In Dark Times
1 min readJan 24, 2019

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While somewhat sympathetic to your trouble, I’m not sure I really understand what you are saying about writing style and philosophical truth. Part of my concern has to do with history, part with language, and part with culture/geography. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger were writing in the 19th century German Romantic metaphysical tradition. One can’t expect them to write like Roger Scruton. Aristotle is a key figure in the history of logic. Despite what one of my analytic philosophy teachers once said, it’s not a pity that he hadn’t read Frege and Quine. Anglo-American ordinary language philosophy is a movement within philosophy. As such, it has made some very important contributions to the overall tapestry. It also suffers from certain limitations (which can appear as either a virtue or a vice depending on where you sit thinking about the human condition). What about Chinese philosophy — would you feel dumb reading Lao Tzu because you were unfamiliar with the language, history, and culture of China, 6th century BCE? In my view, you are not too dumb for philosophy. For its part, philosophy is not telling you that you’re dumb. We just live in an age that has become very superficial about reading.

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In Dark Times

Following the 2016 presidential election, people seemed to be saying these words repetitively — “clearly, we’re living in dark times.” indarktimes.com