters, people who refuse their meds, and downright abusers in both cases. Besides people being self-centered, the common issue is learned helplessness, which manifests differently depending on gender.
Ignoring straight harassment, even "positive" attention is a problem. Some women have had at least one person being "extra helpful" their whole lives, and even when inevitably some of the helpful guys are shocked that doing those favors didn't result in a blowie, it reinforces the idea "fuck them, if men are like that at least they should do my taxes." I've had to metaphorically use a spray bottle on friends who were in princess mode and "forgot how to fold their own tent" when camping or had their SO acting as basically a manservant. The male (and much more common IMO) counterpart is the momma's boy. Doesn't do anything about the chores and common spaces and must be reminded like a child by their SO to do the basics. Then they fuck it up on purpose so others must take up the slack.
The focus on contribution I see is weird; in this economy, stay-at-home anything is becoming rare. The expectation I see in my circle is that home duties are 50-50, with both earning. Did you date/marry the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills? Is this just fixating on internet ragebait?
It sounds like you’ve had your fun in the early years, married a woman you loved for over a decade, have healthy children, wealth and top of it of, you had an amicable divorce, something that is extremely rare nowadays.
Unfortunately, your experience does not match the reality of many men these days, divorce is often catastrophic for them, heck even dating is impossible now. I hope you recognize and appreciate your luck and previlage.
It sounds like you’re at peace, I’m genuinely happy for you and I hope the status quo remains.
The year and a half I have spent single as an adult was the worst time of my adult life. I don’t see the point of living unless I have a wife who needs me.
My first marriage was a training experience that lasted five years and ended peaceably. I learned what not to do. My second has lasted 34 years, with a six month separation 15 years ago that clarified for both of us that life is intolerable without each other.
Respect is the blood and vitality of a marriage. Respect is an aphrodisiac and all-purpose cure. Respect inspires service.
We were married to the same person, except I did everything, including her laundry, and the divorce was very much not amicable.
That said: my ex-wife is a narcissistic and introverted human who does not appropriately interact with any other human, including her children; she views relationships as transactional (i.e., what’s in it for her).
While I am beyond damaged from my 25 year relationship with her and all of the insanely hurtful things she did to my emotional and mental well-being as well as my financial stability being she gets an absurd amount of alimony and all of the money she stole from the family over the years, particularly in preparation for divorce, my children need to see what a healthy relationship looks like and by focusing on them as the central point of my being, they may have that opportunity should I find someone else.
You are looking at it from a child and self-protectionist point of view and I’m looking at it from a healing one. They both have merit, but I just wanted to point out that living without a partner isn’t necessarily the only option post-divorce.
The bits where you talk about doing everything for her sound like you were in service rather than in relationship. I wouldn't want to sign up for servitude again either.
Yet, those sorts of behaviors could easily displace the development of relationship. Part of my being in relationship is also being supportive and doing the work but keeping it balanced has us discussing priorities and leaves us thinking, emoting, and creating together. The question isn't whether I can make a partners life good (I can) but whether they really want to know and partner with me. You may want something else though. Good luck with navigating life, it's tricky, complicated, and nuanced. I have no idea the right path but it stays worth trying to find better paths.
Depending on situation, it’s hard not to be at least a bit bitter. Divorce is incredibly painful; financially, emotionally, and mentally, particularly for those who are blindsided by it.
Don’t judge the bitterness; offer support and care as they heal.
I'm not bitter at all. I'm having a great time. I live in Auburn, AL. It's a huge college town. Whenever I need female company, I go to the gym or Publix and meet any number of random 20-30-year-old women. But I never let them meet my son, and I never let them stay at my home.
Whatever the reasons, modern societies are in a lot of trouble because none of them can stay above the 2.1 replacement birth rate.
And every foreign group that comes into a westernized country ends up having their birth rate dropped below replacement within a few generations too (at least that is the trajectory for those that aren't there yet).
The dropping birth rate is neutral, a thing that is happening like the orbit of the Earth, or a rain storm. Every population’s growth curve levels out, and so will ours. Why? Who knows, and it’s an interesting topic to investigate. But understanding something interesting doesn’t mean that we can change it.
Society will adapt. There are positives to work from. For example the horizon for every exhaustible consumable recedes as population growth slows.
Likely because those species which did not evolve a mechanism for population control went extinct: The parents consumed all of the available resources and their children starved.
Predators doesn't eat apex herbivores like elephants or humans, elephant variants were everywhere until humans started hunting them and had no natural predators.
No, sorry, I don't quite agree that trending towards population and demographic collapse is "neutral".
I don't think it's neutral either that younger generations will have a painful fiscal responsibility to support the older generations who got to live their lives out already.
>exhaustible consumable
Stop with the fixed pie fallacy, that's not how our world works. We innovate and adapt. Look at how renewables are trending, electric cars are growing in market share, poverty rates lowered significantly as population grew the last 50 years, etc.
Are you suggesting the population should grow forever, and that we'll "innovate and adapt" past resource consumption? Feels a bit techno-utopian idealistic no?
Would much prefer a "painful fiscal responsibility" over living out some overpopulation nightmare scenario
They used the word "collapse" for a reason: The problem isn't population reduction in general, the problem is in several countries it looks like it's going to happen too fast.
When the population lowers a bit the birth rate will probably come back up. There is no reason to believe in alarmism at a smaller population. If you're worried about the loss of our economic Ponzi scheme, let's fix that.
You haven't outlined why this is a problem? Population growth overshot with expanding abundance and developed countries are now normalizing to a more sustainable level.
when you had to farm to eat, you needed more farm hands. And lots would die young, or from simple injuries and diseases.
better to have a couple more extra kids in case some of them croak at 8 or 13. with the plus side that now you have extra hands to work on the farm / shop / artisanal cooperage, etc.
Bias is unavoidable. It's a fact of life, every philosopher puts their own bias into their work. You know that, you account for that.
Where it's a problem is when someone claims to be free of bias. To present the one true view, and all others are tainted. That's impossible, all they're doing is saying their bias is more valid than others.
And the trouble is when people buy that, and forget to question it. Which seems to have been the case for, oh, several decades.
Now you have also identified the driving force behind every expansionist attitude in history.
Rome, British Empire, America (and many others besides) all usurped by an ideal that they are and must be the only true light of life and civilization and no goodness or success can be had outside of their rampantly materialistic perspectives.
It hasn’t just been decades, my friend. It’s the perpetual war with an insidious evil that is captured in the aphorism: all that glitters isn’t gold.
It's intuitive, that the pursuit of mastery demands sacrifice (in family life and beyond).
Unfortunately philosophical mastery would seem to require full participation in life (to fully appreciate the human experience), making this level of sacrifice a potentially self-defeating proposition.
I’d say it applies in a lot of other career paths too. Creating something of quality requires holistic life experience. Otherwise it leads to shallow self-absorbed outcomes. Maybe that’s why enshitification is all the rage nowadays, not just pure shortsighted fast-profit-asap greed.
The problem as applied to philosophy is particularly concerning to me since those errors become the framework for thought, but yeah its otherwise not terribly different from the architect who doesnt code, the professor who hasnt spent time in industry, the philanthropist who lives in a bunker, etc.
