[ExI] "How to do Philosophy"

Damien Broderick thespike at satx.rr.com
Tue Jul 22 01:07:14 UTC 2008


At 07:40 PM 7/21/2008 -0400, Natasha url'd:

>http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

This is great stuff. E.g.:

<When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they're 
nonsense generally keep quiet. There's no way to prove a text is 
meaningless. The closest you can get is to show that the official 
judges of some class of texts can't distinguish them from placebos. 
... I think Wittgenstein deserves to be famous not for the discovery 
that most previous philosophy was a waste of time, which judging from 
the circumstantial evidence must have been made by every smart person 
who studied a little philosophy and declined to pursue it further, 
but for how he acted in response. >

Damien Broderick 




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