Underrated philosophers

I know this isn't exactly a surprising answer from me, but I do really think Chesterton is underarrated and viewed primarily as a popularizer of Orthodoxy rather then an original thinker.

I was reading The Grue Paradox recently, and once I got a grip on it, I realized it was simply Chesterton's "Laws of Elfland" and that the 'new riddle of induction' was about 60 years old.
 
That's part of what I mean, actually- Marx is invoked more often than he is actually read, and the blame for this lies mostly with Marxists, or at least Marxists in the Orthodox tradition. So much of what passes for "Marxist" writing is just generic leftism that quotes Marx to abnormal degree, the same way that Thatcherites like to quote Smith or Locke without ever really understanding them. (It's not so bad in academia, since the New Left gave itself permission to consult Marx without a stamp from the commissar, but how much of that actually escapes academia?) He's a name, for more people, rather than a philosopher, and I find hugely unsatisfactory, because whatever you think of his politics or his economics, this guy's work has a depth and breadth that very few other thinkers can match.

Is there a reasonably thorough introduction that would help me skip a lot of trial and error? I'm afraid to step foot into subjects I'm totally unfamiliar with; a result of how badly I screwed up when I first tried to learn economics.
 
Is there a reasonably thorough introduction that would help me skip a lot of trial and error? I'm afraid to step foot into subjects I'm totally unfamiliar with; a result of how badly I screwed up when I first tried to learn economics.

Marx is largely classical economics turned upside-down. A significant influence from Karl Marx came from David Ricardo.

It isn't a really a radical departure from classical economics, rather, a revision within the framework provided by such.
 
Marx is largely classical economics turned upside-down. A significant influence from Karl Marx came from David Ricardo.

It isn't a really a radical departure from classical economics, rather, a revision within the framework provided by such.

Well, since Traitorfish praised the incredible "depth and breadth" of Marx's scholarship I was interested in what I could get from a decent book on him, not a few sentences. As an analogy: Wittgenstein thought all philosophy came from imprecise terminology; true to a degree, but not particularly helpful.
 
As an analogy: Wittgenstein thought all philosophy came from imprecise terminology; true to a degree, but not particularly helpful.

It is. Almost of philosophy requires self-aware oversimplification in order to see the bigger picture. Even if the same is also the reason why certain philosophical concepts are misunderstood. For instance, historicism never claims there can be no outliers that make history essentially impossible to predict, even if it is often attacked as such.
 
^ Re Wittgenstein:

While it is no secret (nor was it before him either) that language replaces the non-lingual sense-connection the infant has with his/her mental world, to argue that all philosophy (or rather as he put it "all problems in philosophy") is the result of 'imprecise terminology' is a claim which renders all other human thought equally problematic.
One might think that other orders don't have this issue. For example you can learn that in the arithmetic system 1+1=2, but it does not mean you have been given a precise relation to form between any of those notions and your mental abilities to form a stable relation of this kind. Ie when you think of "1" as a number, it is rather certain that you don't think of it in entirely (or even largely) the same way that the next person does. If we were already given along with numbers a full number theory, along with a theory of number theory, along with a theory of a theory of a number theory (and so on), chances are we would not need numbers by the end of all that anyway.

*

And a note: Wittgenstein was very interested in the idea of a limit (in math), and also argued that sentences are not an approximation of the mental phenomenon they supposedly communicate, but a limit to it. I find this view also largely suffering from the fault i outlined above, namely that it makes little sense to first argue we cannot approximate, and then try to approximate the border of a larger approximation. In reality (i suppose) we don't approximate but don't calculate losses in approximation either, due to the system of calculation (the human mind) being more complicated than any examiner of it.
 
Is there a reasonably thorough introduction that would help me skip a lot of trial and error? I'm afraid to step foot into subjects I'm totally unfamiliar with; a result of how badly I screwed up when I first tried to learn economics.
Honestly, I don't think there is one. Marx was a great thinker, but he was also a hopelessly disorganised one, and apart from Capital, he never really undertook any coherent project for scholars to grasp onto. Most of his work is found in his notebooks, which are very open-ended. Most attempts to introduce him are written about Marx-the-economist, Marx-the-historian, etc., but never as far as I can tell simply about Marx.