Yes. Philosophy should be read by people who want to deconstruct it and then argue with it. Unfortunately laymen love to take it by face value and try to apply it as-is.
I guess sort of as marketing. When people buy fancy brands hoping to repeat what was shown in the ads.
> But feminist theories of knowledge argue that we shouldn’t think of objectivity in this narrow way. Instead, knowledge should be seen as socially entangled with our emotions, interests, relationships, background beliefs and bodies. And factors such as these should not be discarded as inappropriate or merely subjective.
Is this really an accurate description of “feminist theories of knowledge?” It seems to pretty heavily lean on a somewhat stereotypical characterization of women as the more intuitive/less rigorous gender, which doesn’t seem like a trope feminists would be enthusiastic to go along with.
The dominant modes of epistemology tend to privilege some facts over others. Facts that can be fit into simple, constrained models are superior to those that require complex models.
You can see this in the distinction between "hard" and "soft" sciences. The hard sciences are considered "better", and the people who practice them considered smarter. Less-hard sciences like biology are relegated to "stamp-collecting", and sciences that study human behavior are disputed as sciences at all.
In such epistemologies, vast numbers of facts about the universe go from "hard to model" to "not important" to "nonexistent". You lack the ability to be rigorous about them, but that doesn't make them non-facts, just a limitation of how we practice epistemology.
Noticing this is not fundamentally feminist, and there are lots of other philosophers taking different approaches. Compare Kuhn and Feyerabend's work on theory-ladenness: everything we can possibly know about the world is limited by how we conceive the world to take measurements. Things that we don't know how to measure simply don't exist -- more, we don't even think about them long enough to dismiss them. The things we choose to measure are social constructs, not facts of the universe.
Feminist epistemologists note the way this kind of thinking affects marginalized groups of people. Things that matter to them are dismissed as non-facts, and the social construction of facts shuts the entire question out of existing.
This isn't to say that it's easy. The entire point is that we've been engaging in an epistemology of things that are easy. They're asking us to reconsider the assumptions, and that's going to appear "less rigorous" because "rigor" has been defined to exclude things that are hard.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I don’t have any thoughts about it at the moment, I think it is a concept that will have to marinate a bit. But I appreciate the explanation.
This is not true or really related to the topic at hand at all, but I’m not going to put more effort into rebutting your post than you put into making it.
When „affirmative action“ ends up changing qualification parameters (e.g. for policy, firefighters or military), it does acknowledge stereotypical gender differences.
I've always thought the point of philosophy, and of philosophers, was to provide some ultimate salient, some final read-out, at the furthest point of a way of thinking. One can then sample from these positions, or use them as lenses through which to see their various experiences and understanding of the world. Today nobody serious is going to "live as Kant would" or Nietzsche or Wittgenstein.
Speaking of Nietzsche, I don't think Midgley was the first to remark on the fact most philosophers were single men.
Edit: Typo.
> was to provide some ultimate salient, some final read-out, at the furthest point of a way of thinking.
"The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term" — Wilfrid Sellars, an American philosopher in the 20th century.
> In fact, she thinks this Cartesian move is born from the philosophical ‘adolescence’ that Descartes never grew up from.
Ouch. It hurts. I'm a terminally unmarried man, and probably a "philosophical adolescent" as she puts it: I see a family as a bad thing for health, all these people at my home, or all these obligations to visit relatives who I do not know really and do not care of. And probably because of this I cannot understand what is she talking about. For example, she talks about Descartes wondering do other people exist:
> Now I rather think that nobody who was playing a normal active part among other human beings could regard them like this. But what I am quite sure of is that for anybody living intimately with them as a genuine member of a family … their consciousness would be every bit as certain as his own.
Probably they would be be certain, but why does it matter what they are certain of? They can be mistaken. All these relatives always want something from you, or idk like my parents have a great hopes for my life, which I cannot fulfill and I wouldn't even try, but still they will make me feel guilty about it. Of course in such an environment you cannot think straight, and you have no time to think about some abstract things, you'd prefer practical solution to ignore a question from which follows no practical implications. It is even a rational thing to do, but it doesn't make them right automatically.
So, it seems, that being an unmarried man I'm not qualified enough to understand what is this about. Yeah, it hurts. Luckily she wrote a book about it, probably the book will have a clearer message.
Cutting ties with my family and letting in only people I want in my life was the best mental health decision I ever did (forced by events, I don't get any bravery points)
Of course plenty of caveats apply, but mostly I have sufficiently good social skills, no handicaps and I am able to provide for myself or : I don't need a the family safety net.
I really like the friend relationships I maintain now and I am also happy that what is asked of me is only basic human decency (a standard that is curiously applied to strangers but not always to relatives and parters...).
Also I feel able to be much more generous towards others since little is expected of me. Thus I try to model intimate relationships on the basis of friendship as much as my partner emotional needs and cultural norms allow for.
Intimate and beautiful relationships are possible outside of marriage. I am not looking forward gettging married nor starting a family. Getting to spend time by myself is amazing too.
It’s not about deepness of relationships. E.g. raising kids is pretty intense experience. Procreation being one of the main functions of life, people missing such core experiences tend to have a blind spot.
My interpretation was that adolescent refers to the maturity with respect to life experiences.
The set of life experiences that a bachelor can experience is smaller than the set of life experiences that a married man with children can experience.
I don't think this is a particularly offensive thing to say, but instead, given that she's from a group whose voice has been historically subdued, I think it's a witty reparatee to refer to that philosophy as "adolescent". I don't think she's calling bachelors adolescent, but for the word of a bachelor with most likely more limited life experience, I do think it's fair to call out that it perhaps isn't the most rounded point of view.
Truth be told I also feel sharper when not dating or in a relationship, software engineering takes a lot of mental overhead. Competing in the modern meat market that is the current dating scene increases that mental overhead
Once you are out of the dating game you may get married and start a family. That also has a mental overhead, and it can be hard to keep your kids schedules aligned with demands / timelines from work in tech.
I think you learn to bear the load more gracefullly as you age and mature. It also puts life more into perspective.
My main point is you learn to handle it, which is actually a good form of personal growth.
Dating and relationships add to the mental overhead, but navigating a tough marriage and eventually divorce add a whole layer of mental overhead that I can’t even describe. It’s a miracle people manage to stay employed after going through it.
too absorbed in work making money for a corporate overlord to try to breed.
I hope you're working at a startup that you own, otherwise you're just helping fund some executive's Disney vacation with his four kids, while you end up an evolutionary dead-end.
but maybe you'll write something that everyone will use for a couple years, then replace, right?
Pretty much feels like a second job to me and currently in the stage of advancing in my career and learning Rust on the side and more devops things and then the actual job as a Java SWE I already do like a 150%/60+ hour week, I can not have a 250% load.
There are phases of life where it makes sense to prevent preoccupying yourself with romantic relationships (which end up occupying large chunks of your free time), however I believe that long term this is a bad strategy. Focusing on career above all else will not make you happy in the long run unless you define your entire identity as a career professional.
