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But at no point did they say that the argument was invalid; just that they couldn't stand reading it.
by wk_end 2mo ago
But at no point did they say that the argument was invalid; just that they couldn't stand reading it.
- chungusamongus 2mo ago[flagged]
- achierius 2mo agoThey're engaging with the writing. Talking about it as if it's just an "argument" is reductive; this isn't highschool debate club
- chungusamongus 2mo agoThen why are you trying to debate me?
- hightrix 2mo agoIt may be lazy, but that doesn't make it any more accurate. Take a writing by someone using the tone of Kevin from The Office, “Me think, why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick.” Would you read an argument written in this tone regardless of the content, topic, or position? You write for your audience.
- chungusamongus 2mo ago[flagged]
- wk_end 2mo agoA few years ago I tried to make it through The Critique of Pure Reason, but had to stop because - as many people famously do - I found Kant's writing too abstruse. In saying that, I'm not dismissing the Transcendental Deduction, I'm just saying that I wish Kant was a better writer. No one's under an obligation to engage with an argument, and given the choice of whether or not to engage with a poorly written, clichéd, machine-generated one, most people wouldn't be interested enough to bother. Complaining about laziness here is pretty ironic, actually.
- skeledrew 2mo ago> a better writer That's highly subjective. I reckon his audience and admirers found him an excellent writer.
- wk_end 2mo agoNah, Kant's considered a notoriously poor writer among philosophers. Obviously opinions may differ, but Derek Parfit [0], for instance, wrote: “It is Kant who made really bad writing philosophically acceptable. We can no longer point to some atrocious sentence by someone else, and say ‘How can it be worth reading anyone who writes like that?’ The answer could always be ‘What about Kant?'” (Kind of relevant to this thread actually! Hah!) In the preface to the second edition of the Critique, Kant himself acknowledges that "a talent for lucid exposition" he "cannot regard [himself] as possessing". FWIW I suppose I am in Kant's audience, as a (long-since graduated) philosophy student. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Parfit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Parfit
- chungusamongus 2mo agoFwiw I am much more impressed with the sophistication of someone's argument than i am their writing style. Kant has contributed much more than parfit depsite the abstract nature of his writing and it's not even close.
- chungusamongus 2mo agoKant is a better writer than the vast majority of writers. The problem is, the ideas he is trying to articulate are incredibly abstract. Hegel is like this too
- bilalnpe 2mo agoYeah, no one is obligated to engage with it. They did not dismiss the argument but refused to engage with it. This is totally valid and the point is to send a signal to the “writers”.
- chungusamongus 2mo agoAnd the signal I'm sending is, when I see people do that, I find it to be lazy and totally irrelevant to the content.