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Notes -
Just started on Spinoza after a few philosophy book club sessions of reading Kant, and I'm surprised by how similar the errors of the modern rationalists are to the errors of their 17th century counterparts. The philosophies of both suffer from an inability or unwillingness to really interrogate their assumptions (which is also Nietzsche's critique of most philosophy in general). I'm also reminded by how annoyed I was a couple years ago to discover the parallels between Yud's thought and various branches of ancient and modern philosphy that Yud likes to pass off as his own original thoughts. Maybe not really that surprising given how devalued humanities education is, and how inaccessible a lot of philosophy is.
I don’t know, if you talk to a lot of modern academic philosophers (and I think we have a couple here anyway) they often seem to acknowledge that almost everything has been said before in some way, and a lot of modern philosophy is kind of opinion journalism discussing these ideas in slightly different ways, their relationships with each other, and their application to modern technologies, ideas, and political and social developments.
There are a lot of ‘original’ ideas in Enlightenment philosophy that have strong similarities to ideas in eg buddhist philosophy from a thousand (or thousands) of years earlier, it’s not even a ‘new’ problem.
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