In short bursts this is probably fine (and I followed a similar strategy early in my career) but I am personally happy to have not fallen into the trap of focusing on my career to the detriment of my personal life throughout my entire youth.
Well, no-one can decide your priorities for you, but this is a path you want to be sure you want to follow, as your life options narrow more quickly than you might imagine.
Advancing your career may seem important now, but will you feel that way on your deathbed looking back?
Your loaded comment reminds me of Sheryl Sandberg's statements. "Look how easy it is to maintain work/life balance if you LEAN IN!" -- ignoring the fact that an army of people supporting her "LEAN IN" lifestyle.
It requires effort, but it's not always a chore. It should make your life easier by sharing the load of everyday burdens. I'm thankful to be sharing my life with my wife.
I think because it came off as gloomy. I tried to differentiate effort from being and solely negative and emphasize how marriage is a combination of the good and the bad.
It used to be. But people are now pushed towards the dating equivalent of 'fast fashion', hookups via apps, throwaway relationships, shopping around for something new and exciting.
And then people get surprised that somehow it’s exhausting. It was not supposed to be used like that. Just like shopping in a fast fashion lifestyle is exhausting. Compared to buying long lasting outfit once in a while.
> Midgley’s observation that ‘none of [the greatest] philosophers … had any experience of living with women or children’
Is this... right?
A cursory scan shows a fair number of major philosophers like Aristotle, Socrates, Berkeley, Spinoza, Reid, Hegel, Heidegger, Montesquieu, Husserl, Rousseau, Mill, Bacon and Machiavelli were married.
Perhaps none of them are among the greatest though.
Several of those philosophers had kids too. Hegel had 3, for example.
Heidegger was with Hannah Arendt for a while, and had several kids from previous relationships. Dude had a few affairs, and one of his kids probably wasn't his.
The concept that we would have "men philosophers" and "women philosophers", or "bachelor philosophers" and "married philosophers", and that their philosophical theories would be tainted by their sex or marital status is as bizarre sounding to me as if someone were to talk about "German science" and "English science" as being inherently different from each other because of their ethnicity.
It is very likely that the type of people who actively study and write academic philosophy (especially in pre-modern times), were very likely rather "neurodivergent" at best, but more probably on the spectrum.
"It's unthinkable that people who are not physically similar to me could understand me or imagine what my life is like, much less have any insight into my condition."
Sounds like "people who are not physically similar to me are p-zombies relative to me". By the same rule even our past selves are p-zombies relative to present selves, they could not possibly imagine our feelings as they lack the experience between then and now.
But if you want your philosophy to encompass most people's lives, it mustshould approach the 'standard model' of family-with-kids, or it's impractical and/or inapplicable.
In order for a philosophy to be completely applicable to human life, one has to have lived the experience, not just viewed it from afar.
And, as with all comprehensive philosophies, compassion must be at its root, or it's irrelevant nonsense constrained solely to the physical world, not the human world.
If you view governments as technology, which they are, then it makes sense that you would see very few women at the start and as it gets "grandma-proofed" you would see more and more women participating.
"Make the easy things hard and the impossible things possible."
Women in government was thought to be impossible not just a few thousand years ago, and now it's rule not the exception.
Just another example of how simple (in description, not implementation) tech can change social norms.
That’s ridiculous though. It wasn’t “considered impossible” because we hadn’t engineered a solution yet. It was “considered impossible” because of men’s historic tendanxy to view women as incapable.
If there is one thing I’ve learned about philosophy, it is that it is a field full of arrogant know-it-alls who pretend to know what I am thinking better than I do, and who will preen on about how unenlightened I am while treating me like a 3 year old who should be silent while the adults are talking, wielding “philosophy” like some joke I’m missing that gives them an excuse to be socially-inept at my expense.
Obviously (to me, at least) this behavior is all centered around bullshit. I think it is somewhat common for those who experience anxiety over a lack of control to try and define or categorize what others are thinking, and to find a mild sense of closure or superiority after having done so. But life just isn’t that simple. So I (rightly or wrongly) think of philosophy as a dead field full of old lifeless straw-men.
That’s unfortunate. Philosophy changed my life in an indescribably positive way. I don’t agree with or get value from all philosophy or philosophers, but it’s essentially a foundation of my life now. If I had a think of a familiar parallel, it’s not unlike religion to me. I study it, write about it, practice it, think about it often, and so on.
Something I found helpful was finding schools of thought which emphasized putting the thinking to work as actions in the real world. Some philosophers argue that philosophy is useless or harmful if it isn’t manifested in action, and I agree with that. Reading a lot of philosophy without implementing change in your life isn’t a good use of time. It sounds like you might have encountered the kind of people who do that.
Philosophy should enrich your life and even change you in ways you didn’t think were possible. It should open your mind and teach you about yourself, people, and society.
The worst kind of philosophy and philosophers are those which bring ego and overconfidence to the practice. But there’s so much out there which isn’t like that, and so many people who aren’t as well.
Seconded, I've certainly met the sort of characters described in this post, but I don't think they're at all representative of the field.
One of my favorite philosophy teachers described philosophical criticism as the process of being supremely gracious--of granting your opponent all manner of fanciful and absurd things, and then of peering through the cloud of absurdity and taking small issue with just one thing, preferably a small one, and politely, such that as much as possible of the absurdity collapses. And then you see how big of a thing can be built in such an environment.
I can see how people trying to play this game and doing so poorly might end up being cruel, but the core of is making space for each other's thoughts and playing along for a while, which is anything but.
This reminds me of a guy I met many years ago who told me he was taking a class to learn how to debate people and break every argument by abusing logic. It turned out he was talking a philosophy class, haha. I can’t imagine how the teacher structured it, but somehow that was his takeaway. Maybe from the Socratic method, I guess.
"men have done good enough philosophy in the past. What is wrong is a particular style of philosophising that results from encouraging a lot of clever young men to compete in winning arguments. These people then quickly build up a set of games out of simple oppositions and elaborate them until, in the end, nobody else can see what they are talking about."
At the local pubic high school. The word "rhetoric" isn't used very often anymore--so perhaps I misrepresented a little but it's what she was studying at the time and it's what she's teaching now even though they call it "11th grade IB Diploma Program"
But the IB program requirements for English are all about identifying "author's purpose" and "author's craft" for authors all over the world and relating those things to global issues, which is pretty much rhetoric.
I think they avoid the label because it has connotations of manipulation. But learning to not be duped by a propagandist is the same curriculum as learning to be a propagandist. Better to understand the fire than to be ignorant of it and then get burned by someone else's, I say.
Philosophy was the first science. Aristotle himself developed and popularized the scientific method as we know it. Saying you hate philosophy is like saying you hate science.
OP's post comes off as an angry man yelling at clouds, imagining himself being persecuted by a cabal of philosophers who are telling him what to think.
In truth, there is a great deal of philosophy which has nothing to do with the philosophy of mind. There is enough in the fridge for anyone to find something useful and enlightening, but with an attitude like OP's, it will be rejected out of bias and spite before given a fair chance.