Marx is largely classical economics turned upside-down. A significant influence from Karl Marx came from David Ricardo.

It isn't a really a radical departure from classical economics, rather, a revision within the framework provided by such.
That's hardly fair. Marx turns classical economics entirely inside out, arguing that its essential categories- capital, value, the commodity- are works of collective fiction. He may argue that these fictions operate along lines similar to those outlined by classical economics, but he also examines the way in which these fictions break down, the ways in which the framework of classical economics proves itself to be insufficient, and that can hardly be written off as a simple "revision".

edit: for the record, i didn't mean this to turn into "traitorfish talks about marx, again". i thought i'd say "marx", somebody would say "isn't he very famous?", and i'd say "aha, but that isn't the same as appropriately-rated", and then we'd all go "oh, tf, you and your antics". i didn't think we'd end up debating, although i probably should have guessed.
 
^Tell me about it, Socrates had to drink the conium due to this.. :mischief:

Ancient Greek philosophy is really crappy and is generally read for historical importance rather than scientific. They wouldn't last a semester today.

Marx is a philosopher. The field has changed greatly since the Greeks. 'Natural philosophy', for example, luckily isn't a core part of the field anymore.
 
^Ok, sorry for mentioning the lowly Greek philosophy. Great summation of it by yourself, though :)

(considering you have the habbit of offending your own self and then try to offend others as if they meant to harm you, i think i should leave it at that..).
 
^Ok, sorry for mentioning the lowly Greek philosophy. Great summation of it by yourself, though :)

(considering you have the habbit of offending your own self and then try to offend others as if they meant to harm you, i think i should leave it at that..).

I have no idea what you are talking about right now. You merely made a long post correctly noting that the notion of philosophy has historically changed, but incorrectly implying that this notion means that the term is naturally misapplied today. If it is misapplied, being "true" philosophy is not something to strive for anyways. Because ancient Greek philosophy is more often than not really bad.
 
I'll have to take your word for it. I suppose you read a significant amount of the 30K+ pages that surviving texts of ancient Greek philosophy consist of, and therefore i cannot realistically match your background for a brief and correct critique of all that.
 
What the Greeks did was to provide a lot of really good philosophical framework to work from, such as the conceptualization of logic and essence. Those things are fine and good. It merely happened to congregate as naturalized slavery, Platonic idealism, negative hedonism etc., and oh god the Aristotlean conception of physics, all really terrible conclusions. I mean, you can't fault them fairly for their time, and they are, as foundations are, necessary to contextualize when producing modern thought.

EDIT: Aaand I'm editing that out. Sorry for that, I'm having a bad day.
 
Not sure what you edited out, but what you left is not good either... Surely you understand that your sentences above are nothing other than a made-up summation.


Given that i am not here to attack this or that post or poster, i regard this form of posting to be quite meaningless. I would still type this even if it was not by now an RD thread.
 
I have no idea what you are saying in the second line. My first point was in regards to your massively problematic claim that philosophy today isn't philosophy anymore.

On the first, well. We aren't taught Greek philosophy for any reason except to understand where fundamental philosophical terminology and thought comes from. It's for historicist interest. I am yet to encounter an ancient Greek philosophical paper which correctly describes the world. I still do appreciate it, but for what it is, not for what some people make it out to be.

Having experienced your posting for a while now, I see you don't appreciate ancient Greek philosophy the same way. I'm unsure whether it's because of you or the education system that has molded you; I have never attended a Greek university, and I don't ever plan to, so I don't know their discourse. Care to enlighten me? I'm curious in regards to how you arrive to the conclusion you do in post #10.
 
Having experienced your posting for a while now, I see you don't appreciate ancient Greek philosophy the same way. I'm unsure whether it's because of you or the education system that has molded you; I have never attended a Greek university, and I don't ever plan to, so I don't know their discourse.

