The Two Problems of Non Philosophy I should probably start by explaining how Im approaching this.

Philosophy has a couple of problems. The first is that academic philosophy is cloistered, specialist and closed to outsiders. Even you and I, philosophy graduates, can read a basic philosophy article in an area we havent studied and have absolutely no idea what is going on. Taken to extremes, it wouldnt be too surprising to say that some philosophers create an architecture of jargon which has a dual role of validating their work and excluding others from criticising it (your criticism shows that you just dont understand what Transdimensional spatio-temporal balancing means). This type of philosophy tends to focus so much on the smaller, abstract issues and technicalities that the big questions get missed. The individual philosopher feels irrelevant; philosophy is treated as an object to be worked on rather than as part of the subject. The second problem is that philosophy is inherently human and so is available to anyone and everyone. Everyone is interested, in some level, in the big questions. Why are we here, what are we doing, what is this crap? Everyone can talk of their philosophy or opine on human rights or ethics or ontology without reference to Plato et al. Again, as philosophy graduates it isnt unheard of to hear people espouse their views in an unorganised, fallacy ridden but passionate way. That passion comes from the fact that the philosophy is intertwined with the person talking to you, there isnt that very simple subject-object separation that you get from academic philosophy. Ive called them problems, but really theyre not. Theyre both strengths and weaknesses, however theyre not really ends of a spectrum. I say that because theyre not mutually exclusive. Quite often someone who is drawn to philosophy because of their passion for the big questions and the life changing views then finds that theyre splitting the difference between potentiality and actuality in Aristotle. And they get frustrated that philosophy is missing the point! Why are these people looking at the cosmological implications of Nietzsches eternal recurrance rather than talking about how right he was about passion? So the disillusioned philosopher creates their own work, their own metaphysics in an attempt to capture that primal joy they feel about philosophy. And in trying to write that stuff down, they inevitably collapse into jargon and minute detail. Theres a very well known book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where the author gets frustrated with the way that Aristotle carves the world up analytically and instead the author comes to an epiphany in the last act that everything - our very being - comes from what he terms Quality. Its a great book - but less well known is the sequel Lila where the author tries to discuss and create a Metaphysics of Quality explaining how and why its so central to life. He fails. Its still worth reading. The Two Problems of Non Philosophy is the same; its an attempt to reclaim the essence of philosophy from those technocrats in academia. Im very suspicious about this kind of work because its exactly the sort of thing that Ive tried to write before, so I consider it a fools errand. The article uses the phrase Non Philosophy to describe academic philosophy; the choice of term shows that the author believes academic philosophy is not the true philosophy. The reason for this is that the individual is incidental to academic philosophy which instead ignores the subject doing philosophy and concentrates almost entirely on the object of philosophy. Its a criticism that has been made again and again in so many ways that it immediately makes me suspicious to see it put in yet another way. I would be less suspicious if the article ever made reference to the previous literature which discusses exactly the same problem rather than presenting it as the authors sole insight. And thats my major problem with the article; the whole time I was reading it my brain was screaming SARTRE, HEGEL, DOSTOYEVSKY etc. Even Robert Pirsig, the guy who wrote Zen & the Art wrote this exact article but in a far better way.

Were now at about 5.1.1 which is where my eyes glaze over and I start slipping - I forget precisely what this specific author means when he talks about identification-in-the-last-instance (6.1.4) before realising that this is the first and only use of the term and I have to guess what it means (in fact I immediately equate it to a similar term used by Sartre). So I really see nothing new in the article, nothing that seems like an insight. Nothing thats even all that interesting unless youve only read philosophy from the Enlightenment era. Its a reaction to that rationalist view but its not the first reaction and its definitely not the best reaction.