I don’t know why I did this to myself again, but I’m now in another aesthetics and philosophy class.<\/p>\n
I like the discussions and the level of thinking, but I do find the reading time consuming and sometimes tedious. I think it is the philosopher’s responsibility to communicate in writing at an accessible level, no matter how complicated the subject is. Physicists can do it– they can describe in layman’s terms the inner workings of the known universe, and even those metaphysical aspects of reality that our math can’t yet describe– like parallel worlds or string theory. But in the classic philsophical texts, authors are often all over the place. They take lots of liberty to diverge and take tangents and circle around and then suddenly come back to what they’re actually attempting to describe and write with the expectation that you are right there with them. Rousseau does this and I hate it completely.<\/p>\n
A philosophical understanding of anything is useless to anyone but the author if the author can’t describe it well. That there are thousands of papers trying to describe and understand someone’s work makes me not want to read the stuff. There should be thousands of papers describing the usefulness of the author’s ideas, their value and what they inspire. But if there are a thousand perspectives on what<\/em>\u00a0the author\u00a0actually means, <\/em>I’d rather read something else.<\/p>\n Otherwise I feel like like every sentence is a waste of time, especially the ones that need to be read ten times to start to make sense of. Usually you get that far and then reach a point where you realize if your interpretation was correct, then the whole second-half of the text is one giant contradiction.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t know why I did this to myself again, but I’m now in another aesthetics and philosophy class. I like the discussions and the level of thinking, but I do find the reading time consuming and sometimes tedious. I … Continue reading