Some philosophy is fundamental to developing a mature understanding the world that surpasses that of previous civilizations. Some philosophy deals with core issues like the very nature of existence, or the nature of ethics. Stuff that will completely change how you choose to interact with the world and live your life. This is why people feel compelled to educate others who adopt such an anti-science or anti-philosophy stance.
Note that I (OP here) did not say philosophy is useless. Just the people I typically encounter who want to have a philosophical discussion. I find the actual authors (the ones I agree with, anyway) to be much more refreshing.
I think something similar was once said of Christianity. Paraphrasing: “I’d readily become a Christian if not for the followers!” As a Christian myself this strikes a definite chord.
The article says:
> In the 1950s, the philosopher Mary Midgley did something that, according to philosophical orthodoxy, she wasn’t supposed to do. In a BBC radio script for the Third Programme (the precursor of BBC Radio 3), she dared to point out that almost all the canonical figures in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men. To most, Midgley’s attempt to discuss the relationship status of our most cherished philosophers would have been discarded as irrelevant, even scandalous.
I don't have to rack my brains very hard to recall similar observations that are much older:
> Thus the philosopher abhors marriage, together with all that might per- suade him to it, – marriage as hindrance and catastrophe on his path to the optimum. Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer – were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition. (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality)
I have found this to be a very common motif: a news article presents someone saying something so REVOLUTIONARY it had to be suppressed, that nothing before was ever like this said or done...which is almost never the case; it is very popular for some reason to manufacture these examples of suppression above what really did occur. (I recall a similar HN article about the secret suppressed queen Semiramis, who was proverbially famous until we abandoned classics education.) Although the peculiar anglo attitude towards philosophy probably didn't help, maybe she was just not that interesting: the idea that a philosopher's ideas were really just a distillation of his personality, way of life, and physical health weren't novel.
The article points this out? It describes how this person was outside of the mainstream of a particular time & place, which was noted for being overly restrictive.
Yes, and it makes the implication that it was because of this she wasn’t more famous. It seems more likely that her ideas just weren’t that great.
Another great example is later in the article, where pregnancy is held to refute Cartesian skepticism. Somehow, we are expected to accept that a strong feeling something is true is the same thing as something being true. I am not a Cartesian by any means, but obviously Descartes anticipated this line of argument: this sort of thing is taken care of by his “evil demon” interfering with our feelings and sense perceptions. Even more broadly, we don’t accept this style of argument in general: the testimony of those who have experienced God on acid trips is not taken as confirmation of his existence.
The subject of the article just doesn’t seem to have said much novel or interesting, but the author seems insistent that she deserved more attention anyway, and the only explanation is some sort of deliberate oppression as with the BBC example for malicious reasons. (Which itself is overstated: they would have disdained Nietzsche saying the same thing.)
A bunch of those philosophers and others were probably gay (or at least some kind of not straight) IMO. I get that sense from Wittgensteins letters especially.
I’m not saying that they were wearing eye shadow while writing or anything like that, in fact I think that the burden of being different weighed on them very heavily, hence the philosophy.
As a married man, there's no way I could ever do philosophy.
"Honey, are you going to the store like you said? Or are you too busy thinking about the human condition again? The kids need to eat!"
"Yes dear, just about to leave the house. Will finish this 800 page draft of very mediocre thoughts later."
Yeah, come to think of it, the problem is probably the quality of my thoughts rather than family..
If you are in a marriage with any degree of success, you are a philosopher, and a politician, too ;-)
Thanks for the chuckle, friend.
Nietzsche believed that a philosopher's philosophy boils down to a reflection of his personality and his daily life, and this article seems to assume the same.
I don't buy this for a second. I think it's easier to swallow the very opposite.
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I was married for 12 years. We had a reasonably amicable divorce back in October 23. We have 50/50 custody of our son. He's with me 3 nights one week and 4 nights the following week.
Since our divorce, I haven't spent any energy pursuing another lady, and I'm unsure if I will ever do so.
I have no desire to ever be in a relationship again. I am thriving now career-wise and health-wise.
I cooked better than my ex-wife could ever imagine. I keep a cleaner home than my ex-wife could ever imagine. While married, I handled everything in our house except for her laundry. She wouldn't allow me to do her laundry, or I would have done that too.
I handled all the automobile and home repairs. Now, I can do that all for myself and my son while having the time and freedom to pursue interests without offending someone else.
For a 43-year-old man like myself, I see no benefit in being in a relationship. I spent my formative years running wild in the Caribbean, burning through women as a plow cut through the snow. I'm glad I got all that out of my system as a young man. Now, all I'm focused on is providing my son with all the opportunities and experiences I never had as a child.
My mother was married 4 times, and I was forced to live with 3 different step-fathers. There is no way I would ever put my son through something like that.
Do you think your past has perhaps effected your ability to have a solid relationship? I feel like your post is like someone saying: "I'm never playing basketball again. I have to get new shoes. I have to drive somewhere. I played on a team once and my teammates were assholes. I get tired and sweaty afterwards. I have a lot more time if I don't play basketball". Perhaps basketball could be fun with the right people. I'm not trying to convince you you need a relationship to be happy, but there is a lack of awareness it seems when you say you ar the product of multiple broken relationships and you had a broken relationship of your own and don't connect the dots. I would never want to put my child through what you describe either. There are other options then 3 different step-fathers.
Perhaps. Seeing my mother's inability to keep a spouse certainly doesn't help. And seeing everyone else around me become divorced doesn't help either.
All of the fun I had as a young man served as a constant reminder that my marriage was a downgrade from my life as a single man.
Being married to someone means that you have to take their baggage and their family's baggage.
I grew tired of being the only competent man for five women to rely on. Not only did I have to solve my wife's problems, but I had to solve her mother's problems. And her single-mom sister's issues. And the issues of her two best friends.
Life as a single man in his 20’s is very different from a single man in his 60’s.
Not sure why you thought you had to solve all these other people’s problems, but it seems to be a strong reason why you divorced - unrealistic expectations on you without them taking any accountability for themselves.
I’m going through a divorce right now, just a couple years older than you. My family is very collectivist, hers individualist. They are so individualistic in fact that they literally don’t see a problem with getting pregnant by other men (gay friend for example) because “her body, her choice”, even when married.
That said, I refuse to believe this is the large majority. Billions of females in the world, millions of potential matches. The chances that there aren’t many many good ones I can match with are vanishingly small. Granted, the effort in finding them … that’s another story.
>I’m going through a divorce right now, just a couple years older than you. My family is very collectivist, hers individualist. They are so individualistic in fact that they literally don’t see a problem with getting pregnant by other men (gay friend for example) because “her body, her choice”, even when married.
I'm confused, perhaps I'm just having a stroke. You mean her family doesn't see a problem with your ex-Wife cheating and becoming pregnant with her supposedly gay male friend? Or they don't see a problem with your ex-Wife gay friend (female) which is married to another woman, becoming pregnant by a third party.
> They are so individualistic in fact that they literally don’t see a problem with getting pregnant by other men (gay friend for example) because “her body, her choice”, even when married.
Sounds worse than individualistic. Perhaps avoidant or narcissistic.
This type of behaviour is eventually going to lead to mandatory DNA testing at birth.
