October 3 at 9:24am ·
If by philosophy we refer to fantasy literature as an extension of The Novel, Fictional histories, Mythology, Detective Stories, Fantasy, and Science Fiction, then the study of philosophy is equivalent to a world-of-warcraft or Game of Thrones wiki. It’s just entertainment. It’s no different from collecting any other kind of useless thing: bottle caps, beer cans, antique toys.
If we are to make a list of existential problems that remain unsolved, and we eliminate those problems that are but word games that overload our meager minds, by proposing inarticulate deceptions masquerading as meaningful problems, then we are stuck with a small number of meaningful problems, and the vast literature of philosophy is a little other than attempt to create a religion by more elaborate deception than the original versions.
Now, we could, on the other hand, look at the catalog of philosophical positions as the evolution of (a) correspondence with reality, and (b) deceptions that seek to avoid it. Or the evolution of (a) true propositions, and (b) false propositions.
And rather than empathize with the vast catalog of bad ideas we attempted to criticize and discover the motives of those thinkers and the methods of deceit that they employed, then that might be interesting. It might also be humiliating.