Why I gave up philosophy
I am simply incapable of finding suitable candidates to fill the missing paradigms at the end of the previous entry. I don't know enough about historical figures to do that. However, Pietersen's article does refer to an earlier article of his in the same online journal, called "Meta-Paradigms in Philosophical Thought". I can hope that he at least refers to philosophical traditions that follow some of these missing paradigms, from which I can conduct my own research.
Of personal interest. One of the things that I noted during my Masters degree was that I had absolutely no interest in publishing anything I wrote. In retrospect, therefore, it seems that it was really the right decision not to pursue a doctorate.
This really reminds me of a legal secretarial course I once took. The teacher used to be a legal secretary herself, and she said of law that, even though no lawyer will admit to this, "it's a word game, and he who has the best strategy wins." I never forgot those words. I remember thinking years later that that summed up really well my feelings about the way that academic philosophers treated philosophy. It is therefore good to see another philosopher finding the same analogy between philosophers and lawyers so fruitful.
This, I think, is simply correct, and I intend to remember this quote for my own reference. That is the main reason that I have included it here.
Hence, also, the accompanying phenomenon ( fuelled by the publication norm required for academic career progress, no doubt ) of proliferating academic and research journals, publishing, it often seems, more and more about less and less.
Of personal interest. One of the things that I noted during my Masters degree was that I had absolutely no interest in publishing anything I wrote. In retrospect, therefore, it seems that it was really the right decision not to pursue a doctorate.
In his review of analytic philosophy in America , the leading pragmatist philosopher, Richard Rorty, states that academic philosophy "is a jungle of competing research programs"(1982:216), and goes on to describe academic or professional philosophers in the USA not as scholars, but as lawyers whose standing or worth largely depends on their "ability to construct a good brief, or conduct a devastating cross-examination, or find relevant precedents"(1982:221).
This really reminds me of a legal secretarial course I once took. The teacher used to be a legal secretary herself, and she said of law that, even though no lawyer will admit to this, "it's a word game, and he who has the best strategy wins." I never forgot those words. I remember thinking years later that that summed up really well my feelings about the way that academic philosophers treated philosophy. It is therefore good to see another philosopher finding the same analogy between philosophers and lawyers so fruitful.
They [philosophers] pose as having discovered and attained their real opinions through the self-evaluation of a cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialect--while what happens at bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an inspiration, generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract is defended by them with reasons sought after the event.
(Nietzsche, in : Tanner,1990:36)
This, I think, is simply correct, and I intend to remember this quote for my own reference. That is the main reason that I have included it here.
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