Neither have I. I studied in the university of Essex, in 3rd world England.

As for your claims:

a) Your first claim: 'modern philosophy is not philosophy' (as if I argued along those lines) :

-The argument was on whether Marx is part of philosophy or not. No one here (and surely not myself) claimed that modern philosophy is non-existent. On my part (along with other posters in the thread) i noted that Marx is not part of modern philosophy, cause philosophy is very distinct from economical theory or sociology. I even mentioned Heidegger, who surely wrote a bit later than Marx.

b) Your second claim: 'I am yet to encounter an ancient Greek philosophical paper which correctly describes the world.' :

-"Correctly describing the world" is not a subject of modern philosophy either. Nor was it of ancient philosophy. The topic would have been unpractically vast, not to mention horribly ambiguous. While a number of ancient Greek philosophical works do feature math of their time as part of the phenomenon of human thought, they do not form a hybrid of physics and philosophy. The latter is a modern phenomenon, practised by non-philosophers. A good example of such a problematic hybrid which does not help their actual scientific order and background, while fails to incorporate any serious philosophical thought either, would be biologico-philosophical treatises with a helping of anti-religious focal points :mischief:
Math, on the other hand, is not of the same order as physics or biology etc, since it is by itself a system of thought, and as such a direct expression of the human mind. It is not dependent on external objects (despite being crucially influenced by the facts of our senses, such as our ability to differentiate meaningfully between numeral ammounts). In particular the issue of the relation between the (human) thinker and the world of thought, was examined in the classical era by Anaxagoras, Protagoras, Anaximander, Plato, Socrates and a number of other thinkers, and as i mentioned in a previous post in this thread it presented itself as of the core issues of classical philosophy.
 
He may argue that these fictions operate along lines similar to those outlined by classical economics, but he also examines the way in which these fictions break down, the ways in which the framework of classical economics proves itself to be insufficient, and that can hardly be written off as a simple "revision".

Yet Marx does not at any point venture outside questions posed by Classical Economics, other than to subjugate such to the field of (Marxian) economics.

Because ancient Greek philosophy is more often than not really bad.

Greek philosophers were constrained by the lack of knowledge of the world we now have. That doesn't render Greek philosophy bad in general.
 
Anyone that was not an eastern white man?
I was told that there aren't any women philosopher, and that eastern philosophy = eastern religion.

I wonder if some of you know anyone worth reading.
Spoiler :
Anonymous

Manifesto of Nihilist Women

Let men have their fun blabbering on and on about the Revolution—They’re free to do it! The nihilist women are tired of all this procrastination and are determined to act. Thinking about annihilating the bourgeoisie, they are ready to sacrifice everything to hasten the realization of this undertaking. In the inextinguishable hatred that is devouring us, they will call up whatever strength is necessary to overcome all obstacles.

But since this grandiose project cannot be carried out in one day, they will take their time, preferring for now to use poison and once in a while, to achieve their goal more easily, with a few bad seeds.

The nihilist women will make up for their lack of scientific knowledge and laboratory practice by mixing in the food of their exploiters small doses of deadly substances that are available to the poor and easy to handle for the most ignorant and inexperienced women.

From hundreds of ingredients with incontestable results, we can cite: lead acetate, which you can get in a few days if you leave lead shot sitting around or leave a piece of lead in vinegar; pieces of rotten meat; hemlock, which is so often mistaken for parsley and which grows everywhere on the side of the road and on the backsides of ditches.

At least we will give back to our despicable oppressors some of the evil that they give us every day. We will not smile and support the tyranny knowing that our enemies’ lives are at our mercy… They want to be the masters! Let them suffer the consequences.

In the three years that the league has been around, hundreds of bourgeois families have already paid the fatal price, gnawed away by a mysterious illness that medicine cannot explain or heal.

To work, then, all you women who are fed up with suffering and who are looking for a remedy to your misery. Imitate the nihilist women!
 
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