Philosophy has a tendency to need to use very specialized language to avoid problems of ambiguity and to precisely identify concepts that have no reason to come up in the vast, vast majority of conversation among laypeople.
I mean, yes and no. You go to Aristotle, for instance, and while his work is definitely not easy to understand – it being lecture notes and all – it’s surprising how little jargon he uses, with most of it being just common words used in a restricted sense, e.g., “matter” or “relation.”
Aristotle had the benefit of not having millennia of literature to be working in relation with, and himself is quite responsible for the promotion of metaphysics as a philosophical field, which is perhaps the most obscure branch of philosophy.
Yeah, but seriously what’s even the point of such wisdom, especially when it can led people into things like subjective idealism. Or maybe it’s because idealists needs to reach insane levels of abstraction to even explain their idiotic ideas.
Probably a certain amount of specialized terminology is neccesary, and the complete lack of it, as in (say) Nietzsche, doesn’t always signify a profound thinker. But I agree with you that most contemporary philosophers use jargon simply to obscure.
I mean, from what i see Nietzsche key to popularity was precisely the fact he’s understandable, because he mostly just rambled, but laymen at least can tell what he meant.
Philosophy has a tendency to need to use very specialized language to avoid problems of ambiguity and to precisely identify concepts that have no reason to come up in the vast, vast majority of conversation among laypeople.
I mean, yes and no. You go to Aristotle, for instance, and while his work is definitely not easy to understand – it being lecture notes and all – it’s surprising how little jargon he uses, with most of it being just common words used in a restricted sense, e.g., “matter” or “relation.”
Aristotle had the benefit of not having millennia of literature to be working in relation with, and himself is quite responsible for the promotion of metaphysics as a philosophical field, which is perhaps the most obscure branch of philosophy.
Yeah, but seriously what’s even the point of such wisdom, especially when it can led people into things like subjective idealism. Or maybe it’s because idealists needs to reach insane levels of abstraction to even explain their idiotic ideas.
Probably a certain amount of specialized terminology is neccesary, and the complete lack of it, as in (say) Nietzsche, doesn’t always signify a profound thinker. But I agree with you that most contemporary philosophers use jargon simply to obscure.
I mean, from what i see Nietzsche key to popularity was precisely the fact he’s understandable, because he mostly just rambled, but laymen at least can tell what he meant.