Being married should mean you get to use her strength and her family's strength. Two working together. Otherwise, yeah, not worth it.
2 years out? Sounds entirely healthy.
But consider that you model healthy relationships for your son more than anyone else, and "giving up women for my son's benefit" is a strong signal.
My parents are divorced as well. It's definitely affected my willingness to enter into long-term relationships.
Agreed. My attitude may change. But I think I'm doing everything correctly during these first few years out of marriage. I didn't want to be one of those who jump right into another relationship. That isn't healthy for anyone, particularly my son.
Finding women to have sex with is fairly easy, finding women who are willing to be equal partners is very hard.
I don’t know how this gets fixed. Women don’t want to self reflect and men don’t want to lower their standards for commitment.
I don't think this even needs to be gendered. I'm not insinuating any kind of bias in your comment, it just got me thinking that this is more "people" than a gender divide where women need more self reflection and men need lower standards.
People are selfish, self interested, & caught up in their own lives. Many people suck at consistently thinking about someone other than themselves, and are not good at sacrifice or compromise. It's truly a special thing when you find someone willing to put in equal effort.
Exactly the opposite is true in my experience. Men often fail to realize just how much women are expected to contribute: https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/
At least where I live men work more hours than women at almost any point in life if you include everything like household chores etc. Women still say men should do more, so them asking for that doesn't mean they actually do more.
This is very prone to cultural differences so could be different where you live.
These generalizations make no sense person-wise. Everyone has their own set of shoulds, don’ts and do-it-myselves. There’s no single law with all the bullet points.
That said, your usual selection contains [too] many people’s shoulds and don’ts, on both sides.
Root comment in this light basically boils down to I do everything myself and don’t need anyone to break this perfect system. Which is reasonable, imo. If there’s no synergy by design and a person is okay alone, that’s reasonable.
Like I said, women don't want to self-reflect.
Many have this perception that they are contributing far more than they actually are, and they come up with narratives like this to justify that false perception.
I think men who decide to feel this way instead of having a bit of humility and working on becoming better partners will find themselves stuck in miserable relationships or going down the incel pipeline. Their loss, I suppose...?
Men are giving up on women in large numbers, just using them for sex and nothing more, precisely because so many men have this experience.
Most women perceive they contribute equally (or more), but vanishly few do by any objective measure.
This is an outcome of a very narcissistic approach to life which is completely disconnected to the lived reality of another that you are supposed to love. That approach to life will lead to very dissatisfying relationships, though it will also lead to a generally miserable and frustrating life, so I'd recommend working to grow out of it if you can figure out a way.
On a separate note, generalizing about half the human population isn't going to result in the reliable insights you imagine, you'll mostly find your own projections. If you don't like what you see, chances are it's a you problem.
Well, if we're sharing completely unsourced bollocks, this is exactly the opposite of my own experience. A good number of men in my community seem to live like slobs, take poor care of their health, have zero emotional intelligence, throw tantrums at the slightest provocation, and support brain-dead politics for purely selfish reasons, yet expect their partners to be perfect little sex maids who tend to their every need. Their value on the dating market is not nearly as high as they seem to think it is.
You're not even a women, why are you pretending to have insights here?
His insights come from having eyes and ears, and knowing men and women in relationships. Anecdote for anecdote, your reply applies to you as well. For my own datapoint, I'm a youngish man who wasn't interested in anything long-term until I met my SO.
I've seen the lack of awareness/maturity in both my dates (women), friends (male & female), and in what people say about their exes in my circle. Of course, I'm excluding cheaters, people who refuse their meds, and downright abusers in both cases. Besides people being self-centered, the common issue is learned helplessness, which manifests differently depending on gender.
Ignoring straight harassment, even "positive" attention is a problem. Some women have had at least one person being "extra helpful" their whole lives, and even when inevitably some of the helpful guys are shocked that doing those favors didn't result in a blowie, it reinforces the idea "fuck them, if men are like that at least they should do my taxes." I've had to metaphorically use a spray bottle on friends who were in princess mode and "forgot how to fold their own tent" when camping or had their SO acting as basically a manservant. The male (and much more common IMO) counterpart is the momma's boy. Doesn't do anything about the chores and common spaces and must be reminded like a child by their SO to do the basics. Then they fuck it up on purpose so others must take up the slack.
The focus on contribution I see is weird; in this economy, stay-at-home anything is becoming rare. The expectation I see in my circle is that home duties are 50-50, with both earning. Did you date/marry the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills? Is this just fixating on internet ragebait?
Finding women to have sex with is not easy at all, unless you are good looking. Social media and dating apps have exacerbated the situation.
Majority of men struggle to even date, never mind getting married..the epidemic or male loneliness is a serious issue of our time.
It sounds like you’ve had your fun in the early years, married a woman you loved for over a decade, have healthy children, wealth and top of it of, you had an amicable divorce, something that is extremely rare nowadays.
Unfortunately, your experience does not match the reality of many men these days, divorce is often catastrophic for them, heck even dating is impossible now. I hope you recognize and appreciate your luck and previlage.
It sounds like you’re at peace, I’m genuinely happy for you and I hope the status quo remains.
yeah there is a lot of one-off to the parent post
dude had a crazy crappy home life growing up from the sounds of it, and then partied pretty hard.
he managed to have a stable relationship that ran it's course and ended reasonable well, while maintaining stability for his kid.
all things considered a pretty decent hand to be dealt.
The year and a half I have spent single as an adult was the worst time of my adult life. I don’t see the point of living unless I have a wife who needs me.
My first marriage was a training experience that lasted five years and ended peaceably. I learned what not to do. My second has lasted 34 years, with a six month separation 15 years ago that clarified for both of us that life is intolerable without each other.
Respect is the blood and vitality of a marriage. Respect is an aphrodisiac and all-purpose cure. Respect inspires service.
We were married to the same person, except I did everything, including her laundry, and the divorce was very much not amicable.
That said: my ex-wife is a narcissistic and introverted human who does not appropriately interact with any other human, including her children; she views relationships as transactional (i.e., what’s in it for her).
While I am beyond damaged from my 25 year relationship with her and all of the insanely hurtful things she did to my emotional and mental well-being as well as my financial stability being she gets an absurd amount of alimony and all of the money she stole from the family over the years, particularly in preparation for divorce, my children need to see what a healthy relationship looks like and by focusing on them as the central point of my being, they may have that opportunity should I find someone else.
You are looking at it from a child and self-protectionist point of view and I’m looking at it from a healing one. They both have merit, but I just wanted to point out that living without a partner isn’t necessarily the only option post-divorce.
What does this have to do with the article? Do you think your experience is representative?
The bits where you talk about doing everything for her sound like you were in service rather than in relationship. I wouldn't want to sign up for servitude again either.
Yet, those sorts of behaviors could easily displace the development of relationship. Part of my being in relationship is also being supportive and doing the work but keeping it balanced has us discussing priorities and leaves us thinking, emoting, and creating together. The question isn't whether I can make a partners life good (I can) but whether they really want to know and partner with me. You may want something else though. Good luck with navigating life, it's tricky, complicated, and nuanced. I have no idea the right path but it stays worth trying to find better paths.
