Just me or is philosophy actually a complete shitshow? When I was younger I really wanted to major in philosophy because I thought it was "learning to think real good about abstract stuff", but eventually found out it was "quoting other famous people's stuff at each other"

— Aella (@Aella_Girl) October 18, 2019

This is because even most people in philosophy, just as with most people in general, don’t have a very high capacity of generating interesting ideas or thinking for themselves very credibly. Having a fancy philosophy degree just means you had the patience and diligence to slog through however many years of school. It, alas, means little else. Those people have to name drop philosophers because their thoughts have no impetus, potency or originality beyond what someone else propounded long ago.

And I understand, even. Generating truly novel ideas and approaches is absurdly hard. It’s arduous, far harder than physical labor. (And I have done tons of physical labor, so yes I know. US Army, remember?) I’ve been thinking about and writing about the “new minds” idea, which is in reality a new philosophy, for years now and have made not that much progress at all. I know some things I didn’t before, and years of thoughts went into that.

Knowing the past is important. If you haven’t read Hume and Kant and Spinoza and Schopenhauer, it’s hard to know that you’re not just repeating what someone thought long ago. But it’s not the goal we should be aiming for, at least I am certainly not. I can name drop philosophers until the sun goes red giant, but what I really care about is having ideas that make the current world and the future state space more comprehensible.