“I spent my formative years running wild in the Caribbean, burning through women as a plow cut through the snow.”
Yeah, there's an introspection threshold there that hasn't yet been reached.
What is the insight you’re looking for? Or what is the category? Honestly curious what the threshold is and how you think it would exhibit.
It seems entirely and obviously self aware to me.
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Depending on situation, it’s hard not to be at least a bit bitter. Divorce is incredibly painful; financially, emotionally, and mentally, particularly for those who are blindsided by it.
Don’t judge the bitterness; offer support and care as they heal.
I'm not bitter at all. I'm having a great time. I live in Auburn, AL. It's a huge college town. Whenever I need female company, I go to the gym or Publix and meet any number of random 20-30-year-old women. But I never let them meet my son, and I never let them stay at my home.
Whatever the reasons, modern societies are in a lot of trouble because none of them can stay above the 2.1 replacement birth rate.
And every foreign group that comes into a westernized country ends up having their birth rate dropped below replacement within a few generations too (at least that is the trajectory for those that aren't there yet).
The dropping birth rate is neutral, a thing that is happening like the orbit of the Earth, or a rain storm. Every population’s growth curve levels out, and so will ours. Why? Who knows, and it’s an interesting topic to investigate. But understanding something interesting doesn’t mean that we can change it.
Society will adapt. There are positives to work from. For example the horizon for every exhaustible consumable recedes as population growth slows.
Likely because those species which did not evolve a mechanism for population control went extinct: The parents consumed all of the available resources and their children starved.
That's what predators provide.
Predators doesn't eat apex herbivores like elephants or humans, elephant variants were everywhere until humans started hunting them and had no natural predators.
>The dropping birth rate is neutral,
No, sorry, I don't quite agree that trending towards population and demographic collapse is "neutral".
I don't think it's neutral either that younger generations will have a painful fiscal responsibility to support the older generations who got to live their lives out already.
>exhaustible consumable
Stop with the fixed pie fallacy, that's not how our world works. We innovate and adapt. Look at how renewables are trending, electric cars are growing in market share, poverty rates lowered significantly as population grew the last 50 years, etc.
Are you suggesting the population should grow forever, and that we'll "innovate and adapt" past resource consumption? Feels a bit techno-utopian idealistic no?
Would much prefer a "painful fiscal responsibility" over living out some overpopulation nightmare scenario
They used the word "collapse" for a reason: The problem isn't population reduction in general, the problem is in several countries it looks like it's going to happen too fast.
When the population lowers a bit the birth rate will probably come back up. There is no reason to believe in alarmism at a smaller population. If you're worried about the loss of our economic Ponzi scheme, let's fix that.
You haven't outlined why this is a problem? Population growth overshot with expanding abundance and developed countries are now normalizing to a more sustainable level.
when you had to farm to eat, you needed more farm hands. And lots would die young, or from simple injuries and diseases.
better to have a couple more extra kids in case some of them croak at 8 or 13. with the plus side that now you have extra hands to work on the farm / shop / artisanal cooperage, etc.
Financialization of society doesn't account for externalities.
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The way I read this:
Bias is unavoidable. It's a fact of life, every philosopher puts their own bias into their work. You know that, you account for that.
Where it's a problem is when someone claims to be free of bias. To present the one true view, and all others are tainted. That's impossible, all they're doing is saying their bias is more valid than others.
And the trouble is when people buy that, and forget to question it. Which seems to have been the case for, oh, several decades.
Now you have also identified the driving force behind every expansionist attitude in history.
Rome, British Empire, America (and many others besides) all usurped by an ideal that they are and must be the only true light of life and civilization and no goodness or success can be had outside of their rampantly materialistic perspectives.
It hasn’t just been decades, my friend. It’s the perpetual war with an insidious evil that is captured in the aphorism: all that glitters isn’t gold.
It's intuitive, that the pursuit of mastery demands sacrifice (in family life and beyond).
Unfortunately philosophical mastery would seem to require full participation in life (to fully appreciate the human experience), making this level of sacrifice a potentially self-defeating proposition.
I’d say it applies in a lot of other career paths too. Creating something of quality requires holistic life experience. Otherwise it leads to shallow self-absorbed outcomes. Maybe that’s why enshitification is all the rage nowadays, not just pure shortsighted fast-profit-asap greed.
The problem as applied to philosophy is particularly concerning to me since those errors become the framework for thought, but yeah its otherwise not terribly different from the architect who doesnt code, the professor who hasnt spent time in industry, the philanthropist who lives in a bunker, etc.
Yes. Philosophy should be read by people who want to deconstruct it and then argue with it. Unfortunately laymen love to take it by face value and try to apply it as-is.
I guess sort of as marketing. When people buy fancy brands hoping to repeat what was shown in the ads.
> But feminist theories of knowledge argue that we shouldn’t think of objectivity in this narrow way. Instead, knowledge should be seen as socially entangled with our emotions, interests, relationships, background beliefs and bodies. And factors such as these should not be discarded as inappropriate or merely subjective.
Is this really an accurate description of “feminist theories of knowledge?” It seems to pretty heavily lean on a somewhat stereotypical characterization of women as the more intuitive/less rigorous gender, which doesn’t seem like a trope feminists would be enthusiastic to go along with.
It's accurate, but lacking context.
The dominant modes of epistemology tend to privilege some facts over others. Facts that can be fit into simple, constrained models are superior to those that require complex models.
You can see this in the distinction between "hard" and "soft" sciences. The hard sciences are considered "better", and the people who practice them considered smarter. Less-hard sciences like biology are relegated to "stamp-collecting", and sciences that study human behavior are disputed as sciences at all.
In such epistemologies, vast numbers of facts about the universe go from "hard to model" to "not important" to "nonexistent". You lack the ability to be rigorous about them, but that doesn't make them non-facts, just a limitation of how we practice epistemology.
Noticing this is not fundamentally feminist, and there are lots of other philosophers taking different approaches. Compare Kuhn and Feyerabend's work on theory-ladenness: everything we can possibly know about the world is limited by how we conceive the world to take measurements. Things that we don't know how to measure simply don't exist -- more, we don't even think about them long enough to dismiss them. The things we choose to measure are social constructs, not facts of the universe.
Feminist epistemologists note the way this kind of thinking affects marginalized groups of people. Things that matter to them are dismissed as non-facts, and the social construction of facts shuts the entire question out of existing.
This isn't to say that it's easy. The entire point is that we've been engaging in an epistemology of things that are easy. They're asking us to reconsider the assumptions, and that's going to appear "less rigorous" because "rigor" has been defined to exclude things that are hard.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I don’t have any thoughts about it at the moment, I think it is a concept that will have to marinate a bit. But I appreciate the explanation.
Also might be worth noting the idea does not originate in the feminist school of philosophy
Yet feminists seem to be happy with „affirmative action“ which has very similar logic.
This is not true or really related to the topic at hand at all, but I’m not going to put more effort into rebutting your post than you put into making it.
When „affirmative action“ ends up changing qualification parameters (e.g. for policy, firefighters or military), it does acknowledge stereotypical gender differences.
I stubbed my toe the other day, dang affirmative action.
I've always thought the point of philosophy, and of philosophers, was to provide some ultimate salient, some final read-out, at the furthest point of a way of thinking. One can then sample from these positions, or use them as lenses through which to see their various experiences and understanding of the world. Today nobody serious is going to "live as Kant would" or Nietzsche or Wittgenstein. Speaking of Nietzsche, I don't think Midgley was the first to remark on the fact most philosophers were single men. Edit: Typo.
> was to provide some ultimate salient, some final read-out, at the furthest point of a way of thinking.
"The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term" — Wilfrid Sellars, an American philosopher in the 20th century.
> In fact, she thinks this Cartesian move is born from the philosophical ‘adolescence’ that Descartes never grew up from.
Ouch. It hurts. I'm a terminally unmarried man, and probably a "philosophical adolescent" as she puts it: I see a family as a bad thing for health, all these people at my home, or all these obligations to visit relatives who I do not know really and do not care of. And probably because of this I cannot understand what is she talking about. For example, she talks about Descartes wondering do other people exist:
> Now I rather think that nobody who was playing a normal active part among other human beings could regard them like this. But what I am quite sure of is that for anybody living intimately with them as a genuine member of a family … their consciousness would be every bit as certain as his own.
Probably they would be be certain, but why does it matter what they are certain of? They can be mistaken. All these relatives always want something from you, or idk like my parents have a great hopes for my life, which I cannot fulfill and I wouldn't even try, but still they will make me feel guilty about it. Of course in such an environment you cannot think straight, and you have no time to think about some abstract things, you'd prefer practical solution to ignore a question from which follows no practical implications. It is even a rational thing to do, but it doesn't make them right automatically.
So, it seems, that being an unmarried man I'm not qualified enough to understand what is this about. Yeah, it hurts. Luckily she wrote a book about it, probably the book will have a clearer message.
Cutting ties with my family and letting in only people I want in my life was the best mental health decision I ever did (forced by events, I don't get any bravery points)
Of course plenty of caveats apply, but mostly I have sufficiently good social skills, no handicaps and I am able to provide for myself or : I don't need a the family safety net.
I really like the friend relationships I maintain now and I am also happy that what is asked of me is only basic human decency (a standard that is curiously applied to strangers but not always to relatives and parters...).
Also I feel able to be much more generous towards others since little is expected of me. Thus I try to model intimate relationships on the basis of friendship as much as my partner emotional needs and cultural norms allow for. Intimate and beautiful relationships are possible outside of marriage. I am not looking forward gettging married nor starting a family. Getting to spend time by myself is amazing too.
It’s not about deepness of relationships. E.g. raising kids is pretty intense experience. Procreation being one of the main functions of life, people missing such core experiences tend to have a blind spot.
My interpretation was that adolescent refers to the maturity with respect to life experiences.
The set of life experiences that a bachelor can experience is smaller than the set of life experiences that a married man with children can experience.
I don't think this is a particularly offensive thing to say, but instead, given that she's from a group whose voice has been historically subdued, I think it's a witty reparatee to refer to that philosophy as "adolescent". I don't think she's calling bachelors adolescent, but for the word of a bachelor with most likely more limited life experience, I do think it's fair to call out that it perhaps isn't the most rounded point of view.
Change continent. It was sad the day I left, but one continent between me and my family was actually healthy.
Truth be told I also feel sharper when not dating or in a relationship, software engineering takes a lot of mental overhead. Competing in the modern meat market that is the current dating scene increases that mental overhead
Once you are out of the dating game you may get married and start a family. That also has a mental overhead, and it can be hard to keep your kids schedules aligned with demands / timelines from work in tech.
I think you learn to bear the load more gracefullly as you age and mature. It also puts life more into perspective.
My main point is you learn to handle it, which is actually a good form of personal growth.
Work to live or live to work.
Dating and relationships add to the mental overhead, but navigating a tough marriage and eventually divorce add a whole layer of mental overhead that I can’t even describe. It’s a miracle people manage to stay employed after going through it.
too absorbed in work making money for a corporate overlord to try to breed.
I hope you're working at a startup that you own, otherwise you're just helping fund some executive's Disney vacation with his four kids, while you end up an evolutionary dead-end.
but maybe you'll write something that everyone will use for a couple years, then replace, right?
Pretty much feels like a second job to me and currently in the stage of advancing in my career and learning Rust on the side and more devops things and then the actual job as a Java SWE I already do like a 150%/60+ hour week, I can not have a 250% load.
There are phases of life where it makes sense to prevent preoccupying yourself with romantic relationships (which end up occupying large chunks of your free time), however I believe that long term this is a bad strategy. Focusing on career above all else will not make you happy in the long run unless you define your entire identity as a career professional.
In short bursts this is probably fine (and I followed a similar strategy early in my career) but I am personally happy to have not fallen into the trap of focusing on my career to the detriment of my personal life throughout my entire youth.
Well, no-one can decide your priorities for you, but this is a path you want to be sure you want to follow, as your life options narrow more quickly than you might imagine.
Advancing your career may seem important now, but will you feel that way on your deathbed looking back?
On my deathbed I'll be fondly remembering all the value I created for the shareholders, and the KPIs my team exceeded.
i'll pass those KPI metrics down to my children!
Staying single is only one of the ways to get out of the dating market.
Your loaded comment reminds me of Sheryl Sandberg's statements. "Look how easy it is to maintain work/life balance if you LEAN IN!" -- ignoring the fact that an army of people supporting her "LEAN IN" lifestyle.
To be fair to her, after her husband died I think she had to re-assess a lot of the Lean In stuff.
Is it considered „loaded“ to say that starting a family is um… an option? What a time to be alive.
What are other ways?
Maybe getting married?
The only type of marriage that does not require constant effort is a failed marriage.
It requires effort, but it's not always a chore. It should make your life easier by sharing the load of everyday burdens. I'm thankful to be sharing my life with my wife.
I wrote "effort", not "chore", and yet I got downvoted...
I think because it came off as gloomy. I tried to differentiate effort from being and solely negative and emphasize how marriage is a combination of the good and the bad.
Life in general requires constant energy. Unless you’re freeloader. Be it relationship, participating in a society or anything else.
Are you implying that marriage is, somehow, the end state of relationship building? I can assure you it does not end at marriage.
marriage, which is presumably the intention of dating
It used to be. But people are now pushed towards the dating equivalent of 'fast fashion', hookups via apps, throwaway relationships, shopping around for something new and exciting.
And then people get surprised that somehow it’s exhausting. It was not supposed to be used like that. Just like shopping in a fast fashion lifestyle is exhausting. Compared to buying long lasting outfit once in a while.
Plenty of couples don’t get married and have happy lives together.
I've never dated in this mode before. It's it like... an interview?
haha yea basically, "dating with intention" can be pretty awkward
Mail order bride
Lol, you and George Costanza: https://youtu.be/AariEduyb7s?t=56
> Midgley’s observation that ‘none of [the greatest] philosophers … had any experience of living with women or children’
Is this... right?
A cursory scan shows a fair number of major philosophers like Aristotle, Socrates, Berkeley, Spinoza, Reid, Hegel, Heidegger, Montesquieu, Husserl, Rousseau, Mill, Bacon and Machiavelli were married.
Perhaps none of them are among the greatest though.
Several of those philosophers had kids too. Hegel had 3, for example.
Heidegger was with Hannah Arendt for a while, and had several kids from previous relationships. Dude had a few affairs, and one of his kids probably wasn't his.
Machiavelli had like 7 children!
Interesting article that wears its biases on its sleeve.
Based on the comments we are seeing an extremely curated view of the subject, and the lens through which we are seeing it is colored dramatically.
For all that the core statement is interesting and valid.
The concept that we would have "men philosophers" and "women philosophers", or "bachelor philosophers" and "married philosophers", and that their philosophical theories would be tainted by their sex or marital status is as bizarre sounding to me as if someone were to talk about "German science" and "English science" as being inherently different from each other because of their ethnicity.
It is very likely that the type of people who actively study and write academic philosophy (especially in pre-modern times), were very likely rather "neurodivergent" at best, but more probably on the spectrum.
Nothing that a breakdown of the economy, welfare system, and productivity wont fix...
"It's unthinkable that people who are not physically similar to me could understand me or imagine what my life is like, much less have any insight into my condition."
Sounds like "people who are not physically similar to me are p-zombies relative to me". By the same rule even our past selves are p-zombies relative to present selves, they could not possibly imagine our feelings as they lack the experience between then and now.
man oh man there is a lot of projection in these posts
Philosophy is a wife. Possessive and jealous, demands full focus.
But if you want your philosophy to encompass most people's lives, it mustshould approach the 'standard model' of family-with-kids, or it's impractical and/or inapplicable.
In order for a philosophy to be completely applicable to human life, one has to have lived the experience, not just viewed it from afar.
And, as with all comprehensive philosophies, compassion must be at its root, or it's irrelevant nonsense constrained solely to the physical world, not the human world.
if "family with kids" is standard and not product of last 150 years.
If you view governments as technology, which they are, then it makes sense that you would see very few women at the start and as it gets "grandma-proofed" you would see more and more women participating.
"Make the easy things hard and the impossible things possible." Women in government was thought to be impossible not just a few thousand years ago, and now it's rule not the exception.
Just another example of how simple (in description, not implementation) tech can change social norms.
That’s ridiculous though. It wasn’t “considered impossible” because we hadn’t engineered a solution yet. It was “considered impossible” because of men’s historic tendanxy to view women as incapable.
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If there is one thing I’ve learned about philosophy, it is that it is a field full of arrogant know-it-alls who pretend to know what I am thinking better than I do, and who will preen on about how unenlightened I am while treating me like a 3 year old who should be silent while the adults are talking, wielding “philosophy” like some joke I’m missing that gives them an excuse to be socially-inept at my expense.
Obviously (to me, at least) this behavior is all centered around bullshit. I think it is somewhat common for those who experience anxiety over a lack of control to try and define or categorize what others are thinking, and to find a mild sense of closure or superiority after having done so. But life just isn’t that simple. So I (rightly or wrongly) think of philosophy as a dead field full of old lifeless straw-men.
That’s unfortunate. Philosophy changed my life in an indescribably positive way. I don’t agree with or get value from all philosophy or philosophers, but it’s essentially a foundation of my life now. If I had a think of a familiar parallel, it’s not unlike religion to me. I study it, write about it, practice it, think about it often, and so on.
Something I found helpful was finding schools of thought which emphasized putting the thinking to work as actions in the real world. Some philosophers argue that philosophy is useless or harmful if it isn’t manifested in action, and I agree with that. Reading a lot of philosophy without implementing change in your life isn’t a good use of time. It sounds like you might have encountered the kind of people who do that.
Philosophy should enrich your life and even change you in ways you didn’t think were possible. It should open your mind and teach you about yourself, people, and society.
The worst kind of philosophy and philosophers are those which bring ego and overconfidence to the practice. But there’s so much out there which isn’t like that, and so many people who aren’t as well.
How, where and when in life did you study philosophy? Because that seems like a horrid relationship to a whole field of study.
Seconded, I've certainly met the sort of characters described in this post, but I don't think they're at all representative of the field.
One of my favorite philosophy teachers described philosophical criticism as the process of being supremely gracious--of granting your opponent all manner of fanciful and absurd things, and then of peering through the cloud of absurdity and taking small issue with just one thing, preferably a small one, and politely, such that as much as possible of the absurdity collapses. And then you see how big of a thing can be built in such an environment.
I can see how people trying to play this game and doing so poorly might end up being cruel, but the core of is making space for each other's thoughts and playing along for a while, which is anything but.
This reminds me of a guy I met many years ago who told me he was taking a class to learn how to debate people and break every argument by abusing logic. It turned out he was talking a philosophy class, haha. I can’t imagine how the teacher structured it, but somehow that was his takeaway. Maybe from the Socratic method, I guess.
The subject of this post wrote:
~ Mary Midgley, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/23/mary-midgley-p...Sounds like my wife, who teaches rhetoric. She's a force to be reckoned with. One of the first things she said to me was:
> Give me a problem that the world has an I'll tell you why nudism solves it.
She didn't care a bit about nudism, she was just looking for a fight.
I think that she was, a) looking for something else, and b) got it.
:-)
I didn’t know rhetoric is still taught! Where does she teach?
At the local pubic high school. The word "rhetoric" isn't used very often anymore--so perhaps I misrepresented a little but it's what she was studying at the time and it's what she's teaching now even though they call it "11th grade IB Diploma Program"
But the IB program requirements for English are all about identifying "author's purpose" and "author's craft" for authors all over the world and relating those things to global issues, which is pretty much rhetoric.
I think they avoid the label because it has connotations of manipulation. But learning to not be duped by a propagandist is the same curriculum as learning to be a propagandist. Better to understand the fire than to be ignorant of it and then get burned by someone else's, I say.
Next up is the parade of them telling you that the ones you encountered weren't real philosophers and your experiences are mistaken.
Philosophy was the first science. Aristotle himself developed and popularized the scientific method as we know it. Saying you hate philosophy is like saying you hate science.
OP's post comes off as an angry man yelling at clouds, imagining himself being persecuted by a cabal of philosophers who are telling him what to think.
In truth, there is a great deal of philosophy which has nothing to do with the philosophy of mind. There is enough in the fridge for anyone to find something useful and enlightening, but with an attitude like OP's, it will be rejected out of bias and spite before given a fair chance.
Some philosophy is fundamental to developing a mature understanding the world that surpasses that of previous civilizations. Some philosophy deals with core issues like the very nature of existence, or the nature of ethics. Stuff that will completely change how you choose to interact with the world and live your life. This is why people feel compelled to educate others who adopt such an anti-science or anti-philosophy stance.
Note that I (OP here) did not say philosophy is useless. Just the people I typically encounter who want to have a philosophical discussion. I find the actual authors (the ones I agree with, anyway) to be much more refreshing.
I think something similar was once said of Christianity. Paraphrasing: “I’d readily become a Christian if not for the followers!” As a Christian myself this strikes a definite chord.